E8#134: Free WiFi

Everybody uses WiFi every single day. At this point it seems like almost a human necessity, right? Shouldn’t the government provide it to us out of our taxpayer dollars, just like roads and certain utilities?

WiFi means the internet, and, in this day and age, almost everybody uses the internet for one thing or another; however, I really don’t think that the government should provide it for free. For one thing, I don’t trust the government on almost anything, and certainly not with my WiFi. If the government provided everybody with free WiFi, then everybody would also have the same WiFi, and everything they did on the internet would probably be monitored. Not to mention, WiFi is not that expensive, and it is not that hard for individuals to maintain. On top of all that, many companies provide free WiFi to their customers anyway, so, in the worst case scenario where you don’t have WiFi, there are still ways to access the internet if you really need to.

E8#131: Thunderstorms are Dangerous

Thunderstorms are hazardous to your safety to be out in. With thunderstorms comes rain, wind, hail, and lightning. The rain can lower your visibility on the roads, and that is a hazard. Lightning will kill you if it strikes you, but is more dangerous when it strikes something else and then that falls on you, like a tree.

Similarly to lightning, the wind can also cause major damage, and is probably the worst of the common effects of a thunderstorm. The wind can blow over things like trees and power polls and cause significant damage to property.

Hail is the precipitation that causes the most immediate problem when you go outside in it; hail causes lots of damage to property, especially if it scratches off paint, but the most important problem with hail is that it can hit you on the head and injure you if it is big enough.

E8#126-130: Attention Grabbers

E8#126

Do you love crime rates higher than Chicago? Fattening fast food around every turn? Constantly crowded traffic, and construction on every road? Expensive homes and apartments? Than you’ll just love Indianapolis, where we have all of these things, and more!

E8#127

We have crime rates higher than Chicago! Expensive fast food everywhere you turn to look! Constantly crowded traffic, and construction on every road are our pride and joy. And our homes and apartments? The most expensive things you can imagine! Come to Indianapolis and enjoy all these amazing benefits!

E8#128

What is your favorite part of American Cuisine? Is it a juicy, tender, piece of beef, grilled over a hot flame, and sandwiched between two buns? Or is it a long sausage, covered in toppings, and laid in a perfectly shaped piece of bread? Today I’m going to scientifically prove which one is the superior, and you’re along for the ride!

E8#129

Hamburgers and Hot dogs have long been debated as to which is the better part of American Cuisine. I mean, which would you rather bite into? A perfectly grilled piece of juicy meat, seasoned to perfection, with toppings that make it taste like if heaven was a food, and was sitting in your mouth? Or a sausage with bread wrapped around it? Today I discuss the differences, and crown one as the best American food of all time!

E8#130

(Note: the remaining portions of this essay are written on devil’s advocate, and are not my real opinions. Sorry if they are less enthusiastic than the previous attention grabbers because of it)

School is possibly the most necessary element of anybody’s childhood. The long hours prepare you to work your butt off at an office job the rest of your life, and submit to your superiors, while teaching you stuff that you will absolutely 100% need to know later in life!

Do you think working your tail off to learn how to factor polynomials is the most necessary thing to put your young mind to work on? What about learning about lifesaving in the name of seventh grade science? Could anything possibly be more necessary? Come join me as we jump into the different reasons that school is necessary!

School is the most necessary thing to put a child’s mind to. Imagine a place where you can send your child, a safe haven, where they will learn lots of totally useful skills and not be exposed to abusive and corrupt management, food not even fit for a mouse to eat, and will have all of the attention and care that they could possibly want or need. Imagine the social experiences your children would have, the 100% healthy and not bad growth that such a place would produce. Surely such a place would be necessary for a child to spend their entire childhood spending their time at!

