Monday 30 November 2015

It's Not All About Money

The movement of money, resources, and wants controls whatever is happening in the world. It created the Great Depression out of nothing, and similarly created money out of nothing. Our name for this powerful force is Economics, the subject of the article.

When asked what economics is, many people find it impossible to describe. Economics is not about money; it has nothing to do with money. Economics is whatever people need or want, lose or gain. It is driven by human wants and needs. The basic problem of economics is unlimited wants constantly battling limited resources. Some people may never admit they really want anything, but anybody, negating outside influences, would take the world if it was offered to them. Nobody escapes making economic choices every day, even if they lived in a cave and foraged for vegetables. Going to work/school on a given day is an economic decision; if you decided just to relax at home all day without telling the boss/teacher, you might get in trouble, but you would get enjoyment from a day off.

Economics is driven by producing, selling and buying. There are three basic economic models. The first one is controlled market economy, where the government owns all the businesses. Governments try to keep as many jobs as possible, and tend to be very inefficient. An open market economy is where there are no rules. Although that might sound good, open market businesses never go for things that will lose them money, so as a result hospitals would be crazily expensive and there would be virtually no public transport.

The problems with both of these models can be solved by making a mixed market economy, where the businesses are private and the government makes some rules. Some problems include excessive paperwork for companies and less competition compared to open market, but this system was historically the most efficient and most countries have it.

I recently watched a video about economic models explained with cows. You have two cows. If the State takes them and gives you some milk, you have a controlled economy. If you trade one for a bull, multiply your herd and retire with lots of money, that's capitalism or a mixed economy. If you trade one for vegetables and use milk from the other to "pay" your rent for housing, that's more like Marxism, a Utopian vision which has not gone much farther than being a generation-old dream and has never been tried out.  To find more examples, check the link below.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSl-_UVMXpc

Sunday 29 November 2015

The childhoods of my grandparents

This post is about the parents of my father. They were both born in 1939, and grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in the American Midwest. The purpose of this post is to explain what life was like for children and adults back then.

There were no video games at that time, and TV was very new back then. My grandmother remembers one time when she was in Brownie Scouts(the young Girl Scouts), and her troop went to one girl's house because she was the only one in the troop that had a TV. When they turned it on, the screen just showed a test pattern, like the one on the right. The test pattern would be on in between programs(The old televisions only had about three channels, and not very many shows). The troop waited for a while, but no shows came on, so they left.

As you can see, TV wasn't all that great back then, so children entertained themselves by playing "make-believe" games like House, and other games like hide-and-seek. Plastic had not been invented yet, so toys were made of rubber, metal, and wood, like the Jacks set on the left. My grandparents also played board games and read books.


Computers were another change from back then. For example, people had to go to the library to look up things. There were also no good word processors, so they had to write something down first and then type it up on a typewriter. When you press a key on a typewriter, it would push some levers and a metal arm with a letter raised from it would go up and press on a ribbon. The ink on the other side of the ribbon then gets pressed on to a sheet of paper. The big difference in between writing with a typewriter and writing with a word processor is that if you wanted to correct a mistake or add another paragraph in a place where you had already written, you would have a lot of trouble going back and changing it!

Making copies of written things was also hard. It was done with carbon paper. Carbon paper is paper with loose ink or another pigment on one side, so if something, like the type on a typewriter, was pressed on the coloured side, then the black side would transfer its pigment to a sheet of paper below the carbon paper. In this way, it was possible to make copies while typing. For a short time before my grandmother went to college, she got a job as a clerk-typist at a clinic. Every day, she got a list of doctors that were out that day, and her job was to type up that list and, using eight sheets of carbon paper, make eight copies of the list to send to different departments.

                 
For art there were crayons and pencils, but no magic markers. The only pens were fountain pens. There were jars of ink and to fill up the pen you had to put its tip into the jar, and then pull a little lever to suck up the ink. In the 1950s, they had cartridges of ink that you could just put into the pen. One problem with fountain pens was that they work using a little channel that the ink runs through, so they would often leak and make blotches of ink on the paper.
The amount of polio cases in children and adults in the United States.

Another change that happened since the 1940s was polio vaccine. Polio was a very scary disease that mostly affected children. The poliovirus is a very simple virus that infects the gastrointestinal tract and usually causes minor symptoms such as fever and sore throat, but sometimes breaks into the central nervous system and causes paralysis, respiratory arrest and death. Parents, being scared of the disease, would not let their children go in to public places like swimming pools and movie theatres. Because poliovirus can only infect humans and cannot reproduce in nature, introduction of the polio vaccine has eliminated polio from most of the countries in the world and dropped the number of cases from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 52 in November 2015. This has caused a huge difference to the world, because all the worry that this disease has caused in countries like the United States is gone now.

