Author: princess272

Moving Image-Princess272

0:00- 0.05- During the opening portion of this drinking and driving council ad, two wine glasses slowly move toward each other. This slow movement of the wine glasses filled with red wine symbolizes not only the act of toasting a drink with friends, but also the impairment of alcohol to the nervous system.

0:06- 0:12- This part of video depicts the crashing of the two wine glasses into each other. This resulted in glass shattering and the red wine spilling everywhere. The smashing of these two into each other symbolizes a car crash due to one or more parties being intoxicated with alcohol. While the shattering glass shows the destructive power behind the crash, the red wine is a representation of blood from the victims.

0.013- 0:15- In these two seconds, two beer glasses, filled with beer, move toward each other much like the wine glasses. They have a generic university logo using a big U in order to represent college students drinking.

0:16- 0:21- The beer glasses come into contact with each other and shatter much like the wine glasses again. The only difference is the amount of beer compared to the wine. The wine was a much smaller amount of liquid compared to the beer. This alludes to the mass amount of beer compared to that of wine needed in order to get drunk.

0:22-0:30- Two glasses of some sort of dark liquor on the rocks move toward each other at the same moderate slow pace as the other two clips. The difference is when a hand comes in and stops one of the two glasses from moving forward. This represents a friend not allowing another friend to either drink another drink when they should stop, or not allowing a drunk friend to drive home. In both cases, the shattering of the glasses was prevented.

AD link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jFAvIuAev0   (Friends Don’t Let friends drive drunk)

 

 

Stone Money-Princess272

P1. Up until this point in my life, I saw money just as everyone else in the world. Money is what makes the world go round. This idea was never challenged until reading  the various articles pertaining to this subject. I knew at one point gold was considered a precious gold that backed money. It’s value was created by humans in our minds, but the money still represented it. Now that it has been brought to my attention money is not backed by gold, my whole view has changed. Our money is not significantly different than the Yaps, Bitcoin, or Brazil’s made up currency.

P2. The gargantuan limestone boulders used as money in Yap sounded completely ludicrous to me. Money in my mind should always be able to be carried with you. The fact that there are gigantic pieces of money in their society baffled me, but once compared to our money in the U.S., my mindset began to skew from left to right. Our money can be represented through paper checks, plastic cards, and a special material we call bills. None of these are backed by gold. To make a comparison, Limestone is to Yaps as gold is to Americans. With this being the case, their idea of money is not too different from ours. They leave large pieces of limestone at different locations and use them as a bartering tool just as we use paper, plastic, and bills.

P3. America took the idea to make currency backed on nothing from Brazil. The way used to correct the inflation issue was in fact genius. Using the legitimacy of the country to back the currency was clever, because the government did not need to worry about finding gold or limestone, but rather just focus on amount of money being exchanged. This showed me that money can be backed by anything as long as that anything had value. A country is a great example such a thing of great value.

P4. Bitcoins still to this day do not make sense to me. It’s a made up currency not connected to any government or backed by gold. It is literally just a form of currency people agreed upon to barter created by an individual. For Places like Brazil or America to back their currency by their country made enough sense to not question it too much, but the thought that a legitimate form of currency could come from nothing with but an idea is insane. This simple fact helped me better understand that money does not have value due to the amount of it in the world, but rather what we believe it as.

P5. Money is for lack of a better phrase, a figment of our imaginations. It only has value because everyone wants it. If no one wanted money, everyone would barter using another item or items. Due to this fact, the concept of currency having value only because people want it, is very unsettling. Any boat that can be tipped that easily is not a good one and should be replaced.

Works Cited

Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” Diss. Hoover Institution, Stanford University , 1991.

“The Invention of Stone Money.” 423: The Invention of Stone Money. This Is American Life, WBEZ. Chicago . 7 Jan. 2011.

Joffe-Walt, Chana . “How Fake Money Saved Brazil.” NPR.org. 4 Oct. 2010. 30 Jan. 2015. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil&gt;.

Renaut, Anne . “The bubble bursts on e-currency Bitcoin.” Yahoo.com. 13 Apr. 2013. 30 Jan. 2015. <https://sg.news.yahoo.com/bubble-bursts-e-currency-bitcoin-064913387–finance.html&gt;.