Why Does Obama Hate Freedom?

Now that the O-Bomba is flexing his muscle, the dreaded SHCA hydra is returning to U.S. politics. Yes, that old many headed serpent, the Socialist Health Care Agenda is back, and by Zeus, it has got teeth.
As any liberal with a bleeding heart can tell you, people often seem to support the idea of institutionalised health care. (Usually it is because they are closet commies - no doubt the blood of those demanding fair access to health is red like Marx.) Some people even go so as to say that health care is morally important. I truly wonder why people hate freedom?
Fortunately, like any good citizen group, the CPR have swiftly stood up to the monstrous threat to choice that is socialised health care.
In a series of advertisements released in the U.S., the Conservatives for Patients' Rights have finally spoken the truth about health care. Following is selected chunks from Chris McGreal's article in today's Guardian:

[The CPR campaign claims that] "a state-run system strips patients of control over their healthcare. "[People] lose control over their own destiny in the health system,"...[This] campaign is being co-ordinated by the same public relations firm that masterminded the "Swift boat" attacks by President Bush's campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election...CPR says that Obama's plans to control costs, while widening access to care for some 45m people without health insurance, means that the US will introduce rationing of treatment and drug supplies...[describing] Britons as "trapped" by the NHS, with medical decisions made by bureaucrats, not doctors.

Yes. The U.K. health care system is obviously a nightmare. Waiting lists can be long. Choice relating to doctors is limited. In contrast, the current U.S. system truly supports freedom: I can get the best health care in world if I truly want it. Choice is more important than being alive to make choices. I sure as fudge don't want some pesky socialist bureaucrat telling someone who oversees an institution to tell a medical Dr what to tell me. I would rather die from freedom than live in a world where I get healthcare without choices. As the founder of the CPR Richard Scott points out "What you see is when the government gets involved, you run out of money and health care gets rationed." I assume it follows that those who don't have money to begin with deserve their poor health. In fact those who don't have the money to pay for health ought to follow Scott's entrepreneurial model.
We ought avoid those pesky ideas like 'health' or 'wellness' in the world of healthcare. Healthcare needs only Scott's four pillars: "choice, competition, accountability and personal responsibility." Anything else must simply be a socialist conspiracy.

Economic Rationalism And Smoking

In what is perhaps the greatest news story/public policy on the face of the planet, read the following excerpt from an article in today's Age titled Chinese Ordered To Smoke Until They Drop:

LOCAL government officials in China have been ordered to smoke nearly a quarter of a million packets of cigarettes to boost the local economy during the global financial crisis.

The edict, issued by officials in Hubei Province, in central China, threatens to fine officials who "fail to meet their targets" or are caught smoking rival brands manufactured in neighbouring provinces.

Even local schools have been given a smoking quota for teachers, while one village was ordered to buy 400 cartons of cigarettes a year for its officials.

This is part genius and part rational. While the absurd(ist) moron in me is giggling with excitement about this, I find it hard to see how this is very much different from Rudd's cash-splash. Spend, dammit, spend. Don't save, don't invest in the future, spend now. Even if it means putting a shotgun to a child's head and screaming at them to start smoking, (slight exaggeration here), we must support the economy at all costs.

In fact, if you expand this out a little, this is the very argument put forward by the Australian coal lobby et al. that we can't afford to impose hefty carbon debts on high polluting industries. Jobs (as an abstract economic quantifier) are for more important than the health or well being of the people inhabiting those jobs, their families or those in their community. So smoke up, kiddoes, because Jobs are jesus, and the Economy is god.

Why I am not an economist

I was reading The Times and came across this from Dominique Strauss-Kahn,the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - "The IMF has called for governments in leading economies to spend a combined 2 per cent of global GDP, or $1.2 trillion (£1,075 billion), to try to fend off the danger from global recession.“If we are not able to do that, then social unrest may happen in many countries - including advanced economies,” Mr Strauss-Kahn suggested.

