Posts Tagged hum8
One simply cannot screw up other’s lives.
Posted by Doan Benjamin in Grade 8, Reading, Writing on 15th, Wednesday, February 2012
What the heck. Really. What the heck? Whats happening to the world now. Facebook, is selling our information? Our personal information? They really are using us. Umm, yeah. You know what. Facebook is abusing our information. Sure, they allow us to sign up for free, give us a couple of annoying ads, which of course, they get money from. They they take our information and SELL IT. How does that make any sense. I’m extremely angry that they have decided to disrespect our information. How could they even do this. They don’t care how many lives that they are effecting. I’m just babbling at the moment, so I’m sorry, but HOW?
To me, this is how it goes. We sign up for facebook, to talk and connect to our friends. Sometimes we donate some money, and we click on their ads to look at something interesting. Both of which give them money. Everybody is happy. Then all of a sudden, they decide to make more money, by selling our PERSONAL INFORMATION. That is just plain wrong.
One does not simply sell my information, to some dude who wants to buy it. One simply does not do that.
No, they don’t. And what facebook is doing, is gonna cause a uprising. At least for me anyways. What I can see, is that if facebook keeps violating information, they will lose popularity. The power to sell is the power to destroy.
Christmas bankruptcy
Posted by Doan Benjamin in Grade 8, Middle School, Reading, Writing on 5th, Monday, December 2011
Is spending all your hard earned money on items with a huge discount gonna make you happy?
You heard me right girls, I said no. This Black Friday thing is going to end up making people bankrupt. People are going to stores and trying to buy many things not worth buying, and for what? So they are happy.
“Shopping is like a drug”
Whoever wrote that quote is correct, once you start shopping, you just wanna keep buying things that you don’t need or are too expensive, just to be happy. “Americans spend more in the Search for Happiness“. I think that it is reasonable if you do manage to buy happiness, to go ahead and buy it, but, once again.
“According to the General Social Survey, people report the same level of happiness today (about half are “pretty happy”) as they did in 1972, even though our national spending per capita increased by 96 percent during that time.”
They say people would spend money, only to own certain items, instead of actually buying useful things. If say, they bought tours, with their family, they would be happier than if they bought a huge 5000 dollar painting. People in real life however, many would think the painting would be awesome, and therefore, they think it would make them happy even though it is only one obscure decoration.
If I wanted to be happy, I might go and hang out with my friends, or play a game, mostly because I don’t really go shopping, so I’m not addicted, others however, might not want to play games, or hang out with their buddies. Instead, they would shop until their wallets run dry.
annotated link – http://diigo.com/0lnj0
The Worlds Beyond
Posted by Doan Benjamin in Grade 8, Middle School, Reading, Writing on 16th, Wednesday, November 2011
All of us have seen terraforming. It happens all around us, why else do you think we build buildings. We see it in movies, games, the news. Never before though, have we been so close to making terraforming in space a reality. Just think about it. At latest, by the end of this century? I might even live to see a new lush world that was once the barren planet. I love astronomy because there are so many things possible about it, so many things we can do. This has been one of humanities most pursued dreams. To get past the final frontier. Space.
Then imagine, that we will be able to harvest iron and other raw materials from asteroids and comets. Wouldn’t it boost our economy and also allow the Space Programs more access to the metals that the spaceships are made out of? If NASA did this, it could even be called self funding! And if we are really worried it will destroy some exporting countries’ economies, why not use that metal to build settlements on the moon and Mars? We could always bring some other materials from Earth to help construct. If we are going to end up having to use resources in one area like when resources from Earth are insufficient, non-existent, or will just take too long to arrive, we might as well start trying to build from scratch now.
After mastering terraforming in our solar system, I see no reason why we cannot extend our boundaries to to the edges of the galaxy, and then the universe. We can keep humanity thriving, and try to answer one question that has always dreaded us. ‘Are we alone, or is there other intelligent life out there?’. One great thing can allow other great things to happen. Its like setting up a line of dominoes and then knocking one over. Basically, ‘ To make lush planet, just add asteroid. ‘. It sounds so simple and it will be if we can put resources up to do it. Humanity will now reside in space for the rest of it’s days. We will not recoil into Earth but we will explore the cast depths of space.
