2 . Communities across the world are starting to ban facial recognition technologies. The efforts are well intentioned, but banning facial recognition is the wrong way to fight against modern surveillance (监视). Generally, modern mass surveillance has three broad components: identification, correlation and discrimination.

Facial recognition is a technology that can be used to identify people without their consent. Once we are identified, the data about who we are and what we are doing can be correlated with other data. This might be movement data, which can be used to “follow” us as we move throughout our day. It can be purchasing data, Internet browsing data, or data about who we talk to via email or text. It might be data about our income, ethnicity, lifestyle, profession and interests. There is an entire industry of data brokers who make a living by selling our data without our consent.   

It’s not just that they know who we are; it’s that they correlate what they know about us to create profiles about who we are and what our interests are. The whole purpose of this process is for companies to treat individuals differently. We are shown different ads on the Internet and receive different offers for credit cards. In the future, we might be treated differently when we walk into a store, just as we currently are when we visit websites.

It doesn’t matter which technology is used to identify people. What’s important is that we can be consistently identified over time. We might be completely anonymous (匿名的) in a system that uses unique cookies to track us as we browse the Internet, but the same process of correlation and discrimination still occurs.

Regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process. A ban on facial recognition won’t make any difference. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible.

Similarly, we need rules about how our data can be combined with other data, and then bought and sold without our knowledge or consent. The data broker industry is almost entirely unregulated now. Reasonable laws would prevent the worst of their abuses.

Finally, we need better rules about when and how it is permissible for companies to discriminate. Discrimination based on protected characteristics like race and gender is already illegal, but those rules are ineffectual against the current technologies of surveillance and control. When people can be identified and their data correlated at a speed and scale previously unseen, we need new rules.

Today, facial recognition technologies are receiving the force of the tech backlash (抵制), but focusing on them misses the point. We need to have a serious conversation about all the technologies of identification, correlation and discrimination, and decide how much we want to be spied on and what sorts of influence we want them to have over our lives.

4 . One of the most difficult questions to answer is how much a job is worth. We naturally expect that a doctor’s salary will be higher than a bus conductor’s wages. But the question becomes much more difficult to answer when we compare a miner with an engineer, or an unskilled man working on an oil-rig（钻探平台）with a teacher in a secondary school. What the doctor, the engineer and the teacher have in common is that they have devoted several years to studying in order to obtain the necessary qualifications for their professions. We feel instinctively that these skills and these years should be rewarded. At the same time we recognize that the work of the miner and the oil-rig laborer is both hard and dangerous, and that they must be highly paid for the risks they take.

Another aspect we must take into consideration is how socially useful a man’s work is. Most people would agree that looking after the sick or teaching children is more important than, say, selling second-hand cars. Yet it is almost certain that the used-car salesman earns more than the nurse and the schoolteacher.

Indeed, this whole question of just rewards can be burned on its head. You can argue that a man who does a job which brings him personal satisfaction is already receiving part of his reward in the form of a so-called “psychic（精神的）wage”, and that it is the man with the boring, repetitive job who needs more money to make up for the soul-destroying repetitiveness of his work. It is significant that the jobs like nursing and teaching continue to be poorly paid, while others, such as those in the world of sport or entertainment, carry financial rewards out of all proportion to their social worth.

Although the amount of money that people earn is largely determined by market forces, this should not prevent us from seeking some way to decide what the right pay is for the job. A starting point would be to try to decide the ratio which ought to exist between the highest and the lowest paid. The picture is made more complicated by two factors: firstly by the welfare benefits which every citizen receives, and secondly by the taxation system which is often used as an instrument of social justice by taxing high incomes at a very high rate indeed. Most countries now regard a ratio of 7:1 as socially acceptable. If it is less, the highly-qualified people carrying heavy responsibilities will become disappointed, and might even end up by leaving for another country. If it is more, the difference between rich and poor will be so great that it will lead to social unrest.

5 . Casting blame is natural: it is tempting to fault someone else for a mistake rather than taking responsibility yourself. But blame is also harmful. It makes it less likely that people will own up to mistakes, and thus less likely that organizations can learn from them. Research published in 2015 suggests that firms whose managers pointed to external factors to explain their failings underperformed companies that blamed themselves.

Blame culture can spread like a virus. Just as children fear mom and dad’s punishment if they admit to wrongdoing, in a blaming environment, employees are afraid of criticism and punishment if they acknowledge making a mistake at work. Blame culture asks, “who dropped the ball?” instead of “where did our systems and processes fail?” The focus is on the individuals, not the processes. It’s much easier to point fingers at a person or department instead of doing the harder, but the more beneficial, exercise of fixing the root cause, in which case the problem does not happen again.

The No Blame Culture was introduced to make sure errors and deficiencies (缺陷) were highlighted by employees as early as possible. It originated in organizations where tiny errors can have catastrophic (灾难性的) consequences. These are known as high reliability organizations (HROs) and include hospitals, submarines and airlines. Because errors can be so disastrous in these organizations, it’s dangerous to operate in an environment where employees don’t feel able to report errors that have been made or raise concerns about that deficiencies may turn into future errors. The No Blame Culture maximizes accountability because all contributions to the event occurring are identified and reviewed for possible change and improvement.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which supervises air traffic across the United States, makes it clear that its role is not to assign blame or liability but to find out what went wrong and to issue recommendations to avoid a repeat. The proud record of the airline industry in reducing accidents partly reflects no-blame processes for investigating crashes and close calls. The motive to learn from errors also exist when the risks are lower. That is why software engineers and developers routinely investigate what went wrong if a website crashes or a server goes down.

