Are you right or left?

As we saw in the last class we had this little test called the “world’s smallest political quiz” that classified us into 5 different types of ideologies depending on our political believes; and those were: centrist, libertarian, left (liberal) statist (Big government) and Right (Conservative). I did it with the most honesty and critical thinking I could and I was placed in the centrist area (60,50). It combines our stands on economic issues with our stands with our personal issues.

At the moment we were doing it and when checking the results, I heard some people saying that they were lefts and I said that the quiz was not necessarily exact, in terms that it is not exactly what we believe in; and then he said that the quiz was accurate and that if he/she got there was because he was part of the that political view. I started thinking about the quiz and I got to a conclusion that one quiz will not determine our political situation maybe it could tell us that we are mostly one type of political view and actually the quiz explains that it measures tendencies and not absolutes.

I knew this because we can agree with some political ideas of one “party” but disagree with other ideas of the same party and like few ideas of another party, and vice versa. Therefore, how is it possible that a simple ten-question quiz can tell us that we are part of one ideology? I know it can give us a quite vision about the ideas we agree with, but it can’t tell you that you are just one party men.

Right now? better tomorrow

We had such a great time to rest and relax from school, vacations, the most glorious reward for a student. But what happens when teacher leave us homework in our sacred vacations? Well the answer, for most of the students, is quite simple; they will leave it for the last minute. I had tried to make this homework since the week started but whatever excuse got to my mind, I used it and now I realize that we are live in a culture which is very difficult to make something with time, because we, as students, leave everything to the very last minute.

I have noticed that Mexicans always leave everything to the very last minute, which is not convenient neither for the one that makes is nor for the one that receives it; because if we leave it for the last minute it is very probable that we will do it as quick as possible, we will be really stressed and we will not do it as it should be (in terms of quality). Therefore the one that receives that work will not be highly satisfied and he/she will think we are mediocre people.

I think that we should eliminate that “tendency” because we as humans should have that capacity of organizing our tasks. Another important reason to eliminate it, is because if we leave everything to the last minute we will be highly stressed and stress is one of the biggest illness in our modern world. Lastly if we are trying to reach a better society we should do everything correct, so it is important to take our time and do it as better as possible.

Economic Crisis

I liked a lot the class we had before the holy week that was about where did the economic crisis come from; but what I really found interesting is how do banks work. Since child I had asked my family and myself how do banks work? What do they do with all that money? Do they save it? Well, maestro John, in this class, finally solved all my doubts.

Savers deposit their money in banks and banks give 90% of that money to borrowers and they can be divided in two types: Individuals (they are given the mortgages) and business, which is used for investment and in some cases they borrow money to other banks. Borrowers have to pay what they borrowed with interests; those interests are the left money that banks win and they can give little percentage it to the savers, as an extra interest, because they saved money with the bank. Borrowers can be divided into two types: low-risk, which are the ones that actually can pay those interests and the high-risk people that obviously they can’t pay these.

Then what causes bankrupt in banks is when they gave too many mortgages to high-risk people (what the bank of US did) and then something happens and they start having problems what means that people will hear that their bank is having problems and there’s the “possibility” to loose their money and they will not like that. Therefore they run to their bank and withdraw all their money, which the bank doesn’t have because the bank stayed with only 10% of the total money. Which means that if many people loose their confidence in their bank an bank run will occur, everybody will take off their money, and the bank will not have the money to pay and it will go to the people they gave the mortgages, which are mostly high-risk, who will not pay because they can’t. But the savers will still want their money so the bank will have to go to the government to ask for its help and the government will buy the bank and “return” all the savers their money.

All this is the process in which we got into the economic crisis and I really liked this class because I didn’t know the way the banks manage their money, and it’s amazing the fact that everything, of this process, is based on people’s confidence because if they had left their money in the bank; the bank will be ok and it will just had to find the way to solve its first problem.

The teacher also talked about the Northern Rock Bank, which was the first bank to have a bank run, which consists that everybody want their money back because they loose their confidence on it because thehy may think that they will loose their money.

The overweight Beach!

This holy week I went to Kino bay with my family to have fun, relax from school and forget about stress, but what I found is the fact that almost half people I saw, was kind of overweight and I don’t want to seem that I discriminate them but I realized this and I also have relatives that are overweight and even obese and I love them very much, but I found that Mexico is having a really strong problem with this issue. I searched and found in Internet that Mexico is the 2^nd obese country worldwide after the United States.

