Ancestral ambiguity Aug 26, 2014
At what point in a person's family history do their ancestors stop being what they used to be and start being who they presently are?  My family tree has always been a little unclear to me.  My parents have information about some family members going back to around the mid-1800s, but before that it's muddy.  And the information they have is that my ancestors have been born and raised in America for at least four or five generations.  Their surnames aren't overtly Italian or Irish or German, and we're not black or Asian, so I'm probably a mixture of various breeds of British.  But I'm not British.  And my parents and their parents aren't British.  So at some point in time, my ancestors stopped identifying themselves by their history.  And that was likely the case for my ancestors' ancestors, who went to England by leaving some other ancestry behind.  And so on.  Modern human civilization likely started in Africa, so we're all technically Africans.  But what about before that?  Primordial oozians? #lifestyle
Capitalism vs. environmentalism (3) Aug 4, 2014
I'm a bit ignorant on the topic of economic policies, but it seems from the outside that capitalism is pretty good at making people rich by sort of exploiting other people and things.  That's fine and all, because it enables class mobility.  But I think an even bigger issue is the exploitation of things that don't have a voice, namely the environment.  Capitalism has a tendency to bleed things dry, like oil wells and forests.  As long as people make money, it's deemed a success.  I think -- and I'm pretty sure I'm right about this -- there's a limit to how much capitalism can exploit the environment.  It's fine for now because there's a lot of nature and a lot of money being made.  But at some point, the wells will dry up and the forests will disappear, and no amount of money will be able to undo it.  I like capitalism, but I think it should be regulated to an extent. #nature