You wrote "This kinda reminds me of how peptic ulcers were once thought to be caused by stress until they were found to caused by a virus [3].". First of all, if you read the article you reference, you'll note that Heliobacter Pylori is a bacterium, not a virus. Second, the presence of h. pylori in the gut is not conclusively proven to be a causal relationship for ulcers. That is, in some people h. pylori is just part of the normal gut flora. Further, it HAS been shown that stress is a strong cofactor in peptic ulcers.
"The Chinese have a mob mentality." Uhm, racist flag anyone? Are you really seriously accusing the Chinese of being any different than us? Would you say that someone could look at our behavior in the past decade, and say that we don't also exhibit the same jingoistic behavior?
"I can't really afford .. but I ... value it" . I sometimes hear this and think, do you really? Customer pays for expensive car, hits the right social standing events, but consulting services get the "I can't really afford" story. Truth is that we don't value consulting on subjective issues because there is little conclusive data indicating that the consulting resulted in increased value.
"asking a doctor for advice about a sickness". Odd example given the poor objective performance exhibited by a significant percentage of medical professionals. I remember a study done evaluating the ability of medical professionals to identify spinal injuries in a CAT scan. Very high false positive rates. Scans of normal uninjured people were labeled as herniated discs, etc. Same story with financial professionals, too much subjective judgement involved. Pick a profession that is more objective, eg: civil engineering, will this bridge stand or not.
The article is pretty much confused drivel with no clear substantiating data. My observations are that India is unable to control the growing fundamentalist Islamic element within its population. Recent riots and pogroms against native North-Eastern Indians (they have a significant East Asian component to their appearance) by Islamic groups is a clear marker of rapidly increasing instability. India as a state is one of those mixed stable-chaos types that is teetering on the brink of disaster. A mafia driven monarchy (Antonina Malno aka Sonia Gandhi) has effectively injected massive corruption into India's state bureaucracy and destroyed the improvements/gains made in the 1990s by civil society types. It is a mess. I would not invest any hope in India unless there's some massive change in their politics.
You raise a seemingly valid point. But, your data seems to be different than mine. Many companies, especially large multi-national ones have an excellent track record of media manipulation and the ability to successfully hide massive problems. Think about how rare whistle blowers are. Easy example that I was personally affected by: Vioxx from Merck where Merck knew about the problems with the drug but pushed it through anyway and got away with it for years. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192603/ns/health-arthritis/t/re... . Think about big tobacco, think about Chiquita and its activities in Columbia, think about Dow Chemical/Union Carbide...
"lower than the rate among US factory workers". This is a common comparison fallacy. The baserates you appear to be comparing with are all general population baserate. The baserate that I was thinking about was how many factory workers committed suicide on-site. That is the Apples-to-Apples comparison. Eg: How many Apple employees committed suicide on campus vs how many Foxconn employees committed suicide at their factory camp/dorm.
It is hard to know who to believe. The journalist who has something to gain by exaggerating the suffering of the workers, or the company which has much more to gain by hiding the suffering. The truth is somewhere in between. Based on the Foxconn on-the-job-site suicide rate being significantly higher than other on-the-job-site suicide rates (important to compare apples-with-apples, no pun intended), the truth probably lies closer to the journalist version.
Wow. Utter disbelief. A foreign more technologically advanced people came in with weapons and technologies that were basically magic to these hunter gather/pastoral people. These people took up a last ditch desperate idea rather than submitting to the holocaust by the Voortrekkers of the Dutch.
"The tribes of africa were largely barbaric and vicious"
The incoming Dutch tribes were vastly more barbaric and vicious despite having had a 400 year head start and education and technology. Tag on to that the subsequent Anglo-Boer war which Boers still describe as their holocaust and you can't distinguish between any of these tribes. Humans are just a nasty evil species when they agglomerate.