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Health and Wellness: Youth Vaping Overview

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Health and Wellness: Youth Vaping Overview

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Summary: Vaping is a commonly used alternative to smoking intended for those who are trying to quit cigarettes. While that is the target consumer, it has become a trend among teenagers. Though it is said to be a safer way of nicotine delivery, it is not a healthy practice. E-cigarettes are putting teens who never smoked in the first place into a lifelong physical dependence or addiction.The long term effects of vaping are completely unknown and it has become a national problem.

Reflection: I personally believe stopping the use of vaping devices must derive from educating the use of it’s harm to the body. Kids are more likely to be scared of the effects it will have on their body than listening to an age restriction on the product where there are loopholes.

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Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society - Username

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Welcome to Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society

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Summary: Homelessness is a major social issue in the United States. Homelessness isn’t just exclusive to those who solely live on the streets but also those staying in a car, an abandoned building or place of business, emergency shelter, a hotel or motel paid by a shelter voucher, or in a place where they could not sleep for the next month without being asked to leave. There are opposing viewpoints in the main factors that contribute to homelessness. The first viewpoint is based on a person's individual characteristics such as low job skills, single parenting, substance abuse, mental illness, and moral deviance. The second viewpoint is that it is mainly caused by structural changes such as reduction in industrial employment and recessions, a retreating welfare state, and rising housing costs.

Reflection: I personally believe that homelessness is caused from a mix of both individual characteristics and structural changes. For some people homelessness is close to inevitable and others there's a chance of chance.

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Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society - Username

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Welcome to Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society

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Social Justice: Dr. Seuss' Children's Books Show a Commitment to Social Justice Relevant Today

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Social Justice: Dr. Seuss' Children's Books Show a Commitment to Social Justice Relevant Today

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Summary: Prejudice is a negative attitude or hate toward someone of a specific social group. Prejudice is prevalent in both the lives of children and adults. Many time prejudices form around race, religion and gender. Dr Seuss saw the power of children and how they are the future of the world. He knew that the things they get taught at a young age, will depict the morals they have in the future. He wanted this generation to make an impact. Dr Seuss had the used his story Green Eggs and Ham in order to confront the grinch-looking creature’s prejudice and bias toward the green eggs and ham.

Reflection: I personally see the importance of putting these important societal lessons in children's books. Kids are very impressionable and this age is primal in shaping the world ahead of us.

https://time.com/3978547/dr-seuss-social-justice-commitment/

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Dr Seuss’ New Book Stays Committed to Today’s Social Justice Movement

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The 650 million children who have read Dr Seuss’ books have been exposed to new ways of rethinking a social order often imbued in prejudice

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Health and Wellness: Frozen Food Packages in China Keep Testing Positive For Coronavirus. Here's Why Health Experts Aren't Worried

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Health and Wellness: Frozen Food Packages in China Keep Testing Positive For Coronavirus. Here's Why Health Experts Aren't Worried

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Summary: It was recently discovered that the virus that causes Covid-19 is being found on packaged fish all around the world. In China, they traced back the virus to two dock workers in which their fish was being imported to different places.
Though this was a recent breakout of the virus, this has been happening with many different packaging companies since the start of the pandemic.With this in mind, experts are saying not to worry too much as it is difficult to contract the virus from food or packaging rather than airborne person-to-person.

Reflection: After debriefing this article, I personally plan on being extra careful when picking out my packaged fish and poultry at the store. I will be sure to disinfect the packaging before handling.

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COVID-19 on Food Packaging: Why Experts Aren't Worried

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Chinese authorities recently warned contact with frozen food packaging could cause infection. Here's why health experts say the risk is low

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Health and Wellness: Alcohol Abuse Overview

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Health and Wellness: Alcohol Abuse Overview

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Summary: It is quite known that excessive alcohol use is detrimental to one's physical, psychological, and emotional health. Alcohol abuse is prevalent in many day to day activities. For most, it is easy to tell that it is being abused when one is unable to go a day without taking a drink.Alcohol abuse is known to be linked to several mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder. They can either cause the abuse or be a result of the abuse. Societal Attitudes make it hard to draw the line at abuse of the substance. In the media and movies, it is portrayed as a positive activity that is normalized by all. This creates a problem when it comes to trying to reduce the amount of people falling down this rabbit hole.

Reflection: Though this is already starting to become prevalent in society, I feel as though it is important to create movies and TV shows that really portray the negative side of drinking. It is important for people to see from all angles what this drug is capable of.

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Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society - Username

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Welcome to Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society

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Social Justice: Equality in the Workplace Overview

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Social Justice: Equality in the Workplace Overview

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Summary: Though we have made great strides in both equality in gender and equality in the workplace, we still have ways to go as far as distribution of occupations. Many jobs are segregated based on gender. There is still usually one gender that is prevalent in each individual occupation.The inequality is due to gender stereotypes  that suggest that men are stronger in certain areas and women stronger in others. It is more likely that a man will get a strength dependent job over a woman.

