The Internet

The internet is an incredible resource that puts unlimited information right in front of you, whom ever you are, where ever you are (with wifi.) It was theorized that the internet and all of this new technology that we have would turn all of us into much smarter beings and make all of our lives infinitely easier. In some senses it has; I can now write a research paper using hundreds of primary and secondary sources without ever having to get up from my seat; I can now figure out what the weather will be like in Spain in two weeks in a matter of seconds. This is all a great improvement to the old ways that those things had to be done; however, it has had quite a few unexpected, serious consequences that we are just now starting to discover.
First of all, the internet can be a very dark place, not just certain sites but also in terms of human happiness. According to a recent study done by the Institute of Physiological Sciences at the University of Leeds shows that long periods of time spent on the internet can lead to depression. In other words, the amount of time one person spends on the internet had a high correlation to depression and feelings of sadness.
Social Media is making us more anti-social. More and more I find myself at a table with my friends, and we are all on our phones. No one is talking; no one is listening. Everyone is absorbed in their phones, checking what is going on in the world of technology. If we wanted to, we could all just text each other and that would be our whole conversation. The only problem with this is that text does not pick up on the tones that people are attempting to convey. This can lead to people getting upset over something that is simply misread.
The internet and technology can be very useful, but just like any tool, harmful.






http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/03/surfing-web-make-depressed/

Sydney's Blog

I think that almost everyone would agree that falsely accusing someone of a crime is a bad thing. It is really unfortunate that people are being falsely accused of rape, as it ruins their life even though they did nothing wrong. That being said, rape cases are very often simply a case of "he said, she said," so it is very difficult for courts to decipher who is innocent and who is guilty. In theory it should be easy; there would be no accusations if it did not happen, but that is not how life works. When there is the possibility that someone may receive a very large payoff at little cost to them, there will always be people who value this money over someone else's life. This brings up a much larger problem within society, and that is the abuse of the legal and civil court systems for personal gain. A very good example of this would be the law suit that was brought upon McDonald's in the early 2000s. They were sued for millions of dollars because people felt that their food was too fattening, and people could not control themselves. They ate too much of their food and became fat. The law suit was successful and McDonalds as a result decided to nix their Super Sized option for fries and a drink. Obviously changing this would be very difficult, and I do not see any way to do so, but it does irk me that someone will ruin another person's life for their own personal gain. 

Selfishness is something that we all suffer from, but it is not always a bad thing. It is our primal instinct to put ourselves above all else; it is what keeps us moving forward. In a capitalistic society, it is what takes us to the top and supplies us with money. That being said, where do we draw the line between looking after our own self-interests and being so selfish that we will ruin other people's lives to get what we want?

Capital Punishment

As society has progressed through time, people like to think that we as people are also progressing. We think that we are continually getting smarter and learning from our mistakes. We are definitely seeing the errors that our ancestors have made, but are we really learning from them? We see the same things happening over and over again; the stock market crashed in 1929, due in part to mistakes made by people, and very similar things led to the recession in 2008. Throughout history, we can see that different forms of death sentences have existed. Many different reasons for these death sentences appeared. In some cultures, execution was used to punish criminals, in others it was used to crush political opposition to those that unsuccessfully challenge those in power. Back in ancient times, the ways that people were murdered were quite gruesome, like being burned alive or boiled to death. These deaths served a purpose, as they were often public and attempted to deter people from attempting the same crimes and suffer the same fate. People in civilizations to follow tried to become more and more civil; for example, the guillotine cut off the heads of its victims immediately causing no physical harm to people while creating a public scene for all to see. People have used firing squads to kill people since the rifle was invented, and this too can be a quite humane way to kill someone. By using more that one person in a firing squad, no one knows who actually killed the victim. This is quite unlike the guillotine that has a someone that pulls the pin to kill the person. This can be a problem because while it does not create pain for the victim, it can cause some emotional pain for the executioner, who has to deal with the fact that he or she has killed someone, which can weigh on someone's mind very heavily, no matter how much the person deserved it. In America today, we use lethal injection to punish people to death, and this has quite a few complications. First of all, the price to actually create the murderous concoction costs quite a bit of money, and it is not made in America. Therefore, Americans cannot control the amount of the solution is produced. As a result, people some prisons have basically been putting everything under the kitchen sink into the mix in order to attempt to kill people. This can also lead to people not being killed humanely, as we can see from some examples in American history. For example, Angel Diaz was sentenced to death, but when he was lethally injected, he did not die. It took a second dose after a half an hour, and Diaz felt extreme pain before finally dying. By killing people with lethal injection we are not only exposing people to extreme pain on occasion when trying to kill them without harm before death, but we are also creating an executioner that will too experience pain from these events. This shows that although we say and try to learn from our mistake, we often times revert back to the thing that we are trying to avoid.