Students give a hoot for their campus

By Thomas Gibbs

Trash: It’s ever present around our campus, and it is the result of the active lifestyles that each student at UMass Dartmouth has throughout the school semester. Still, the plastic cups, cigarettes, candy wrappers, and other assorted garbage have given the campus a rather untidy and unkempt feel to it. The trash barrels located within the buildings eventually fill to the brim, and careless litterbugs are free to drop their rubbish wherever they see fit. Thankfully, students and faculty members took notice of this, and quickly solved the problem with, for the first time ever, a Campus Clean Up Day.

Officially started on May 2, and going from 2 to 5p.m., Campus Clean Up Day was an idea organized by the Center for Sustainability, and as noted by Chancellor Jean MacCormack via an e-mail message, was soon followed by a partnership with such groups as “The Social Change Society, MassPIRG, Facilities, Sodexho and Dartmouth Recycling.” The basic goal of Campus Clean Up Day was, obviously, to clean up the campus, but also to place emphasis on the geography of the campus, pointing out and highlighting its finer aspects such as the tree and flower placements alongside certain sidewalks and dirt roads. Many students signed up for the event, and formed into groups that took charge of different parts of the campus. They were all working hard to keep their campus looking as clean and pristine as possible.

If one were to have taken a drive around the campus between the three hours stated earlier, chances are that he or she would have seen countless students carrying hefty trash bags and picking up discarded garbage with which to toss out. Some of the dirtiest areas such as the sides of the road and the parking lots were tended to right away, and eventually the groups managed to bring themselves into the interior of the campus in order to take care of the quad, and the buildings that surrounded it.

Watching the students hard at work made me think hard about how most students handle their trash. Some are careless about their environment and toss whatever they don’t need right out their car window. Others do it without even realizing, and have somehow slipped into a habitual state of laziness when it comes to proper waste disposal. Few, very few, actually manage to properly put their trash away on a regular basis. Whether it’s due to a hectic class schedule or a misstep in priorities is another story for another day, but the point that this clean up crew was trying to make was that the campus is not just a place for learning to most people; it is a second home. Would you want people throwing litter and junk all over your front lawn or backyard? In essence, that’s what it feels like to these pioneer picker-uppers. Every piece of trash contributes to the further degrading of the campus’ appeal to future students. Not to sound too much like an environmentalist, but nature can actually be a beautiful thing, and our concrete jungle can have some amazingly stunning spots if the time was taken to look around.

Hopefully Campus Clean Up day will start to become an annual or even biannual event that will put us two steps forward into the vast improvement of our campus. So the next time you finish a sports drink, or a bag of chips, or whatever the inevitable trash may be, stop and think about where you live, where others may one day look forward to living, and toss it in a garbage bag. You’ll be glad you did.

Fight for survival begins now

By Jeremy Hollembaek

Without hyperbole, the United States is facing the biggest threat in its history. The War on Terror is not the cause, but the symptom; the Iraq War not the War for Democracy, but a war for energy. At its most basic, the United States, and the world, is at the threshold.

We are approaching two species changing events, either one of which would completely change society as we know it. With both Peak Oil and Global Warming occurring as of 2006, and the repercussions echoing for the next several decades at the minimum, this is the prime issue of the Twenty-First Century.

Forget the War on Terror. Forget the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and the War for Democracy. This is it. This is the War for Survival. The Stern Review Change has stated that a billion may die from famine and drought - and this at only a moderate rise in temperature. The UN Report on Climate Change has stated that it is occurring and is irrevocable.

This is the species-changing event. Extinction can be avoided at this point; maintaining the standard of living cannot. Half the animal kingdom may be written off this century; at best, we may save their genetic material. However, most will die. In the same token, humanity may lose half its numbers and count itself lucky.

In 2007, and in 2008, we look to be doing business as usual. As the weather worsens, the U.S. will set up dikes on the coastlines. As the oil ends, we may involve ourselves in more wars in the futile hope that we can spend trillions of dollars to maintain our standard of living. It won’t happen. It should instead be our goal to use these trillions of dollars to minimize the crash. It will hurt regardless.

