The Meta-Post

     So, this was an interesting requirement for a class to have. Blogs could sometimes be fun, but it was occasionally stressful trying to meet the one per week requirement in addition to doing everything else. That said, I really enjoyed it. My blogs weren't the most read that's for sure, but hey maybe someone found something useful at some point.

     A few of the assigned videos/blogs were a little confusing, but hey everything has its downsides. Believe it or not, the hardest part was coming up with ideas once a week. I don't like thinking that often it's way too much pressure on my brain. That's also why my final blog is this boring, and why some of the other ones were occasionally small-scale and "bleh" for readability.

     In any case, it was mostly fun, pretty creative, and way more interesting than most of the other assignments I've had.

Capitalism's biggest Isuue

Notice: I'm not a Communist, but nothing is perfect.

"Better, Faster, Harder, Stronger"

     Daft Punk sums up the goals of most capitalists pretty well: build everything we can better, build it faster, and make it harder and stronger at the same time. And, frankly, that's fantastic for progress. It puts people on the moon, it creates computers, it created the internet, the smart phone, the yada-yada and the blobbity-blabbity. In a time period where discovering things has become far harder than ever, we humans have been able to keep pace at least partially in thanks to it.

Notice 2: Yes, the USSR made it to space first. Yes, they were (extremely technically) communist. However, the actions of the USSR were in competition with the USA, and competition is definitely a concept that applies more to capitalism.

However, capitalism has (in addition to some obvious human rights problems it's caused) a major issue as a concept. 

Here's a chart from my favorite industry:

That chart shows a few problems. Most importantly, it's similar to the beginning of this chart

Recognize the importance of that title? (Notice: It's the number of employees because this is the graph that fits the timeline I'm looking for) The crash of the automobile industry in Detroit. OK, stay with me for one more chart:

     Other than agriculture and goods that absolutely require replacement over a certain time, every industry in America has followed this trend. 

     So, what does this mean? It shows that industries push production much further than demand holds. One of the causes of the Depression, the overproduction of crops, was exactly this. Businesses in capitalism are encouraged to maintain constant growth instead of simply maintaining the delicate balance of supply and demand. Instead of simply holding production steady, business invest massive amounts of marketing to try to appeal to more people. Where this wouldn't be a problem if these products only lasted a short time, it becomes a massive problem when products last the entire lives of their users or even longer. 

Normally, signs of the inevitable failure of production are about the same no matter what the industry: limited real advances in the product (occasionally in comparison to other companies: in the Detroit collapse a big factor was the higher fuel efficiency of competing brands that produced elsewhere), slowing growth of sales (this should be expected, but almost always comes as a surprise somehow), and consumers continuing to use older products from the same category instead of upgrading to obtain the newer products.

Why does this matter? Because somewhere around 90% of all production follows these unsustainable growth charts, and the world economy is definitely not in the best state right now.  

First Woman to Enter the Boston Marathon

I really...don't have a reaction to this. I realized sexism was and is a massive problem, but I also know we have progressed pretty far from the former crappiness of society. I was surprised that the runners themselves were apparently nice until the weird ogre dude tried to chase her down to be honest. In any case, huzzah for women's rights.

None of this surprised me. I was glad the runners were nice, the bad treatment wasn't anything unexpected from the time period, her feeling pressured to make it to prove women can is a typical reaction to anything like that. I'm not a very emotional person, but this really didn't have any particular impact on me.

Are Humans Good or Bad?

     To answer very simply: No.  

  I definitely hate that there's no "middle ground" when we write or discuss something in school. Seriously, conflict resolution does NOT work like that, stop teaching us how to bicker and fail at working things out like every past generation did and congressmen do now. Anyway though, that's a topic for another time.

     So, humans, are we good or evil? Everyone has a different take on this, because no one can objectively say what good and evil are. Let me answer this question with some more questions: Is a dog panting to cool down good or evil? Is a panther eating some cute fluffy thing evil? Is the common cold evil?

     Whether you take God out of the equation or not, every cell, virus, and organism adapted to live in its specific environment, and takes the actions best suited to ensuring its survival in that environment. Every individual human instinctively does what they (through genetic experience) feel is the best way to survive: such actions can neither be classified as good or bad.

     One of the most common(ly criticized) statements that "proves" humans are bad is that unlike every other animal, we have nuclear bombs and flamethrowers and napalm and other things that explode or make fire and that we use them on each other, but animals don't. To counter this, anyone who has seen a video about nature knows that animals almost always compete with each other for resources. Even if we don't need the resources of another human we are currently fighting, humans don't like taking risks. Anything added to the dragon horde ensures another winter or two, and that is the unbeatable subconscious justification every human who seeks war has.

Now, typically, the biggest argument for humans being good is that we often have charities and try to fix our mistakes. After all, the fact that we develop concepts of "good" and "evil" in our own perspectives means that we at least try to be good right?

Maps of human populations counter this easily. Humans are "herd" animals; we stick together to keep faster and stronger animals from kiling us. To have a herd; however, at least some number of people need to stay alive. So, we care for each other with the expectation (at least subconsciously) that it will benefit us.

Humans. We're mammals. We compete for resources, try to survive through the winter, and try to keep the herd alive so that we all survive. There's nothing good or bad about it, it's just the way life is.