Earth Hour

Look around, and watch your world getting destroyed. Or take a stand and make a difference.

Put simply, out planet is dying the death of a million cuts. If each person contributes even in the smallest proportion it can make a difference. It would take an ignorant person to not know by now what I’m referring to.

Global Warming. Despite being ignored for decades, the issue has found public interest in recent years. Amongst many efforts comes Earth Hour – a stand taken up first by the city of Sydney (Australia) in 2007. By switching off their lights for one hour in the evening, 2.2 million homes and businesses in Sydney collectively voiced their concern for our planet.

Moved by their actions, people around the world joined in the next year. In 2008, 50 million people switched off their lights. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all stood in darkness.

And on March 28, 2009 an estimated 1 billion people took part in Earth Hour. Sitting in my university in Singapore, I watch the lights go off and realised how collective people from different parts of the world were at that instant. Pictures posted at Boston.com reveal the effect in a series of before-and-after photographs – which (starting with the second one ) fade between “on” and “off” when clicked.

This is the official Earth Hour 2009 video:

To learn more about Global Warming, you can check the following websites:

• Global Warming.org – http://www.globalwarming.org/
• The New York Times – http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/
• Al Gore’s ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ documentary – http://www.climatecrisis.net/ (Watch here on Google Video)

The Lost Generation

A good message…

Profiting from others death?

In the US, shady brokers are making horrific deals. Read here.

They first find a person who has life insurance and is currently in need of money. Then they find investors who currently have some money to invest for a phenomenally high return with literally no risk. The investors agree to pay the insured person’s premiums plus some more cash up front, and the insured person agrees to make this investor his/her beneficiary. In simpler terms, when this insured person dies, the investor will claim the insurance amount! In the middle, this broker makes money too.

The pangs of old age are unimaginable. And if you don’t have any beneficiaries, are hard up for money, and without any other sources of income, this could be an option you’d consider, I guess. It does not seem morally correct, but then at that age, the position you’d be in, and relentless persuasiveness by brokers may just cause you to give in.

On the whole, I think the insurance industry should take such astonishing figures into account and introduce regulations/features that would dissuade policy-selling.

Paying premiums through cash values is an option, but it doesn’t provide money if you’re hard up and have current needs right?

Stretching my moral boundaries, a one-off deal between a seller and an investor (for mutual benefits) may just be acceptable.

However, commercializing this is not. Even what the Legacy Funding Group is doing (providing beneficiaries the net amount) is wrong! They benefit from the death of the insured (and by a fairly large margin!) – so who knows, they may just encourage it !?! No idea how far they could go too..

I may be a skeptic, but its ‘people’ and ‘money’.