Re: The Rich Having Less Compassion Article By Time

I just want to make a quick response to this article. 

I was trying to warm up before I start studying Korean today and happened to come across this article on Facebook. There was this Time article that intrigued me mainly because it mentioned "rich" and "compassion" in the title. Then I go on to read there whole spiel on their diatribe about having compassion and why rich people might not show empathy.

The second study involved a smaller group of 64 subjects who watched two videos — an emotionally neutral instructional video on construction techniques, and a far more charged one that involved real families coping with a cancer-stricken child. Again, the subjects filled out emotional inventories and again they scored similarly on most mood metrics, including sadness. But the lower-income volunteers continued to come out higher on the compassion-and-empathy scale.


During this part of the study, Stellar also hooked her volunteers up to heartbeat monitors to determine their physical reactions to the two videos. There was, not surprisingly, no difference in heart rate when the instructional video was playing, but when the cancer stories began, the heartbeats of the lower-income volunteers slowed noticeably — a counter intuitive sign of caring. An immediate threat to ourselves or another causes heart rate to jump, the better to snap into action to respond to the danger. An emotional crisis can have the opposite physical effect on observers — helping them settle down to provide the quieter attention that simply listening and consoling requires.

There are inherent flaws in the logic behind their experimentation in my opinion. One is the whole monitoring the heart rates of people behind the experimentation. I understand it was used to measure a physiological response. Two, it was the fact that they did not take profession and overall social status into account. I think a low income, hardened criminal, with multiple accounts that has been in and out of the prison system and that shows signs of schizoid personality disorder might illicit the same results. To me this does not measure compassion. Compassion goes beyond the physiological responses of a human being. It is psychological, too. It is also historical as well. How did a person grow up? This should have been taken into account.

I like many young people have grown up in a poor lower class environment. My mother was generous with money, but she was also foolish with it too. The one thing that stopped my mother from becoming rich was her compulsive gambling and drinking. My mother was a nurse. Naturally, I think she was put into positions where she had to show compassion for those around her. She was not an RN, I want to make that clear. RNs got significantly more money. But despite not having much money, my mother donated generously.  Despite this, she was still somewhat frugal with her money. She had the chance to become middle and upper class, but she didn't many due to her marriage. To make a long story short, she was poor and compassionate.

Now let's an Oprah Winfrey and you will see the same possible results. Someone who was from a lower class back ground who went on to become a billionaire. She went to college and did the Oprah show and then eventually O! magazine. She has donated and has made her money through being in a field where she is forced to show compassion. I'm not saying that Oprah would have been callous if she was in commissioned sales, but from the experiences that I have had, you are taught to act a certain way when you sale and I think that indirect brainwashing could be attributed to callousness.

However, if someone acts callous it is mostly due to how they were taught to either respond to hardship or how they naturally respond to it. I think Time sends a negative message about having money, because for every negative insight they have, I can think of a dozen positive ones. Last time I checked, rich people are the ones that are helping to treat cancer. Most of the donations towards cancer research are done mainly by rich people and middle class people.  And I'm making the regards in a money since because I think that is more logical than to just take a study and fire off numbers. Statistics can easily be manipulated to support one's own arguments and opinions. Taking that into consideration, I would try to not mentally demonize rich people for being successful. Demonizing certain rich people for their moral decisions to me is a waste of time. Not everyone shares the same compassion for cancer. It might not appeal to people as much, but it should be considered looking into. We live in a age where we can make prosthetic body parts and treat AIDS but we cannot cure cancer.

My Thoughts on Retro Active Loan Forgiveness and Wall Street Occupation

I have been getting into some pretty interesting debates on the whole student loan and Wall Street fiasco. And because I have quite a bit of money, I am suddenly the "know all see all" to the situation. Here's how I see it as a whole: 1) no one should be "forgave" for their student loans and 2) occupying Wall Street is not the answer to the financial problem in the United States.