There is an obvious worry about embracing blamelessness. What if the website keeps crashing and the same person is at fault? Sometimes, after all, blame is deserved. The idea of the “just culture”, a framework developed in the 1990s by James Reason, a psychologist, addresses the concern that the incompetent and the malevolent (恶意的) will be let off the hook. The line that Britain’s aviation regulator draws between honest errors and the other sort is a good starting-point. It promises a culture in which people “are not punished for actions or decisions taken by them that match with their experience and training”. That narrows room for blame but does not remove it entirely.

6 . If you are a fan of fast fashion, your choices may be narrowing in the near future. Recently, a large number of fast-fashion stores were closed worldwide.     1    

A major reason is the shift in the mindset (心态) of consumers. Millennials, those who were born in the 1980s or 1990s, are now the largest consumer group.     2     Low-priced fast fashion is not their priority. More people are starting to care about quality and the stories behind a product.

    3     The fashion industry is one of the largest polluters of clean water and three-fifths of clothes produced in a year end up in landfills (垃圾场). As there is more awareness of the climate crisis (危机), younger people are pursuing more eco-friendly choices.

Molly, 22, is one of them. Before she went to college, she used to frequent fast-fashion shops.     4     Now, she tries to shop in a way that is both sustainable (可持续的) and affordable:She shops second-hand. “My friend showed me how easy it was to be thrifty (节约的), and I developed a new personal style that focused less on trends but on basics that don’t go out of style,” she said.

In order to survive in the competitive market, many fast-fashion brands are making changes as well.     5     “Sustainability is a never-ending task in which everyone here is involved”, said a CEO of a fast-fashion company.

7 . Would you turn down the chance to become a smart cookie? We’ve been longing for quick fixes that could increase our intelligence (智力). Today, people’s hopes lie in brain training apps as a speedy “digital pill”. The more you play, the smarter you will get—or so some apps tell us. But is this digital-shortcut all that it seems to be?

The use of games for serious purposes has become widespread with the development of the Internet and smartphones. Brain training apps are typical, frequently featured by Apple and Google’s app stores. Many of such apps say that they are backed by “science”. Even if there were agreement around what makes general intelligence, the idea that increasing it would be as simple as practising a few mini-games every day goes against our current discovery about thinking and learning.

Several major studies, surveying users across a wide variety of apps, have found that they have little effect on users’ performance. A 2021 study by researchers discovered brain training has no significant effect on cognitive (认知的) functioning in the “real world”. The positive effects reported are limited to the very specific mini-games and tasks, such as memorizing lists of words or numbers, or performing mental calculation (心算). So, if your job or your calling in life needs summing quickly or remembering all your friends’ phone numbers, these apps will do. But if you are expecting them to improve your ability to write a novel or form a complex (复杂的) spreadsheet, you have to look elsewhere. Yet, despite the fact that they hardly work, brain training apps play a leading role, partly because they are regarded to be scientific and partly because users think they are fun.

As a co-creator of one of the most popular forms of gamification (游戏化) noted, what is especially disappointing about these apps is that they just aren’t that fun—at least, not compared with the various thoughtful board games and video games coming out every day. Puzzle video games, such as Baba Is You and detective games like Return of the Obra Dinn, see players apply their skill at reasoning, memory and concentration in a far more challenging and engaging (吸引人的) way.

If you aren’t into games, simply go for a walk or learn how to dance. They are likely to be more effective than a brain training app in sharpening your mind. These activities might not lead to an increased IQ, but they are sure to engage your brain deeply while having fun—something I can by no means say of brain training apps.

10 . Never go into a supermarket hungry! This is a good piece of advice. If you go shopping for food before lunchtime, you’ll probably buy more than you plan to. Unfortunately, however, just this advice isn’t enough for consumers these days. Modern shoppers need an education in how and how not to buy things at the store. First, you check the weekly newspaper ads. Find out the items that are on sale and decide if you really need these things. In other words, don’t buy anything just because it’s cheaper than usual! “New and Improved!” or “All Natural” on the front of a package influence you. Instead, read the list of ingredients (contents) on the back. Third, compare prices: that is, you should examine the prices of both different brands and different sizes of the same brand.

Another suggestion for consumers is to buy ordinary items instead of famous brands. Ordinary items in supermarkets come in plain packages. These products are cheaper because producers don’t spend much money on packing or advertising. The quality however, is usually as good as the quality of well-known name brands. In the same way, in buying clothes, you can often find high quality and low prices in brands that are not famous. Shopping in discount clothing stores can help you save a lot of money. Although these stores aren’t very attractive, and they usually do not have individual dressing rooms, not only are the prices low, but you can often find the same famous brands that you find in high-priced department stores.

Wise consumers read magazine ads and watch TV commercials, but they do this with one advantage: knowledge of the psychology behind the ads. In other words, well-informed consumers watch for information and check for misinformation. They ask themselves questions: Is the advertiser hiding something in small print at the bottom of the page? Is there any real information in the commercial, or is the advertiser simply showing an attractive image? With the answers to these questions, consumers can make a wise choice.