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Why is it important to balance personal, short-term benefits and society's long term welfare? **

=** Angela **= It is important to balance personal, short-term benefits and society’s long term welfare because if you try to benefit the society in the long term too much, then personally in the short term, you may not benefit very well. Also, if you just want to benefit yourself for short-term, then in long-term society it will come back on you For example, if you were sick with a contagious disease and although people tell you not to go anywhere, you go outside or on a plane, then everyone will get sick. You are benefiting yourself for a short term, but endangering society's long term welfare. Like most other things, you want to be in balance because if you aren't, then it will come back at you.

Louise: I think the points you made are very interesting. I dont think the point you made relates to the example too well though. Shouldn't it be the short term benefit of you getting on a plane will be bad for the long term effect of everyone else on it? Angela: Oh yea thanks I messed up. I changed it now. :] Back to Top
 * http://www.flickr.com/photos/22985433@N00/3182482144/**
 * Here is a picture of a scale in balance. This is what you want; you want to balance personal, short-term benefits and society’s long term welfare so it benefits you in the whole.**

=Harry= I think it's important to balance personal short-term benefits and long-term benefits because if either side is not balanced enough, then that side will come back to you as punishment soon enough. For example, if you think about yourself too much, you might keep yourself clean and healthy, but the society will not have benefited from your care. The society might become sick with an incurable disease, and soon, most people could die off. If you help the society too much, though, you won't be able to live a healthy life. If you donate money to charities helping diseases like malaria and such, then you won't be able to keep yourself strong and healthy; in other words, you might get a fatal disease and die very quickly. If you help yourself and others, though, then you can keep yourself healthy, so you can go to work, and some of that money could go to charity. If you die, though, you won't be able to support the charities anymore. Here is a picture representing the balance between long-term benefits and personal short-term benefits. With both of them in balance, you can benefit from more than just one side. [] Back to top =JX= Balancing short-term benefits and needs and society's long term welfare is a hard decision to make. Of course, you might be selfish, and you put more weight on society's long term welfare. This isn't good because you just might be contributing to something bad. Another point is that society might take revenge on you, and take away your privileges. If you are too contributing, you make life hard on yourself. However, if you really are that generous, and suddenly something bad happens to you, society may take pity on you and help you. A balance of every food item in the Food Pyramid makes a healthy diet. This is what you want here, so you have to balance your personal benefits, and society's long term welfare. Today, many people use antibacterial products, and this might make you feel good and clean, but in the microscopic world, you are creating something tough, hard to kill, and, perhaps someday, indestructible. Think about it. The Black Plague was absolutely destructive. It killed 1/3 of the population in Europe. Nowadays, we think we can destroy any minor disease with antibiotics. But what if the Black Plague was to become antibiotic resistant? Today, we have about 6.2 billion people. 1/3 of them gone is about 4 billion left. That is a massive amount! 2 billion people, twice the population of India, suddenly gone. Wiped off the face of the earth.

http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pubs/images/balance.gif (Can't upload for some reason) This picture relates because the scale is in balance. It is good, since your personal welfare and society's long term welfare are about the same. This means you can benefit from both of them, not just one. Back to top

David: I like how you tried to relate the food pyramid to the topic. It's like eating a lot of chocolate that might be sweet and delicious when you eat it but you get obese. =Daniel R.= It is very important to be able to balance short-term benefits and long-time welfare. There are many examples that show how important this balance is, including the uses of antibacterial products. The short-term benefit of using them is the fact that you are clean from many bacteria, but you also have to see how this can affect the long-time welfare. While you are all clean and satisfied, bacteria are growing resistant to these chemicals so that in the future when somebody really does need antibiotic treatment, the antibiotics might not work. Another example of balancing these traits is in pretty much anything that uses mechanical energy, such as cars, air conditioners, television sets, and etc. Millions of people use these appliances everyday to help make life easier by means of faster transportation, health beneficial, entertainment, and productivity. So this means that unless everybody is using a green source of energy, a lot of pollution is getting into the air which could affect the future of the planet. Already some of the effects are going on right now, such as global warming. A final example of why it is important to balance short-term benefits and long time welfare is the use of depleting materials such as fossil fuels, wood, and some others. While they help us in either building or providing energy, some people do not realize that if we continue to use up these materials, there will be none left in the world and that negatively impacts the long-term welfare. These are some of the reasons why it is important to be able to balance the things you use for a short-term benefit in order to positively impact the long-time welfare. This picture relates by showing how short-term benefits and long-term welfare should be balanced in order to provide a positive future. [|http://a.abcnews.com/images/Technology/pd_balance_scale_071016_ms.jp] Back to Top

David: You probably covered everything I was going to talk about, anyways, people are always greedy to want more. The gage of antibacterial resistance, pollution on the environment is getting higher. One day, it will outrage and bacteria turn to superbugs or superbacteria and the nature and environment will pay back on us with droughts or super hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons.

Hannah
It is important to balance personal, short-term benefits and society's long term welfare. Sometimes people do things that are convenient for them right at that moment, but they don't think about how their actions are affecting themselves or the world around them in the long run. An example is rain forest destruction. People do not think about how this is ruining the beautiful wildlife and green; they just think about how in the short-term, the people need paper and wood supplies and land to live on. http://redapes.org This is a picture of bulldozers knocking over the last of a rainforest. You can see the damage done. There is no home for the wildlife that once lived there. There is no trees and flowers. Yes, now we have paper and such. But can't we make do without those?