The United States has grown in the habit of viewing its forces as easily deployable, that we can become involved in any emergency or deploy to any regional conflict. That idea is ending for two reasons. We simply do not have the capability in either manpower or fuel reserves. The Pentagon has stated our oil use in the military is “unsustainable in the long term.” In addition, various members of the military have come forward and said the military has become broken. We simply cannot deploy at such a breakneck pace, and neither can we move the troops in such a manner.

We have nearly a thousand bases around the world monitoring, observing, and preparing for theatre operations. We don’t have the capability to sustain them. At best, we should maintain the observation posts and embassies, but it is not in our interest any longer to set up tripwires to await a new war. We don’t have the capability or interest in a new war; on every front, we need to cut back, and focus on survival here at home.

President Bush desires to enlarge the military. This is the last thing we need. We have the largest military budget in the world, and we absolutely should not attempt to fight the rest of the world. Indeed, if we can move the troops back and protect the homeland, there will be many issues that will need to be dealt with. At the very least, many of them will be needed for the public projects to follow. Consider them the new Roman Legions who built roads in times of peace.

If the military is to be maintained, its techniques must be adjusted for insurgency small unit warfare; no one is going to have the energy for conventional warfare. This includes heightening the training of the soldier for basic combat and retraining the Marine for Small Wars. It is a necessity that their leaders become trained in network warfare, as we will not fight mass armies.

In addition, whatever aspects of the budget at home can be cut should be cut. This includes the War on Drugs; we have neither the resources nor the inclination to jail millions of citizens. At the very least, their labor will be needed. As is right and proper, they should have the right of privacy to do as they will, as long as it is only to themselves.

Taxes will be raised; extensively. Consider this the biggest deal since the New Deal - we cannot deficit-spend our way out of this one. The car culture is over. Indeed, the oil culture itself is over. Extinct. Consider the oil run out; to fight in the Middle East over the scraps would only serve to weaken us, particularly against a rising China. Just by fighting, we would lose time, lives, and treasure we cannot afford. We have taken the lion’s share of the oil; let us leave the field and let the jackals fight over the rest. Domestically, we must go cold turkey. Raising taxes on gasoline until it is unsustainable is the only option, and doing the same to airlines is ideal. Emergency government action is the only reason for either.

We have mentioned public works. This is where their value is shown, on two fronts. The first is transit. The Interstate Highway System is finished. Any effort that went to that must now go into trains; roads to rails, subways to rail tunnels, to every city in the States. There has been mention of a train line to Russia; acts like this are only to be encouraged.

As well, canals have become a vital necessity. It is impossible to move things as cheaply as we did with gasoline; making use of rivers is the next option, and they must be built with all haste. To adapt the loss of oil, we need to make use of alternate energies. Windmill farms would be the first and quickest; nuclear power would follow. Regardless, they need to be built immediately.

All indications suggest we’ll be in the Second Great Depression by this point. Be it the huge deficit spending, the extinction of the oil, automobile, and airline industry, or the environmental destruction of cities, we are going to have an erratic economy. Free college will allow some breathing space for the millions of people without jobs. In particular, we want to focus on alternatives for all the fields that had been destroyed - alternate energy at the foremost. Free health care will allow many to survive who would not. Focusing on rehabilitation over punishment will also give us a boost. We need all the help we can get, plus it is simply the Right Thing to do.

Above all, we need to ensure that, for all the new expansion of government, we maintain the people’s control over the administration. It is vital that both FOIA and the Hatch Act remain in place, for while a decisive leader is vital in this situation, ensuring that he is not being foolhardy is necessary. It will also be essential to end campaign contributions, lobbying, and other ways of de facto bribery of our politicians by monied interests and corporate giants outright. Consolidation of the media by one or two power players is to be avoided like the plague it has demonstrated itself to be.

Finally, it is in the vital interest of the United States that we do everything in our power to ensure a global fight against global warming, and deal with the energy crisis as quickly as possible. Beyond that, however, foreign affairs are to be avoided; it is going to be a den of vipers for the next several decades, and we cannot afford to try to tame them.

Letter to the Class of 2007

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all success and happiness in the future.