I started thinking about this issue and I realized several things like: first of all the influences of the United States they invented the fast food and Mexico took that habit and obviously Mexicans accept it and we eat all those fast foods, which are really dangerous to our body. Then we have the junk food, and because they are cheaper some people buy them and prefer to eat them because they have no money.

But besides all these factors; what I think has the fault is our culture and our parents. Why? Because they teach us how to eat, what should we eat, the quantities and all that stuff, which is part of our culture that is passed from parents to sons. I think they should teach us to have good habits with food and maybe just once a month we could have a brake and eat whatever we want to. They should also teach us that we have to exercise our body and not because we want to have a hot body, but because we need exercise. Exercise is essential to our body because if we have it we should use it for something.

I think that it is important to make several programs or ways to eliminate or reduce the percentage of obese people because we should face this problem with all the tools that we have, we have lots of good technology we just have to apply it in some way, but the point here is to find a solution to this problem, now!

The brain suckers

In my family, we have a ps3, a wii and everyone has a portable game and I love these games; but recently, I have noticed that my relatives spend too much time in these videogames, they are becoming addict to these kind of games, they want to play every single minute they can and it’s kind of funny how these games affect them, because you can see they start to lack of imagination, and whenever they want to joke they bring these weird jokes about their games that nobody understands.

When they are playing these games they loose their minds, they are like zombies trying to reach the next level. Whenever I try to make them go out and have some fun or even just take a walk, see the moon or anything, they just don’t want to go and they want to play even they had played for about hours or even don’t want to sleep because they still want to play more. I think that when they reach this point that’s when our parents have to do something on the matter. The other day I read in QUO magazine that every human has to follow the 8 rule, which consists of 8 hours for working, 8 hours for fun and 8 hours for resting and I think it’s quite true, because we have to balance everything and organize out time.

I think it is important to bring a balance; it is ok to play with them because that’s why they were created, to have fun and don’t be bored, but we have to take care about the time of our lives that we spent in those games, because we also have to get along with our family, nature, and so on. They are not bad if we use them cautiously.

Stress vs. Society

This weekend I had tons of homework; consequently, I had a lot of stress; but stress? What is it useful for? I have several two theories about it. The first one is that it just something that a person has when he/she is worried about something and it just functions as something negative because If someone stresses a lot he/she would have problems with his body; Therefore it is important to control stress and try to get rid of it. My second theory is most likely the same, but the difference is that with stress, for example: I can make thing better and faster, because I’m worried about something, then I worked more efficient.

I heard once, that stress was going to be the biggest problem in the world (besides obesity), but what really caught my attention was that stress was going to be the biggest factor of suicides, and I was like: Noooo! Because I suffer from stress, and now I understand that we have to have a balance between stress and freedom. There are several ways to calm down your nerves & stress. I think this is quite important to society because everyone knows that we have to take care about our body, what we eat and all that, but almost nobody knows that we also have to take care about our mind and our mental problems such as stress. Which is a really huge problem for the next years. We have to learn how to manage our stress and if not; we will loose our heads...

Unidos – A great Experience

Last Saturday, I went to Unidos in order to do social service from 10am to 2 o’ clock. When I arrived at Pitic’s park, I was quite stressed and I had this feeling of anxiety because I have never interact with special needs people before, so I didn’t know what was going to be my reaction towards these kids. I was scared because what would happen if I made them a rude gesture or if I make them feel bad… I wouldn’t like to make them feel bad. It wouldn’t be my intention.

It was the time to meet our new friends; they came and the organizers assigned us kids. That was the moment when I met Carolina, she is 12 years old and she has this Down’s syndrome. I presented myself and I asked her several questions. The bus arrived and took us to 300 (Bowling place). Here everyone played and I made a lot of new friends.

I loved this experience because they showed me something that is important to society. We, as society, have to reach equality and support ourselves, not everything has to be: me, me & me; We have to think for others, support them, help them or at least don’t make them feel less and not only with Down’s syndrome but also with women, eldest people, and so on. We (Mexicans) have this weird culture that doesn’t support these kinds of kids, so we have to make a change because they are important to our society. Why? Because they are people! That think; that have feelings! I think that society has to make a drastic change to avoid those problems. The good thing here is that there are several groups, as Unidos, that’s making a change in society.

