Memes and Whatnot

Eminent Domain is quite honestly the pink elephant in the room. From the sources that we had to use for the synthesis essay, I would've assumed that this would be an issue that was known to everyone , but as it turns out, most people don't. Today , I want to talk about the clause that makes eminent domain fair - "with payment of compensation". Jesus  freaking Christ, this is such a vague clause. The government is literally like, we can take your land, and we decide what just compensation for it is. Once upon a time , for over 100 years existed in the U.S. Constitution. It wasn't until 1876 that it was used. That case in which it was used was a huge landmark supreme court case. The provisions of this basically deemed that The court ruled that it is necessary for the government to be able to seize property for its uses, such as creating infrastructure, which ultimately are determined by the legislature and not the judiciary. This essentially gives the government u...

Since I am a junior, I, like most other people reading this blog, will have to take the SAT or the ACT. I personally took my SAT yesterday, and I thought that it went pretty well. Yay me! But that got me thinking, what enabled me to perform to a standard that I was happy with? By far it would be the time and money that I put into studying for the SAT. Studying for the SAT came with many costs including purchasing books with practice tests. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with having to purchase textbooks to improve my SAT taking abilities. But what I think is wrong is that the SAT tests material that is not representative of what schools teach. Take for example the Writing section of the SAT, when was the last time in your English class that you studied just grammar rules? I can quite confidently say that never happened. Then take the reading section, if I was to take an average high school in the United States, I can also quite confidently state the level of reading that is req...

Here's me, chilling on my bed scrolling through TikTok like the lifeless person I am, and I stumble upon this:  https://vm.tiktok.com/H3wkPv/ . I highly recommend y'all watch this, if you don't this entire blog post will have no context. Claiming that I'm Hispanic, I mean this in no offense to Hispanic people, will help me get into college. After some researching, aka reading a Vox article on this, I stumbled upon this image:  To most people, the above infographic shouldn't come as a surprise. We all have the notion that race does in fact play a role in college admission, and this study by Princeton researchers proves it. Don't get me wrong, I think affirmative action is definitely a step in the right direction in the efforts of reducing de facto racism in America, however, I truly believe that there are better ways to be going about this. To address the issue of why do something other than affirmative action, the answer is quite simple: it doesn't work...

Years of high unemployment rates let to underemployment for those who were working, and this led to more unemployment for those who were not working. Gas prices were also incredibly high, regardless of the fact that oil prices were dropping. This then lead to high food prices and higher health care costs. You might be confused as to what this is about, this is about the unattainability of the American Dream. The American Dream relies upon a key concept that people can make enough money to get themselves out of whatever dire situation they are in and with enough hard work they are able to move up the socio-economic ladder. Well think again buckaroo. Here's a little graph comparing minimum wage to the GDP. What do you see? What I see is that our country is becoming more and more prosperous, which leads to increasing cost of living, but a minimum wage that isn't keeping up with this. We now live in a world where working minimum wage means that you are earning far less money t...

The Great Gatsby highlights the disparity between the upper and the lower classes of society. The disparity between classes is extremely visible in the United States. Poverty, the classic marker of the lower class is a constant, self-propagating cycle. We start the poverty cycle with a family in poverty. This family in poverty cannot afford to properly educate their children. These children continue their lives with sub-par education, which leads them to make sub-par decisions. They are more likely to choose not to pursue higher education, which then leads them to struggle to find jobs. Their inability to find jobs means they struggle to earn enough money to get out of the poverty threshold. They then start a family, which just continues the cycle of poverty over and over and over again. There is a couple of welfare programs that the government can instill to help alleviate the problem of poverty. Obviously, the easiest way to get people out of poverty is to simply provide them w...

Okay so you might be wondering what type of title that is, and in all fairness, I have no idea either. The title comes from my first reaction to reading on page 337 when Milkman "leaped". I personally thought what Milkman did was probably the stupidest thing he could've done. Yeah I get it Toni, you need to be all symbolic and come full circle, but come on, no one is that stupid.  On to the assigned part of this blog. If Vsauce existed back in the 60's, Guitar probably thought of the exact same thing I did. I can only imagine that he was extremely confused by Milkman's actions. I'm assuming everyone knows the saying "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight", Milkman was the type of guy to bring just himself to a gunfight. If Guitar could read what Morrison wrote about Milkman's leap, I think he'd also be confused by how a person could be "bright".  Again, I get it Ms. Morrison, symbolism, but c'mon he's an African ...

I think it is astounding at how desperate some people can get in their search for riches. Milkman traveled so far away from home in search of something that he wasn't even sure was there. I think it was quite ironic that Milkman was wealthy enough to afford the trip all the way down to Philadelphia, and he was able to simply carry $500 worth of cash in his pocket, but yet he still craved for more money. What stood out to me was that Milkman was so ignorant during his search for the gold. He simply gets out a lighter and takes about 30 seconds looking for the gold. What I think he should've done is went back to town, rested up for a bit and collected the tools that he needed to succeed in his search for the gold. If he had just went out and bought a shovel as well as a proper flashlight, there seems to have been a good chance that he would've found the gold. I thought it was also incredibly dumb of him to just tuck his tail between his legs and run off to Virginia in hopes o...