Since you came to UMD, some of you as freshmen, others as transfer students, you have given me great joy. Thanks to Veronica and the CAB members, I participated in Mr. and Ms. UMD. I was invited to music recitals, RHC Banquets, a Student Senate Banquet and saw many of you perform in plays.

It has been my sincere pleasure to serve you during your patronage of the Res Caf. I saw many of you every day, and we had many laughs together. I saw your happiness when things went well and your sadness when they didn’t. You worked with me as I tried to learn your names, and one of you, Peter (alias Casey), even started an “I love Bev” Facebook group.

Most of you came in as unsure teenagers, not knowing where you were going and matured into young adults with a direction. I was lucky enough to have witnessed this transformation.

The years have gone quickly, and I am excited to have the summer off, but I am also sad that I will not be seeing your happy faces again. Please leave knowing that I will miss you, and I hope that our paths cross again.

I am very sentimental, so I have shed a few tears as I write this, but I hope that if you remember me, it will be with a smile at the top of the stairs at Res.

Congratulations, Class of 2007!

Best wishes,

Bev

SOUL SIGHTINGS

“Three R’s” revisited

Recently, I received an email listing the results of the Student Senate elections. The final results for the election were disappointing. The highest number of votes for any of the positions was 248, for trustee. Such an event provides a background for reflecting on another version of the traditions “three r’s, reading, riting and rithmatic.” This new version posits the importance of rights, responsibility and respect.

Daily, the news carries pieces about individuals who claim, sometimes with cause, that their rights have been violated. Unfortunately, the first amendment is all too often used as a shield to hide behind or a justification for doing what we want to do, when we want to do it, in the way we want to do it. The very thought that we might be told “no, you cannot engage in a particular action or use language to demean, insult, marginalize or otherwise belittle another individual” brings screams of protest in the name of free speech. Speech is like a feather pillow. It functions well when contained but once opened there is no way to take back what has been said or written just as there is no way to collect all the feathers once the pillow is torn. Each of us has a history of stories we wish we had not told, gossip we cannot take back and words said in anger that destroyed a relationship. As homosapiens we seem to be regressing in the journey toward sapiens.

Even though we have rights guaranteed to us by law, responsibilities are the companion of those rights. Responsibility truly is an “r word,” never to be spoken to self or another. Few, if any, court cases focus on an individual, demanding their responsibilities. Instead, there is a stampede to avoid responsibility and find someone or something to blame. As a result we have racial profiling, huge law suits and children in the school yard using the words of cartoonist, Bill Keane, “Not Me.” Just listen to the news. No one says it was my fault. Of course if they did, their statement would not reach the news.

Respect seems to be the first causality of the unreasonable demand for rights and the refusal to accept responsibilities. Respect as used today seems to be more concerned with adoration and fear than a reverence for the other individual. The media has desensitized us to the point where we are no long shocked by violence entertainment or language. We seem to be on the road to becoming a language-poor society unable to express ourselves and so revert to sound bites, generalization and stereotypes. Real respect is built on reverence for the other person. It is built on not needing to demean the other so I can feel good or superior. It means following the very ancient cross-cultural adage of doing to others what I would want done to me or in the negative not doing to others what I would not want done to me.

The summer break is an opportunity to change our life and begin the process of becoming a more whole person. A facet of this maturing process is the willing acceptance of our responsibilities and developing an attitude of respect for others. If we respect the other we help to heal them and society. Be well during the break.

Sr. Madeleine Tacy, OP
Catholic Campus Ministry, UMD

EDITOR'S FINAL WORDS

Identity crisis

Self-parody and drunken debauchery

What I want to talk about is the theory that someone can be a parody of themselves, or a “self-parody.” With all of the cultural diversity and natural absorption that exists at college, especially here at UMD, identities are constructed out of materials, not developed through personality. That’s not so bad; if you like classic rock, old movies or Mexican culture, it’s okay to flaunt it around your dorm room or apartment. The problems begin when these material aspects seep into your personality.