Kind of reminds me of what Peter Singer argues for in One World, among other places, where he calls for members of the developed world to donate 1% of their annual income, which he argues will not only meet the UN Millenium Summit Goals of halving world poverty, but eliminating it. (see pp 180-195, in particular p 193)

Now, I read these comments by Strauss-Kahn, on the necessity to deal with a global recession, and think of Singer's arguments and a certain frustration builds up in my liver. Trillions of dollars so far have been spent on saving a global financial system which is at best plagued by problems, at worst pathological, yet millions of people world wide live in preventable poverty. Citibank amongst others was 'too big to fail' yet a scheme like Thomas Pogge's pharmaceutical re-incentivisation scheme, estimated to cost 45-90 Billion US anually, seems too big to fund. Simplifying the issue, white collar jobs and investments trump basic health.

Now I am sure that there are peoples out there wondering what loose connections I am drawing, pointing out that what Strauss-Kahn is demanding is 2% of GDP, while Singer's 1% is individual contribution, or that the collapse of Citibank would precipitate great suffering, while Pogge's pharmaceutical ideas are suspiciously socialistic. All true, but this is why I am not an economist. I don't care about protecting an endangered habitat like the Global Economy, or saving endangered species like those poor financial specialists with the dodgy 700 Billion US Bailout.
In fact I don't really care about much at all. But my blood angers up at the weird disconnect that is going on world-wide at the moment between throwing money at a problem for reasons like the importance of national stability, whilst ignoring other preventable causes for unrest. And don't just listen to me. Try that bastion of left-wing intellectualism and academic communism, the US National Intelligence Council:
" New and reemerging infectious diseases will pose a rising global health threat and will complicate US and global security over the next 20 years. These diseases will endanger US citizens at home and abroad, threaten US armed forces deployed overseas, and exacerbate social and political instability in key countries and regions in which the United States has significant interests."

Animal Ethics = Freedom Of Choice

I was reading an article about the 'shonky awards' today. These are put out by Choice Magazine each year.

One of the beneficiaries of this was the Australian Egg Corporation which won an award for their 'Free Range' barn laid eggs. Their free-range birds have the option of leaving the barn, and roaming in an open range area. Yet, many of the birds in the barn do not do this. Choice Magazine thought this was shonky. The managing director of the AEG, James Kellaway, defended their product through the lovelly use of a free-will argument. Here he is, taken from the Sydney Morning Herald:
"As for access to the open range, the corporation was not about to start strong-arming chickens out the barn door each morning."We need to ensure each bird has access to an open range, but it's a chicken's freedom of choice," Mr Kellaway said."

Gold!

Without wanting to ruffle the feathers of those of you who hate counting a pun before it is hatched, I would say that Mr Kellaway's argument is Eggsellent.

Curiouser and curiouser!

After a recent talk here at CAPPE on virtual friendships, I have been a little interested in the various questions and concerns raised by having internet only friends. One of the problems that people find with virtual friendships is that they remove the need for social interaction, thus reducing contact with real in-flesh'd humans, leading to less ability to socialise etc etc.

And then I read this article: Japanese Man Petitions To Marry Comic-Book Character.

Edited highlights include:

A Japanese man has enlisted hundreds of people in a campaign to allow marriages between humans and cartoon characters, saying he feels more at ease in the "two-dimensional world."...Taichi Takashita launched an online petition aiming for one million signatures to present to the government to establish a law on marriages with cartoon characters..."I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world," he wrote..."However, that seems impossible with present-day technology. Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorise marriage with a two-dimensional character?"

Now, am I being a stupid old-fart here, and not being up-to-date, hip-wit-da-kidz and down-with-it or has this guy completely lost the plot?

Why Digital Rights Management is lame

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is lame. Here's my most recent example of why:

Spore is a recent game designed by Will "The Sims" Wright as basically a "sim evolution" game. It's had a lot of hype and seems pretty fun for a Sims-fan like myself (although it didn't play so well on my Macbook, unfortunately). It's currently retailing in Australian computer game shops for around $90-100. Which is a lot for a game, in my opinion.

In order for EA (the publishers) to extract as much money as possible from people who wish to play the game, they decided to put DRM on the game. This is pretty standard practice in the game industry. Usually the DRM is along the lines of "you have to register online to play" or something that makes it really hard to rip a copy of the disk using basic disk ripping tools. Or registration keys, etc. etc. Game distributors know that it's pretty much inevitable that their games will end up being pirated anyway, since hackers are pretty smart and like to get things for free, so will poke away at it until they succeed. So DRM acts basically as a "speed bump", hopefully slowing the flow of pirated copies until the first couple of weeks sales (which is usually when games sell the most copies) come in.

