Interesting read.

Once, I was driving across Hokkaido, nothing but white snow for miles. One thing that struck me were the barns and other rural building roofs. They all were a very specific hue of what I'd consider "teal." It was quite beautiful, I even later used that particular hue to paint some walls in my home. I'm not sure exactly why that particular color was so widely used, but it was their equivalent of our 'barn red.'

I vocalized my observation, and my friend told me that traditionally the Japanese don't differentiate between blue and green, that they were just considered different shades of the same color.

That piqued my curiosity, so I did a little research and I found that it was quite common across cultures.

Puzzling.

I was walking through the grocer just the other day, looking at the price of meat. There was a special on legs and thighs - around $4 for 12.

That's 6 chickens worth of legs for $4 - all hatched, housed, fed, slaughtered, plucked, processed, irradiated, packaged, frozen, shipped thousands of miles, shelved... for $4.

Frankly, it's amazing. It doesn't justify the conditions whatsoever... that's not what I'm saying at all. It's just... amazing.

Consumer expectations are driving these conditions.

Meanwhile I'm living on a meager country homestead, trying to teach myself what it really takes to sustain a single human life. It is mind-bogglingly energy and resource intensive. It's really unbelievable. Our ancestors were impressive specimens.

And my research indicates that the most humane way of slaughtering a chicken is bleeding it out by slitting its throat.

Sustaining human life is difficult enough, and cruel enough, as-is.. without adding negligent cruelty into the equation.

In the past, publications had strict rules regarding 'native advertising' - They intentionally changed typesets, coloring, etc to make it obvious that it was a sponsored piece. This was part of the ethics of journalism, and to break that code was to lose integrity, and in turn lose the trust of your readers.

The only thing that is new about this is the degradation of the ethics of publishing. And it's coming at a time when consumer distrust of the media outlets is already increasing.

There is an inherent conflict of interest with advertising, and to deny that is to ignore the 'Chinese wall' that has been in place at major publishers for many decades.

In my view, a new paradigm has to be found eventually, because as it stands today, we're on a path that is leading in the opposite direction of consumer trust and unbiased reporting - and that is incredibly unsustainable, even ignoring the technical realities of the modern age such as ad-blocking.

And regarding the 'inability to block native ads' - I can already forsee crowd-sourced native ad blocker, where users simply flag articles as native ads. It's impossible to stay ahead of the curve with this stuff. It's the same mentality as the anti-piracy segment - until you embrace the structure that your customers are demanding, you will lose. That's what the music industry is finally realizing, and they are making headway, if slowly.