It’s all about absolutism really. When you come to define yourself with certain things, whether it’s foreign films, fast music, rational art, whatever, and all other culture is sub-standard you’ve become an absolutist self-parody. Not everything is so simple, be open-minded; don’t be so elitist about YOUR passions and preferences. I don’t see you anymore after that, I just see all those things that you condemn as dumb and idiotic, and it’s isolating your true self in between colors, numbers, sounds and images.

A lot of the time the isolation comes from the identification of a piece of culture with the people who like it. This is the essence of self-parody: nothing is just conditionally alive; it always exists beyond that and into categories, likenesses, and human adjectives. ‘That music is pretentious because the people who listen to it are pretentious. Old movies are boring because people who like them are boring. Philosophy is not relatable because those who read it don’t make any sense when they speak. Politics is a corruptible institution because those in it are almost always corrupt.’ These things are not eternally intertwined; they are very much separate. Plato believed in the world of man and the world of ideas, the latter being higher than and non-corruptible by the former.

Generalizations, clichés, stereotypes, topical references, superficial enunciations, fringe judgments; they all grow out of absolutist people that end up being self-parodies. It’s so easy and so natural for them because they’ve never gotten their hands dirty in anything. I bet you wouldn’t judge music so harshly, tastelessly and quickly if you’ve ever tried to sit in a room and try to write a good album for three weeks. Movies are harder to trash if you’ve tried to write a good script with developed characters, an interesting plot, perfect lighting and spot on camera angles. Poetry is harder to dismiss as irrelevant and stupid if you’ve ever tried to really write some, the best being that which touches the essence of life beneath the surface, oddly enough the same surface self-parodies can’t puncture.

You just have to be yourself. Don’t analyze, don’t talk to me about frivolous comparisons. Don’t feign interest for appearances. For people that have become a self-parody, being themselves is the hardest thing to do. They have let other people, through contemporary mediums, become them or become their main spokesmen. ‘Do you want to know my philosophy on life? Listen to this comic I like. Want to know my take on politics and society? Watch South Park. I don’t need to share myself, professionals have already done it for me.’ When material and entertainment mediums define you, you are a self-parody.

I know you can talk ad nauseam about the intricacies of men, women and their relationships. Why don’t you stop talking about, theorizing, and throwing out clichés a mile a minute? Dive in headfirst, get your hands dirty, feel a little pain, and reach the bottom. You’ll know nothing about reality if you never face it. And trust me; reality television does not touch the real ‘reality’, although you might live like it does.

For a decent amount of my time at college, I was a self-parody. I did things, listened to music, read books and watched movies on the advice of another being besides yourself. Soon I didn’t have an identity, only a collage of materials and words that weren’t mine. Make sure the words in your head and that others hear are truly yours.

On May 5, we had Springfest. As the beer corral by the Campus Center overflowed, a lot of students looking to drink outdoors hung out in front of their dorms in the Woodland Commons and snuck beer into not-so-cleverly disguised cups and continued with their activity. As the hours went on, what only can be described as the most blatant disregard for authority, respect, conscience, and temperance took place well past nightfall. At 9:30, a single cop broke everything up - all it took was one.

What am I complaining about? No one got hurt, a few people got drunk but so what? Underage drinking, destruction of property, loitering, littering, having open containers...it all happens inside the dorms on a nightly basis, so who cares about outside? It was allowed to happen, and because they got away with it, the debauchery will grow. I love this school, but I’m glad I’m leaving.

What I learned in college

I learned that all of our actions and decisions are based on a categorical imperative, as described by Immanuel Kant. Sometimes we do things because of their intrinsic value - meaning they give us straight satisfaction; they are the ends. Other times we do things that have conditional value - meaning they are a means to an end, which is a step to get to the intrinsic value. In college, when I observe the actions of students and faculty, myself included, I feel almost everything at college should be intrinsic. However, our intrinsic goals are so clouded and fake that we act conditionally almost 24 hours a day.

Another huge bummer is the fact that most interests and hobbies in college, which should all be intrinsic, seem conditional to me. I don’t know if it’s because kids here don’t know what satisfies them, but people like certain things and believe certain ideas only as a means to an end, and aren’t ends in and of themselves.

