1. Deep Glamour, a new Virginia Postrel blog, linked to a forthcoming Virginia Postrel book
2. Videos of Nobel Laureates, recent talks
3. Beware what ye do not know, namely peanut butter
4. Robert Solow takes down Kevin Phillips
Assorted links
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Actually, the warning makes a lot of sense. So many products these days synthesized out of various parts of corn and other chemicals (think of all the products with “cheese” in the name that contain little or no cheese and the “butter” that’s on popcorn) that you need to be warned if something actually contains the thing you would expect it to be made of.
The peanut butter warning is there because behind that website is a database, and someone thought it helpful (and they were right, it is helpful) to have an attribute in the database that records the presence of peanuts in a product. This way, if I have a peanut allergy, I can have the database filter by that attribute, and I wont be bothered to look at products I have no intention of buying.
People react to it as if today is their first day on the Internet and they assume that a human being manually created that web page and manually placed that warning there. That’s not how it works in 2008.
Chicken of the sea contains no chicken!
MR commenters are contrarian.
Growth trends of the past two years, if continued, will result in China having more than the US GDP in foreign reserves alone in about a decade or so. Extrapolation is not always helpful.
Assuming we have some bright teenagers here, that time period could cover the entirety of the 21st century. That’s an awfully long time for foolhardy confidence in making predictions. I suspect you could be wrong a lot sooner than you imagine.
We can surely expect the 21st century to be as rich in game-changing technological advances as the 20th; we can likewise expect it to be as rich in atrocities and unthinkable events. The world will almost certainly lose some cities. Who knows, the singularity might even come to pass, for real. We are very far from the “end of history”.
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