This time, however, EA decided to a) get greedy, and b) piss off their customers more than usual with DRM by using a 3 installs and you're out system. Now considering that it's actually recommended that you reinstall Windows at least once a year or so, this effectively gives your copy of the game 3 years if you're particularly careful (not of course, barring the fact that you may end up buying a replacement computer and wanting to install it on that, or you get infected with a virus and need to reinstall, etc.).

So given that DRM is really just a "speed bump", this is lame, lame lame. Why? Because even before Spore was available for sale, a leaked, pirated, cracked copy was available to download, that was playable without having to worry about how many times it was installed. The DRM was effectively useless. And it seriously disadvantaged the people who actually bought the game, leaving pirates, once again, the winners of the DRM game, and people who want to support the games industry the losers.

More Spore DRM fun:
Spore DRM is a screw-up: "Firstly, SecuROM [(the DRM tool EA used)] didn't even work, as the game was pirated before release. Secondly, this game was much anticipated by gamers as one of the most significant releases of the year, so the idea that you could not have a single worldwide release date, and expect people in North America to resist the temptation to pirate it was just silly."

Spore rated down on Amazon as a protest against its DRM: "[Jeff Brown, vice president of corporate communications at EA] described EA’s SecuROM DRM as standard for the industry and cited Apple’s practice of only allowing downloaded music to be played on three devices. “We are extremely pleased with the popularity of Spore and the critical response to it,” he said. The latest figures on Amazon are 1,676 one-star reviews out of 1,812."

U.S. Federal Election

I am sure that some of our loyal and devoted fan base (consisting of millions, no doubt) have been following the recent developments in the U.S. Federal Election.
First off, we have Obama as the first 'non-white' major party candidate, then McCain names Sarah Palin as his running mate/potential Vice President. She is young (mid fourties) conservative, and she is female. She also has five children, one of them 17, pregnant and - shock horror - unwed. As the dirt diggers fire up their engines, and rumours and scuttlebut abound, I am become more and more fascinated by this election. Obviously the outcome wil be interesting, but to see what happens during the process leading to the outcome will be really really interesting.

Just to add a little slacademic fuel to this fire, this is a quote from our girl Sarah P from today's Australian: She is expected to highlight her focus on ethics issues in Alaska and other accomplishments...

Hmmm, I wonder if she takes an irrealist or a non-descriptive cognitivist approach, or whether she is a full blown realist. Methinks the last.

A dark and cynical ray of hope

I was reading this little article on Jon Stewart.

It was quite refreshing (or distressing) to read that he is seen by Americans as the fourth most admired journalist in America. Now, to give this a bit of context, he is a satirist, presenting a farcical and absurdist view of American/Global politics. Taking the piss out of politicians in a humerous and gifted way, whilst exposing the hipocricy and idiocy of modern politics and world affairs.
I think our old mate Freud once spoke about laughter and black humour as a way of cleansing us of the darkness that builds up, and given the dark times that are kicking about at the moment, an abusrd voice of reason is like cool water to the parched desert traveller.
An alternate view is that when the journalism and the media are so perverted and corrupted that a comedy show is seen as one of the most important voices of truth in a country, we know that something is horribly horribly wrong.

Anyways, check out Stewart's Bush - Bush debate for one example of his comedic stylings. OR, if you have nothing better to do, trawl your way through the Daily Show's website. Its a nice.

Children and consent: the artist as pornographer

Is it right to let childrens' parents consent to them being photographed naked and displayed in public? This question has become a hot topic after an exhibition due to be displayed of the renowned photographer Bill Henson that was closed down before even opening due to the controversial nature of the photographs. They showed a 12-year-old girl naked in a series of non-sexual photographs. The full story can be found here, with a followup of obscenity and potential child pornography charges here, but in this article former models of the photographer say that there was no way he had ever sexualised the photography he did of children, and always made sure to get the consent of the parents and the child:

"Bill asked my mother at an exhibition opening if I would like to pose for him and we talked about it and decided to do it," says Ms Elenberg, now a 34-year-old mother. "We went to this old building in Melbourne. It was quite dark but I never felt uncomfortable. Bill made you feel incredibly safe and calm. I was involved in the artistic process and I never felt that I wasn't in control.