Reflection: In my personal opinion, I believe that jobs should be based on ability to do the job at hand. This ability should not be presumed and there should be an adequate test of ability giving both genders a clean slate. Business should be gender blind.

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Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society - Username

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Welcome to Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society

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The Environment: Urban Planet: How Growing Cities Will Wreck the Environment Unless We Build Them Right

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The Environment: Urban Planet: How Growing Cities Will Wreck the Environment Unless We Build Them Right

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Summary: Urbanization is the increase in the population of people living in a region within cities. As urbanization is on the rise in many developing countries it’s important to recognize it’s harm to the environment.
Land which both animals and plants reside in are being taken over by the need to increase the size of cities. Since many people are migrating to cities there is a need to expand. By kicking out these animals from their habitats many species are becoming endangered.

Reflection: I feel as though this is a hard problem to fix overnight. There are really no permanent solutions. Governments may need to start putting restrictions on the amount of people allowed to reside in one city. Their needs to be a capacity limit, wish would reduce the need for expansion.

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More and more people are moving into cities around the world-and those cities are getting bigger and bigger. The urbanization shift could wreck the environment-unless we can plan the transition.

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It's easy to miss amid the day to day headlines of global economic implosion, Presidential campaign foibles and Mideast rage, but there is a less conspicuous kind of social upheaval underway that is fast altering both the face of the planet and the way that human beings live. That change is the rapid acceleration of urbanization, as more and more people in every corner of the world put down their farm tools and move from the countryside or the village to the city. In 2008, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population was living in towns and cities. And as a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows, the process of urbanization will only increase in the decades to come - with an enormous impact on biodiversity and potentially on climate change.

As Karen Seto, a professor of the urban environment at Yale and the lead author of the PNAS paper, points out, that the wave of urbanization isn't just about the migration of people into urban environments, but about the environments themselves becoming bigger to accommodate all those people. Today urban areas - ranging from Times Square to a small town in India - cover perhaps 3 to 5% of global land. But Seto and her co-authors calculate that between now and 2030, urban areas will expand by more than 463,000 sq. mi. (1.2 million sq. km). That's equal to 20,000 U.S. football fields being paved over every day for the first few decades of this century. By then, a little less than 10% of the planet's land cover could be urban. "There's going to be a huge impact on biodiversity hotspots and on carbon emissions in those urban areas," says Seto.

( MORE: Soaring to Sinking: How Building Up Is Bringing Shanghai Down)

The bulk of that great urban expansion will be in Asia - where more than 75% of the increase in urban cover is projected to occur - and in Africa, where urban land cover will be 590% above the 2000 level of 16,000 sq. mi. (41,000 sq. km). In China and in India, cities will balloon - especially smaller, second-tier cities like Dalian or Pune that often lack the attention and the funding of megacities like Guangzhou or Shanghai. That's worrying because much of the urbanization wave is happening with little to no advance planning, amplifying the environmental cost of stuffing hundreds of millions of poor people into half-built metropolitan areas that often lack basic sanitation, waste management or water services. "The growth is really going to be in those medium-sized cities, and that's where the planning has often been lacking," says Lucy Hutyra of Boston University, a co-author of the PNAS paper.

Those areas of Asia, Africa and parts of South America that will see urban territory grow most rapidly tend to overlap with biodiversity hotspots, concentrations of exotic plants and animals. Humans are the ultimate invasive species - when they move into new territory, they often displace the wildlife that was already living there. The PNAS researchers estimate that urban expansion will encroach on or displace habitats for 139 amphibian species, 41 mammalian species and 25 bird species that are either critically endangered or endangered. And as land is cleared for those new cities - especially in the densely forested tropics - carbon will be released into the atmosphere as well. "In developing countries, there is a lot of pristine land and hotspots that could be threatened by the process of urbanization," says Seto.

( MORE: 5 of the Most Endangered Species on the Planet)

All of this might seem surprising to people who've read this blog for the past couple of years. Counter-intuitive as it might be, we've usually presented urbanization as a good thing for the environment - and especially for carbon emissions. In the U.S., it's residents of cities like New York that tend to have smaller carbon footprints, especially compared to their counterparts in the countryside and the suburbs. Dense urban areas reduce commute distances - saving gas - and allow residents to forgo cars altogether. That density also pushes urban residents to live in smaller homes, which in turn means less energy is needed for heating and cooling living spaces. If urbanization tends to be good for the environment in the U.S. and Europe, why wouldn't that be the case in the rest of the world?

It's true that as people in developing nations move from the countryside to the city, the shift may reduce the pressure on land, which could in turn be good for the environment. This is especially so in desperately poor countries like Madagascar, where residents in the countryside slash and burn forests each growing season to clear space for farming. But the real difference is that in developing nations, the move from rural areas to cities often leads to an accompanying increase in income - and that increase in income leads to an increase in the consumption of food and energy, which in turns produces an uptick in carbon emissions. Getting enough to eat and enjoying the safety and comfort of living fully on the grid is certainly a good thing - but it does carry an environmental price. In the U.S. urban dwellers tend to be poorer than their counterparts in the suburbs -though the recent gentrification of top-tier cities like Washington and San Francisco has altered that dynamic - and consume less, especially energy. But that's not so in the developing nations.