I also feel commencement will be rather bittersweet for me. The fact that my four-year career at UMD will be boiled down to a piece of paper, a piece of rope and a different color sash; it’s upsetting because it doesn’t truly represent what I feel were the most important experiences in college. I wish I had something more to look forward to, something that recognized the late nights, the breakdowns, the frustrations and the triumphs. Those will only be memories; what will last on the surface are the grades, the numbers, and the materials.

I didn’t come to college for the grades, the awards, the scholarships, honors or titles. I came to understand more about myself, and become better acquainted to who I am, and what I like, and what I believe; I’ve been able to do that at an institution that offers that opportunity more than the real world does. And I’m not done. I’m not sick of school; learning is an intrinsic value to me, not a conditional one.

College, besides being a center of learning, is a cesspool of hedonism. Kids bully, demean women and minorities, worship the chain-breaking qualities of alcohol, and care only about proving their masculinity, which often includes being too cool for schoolwork. And college is a place where these kids can come and succeed, and get degrees.

How damaging to society are these hordes of mindless, self-indulgent, superficial junkies going to be? These are the people who would rather let politicians and television tell them how to act while they focus only on their hedonistic wants. Or they will become the politicians, I don’t know which is worse.

Balance and patience are the keys to life, I discovered in college. Patience opens up your heart and mind to new things: music, art, friends, food and drink, areas of study, anything that you never thought could be an end, and not just a means to an end. Balance keeps your imperatives from being jaded. Go outside and enjoy nature instead of being frustrated and exiled from it. Read as much as you write, talk as much as you listen, do as much as you say you’ll do. Open yourself up to some kind of spirituality; don’t succumb to the jaundice of materialism.

The only thing I fear in life is not living up to my own potential. No one can tell me what I should do, because only I know what I should do. Turn those ‘shoulds’ into ‘wills’. The older I got as a college student, the more I realize that I don’t have life figured out at all; other people confuse the hell out of me. How can we be so smart, so bright, and so advantaged, yet we need to trivialize it every moment we get by acting like total ingrates?

Anyways, I don’t know other people and I don’t know any absolute truths about life that exists beyond me; all I know is myself, how I operate, and of what I am capable. I also know how I affect other people, and I know it seems unethical to me to take advantage of that knowledge; I want to try and do it as little as possible. You can’t tell people what to do; if you can, there is something wrong in the equation.

Some advice: Never do anything if the phrase “because it will look good on my resume” comes up in your head before anything else. If nothing at this school makes you think, “because I really enjoy this and want to do this,” then leave college immediately. Not only are you ruining the experience of those who really want to be here, but you are also wasting your own time and your parents’ money.

I know all of your parents forced you go to school even if you didn’t want to, that’s because they feel they are a failure if you work at a car wash or a diner your whole life and never at least gave college ‘a shot’. I know that “some people just don’t belong at college;” there are a lot more of those people than you think. If you got straight A’s in high school but you want to be a paramedic, an electrician, or a police officer, you don’t need college and you shouldn’t waste any time there. You know yourself; your parents, your friends, and the media don’t. The worst part about this advice is that a lot of people know they hate college, they just want to go because of the extra salary they’ll get, which will lead to a more ‘comfortable’ life, with a $30,000 car instead of one that cost $15,000, (insert your own example of lifestyle upgrade here).

Materials only represent things you have done, they are not the reason you do them. I learned at college that not enough people follow this mantra. Again, I don’t know them, I only know myself; preaching won’t do anything but describe them, it won’t change them. I’m closing this chapter of my life on May 27, and you may be looking for an epilogue to wrap everything about my four years here in a concise and manageable phrase. You’ll get no such satisfaction from me because I’m not satisfied with this world, you (fellow student), or me. This is only the beginning, I’m not done, and neither are you.

Although I sound vindictive and spiteful, I wouldn’t trade my four years here for anything, and I couldn’t imagine having such a fulfilling and enlightening experience at any other school. I got the truth here; I experienced the full force of my generation. Only at a place so free, opportunistic, and self-serving like this could I have found it. I’d rather know the truth about myself, and us, and try to correct our faults than live in some fantasy world with ironclad ignorance. I learned a lot, mostly that I know very little. I know myself, though, and I’ll never apologize or compromise my convictions. One of those convictions is to treat these last few weeks no differently than I did in late February, and to write about what I think is important for you to know.

