Shit we'd like to forget,
And shit we just find annoying.

We mean that in the best way, after all, Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984 while living in West Berlin on a grant that provided funding to filmmakers, writers and musicians to live and work in the West German district occupied by the allies. "When I was writing it, we were still in an age in which America was seen as a beacon of light, of liberal democracy, a model for the rest of the world,” says Atwood. “We're not there anymore, because the rest of the world has changed and so has America. That is why I think people are seeing The Handmaid's Tale as more possible than they did when it was first published.”

A former Facebook executive made waves in 2017 after he spoke out about his “tremendous guilt” over growing the social network, which he feels has eroded “the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.” Chamath Palihapitiya began working for Facebook in 2007 and left in 2011 as its vice president for user growth. When he started, he said, there was not much thought given to the long-term negative consequences of developing such a platform.

I love Kinder Eggs, I live in Canada and have fond memories of my parents and relatives gifting these wonderful treats, two types of chocolate and a surprise inside, can it get any better? Well not if you live in the USA. In fact, In January 2011, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) threatened a Manitoba resident with a $300 (Canadian dollars) fine for carrying one egg across the U.S. border into Minnesota. In June 2012, CBP held two Seattle men for two and a half hours after discovering six Kinder Surprise eggs in their car upon returning to the U.S. from a trip to Vancouver.

Chivas Regal was once an obscure brand of Scotch whiskey. By raising its prices, it not only increased sales but also realized consumers associate price with quality. The Chivas Regal effect is based on the commonly accepted idea that we've all heard a million times - you get what you pay for. Back in the 1950s, Coca Cola was twice as expensive as Pepsi - despite very similar ingredients. Coca Cola was bigger, had more sales, yet when Pepsi increased it's prices, sales increased - enter the Chivas Regal Effect. In 2010, consumers pay more for brand-name bottled water, believing it is of better quality even though water is colorless, tasteless and odorless, and research shows that aside from PH and Alkaline levels - most bottled water is the same.

Most consumers have no idea about technology. I’m sorry if this sounds offensive but the reality is technology has evolved at such a rapid pace, we don’t know truly understand what hit us – and what the implications are. Take for instance something as simple as your browsing behavior. On the surface we know that we look for things, usually through the aid of a search engine, or we go to a site which is familiar to us, and if you’re like most people end up taking a ride through a digital maze of things we find interesting, responding to click bait, stories of interest, products that we think we need, or stories we want to share.

There’s a lot of talk today about privacy, more specifically recent new stories about the government trying to get Apple to provide backdoor access to their phones. I personally am completely for living in a safe country, one which respects freedom of speech, personal rights and freedoms, and safety from enemies abroad. History however, time and time again, has taught us the fine balance we must maintain in order to preserve these rights we hold so dear to our hearts (rights which are diminishing today by the way).

On the surface “love” immediately musters up romantic mental images of a perfect life. An image which was embedded early on in life by "the media of the day", in other words love is branded a certain way by the stories, books, newspapers, magazines, television and movies we are exposed to. Those that don’t fit into the popular “brand” of love are excluded, and for the most part ostracized by the rest of society. Love is complex. It’s more than emotions – it defines everything we as humans do. It defines where and how our taxes are spent, our tax exemptions, who we can call a spouse, how we get jobs, where and how we live, and sadly why we go to war – it’s the reason behind everything that moves our world.

In the weeks since the November 8 election and US media reports on the spread of so-called “fake news” during the presidential campaign, we've been exposed to an ever-growing amount of finger-pointing blaming everyone from the Russian government to Facebook – all in an effort to try and explain the election results. By no surprise then, shortly after the election, I was listening to a radio program on NPR about a small town in FYROM (Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia) called Veles - and their role in this narrative. The town is poor, typical for the region, but recently has seen an insurgence of new BMW’s, Mercedes and other fancy cars ....and people.