Interesting fact.

[conuly]

I just ran the numbers and 1/1000 of the world's population lives in NYC. A little more, actually. That's just within the city, it's a bit more than twice that if you count the entire metro area.

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Comments

[chelseagirl]

Which explains a lot.

[conuly]

Hey, it's an amazing place! Mostly.

[chelseagirl]

Yes, which is why I moved here the minute I graduated from college and have stayed for almost 40 years so far. Chelseagirl stands for that Chelsea, though I've actually lived in the East Village since we got into a Mitchell-Lama 8 years ago.

As a city/region we are known for our outsize influence. Because there are so many of us.

[moon_custafer]

The Lives of Others (Fascinating! Content note, though: one suicide)

I grew up in the Maritimes, which is a touch less remote but a neighbouring part of the world, and there are, I’m sorry to say, even worse stories out there, from the orphanages and the homes for unwed mothers. At least Clar and Craig both ended up in loving families, albeit the wrong ones.

[calimac]

I've read such stories with other settings. Some sisters in NYC took the genetic-spit test and found ancestry they didn't expect, eventually discovering that their late father had been sent home as a baby with the wrong family from, iirc, a NYC hospital in the 1920s.

And a truly bizarre story from South America somewhere about two sets of identical twins who got mixed up that way: each set of parents got one of their own sons and one from the other set. Just imagine how confusing it was when they accidentally ran into each other. Made my head hurt just to read about it. From their ages the birth incident would have been 20-30 years ago.

[conuly]

I think I've read (and posted) both those articles too, but this one was more interesting than most because apparently it wasn't just a one-off but a whole freaking pattern, with babies being swapped left, right, and center. It seems that most of those swapped babies were caught within days - but who knows, really?

[moon_custafer]

Just imagine how confusing it was when they accidentally ran into each other.

Wow, rl Comedy of Errors/Start the Revolution Without Me/Big Business/Our Relations (what can I say, it’s a very popular plot)?

[conuly]

And at least both families now have each other. Still, it's such shit. It should never have happened.

[acelightning]

That makes me so proud!

[conuly]

We're an even more significanter portion of the USA population, of course - though in terms of sheer numbers I think we're actually beat out by... Appalachia.

[acelightning]

Well, Appalachia covers a lot of territory.As a country and western radio DJ, I became familiar with many aspects of its culture - and I've driven through several chunks of it, voluntarily. And it was always "where the coal comes from". ("I was born in Harlan County, Kentucky born and bred, but when I joined the NMU, folks called me a Russian Red!") But a lot of coal miners moved North when the mines closed <*https://youtu.be/hhtCYl4CQyQ*>Cash your chips for all the shifts you worked at Stackhouse Colliery, And head on up the Hudson before you change your mind.)

(See, I warned you that I learned all this shit from country music.)