The case for free banking

By Ben Tansey

Most people are aware of the basics of the current system of banking that we have in place. Joe Average takes his savings to Steve’s Bank, and gives it to them as a deposit. They credit his account with the amount of money he has given them. They then take the majority of that money, we’ll say 60% as an example, and loan it out to borrowers, charging an interest rate. If Joe should return to collect on his deposit before the bank collects on the loan, they will pay it out to him either through their takings from interest rates on other loans or from the accounts of other customers of the bank. This system is why economists say that savings and investment are so closely linked. Without savings, placed in the hands of fractional reserve banks, there could be no loans, and without loans, there could be no large scale investment.

This system does not work too badly (we’ll get to that later) in the absence of a federal bank and fiat currency. However, in our current system, it is an inherently inflationary process that serves to distort the structure of production and cause what economists call the business cycle.

Suppose that there is a sudden increase in the demand for loans in our current system. Banks, of course, oblige this desire for loans. However, since the supply of money has remained the same, they react by raising interest rates. Interest rates are, essentially, the price of borrowing money. So, of course, they obey the laws of supply and demand like any other price mechanism. However, the government has in place a price control on interest rates. It takes the form of the Federal Reserve, which will respond to rising interest rates through pumping money into the economy, in an attempt to keep rates at what the Fed has set as its target. The result of this is of course, inflation. Anytime the demand for loans is increased, money is simply taken out of thin air and placed into the economy by the Fed!

Like any policy that refuses to let markets clear, the Fed’s policy of trying to control the interest rate is misguided and has ill effects. By refusing to allow interest rates to function properly, and keeping them artificially low via the creation of new money, the fed encourages malinvestment. Investors who believe that interest rates will always be (relatively) low have much less reason to invest carefully. Why not take big risks? After all, you can always take out more loans, it’s not as if the price of loanable funds is liable to change just like the price of anything else in a market. Of course, eventually this malinvestment boils over, and the demand for loanable funds begins to skyrocket. Sometimes, the fed responds by bailing out banks (remember that they keep only a fraction of actual savings) through loaning them large amounts of money. The result is large scale inflation. Sometimes it chooses not to, believing it is best to stick to a tight money policy. The result is bank runs. With the federal reserve in charge, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

So, clearly, this is a problem. It traps us in a constant state of boom-bust capitalism, the business cycle always nipping at our heels. Is there nothing we can do? There is an answer, however politically infeasible it seems currently. The answer is a complete end to government monopoly on the money supply. We should instead institute a system of free banking, whereby banks print and compete with their own notes.

Before discussing this, it is important to understand the nature of money, and what it really is. Everybody knows how a primitive, barter based economy works. If I have wheat, and I want meat, I take my wheat and I find someone who A.) Has meat in the quantity I want and B.) Wants wheat in the quantity I have. We can then trade. For obvious reasons, this gets very inconvenient very fast, especially when more complex trade enters the scenario. The result is that some good appears in the barter economy, which is widely traded enough, that it actually becomes the standard of trade itself. Everyone is confident that everyone else will be willing to accept it in trade. In the history of the west, and indeed of all advanced economies, this has near universally been gold. So let us assume that, in the absence of the dollar, gold becomes our standard of trade (though really it could be anything). Of course, just as nobody wants to lug all of their dollars around with them in cash, nobody wants to lug all of their gold around with them. That would be even more inconvenient!

So people pay to have the gold deposited in banks, and are issued receipts in the form of bank notes to use as trade. Now, obviously, banks are going to want to compete to have the best notes. After all, banks want to get the most deposits. The result will be that banks will try to minimize the risk a consumer takes by depositing with them of a run on the bank. This could either spell the end of fractional reserve banking altogether, and the creation of a separate market for loanable funds independent of banks. It could also mean that fractional reserve banking will continue, but, in the absence of a price control (Federal Reserve) interest rates will set themselves according to the actual demand for loanable funds. It will likely be some mix of the two, with some banks engaging in fractional reserve, but using other perks to get savers to deposit with them instead of with other banks. In any event, it is the end of inflation, and it minimizes the risk of bank runs (since investors will be much less likely to malinvest if they know that interest rates might change rapidly). Fractional reserve banking with a central bank structure is the cause of the business cycle and of boom-bust capitalism. Free banking is the cure.

