One of the peculiarities of our culture is that we expect the people we deal with to be honest and the institutions we deal with to lie like liberal politicians in an election year. Having said this, the use of the word "we" in the foregoing sentence was arguably a bit vague. I don't, and you shouldn't either.

When larger entities than yourself tell you fibs, they usually do so for their benefit and at your expense. This only works, however, if the people being lied to believe what they're told.

You can mitigate the damaged done through the dishonesty of your government, your employer, various bits of the media and in some cases your own genetics if you understand what's really being said, and consider whether anyone with two or more functioning brain cells would believe it.

This article outlines some of my favorite lies — your mileage may vary, and I'd be surprised if you didn't have a few of your own to add to it.

An easily understood, workable falsehood is much more useful than a complex, impenetrable truth.

To keep the lawyers happy, please note that all the information in this article is provided to you entirely at your risk. In reading it, you specifically absolve its author, Alchemy Mindworks, its shareholders and its suppliers of any responsibility for loss, damage or expense caused by your use of it, however it occurs, including but not exclusive to attorneys' fees. In the event that you discover a way for this to happen, you're on your own. Should you be unable to agree to these terms, click on BACK now.

Harry Gordon Selfridge was an American businessman who moved to London in 1906. On March 15, 1909 he opened England's first department store, the eponymous Selfridges. Retail stores at the time were typically small, dark, single-purpose establishments, and what shoppers would refer to as the "retail experience" a century later could be a bit brutal. Selfridge created a store that sold almost everything, made its products readily accessible and treated its customers with courtesy and respect.

One of the legacies Harry Gordon left to retail sales was a phrase he used to instill his vision of customer service into his staff — the customer is always right.

It probably should be noted that Harry Gordon wasn't always right — while Selfridges made him quite wealthy for a time, the death of his wife, his lavish lifestyle, the great depression, compulsive gambling and drink ultimately ruined him. He died in poverty in 1947.

Selfridges still exists. It opened its second store in 1988.

Selfridge's motto is often quoted by disgruntled customers a century after it was first uttered, typically without much thought as to its origins. Selfridges was, and remains to this day, a lavish shopping experience with exemplary service and an eye to quality. Sadly, it's a shopping experience which only a few shoppers can afford. What Harry Gordon really introduced to retail sales was the idea of building the cost of an elaborate marketing plan into the prices of the things he sold.

It's worth considering that the global empire of Wal Mart — a retail experience that could arguably be described as the "anti-Selfridges" — probably sold more things since you began reading this article than Selfridges sold last month. Wal Mart's stores are often described by its detractors as being little more than barns with shelves and bright lights; its staff can be less than helpful and some of the merchandise it offers seems poised to tear, break or malfunction before it reaches the parking lot, but its prices are reasonable and there's a Wal Mart within driving distance of most of the western world.

One reality Selfridge brought to retail sales was an appreciation that you can have it good or you can have it cheap, but you can't have it both ways.

Most business owners come to realize that Harry Gordon was essentially wrong — the customer isn't always right. Most of them are, but customers, perhaps inspired by the shade of Harry Gordon Selfridge, occasionally demand more of the places they shop than is reasonable. It's engaging to speculate that were he alive today, Selfridge would probably choose to qualify his axiom.

The customer is usually right, but when the customer wants to abuse or assault the staff; requests a receipt in excess of his or her purchases to fiddle his or her taxes; issues preposterous threats; insists on returning unreturnable merchandise; demands to be hugely compensated for an immaterial or imaginary problem or otherwise behaves like a turkey just to see if he or she can get away with it, the customer should be considered dead wrong, and shown the door.

Of course, it's not as catchy when you say it that way.

The really impressive thing about the computer you're sitting in front of as you read this is not the speed of its processor, the size of its footprint, how much memory it contains or how many ports it confuses you with.

The really impressive thing is what it cost. Technology is cheap.

One of the reasons technology is cheap is the existence of huge, brutally-competitive big-box retailers which will happily nuke their competition with every dirty trick at their disposal to get warm bodies through their doors and plastic through their credit-card imprinting machines.

For the most part, the only way big-box retailers can make this happen on a regular basis is to reduce their prices below what their competitors are selling the same toys for. The same Internet that makes undulating throngs of customers want to rush in and buy computers also makes it possible for them to comparison-shop every store in town in less time than it takes to ask "did you find everything you were looking for today?"

The competitive nature of retail technology sales has reduced the profit margins on these toys to the thickness of a cash-register receipt.

In an effort to improve their profitability, most electronics retailers have begun offering "extended warranties." Also referred to as "protection plans," "service plans," "long-term satisfaction assurance" and "enhanced reliability services" among others, these things usually take the form of a considerable additional charge to provide warrantee coverage that lasts longer than the manufacturer's warrantee for the product being purchased.

Extended warrantees are arguably the best scam anyone's thought up since the invention of liberal politicians. Like liberals, they sound great on paper, and they do their best work in an atmosphere of relative ignorance.

The companies that build computers and DVD players and flat-screen television sets offer warrantees with them because doing so makes people comfortable with the idea of parting with big piles of cash in exchange for a mysterious box they have less chance of understanding than pigs have of flying, and no hope of fixing if it begins to emit smoke unexpectedly. Because said manufacturers build extremely reliable products for the most part, offering warrantees with them is almost free — they know that only a tiny fraction of the boxes they ship will return to them with warrantee claims.

Technology fails for a number of specific reasons, to wit:

• Manufacturing defects
• Abuse
• Old age
  
  

It should be noted that warrantees — extended or otherwise — only address the first item on the foregoing list.

Manufacturing defects in technological devices typically make their presence known shortly after you tear off the shrink wrap and plug the beast in. If it doesn't blow up during the first week or so of operation, it was almost certainly built correctly and is ready to provide you with a lifetime of reliable service. Chances are, you'll get bored with it, break it or decide it's too slow long before it wears out or dies.