"I absolutely support Bill Henson. I'm a parent myself and I abhor child pornography, but this is not child pornography. It's artistic and creative."

So the question is, though, can a child consent to something like this? Where is a line drawn between nudie pics in the bathtub put online for all to see and photographs of artistic merit, and child pornography? In the above article, the CE of Child Wise, Bernadette McMenamin says: "It is clear from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that parents do not have the right to make that decision on behalf of their children. And children, at the age of 12, 13 or 14, do not have the experience or the understanding to make an informed consent. They don't understand how those images will be used or re-used. When they're 18 or 20 or 30 they may look back and say, 'My god, I made a mistake.' "

It seems to me that the difference between naked pics in public and pornography is largely intention. The creeps who get off to children in the first place are unfortunately likely to find catalogues of childrenswear sexually gratifying as well, so there's not a lot we can do about that (except deal with them as we currently do when we find them, because that sort of thing is just revolting). But these photographs are apparently non-sexual (I cannot verify personally, I haven't seen them). How then are they different from anatomical photographs for public medical use, or the aforementioned baby bathtub pics? I personally would be more embarrassed to know that my parent had been showing naked pics of me on their laptop at each talk in public they gave as their background wallpaper (not mentioning any names here person who gives talks in CAPPE!) than to see artistic photographs of me when I was younger that were tasteful and associated with pleasant memories.

Basically what I'm getting at is that yes, I think children can be part of a consent process here, but with their parents who should be properly informed. The argument given by McMenamin above is just silly, because it means that nobody would be able to make decisions for their children at all. A good informed consent process should take the mental status of the parents and child, the understanding of the parents and child into account, and above all put the child's interests first, and it sounds like this was exactly what Henson did. This whole kneejerk reaction to something that touches society's nerve can be used to draw attention to the problems we have in society and maybe work on dealing with them rather than shutting them up in a cupboard. And that's one of the wonderful things about art, is that it often does that to great effect. Perhaps they should start up a fund to help children in developing countries, or something, rather than get on their high horse about all this.

Art is art. Erotica and porn are usually quite obviously so, through the intention of the photographer. Perhaps next time Henson, to avoid controversy, should paint or draw his subjects instead of photographing them? Would that be more acceptable?

Informed consent trumped by backward crazy Oklahomans

Nothing gets my goat quite as much as pro-lifers. But y'know, I'm happy for them to stand around with their placards and waste money on stupid videos and pamphlets I'll never see or read, as long as they don't impose themselves on me or anyone in fact. Peaceful protest and all. It's when they manage to wangle their way into legislature and practise at clinics or when they start up their own clinics masquerading as medical centres for pregnant women that I really start to get annoyed.

I won't go into the amazingly detailed annoyances I have with their whole outlook on this issue, because it'll just make me even more mad than I am already, but today I found this article which just makes me livid. In short, Oklahoma has brought in legislation that requires women seeking an abortion to have an ultrasound.

Under the guise of obtaining informed patient consent, this new law requires doctors to withhold pregnancy termination until an ultrasound is performed. The law states that either an abdominal or vaginal ultrasound, whichever gives the best image of the fetus, must be done. Neither the patient nor the doctor can decide which type of ultrasound to use, and the patient cannot opt out of the ultrasound and still have the procedure. In effect, then, the legislature has mandated that a woman have an instrument placed in her vagina for no medical benefit. The law makes no exception for victims of rape and incest.

Argh. I can't even begin to explain how wrong this whole thing is. Consent is about taking into account specific situations and giving people the choice about violations of ethical norms, empowering people to act with their own best interests in mind, not imposing unnecessary restrictions and backward religious beliefs on people.

Grr.

Phorm: like a human organ farm for advertisements

While I'm busy being outraged, here's something interesting I found today, a BBC article discussing a new advertising company called Phorm.

This is the rub:

Phorm works by connecting a users' web surfing habits to a series of advertising channels in order to target adverts.

Keywords in websites visited by a user are scanned and connected to advertising categories, and then matched to particular adverts.

It means a user who has been visiting web pages with lots of references to cars, for example, could then see adverts for cars when visiting a website that has signed up to Phorm's service.