Let's face facts: the United States is trillions of dollars in debt with a highly educated work force whining about every single little thing because things do not go so well for them. This is supposed to be our educated elite capable of making decision and innovations for themselves. This is supposed to be the top of the top "intellectually" (which I really don't believe in IQ) and this group is supposed to have all the answers for going to college for so long. Then why can't all these geniuses balance their own budgets? Why are all these people in debt with no way of paying their loans off? I'll tell you why, they were spoon fed a system, that "has" the solution to their needs. But if you take a step back, you'll see how stupid that notion really is.

Take two college students: one of them decides to study four years, take no loans, and scrape by with little or no debt. Another decides to go to college for 10-12 years (which they are in their 30s by now with no real work experience) they take a bunch of loans, go in debt, and tries to get a job in a bad economy. Suddenly to get a regular job, you need some college. Suddenly to get hired, you need at least a 4 year degree. Who do you think wins? The answer is the college student with the 4 year degree. He/she has close to no debt and can start earning money right away. The other student has to wait for his/her professional job. Student A can work a regular 9-5 and be already set to elevate to his/her professional career. Student B has to find a way to make ends meet because he/she has to compete with an educated pool of people with the same if not better qualifications. In short College student A will begin a life of earning money. Student B will have to wait 20 years down the road due to their six figure debts that they have to pay back.

Think about it: the most affluent people in the world do not have anything more than a 4 year degree. Unless you really want to be a lawyer or an M.D. there is no real need to go another 4-6 years in a shaky economy rapt with uncertainty.  I have to say that many people have this myth that getting a college degree means you will have money. That's is far from the case. 70% of all students that go in for a college degree and graduate get jobs outside of their feild of study and 80% of those students end up living with their parents. I considered this the ultimate act of disgrace. I supposebly went through all these classes and am considered super educated yet I ask my family for hand outs? That is total garbage in my eyes.

I'm going to be trite for a second: if you got into debt, you should get yourself out. No one put a gun to your head and said take the student loan. You could have taken time off to do an intership or worked for a little while or applied for scholarships. No one who works really cares about giving just you a job. So please check your entitlement mentality at the door. You are entitled to pay your taxes, you are entitled to apply for jobs, you are entitled to work your way up like everyone else. You do not deserve special treatment. Quit whining about your student loans. Suck it up and pay them off. No one deserves to really forgive you.

Ultimately, I would like to address people that have debt, but want to be rich. What are you producing? Your supposed to be leaders of the world. If you can not find decent work that you like, you should consider being an entrepreneur. I seriously have no love for people that just want hand outs. If you have an idea to make a company and create jobs, you should run with it. People are just banking on their degrees, when they should be banking on their imaginations. Sorry that's the way it is. You need to take your big idea and run with it. You are young and should not be scared of failure. If you fail, so what. Just don't go asking me for a loan.

Now getting into the occupy Wall Street fiasco. There are all these companies that put home owners into debts that they could not pay off. Think about that for one second: if you are truely one of those owners, then the person you should blame is in the mirror. If there are millions of families stupid enough to not read a contract or take it to a lawyer for verification, then they deserve to lost their money. The businesses aren't really that predatory per se. I was about to go in on a house and there were many many different loan options. Analyzing that, I could choose which one was right for me and my personality. What makes Wall Street the total problem? Does anyone honestly think that they are solely to blame?

services. Which means you do not have to buy anything from those stores if you do not want to. Again I'll use the gun analogy: no one says by stuff from Wal-Mart at gun point. You choose to because of the prices they have. They outsource to lower their prices. No one says "eat at Taco Bell because they hire immigrants who are willing to work for minimum wage" at gunpoint. Again these companies do not want America to fell. If they did, then they would no longer have 75% of their customer base overnight. 