Most technology comes with a one-year manufacturer's warrantee, which is ample time to make sure there's nothing funky inside your new box. Think of the warrantee period as a shake-down. If the device in question is still running after a year, it's likely to keep doing so for five or ten more. If you break it, no warrantee — extended or otherwise — will help you. By the time it wears out, even the most extended of extended warrantees will have expired.

In buying an extended warrantee — which will typically warrant your purchase for the second to fifth years of its life — you're providing yourself with protection that addresses the period when technology almost never fails due to manufacturing defects. It's expensive coverage that you're extremely unlikely to need.

This is, of course, why retailers really like selling extended warrantees. They get to collect a bucket of cash and do almost nothing for it.

In considering an extended warrantee, you should keep in mind that:

• They typically cost about 20 percent of the purchase price of whatever you're buying. If you buy five technology items, decline the extended warrantees on all of them and one of them blows up after its manufacturer's warrantee expires, you've still broken even.
  
  
• Most extended warrantees have fine print in their agreements which allows the stores that offer them to refuse to fix your purchase if they decide it has failed due to abuse. They get to make the call.
  
  
• The majority of component failures in technological devices are caused by power spikes and surges. You can buy a surge protector for a lot less than the price of an extended warrantee, and it will protect your purchase for a lot longer.
  
  
• The banks that issue credit cards are just as competitive as the stores that sell Play Stations. An increasing number of them offer no-fee gold or platinum credit cards with purchase protection plans. If you pay for your new toy with such a card, its warrantee will be extended — typically to two years — and the extra coverage won't cost you anything.
  
  
• Because they're so profitable, many of the stores that have their staff lean on you to buy extended warrantees pay them a commission when they sell one. That geek with the bad haircut isn't trying to talk you into a "service plan" because he wants you to enjoy your new TV.
  
  
• You'll probably replace whatever you're buying within two years, even if it's still working.
  
  

Unless you find yourself burdened by a lot of extra money you don't like the look of, decline the extended warrantee.

Lotteries might well be regarded as a tax on greed and stupidity. They're immensely lucrative for the parties which run them because most people can't comprehend large numbers, long odds or probability.

In addition, lotteries run by governments are very often a license for the governments in question to go shopping. Governments like to observe that while lotteries place a financial burden on the people who play them, it's a voluntary one, and they offset other forms of taxation. This is an argument that usually cools the righteous indignation of all but the most ardent opponents of lotteries. What they usually fail to mention is that the proceeds from lotteries typically get spent on questionable pork projects the governments in question couldn't otherwise afford, rather than being used to reduce other forms of tax.

The biggest addicts of legalized gambling are usually the governments that legalize it.

The concepts of probability as they apply to lotteries can be disturbingly elusive. People who play lotteries usually do so because they see other players win them from time to time, and come to the conclusion that if someone is going to win, it could just as well be them. This is, of course, true as far as it goes... but it hardly goes far enough.

The odds of winning a 6/49 lottery are about fourteen million to one. Fourteen million is a very large number. If fourteen million people were to buy a 6/49 ticket, each with a unique combination of numbers, one of them would win the lottery. If you were one of the purchasers, the likelihood of that one person being you would be about the same as the likelihood of your being killed by a falling vending machine.

You might want to think about the last time you noticed someone being killed by a falling vending machine.

The phase "you can't win if you don't play" — much beloved of the managers of lotteries — ignores the reality that for all practical purposes you can't win if you do play. It gets involved with the true nature of the words "can" and "can't," and the greasy pole of probability.

Consider that nothing is impossible, although a great many things are extremely unlikely. Some things are sufficiently unlikely that we regard them as being impossible because it's convenient to do so. The likelihood of a dragon materializing next to you and incinerating your monitor with its breath is very low, so much so that you arguably need not worry about it. You can safely decline dragon insurance for your house.

The likelihood of winning a 6/49 lottery falls into the same level of probability. It's possible, but extremely unlikely. The only difference between playing the lottery and buying dragon insurance is that the occasional appearance of a lottery winner, as opposed to the general absence of dragons in the respectable media, makes the probability of winning a lottery appear better than it really is.

It's worth noting that the odds of dying in an airplane crash are similar to those of winning a 6/49 lottery. People who are prepared to risk their lives on the belief that these odds are too long to worry about will none the less spend their money on an enterprise which seeks to convince them that they aren't.

Here's another probability analogy. You can't ski through a revolving door. If you try, your skis will get stuck in the door, and you'll get mangled. This is arguably a good reason not to try.

Imagine a ski slope with a revolving door at the bottom, and fourteen million really stupid skiers at the top. The carnage resulting from each of them trying to ski through that door would require a two-hour documentary to properly express, but it's reasonable to assume that one of them would probably luck out and make it through somehow.

This would not change the belief of anyone with two or more functional brain cells that you can't ski through a revolving door.

Some of the people who play lotteries claim to enjoy the buzz that results from buying a ticket and then hanging out in a smoky coffee shop with several tables of little old ladies watching the ping-pong balls drop on TV. Dragon-insurance salesmen are easier to believe.

People buy lottery tickets because they expect to win, never appreciating that for all practical purposes, they can't.

There's a perception among most consumers — having funded their respective governments' food monitoring agencies with voluminous bucketfuls of taxes — that everything they eat is inspected, and everything it's made of has been determined to be safe by people in white coats with letters after their names.

This is, regrettably, science fiction. A tiny fraction of the food sold in western supermarkets has passed any sort of government inspection, and in those cases where it has, the inspections are oftentimes cursory at best. Food safety only becomes an election issue if a lot people die spectacularly as a result of the lack of it. Failing this, it's an area which politicians rarely visit, and are loath to fund.

Large-scale food safety is usually not a concern because the businesses responsible for producing food are usually good at their jobs, or cognisant of the magnitude their potential liability should they prove to be otherwise.

The ingredients used to make artificial and commercially-packaged foods are a larger and somewhat more insidious issue. Few consumers can tell Polysorbate 80 from polyester. Reading the ingredients lists on food packages isn't all that useful if you don't know what most of the words mean.

