My personal opinion is that 18 should be the age of consent, because it's the age of legal adulthood. It's also the age when someone can leave their home without enabling their family to get them in trouble with the law.

-SerenaDante

I'm going to have to disagree with you here.  Sure, it's true that not everyone is ready to give consent.  However, age is not a good metric for this.  There are people who are 20 and still have the maturity commonly associated with 16-year-olds; there are people who are 16 and very wise for their age.  People made up the idea that you have to fill some arbitrary requirements to be capable of giving consent as a stand-in for considering every case individually, and that one-size-fits-all judgment is where it all began to go horribly wrong. 

Consider that some truly ridiculous cases have occurred all because the law strictly defines rape as one person being over the age and one person being under the age - I've read about 18-year-olds arrested for being with their 17-and-a-half-year-old boyfriends whose parents didn't approve.  Consider also that the recent prosecution of teen "sexters" as sex criminals for putting up their own nude pictures on web sites hinges on the fact that they are underage (or were, at the time of the photos.) 

Of course a lot of the activities that got them in trouble weren't smart.  However, that hardly means they should be punishable by imprisonment or being branded as sex criminals for life.

Ask yourself: is forcing everyone into categories based on age alone the sort of thing we should be supporting?

This site has a graphical presentation of jobs gained and lost, likening our current economic crisis to what some call a "zombie infestation."

The FTC recently unrolled a new set of rules to clamp down on blogging for pay.  As someone who has blogged for years and never seen a cent from my personal blogging, this was amusing to me. I wondered: what kind of person makes money off of blogging? What is it like to be paid per post?

Out of sheer (and possibly perverse) curiosity, I started looking around to find pay-per-post blog sites.  As a professional writer*, it would hardly be a stretch to do this, though the direct mechanism of payment - that is, write one post, get it approved, receive one small payment - seemed a little strange to me as I was never a freelancer.  Most ominously, the advertiser - and not the pay site - must review and approve your post.  The site does state that it will not tolerate advertisers demanding retractions of criticisms, but only time will tell if they can stick to that.

What does the blogosphere say of all this?

The blogosphere at large has yet to really catch up to the government; sites such as eHow still advise bloggers to never disclose their financial connections:

What a paradox. If there's no reason to be ashamed, why not disclose it?  In the end this comes down to companies wanting to buy what can't be sold: love.  They want people to love their products, and generate great word-of-mouth, but they find it cheaper to throw money into advertising than to have a product that blows away the competition.  This is far from descriptive of all cases, but it certainly is of some, and it is those shallow companies that advice like this panders to.  The sad reality is that those companies will benefit the least from their ads anyway - for rational buyers, glowing reviews rarely replace hard fact.

On the other hand, there is the possibility that a company with a solid product merely wishes to accelerate its market growth.  That probably describes a minority of companies in social advertising, but there's certainly nothing wrong with it as long as they aren't trying to use it as a crutch.

Disclosure is now mandatory anyhow.  Let us see how far down this rabbit hole goes.

*I am a contributing editor at Anime Diet.

QuantumStorm suggested that many of us were missing the point in yesterday's article:

I wrote the following reply to him:

Readers - am I looking at the wrong part of the issue?  What do you think?  Which is the more important aspect of the story?

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was employed by Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad.  Her co-workers drugged and gang-raped her.  After she reported the rape to her supervisors, she was locked in a shipping container without food, water, or a bed, and warned that if she left Iraq, she’d be out of a job.  The rape kit that a doctor used to treat her was taken away by KBR security staff and never seen again.  When she finally made it back to the US thanks to a security guard taking pity on her, she tried to sue, but a provision of the contract she'd signed stated that she couldn't sue her employer: everything workplace-related had to be handled via arbitration.  Typically, such clauses involve arbitrators that are chosen beforehand by the employers, plus binding nondisclosure agreements, so win or lose, the victim cannot say anything to the public.

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would not allow defense contracts to go to companies which use arbitration clauses to prevent employees from taking work-related sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) responded to the above speech by labeling the proposed bill amendment “a political attack directed at Halliburton.”

Being against rape is now a directed political attack? This isn't just rhetoric. These aren't theoretical rapes that might someday happen; they are actually happening. They have already happened.  They will happen again, in all likelihood, if nothing is done.

Protecting the rights of women to sue if they are raped actually needs to be debated?  What the hell is wrong with our elected officials?

Obama won the Nobel Prize and Aung San Suu Kyi is meeting with US Diplomats.

Is this the right world?

Back when Warren Ellis was writing Transmetropolitan, he was fond of saying that nobody ever expects investigative journalism, because hardly anybody does investigative journalism any more.

I took that advice to heart - when an article came through about a politician affecting shock and outrage that sexuality appeared in Dragonball Z (really only to be joked at - the theme of it is, "look at all the absurd hangups we have about sex") I thought long and hard about going down there and checking things out in person.

The problem is, Anime Diet does not have a history of doing these things.  Anime Diet does not have a budget for these things.  Anime Diet is to mainstream journalism what a roadside falafel stand is to Essex House.  I really couldn't do it the way that a journalist working for a big paper would have - feet on the ground, pounding rubber.  I had to settle for digging around online and asking the few friends I had in politics.

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Pues el pájaro cantor jamás se para a cantar en árbol que no da flor.

"The songbird will not sing for a tree that refuses to bear flowers."

From destinyisathand:

This is pretty neat.