I think the anger should just be directed towards the CEOs who took the subsidy money and gave themselves bonuses. They should all be imprisioned for abusing government money. You should not get mad at capitalist for being capitalist though. You should just get mad at the crooks for being crooks. Also, occupy Wall Street doesn't solve anything. If anything it creates problems, because the majority of poor people are not at Occupy Wall Street. They are in fact middle class to rich people. If you really want to point fingers at the problem, it should be at those people for not starting up companies to compete against the supposebly "evil" corporations.

Re: The 4 Worst Things About Writing for the Internet

Hey everybody. This is Charles once again getting it in. I was satisfying another Facebook addiction phase when I came upon this article at http://cracked.com . While I am a fan of Cracked, Daniel O' Brian wrote a article that would probably get under a lot of writers skin. First off, if you are writing on the internet trying to just make ends meet doing articles about blogs, your not really going to get anywhere. Trust me, I didn't start making any money off of blogs. Because if I did, I would starve to death. That's the truth.

If you expect to make ant money on there internet, two of the simplest ways is A) having a marketable product and B) having a huge fanbase prior to making something. For example, celebrities are already successful, so when they make blogs they are instant hits. They already have the following and they already have their target audience. My blog probably only has around a few hundred followers and just so we're clear out of those followers only 2% of them will leave actual comments. The other 98% will either tell me in person, not tell me, or are bots trying to spam me. And... that's just what it is.

Now the whole thing about his articles being ripped off also touched a nerve with me. I have been doing this as a hobby for years. I tried to do on a pro level, but without a blogging army or team, competition is really cut-throat. I was making articles with Blogger News Network before this. My job was to comment on news paper articles and review different products. However, I searched my own articles to discover that  on of them was stolen by another website called Sheeple (probably changed the content around and threw dirt on my craft). I wasn't getting paid enough for the amount of effort I was putting out so I decided not to do it anymore. What Daniel O' Brian is talking about here makes a lot of sense from a writer's perspective. The only way bloggers can come up really is with viral content from a large fanbase. No one these days really is knee deep into frugality and I have way more popularity on my Korean blog because I use comedy and target a wider audience. Plus I have loyal fan base through Facebook. That being said, the best way to come up on writing skills is to network with writers and target a large fan base.

It's an unfortunate reaction to have, but it's true. Publishing on the Internet means you run the risk of having your work seen but also stolen by millions and millions of people, all the time, every day, forever. Even if we got this guy's blog shut down, I guarantee you three more blogs would take its place, all of them piloted by writers who have no problem stealing other peoples' material, because starting a blog and stealing are two very easy things to do. To a lot of folks, the Internet is still just the Wild West, lawless and open, and full of shockingly filthy people. There are no rules, and if anyone's caught doing something wrong, the go-to excuse of "Relax, man, it's just the Internet" isn't stale enough yet that people won't still casually throw it around. And maybe the Internet will always be this way, with fickle audiences, impossible-to-please commenters, distractingly endless $%^&**#$, and shameless plagiarists. - Daniel O' Brian: Cracked Comedy Writer


 

And that was more eloquetly phrased than I could have put it. Please remember that this is the truth about blogging in general. There are plenty of people that want to rip off your ideas. One so called friend took it upon himself to write a book copying many of the ideas on this blog. In hip hop, the person who steals someone else's rhyme structure and flow is known as a "biter". I would like to dub these people who do the same thing with blogs as "writer biters."

That being said, Daniel O' Brian claims that the pros outweigh the cons. If you are persistent and find a responsive audience; they do. If you can get thousands of people to read just your blog out of the billions of other blogs; they do. I think I have been lucky to get the hundred or so people to keep reading per month. I think it is that alone that keeps me writing. It is a passion that only grows everyday. I have written work in a lot of different genres. Fiction, Non-fiction, poerty, you name it. As I near my 200th post I have noticed my style has evolved with the times and has continued to stay fresh. Being creative and innovative is what keeps a blog alive. Also putting in the time to write good material is key to consistently creating success for you and your blog. 