The disturbing aspect of many of the mystery ingredients in commercial food is not that they're known to be dangerous, but rather than they're not known to be safe. Increasingly, the research to determine the safety of consumable ingredients is being undertaken on behalf of various governments by the manufacturers of the ingredients themselves as part of the approval process.

Well might one argue that the parties trying to get their creations past the government are not always as objective as they might be.

In addition to questionable new food ingredients, there is a rich palette of questionable ingredients already in use. These substances are unlikely to be withdrawn from use unless a lot of people get really, really sick or genuinely dead as a result of consuming them over the long term. In many cases, there is enough research to make their continued use highly suspect — but governments typically want to see large body counts before they'll act on matters like this.

In the likely event that you don't favor yours being one of the bodies being counted, you might want to arm yourself with a better understanding of what some of those mystery ingredients really are, and what they might really do to you if you eat them. Some are questionable, some are known to be toxic and a few of them are just plain gross.

Eaten any bugs recently? Don't be too sure.

Here are a few common commercial food ingredients and a glimpse behind the curtain as to what they do, and what they might do to you. This list is by no means exhaustive, and many of the ingredients listed here are merely suspect, rather than known to be dangerous.

Acrylamide: As of this writing, you're unlikely to find acrylamide in ingredients lists, although this may change shortly. While predominately an industrial chemical used in stabilizing paper and dyes, acrylamide is also produced when fats and cooking oils are heated to a sufficient temperature. Small quantities of acrylamide turn up in many commercial baked foods, but their concentrations are disturbingly high in fried foods, such as French fries and potato chips. Acrylamide is believed to cause genetic damage and in some cases neurological and reproductive degradation. It promotes cellular mutation — the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified acrylamide as "probably carcinogenic to humans." Exposure even to low doses of acrylamide increases the risk of several cancers. In August 2005, the attorney general of California filed a lawsuit against several manufacturers of French fries and potato chips which, if successful, would require the packaging of these products to contain a warning to the effect that they contain acrylamide, a known carcinogen. Acrylamide is also found in high concentrations in cigarette smoke.

Aspartame: An artificial sweetener marketed under a number of trade names, Aspartame has been the center of considerable controversy almost since its initial approval in 1981. It's listed as E951 in European packaged foods. Aspartime contains phenylalanine, an amino acid, which is toxic to people born with phenylketonuria. There is inconclusive evidence suggesting that it increases the risk of brain tumors and lymphomas. It has been speculated that the "Gulf War Syndrome" suffered by significant numbers of American military personnel returning from the middle east in the 1990s was in fact the result of their having consumed large quantities of diet soda in the desert heat, and in so doing ingested far more Aspartame than was good for them. Aspartame has been linked to a number of symptoms, including headaches, seizures, allergic reactions and mood swings.

Cochineal: Cochineal is a red food coloring, carminic acid, which is squeezed from coccidae, a scale insect that lives on prickly pear cacti. Carminic acid is mildly toxic to other insects that prey on the coccidea, providing them with a natural defense. Cochineal is listed as E120 in European packaged food. Some people are allergic to carminic acid — consuming it can cause hives, or in severe cases, anaphylactic shock. It has been known to cause asthmatic attacks and hyperactivity in children. Cochineal also appears in ingredients lists as "carmine" or "carmine coloring" in some countries.

Gelatin: A byproduct of the meat packing and leather tanning industries, gelatin is a protein made from collagen scraped from the hides of cattle and swine, or in some cases extracted from pork and beef bones. Collagen hydrolysate is soaked in a caustic bath for several weeks to break down its proteins. Gelatin is useful as a stabilizer, thickening agent or texture enhancer — it turns up in candy, ice cream, margarine and a lot of low-fat food. It forms the capsules used in pharmaceutical. It's largely non-nutritional — while it's a protein, almost none of it can be metabolized by human beings, and it can actually cause people who eat enough of it to shed proteins from other sources. Being a beef byproduct, there is growing concern that gelatin could transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or "mad cow disease," to human beings, resulting in Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome, a fatal brain-wasting condition. Note that there are a number of food ingredients referred to as "vegetable gelatins" which aren't gelatin at all — they just behave in a similar manner, without actually having been made from animal byproducts.

Hydrogenation: Hydrogenation is an industrial chemical process which causes the unsaturated bonds of carbon atoms to have a hydrogen atom attached to each of them. Should you have slept through high school chemistry, suffice it to say that it's usually applied to fats and oils — it converts unsaturated fatty acids to saturated fatty acids. It results thick, appetizing fats in processed foods, and processes liquid oils into solid or gelatinous products. A common example of the application of hydrogenation is converting liquid vegetable oil into margarine. Hydrogenation is easily the cheapest way to arrive at thickened fats, and the result of creating them this way usually results in products with longer shelf lives than they would otherwise enjoy. There's a catch in the process of hydrogenation, however — it's most cost-effective if it's performed with a metal catalyst, such as nickel, palladium or platinum. The result is the production of trans fats, which greatly increase the risk of heart disease in people who consume them.

Monosodium Glutamate: Monosodium glutamate, or MSG, is a flavor enhancer. It's listed as E621 in European foodstuffs. It's the sodium salt of glutamic acid, a natural protein that occurs in many foods. It gives food a savory, meat-like taste. It behaves as an excitotoxin — it overrides the normal behavior of some nerve cells. Monosodium glutamate has been linked to migraines, nausea, digestive disorders, sleepiness, heart palpitations, asthma and in extreme cases, anaphylactic shock. Some research has suggested that it's responsible for lesions in the hypothalamus, causing obesity and sexual dysfunction. Perhaps because monosodium glutamate has earned itself something of a reputation of late, a growing number of food products which contain it list it as something else, typically referencing the process by which it's made, rather than the substance itself. Among the aliases for MSG commonly used as of this writing, look for "hydrolyzed vegetable proteins", "hydrolyzed plant proteins" and "yeast extract" — all of these are really monosodium glutamate.

Polysorbate 80: One of a number of popular emulsifying agents — substances that make food seem firmer, thicker and more fat-like — Polysorbate 80 is used to enhance the texture and appearance of foods such as ice cream. A number of animal studies involving feeding varying amounts of Polysorbate 80 to mice have linked it to lowered body weight and organ size, and mild inflammation of the digestive tract.

