My brother, Keane Fine, is looking for an internship with an advertising agency. To spice up his application he added this little informational page, complete with it’s own post-it note.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Real Estate with Ethics
I’ve continued to read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and it continues to put this driving question in my mind. How can we invest in Real Estate in a way that is ethical?
Currently though only thing I’ve come up with is to do Real Estate in rich areas where it’s not directly affecting the poor. As I said in a previous post, so many options of making money in Real Estate seem to be doing so at the expense and oppression of the poor.
So, here is the deal. I want to make a lot of money. I want to make money so that I don’t have to raise it, or break my back working for it; I want to have money so that I can do all the things I desire to do and not have to worry about it. The stock market sounds interesting to me as does Real Estate. Lucrative business ventures are great too, but here’s my catch. I want to invest in things and in ways that I believe are ethical.
I’ll try the real estate thing, but not if it means ripping off someone just because they are in a tight spot, and not if it means pushing the poor out of their neighborhood, and not if it means charging oppressive rent prices.
I’ll try the stock market, but I don’t want to invest in companies that run sweatshops. I don’t want to support companies that make their millions in alcohol, pornography or the slave trade. I want to make money helping the world become a better place.
Anyone know of any good places to go for that kind of financial advice? Because I haven’t a clue.
Coverage of death in the Middle East
I have BBC news as my homepage on Firefox. It helps keep me aware of what’s happening in the world. Today the frontpage news is the Hajj Stampede. I don’t have much commentary on it specifically. I do know that there have been stampedes like this in the past, and it was never frontpage news, at least it wasn’t before 9/11.
This could be my own bias perception, but I did a quick search on CNN and here’s what I found: Between April 97 and December 99 (3 years) there where 19 stories about the Hajj Pilgrimage in general (searching for ‘Hajj Plgrimage’). In the past year (from Jan 05) there have been 27 new stories and most of them have to do with deaths, crime or weapons of some kind.
I know our interest in the Middle East has increased, but I fear our news coverage of it has leaned more towards the negative and violent coverage. I’m not trying to throw out any government conspiracies, but I worry about how convienent and desensitizing it is to us to hear that those our country seems to dub our “enemies” are killing each other anyways. I worry our negative coverage of Arabs in general is going to make our continued war on “terrorist” easy and cloudy; All Arabs are not terrorist.
“We are not all football players” (nor do we want to be)
Another interesting point that came up in the movie Rize is the idea that in the inner city the one thing you can always seem to find is a sports team. Maybe is one of those catch-22 types of things, but the truth is that a lot of do-gooders come into an inner city neighborhood and start sports teams. This makes some sense because there are a lot of kids that want to play sports, and thus we have our little catch-22 (I could be using the term all wrong, sorry).
But there are plenty of youth in the inner city that have no desire to play sports and would love to have other outlets. In the movie they mention the lack of performing arts schools and studios which is very true from what I know. There is a definite need for more of these things in the inner city.
If you have tons of sports options available to youth, you’ll continue to hear plenty of “rise out of poverty to sports star fame” types of stories. If you make performing arts more available, and good education available, you’ll eventually hear many more, “rise out of poverty to” broadway renown, ballet all-star, symphony elite, science genius, and the list goes on.
The sweet beauty of healthy race relations
Eventually, someones going to figure out that I am fairly emotional (i.e. I cry very easily). I was watching Rize today (I’ll write more about it later), and a quick 30 second scene brought a tear to my eye.
The movie is a documentary about a dance culture in the African-American community. In the one scene there is a party happening and you see an elderly white couple watching from their driveway. Three girls from the party (all three black) come up to the couple and do a little dance for them and then give them a balloon animal. The couple claps for them.
The scene isn’t really crucial to the rest of the film, it’s just a snippet during a music and dance segment. The part that touches me about it and other occasions, is the sweet beauty there is in healthy communication and interaction between people of different races. I see, hear and know of so many injustices and racism that occurs that you just long to see more and more relationships that are healthy.
Maybe I’m alone in that, but maybe not.
[IfeelWhenYou]
[Rize]
The trouble with Real Estate
As a gift over the holidays, Mindy and I received the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It had been recommended to me before and I had browsed the first chapter but hadn’t picked it up.
I’m currently a good chunk of the way through it and it brought up an interesting financial issue that I have. In the book Robert Kiyosaki will give examples of was that he made money. The two primary ways have been small stocks and Real Estate. I’ve read my fair share of money making and finance books and a lot of them, as well as plenty of people say there is money to be made in Real Estate.
You look at the ideas, me being somewhat of an entrepuneur, and your mind start whirling through all the possiblities and the idea of being able to make a ton of money quite quickly through buying and selling real estate (I know some of you are surprised by me talking like this). When I think only about the financial side of the real estate business, it’s quite tempting to try and jump in. And that’s when I step back and think about some of the social implications.