That was my reply. I'm out! CB

Cthulu Saves the World: A Cheap Indie Game Available on Steam

I just though I create a quick post. I haven't found any frugality hacks as of late...until now! I manged to come across an ad for Cthulu Saves The World in my Facebook. I was just playing Tetris like I always do and I went to my groups to check on how many members we have in there. Turns out that we have roughly 200 members.

Anyways, I checked and there was a video showing Cthulu Saves the World. I also got Breath of Death 7 for free with it. It will only set you back $3 for over 60 hours of game play. If you count all the different modes of gamplay it says, it accounts for more than 60 hours, See the video to Cthulu here.

Korean Dental Vacation???

Hello. thought I'd make a quick post about dental vacations. It seems to be the in thing these days. I came to Korea to fix my teeth and earn some money. Why did I come to Korea for Dental Work? Well it only costs about $4,000 for all of my dental work combined. In the United States it would have cost you much more.

How many people just shrug off the fact that they have dental problems and decide there is nothing they can do about it? Many. They would just opt for dentures and a extraction. However, I did some research into this. (I wanted to fix my teeth without going broke.) Mexico and Korea have far less cheaper dental cost than most other countries. Poland I think also has affordable dental (but the price of the rooms were outrageous). This is why I went to Korea: a) I was tired of paying rent, b) I actually wanted to use my college degree instead of selling electronics for a living, and c) my teeth looked like a Fallout bomb shelter.

Perhaps I should post this in Incheon Charles , but I think it has just a little more to do with frugality than Korea as a whole. Anywho, if you can save a least $10,000 for dental work you can have wonderful results if you decide to go out of the United States. Dental work in the US, is just too expensive. 30-40K for an operation (not including cometic dentitry) is just too much to pay. If you pay that much, you eccentially are signing a licence to get ripped off. The reason why it is so expensive is the exorbant loans and insurance costs that US dentists have to bear.

I need to get my implant and crown so I will end here.

Later

Announcement of LinkedIn's Changes

This is something I found while I was on my LinkedIn profile. I have to say being able to actually apply for jobs through LinkedIn makes total sense; considering that it is a website for hooking up with professionals. With that being said, people should keep their options open because there is no way that I could just land a job from LinkedIn alone. It is nice to be able to connect with professionals, but I have had better luck with other sites.

These days, it is a good place to store your resume because when someone tries to find your profile in the search engines, 9 times out of 10, your Facebook profile and your LinkedIn profile is on the first page. I'm not saying that I couldn't land a job via LinkedIn: I am saying that out of all the websites out there LinkedIn has had mediocre responses in the past. For all due respect to LinkedIn, I have actually gotten two job offers, but that was while I was on contract in Korea. Here is the article of LinkedIn's announcement about their up and coming plans to make the site better.

Over 3,000 Hits

I just wanted to post this as a way of showing thanks for all the support you guys have given chuckiesblurbs. I know it isn't that many hits when someone puts this blog's timeline under a microscope, but I felt that I have grown as both a writer person by sticking this project out. Shots out to all the family in Korea, Japan, and America. Special shots out to the people in Incheon, Korea and Okinawa, Japan for being hospitable towards me.

I want to think Madi, Grigory, Navgeet, Kris, Masako, Osamu, Shintak, Tamera "Saigi", and any one else I have neglected to mention.

I have two minor projects that are on my plate at the moment: 1) I am planning to write a book under the pen name Alex Patt. It will be my second book and this one will be an informative piece about the Korean ESL market. 2) I am working on some poetry for a upcoming project. A third minor minor project, that I have is adding more content to http://www.incheoncharles.blogspot.com/. Stay tuned for more upcoming announcements. Lates. =) 

P.S. Expect a post at IncheonCharles soon.

Time is Money

I think everyone has heard this phrase before. But, what do people mean when they say time is money?