Another thing that people were afraid about was World War II. When it started, the United States, facing unemployment and economic disaster due to the Great Depression, was reluctant to join, and only sent money and weapons to the Allies instead of soldiers. At December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed a naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. The United States government finally spent more money to start up the economy and hire more soldiers to join the War, ending the Great Depression. You have probably heard of famous battles like the ones in Okinawa and Iwo Jima in the Pacific, and Omaha beach in Europe at D-Day. Other famous times included VE day(Victory in Europe), when Germany surrendered, and VP day(Victory in the Pacific), which was the surrender of Japan. How did all of that affect peoples' lives during the 1940s? For one thing, poor families lost fathers and older brothers, when they went to become soldiers in the War to support their families. Other people followed the news in theatres or with the newspaper. In American cities, there were air raid drills, when people covered up all of the windows with blankets or turned all the lights off, so that no light could be seen from outside, or above. This was probably because they were scared that enemy bombers could see the light and bomb the city, like they did in World War I.

The basic crowd opinion of everybody in the U.S. was that people on their side were "the good guys" and that the opposing countries were "the bad guys"(When they were young, my grandparents played games where they pretended to be heroic soldiers who were going around, killing the Japanese). This opinion has led to war many times, war strengthens that opinion, which leads to more wars, and so on. As population grows, resources decrease, and gases in the atmosphere cause climate change, the countries must learn to co-operate, and deal with these problems.

Thursday 19 November 2015

War

You must all know about the crisis going on in Syria and Iraq right now. Millions of refugees are fleeing Syria. The powers of the world are getting involved in it, and there is no end of war in sight.

Why doesn't anybody do anything about it? How did Syria get into this mess in the first place???

I'll explain. It started many years ago, at the end of the Second World War.

At the end of the war, everybody was settling down into new boundaries, but the Middle East had not been defined yet. So the more powerful nations met together to discuss countries in the Middle East. They eventually came up with a plan to create several new countries such as Syria and Israel. In these tiny countries, ethnic communities were scattered, and each group wanted to rule. In Syria, the democratic rule set down by the founders of the country toppled and was replaced by Alawite rule. Alawites are an ethnic minority in Syria. The dictator himself was Hafez Assad, who ruled until he died in 2000.

The new dictator, Bashar Assad, promised a democracy after several peaceful protests. The protests were triggered by other countries toppling their dictators in the Arab spring. However, Assad remained the dictator, while imposing restrictions on the Sunni, the ethnic majority in Syria. He soon became very unpopular. Starting around 2011, protests became riots. Eventually, the people armed themselves and braced for a civil war. Everything began with little groups, mostly in the West of Syria, fighting back. Some of the groups began to join together, and some of these larger groups were strong enough capture entire pockets of land from the government.

Around August, the forces joined together, took over vast areas in the west and north of Syria, and called themselves the rebels. As the government of Syria began to weaken, a new group entered the battle, the Kurds. They came from the north of Syria, and have been creeping slowly southward ever since. Before the Kurds entered the war, the Gulf states had been supporting the rebels, and Russia had been against them. The United States had not actively entered the war, but they favored the rebels. Now that a third group had been introduced, everything changed. The United States could not decide who to support. Russia and other countries had trouble deciding, for various reasons, to support the war.

Around this time, millions of refugees began spilling out of Syria. The war had begun in its earnest. In 2014, yet another group had joined the war; the extremist group known now as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The group, in an aim to create a new country, expanded into Iraq and Syria, mass killing people and galvanizing the world against them. They took over a lot of land from the rebels and the Kurds, and became the richest terrorist group in the world. Around January 2015, they were turned around in Iraq. To compensate for lost territory, they expanded into Syria and now have taken over about 55% of the country, but they are slowing down there too. Some are worried that this may cause the Islamic State forces to take the battle to the international scheme, like what happened in France. ISIS are attempting to draw the world to them because they want an apocalyptic battle to happen in Syria. They believe they will go to heaven by going down fighting.

There is no knowing when this will end or how. However, whoever wins power over Syria will inherit a country in ruins, with the responsibility of cleaning up an entire desert.

Despite the violence going on, most of the civilized world is not concerned with the war, but with the refugees coming from it. A quarter of Syria's population has already fled Syria, and there are more to come. Some are afraid of this swarm of refugees, but there is not much reason to be. They are capable of integrating themselves into a new community, and may help the society of Western countries in years to come.

Tuesday 10 November 2015

Movements

 A hundred thousand years back, mankind had just evolved in the Great Rift Valley of Africa. These people had fires, arrows, spears, and an advanced brain. They had power over many tools and inventions, but all of these inventions were created millions of years before. No human development seemed to be happening.

Suddenly, a drought appeared, and all sources of water in the valley dried up. And the newly evolved species began to move away, first to the south and west. When the drought lifted, people kept moving away, for they had found more fertile valleys to live in. Around 80,000 years ago, people crossed the then very wide land bridge between Africa and Asia. They poured out into a series of muddy valleys, and kept on going. Somewhere in this land, which is now the Middle East, the people split into two different types; generally white people and black people. The black people filled up the rest of Africa and went on to China, India, Australia and Melanesia.

