Blog 19: The True Value of a T-Shirt

• It starts out with cotton being grown all over the world: US, Uzbekistan, Australia, China, India and small African counties like Benin and Burkina Faso. Each year it produces about 25 million tons of cotton globally.

Cotton Crop all over the world

• Cotton crops needs a lot of water for it to produce and therefore, communities aren't getting enough water to drink. If 25 million tons of cotton are produced globally, imagine how much gallons of water it would need. 

Hunting water in Africa

• Not only were using tons of water in the making of a t-shirt but the crops are coated in pesticides. These crops use about 25% of the world's insecticides. It turns out t-shirt making is also a pesticide-laden business. 

          

•  Making matters worse all these pesticides being sprayed on crops also harm workers, the planet and neighboring communities. They suffer from nerve diseases and vision problems because of the number of toxic chemicals.

          

• Next step tons and tons of energy are needed to take it from raw cotton to a t-shirt (which is fueled by oil drilling or dirty coal). All this is to get the cotton to turn into thread.

 

• After having the thread you would bleach the cotton with chlorine even though it can become a neurotoxin and carcinogen. The cotton industry still going to use it even if they are to dye it.

Bleaching the cotton 

• Next the cotton industry wants to make it easy as possible to take care, so they would spray it with formaldehyde knowing that it would cause respiratory problems, burning eyes, allergic skin reactions and even cancer. The use of formaldehyde makes the t-shirt soft, wrinkle-resistant, stain and odor resistant, fireproof, mothproof and even antistatic. 

Another chemical being used in the cotton industry

• Finally the fabric gets shipped to a factory or a sweatshop where workers work long days for low wages. Many are working in unsafe conditions and are teens. 

Cartoon showing teen sweatshop labor

• When it's all done the t-shirts get shipped to the United States and sold to the public for under $20. 

• After reading The Story of Stuff, I believe that the value of a t-shirt should go up not like the price you see then for at  the 99 cent stores, teens and adults have shed blood and sweat just to make these product. Not adding the fact that they are exposed to many chemicals in the factory they work at. Some will never recover from there illnesses. It's a never ending cycle. It's just not right. It may be cheap to us but not cheap to them.

The price should be higher than this

Blog 18:Too Much Stuff

Summary: According to Mary Elizabeth Williams, cheap is bad and it's ruining our lives. You keep throwing away your old things and buying new ones because of it's durability.When we see the low prices from aggresive advertising we tend to react and buy their products.Not only it's bad for the consumers to keep buying it, it's bad for the workers that makes these products and it's also bad for the enviroment since there's more junk being throw away.

My Thesis: Mary Elizabeth Williams is informing us that cheap is bad and it ruining our lives. There is one problem with her argument: Why is it bad?

Reason 1: The workers that makes the product

Example: In the movie, Sleep Dreamers workers were being paid very little to produce these products from the consumers

Reason 2: It's bad for the enviroment

Example: On black friday the busiest shopping day we spend so much money because there so cheap

Ninth Lab/Blog 17: Reflection on Blogging

1. Blogging has improved my writing in so many ways. For example, in Blog 1 when I wrote about the Advertisment story my ideas were very vague, no structure of any kind and to short. Now I know how to write an organized essay for the CATW. Things like elaborating on your examples, your summary is in your own words, starts in the first paragraph, include author's name and title of the passage. Also in your response which comes after should have multiple paragraphs, and have at least two quotes from the reading. Looking at recent CATW's I wrote like in blog 13 and 11, there's a major difference.

2. I probably could of done more writing on certain blogs to make them longer like expanding on my ideas. I also probably would spend more time writing everyday so my writing would improve.

Blog 16: The Industrial Migrants

                                                         Part 1:
 
        In Eric Scholsser "The New Industrial Migrants", Scholsser explains that MIGRANTS that are coming from Mexico, Central America and Southeast Asia are working in meatpacking jobs that offer low wages and high TURNOVER rate. Most of these immigrants came from places like River Park Mobile Court, beaten trailers and not far down the road from slaughterhouses. Most of them had to share rooms in old motels and sleep on the floor. During one 18-month period, more than five thousand different people were hired at the Greeley beef plant- an annual turnover rate of about 400 percent. This lead to an average worker quitting or fired every three months.
        One thing this article reminded me of is the films we watched in class called The Meatrix because they both had the same mindset in PROFITABILITY and not care about their workers. According to National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, many of the workers suffer from back problems, torn muscles, deep cuts and amputated fingers. Many of the workers was illiterate. Mike Coan in an 1994 interview with Business Insurance, an industry trade journal stated  that "We're at the bottom of the literacy scale and in some plants about a third of the people cannot read or write in any language."

                                                         Part 2:
        In Schlosser second excerpt, Schlosser tells us how companies like IBP would hire immigrants since they would work for lower wages than americans and would be more reluctant to join unions. According to The Immigration and Naturalization Service about one-quarter of all meatpacking workers are illegal immigrants. He also tells us how companies deny hiring illegal immigrants to work for them. Spokesmen for IBP stated "We do not knowingly hire undocumented workers," and "IBP supports INS efforts to enforce the law and does not want to employ people whot authorized to work in the United States." Nevertheless, meatpacking companies target are poor communities and there willing to accept any kind of job because  getting pay is better than no pay at all.

Blog 15

Some interesting things was that Greenmarkets were founded in 1976. It began with 12 farmers in a parking lot on 59st and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan and now has over 51 locations throughout New York city. I never knew there were so many greenmarkets in NYC. There's actually one near the park I live at Fort Greene Park. Every year New Yorkers throw 25,059 tons of recyclable plastic bottles in their household garbage.

Blog 14: Ideas for Improving my Performance in the CATW

Ways that we can improve on our annotation of the reading:
- underline important ideas
- organize your ideas
- ask questions
- underline words you don't know
- underline topic sentences

Ways that we can improve on our response to the reading:
- Be organized
- Have a structure
- Elaborate on your examples
- Use words such as For instance, In another case to give reader examples

Transitions that would help us organize our CATW better:
- Sentence one should be your topic sentence
- Sentence two provides specific detail/examples as a restatement of the first. It "opens up" the first sentence.
- Use Further, Besides, Equally important, Finally as some of the transition words

After doing this excersice things that were emphasized was to include quotes from the passage, use transitional words to connect your idea, use at least two examples from your personal experience and to explain in details. Also to check your passage over again for spelling/grammar mistakes.

After reading the comment posted by Ellie, I learned in the summary you have to address who, what and why and to just proofread for grammar mistakes.

Blog 13

      In "How to do one thing at a time", Nancy Jones explains that multi-tasking is bad and is harmful to the brain. Things like talking on the phone while driving, texting while driving or chatting with your friends while sending out an office email. One significant idea in the passage is the experiment done at Stanford Unviersity.
      The experiment proved Nancy's point. The poeple that weren't multi-tasking did significantly better than the other group. I agree with her because whenever I'm writing a paper or doing a project, while listening to music and watching a basketball game, I tend to get distracted and can't focus on the things I'm going to write for my essay. According to Clifford Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford Unveristy, "A tremendous amount of evidence shows that the brain does better when its performing tasks in sequence rather than all at once." It seems to me that I'm not alone.
      Another reason that the experiment is important is that according to another article published in the science journal, "NeuroImage revealed that when we attempt demanding tasks simultaneously, we end up doing neither as well as we should because our brains have cognitive limits." That explains why it's so hard to focus when your doing multiple things.
      In conclusion, we should break our multi-tasking habit and sharpen our fous. Some solutions such as yoga and acupuncture can be helpful according to experts.