Summary 1: Advocating Presumed Consent for Organ Donation
It seems counterintuitive that with so many people dying at any given moment, that there would be any shortage of organ donors. In the United States, organ donation requires that someone be living to opt-in to the program. Given that the main function of an organ is to keep its owner alive and functioning, the notion that a dead owner would want to keep their organ would only be for visual reasons than functional, or if the currently living owner wishes to keep them for the future. A 2010 law aimed to combat this by making organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in. This would mean moving anyone who has not updated their position onto a new list of donors. In some states, the waiting list for organ donors stretches out well over a thousand people long, and given that many people will not go out of their way to change the default orientation, more people will be able to access the organs they need to survive.
Summary 2: Obscurity: A Better Way to Think About Your Data Than ‘Privacy’
It seems counterintuitive that one of the best ways to keep information secure doesn’t make it inaccessible, just not easily understood. Data that is obscured to all but a small target audience is therefore useless to most people, assuming they ever even see it. This begs the question if unobfuscation is really a breach of privacy, and the legal definition of this states that even if information may be publicly available, it would be so time consuming to sort through the information that it is effectively concealed. Given that many things such as mugshots and social media posts are public and can be found with dedication, what may seem like a moral gray area is numbed by the fact that they are known to be public, and in the case of some personal information can often be made private instead.
Summary 3: Is Walmart Really Going Organic and Local?
It seems counterintuitive that Walmart would be the number one seller of organic, local produce, but in many ways they are. Their produce was already in some part local, yet Walmart expressed their interest in expanding the amount of local produce to some 9%. In part, this was due to keeping costs down, as moving the mass amounts of produce that they do was quite expensive. Local produce only requires it be grown within the state that it is sold in, and as such this makes the requirement for being local much easier to meet in some states. Calling all their grocery items organic however, would appear to be misleading given that the majority of items sold under that title are not fruits and vegetables, but rather items such as milk and baby food.
Counterintuitive 