But That's What I Think

Net Neutrality is already gone (technically). In December of 2017, the Federal Communications Committee (the FCC) votes on whether net neutrality, a system that keeps internet providers from charging for certain types of internet data, should stay. The vote was 3-2 against keeping it, and net neutrality was officially repealed. However, Congress has gathered enough votes to hold a Congressional Review, which allows the government to overturn decisions by federal agencies (like the FCC). This vote is to be held sometime this week before companies can start to change their payment systems on June 11th of this year (when net neutrality is officially out the window). In the capitalist point of view, this is a good thing. More money is circulating and companies are receiving money and buying things, however from a different standpoint net neutrality could just about destroy the socioeconomic system. The American education system already has a huge gap between the education of people w...

In the wake of the 18th mass shooting this year in America, which came less than two months after 2018 began, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, chose to stand up for every child who's ever endured a school shooting just one day after they watched and listened to their friends and teachers being shot. And it wasn't politicians or people in power who stood behind them, it was students just like them who realize, every time a school shooting hits the news, that there won't be change until we make it. The day after the shooting, a friend and I were talking about what we would do if we were in a school shooting. What escape routes we had in a classroom with just one door to exit from that locks from the outside. We considered jumping out a window, but where would we go from there? The woods? The highway? Then it occurred to us that it's not something we should ever have to worry about, yet we do. Every year another school shooting puts us on our toes, ...

This was originally written as a social commentary piece for my Creative Writing class. Humans like to think that they are invincible, but as we continue to expand our technological abilities and the space we take in the universe, we will start to face problems we have never faced before. Despite humanity being decades from space travel being a common luxury, we are already facing problems that we can not seem to control. The biggest of these issues is population growth. The global population growth rate has been going down over the last twenty years, but the amount of people on Earth has just about doubled in that time(Roser, Ortiz-Ospina I1). This is possible because although fewer people are having children, they are living longer due to technological leaps made over the last fifty years. In a broad term, technology has been growing exponentially since the invention of electricity, but the succession between new types of tech has rapidly gone from years to weeks since the creat...

While scrolling through Tumblr last night I found a Tweet by user @/BNeslob that reads "The fact that Malia Obama is trending higher for smoking weed than 200 people killed in #Egypt is one reason why the world is f***ing doomed". And I couldn't agree more. With attention spans as long as 280 characters there's little to be said about the amount people are willing to read about an evolving story. With every attack or resistance comes a media campaign, but these online movements don't always get seen because they are trumped by useless media that means next to nothing. If Malia Obama, an autonomous teenager in college decides to smoke weed people can judge all they want, but there are greater things at play in the world that require more attention. On October 10th, in the heart of London, there was Muslim march against ISIS and the rest of the world didn't see anything about it because worldwide trends don't actually hit worldwide. People don't want ...

“Our population is spiraling out of control. Inferno is the cure.” That is a quote from Dan Brown’s book Inferno . The character who says this intended to fix the world’s problems by shrinking the world population through infertility. While population isn’t the biggest problem in the world and rendering one third of the population infertile is a bad idea, population does make a significant impact in many societies. When we analyze GDP per person (PPP) in a country, then divide it by the population density, we see that countries with the lowest PPP and the highest population density have the most problems in their countries. This is due to low employment in areas where people are in close contact. Having lower economic opportunities along with challenges in daily life leads to conflicts between different religions and classes. Tensions like these lead to bigger problems, such as radicalism, and create opportunities for totalitarian governments to manipulate the population. Of cour...

Most people with access to a radio or the internet have heard the song Feel It Still by Portugal. The Man. It topped the Billboard Adult Alternative list, as well as the Billboard Alternative Chart in just six weeks. The song, while catchy and repetitive has a deeper meaning than most would think.  The band released an i nteractive video  to go along with the song an it reveals exactly what the song is actually about. 30 different "tools to resist" are featured, and in the interactive video the watcher is encouraged to find all of them, with a running count in the corner. Some of the "tools" include donating to the ACLU , standing up for equality , and combating climate change . And those are just the first few.  One of the most repetitive lyrics in the song is "I'm a rebel just for kicks", which can be taken to mean that, in the current time, rebellion against everything is common and it seems like it's just for fun. The band has clear...

All life evolves, it changes and engineers and then re-engineers until it has a completely new look that helps its function. Humans have been evolving since the beginning of the planet, from single cells, to bacteria, to fish, and so on. And while Earth has been evolving, for all we know, so have extraterrestrials. Maybe these aliens have been in the universe for less time than we have, or maybe they've been here much longer, but either way some day one of us will find the other. They will find us, or we will find them. And with the great danger humans have posed to our own survival on Earth, it is most likely that we will have to leave our planet and will run into some other living creature, maybe one that looks similar to us or one that looks nothing like anything we've ever seen before. Regardless of this, maybe we'll visit their planet and see it's the perfect habitat for them. They regularly make differences in their habits to keep their planet clean and safe fo...

Everything that has happened in the past dictates the future. That's basically what dictates everything people do. Everything that is happening now is a direct result of what has happened in the past and without knowing what happened in the past, it's impossible to know what will happen in the future. Learning about history can be the most boring thing in the world, but without that history a person wouldn't know that North Korea and all the problems associated with the country began, in part, because of the first World War, which wouldn't have started if Serbia hadn't tried to become it's own country. History is essential to reading a situation and knowing how to react to it, whether it was politically or militarily. When people find themselves without the knowledge of what happened in the past, they make the same mistakes that prompted the issues at hand. Without a history lesson, no good decisions can be made, not ones that will help for very long. As fo...

Humanity is unique. We have done great things for themselves, creating till we could touch the moon and talk over hundreds of miles. We’ve created so many things to make our societies and future generations as intelligent as us, from language to writing. Yet we’ve failed to address the fact that we can’t go on like this if we want everyone to live. The planet is overpopulated with humans, that is a fact. You can watch people be born and people die on the internet and just watching that clock move should scare you. Four children are born every second. Our population is growing  expoenetionally  and this planet can barely handle as many as we have now. There are simply too many people and too few resources. People are dying worldwide of hunger. The population of our species is out of control. It cannot be sustained on what we have on this planet.  There have been  five great extinctions , the most famous being the one of dinosaurs, which was the most...