Month: July 2015

Is Advertising Morally Justifiable? The Importance of Protecting Our Attention – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.

What is needed is an effective property-rights regime that gives individuals the right to control where we direct our attention, and thereby bring the market price of this modern commodity in line with its true market value. Advertisers should pay us, not third parties.

As long as either our attention or our personal information is traded by third parties in markets that do not incorporate their value to us, they will tend to be underpriced and used in ways that are both against our wishes and detrimental to our well-being. That meets the definition of exploitation. Things that we find valuable and are quintessentially our own are being stripped away from us without our consent or adequate compensation.

Source: Is Advertising Morally Justifiable? The Importance of Protecting Our Attention – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Are GMOs safe? Yes. The case against them is full of fraud, lies, and errors.

The war against genetically modified organisms is full of fearmongering, errors, and fraud. Labeling them will not make you safer.

Here’s what I’ve learned. First, it’s true that the issue is complicated. But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.

there are valid concerns about some aspects of GE agriculture, such as herbicides, monocultures, and patents. But none of these concerns is fundamentally about genetic engineering

it makes no sense to avoid GMOs based on standards that nobody applies to non-GMO food

By making cropland more productive, with less output lost to weeds and insects, GMOs reduce the amount of land that has to be farmed and the amount of water that’s wasted.

Pesticide vs. pesticide, technology vs. technology, risk vs. risk—it’s all relative. The best you can do is measure each practice against the alternatives.

Source: Are GMOs safe? Yes. The case against them is full of fraud, lies, and errors.

The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest

When the Cascadia fault line ruptures, it could be North America’s worst natural disaster in recorded history.

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries.

Source: The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest

If you’ve got nothing to hide… · Jacques Mattheij

the original goals of making the database may have been relatively innocent [but] the data suddenly took on a totally different meaning when the ownership of the data changed

You don’t have to have any dark secrets in order to to value your privacy.

If you really strongly feel that you have nothing that you consider private ask yourself this: Even if you have done nothing wrong, are you willing to publish your pin code, a high resolution scan of your signature, your passport, your SSN, your passwords, your photographs (naked, preferably), your medical records, the conversations with your attorney, the amount of money you currently have, your criminal record (if you have any), your bank statements, your tax returns for the last 10 years, your license plate and a copy of your driving license, your sexual orientation, your infidelities, the names of the people that you love, the names of the people you despise, the contents of your diary, all the emails you ever wrote and received, your report cards, your entire credit history, all the stuff you ever bought, all the movies you’ve ever watched, all the books you ever read, your religion, your home address and so on for all the world to see?

Source: If you’ve got nothing to hide… · Jacques Mattheij