Propyl Gallate: One of a number of substances used to prevent meat from spoiling, propyl gallate appears to be moderately carcinogenic.

Propylene Glycol: Propylene glycol is a petroleum derivative — it makes an excellent automobile anti-freeze. However, it also turns up in a number of foodstuffs and cosmetics. If you feel uncomfortable with the thought of downing a frosty cold glass of anti-freeze, you might want to watch out for this one in the ingredients list. It's used in commercial processed food as a solvent for food coloring, and as an humectant, a chemical which helps bind moisture to food and make it seem richer or fresher. In fact, it's among the least costly humectants available, hence its widespread use. The American Food and Drug Administration maintains that propylene glycol is "generally recognized as safe" when it's used in small quantities in food and cosmetics. However, there is considerable disagreement as to what constitutes a sufficiently small amount of propylene glycol. There are indications that it is carcinogenic to an indeterminate degree, or possibility an agent that makes some people more vulnerable to other carcinogens. There's growing evidence that it causes skin irritation when it's applied externally, such as in soaps, cosmetics and skin creams.

Potassium Bromate: Potassium Bromate increases the volume of baked foods, such as bread and cakes. It has been shown to be carcinogenic in animal studies. It's banned in most western countries, with the exception of the United States.

Saccharin: The artificial sweetener Saccharin has been linked to several cancers in laboratory animals. Some evidence suggests that while it is not carcinogenic itself, it increases the likelihood of developing cancer caused by other carcinogens.

Sodium Benzoate: Sodium benzoate is a preservative — it kills bacteria in a variety of food and drink products. It's listed as E211 in European foodstuffs. It's harmless in isolation, but if it's combined with ascorbic acid, vitamin C, it releases benzene, a known carcinogen. Ascorbic acid is an antioxidant, which inhibits spoiling and improves the shelf life of products which contain it. Sodium benzoate and ascorbic acid appear in some soft drinks, which can contaminate these drinks with an unacceptably high level of benzene. Benzene has been linked to a number of forms of cancer, including leukemia.

Sodium Nitrite: Sodium nitrite is widely used in processing meat — it improves the color and flavor of meat products, and increases their shelf life considerably. Nitrites can produce nitrosamine, a serious carcinogen. Most of the foods that contain sodium nitrite — frankfurters, sliced sandwich meat, sausages and so on — aren't particularly good for you at the best of times.

Sorbitol: Used as a sugar-free sweetener in chewing gum and other confectionary, and as an emulsifier and humectant in a number of other processed foods, sorbitol has an unpleasant side effect. It's a powerful laxative. Because this aspect of its behavior doesn't tend to make it to the labeling of the products that contain it, most people beset by its ill effects don’t realize why their digestive systems are behaving like a heard of wildebeests in mating season. Sorbitol won’t kill you, but it might make you wish you were dead from time to time. Also referred to as glucitol and in European foodstuffs as E420, Sorbitol is a sugar alcohol. It occurs naturally in some fruits and berries, but typically, you’d have to get through a few bushels of them to approach the sorbitol levels that turn up in some processed foods.

Tartrazine: Tartrazine is a yellow food coloring — it's often listed as FD&C Yellow 5, and as E102 in European foodstuffs. It's derived from coal tar. It has been linked to a broad palette of health issues, including allergic reactions, severe headaches, blurred vision, itching, rhinitis and hyperactivity in children. Several European countries have banned its use.

In its simplest sense, commercial advertising helps offset the costs you pay for whatever medium it appears in. Broadcast television is an easily understood example of this. Rather than charge you a monthly fee to receive their programs, or otherwise compel you to pay for their content up front, broadcasters sell advertising into their programs and let you watch them ostensibly for free.

They're not free, of course, because your time isn't worthless. You're paying for the television shows that originate with broadcasters by allowing their commercials to consume some of the time you spend watching the shows. The value in your doing so is to permit advertisers a shot at persuading you to buy their products.

At least, that's what they appear to be doing — we'll deal with what they're really up to later in this section.

The problem with this model for advertiser-supported content is that over the past few decades, the price of it has increased — a lot. In fact, it has increased to the point wherein advertiser-supported television programs are a really, really bad deal. Far from being free, they're easily the most expensive way you can watch television or movies.

An hour of network television typically includes about 20 minutes of advertising, which is to say that its ads will soak up 20 minutes of your time. If your time is worth 25 dollars an hour and you watch four hours of television per day, commercials will cost you $33.33 worth of your time. That's about $12,000 a year. You can buy a lot of pay TV for $12,000. You could probably buy DVDs of all your favorite shows with twelve grand and still have eleven grand left over.

This ignores the value of product placements in programs and other forms of sneaky advertising that degrade the value of whatever's left over between the commercial breaks.

Advertiser-supported television kind of looks like it's free if you don't consider what it's really up to, but its appearance is deceiving.

You can, of course, reduce the effective cost of broadcast television considerably. You can use a digital video recorder or a video tape recorder to time-slip broadcast programming and then fast-forward through the commercials. This is the sort of suggestion that gets the people who work in broadcasting and advertising agencies — and, of course, the folks who work for the companies that want to sell you stuff through television ads — really steamed.

Jamie Kellner, the former chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting, now a division of AOL Time Warner, said in an interview published in CableWorld in April, 2002 that skipping television advertising constitutes "theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial... you're actually stealing the programming."

The "contract with the network" he was referring to is implicit, and represents something of an honor system. It allows that broadcast television might not require an up-front fee to watch it, but it's not free. If you watch this programming on broadcast television, you are in effect undertaking to pay for it with your time.

This is an interesting perspective, albeit with a large number of holes in it. Some of them are sufficiently cavernous to permit a bus to drive through them. That's a huge interstate tour bus, the kind with four bedrooms and a hot tub.

