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Topic #319: Would you rather be able to read other people’s minds, or live forever?

If I had to pick between having the ability to read minds or to live forever, I would probably go with reading minds, for a pretty obvious reason.

If I were to live forever, there’s no mention what will happen to my actual aging. I don’t want to be an old man who only gets older for all of eternity, because as I get older, my body will start to get weaker and less functional, and my older years will be terrorizing more than they would be enjoyable. People with an uncurable disease causing them extreme pain have death as an escape; if this were to happen to me, I would not have that option.

On the other hand, if the prompt specified that my aging process would be frozen and I would never get any older, I would still not want that to happen because I want to age and progress through my life like a normal human, rather than being stuck at a particular point in my life for the rest of my life. It would be great if I could maintain my current health forever, but I’m pretty sure that most people would agree that it doesn’t sound that appealing to be a 19-year-old forever.

Reading minds comes with its benefits as well. It seems like it would be a way to save significant time in my life, because it would eliminate the need for extensive communication. Frequently, it takes a long time for someone to pass on his/her ideas to me, either because it is a complex idea, or simply because the person is bad at explaining concepts in his/her mind. If I was able to read minds, I could get a solid grasp on what the idea is without having to go through the trouble of physically illustrating or describing it.

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Topic #310: If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? Do you feel like your name matches your personality? If not, what first name would better match who you are?

If I had to change my first name, I would change it to something random, then change it back to Adam. I’m content with my first name of Adam, and it seems completely unnecessary to change it.

I’ve noticed in the past that some first names tend to match particular personalities quite well, but I’ve seen and met so many people so far that I can come up with at least one exception for almost every name and personality pairing that deviates from common speculations.

I don’t really think that your first name, or your name in general, really determines what type of person you will be or how you will end up in the future.

Some of you might have already heard of the story of Winner and Loser. There was a father who named his first son Winner because he wanted him to be a winner; the same father named his last son Loser because he didn’t like him (or something along those lines) and wanted him to be a loser. Much to the father’s discontent, Winner ended up becoming a criminal, did drugs, and landed himself in jail, like a loser. Loser ended up becoming successful and getting a good job, like a winner.

Of course, one could argue that the reason Winner lost was because he was too confident in his name, and the reason Loser won was because he wanted to spite his father. But either way, I think this slightly proves that names don’t have that significant of a role in ones life, unless they’re something strange like LemonJello or OrangeJello (yes, those names really exist – you can search for them on Google), or having a name of distinct African descent, then applying for a job at a racist company.

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Topic #309: Have you ever protested for anything? What was the cause? If you haven’t, what would it take for you to go stand up and protest for (or against) something?

If you’ve ever taken a look at my profile page or have read up on any of my background or personal information, you might know that I am an undergraduate college student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. If you’ve been keeping up with the news for the past year, you might have heard about the protests that have been going on in Madison, Wisconsin against the governor. Even though massive protests are going on in my area, I still have never participated in a protest before, and I don’t ever plan on doing so in the future.

Even though I lived literally less than a few miles away from the capitol building, I chose not to participate in the protests because I thought it would be a waste of my time. You might also know that I work for the Badger Herald, which is a campus newspaper, and I still did not participate in the protests, even though I am so closely tied with current events. The only time I even went into the capitol building during the protests was when I went with the editor-in-chief to find one of our reporters inside the building.

Going back to my reasoning behind why I don’t protest, I don’t feel as if I would make a significant difference (or even a marginal difference) if I were to go and protest with everyone else. There are already so many people protesting that I probably would not even fit in the area at which they are protesting, and nobody would ever notice that I showed up. If you know me, you know that I like optimizing everything I do, and I feel as if going to protest would not be an efficient use of my time.

Addressing the second part of the prompt, the only reason I would ever go and protest for or against something is if I knew for a fact that my participation would make a significant difference in the outcome of the protest, and I had nothing better to do. For example, I would attend the protest if there were thousands of people who will only go to the protest if I go, or if I was publicly speaking at the protests and I was able to influence people of power with my opinions. As we probably all know, something like that will probably never happen, or if it does happen, it will not happen for a very long time, so I don’t think we have to be very concerned about expecting me at any protests any time soon.

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Topic #305: Would removing all guns from earth make us more or less safe?

I think that removing all guns from the planet would make us more safe. I chose to answer this prompt because it is closely related to if making guns illegal would make us more safe, which in that case, I think it would make us less safe.

The main reason guns are so dangerous right now is because people with malicious intentions use guns to harm other people. Fortunately, deviants not the only ones who are permitted to use guns; people who wish to use guns to defend themselves can also get a hold of them and use them when needed.

If possessing guns becomes illegal, it will affect those who use guns as defense more than it would affect those who use guns as offense. Most criminals who use guns for attacking others get those guns illegally anyway, so outlawing guns would have little to no effect on them. On the other hand, those who use guns as defense acquire them legally, so if they are not able to do so, they will be left in the dark and have nothing to use to defend themselves if the situation arises.

However, if guns were completely removed from the planet, nobody would have guns at all, and it would make us more safe. Not only would defenders not have guns, the offenders would not either. Thus, it is not important that the defenders do not have guns because they do not need to use the guns to protect themselves from guns.

Of course, I can probably bet everything I own that guns will not magically vanish from the planet any time soon, so this ideal scenario is probably never going to happen, but it would be nice if it did.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t think I went into detail about it – I have a very busy week coming up, with a paper due on Monday morning, an exam on Monday night, a paper due Tuesday afternoon, and a quiz on Wednesday morning. So, I’m not going to have time to make very detailed blog posts for a while.