Meanwhile, a group of lighter-skinned people made their appearance in Europe, covering the continent by 40,000 years ago. Some of these lighter-skinned people resumed their colonization, and streamed into northern China through Siberia. They or the other darker-skinned group eventually colonized Polynesia around 5,000 years ago. Around China the genome changed, and gave rise to Native Americans. This stream of people traveled across the land bridge into the Americas and arrived at Cape Horn 10,000 years ago.

Homo Sapiens had just conquered the world. While they were doing so, to fit in with whatever place they were in, they had made many new inventions; the raft in Polynesia, the boomerang in Australia, the bullroarer in Africa, farming in the Middle East. The entire species had developed greatly, just because they had to move out.

That was when people settled down -- well, not really. People have been on the move forever since, whether for family, or for money, or as refugees from drought, war, or famine. Most people do not live in the same house their great grandfather was born in. Humans are always on the move.

Migrations of people still help shape the world today. If nobody ever moved to a different place, all 7 billion people in the world today would have lived in one concentrated spot in the Great Rift Valley of Africa.


Friday 6 November 2015

The Great Barrier

Some continents may be low and flat, but not one continent exists in which there are no mountains.

Mountains are the pulsing heart of regions with infrequent rain or little snow, because snow collects on high mountains in the winter to melt in the spring, creating a fluctuation of growth which make the growing season for plants and trees longer. And mountains don't just do that; they create barriers which can steer away heat and trap rain in parts of the world, usually on the eastern side of a mountain range. In this way the American Rockies created the Mississippi River Basin, an area of great growth and richness (although not in the cities) and the Andes created the Amazon Basin. The highlands of western China guards, to a certain extent, Beijing from the wind and dust of the Gobi Desert.

Mountains are one of the most important biomes in the world, and must be protected. In this blog entry, I am going to write particularly about low mountains.

Although low ranges of mountains are not as influential as big ones, they do make a big difference to environments. The natural ecosystems east of the Appalachian Range in the USA, or what's left of them anyway, are very different to the forests of the Range itself, or the plains behind them. The Appalachian Range forests are part of one big plateau, the top being light woodland and dense scrub, the bottom being tall, stately trees with little underbrush. The lands to the West are dry woodland and some grasslands, and the coastal vegetation is mostly open woodland dominated by low trees.

The forests, alpine fields, grasslands and equatorial forests of the Great Divding Range in Australia are completely different from the Appalachians. To the west are dry, hot, dusty grasslands, and to the east are coastal forests and ranges which vary from place to place. However, for the mountains themselves, it really depends on which part of the map you are pointing to. To the northernmost end of the range stand equatorial swamps of great size, spanning the large Cape York Peninsula, and just to the south of that is the Daintree Rainforest, the only rainforest in Australia, which contains some of the oldest species in the world.

To the south of this is a very large in which there are a few scattered hills, but overall the entire place is dry and dusty, like a desert except for periodic floods. Eventually these tablelands are broken by a vast tabletop mountain and a colorful range called the Carnarvon Gorge, which contains several spectacular gorges and slot canyons, pillars and layered tiers of bare rock. Further to the south, is the beginning of a large World Heritage Area, the Gondwana Rainforests. These forests have basically been preserved in time, and a thick layer of fog only the highest mountains can pierce, for 100 million years.

To the South of that is the Blue Mountains, a massive wilderness of narrow gorges, parts of which are so remote entire types of trees have been quite recently found there. Then the Snowy Mountains, the only area in Australia where snow settles. Finally, the mountain range curves to the West and ends with a group of razorback ridges called the Grampians.

An explanation of why the two mountain ranges are so different can be derived from their formation. The Appalacians were formed by a great uplift that began many years ago. This means the mountains were mostly uniform in height in composition. The Great Dividing Range of Australia was formed by a volcanic hotspot like Hawaii. This means that, like piece of paper being moved below a hole puncher, the earth's crust was repeatedly punctured by a magma plume, causing earthquakes, and volcanoes. During each "puncture", the volcanoes varied in size, intensity, and height, explaining why some parts of the Great Dividing Range was only uplifted in some areas whereas others are completely made of basalt or granite. This creates an incredibly varied landscape.

Of course, this does not mean all "uplift" mountain chains are uniform along their length. The Himalayas, for example, certainly aren't. This is because the Himalayas are made of a particular type of rock that only  weathers most in certain situations. The American Rocky Mountains are slowly being stretched apart so that the Southern part of the chain is lower than the northern part.

Wherever they are, however they are formed, however high they are, mountains will always serve as driving forces in the culture and prosperity of peoples around the world. They will always serve as "great barriers".