P.s. I wanted to make this blog post about this because this was a totally new experience to me :)

Polyglotes = Professional Progress

Now at days, it is very important to know more than one language in order to survive, but if you want to have a good progress in this globalized world, economically talking, you have to know more than three languages. But Why? Very easy, because it’s easier to manage information, you can specialized yourself in a good college from other country (let’s say we are Mexicans and we went to France to get a master’s degree.) You can share information; it is also said that when a person knows more than two languages, he has more abilities to learn (whatever information is needed to be learned), and it has many other benefits.

As the world is in a period, in which it is globalizing. Therefore it is important to break those barriers to understand each other and have a better “communication”; and in order to understand each other we need to know about the different cultures in the world and we also need to know several languages, maybe not all of them but the most important ones and the most spoken ones (English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, and so on).

But how do I choose those languages? Well it is important to know which language will help us in our professional future, for example: if you want to be a engineer, you will have to have interest in German because Germany has a lot of progress in this area. Another important factor is how many people speak the language because you will not like to learn a language that only one city speaks. You need to be interested in the languages that many nations or people, depending on the case, speak; for instance: English or Chinese.

And always remember that knowing (and speaking) more than one language will open you many doors!

The Amero

Wouldn’t it be nice to have just one currency in America?

But what canwe do to accomplish that? Once, I heard somebody that was saying that Canada, the U.S.A, and Mexico had this strange idea of unifying their currencies and call it the amero, but then he said that it was impossible. I wondered why, at the moment I didn’t give it enough attention. With the pass of time I asked myself if it was possible and I discovered that in order to do that, these countries would have to either balance their economies or have problems with it.

If they balance their economy (more less have the same currency value), they will have to increase Mexico’s economy and/or decrease US’s (which I don’t think will happen) to convert their currency to just one. If they join their currencies without a balance, it might happen that Mexico will have several problems because he would not be “strong” enough to support this and Mexico’s economy will be in a hurry.

Beside all these, wouldn’t it be nice to have just one currency and don’t have to worry every time the dollar increases? Maybe Mexico will have a boost in its economy because Canada and the US will push it. This currency, I think, will have the opportunity to fight against Europe. It will have many disadvantages but also many benefits.

If you want to know more about this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_currency_union

Mexican Peso vs. American Dollar

It’s amazing how come that the value of one currency towards another can affect many people’s lives. In the sense that if taking the example of the Dollar (U.S.A.) against the Peso (Mexican); if the Dollar increases its value, many people in Mexico will “suffer” (maybe because Mexico’s economy mostly relies on USA’s) because they will not have enough money to buy things from the USA or even they’ll have troubles solving their debts because they will increase, talking in pesos. But in contrast if the dollar decreases, towards the peso, everybody will buy dollars and go to the USA to buy thing because they “have” money.

I wonder how can they know the relationship between these currencies. I know that this relationship depends on; obviously, the American economy in contrast to the Mexican’s and vice versa, also the inflation of each country. But what factors influence this? Anyway what I try to explain with this, is the fact that a change in any currency can affect many people’s lives, even if the change was not in their country’s currency (as we can see in the example with the U.S. and Mexico.)

The consequences of the change of the currency’s value can vary from insignificant to genocide (dead of many people). For example: the insignificant consequences (mostly when it had changed few cents), you can buy “more” for less, but if the change is huge, the consequences can be from Mexicans buying more from the US to the genocide because people’s debts increase a lot (e.g. what happened in Mexico in 1964, that the dollar increased a lot and many Mexicans that had debts in the USA, committed suicide because their debts increased a lot).

Today:

Divisas y Metales 01.03.2010
Divisas y Metales	Compra	Venta
DOLAR AMERICANO	12.55	12.92

I.V.A... good or bad?

They rose the I.V.A and what for? They say they will use that money for making more jobs, make better infrastructure and all that stuff, and we should believe them, but I have issues in the part of the people that pay that tax. Because how many people pay that tax? I think that the percentage of people that pay that is so little and ironically the ones that gain more money (the richest) are the ones that avoid more taxes, while the people that have less money have more difficulties when avoiding taxes, so they avoid less taxes and obviously they pay more.

I found this really unfair, and because the ones that have less pay more than the ones that have more (according to the percentage everybody should pay). In my personal opinion the government should do something with this problem because it shouldn’t continue because as a country it should have a value called equality and this problem can cause much more problems, for example: can make the difference between classes even bigger.

It is important that everybody pays taxes because with that money government can pay & produce more jobs, make better our infrastructure, highways, buildings, etc. But it is also important to check what do our representatives do with our money (check that they’re not stealing it, using it appropriately, etc.)