In most countries in the western world, broadcast television is only one form of television available — there's also pay TV. Premium pay TV carries no third-party commercial advertising, but it does require that its recipients pay a monthly fee to enjoy it. Despite the oftentimes high-end content on pay TV, it's not really all that expensive. HBO, for example, costs about twelve dollars per month, or about 140 dollars per year.

HBO is a useful example of what television costs when there are no commercials in its content to support it. If HBO can provide several channels of movies for twelve dollars a month, one can reasonably argue that a broadcast network should be able to provide one channel of its content for a comparable amount — if not as a cash fee, than as an equivalent amount of your time spent viewing commercials.

As an aside, HBO is owned by AOL Time Warner, the same parent company that employed Jamie Kellner at the time he gave the interview cited earlier.

The people who get hot and bothered about viewers skipping the commercials television networks broadcast often liken the practice of doing so to stealing HBO. Stealing HBO — by burrowing past the security of a cable decoder, that is, by hacking it — is a genuine crime, and viewers who engage in it are genuine criminals. They run the risk of having men with body armor and bad photo ID break down their doors.

It might well be argued that skipping the commercials in broadcast television programming does not constitute stealing the programming because the broadcasters in question use a public resource — the broadcast spectrum — to provide you with their content. As a member of the public and as such one of the de facto owners of this resource, you have the right to expect that it will be used in your reasonable interest. In this case, your reasonable interest is providing you with television programming at a fair cost.

The cost of the programming in question is hardly fair — you could buy every pay TV channel available for a fraction of the effective cost of watching network television. In that the broadcasters haven't lived up to their part of the "contract with the network," you shouldn't feel too guilty about not living up to yours.

Now, about what the little man behind the curtain is really up to...

The advertising industry likes to characterize itself as a messenger, in that it seeks to inform people of the availability of the products it promotes. This is, at best, half true. Most advertising seeks to motivate people to buy things they ordinarily wouldn't buy.

Many advertisers aren't above using some fairly questionable methods to get to your wallet.

If you're unwilling to accept someone deliberately lying to you to sell you goods or services you don't need or want — unscrupulous repair-people, for example — you might want to consider how you feel about advertisers who seek to do much the same thing by figuring out which of your buttons need to be pushed to persuade you to get out your credit cards. While the latter is somewhat more subtle, the result is the same.

In both instances, you have the opportunity to refuse to be motivated — keep in mind that the people who craft media advertising are usually at better at their jobs than itinerate aluminum-siding peddlers.

Should you find yourself confronted with television advertising you can't fast-forward through, you might want to watch it in a manner other than its creators intended. Specifically, you might want to see if you can work out what it's really up to. This does not require a secret decoder ring, trick sunglasses or special advertising-analysis software. You will need a fully functional brain, however, which is one of the things most advertisers hope you'll have forgotten to bring with you.

Before you can discern what advertisements are really up to, you'll need to understand what you're really up to. People are weird creatures. Unless you believe in biblical creation — in which case you've already bought into more nonsense than a solid year of television advertisements could ever hope to sell you, and you're beyond rescuing — people are essentially a peculiar adaptation of primates with poor musculature but really nice opposable thumbs. In an evolutionary sense, we were living in trees until just the other day. While most of us don't do that any more — unless we lose our house keys — we still have all the instinctual baggage that was hard-wired into our smellier forebears to help them survive in the wild.

We have instincts that make us want food, shelter, security, the companionship of people we believe we can trust and — most importantly for advertisers — sex. We want these things at so primitive a level that we're not always aware we want them. The people who try to sell us stuff are aware of it, however.

Consider the reaction of most guys to pictures of naked women, or even to pictures of women who look like they could get naked without too much effort. The interest guys take in these images is rationally pointless, because you can't do a whole lot that's worth doing with a paper woman. None the less, their instincts tell them that these images are desirable.

It's a safe bet that a few hundred thousand years ago, when the instincts in question were first being wired up, guys didn't have full-color pictures of women to distract them. All the women were real.

Here's an example of how these instincts can be manipulated in television advertising. You'll probably have noticed that advertisements for ostensibly sporty cars usually have attractive women in them. The message in these advertisements has nothing to do with horsepower, air bags, long-term warrantees or improved traction in bad weather. These advertisements are really trying to convince guys that if they buy the car, they'll get laid. Actually, a lot of advertising suggests that buying the products in question will help whoever buys them get sex.

As I noted a moment ago, human beings are hard-wired to want a number of specific things, of which sex is pretty near the top of the list. Associating something everyone wants with whatever is being advertised is a productive way to suggest that whatever is being advertised would be a good thing to go buy.

These advertisements also point up a useful technique in creating television advertising. Human beings have a variety of senses, but our most highly-developed one is sight. Your eyes are a high-speed connection directly to your brain, with few troublesome conscious processes to get in the way. By comparison, text and to a lesser extent speech requires that your brain process words, figure out what they mean... and potentially consider whether they're in your best interest to believe.

A lot of television advertising has visual content with one message and text or audio content with quite another. In the case of car ads with a few babes draped over the fenders, the visual message is the one they'd really like you to process.

Buy the car, get the girl.

Not all associative advertising associates itself with sex, of course. Consider clothing advertisements which display young people ostensibly looking cool, or advertisements for fast-food restaurants that depict happy, attractive families. Buy these clothes and you could look cool too, and be popular. Eat here and your family will stop trying to slip arsenic into your burgers.

Messages like this pretty much have to get into your brain at an unconscious level, because no thinking person would believe them, given the opportunity to consider them rationally. At least, I hope not.

Advertising that tries to sell you things by making your subconscious instincts work against your better interest is manipulative. It lies to you in a way that gets around your rational thought processes — which would probably appreciate that you're being conned, were they to become involved — and any troublesome "truth in advertising" legislation that might pertain to the jurisdiction you reside in.

Car companies could never get away with promising you sex if you buy one of their cars, but they can certainly suggest it non-verbally.