(Not my best work by any means, but I tried my best. This whole persuasive writing is very new to me)

E8#119: Loyalty and Unconditional Support

In my opinion, loyalty should not require unconditional support. I think that if you are unconditionally supportive regardless of whether you think it is right and wrong, and you do whatever the person you are loyal to says, than you will loose a lot of your personality and freedom of thought. You become a slave. I think that part of being loyal to someone is holding them accountable. I think that is also a part of looking out for them, because if you point out a mistake, then maybe you will be able to help them grow from that mistake when they otherwise wouldn’t have recognized it. I think loyalty isn’t about unconditionally and unquestioningly obeying everything someone tells you to do; it is trying to do what is right for them. Questioning them is not bad. Being critical of people can help everybody involved. If you think the person you are loyal to is doing something wrong, than the most loyal thing you can do for them is the critique them. If they don’t want to listen and do something that they regret later, you need to hold them accountable for their actions, and hopefully they’ll grow.

E8#118: Achievements Benefiting Others

I am supposed to talk about if people are happier when their achievements benefit others. Personally, none of my past achievements, if they have benefited others, did not cause me to feel especially happier after succeeding. I also have not done many things that benefit others of my own will, so I don’t really have the right to talk about this subject. It will most certainly be different with other people, but I really don’t have anything else to say.

E8#117: People Being Remembered

In this essay, I am supposed to talk about how long people are remembered for. Specifically, if there are people who will be remembered forever, or if everybody will be forgotten at some point. I think there is a very clear-cut answer for this question: there is a select group of people that will be remembered as long as humanity survives. I believe somewhere in the bible it says that God’s word will be remembered forever. I don’t know for sure, so take this with a grain of salt. In this case, this means that everybody mentioned in the bible would be remembered forever, and probably not many or no other people will be remembered forever. Really, I don’t think there will be any other people that will be remembered forever. Forever is a really, really long time, almost incomprehensible to man, so I don’t think anybody’s legacy is going to last forever. There are people who might have a legacy that lasts thousands of years, but, ultimately, I think that one day they will be forgotten. They say that when you physically die is one level of death, but you truly die the last time you are thought about.

I don’t really have anything else to elaborate on, so I am going to summarize. I think that only the people in the bible are truly going to be known of forever, and I don’t think that anybody else’ legacy will last forever, even if their legacy does last for a really long time.

E8#116: Options & Choices in Life

Today I am supposed to talk about whether having lots of choices and options for different activities to occupy free time is good or bad. I think it really depends on how much free time you have, as well as the length of the things that you want to do. If enough time to complete all of them, than I don’t have to chose which ones to do and which ones not to do. For me personally, I really only have a few things to occupy my time when I’m not wasting it on school. Those things are basically as follows: I can play video games (either Zelda, Smash Bros, or Minecraft at the moment); I can edit one of my YouTube videos; I can 3D model or print something; call one of my few friends if they are available; or, if the weather is nice, I can just hang out outside. That’s really all I have to occupy free time if I don’t have something special planned like an overnight, youth group, or something like fixing the go-kart. I don’t have a lot of free time because I have to waste it all on schoolwork, so just having those few things is just enough to fill it all up if I didn’t have screen time limits (hint hint). I think if I had very many more choices outside of special plans, I’d probably be overwhelmed with all those choices; however, if I had a lot more free time, then I’d probably get bored and want more choices. There is a balance that has to be maintained. I think it is possible to have to many choices, but there is no specific number that is “too much”. It is all relative to the amount of time that you have to spend, and it also depends on how much passion that you have for each individual thing. I’m sure that there are some things that you could do for hours on end without getting bored, and so, in that case, you wouldn’t need to have as many choices, because one or two can take care of all your time.

H8#160: Social Media

Today I’m going to be comparing and contrasting some different social media platforms, as well as talking about their history and how they were founded, their popularity, and their different uses to the consumer!

First, we have to talk about the largest social media giant of the U.S., Meta, the parent company of both FaceBook and Instagram, the first and third largest social media platforms respectively. Facebook was founded by a young Mark Zuckerberg in college, and its original purpose was actually as a photo sharing and rating app for Harvard University, where Zuck was attending at the time. He eventually re-branded to be an all-round social media platform for the sharing of photos, videos, and written posts across all the users, though the Facebook Algorithm recommends more of what you are interested as you use the app and it collects information about you. This is basically how all social medias work.