Human Behavior & Movies

Yesterday I went to my grandmother’s house and she was watching an old movie and I joined her to watch it and while I was watching it I noticed that they are way different from ours. I’m not talking about special effects and all that because they have changed a lot; but I’m talking about the behavior that all the characters have, they are so different from the ones in the present.

To start they are so polite, they talk with so much respect to their relatives and the people that is bigger. Their fights are kind of just discussions; the man is kind of gentleman that sees the woman as the perfect figure and tries to inspire love in her by telling poems and all that stuff. In comparison with the present movies that the characters talk to each other as normal, without respect, now it is easier make a woman fall in love.

With all these characteristics I tried make a little bit clearer that when people changes behaviors, movies do the same, to make us feel that they are normal activities. And so other times they change our behaviors, because we take movies as examples for our lives and that’s where my question is: What happened? The movies changed our antecessors? Or their behavior changed movies? Here we can also notice that human behavior changes so quickly that from one decade something can be correct but the next decade can be wrong.

Our second Social Life

Almost all people that have access to Internet, have a facebook account and that’s why I started thinking about this; It’s kind of interesting to know how does a network became the most popular site in the internet. I found out that it is becoming like our second lives, we upload our photos, we post our thoughts, we use it as a messenger (to communicate), we play games, and use it for many other things. That is the reason why we spend so much time in facebook.

I’ve noticed that it has changed our lives, sometimes in a better way but others in a negative way. The positive things for example are that we can have communication with our friends from other countries, see what’s happening in the social aspect (with the photos), and also use the free-time, but in the other hand it can be very dangerous if the person doesn’t know how to use it correctly because there are some people that besides doing what they’ve to do, they over-use facebook.

I think that facebook is like our second social live and that is has changed our style of life because today we are more connected within our groups of friends and now it’s easier to make friends because there’s no need to be face to face. Society has accepted that, and through the pass of time the world will be even more & more linked. I would like to learn more about this phenomena.

Society Vs. Global Warming

Few days ago I was asking myself about how many generations will live after us. Then my grandmother took some disposable glasses, and I told her that we shouldn’t use them because they affect our environment, while we’re suppose to take care of it (environment) and I also explained her the way they affect it, but she denied to stop using them because she said that she is going to die, soon. I was like surprised because, obviously, I don’t want her to die soon and because of how come that people don’t care about their environment and their future generations.

I also asked myself about how can we like, make a conscience on others, to stop doing things that affect our environment like using disposable glasses or dishes, hair sprays, throwing water, don’t caring about separating trash (organic, plastics, etc.) and all those kinds of actions that deteriorate our planet because It won’t be forever. I have been wonder this for several weeks and trying to find out a way to make my family take more care about what surrounds us.

But I found that, for one is very difficult to make a change, but a group has more probabilities of doing it. Because I find society as many brains together and if you convince one, he will change another and so on until the whole society is changed of mind, just like a chain. If a group does this will be much more easy. That’s why I joined this group called “Greenology” in my school to gather some ideas and imply them in my house (family).

A Racist "Helper"

A few weeks ago a delegate from the PRD party & also a radio host, named Ariel Gómez León “El Chunko”, made a comment about the fact that Mexico was helping Haiti (because of the earthquakes they have had). As most of us know, the government took a little percentage from the people’s wages (The ones that work in government; in order to help Haiti.), Well he commented that the Haitians are abusive and that Mexico should not help them because they are black, and also because in the T.V. we can “see” that in Haiti there are some people giving them food and according to him, they have enough food and they are just asking for more and more.

In my personal opinion he did totally bad in making those comments. First of all he made a racist comment… we are not in those times that people care about the colour of their skin (or at least the ones that are in an important job shouldn't do it). We are all humans and color is not a matter of discrimination (shouldn't be); Then he said that in television we could observe that they are being fed & they are asking for more and more (that they're being abusive), but I think his kind of cretin because in television everybody could notice that they couldn’t be fed because they were so many and the soldiers were just few (in comparison with them). That’s why the soldiers couldn’t distribute food fairly. I think he should had though about what was going on, besides criticizing. He made a wrong comment through radio (his show) and a few days after he was fired because of those racists comments.

I think they did well (the poeple that fired him) because we can't have those kind of people that base their, let's say their critical thinking (the way they see poeple) on the color of their skin, in important jobs such as an delegate. We are in 2010 that shouldn't happen anymore, but there's still racist people. One more last comment I'd like to add is that even if there's still racist people, they shouldn't care of the color of sking when is a matter of helping others (in sense of natural disasters, scarcity, etc.)