Yes, seriously. Of course, he can't help it if his opinions have been formed by working as a professional wheel-greaser for one specific industry. That is, of course, the most insidious danger to a good government - people of good faith who are overwhelmingly biased in favor of economic elite interests (which is why a randomly selected Senate, like juries, might be interesting). Since having jobs like his look like a positive mark for government jobs, and corporations tend to hire people who like corporations or are willing to become sympathetic, it's a tough, systemic problem.

BlueKai does something similar (except it's for a wide range of display advertising, not just facebook) - they infer things about you based on your browsing history and use that to target ads at you. They are all over the web, so they have a good amount of information, but the surprising thing to me is that they let you look at your profile on their website - http://www.bluekai.com/registry/ is the place to find it.

I don't work for BlueKai, or even for a company that uses them.

That's a different category of belief - it's belief in a moral imperative, not a fact, and as such doesn't have a factual right/wrong which is demonstrable. Believing wrong facts is sometimes harmless, but believing wrong facts as a policy will lead almost exclusively to worse decisions.

Another important difference is that getting the flu vaccine (along with other vaccines) is enforceable and only has to be done right once per employee per year, not thousands of times without error.

I agree that religion is no more dangerous than other classes of unfounded beliefs, but surely no one thinks that unfounded beliefs are no more dangerous than well-founded beliefs, right?

That's an optimistic view - often this translates means they see the problem as being oneself - that is, the responsibility of the person that particular Christian is judging to be inferior.

People who are not participating in the negotiations do not always come out ahead, and the net social benefit might be negative. Here are some two-party deals that are bad for society (some more extreme than others, but I think they illustrate the need for laws and social rules outside of property protection):

1. You pay me $1200/oz for gold, and I open a gold mine. The gold mine leaks poison into a nearby river, killing tens of thousands of fish, reducing life expectancy in surrounding communities by 5 years, and not being my problem.

2. I am a congressman and you are a pharmaceutical company CEO. You pay me $10 million, directly and in jobs to my underqualified relatives (and me as soon as I retire from Congress), to sponsor a bill which makes competing drugs illegal by extending your intellectual property rights another 5 years. I win, you win, and consumers get screwed with higher prices for a longer time, competing firms go out of business, and the generic version of your drug appearing 5 years later results in 50,000 avoidable deaths among the under-insured.

3. I am a hitman. You pay me to kill your wife, only $20,000, and receive $10 million of her assets that you would have lost in the coming divorce. I win, you win, she loses.

4. I go to a futures market and make bets/investments relying on a 4-degree temperature rise in the next 4 decades, open shipping lanes at the north pole, a dwindling supply of ocean-based food, etc. These are highly leveraged and worth approximately $50 Billion dollars. I then pay you to put CO2 and methane in the atmosphere as quickly as possible, investing $2 Billion in this scheme and improving the likelihood of my payoff by over 10%, making the investment an easy decision. You make tons of money, and so do I. A win for unrestricted capitalism!

These examples are crude, but meant to illustrate certain anti-social impulses inherent in unrestricted deal-making in a capitalist framework. Property rights are not as important as other human rights.

It doesn't matter what we call them, but it does matter how many sets of competing standards we have. You are skipping steps in your argument, and your claim that 'a human is going to fuck it up anyways' is just negative bullshit. There are clearly ways to reduce the chance of that - one is to move away from having two competing systems.

And your argument in turn implies that there's no point in ever trying to be systematically consistent to reduce errors, because .... What? The frequency and severity of human error is going to be constant regardless of the systems people are forced to work within?

People will continue to make mistakes. In some cases, the existence of confusing doubles standards increases the chances of that happening, as well as introducing pointless costs. Measurement is a wonderful example of a natural monopoly, and we should prefer (open) standards.

Racial purity, the most important of all the virtues!

And killing a bunch of children is certainly more reasonable than just using your God-like powers to spirit the slaves away to the land of milk and honey . . . .

This sort of thing is why the Old Testament is fun to read and makes for good movies, but is an unreliable source of moral guidance.