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Topic #302: When is it a good time to quit? There’s a common sentiment that you should always tough things out and that it’s weak to quit. When is this not true? How do you know you should quit something?

I chose to answer this topic because it’s a very common misconception that once you start something, you should always commit to it and persist until you finish. Although that’s a good way to approach things, it won’t necessarily yield the best results.

The best example that I use to support my argument is scam inheritance letters. Almost all of us have gotten them before – the emails that tell us that we have inherited a fortune from a remote relative, and that we must follow through with the instructions of the email to get the money. Most of us know that these are scams and don’t even open the emails, but unfortunately, some people fall for the trick.

If you have not thoroughly investigated these emails or have not seen someone else’s investigation results, you might not know exactly how these scams work – and that what I’m here for.

Normally, when you reply to one of these emails, you will receive a response from someone telling you that you need to first submit a small sum of money (maybe around $10) to start the claiming process. Generally, this request is justified by saying that it’s a filing fee for paperwork. It doesn’t seem like a huge deal, because the money that you are eventually going to get is in the millions.

After you send in your money, you might get a response from the person saying that, unfortunately, $10 was not enough to finish the paperwork and they need $20 more. Again, under the same logic as before, $20 more is nothing compared to the millions of dollars that you will get from this inheritance, so you send another $20 their way.

A few days later, you might get a response telling you that there was another problem – such as the money contained in a bank vault – and you need to submit a bit more money to get it released. They might possibly request an additional $100 charged from the bank and $50 charged from the service representative. Again, $150 isn’t that much more money, so you agree and pay.

After a few weeks, you notice that you haven’t heard back from the person who was helping you claim the money, so you reply to the email again asking what happened. Apparently, the person who was originally helping you no longer works at the location and you must be reassigned to a different rep­resentative, which will cost $200 for a refiling fee. You’re getting suspicious as to why all these fees are piling up so quickly, but you still comply with the request because you have the big picture in mind – a couple million dollars.

Your new representative helps you out and emails you back telling you that the money is being with­drawn and will be sent on its way to your house shortly. You get excited as you anticipate its arrival.

A few days later, you receive another email telling you that your claim is being challenged with striking evidence and that you will need a lawyer to fight for you. Fortu­nate­ly, your representative found a good and cheap law­yer for you that will only cost $500, and will put you at a good chance of winning your money.

Things continue to go downhill as the lawyer requires additional support, and you must pay up an additional $2,000 for more legal assistance. At this point, many people have run out of spending money and are slowly eating up their savings. But, you realize that you’ve al­ready spent a lot of money on this, and if you quit now, everything will go down the drain, including the couple million dollars. You stick with your original plan of claim­ing your inheritance and keep paying all your fees.

A week later, you get another email saying that the lawyers are charging an additional $5,000. At this point, from a third-person viewpoint as a reader of my blog, you are probably realizing where this is going, and can easily judge that it’s best to cut losses and quit now, because the couple million dollars doesn’t even exist. Unfortunately, those who have a strict philosophy of never giving up won’t do that, and instead, will persist and keep going for the millions.

My point here is that instead of going blindly for a goal, you should analyze your situation each step of the way. Even if you have suffered losses, you should analyze those losses and determine if it would be better to take those losses and quit rather than continuing and not realizing that the goal you want to achieve is impossible.

I haven’t really been up to much today except for going to class, doing homework, and programming a little bit for work, so I don’t really have anything interesting to blog about. So, I decided today would be a good day to catch up a bit on Daily Post topics that I was interested in writing about.

For those of you who have not been around for long enough to know what the Daily Post is, it is a pro­ject hosted by WordPress.com that encourages people to blog every single day in 2011. WordPress says they understand that it is not always easy to come up with topics to blog about, so they provide an optional topic that you can write about every day if you don’t have an idea of your own. I have not been consistently using Daily Post’s material, but whenever an intriguing topic pops up, I write about it.

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Topic #285: Do you like surprises? Why or why not? Can you think of the best or worse surprise you’ve had in the last year?

I do not like surprises at all because I do not like being caught off guard. I like to plan ahead for things that will happen in my future, and even if they are good surprises, I do not like it when my regular plans are thrown off schedule because of something unexpected.

I don’t really keep track of all the times I’m surprised, and it usually does not happen very frequently because the people who interact with me often know that I am a type of person who likes to be informed, and they do their best to avoid making me feel uncomfortable.

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Topic #290: Do you think Shakespeare existed? Or are there just too many plays and sonnets credited to him to be the work of one person? The new film Anonymous questions his prolificity and his existence. If you think these claims against history are a waste of time, why do you think they are periodically raised by so many people?

I’ve heard this argument a lot, and based on all the evidence, I can’t really form a solid opinion for or against either side.

However, I do have a strong opinion about claims like this in general, and I think they are a waste of time. I don’t really see the point of arguing about if the person credited to writing these novels really existed. I don’t think anything is going to change if we prove or disprove that Shakespeare was an existing man who fits the description of how everyone knows him. As far as I am concerned, Shakespeare’s writing is famous because of the actual writing, not because of the name of the author associated with the text. I don’t believe that any English curriculums will change just because they discover that Shakespeare is either not who he claims to be, or is a collection of multiple people using the same alias.