Month: November 2016

Easily Browse Online Anonymously

- Adam Clare

In a world where our digital lives are tracked by democratic governments (Canada and the UK amongst them) we need to ensure that we can have private conversations online. Over at Digg they have collected a very easy to follow setup to get your protecting your privacy online in only an hour!

Keep Your Private Conversations Private

It’s rude enough for a stranger to even eavesdrop on your conversations in a place as public as a park. So opting to use messaging services with end-to-end encryption doesn’t make you some sort of criminal or tin foil hat-wearing nut. Whether you mind or not, there are organizations out there that are just scooping up every chat (Hello NSA!) you send out over the internet. No one is actively looking at them, or might ever look at them, but they’re listening so you might as well turn some music on or something.

It’s sort of like taping over your webcam or looking both ways before you cross the street — it’s such an easy and painless thing to do that it far outweighs the consequences of not doing that thing.

Read more.

Think that because you have “nothing to hide” that you shouldn’t be concerned about being tracked? Or that it’s OK for the democratically elected governments to justify mass surveillance? Well, Edward Snowden has a nice and short counter argument:

Some might say “I don’t care if they violate my privacy; I’ve got nothing to hide.” Help them understand that they are misunderstanding the fundamental nature of human rights. Nobody needs to justify why they “need” a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can’t give away the rights of others because they’re not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority.

Taiwan is About to Legalize Same-Sex Marriage

- Adam Clare

love

Taiwan might be the first Asian nation to legalize same-sex marriage. The country is working on legislation that will permit people who love each other and are of the same sex to marry, which is a great thing to see! Let’s hope that other places in the region follow suit and begin the process of changing their legal systems to reflect reality.

I think it’s worth noting that some of the earliest posts on this site were about countries doing the same thing. Both Canada and Spain legalized same-sex marriage in 2005.

Taiwanese lawmakers are currently working on three bills in support of marriage equality, one of which is already listed for review and could be passed within months. Same-sex marriage also has the prominent support of President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s first female head of state.

About 80 percent of Taiwanese between ages 20 and 29 support same-sex marriage, said Tseng Yen-jung, spokeswoman for the group Taiwan LGBT Family Rights Advocacy , citing local university studies. Taiwan’s United Daily News found in a survey taken four years ago that 55 percent of the public supported same-sex marriage, with 37 percent opposed.

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Bike Lanes Save Lives of Non-Cyclists

- Adam Clare

bike
Cities can improve the health and well being of everyone by simply adding bike lanes. That’s right, drivers not only benefit from faster traffic flow they also benefit from increased health when cities install bike lanes. As Bloomberg reports, cities around the world are catching on and adding bike lanes to benefit all citizens.

There’s math to show how cost-effective the strategy could be for public health. When New York spent about $8 million in 2015 on bike lane expansion, the cost per additional “quality-adjusted life year,” or QALY, was about $1,300, according to the Mailman paper.
A QALY, pronounced “qually,” is a standard measure of cost-benefit analysis. It takes into account the number of people who benefit from an intervention, how many years of extra life they can expect to get, and how healthy they will be during the extra years.
As it turns out, when you apply this to bike lanes, it makes them more economical per added QALY than, say, kidney dialysis, which costs over $100,000 per QALY—although not quite as cost-effective as standard vaccines, which cost in the low hundreds of dollars per QALY, Mohit said.

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Slavoj Zizeck on the Ethics of Consumption

- Adam Clare

Slavoj Zizeck is a modern thinker that has done a great job of critiquing the overarching assumptions in our society when it comes to power dynamics and the insidiousness of neoliberalism. In the video above his views on capitalistic consumption are summed up rather nicely. It’s worth the ten minute coffee break to watch it. Just be conscious of where you get your coffee from.

Simplify Your Wardrobe by Wearing the Same Thing

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Staying on trend in the world of fashion is hard! It’s hard on individuals and fashion is really hard on the environment. So make things easier on you and the planet by wearing the same thing everyday.

By wearing the same style, not necessarily the same article of clothing, you can make your life easier. Its one less series of decisions you have to make throughout the day and will let you get your day off to an easier start. Plus you can save money!

Men can just wear a suit everyday and get away with it. If you think this is too hard for women, here’s an entire conversation on how you can pull it off.

So if you look at the direct costs of the outfit I wear every day, and the indirect layering-and-replacing costs, I’ve spent about $834.95 in the past 18 months on my work clothing. Which you know what? Is probably what I spent over the course of six months before starting up this whole crazy idea in the first place.

But here’s the thing: this was never about the money. (Or, lol, the “fashion.”)

This was 100% about not having to think about what I had to wear to work every day. Eliminating that one decision saved me hours of stress, and piles and piles of feeling uncertain and awkward and less-than-totally-confident during my day to day. Decision fatigue is real, friends, and I’d rather spend my limited decision-making energy on things that make a real impact, like my work or my relationships or literally anything other than my clothing. I just don’t care about it enough to spend any more time than I have to thinking about it.

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