Most people have a distaste for politics, which is related to public policy. This section of the website is devote to issues surrounding these kinds of issues.
Government has become a four letter word. What is government there for? Who does it represent? Why are there legal entities other than people?
I work in the creation of new knowledge in the area of science and technology. The concept of Intellectual Property (IP) has become a cornerstone of this area.
One of the big driving forces in capitalism, is advertising. The process whereby manufacturers, distributors, service organisations and stores inform the consumer of their goods and services. The object of this is to get the consumer to purchase their goods and/or services.
Mankind seems to be killing the environment. Can we stop? Should we try? Do we need to change our attitudes?
Medicine and doctors are important parts of society, and the do good work. They are not however, perfect. Some observations.
I think the systems of government seen across the many democratic societies for the most part work well enough. I do not believe they are perfect. Hopefully with time they will get better. This page on government is meant to summarise how I observe government, and make some possible suggestions on improving it. It's too easy to just complain about things without giving any realistic suggestions to fix things.
Intellectual property is an important part of our free-enterprise economy. Current lobbying is trying to make the term of all intellectual property protection permanent, which is not the original intention. Patents are meant to temporarily protect an invention, copyrights to temporarily protect publications and works of art, trademarks to temporarily protect a peculiar mark affixed by a manufacturer or merchant. Industrial designs are not uniformly accepted, and so won't be considered here. More information can be found at the link.
advertising \advertising\ n. 1. a communication publicly promoting some product or service (The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48).
I suppose one might look at advertising as a necessary evil, as many companies are willing to spend money on advertising in the hopes of attracting our business. It (advertising) and porn have certainly had an impact on the development of the Internet once it made its way out of academia.
The object of the promotion doesn't necessarily require honest and complete disclosure of information. This isn't to say advertisements are dishonest, but that the literal content of the advertisement doesn't completely answer or specify things. We are expected to fill in the blanks left by inference. Some advertisements are classified as non-commercial, in which case it has been observed that the disclosure will often be more honest and complete. In the case of commercial advertisements, the objective is often to convince the consumer to purchase something. It is not in the best interests of any commercial organisation to promote the products of competitors, which does effect the advertising produced.
One advertising activity which gets my attention in a negative way, is the use of the word patentin an advertisement. The idea being exploited by the advertisement is that a patent is in some way, an indication of fitness for service. This is completely wrong! A patent is the granting of a temporary monopoly to some legal entity (who may license the object of the patent to others) in exchange for publishing the knowledge behind the patent. A temporary monopoly is something very valuable to certain people or organisations, but it should have nothing to do with our purchasing habits. The idea behind the application for a patent is that certain kinds of intellectual property should not be lost to mankind. Once the term of the patent has ended, the knowledge is freely available for all citizens. It is entirely possible that someone can come up with a new, non-obvious, way of producing a new kind of mouse trap. That does not imply that this mouse trap is in any way superior to existing designs. It just means that competitors cannot use that same technology for producing the new mouse trap without licensing, or otherwise obtaining permission, from the patent holder. In my mind, if two companies are advertising similar products and one of them is mentioning some kind of patent in their promotions, you should probably buy the other product.
Another advertising activity I dislike, involves the term clinically proven. Products which might effect a person's health, are often observed in a clinical setting, to try and estimate population characteristics. Characteristics such as efficacy, probability and seriousness of side effects, etc. There is no proving going on, just observation and analysis. Even if 100% of the observations in a clinical trial are consistent with some fact, it does not mean that 100% of the population the clinical trial is meant to approximate, will also be consistent with that same fact. Doing a clinical trial with a small number of observations will greatly increase the chance of observing some wanted fact 100% of the time.
The advertising community also seems to think we are a society of lemmings. If N people are doing something, that is adequate reason for any other person to quit doing what they were doing, and do the same thing as the N people were doing.
Another part of us being lemmings, is that we will also switch what we are doing just by being told something is number 1, is best, is .... If we couple this requirement of some description of excellence, with some US president's idea of using novel definitions for words; we get the observation than it doesn't matter how many of something is in a marketplace, they are all the best! One way to do this is to say something like "Best in its class", and then never bother to define the class. Sure, use some inferences as to what the class is, but never define it. Or, you can go shopping for awards. If some agency hasn't given your product an award, keep looking for other similar agencies to see if any of them has given your product an award. If need be, have an agency set up just for the purpose of issuing your product an award.
Have you ever looked for a job? Did you ever think the process was completely fair? I doubt very many people have gone through the jobsearch process and every time thought it was fair. And that is just for people who are "normal"! If you have a disability of any kind, you will have had problems either most or all of the time.
People who are "normal" may only have problems once in a blue moon. And politicians are normally only sensitive to problems which are frequent, or involve lots of money. So, if you are in a minority having a problem with jobsearch, you might have to wait a long time before being able to provide meaningful input to politicians. The thing to do is to increase the numbers. It's not a case of someone who has XYZ has problems, it's a case of everyone who isn't "normal" has problems.
Anyway, this page has some thoughts about how jobsearch could evolve.
Low income housing is something which many communities need, and probably want. Building an efficient community which allows for likely disasters makes good economic sense. People living on a low income shouldn't be "wasting" money on inefficient use of heat, electricity, water or other necessities. As they probably have insufficient insurance, minimising how much damage can happen in likely circumstances also helps their cause.
Pollution, over-use and greenhouse gases all get some attention these days, although over-use probably could use more attention. We really are being hard on the environment. While I'm not advocating as extreme a point of view that is followed in this link, I think it points in the direction we should try to drag public attitudes.
Medicine and doctors are useful and important. And somewhat fallable. This link current explores a couple of points.
Body image is important. We have people who are too thin, but by far the largest problem is with people who have too much fat. Yes, let's help the people who have too much fat. Please forget that BMI or height/weight tables exist. We can measure the amount of fat with fair accuracy and precision at a reasonable cost. Use the amount of measured fat instead of some bogus datum that has outlived its usefulness.
People will attempt to patent the strangest things. Monopolies can be kind of handy if you enjoy making money, but too much stuff sneaks through the patent office. Mankinds has been using multispectral analysis for medical applications, we certainly don't want to see anyone trying to patent the finding of medical problems using coloured light.