There are a number of other things advertisers do to manipulate television viewers at an instinctive level, for example:

• Advertisements that are repeated until you're pretty certain your head will explode aren't the result of someone's bad scheduling — they're played that way for a reason. When you're standing in a shop trying to decide which brand of mouthwash or DVD player or mac and cheese to buy, the advertisers in question would like their brand name to be familiar to you. They don't mind making your ears smoke to do it, either. You might prefer that the brand that pops into your mind be one that was recommended by your friends, or which you've researched — and not have more reliable sources overwhelmed by ads.
  
  
• Advertisements with testimonials by ostensibly ordinary people just like you help create the sense that you've heard of the brand name being plugged, even if you really haven't. This is another example of advertising which seeks to get past your rational thoughts and work its way into your subconscious. Rationally, you know full well that the people in those advertisements are actors who were paid to say nice things about the products they're endorsing. It's interesting to note that some testimonial advertising actually states as much in small print for legal reasons, clearly without concerning its creators that doing so will reduce its effectiveness. Most viewers don't process advertising on a conscious level, and as such they won't catch this disclaimer.
  
  
• Some advertising is intended to frighten you. As I write this, Hurricane Katrina has just left hundreds of thousands of people homeless in Louisiana. The number of television advertisements for home-owners' insurance have tripled. Even if you don't live within a thousand miles of an ocean, it's unlikely that you'll miss the obvious suggestion that your life could be disrupted by a natural disaster too. Advertisements for security products, such as alarm systems, use much the same approach — they depict someone's home being broken into, and try to make you identify with the victims.
  
  
• Some advertising seeks to make you notice it and the products it's plugging by being humorous, or disturbing, or otherwise out of character with all the other content around it. If you remember the advertisement, you'll probably remember the product. While ads that make you laugh might not seem as objectionable as ads that try make you think you'll get more sex if you believe them, this is really just another way to implant awareness of a product in your mind when it probably doesn't belong there.
  
  

If an advertisement which merely announces the availability of a product and enumerates its features or benefits isn't sufficient to make you want to buy whatever it's flogging, it's a safe bet you don't want or need whatever it's flogging. The final decision is yours, or at least, it should be. Advertising that goes beyond this and attempts to manipulate you into buying stuff through psychological tricks is cheating — it's taking your money under false pretenses by promising you things, albeit through inference, innuendo and suggestion, that it's not capable of delivering.

Sneaky television advertising burrows past your defenses by understanding your weaknesses and exploiting them. This is analogous to what a hacker does when he defeats the security of a cable decoder box to watch HBO for free. No one at AOL Time Warner is likely to be at all sanguine with the latter activity — and rightly so. As such, they should have no expectation of you being prepared to put up with the former.

The argument that you have a "contract with the network" to watch advertising in exchange for the television shows they sponsor most assuredly doesn't extend to giving them a fair shot at defrauding you. If they insist on trying to mess with your brain, you have every right to defend it with whatever weapons you have at your disposal. A fast-forward button comes immediately to mind.

Once you come to terms with how advertisers attempt to manipulate you, you'll probably want to consider how to change your relationship with them. Knowing what they're up to is helpful — it's a lot more difficult to motivate people who understand the head games being wrought upon them.

You could also just avoid as many advertisements as possible.

If you understand how advertising really works, you're unlikely to buy what it's selling. In learning to think for yourself, rather than letting the ads do it for you, you'll come to appreciate that you don't need most of what's being advertised, or perhaps more correctly, that what's being advertised won't get you what you want. This being the case, there's no point in watching the ads, as doing so won't benefit the people who run them. They're not really out to get you to watch the ads, after all — they want you to buy their stuff.

If you regard broadcast television as an honor system — in which the broadcasters let you have the programming without demanding up-front payment for it, with the understanding that you'll watch their commercials — it must be said that the broadcasters behave pretty dishonorably thereafter, running manipulative ads, placing paid promotions in their shows, increasing the duration of commercial breaks toward the end of a long show, when you're less likely to change channels and so on. Honor arguably works both ways.

If your time is valuable to you — or if you just feel like you're entitled to spend your money on what you want, rather than what advertisers want to sell you — you might want to look at some of the things you can do to avoid advertising. The most effective of these involves buying a digital video recorder. These include TiVo — which is something of a lifestyle rather than an appliance, and an ongoing expense — and a number of stand-alone recorders from manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic. They'll let you time-slip broadcast television and skip through the commercials. Many of them include DVD burners — you'll be able to excise the commercials from programs you want to keep, and save the commercial-free versions to disc.

I don't believe I've ever seen a television advertisement for one of these devices.

If you express the sentiment that you harbor reservations about the prospect of having children, some well-meaning parent will unquestionably suggest that "it's different when they're yours." It probably is... but this may well be the biggest lie of all.

The reason we're all wired up to want sex, as noted in the preceding section, is to make sure we make more of ourselves and keep the species alive. This is another example of wiring that's left over from a much earlier epoch, when the world was a bit different. Look around — the species is in little danger of dying out, expect perhaps due to overpopulation.

If you're presently childless and of an age to be otherwise, there are probably a number of parties with an interest in seeing you start a family. These include:

• Your employer: You'll be a more tractable employee if you have kids to support. You'll be motivated to work harder, and you'll be less likely to tell your boss what to do with his job, even if he genuinely deserves it.
  
  
• Your parents: Grandchildren are like having kids without all the work and aggravation. If they start screaming or demanding new iPods, your parents can hand them back to you. Grandchildren promise a continuance of the family name, and most grandparents are prepared to overlook the likelihood that it will continue with half its hair dyed green.
  
  
• Your government: Your having kids ensures your government of a new generation of taxpayers, and for most governments, a still more important new generation of workers to prop up their wobbly pension schemes. Having children will allow your government to set much larger hooks into your life, under the premise that it's looking after the welfare of your children. Doing so will also make it less likely that you'll pick up and blow town one day, possibly taking your taxes to another jurisdiction.
  
  
• Every business with a credit card imprinting machine: Kids are expensive.
  
  

These not-inconsequential forces, plus your own biological predisposition to reproduce, will probably make the prospect of having kids seem all but inevitable.

It shouldn't be.