Lets face it though, eventually, we will have a overpopulation crisis in the entire world, and then we will run out of resources. We need to act fast and really, why shouldn’t we expand. One day, our descendants will look back and laugh, because we though going to the moon on a kinky bucket was a great achievement. That is as it is. It was a great achievement. A major stepping stone that makes us want to strive forward and conquer the galaxy.
Annotated Link - http://diigo.com/0l7lz
Attack of the Seas
Posted by Doan Benjamin in Grade 8, Middle School, Reading, Writing on 7th, Monday, November 2011
Floods make people go crazy. They cant help but absorb all of those pieces of information from the web. Panic causes many to do rushed things and take unnecessary risks, and may cause them to end up drowning and killing themselves in these harsh conditions.
Thailand is having one of it’s highest rainfall levels and flood rates in history. This flood ain’t good for the rice either. It sweeps away the rice from the fields, and it kills panicked people. For a flood, 500 deaths is quite bad. Maybe even catastrophic. People are being hit almost everywhere in Thailand. So its a bit like a war zone.
A flood shouldn’t really be allowed to claim any lives at all but like many South-Eastern Asian countries, Thailand also has a bit of corruption going on. So I think this is one of the reasons that make it possible for this flood to claim over 500 lives. I think people should stop talking about which cars to pull over and start talking about how to stop the flood. To be truthful, a couple of sandbags isn’t enough. I really want to know if there are any areas in Thailand which are not flooded and then evacuate the majority to the area.
Also, another possible reason why many people are being killed by the flood is because many people may be uneducated and don’t know survival techniques or don’t know how to swim. Beats me really. In Vietnam, some areas are also being trespassed by water so that is one sign that the seas could be rising.
Many factors can also make these floods worst and more commons like global warming. Even floods are connected to global warming and green house gases. This shows that one thing can lead to disaster for many other things. The green house gases are released, therefore making the Earth warmer and melting the ice caps and leads to the fact that floods become more numerous.
This makes it even more important to know what you are doing to the environment. Floods are natural but if the world is much warmer, they will be more numerous. Let us learn a lesson from those who perished in Thailand’s flood attack.
Annotated links
http://diigo.com/0l1rg – Thailand continues to battle flood
http://diigo.com/0l1rr - Death toll tops 500
The story of the innovator.
Posted by Doan Benjamin in Grade 8, Middle School, Reading, Writing on 1st, Tuesday, November 2011
Above, Steve Jobs.
If I looked at a few of the negative things from Steve’s life, such as the fact that he – dropped out of college, has cancer, died at the age of 56, was fired from a company he made, you would probably think, (assuming the fact that you didn’t know anything about him) that he was a lifeless, annoying, uneducated idiot who smokes too much. However, we all know Steve. The genius. The innovator. The inventor. The changer of worlds. None of the lifeless annoying uneducated words which I had said above apply to Steve, apart from maybe annoying because he was a perfectionist, but then, so am I. He was not an annoying idiot. I might be.
It’s funny, many famous people such as Bill Gates (Microsoft) and George Lucas (Star Wars and Lucas Arts), they dropped out of high school or college. Bill was a poker addict in his younger life and neither of them made it past high school. They are still who they are. Steve was no much different. He though many things in college were useless. So he dropped out. To me, being a genius doesn’t mean you have to know everything. You may have to know certain things to be successful in your field but it doesn’t always help to know everything.
Our Steve then ditched his lessons (you cant call him a quitter) and decided to drop in on other more interesting classes. He wanted to join calligraphy, and perhaps of choice (I probably would have thought it was boring) of lessons that I am typing using this font and not some other possibly unappealing font which some sort of rather unappealing variation of my rather unappealing handwriting. Comic Sans font is something that would have probably became the default.
Steve created Apple in his garage. Literally. He probably didn’t know it but this garage programming team was going to create a 2 billion dollar company in 10 years. He also asked for help from Microsoft and vice versa to create the Apple II and so on. Then they had a disagreement. Bam, he gets kicked out and made a total fool of. He was devastated but how he managed to create 2 more great companies during the depression is above me. To make matters more over the top, he started the best animation studio in the world today. You may have heard of it. Pixar. He was the one behind the making of Toy Story (he was one of the executive producers).