The urbanization wave can't be stopped - and it shouldn't be. But the PNAS paper does underscore the importance of managing that transition. Seto notes that around 65% of the urban land core in 2030 has yet to be built. If we do it the right way, we can mitigate urbanization's impacts on the environment. "There is an enormous opportunity here, and a lot of pressure and responsibility to think about how we urbanize," says Seto. "The one thing that's clear is that we can't build cities the way we have over the last couple of hundred years. The scale of this transition won't allow that." We're headed towards an urban planet no matter what, but whether it becomes a heaven or a hell is up to us.

MORE: Political Pollution: How Bad Air is Slowly Changing China

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Urban Planet: How Growing Cities Will Wreck the Environment Unless We Build Them Right

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It's easy to miss amid the day to day headlines of global economic implosion, Presidential campaign foibles and Mideast rage, but there is a less conspicuous kind of social upheaval underway that is fast altering both the face of the planet and the way that human beings live.

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The Economy: The Speed of Economic Recovery Depends on How Soon We Control the Virus

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The Economy: The Speed of Economic Recovery Depends on How Soon We Control the Virus

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Summary: The mainstream media is trying to predict when we will be out of this recession but aren’t experts on when coronavirus is contained or is treatable. This is making their predictions faulty. When deaths minimize significantly and the virus is spreading less rapidly there can be an expected boom in the economy. With people being pent up in their homes there will be an increase in activity at movie theaters, malls, and restaurants.

Reflection: People might have extra money saved up from when they were not participating in recreational activities along with their bonus stimulus checks. They may use this money to “make up for lost time” and splurge at the places they miss the most.

Local Connection: Locally, at the restaurant I work at, a significantly low number of customers were coming in at the start of covid, making it extremely hard for the restaurant to cover all it’s expenses while paying it’s working.

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There have been a number of pieces in major news outlets telling us what the recovery will look like from this recession. Most have been pretty negative. The important thing to know about these forecasts is that the people making these forecasts don't have a clue what they are talking about.

The shape of recovery will depend, first and foremost, on the extent to which the coronavirus is contained or is treatable, areas in which most of our prognosticators have zero expertise.

I can think of a scenario in which we have a very robust recovery. Suppose that in three months, we have developed treatments to the point that the disease is not much more deadly than a standard flu. In that case, we would look to restart the economy while trying to protect the most vulnerable segments of the population.

If this happens, there will be lots of people with money to spend (many are getting full paychecks, plus $1,200 from the government). They have gone three months without going to a restaurant, seeing a movie or any other form of recreation. There will also be lots of pent-up demand for cars, houses and many other things. This could lead to quite a burst of spending that could keep the economy going strong for some time. (Look for some inflation, insofar as a poorly designed economic survival package didn't focus on keeping workers tied to their firms, so that businesses could restart quickly without having to hire and train workers.)

Will this happen? Ask someone who knows something about the virus, not me.

The point is that the course of the recovery will depend on what happens with the progress in containing and/or treating the coronavirus, and anyone who cannot speak authoritatively on that point has no clue what the recovery will look like.
A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR's blog Beat the Press (3/26/20).

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The Speed of Economic Recovery Depends on How Soon We Control the Virus

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There have been a number of pieces in major news outlets telling us what the recovery will look like from this recession. Most have been pretty negative. The important thing to know about these forecasts is that the people making these forecasts don't have a clue what they are talking about.

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Summary: Overpopulation is when the number of people in one area exceeds the threshold of keeping a successful working economic, political, and environmental country. The increasing population in the Western United States caused an extensive drought.  It can cause other natural resources as well to meet the energy needs of the population.The native animal population is put at risk due to more land needing to convert to urban areas to accommodate the excess of people.

Reflection: Personally, I feel like there is no moral solution to this. It is hard to regulate the number of humans being born each year in a moral fashion. Though I think this is a pressing issue, it is immoral to have the government control whether or not you can have children and when you choose to do so.

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Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society - Username

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Welcome to Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society

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Summary: Poverty is a condition in which someone lacks basic necessities such as food and adequate housing do to insufficient income. Poverty levels are dependent on several factors such as ethnic & demographic groups, education level, and gender. In hopes to try in lower these levels. Governments provide funding programs such as low-income housing and food services such as food stamps.

Reflection: After seeing that lack of education plays a huge role in poverty levels, I personally believe that there needs to be another alternative to bachelor and master degree programs. For people that don't have the money to obtain these degrees, they deserve equal opportunity. Sometimes financial aid is not enough.

Local Connection: Locally in Danvers there is both a food pantry and a savers (second-hand clothing) store. I personally try and get myself to donate to both at least once a month.

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Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society - Username

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Welcome to Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society