So basically it builds up a profile of your browsing habits while essentially snooping on you, then presents you with targeted advertisements.

If that's starting to sound a little evil, then here comes the clincher: it uses anonymous ISP data, that is, information taken from the ISP -- you don't have to install anything on your computer.

But it's opt-in, which is good... and they don't store or personalise any data, which is good... however to sweeten the deal (and to make ISPs possibly start to require it for their subscribers), they add in a bunch of useful things like phishing and fraud protection.

It could, however, be illegal, because it's intercepting information between the ISP and the user. But IT specialist Alexander Hanff went one step further:

"What Phorm is trying to do is to turn people into products - a global warehouse selling pieces of us to the highest bidders."

I'm really not sure how to feel about this one, except for a vague sense of uneasiness, because this is almost like a lime cordial maker paying the water company to put lime cordial directly into the pipelines that go to peoples' houses. And that makes me a bit upset.

Follow-up to employee email snooping article

So the water becomes a little muddier here -- turns out the Attorney-General's office is quite well renowned for attempting to bring in crazy authoritarian initiatives to restrict Australians under the guise of anti-terrorism solutions.

According to Crikey today (subscription possibly required), some of the A-G's secretary's recent efforts include attempting to silence criticism of ASIO after they wrongly detained Izhar ul-Haque (rejected by the commission), others in the office helped Howard with his infamous "children overboard" mess and providing the false allegations of weapons of mass destruction that dragged Australia into war. Apparently it seems that this lot quite enjoy close relations with the private sector.

Bernard Keane writes in the above article:

The private sector, across areas such as transport, communications, IT and energy, is a willing participant in the process of establishing a system for monitoring and protecting their facilities and the public infrastructure they use, all in the name of preventing or effectively responding to terrorism. After all, the process allows companies access to government funding for the maintenance and upgrading of monitoring and information-collection systems they would otherwise have to invest in themselves, enables – in the name of greater security – the development of new regulatory requirements that raise the barriers to entry for possible competitors, and transfers an element of operational risk to taxpayers.

Still think this is all about keeping Australians safe?

P.S. for some fun acronym bureaucracy in the world of Critical Infrastructure Security (CIS), this is a good read.

Is losing employee consent the price to be paid for cyber-terrorism safety?

I read with some initial horror this morning that the Federal Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, has proposed amendments to the Telecommunications (Interceptions) Act among other legislature to be introduced in order to combat cyber-terrorism. These amendments apparently (I can't find the original documents for all the searching I have done so far today after trawling the parliament website, all I could find is a proposed amendment from February that just expands warrant powers) allow companies and others who run critical infrastructure (apparently the financial system, stock exchange, electricity grid, transport system, etc.) to monitor employee use of the internet including email and other communications without their consent. The Act so far only allows those working in security agencies to be monitored without consent.

McClelland and Julia Gillard have spoken out to say that these amendments will help in securing Australia's infrastructure against cyber-terrorism, because a terrorist attack on critical infrastructure would "reap far greater economic damage than would be the case of a physical attack", according to McClelland, which Gillard backed up soon after.

Why do the A-G and Julia Gillard suppose that cyber-terrorists are likely to be working from within an infrastructure company? McClelland used the example of the Estonian hackers which used a bot-net of thousands of external zombie computers to take down the system. This isn't something that will be fixed by monitoring, all it requires is decent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack prevention mechanisms, which are available. And even if they still think that insider jobs facilitate terrorist attacks, why do they think that cyber-terrorists that may happen to be inside the company are likely to be stupid enough to communicate through company channels?


I'm also interested in what sort of mechanisms they are putting in place to avoid situations where employers with a grudge could use this law to poke into private affairs of their employees who are in no way a danger to the company or Australia's infrastructure, and how they are proposing that employers effectively monitor their employees for terrorist activity. What sort of delegation of these powers would there need to be to, say, someone employed by the company to monitor other employees? What sort of checks and balances are there for this? It seems like it would be detrimental to Australia's security if employers could act as if they were security experts and identify likely threats from innocuous emails.

