joinStampede

The collective action that I wanted to talk about is the JoinStampede movement that is currently happening in the United States as we speak.  The reason why I picked this collective action is that it deals with student debt and a lot of people can relate to it - as most of us take out student loans to pay for post secondary education.  Currently in the United States, student debt exceeds over one trillion dollars and in my opinion, that is an obscene amount of money for one to owe.  In the United States there are typically two solutions to mitigate the burden of student loans, which are bankruptcy relief, or a full-out student loan bailout – both of which destroys credit ratings.  Launched in the beginning of March, JoinStampede is trying to get one hundred thousand people to join their movement and as a group they would collectively negotiate better terms for student loans.  JoinStampede not only targets those who are currently enrolled in post-secondary but also those who have an outstanding student debt that they are currently paying off.  It is needless to say that by having better interest rates students can pay off their loans faster.

Because this is a collective action in progress, the result of this collective action is unknown however it creates awareness of how much students owe in student loans and how much it costs to go to post-secondary in the United States.  Even if this collective action does fail, it may stir up other collective actions that may succeed in the near future.  Collective action can be a powerful tool in changing policy and legislation.  By having a large population rallying for a common cause it creates awareness and attention to the cause.  With awareness and attention to the cause, there is a higher potential for the collective action to succeed.  I like JoinStampede’s idea of a group of people collectively negotiating for lower interest rates and I hope that this campaign is successful, as it will benefit a lot of American students in the long run.  I believe that education is key in creating a more understanding and open-minded society.  By having more people being able to pay off their student loans at a better rate will encourage people to get an education.  

Last 2 weeks

Okay, so I have yet to have time to actually sit down and just let my fingers do it's thing.  Last 2 weeks have been crazy busy with school and not to mention that last weekend I got my wisdom teeth out so I've been in a semi vegetative state hopped up on Ibuprofen and T-3s.  There wasn't anything in-particular I wanted to talk about, but just wanted to check in with everyone and to let people know that I'm still alive despite the lack of Google+ activity!

Happy Wednesday everyone! We're almost done!

RPG!

Memes may be the longest running trend on the Internet. There are millions, if not billions of meme's that can be found on all social media including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and now Instagram. A recent meme that was founded just under a year ago was the "Ridiculously Photogenic Guy" aka. RPG. The original picture was taken at Cooper River Bridge Run on March 31, 2012 by a photographer and computer programmer Will King. King uploaded a set of almost 100 photographs taken at the run onto Flickr and Facebook. One of King's friends commented on this particular photo, thus dubbing the man in the photograph, who was later revealed as Zeddie Little as the, "Ridiculously Handsome Guy". King uploaded a cropped version of just Little on Reddit with the title, "My friends call him, 'Mr. Ridiculously Handsome Guy'" which received over 40 000 votes. King also posted this picture with the same title on Flickr and within an hour received 300 000 views. Days later, Quickmeme received over 1000 submissions of RPG. The meaning behind this meme is that the "ridiculous photogenic guy" is so incredibly handsome he could have anything he wants and that everyone (male or female) would want him. There have been several different spinoffs to this meme, such as, "Ridiculously Photogenic Surgery Girl", "Ridiculously Photogenic Metal Head" and "Ridiculously Photogenic Syrian Rebel". All of which have the same meaning where they could have anything they want and that everyone wants them because they are incredibly photogenic. On April 4, 2012, Little was interviewed on Good Morning America and he announced that he was going to run in the New York City Marathon and raise money for the John Ritter Aortic Health Foundation. I think it's amazing that Little used his unpredicted Internet fame to raise money for charity. Seeing the meaning behind the meme, he used the context to his advantage to raise money for a good cause.

Running!

Okay, so I've decided to take up running and I'll be running the Scotiabank 10k run in May. I'm a new runner and I'm hoping that you guys can give me advice. I'm also curious to know about running form, I've heard of both toe-to-hell and then midfoot striking, which one is better?  But any information that you know about running, I would love to hear.

Cheers!

Guilty Conscious?

There are good people and bad people in this world, but being somewhat optimistic, I like to think there are more good people than there are bad.  But due to recent events that are indirect with my life, I've come to question that.  How can these "bad" people be the way they are and be okay with it? "Bad" is a very loose term as everyone's definition of "bad" is different, but I'm pretty sure everyone has had this though run through their mind at some point in their life.  I'm not saying that I am perfect in any way; I am human and I have my faults.  To be perfectly honest I have done bad things in my life and then my guilty conscious eats me alive which then forces me to apologize and make up for my bad deed.  I may not be perfect, but I know that deep down in my core I am a good person.  And I think due to my guilty conscious I am more reluctant to do bad things. But my question remains, how can bad people be they way they are and be okay with who they are?  Is it because they believe what they are doing is good/right?  Or because they have no guilty conscious? I know that there isn't a definite answer to my question, but I am curious to read the responses that I get.

Have a good evening everyone and good luck with midterms!

You can't always believe what you read

Blog Assignment #2

The website that I've chosen to analyze is Sun News. I found this website neutral as it included all different kinds of articles from politics, economics, and world news. A cue that I thought it gave a neutral perspective was the titles of the articles that are main page, none of them were putting down political parties or policial members like other newspapers. From browsing some of the new articles that are posted on the website, I think this website is well rounded with the various topics it discusses such as the economic summit that was held at Mount Royal, to the Keystone project, to Taiwan lifting the Saskatchewan poultry ban. In order to identify the political position a blog takes is by reading their entries and figuring out their opinion of the political system that they're subjected to. If it's a newspaper website, you can tell by what the authors write about what's happening in the political world and what their opinions are. My philosophy is that, "you can't always believe what you read", I find that most authors are biased and that's natural. But if I am interested in a topic, I take the initiative to read more than one article about the subject so I can see all the angles of the topic and then make my own judgements based on all the information that I've gathered.

Warm Bodies

So, last weekend a few coworkers and I went to go see the newly released movie Warm Bodies. I'm not  gonna lie, but I was super skeptical about this movie being any good. The basic idea of this movie for those who haven't seen the trailer (warm bodies trailer), is a world taken place during the zombie apocalypse. So a viral infection has turned most of the world's population into flesh eating corpses with no consciousness, but the main character who is named "R"is a zombie with a conscious who falls in love with a uninfected human girl named Julie. I'm not going to spoil the movie for those who are going to watch it, but the end result was that I found it extremely cheesy, so cheesy that I thought it was good.  I want to know what people's opinion of the movie and what other movies that people found cheesy but good at the same time.

Night world!