I  look at time this way: we were given a certain amount of credit on this, but we cannot recharge it. You know; like one of those prepaid cards. Wal-Mart allotted me about 40+ hours to make $1600/month to live on. In Korea, when it is all said and done, I make a decent living, but every second is more precious than the last. I have to use those seconds responsibly; especially if I only have 30+ hours of free time per week. This is why I read a lot instead of partying or squandering money endlessly.

I do eat out; because I consider a cheap meal at a fast food place more worth my time, than slaving over a kitchen stove for 2-3 hours. What I am saying is, lately I notice I have been getting sucked into pointless debates. Is it fun to join them? Yes. Do they accomplish anything? Probably not. Am I losing  money? Absolutely! Because time is money! I could spend that time off the Internet doing something contructive like solving world hunger or finding a cure for AIDs. :-O

 Or better yet, meeting real people and having real social interactions. Think about that.... Peace~

Chuckiesblurbs has donated to the Japanese Red Cross

In order to help raise awareness of the situation in Japan, I have decided a few months ago to donate to Japan. I am a man of my word and CB has personally donated 16,000 JPY towards the relief effort in Japan. Please if you have anything to spare, please donate to their cause. The people of Japan have got hit with a paramount 9.0 Magitude earthquake leaving close to 30,000 people dead.

A little bit ago, Japan was hit with another 7.1 earthquake and these tremors are exspected to continue for a long time. For me, Japan really is a second home and I feel like I'm obligated to do something to help them. So please, contribute what you can.  Go here if you want to donate.

Twitter URL

There was a request from someone to put a link to my Twitter URL on this website. Yes, I have a Twitter URL. It will funnel YouTube comments as well as comments from this site. Also my new blog might be getting tweets too, but I'm not certain about that. I might need to check Twitter when I have time. Oh I will drop that link too.


http://www.twitter.com/#!/needmanshini




You guys can reply or hit me up there. I will answer questions in the order I recieve them.
 
My new blog that I am currently working on is:
 
http://www.incheoncharles.blogspot.com/
 
I have been a little slow updating it because I have been mad busy at my new job. We're talking like 50-60 hours a week. There are even days were I do not even get a chance to study foreign languages. Lately, I have been studying Korean as well as Japanese and Chinese (although I have taken a bit of a hiatus from Chinese).  For anyone that is interested in studying those languages, I can be contacted through the CB e-mail or my Twitter. Again, I take messages and comments on a first come first serve basis. I have to sometimes filter through a lot of spam as well as legitimate comments. So if I do not get back to you right away, that's those are the reasons.

Investing Does Take Work

Here I am, up at 3:18am getting my blog on like I'm in a marathon. It is 3:18 in Korea and it is my Friday. Not really sure why I am doing laundry at this time, but maybe its just because I can.

There are Americans both here and in America that ask me why I have so much money. I am not rich, I am not wealthy, but I am well off in a sense that I am not living 2 paychecks away from the street. I closed that chapter of my life and I am not returning there. Anywho, I wanted to make this response.

On my LinkedIn Account, I am a member of the UNR Alumni group and there was this post that talks about hard work when investing. My response to that is this: read the post; the man's right! Think about it: how are you going to invest if you have nothing to invest with? You need something people! Money, education (always an asset), time, whatever. I mean seriously!  I met a Hagwon working married couple that just got done living in their car. They went to a foreign country to work because it was a step up. I think it is only a momentary escape considering the honesty of hogwans, but that is for another blog. Anyways the craziness in the economy right now should have people on their toes.

Take me for example: I did not leave Wal-Mart and pursue my dream until I had enough money to do so. I liked Sam's Club, but did not want to retire with a 9-5. I wanted to learn another language along with the adventure and excitement. Like I said, this blog is completed as far as I am concerned, but I will add things here and there  because a blog is always a work in progress. It was originally written by Draco Capital Management. Read it here. I would say ultimately, you need to work and order to invest and you need to invest in order to have a reason for working! They kind of go hand in hand like PB and J.