THE BLURBOSPHERE - EDITOR'S SPECIAL FEATURE

Cable providers cracking down on avoidance of commercials

One of the great things about on-demand television and digital recording technology is the ability to avoid commercials; it’s the most popular loophole in entertainment today. I know we all hate commercials, but they are a necessary evil in the television industry. The popularity of these new mediums that allow common viewers to ignore them will inevitably reduce their returns, causing advertisers to back out. A lot of good television is created on the money paid for advertising, and if big companies move all of their money out of TV and into the Internet, then quality television could disappear.

I’m trying to rationalize between good business sense, what’s best for the common viewer, and my own desires. I hate commercials and I usually change the channel when one comes on, even for my favorite program, but I always do so knowing what I am not watching is paying for that particular show to be made.

Cox Communications has recently formalized a deal with ABC and ESPN, both subsidiaries of Disney, to disallow the ability to skip ads on on-demand video. If you haven’t noticed, online previews and videos have been doing this for a while now. ESPN online has small clips of SportsCenter broken down into individual games; when I want to see hockey highlights or Red Sox previews I don’t have to watch the whole show. However, there is usually a 30-second ad beforehand that you can’t drag the viewer bar across in order to skip. This technology will now be heading to on-demand television.

New online acquisitions spurn entrepreneurship in online sharing world

MySpace is going to buy the online photo-sharing site Photobucket.com for hundreds of millions of dollars soon. Google recently bought YouTube for even more money than that. MySpace itself was bought by News Corp. for millions and I am sure the man behind Facebook will be a multi-millionaire before it’s all said and done. The ‘start low, build a sharing base, then sell very high’ method began in the online sharing market with Mr. Fanning earlier this decade with Napster. Now anyone with some foresight, some computer savvy and a unique sharing idea can become multimillionaires in a few years. There’s little investment in education into any of these upstart programs, making buyout profits and advertising money all the more sweet.

Although only the strong survive in the online sharing industry, taking a chance is less risky than investing in houses, property, stocks or anything else. The new online market provides the opportunity for people our age to hone in on what they know we’ll like, and make millions on it. It has never paid so well to be so observant. What ideas do you have for online sharing?

Media acts like they know us, again

I have yammered about this subject a lot recently, especially in the light of the media’s coverage of Virginia Tech. As graduation nears, they are making more and more assumptions about how we are going to handle the ‘real world’ of post-graduate life. The truth is we have lived in the ‘real world’ for a while; I’d say only freshman, and maybe a little bit of sophomore year, is truly spent isolated from jobs, home and the private social sector. Because we have such easy access to everything, college is less a restriction on our determination to live independent lives than ever before. Our parents are hardly ever more than a ring away; the same with siblings and friends from home. When we go home to visit, we already have all the updates; life goes on as normal.

Since we all like money and need jobs to get it, we generally work a lot. Menial jobs, on campus jobs, internships or field-level work will be nothing new to us graduating seniors. The media treats graduation like our mass exodus from the fantasyland of college to the down and dreary land of responsibility and maturity that is the ‘real world’ that they (upper middle class white media members) have been so busy and instrumental in shaping. Those who grew up with the Internet, cell phones and cable television will always be incapable, immature kids to them, as long as we live. We know how to handle ourselves in the working world; we don’t need your endless advice.

What they are missing is the fact that we are leaving what we considered to be a respite in our lives. Not having another semester of undergraduate studies to look forward to in the fall will be the hardest part. Also, the jobs we’ll have will most likely not be in our directed field of study, which we’ve grown quite used to in studying it for four years. Going from our jobs to our studies has given us a refreshing balance in our lives thus far, and not having that anymore will be the hardest transition. Those jobs we considered only useful to make money while we studied will now be our sole matter of existence, thus making money our sole matter - that’s the real world. It’s been one we’ve tried to ignore and avoid, but now we have to face it; there’s no place left to hide.