Poverty

While writing my essay on how to fix the economy, I came across this feature story in Marketplace magazine's website. Although I was stressed on finishing my paper, I couldn't stop myself from reading the whole article because it was so compelling.

The story examines three different families living in extreme poverty and shows their struggles to get through things we take for granted daily.

One man risks his health by donating blood twice a week to pay the internet bill required by his children's school to do homework.

One woman walks up a giant hill to get water for her kids' baths from a public water fountain when they can't afford the water bill.

These things are happening in the United States all around us. So often we focus on the problems of other nations without even having made a dent in the domestic poverty growing in our own cities and towns. Just to think of all the homeless people I've walked by and kept my head in line, maintaining the illusion that I could somehow use the dollar in my pocket more effectively than they can.

It's hideous, the things that these people go through every day all around us as we go to school and work in this bubble of economic stability.

The things people do to help are not enough and will never be enough until we have eliminated poverty.

Small Business

Over the past few months in Takoma Park, some changes have been made. The most notable of these changes is that both Summer Delights, the local ice cream shop, and Video Americain, the video rental store, have closed down.

These stores have been around in Takoma Park for over a decade, and I personally have passed a lot of hours in them.

The loss of some childhood memories and a cool place to get ice cream and rent R-rated movies isn't all bad. On the bright side, they're being replaced by a big restaurant owned by a man named Jeff Green. Maybe he won't be a bully to teenagers like the Summer Delights owner was, but we'll have to see.

The real newspeg of these stores closing is the growing abundance of chain restaurants and the decay of small business and privately owned stores. Someday, places like Summer Delights and Video Americain won't exist anywhere, and they will all be replaced by Baskin Robbins and Netflix. As a kid that's soon gonna enter the job market, this worries me. I've always thought of myself as an entrepreneur with potential to create my own business or store. However, this is becoming harder and harder to do as big business dominates the field entirely.

Every town needs to support their local business. Walk up to the video store instead of streaming netflix on your computer. Go to that cute little Italian restaurant up the street instead of ordering Dominos pizza online for the third night in a row.

RIP Old Town Takoma Park

Good Cop or Bad Cop?

I recently came across a YouTube channel called "FlexYourRights". This channel is dedicated to educating people about their rights as citizens, but most of their videos are simply tips and tricks for dealing with police officers.

The video below is actually a fragment of a longer video, but this shows the jist of the channel. It depicts a scenario involving a young black man dealing with a police officer who is treating him unfairly.



This video is very informative and could certainly be useful for many people, namely minority citizens who frequently get unfairly profiled as criminals by police. This information isn't taught in schools and many people can be taken advantage of due to lack of knowledge of law. This channel is a great resource and I highly recommend watching their videos.

The problem with this video and the channel as a whole is that it shouldn't have to exist. The police force is a public service we all have as citizens to protect us and keep us safe. However, the relationship between citizens and police has evolved into a sort of a hatred, an ongoing battle between the taxpayer and the unfair street demons trying to give out tickets and arrest people wherever they can.

A large percentage of "criminals" that are arrested and placed in US jails are people who committed crimes that aren't dangerous or harmful to anyone. This can range from evasion of parking tickets to possession of marijuana. They are silly crimes that our police are so focused on enforcing that they let more important things slide by, such as gang violence, theft, rape, and murder.

We needs guardians and protectors walking the streets, not a scrutinizing eye ready to pounce at any moment for standing in one place too long or driving a few miles per hour too fast.

Are Humans Meaningless?

I'm sorry if anyone feels depressed after reading this but it's something I've been thinking about a lot.

This is a video by my favorite YouTube video blogger. To give a quick summary, he pulls lots of facts from his astronomy textbook to show why we are insignificant worthless specks in the grand scheme of the earth and the universe. You should watch it.


While this video doesn't really mention the fact that most of the universe is just empty space and that we could be the only intelligent beings that exist, it's still scary. We really are just ants that can be squashed at any second. No, we're smaller than ants. As mentioned in the video, the ratio of the earth's mass to the universe's mass is at most 1 to 100 billion billion (yes, billion billion). If there were a theoretical god-like figure that could live for thousands of years and see everything in the universe, chances are that he/she would never find us in their lifetime.

The reason this scares me is that I worry that if everyone in the world realized how meaningless and insignificant our lives are, we would have a 2012-type apocalypse on our hands. And why not? If our lives don't matter, why not just disregard all rules and do what we want for our brief time on this earth?