Another thing that needs to be asked is why consent needs to be taken away. Consent can be construed as a waiver of normative expectations, according to Neil Manson and Onora O'Neill (and my upcoming thesis on informed consent in ICT will explain why I think this is a reasonable model to apply to ICT). It seems here that by legislating consent out of a workplace agreement that the government here is almost attempting to make workplace surveillance the norm. This surprises me coming from a supposedly liberal government! Why is not having an employee's consent important to this bill? Surely we can have a bill that allows for all the other parts with explicit knowledge of the employee. Many companies already have internet use policy agreements with their employees, which involve degrees of surveillance. Legislating this sort of thing is fine, but surely, like collecting tax file information or as part of a standard contract for employment, the legislation could include some sort of policy for detailing the surveillance and obtaining consent from the employee?

McClelland has said that information from these communications could be used in "for instance, disciplinary matters regarding the employees' conduct or any other privacy issues. In other words, you're not interested in communications from employees' friends, their children, other family members." I fail to understand why this sort of thing isn't already covered by the existing legislation though, or why it is necessary to remove consent from the equation, or put employers (and/or the person delegated to deal with these matters) in charge of judging the relevance of personal communication.

I agree that infrastructure is a juicy target for potential cyber-terrorist attack, but this set of laws is not the way to protect infrastructure. Infrastructure needs good solid protection through careful construction and management and contingency plans, not the ability for employers to be able to monitor their employees' internet use. If that's not what this is about, then terrorism needs to be fully disconnected from the discourse about this law. Otherwise, it's just fear-mongering, something more suited to the dim dark past of Australian government history.

How much does informed consent actually waive?

One of the things I've been looking at recently is Neil Manson and Onora O'Neill's "Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics", which puts forward the idea of dropping autonomy as the justification for informed consent (with a bunch of compelling arguments, the most compelling being that we really just don't know exactly what autonomy means), and instead using informed consent procedures as a waiver of normative expectations. For example, taking a knife and stabbing it into a person's body is not usually something you would expect to be acceptable, but surgeons will commonly do so given that the patient has gone through a particular set of informed consent procedures. So informed consent here is being used as a waiver of the expectation that one would normally not get stabbed in the chest by someone else.

This sort of idea is obviously already in use (most medical informed consent procedures for example require a certain amount of disclosure of information, some measure perhaps of how much the consenter understood the information, perhaps also some sort of competency test, and then some sort of signing of a waiver that absolves the practitioner of responsibility), but what Manson and O'Neill do is cut to the chase and rub out any lofty goals of achieving autonomy and full understanding and rather difficult-to-obtain idealistic goals like that, and get straight into what it is that informed consent wants to achieve for all practical purposes.

So it is with this in mind that I find this article today (excuse the terrible pun in the headline), about a (rather stupid) man and his then (also rather stupid) girlfriend who wanted to scam a local council out of compensation by claiming that a wall fell on the girlfriend's leg, breaking it. Of course, what does the scheming couple do? The girl puts her leg up on some bricks and the guy jumps on it, breaking it in several places. Oh yeah, and their friend films it on a mobile phone camera.

He claims they filmed it so he had proof she consented to it, and she says she gave her consent to him jumping on her leg (and even suggested they do it in the first place). At the trial of the man, the judge seemed to think this consent was not a mitigating factor.

When jailing Thomson, Judge Francis Gilbert said: "This is an extraordinary case. You broke Miss Hingston's leg deliberately at her request and with her consent in order to make a false claim against the city council. Whether or not she consented or suggested the scheme, it is no defence. You inflicted really serious harm to another person deliberately and with pre-meditation for a wholly financial motive."

-- http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/chef-burnt-as-he-overcooks-compo-plot/2008/04/11/1207856774622.html

I find this quite an interesting case, because although obviously they're both quite stupid people (I mean come on...) she did give her consent. However there could be an argument to say that the man just took advantage of her stupidity, but how are we to know that for sure (unless he confesses to it)?

So to put that back into Manson and O'Neill's informed consent procedure, she acknowledged and agreed to a waiver of the jumping on her leg for a particular purpose. Now it seems that the actual jumping on the leg is not theoretically the issue at stake, but the reasoning behind it that the judge takes issue with. So how should we take that into account? Should we perhaps have waivers of waivers? Or restrict legitimacy of waivers to waiving "reasonable normative expectations"? What would constitute a reasonable normative expectation then? Obviously to this couple, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Some things to think about!

By the way, the couple are apparently no longer together!