BART: Better After Reading This

You know those useless BART tickets that you have lying around with a few cents on them? Well, BART, in addition to being a less environmentally destructive mode of transportation, is also beneficial to our community and its inhabitants. In the article titled "Tiny Tickets: BART’s Best-Kept Secret?" in the Mission Local and also in the San Francisco Chronicle, J.J. Barrow explains that:

While most BART riders don’t know that their 10- or 30-cent tickets, forgotten in purses and drawers, can be turned into charity donations, a few nonprofits do.

If you're itching to help your community, but you can't find the time or the money to help, then turning in these old, unwanted BART tickets is the perfect option. BART began this project of donating the money on these leftover BART tickets to charities, in 2001. This program is called "Tiny Tickets," and it has lost some popularity as of late as charities have dropped out due to tough economic times, yet there are still around fifty charities that participate in this program now. In the seven years in between 2002 and 2009, charities have made around $260,000. Imagine how much more that sum would be if all people who rode BART knew about Tiny Tickets. Unfortunately, due to issues with money, charities and BART are no longer able to advertise this program so it is up to us to spread the word about Tiny Tickets in order to improve our community with this simple program.

The Call for Education Reform

The founder of Microsoft and possibly the world's most famous billionaire, plans to push for an overhaul of America's current education system, on November 19, 2010. Bill Gates is actively contributes to various non-profit organizations with support and donations, and encourages the youth of America to live better lives. According to the article entitled "Gates Urges School Budget Overhauls" by Sam Dillon of the New York Times, tomorrow, Gates is planning on making a speech directed to all the superintendents of the fifty states of the U.S. to transform the current educational budgets for public schools into a new system that would be spent better and would better benefit the youth of America. Gates wants to:

end teacher pay increases based on seniority and on master’s degrees, which he says are unrelated to teachers’ ability to raise student achievement. He also urges an end to efforts to reduce class sizes. Instead, he suggests rewarding the most effective teachers with higher pay for taking on larger classes or teaching in needy schools. 

While I believe that the better a teacher is and the more qualified he/she is for his/her job, the more he/she should get paid, I do agree with Gates that we do, in fact, need an overhaul of the current public education budget because, in the tremendous majority of public school districts in America, kids are not being educated the best they can be educated and many schools are not using their money in order to best suit the education of their students. Even though education falls mostly under the jurisdiction of state governments, President Obama should back Gates up and should also push superintendents to reform their budgets. I also agree with Gates in the respect that class sizes should be cut down because the lower the student to teacher ratio is, the better, because teachers are not as swamped with dealing with more students than they can handle, and the students will also feel more comfortable to approach the teachers, who will have more time to deal with the fewer students that they have.

Mental Health Break

Another Reason to Vote in Favor of Prop 19

In anticipation of the legalization of marijuana, which will be made possible by the passage of Prop 19, some are beginning to purchase internet domain names in case marijuana goes web. In her New York Times Article titled "Marijuana Web Names Snapped Up, in Case of Legalization," Malia Wollan describes that: 

Mr. Faler, a former police officer who once worked the narcotics beat, has registered more than 1,000 marijuana-related Internet domain names, including oddities like icecreammarijuana.com and marijuanapastry.com. And he is not the only one banking on the drug’s online future. He is part of an Internet land grab for marijuana domains by so-called domainers who hope to sell their holdings at a profit, betting that more lenient marijuana laws will eventually drive more people to the Web for their supplies, whether they are seeking seeds, bongs, recipes or drug-laced dog treats.

Among the benefits that can come with the passing of Prop 19, which include diluting the influence of drug cartels and creating an economic boost for the state of California through taxes on marijuana, another benefit is providing a select few the opportunity get rich quick by purchasing internet domain names that marijuana product vendors might buy in the future, if Prop 19 passes. While this does not provide a significant economic boost, it gives some smart Californians the opportunity to get rich quick if Prop 19 and similar laws go into effect. These domain names are cheap now because they are useless due to the fact that Prop 19 still might not pass, but when marijuana laws become much more lenient, these domain names will be very desirable to online vendors, and the people who purchased the domain names will make a fortune.

Dubai, the Newest Adopter of the American Lifestyle

Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates, has recently become a popular tourist location, with its numerous luxurious hotels and newly acquired American lifestyle. Liz Alderman, columnist for the New York Times, in her article entitled "Dubai Faces Environmental Problems After Growth," explains that:

In the last year, tourists have swum amid raw sewage in Dubai’s slice of the Persian Gulf. The purifying of seawater to feed taps and fountains is raising salinity levels. And despite sitting on vast oil reserves, the region is running out of energy sources to support its rich lifestyle. 

Dubai is the perfect example of the lavish American lifestyle spreading to other places, and promoting greater waste, environmental damage and use of crucial, decreasing resources. Everyone wants to live like the Americans, and while this does bode well for immigration, when people transform the lifestyles of their country into American lifestyles, waste tends to vastly increase and the greenhouse effect increases and produces a more widespread and harsher global worming. As people in various places around the globe become wealthier as the world becomes flatter, to use one of Thomas Friedman's terms, more and more people will be able to support and live the lavish, expensive and wasteful lifestyle. While this does provide great support for the world economy, it is an issue today and for the future because the American lifestyle is incredibly wasteful and is one of the things that Friedman pushes us Americans to move away from because of its significant contribution to global warming and other detrimental environmental and economic effects.

Mental Health Break

Number 2 on this countdown is the best dunk of all time.

Whitman Exhibits Less Than Sportsman-like Behavior

Today, on October 26, the competing gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown met face-to-face most likely for the last time until the governor election. The candidates met in Long Beach, California along with current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger for Maria Shriver's annual Women's Conference. Carla Marinucci, author of the San Francisco Chronicle article titled "Meg Whitman says she won't abandon negative ads," describes that:

Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman drew a chorus of boos from the capacity crowd at a major women's gathering here Tuesday after going on the attack against her Democratic opponent Jerry Brown and refusing to withdraw her negative television ads, as Brown said he would, for the rest of the campaign.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/26/MNTH1G2C1A.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz13X2b9iJ3

Even though most of the crowd was comprised of women, the crowd was not happy with Whitman because, while Brown agreed to stop the vicious and destructive advertisements on his end, Whitman did not want to retract these advertisements because she felt that she needed to protect her image with her destructive ads. Jerry Brown's willingness to retract his destructive ads displayed a sense of admirable integrity that all political candidates should possess. Whitman's unwillingness to retract the advertisements displayed insecurity on her part and showed that she really does have something to hide and she wants to make sure that she is on the attack so that others, especially Brown, don't attack her and reveal whatever she is attempting to hide or feels insecure about.