=David= Short-term benefits can help us in a short time like the word itself, long-term benefits benefit in terms of in the future. We don't want to have too much of one of these benefits. With anti-bacterias the situation is the same...After the invention of anti-bacteria, people used this medicine in an excessive amount. This medicine is used even when we don't need them, and if we use them on;y thinking it will help your health, you can actually damage it. Taking lots of bacteria means more anti-bacterial resistance, making bacteria totally imune to every known anti-bacterias...Superbacteria or superbugs like MRSA. But still, we need to take anti-bacterias when you are sick, more important is that you develop a strong imune system. This is MRSA, a form of superbug, it is imune to probably almost all antibacterial drugs. Scientists are continuing to develop a medicine to fight off this micro-organism. (look at the size of its cell wall !!!) Image: www.thesun.co.uk  Angela: Nice answer! I like how you use the fossil fuels as an example, it's really well-written. lyle:Good explaining! But i think you could of talked about short and long term benefits more then what global warming is.

Back to Top It is important to balance person short term benefits and societys long term welfare becuase everyones choices effect other people in some way. The biggest example of this is global warming. Lots of people are not consiously taking precutions which is making the situation much worse. Another example is viruses and bacteria, when you are sick you can easily pass on your virus or bacterial infection to someone else. Many people will travel, go to work etc... when they are sick which then cuases there sickness to pass on to other people. Then it starts to effect society's long term welfare cuase the sickness can start to spread very very fast. the that one person who didnt balance his personal short term benefits creates a pandemic! This picture shows a man thinking about his personal short erm benefits (more money) then society's long term welfare(global warming). Link: [] Backtotop Mathieu: Yes it is true, a lot of people care more about how much money they make rather than how it affects our dear planet earth
 * Lyle**

=Josephine= It is important to balance personal, short-term benefits and society's long term welfare because every individual action affects your surrounding and your environment. Everything you do has a consequence, and it might end up only affecting yourself or it might affect the whole society. For example, when you throw a banana peel on the floor, the next person will slip if he walks by. You threw the banana peel for your own short- term benefit, but it actually harmed a person from your society. Let's look at something bigger. You used a lot of electrical energy for your short-term benefit, and if everyone on the Earth does that, the Earth will soon be destroyed by the pollution. There is a really good real life example that happened in China a few months ago. The powdered milk company, San Lu produced poison milk that would harm our human body. Why did they put poison in the milk? It is because the company wanted to make more money out of cheap materials. They made manufacture milk with chemical and even added melamine (a material inside plastic, C3H6N6) to increase the amount of protein. The way they detect the protein in a dairy product is to find out the amount of nitrogen in it. Adding melamine can increase the amount of nitrogen but doesn't increase the nuitritious value, many low-qualitied dairy products used this chemical to pass the nuitrition test. However, as the time pass, babies began to die after drinking the powdered milk. The Chinese government sued the San Lu company, and they were forced to shut down after the incident. San Lu company put poison material into their milk for their short-term benefit, but the action resulted in killing people and having to shut down the company. This is a picture of powdered milk (not San Lu because they blocked all the sites about it) Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powdered_milk Back to Top =Ryan= It is important to balance personal, short-term benefits and society’s long term welfare because what might seem good at the time might be bad in the future. Not only might it affect you, it might even affect your family! One of the modern examples is: We use a lot of electricity, with new babies born everywhere they need even more electricty. It might benefit you now, but in the future it might be the fate of this world. (right now we're taking alot of the earth) Another modern example is kinda obvious: Smoking. Smoking kills at least 1 million people a year, it might feel good at the time might end up as cancer heart attack, other related diseases. Most people smoke for "fun" but what is fun kills! Smoking can be dangerous so stay away, if you want to have fun do some exersise, it'll benefit you.

SMOKING KILLS!!! [] Back to Top



=Mathieu=

If we don't balance personal short term benefits and societies long term welfare, then everything would be out of control. Some people are selfish and want everything for themselves so they do not balance those two things, but if everyone was to put themselves in front of everyone else then societies and civilization would just crumble and we would go back to times like in the middle ages. We need to balance those out though, because if we put everything into long term welfare's, there would not be anything in for us and then I think a lot of people would go selfish. But if we do balance those two out like many people do today, a lot of good things happen. Technology advances, and new things appear all the time. This is a picture of what it might resemble. http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/black-death-1.jpg Back to Top =Brandon= It is important to balance personal short term benifits and societys long term welfare because if you keep using that benifit then later that benifit will become a bad thing. Like how we keep using antibiotics when it is not needed. If people keep washing their hands all the time then bacteria will become resistant to the soap that you use, and then they will have the time to grow strong and really hard to get rid of. It is a 99.9 percent chance that antibiotics will kill all bacteria. If we keep doing this than many bacteria will become resistant to antibiotics then we cannot cure many diseases.

These are antibiotics they arent exactly good to keep using like we are now [] Back to top

=Owen= It is important to balance our short term benefits with societies long-term welfare because if you have two much of one it screws over the other one. An example that has to do with diseases is if you have an contagious disease and doctors tell you you're going to die a short term benefit for you would be seeing your family or doing something before you die. A long-term consequence for that would be you spreading disease. This happened once were a guy had a deadly disease and was in quarantine he wanted to see his family so he escaped and went on an airplane. This could have causes an epidemic but luckily it didn't.

= = Diseases can spread easily on airplanes because the same air is just circulated the whole time.

=Jessica=

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