And to answer that question, we must acknowledge that humanity is actually good. The reason we don't just do whatever we want is because we care. We care about our friends, our family, and most of all our children and we want to create a better world for them, not one that lies in the wake of our no-rules destruction.

Of all the things you can do with your 80-90 years on this planet, I would argue the best thing is to better the lives of others. Some of the most respected people in history like Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Malcolm X devoted their lives to making life enjoyable for everyone. All four of those men could have had happy, naive, and secluded lives but instead went to jail or even died for their cause of improving other people's lives.

Mathematically, you mean nothing. But as a human, you can mean a lot more than that.

Technological Empires

Last week I was lying on my bed late at night procrastinating homework when I stumbled upon a music video that gave me some inspiration. The song "Fake Empire" shows us the harsh reality of our world, a world controlled by the few corporations and their products. The most obvious one of these is Apple, and that's emphasized in Ryan Lewis' video.



This video's image of people's mouths being covered by corporations made me think about my own life and how dependent I was on certain companies, mainly Apple. I sit and write this post on my Macbook pro while checking texts on my iPhone as my mom sits in her room looking for Christmas presents on her iPad and my dad does work on our iMac. Apple truly is a company that my family relies on to function, and I think it's frankly too much.

Technological advancement is supposedly an exponential function. This means that for all the new technology that gets created today, twice that will get created tomorrow. And four times that the next day, eight times that the next day, and so on and so forth. If technology seems advanced now, it's barely scratched the surface of its full potential. This can be explained further by Dan Brown in the video below.



What really scared me as I looked around my house and saw all the Apple products is the idea of the future. If Apple can already dominate technology on the relatively miniscule scale of technology that exists today, imagine where we'll be in twenty years. Will Apple lose its popularity and ultimately become a small company in a large conglomerate of tech overlords? Or will our entire existence be controlled and dictated by one megacorporation?

Talk about a dystopia.

Shoe Game

Although it looks like I won't be able to do my documentary on this subject because another group is already doing it, I wanted to at least write a blog post about this interesting subject.

The Shoe Game is the business of buying, selling, and trading shoes. It's somewhat like a black market, except there isn't really much illegality associated with it, the shoes are just treated as such. People buy these shoes, mostly varying types of Nike Jordans, for 500 hundred dollars or more, compared to the limited release retail price of around 200 dollars.

In many malls and schools (including Blair) you can see these shoe deals happening all the time. One guy hands another a seemingly new shoe box, and the other hands over either a giant wad of cash or another box of shoes. Apart from the "resellers", people only involved to profit off desperate shoe-gamers, the goal of the trade is to be able to wear the "freshest" and "rarest" pair that everyone else wants but can't find.

While this business can actually be good practice for business in the real world and some people can even make substantial income from it, there are inherent dangers in such high value merchandise. This video shows a store being broken into by a stampeding crowd in order to get these shoes first.



In addition to the dangers of these actual shoe releases, there are dangers in the deals themselves, where a buyer may mug a seller or the other way around. I spoke to one student at Blair who was held at knifepoint for his Nike Foamposites.

Pink Nike Foamposites

Overall, the shoe game can be an educational and profitable business, but there are risks involved and any shoe gamer should be aware of them and take necessary precautions.

Kids and Sleep

As a high school student, something that I'm always worried about is sleep. With school, sports, clubs, homework, chores, and all the other obligations I have, it's really hard to get enough. This scientist talks about the requirements of sleep and how much kids of different ages need.



As a young child, it's not hard to achieve the numbers this man specifies. Even through elementary school and early middle school, the 8-10 hours he recommend is easily attainable with fewer worries and obligations.

However, as kids approach later middle school and their high school years, things change. Homework piles on, along with more frequent and longer sports practices, earlier school start times and later school release times, increased social pressures, and many other stresses that push bedtimes later and later. Many students can find themselves getting six hours or less per night, which can cause increased reaction times, slower brain activity, and overall a less functional person.

Certain proposals have been made with hopes to improve this situation. In fact, here is an article about a petition that I and many others have signed encouraging MCPS to move its high school start times to no earlier than 8:15.

While this potential legislation wouldn't magically fix all student sleep problems, it could certainly help students get more sleep, making them more alert, focused, and ready to learn in school, all things that lead to their success.