The Big Short - A farce explained

"[They] had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now they saw there was not." Michael Lewis

The movie is good, well acted and very good editing and directing in my humble opinion. Entertaining and also educational at some level, a fact that is not to be taken for granted since is not a normal characteristic of hollywood movies.

Coffins as productivity motivators

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” 

― Walter Benjamin

The BBC article reports that to combat the high stress related suicide rates in South Korea, workplaces are encouraging employees to perform their own funeral rituals. They believe this theatrics will help them appreciate what life has to offer and to accept their problems as a part of life. Additionally the article describes other efforts made by employers to improve stress related problems with their employees, for example morning rituals that include stretching exercises and loud and joint forced laughter also aimed at dealing with stress and workplace “happiness”.

Revised Post: The use of sugar (sweet metaphors) in literature

We construct reality through our actions and practices. The representation of reality also reflects our sociocultural practices. Mintz contends that our preference for sugar is not rooted in our biology rather our reverence for sugar is historical and closely connected to our social practices. Mintz argues that sugar replace our desire for honey—"linguistic imagery suggested not only the association of sweet substance with certain sentiment, desires and moods but also the historical replacement, in large measure, of honey by sugar" (p. 154). To buttress his argument, Mintz highlights that language has been used to normalize and perpetuate the socially constructed practices throughout the history; and, sugar is one of them. Sugar has become part of our daily conversations, acts, music, poetry; and through which our cultural imagery of sugar proliferated. For example, we started to integrate sugar as a metaphor to describe personality and closeness of the human relationship. 

Sweet Slavery - Final Post

What surprised me most about the sugar production was the effort necessary to produce such a desirable good, “Once planted, the cane sprouts and with adequate heat and moisture may grow an inch a day for six weeks. It becomes ripe- and reaches the optimum condition for extraction- in a dry season after anywhere from nine to eighteen months. ‘Ratoon’ cane… is normally cut about every twelve months. Seed cane cuttings in the tropics take longer to reach maturity. In all cases cane must be cut when ready so as not to lose its juice… and once it is cut, the juice must be rapidly extract to avoid rot…” (page 21).

Revised Post: The Lives of Slaves in the Production of the Sugar Cane

            Sidney Mintz’s book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, focused on the production of sugar in mass quantities in the early modern period in mostly colonial areas of the New World. He studied the lives of slaves and work laborers in the Caribbean area, especially Puerto Rico and Haiti. This was mostly on the every day lives of these workers and their role in the production of sugar, which ultimately became the major source of income for plantation owners and inevitably the workers themselves. Their lives revolved around the production of the sugar cane, most of which they were not allowed to consume themselves.

Final Post Miranda

The Power of Symbolism and Meaning in Sugar Consumption

In Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power the story of one commodity, sugar, is given its rightful place of importance in the evaluation of modern history. Throughout his book, Mintz delivers evidence and theory as to how sugar came to shape the political world as it is today and how what was once a luxury item of the rich and powerful became a staple food source for the poor of Great Britain and eventually the world. The history of sugar consumption is distributed into five historical categories based on function: as medicine, as a spice, as decorative materials, a sweetener and finally, as a preservative. In this brief paper I will focus on the part of consumption by the West, especially England as a sweetener. I will show how new meanings began to be associated with sugar through the changing class politics of sugar consumption within the British Empire.

Revised Post: The Social Construction of Taste and Sugar

The Social Construction of Taste and Sugar

Inspiration: Sweetness and Power

By Sidney w. Mintz

       Much of what we find tasteful and desirable to eat has been shaped by society over the past 800 year through a process of social construction. It is often hard to wrap your mind around the idea that taste is socially constructed. Intuitively, there is resistance to such an idea that harkens back to high school biology classes, where it seemed that taste was purely biological. Our tongue responded with sensory perceptions that told our brain how something tasted. If it was bitter or sour, we avoided it and this served to keep us from eating poisonous or rotting items that could kill us---end of a relatively simple story. However, the story isn’t over. In fact, the story has evolved dramatically, as have our tastes.