I find it fascinating how he could start 3 companies, and all three were mostly successful. Eventually, he is rehired for Apple after they buy NeXT, one of the newer companies that he created. Apparently, most of the software and programming behind NeXT is not put into the Macintosh and many of Apple’s devices. Sadly, the company is failing miserably. Then Jobs comes back and sends the profits back up with at least 5 major innovations. The Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad. Not to mention that there are always more surprises in every new version of iOS. The iOS 4 introduced folders and multitasking for example. The iOS 5 introduced iCloud.
Yet all good things come to a bitter end. He has always seemed to inspire me. I even designed a computer based on his ideas. I had also wanted to travel to Silicon Valley and talk to Steve, or even work for him, but those hopes were thoroughly disintegrated when he moved on. It must be terrifyingly sad to die the same week that the iOS 5 and iPhone 4s was released but that was what happened to good old Steve. He changed the way we looked at the world. From a rather dull and noisy place to a colourful and artistic place. Steve left ideas for the next 4 years for Apple. Steve was succeeded as C.E.O. of Apple inc. by Mr. Cook. I hope Mr. Cook will do as half as good a job as Steve did, since that would be one big achievement.
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.” -Steve Jobs
The prejudice is still at large. We need to stop the nonsense.
Posted by Doan Benjamin in Grade 8, Reading, Writing on 24th, Monday, October 2011
Whats wrong with dark people? I have no clue. I would have thought that India isn’t prejudice about your skin colour. After all, you find many more dark people there. I would have even thought that America wouldn’t be the place for many dark people. After all, there is quite a bit of racism. Here I am though, wrong at both ends. Being in the darker part of skin tone myself, I can’t bring myself to believe the fact that people would automatically tell you to put on some creams that help make you whiter, just when people see that you are darker than the average person. I would have thought people have better things to do.
Being partly darker myself, I would think this is absolutely garbage and even offensive if it happened to me. When I read it, many of the things that happened were absurd! How can just walking into a salon immediately cause a reaction if your skin was darker? I can’t bring myself to believe it. To be serious, what would happen if you were virtually black (excuse the expression). Perhaps they would apply bleach on you when you aren’t looking, the people should really only ask about this if the person brought up the subject themselves. I really cannot understand how this salon wasn’t full of complaints. Oh well, perhaps they will change, perhaps they will not, but I don’t like it the way it is at the moment so I really do hope that a person doesn’t have to be fair in India to be beautiful.
Trouble brewing in China
Posted by Doan Benjamin in Reading, Writing on 27th, Tuesday, September 2011
The article that this post is on can be found here
To me, this is downright unfair. If I could, I would probably do something, considering the fact that if I did, they would probably lock me up in prison. To me, this is not what shows people ‘We, are going to be better than the United States’. Sure, in the States, there is a large unemployment rate right now, but even the schools are free. They are probably better than some of the schools you have to pay for in China. If people don’t want something from someone, they cannot shove it back in their face and leave it as so. It’s gonna come back. And hit them. Harder.
I understand now why my dad is so angry at china. He was Chinese, and after he left, he never wanted to come back. He says they are corrupt, the government over there. Imaging in your country ‘Tens of thousands of migrant children are left without schools and nurseries to go to’. You would probably take action to that. No offense to any of you that might take this personally but if the United States didn’t want the illegal immigrants, would they kick all of the Mexicans out of the country? Rhetorical question, don’t answer. I think not.
Now imagine these migrant people make up a whole third of the population - Here in Beijing, two worlds exist in parallel. Those of rural origin – a third of the city’s 19 million population’. If China wants to actually become better than the USA, which is what I heard, they have to have better educated people, not stop educating people. How would you like your town or city to be filled with lottery ticket sellers and criminals? These migrant people never wanted this life. They were born with it, and since China is a communist country, shouldn’t everyone be treated fairly? To add to the negative, crime is a large part due to un-education. We wouldn’t want that would we?
I believe that everyone shouldn’t be treated badly. Sadly, that is how this world works. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. To conclude, I am extremely unhappy with China, especially because my dad is part Chinese. The Chinese have to change this to change their reputation.