The second largest social media platform, and, in my opinion, the best one, is YouTube. YouTube is the hub for all things video. It includes three main types of video: Long Form (>1 min), Short Form (<1 min), and Live Streams. YouTube has also been proven to have the least toxic community on it. YouTube Shorts are a video format based off of TikTok, which I’ll talk about later. YouTube is also the best place to search for tutorials, and also just information in general, which makes sense, since Google owns it. YouTube was founded as way to easily share, of course, cat videos! So YouTube began.

Instagram is FaceBook’s sister company, being recently acquired my Meta. Instagram functions mainly as a platform for sharing photos, and not so much a platform for messages and videos as much, though FaceBook and Instagram both have access to Reels, a sort of short form content more like TikTok, which I’ll talk about next. It is the third largest social media giant.

TikTok is the fourth largest social media, and personally my least favorite. TikTok is also relatively new, being founded in 2016. It has taken the younger generation by storm, and lots of teenagers, specifically, use it today. It is primarily short form vertical content, that has a maximum time limit of two minutes. The reason it took off so much is because people really like the dopamine rush they get whenever they watch a new video. Personally, I don’t see the appeal as much as others, but because of TikTok’s success, lots of other companies have copied it, like YouTube with Shorts and Meta with Reels.

The last social media I’m going to talk about is Snapchat, which I, by far, know the least about. Snapchat is a sort of glorified messaging app, used mainly for messaging and sending photos and very short videos to friends, basically, a worse version of discord (which I am not mentioning here because it’s not really a social media in the sense of the others).

Social Media has changed communication as we know it, for better or for worse. You have access to a constant stream of information and entertainment at will, and that has changed lots of different parts of society as we know them.

H8#155: Dot Com Bubble

The dot com bubble was an economic event during the end of the 20th century after many speculative investments had been made into new internet companies. Many companies died there, but the few that survived would come back to thrive later. This bubble also actually helped the publicity of the internet, which would help advancements in the technology to be made.

There were several different things that had to do with the dot com bubble. Firstly, there were a LOT of speculative investments, which led to inaccurate evaluations of a company’s worth. These investments were all based upon the brand new idea of the internet, which had not had any proven value yet.

There were several companies that survived the dot com bubble, and the ones that did would become some of the biggest sites, like Amazon, eBay, and Google; however, the vast majority of companies went under, never to see the light of day again.

In 2000 and 2001, the bubble burst. People started to realize that their investments had not been worth it, and so lots of companies decided to cut their losses, meaning shutting down their businesses and letting all their employees loose, which caused a lot of people to lose their jobs.

The Dot Com bubble actually impacted the development of the internet for the better; with so many companies starting to develop, it pushed for improvement in the space, and the companies that survived the bubble would go on to become some of the biggest in the market.

H8#150: Culture of the 80’s

The 1980’s brought some large changes to American Culture as we know it. Namely, the invention of new technologies like the VCR, Cable TV, and Video Games coupled with the rise of new celeberties in the music and sports industries and the average American having more free time than before resulted in an upheavel of culture, now focused more on entertainment and free time than any other previous generation.

When cable tv was invented in 1948 and then introduced to the vast majority of the public in the 1980’s, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon. People could access so many different channels and different topics that were broadcasting at the time, whenever they wanted, and they could actually choose exactly which channels they wanted to watch.

There were several popular movies of the 1980’s. ET, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, the Shining, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Wars sequels were all big movies that hit the box office in the 80’s. You can see that there was a trend of horror movies and of action fantasy movies at the time.

Coupled with big movies of the 80’s was the popularization of the VCR. This let people go to movie rental stores to rent movies and take home to watch on their own television, rather than having to go to a theater to watch it on the big screen.

Video Games also became a popular form of entertainment during the 1980’s. The Nintendo entertainment system was launched to the public in that decade, bringing with it the revival of the dying video game industry and introducing us to the franchises of Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, and others. I could ramble about this alone for hours, but I refrain.

Lastly, I’m going to talk about two of the most popular celebrities from the 80’s. Mike Tyson was a famous boxer, and he dominated the world of boxing, even getting his own boxing game in the form of Punch Out for the NES.

Michael Jackson was the most popular musician of the 80’s, and became a public icon, representing the American Music Industry as a whole, and his music is still popular to this day.