Being a parent is a serious undertaking, and not everyone has the temperament to do it successfully. If you try golf and you prove not have the temperament to do it successfully, you'll be left with some useless golf clubs and a bad hat. If you try parenting and prove not to have the temperament to do it successfully, you'll be left with one or more really messed up people — likely including yourself.

There are a number of good reasons to have kids — but determining whether they apply to you might entail some soul searching and long, awkward conversations with whomever you plan to have them with. The good reasons to question all the foregoing pressure and manipulation to start a family are probably easier to identify.

• Children are a commitment — the most serious one most people undertake. If you aren't big on commitments, you might want to consider an alternative, like a dog or a sports car.
  
  
• Children require at least one full-time parent. A day-care center is not a full time parent. If you and your spouse both really want careers, neither one of you is going to be around to raise your kids. That your government will try to convince you that this isn't an issue notwithstanding, you can't have it both ways.
  
  
• Children are expensive. Estimates vary, but it will probably cost you an average of $20,000.00 a year for at least sixteen years to raise your children. In the event that you're making minimum wage and see little prospect of upgrading to a corner office any time soon, you might want to consider the impact having kids will have on your finances. Keep in mind that while a growing number of governments offer tax credits or other financial assistance for parents, the amounts involved won't even keep your kids in mac and cheese.
  
  
• Children are hard on a marriage. Kids are a lot of work, and are usually the source of considerable stress. If you and your spouse are having a hard time staying together now, you probably don't need another divisive element in your lives.
  
  
• Children are hazardous to your health. In February 2006, Robin Simon of Florida State University and Ranae Evenson of Vanderbilt University released a study involving over 13,000 subjects which indicated that parents suffer significantly more depression than adults without children. As the authors of this study observed, being a parent is not without its rewards, but for many parents, the emotional cost of raising children can outweigh its benefits.
  
  

One of the most important things to keep in mind about all the foregoing is that children will change the number of digits in your bank account, the amount of sleep you get and what you watch on television. They won't change who you are. If you don't have what it takes to be a good parent as you read this, having kids won't alter this fact.

Your grandparents — and perhaps even your parents — very likely never considered the possibility of being "childless by choice." You do have a choice, and it's one that you should make having evaluated how you live and how you'd like to live in the future. The world in which you live is not that of your grandparents. One axiom about having kids maintains that "it takes a village to raise a child." Your grandparents probably lived in a community to a much greater degree than you do, and could count on the support of said community in bringing up their children.

You'll have to do it on your own.

There are, of course, consequences to not having children.

• You'll enjoy a great deal more freedom and probably more disposable income. You shouldn't forego having kids just so you can keep the cash, but as beneficial side effects go, a larger bank balance is one of the best.
  
  
• You'll probably have fewer friends as you get older, and you'll have a hard time making new ones. Children are typically how adults meet each other, and having kids is a sign to your neighbors that you're at least somewhat normal. The common experience of raising children gives grownups something to talk about — this assumes, of course, that you like talking about minor league baseball and ballet classes.
  
  
• You won't have anyone to take care of you when you're too old to take care of yourself. In the new millennium, this probably translates into not having anyone to get a durable power of attorney and lock you in a nursing home. It might well be argued that if your best reason for having children is to be able to impose yourself upon them in your dotage, you should establish a really good retirement fund and have another look at getting a dog.
  
  
• Your entire immediate family will consist entirely of whoever you're married to, or living with. You'd better like him or her a lot.
  
  

For the most part, parents are wont to describe non-parents as selfish, shallow, materialistic bastards. As a non-parent, I'd like to get a T-shirt with that printed on it. The issue probably calls for another bout of soul searching and awkward conversations. If you really are selfish, shallow and materialistic, you need to accept it. You're not likely to change. Turning yourself into an emotional train wreck for twenty years to be a parent when you're not capable of being a good one doesn't have a detectable up-side.

As a final observation on the prospect of non-parenting, it's probably worth noting that there are a number of ways to not have children. Most of them are either no fun at all, less than optimally reliable or generally regarded as being hard on the long term health of women. The remaining one on the list is surgery. The male version of this procedure is very scary, but it takes about an hour and stings for a couple of weeks. The female version is invasive, entails days in hospital, the risk of infection and leaves a nasty scar.

Suck it up, lads — it only hurts when you laugh.

Most of the efforts by governments to address issues of pollution, "greenhouse gas" emissions and other forms of environmental degradation are intended more to look good on paper than to actually produce any significant results. Governments typically want to be seen to be doing something about this high-visibility issue. That's not the same as actually accomplishing anything useful.

Most inhabitants of the western world will have found themselves beset by a least one government feel-good get-green frog-counting tree-hugger stealth-tax photo-op — here's mine.

In southern Ontario, where I used to live, the air started getting pretty thick, and the government wanted to be seen to address this issue. It created a mandatory emissions testing program for passenger cars, which it called "Drive Clean." It required that all automobile owners living in southern Ontario submit cars more than two years old and less than 25 years old for an elaborate emissions test every two years. The program represented a considerable expense for automobile owners, who typically had to blow away an afternoon to get their cars tested, pay for the test and who frequently found themselves placed at the mercy of the garages which ran the tests, and could insist that they have several hundred dollars worth of repair work done to allow their vehicles to pass.

The emissions testing fee was on top of the license fees, license plate fees, tire tax, battery tax, air-conditioning tax, oil-change environmental surcharge and a fifty percent gasoline tax already imposed on drivers.

The cost and inconvenience of Drive Clean might have been justifiable if it actually improved the air quality in southern Ontario, but it required very little calculator action to appreciate how pointless it was. Using the government of Ontario's own statistics:

• About 50 percent of the air pollution in southern Ontario floats in from Michigan and other northern states, and as such is beyond the direct control of residents of Ontario to prevent. If every source of pollution in Ontario were to be removed, the air quality could only improve by 50 percent.
  
  
• Only 25 percent of that 50 percent of emissions in southern Ontario are produced by automobiles. That works out 12.5 percent of the total air pollution. If every car in Ontario could be made to reduce its emissions to zero, the air quality would improve by 12.5 percent.
  
