President Barack Obama has finally given his opinion on the hot, widely controversial topic of net neutrality, urging the FCC, federal communications commission, to make the internet a basic utility like electricity and to stop any companies from fiddling with peoples basic human rights. Net neutrality has quickly became an extremely important topic as Internet Service providers, like Verizon, have recently seen that they can make backdoor deals with different companies and basically speeding up internet access to those companies and throttling access to rival companies. It is acts like these that really bring out the dark side of capitalism, it really ails me to see huge companies trying to make even more money by putting the smaller guys at a huge disadvantage by restricting access to their content. I am really glad President Obama has finally given his firm opinion on this matter and hope that the FCC, being a private company, listens to the government and not the dirty, money-hungry, companies that are trying to bribe them. If serious net neutrality laws are not passed as soon as possible, we may see the end to the era of there being a free and open internet where everyone gets an equal chance to showcase their content.

Here we have a classic case of protecting the environment or a bunch of rich people making even more money at the cost of beautiful landscapes lost. I believe the people, the corporations and the governments of earth have to wake and and realize global warming is a real thing and our continued efforts in degrading the environment will, without any shadow of doubt, lead to our own demise. The environmental costs of setting up this mine heavily outweigh its benefits by orders of magnitude as the amount of habitat, clean water and animals that will suffer due to the extraction of gold from Dasiqox Tribal Park by Taseko Mines project of Fish Lake is beyond comprehension. This alone should deter anyone from destroying such priceless things, but to even further the damage, the mine itself will produce so much waste and pollution that it is simply just not a sensible thing for the government to allow.

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This is a reply to a fellow students blog about Facebook’s deliberate attempt at changing users moods by only showing them specific content, this blog post can be found here: http://blogs.ubc.ca/liamadams/2014/09/10/should-facebook-be-allowed-to-manipulate-our-moods/

Everyone and their mothers has heard of how Facebook has done a massive social experiment on its users by showing a group of people sad stories generally and another group happy stories generally and has monitored their actions and posts over time to see that this treatment has, in fact, changed their mood. I understand why people might not be happy that Facebook is doing this but I want want to be the Devil’s Advocate here and say how did no one already know that this was happening? With the amount of specific data Facebook has on its users it surely is not just storing them, everyone should know that their psyches are actively being manipulated by major corporations and that is just the way the world works. This kind of information is extremely valuable in our world today and business will use this to gain many advantages and capital. Also does no one else see the value of having a service that can do these experiments in order to provide so much data on human behaviour? I think there is a lot of value in this information and since we knowingly make accounts and choose to use these services then we should be fine if companies want to experiment with us.

Original article:  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/06/we-shouldnt-expect-facebook-to-behave-ethically