  
• The Drive Clean program didn't seek to reduce the emissions from automobiles to zero, of course. It only required that they not produce substantially more emissions than they did when they were originally manufactured. Cars more than 25 years old were exempt, essentially because reliable emission baseline data for them wasn't available. Pity, this, as they can really pump out fumes. The cars affected by the testing program were those with modern electronic ignition and fuel management systems. For practical purposes, when these engines are sufficiently badly adjusted to produce in excess of 10 percent more emissions than they were designed to, they flat-out stop running. As such, if every car in southern Ontario was polluting as much as it possibly could and still keep driving, and Drive Clean caught them all, it could hope to reduce Ontario's air pollution by 10 percent of 12.5 percent, or 1.25 percent.
  
  

Needless to say, an improvement in air quality of 1.25 percent is too insignificant to measure, and too small to affect anyone. Furthermore, this number is based on the presumption that every car on the roads of southern Ontario is malfunctioning — based on the Ontario government's statistics, 9 vehicles in 10 passed its Drive Clean tests. The actual improvement in air quality would be more like 0.125 percent, a still more insignificant figure.

The real result of Drive Clean was a public perception that the government of Ontario was serious about air quality, and new sources of revenue for the government, which collected a portion of every test fee and retail sales tax on the repairs required to pass the tests.

I should note that while I've described Drive Clean in the past tense — perhaps because I don't have to get my vehicles tested any longer — the program still exists. Its testing fees have increased in recent years.

For practical purposes, governments can't really do much to address consumer-level environmental issues. The things that damage our environment are ultimately related to consumption — people buy stuff, creating a demand for stuff and enticing manufacturers to make said stuff. Making stuff — or more correctly, the manufacturing processes required to do so — consumes the bulk of the world's energy and generates much of its pollution.

You can do a lot more to address environmental issues than your government can, albeit with a bit of a catch — we'll get to the catch in a moment.

In making choices about what you buy, what you use and what you think you're doing to the environment, it's important to keep in mind that you probably aren't directly responsible for most of the environmental impact wrought by your choices — the suppliers who make the stuff you consume are. This having been said, if you don't consume it, they won't make it, and the resultant environmental impact won't happen.

One of the things that many environmentally-conscious people consider doing to save the earth and such is buying a smaller, more fuel-efficient car — and this is one that governments are fond of leaning on. While all parties no doubt have the best of intentions — except perhaps the governments in question, which are typically pleased to collect bucketfuls of tax on new automobiles — replacing your existing car may result a larger environmental hit than keeping your old one.

If you trash your SUV or land yacht and replace it with an environmentally-friendly hybrid, driving to work will unquestionably generate less pollution, and consume less gasoline. However, building a car — even a really cool, eco-friendly, responsible one with less leg room than an airplane seat — requires a huge amount of energy and generates mountains of environmental nasties to mine the metal, smelt the metal, transport the raw materials, drill oil for the plastic bits and then refine and process it, melt glass, make tires, ship parts and finally assemble and transport the finished vehicle.

While such numbers have a large voodoo math component, one estimate suggests that the energy required to make and deliver a car, if converted into gasoline, would drive it 10,000 miles a year for seventeen years.

Having a new car built for you before your existing car needs to be replaced arguably embodies a much larger environmental hit than driving your existing car does, even if your existing car is a bit of a pig.

You should choose an environmentally-responsible vehicle the next time you need new wheels, but you shouldn't do so until your existing car is really done for.

As an aside, governments seem to like the idea of hydrogen-powered cars at the moment, hydrogen being capable of driving an internal-combustion engine with no meaningful emissions. This is arguably another example of governments favoring environmental solutions that look good, rather than those that work. Hydrogen doesn't exist in nature as a discrete substance — it's pretty much always found inconveniently attached to other atoms. The most common example of this is water. It's possible to extract hydrogen from water — the most effective way to do so is to pass an electric current through it.

Extracting enough hydrogen to run millions of cars would require a lot of electricity — the result would really be electric cars. While hydrogen may burn clean, most of the currently-available sources of electric power do not. Much of North America's electricity comes from coal. Few politicians would be openly supportive of replacing gasoline-powered cars with coal-powered cars.

You can also make environmentally-responsible choices when you buy smaller things, such as apparel, electronics and appliances. When you consider the total environmental cost in energy and emissions required to create the raw materials for consumer products, transport them, refine them, assemble the products in question, package them, transport them and sell them, it's not difficult to appreciate that everything you buy represents a substantial environmental hit. All other things being equal, buying less stuff will result in less energy consumption and fewer emissions being generated.

As a rule, inexpensive appliances and clothing from manufacturers in China, Thailand, Korea and other developing countries don't last as long as comparable products made locally. Seen only as a function of the damage done to your credit card, this isn't much of an issue — given a choice between a coffee maker that costs $30 and lasts two or three years and a coffee make that costs $100 and lasts ten years, the $30 coffee maker doesn't look like a bad choice. If you bought an expensive American or European-made coffee maker, you'd probably get tired of it, or break it, or swear off coffee for health reasons long before it reached the end of its useful life.

Realistically, you'd have to buy three or four cheap coffee makers to enjoy the same lifespan as one expensive one. While not having to take the hit for the expensive appliance up front makes doing so attractive, someone is going to have to build three coffee makers — and use three times the energy, generating three times the emissions — than would have been the case if you'd bought one good one.

Buying well-made appliances, consumer electronics and clothes will significantly reduce the environmental impact of your purchases. It's arguably a difficult thing to do in practice, however — much of what we consume is bought for reasons of convenience or fashion, rather than out of necessity. Changing these habits is significantly more difficult than having to submit your car for a superfluous emissions test every few years.

And there is a catch to doing so, as I noted earlier. While it's hardly worth mentioning, the world's economy is based on people buying a lot of stuff. If everyone stopped buying inexpensive, short-lived products, a lot of factories would close, workers would be left to fend for themselves and a dark cloud of recession and global doom would descend upon our civilization for decades to come. Ya... it's hardly worth mentioning.