I’ll start with a typical example. Pick up your average ‘Make millions in Real Estate’ book and one of it’s tips will be to go to the bankruptcy office, or look for foreclosure notices, those are places to get houses for dirt cheap. Never have I seen in ANY book or tape or information anything that addresses the needs or situation of the person that is bankrupt or foreclosing. If anything it might mention that they’ll be glad to have the money, but I highly doubt they are glad to lose their house. “Your misfortune is my fortune,” that’s basically what it is, and that just doesn’t sound right to me.
The other major problem with real estate that I see is the power it has to push people around, particularly poor people. Gentrification is somewhat of a buzzword, but it’s happening and it’s frustrating and sad. Pick any major city and what’s happening is people with low incomes, but people who had a stable home, are being pushed out of their residence and left to move somewhere else. Now that the city has become popular again, those with money are forcing (I’ll explain in another post) out those without money. This includes housing projects (Cabrini Green of Chicago is now condos). This troubles me.
I like the idea of buying a house some day. I like the idea of living in community with people in a place that we own. I worry that my purchasing and profiting will be at the expense of others. There is oppression in the way we do real estate and I want to have no part of it. I only hope I can find out a way that is possible.
Is “Socially Responsible” catching on?
When you see the term on a McDonalds brochure you know something is up. I don’t frequent the golden arches much, but I was in there a couple weeks ago and I saw this brochure.
“We Share One Community: Socially Responsible Neighbors”
I’m not posting to bash on McD’s (that’s what you’d expect from me though isn’t it?). I think it’s great to see a company like this and others (Walmart, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, etc) put out Press Release and make statements in the direction of Social Responsibility. I applaud those efforts, but I want to caution us as well. I think we’ve seen countless times (look into statements from companies about stopping sweatshops) that just because they make a statement or give their word does not mean a change has happened. There are times when all we can do is take their word for it, but let’s also be all the more aware when the news reveals that they have not been keeping their commitments.
When Social Responsibility becomes the buzz word everyone will jump on board, at least in word, not necessarily in deed. You see being Social Responsibility cost your company money. Paying garment workers more cost more. Treating animals humanely cost more. All these things our money lost from the company and any good economist knows that money is the bottom line. Let’s just be aware.
On that note here is an exciting company, Maggie’s Organic that looks like they are doing things right. Watch the Video.
The Next PostSecret… Sharing our Feelings on Race
I mentioned this last week, but my readers jumped off on a discussion about other things in the post, which was great and enjoyable, but made me want to mention this again.
Something that troubles me in dicussing race and racism is that we are often (like in many other areas) poor listeners. We tend to have a lot to say regardless of how important it really is or how much it affects us. Like you learn in any basic communication class sharing your feelings is perfectly okay and important. It’s also important to listen to one another. The typical statement you’ll here suggested is the famous, “I Feel…When You…” It allows you to share what your feeling based on the others action and focuses on your feeling rather then just yelling or pointing out their action (the “You ALWAYS do this…” types of statements).
Martin Luther King day is just around the corner and I thought it would be neat to have a site dedicated to sharing our feelings about Race and Racism in a constructive way. The site IfeelWhenYou has been up for less then a week now and the traffic to it is slowly increasing. Traffic doubled yesterday and there looks to be even more today. Many people are coming back and browsing through the confessions to read what people have written. The statements are anonymous, so there is no way to react you just listen. You can post your own statements to and I’d encourage you to do so.
Radiant Magazine and sexist assumptions
I’ve written for RelevantMagazine.com a number of times now. It’s a decent magazine, targeting 20-somethings with a focus on God, Life, and Progressive Culture. They have a lot of movie and music reviews and they try and stay on top of the latest trends.
Recently, the folks at Relevant started promoting a new magazine they would be releasing entitled, Radiant. Radiant Magazine as you can see from the site is geared towards women. What’s so terrible about a magazine geared specifically towards women? Nothing; the terrible thing is that it implies, that Relevant was/is geared toward men. I am not saying Relevant was, or is, a men’s magazine, I’m saying their choice of wording implies that it was.
Take a look at the ad for Radiant on Relevant’s homepage. It says, “It’s Our Turn Now.” Does this mean that Relevant was the “men’s” turn? Clearly the approach towards this new magazine does reveal that assumption (just like so much of our culture). Why wasn’t Relevant a level place for men and women? Why can’t guy’s learn to take turns in the same place, rather then forcing women to go off on their own to have a voice?
If Relevant is a magazine for 20-something males it should say MALES outright. Personally, I don’t think they had any intent for Relevant to be a ‘male’ mag, it’s their choice of wording that hint at the sort of assumption that ‘normal’ or ‘regular’ means male or oriented towards men.
Here I am a male ranting about these things, Do any females want to chime in?
Increased web traffic
I’ve been struggling with whether or not I’ve been posting too much and I’m interested in hearing your feedback.
I did take a chance to look at some other feedback, my webstats.
Minus the weeks where I forgot to add the webstats code, it seems like I’ve averaged a little over 100 unique visitors a week (I’m not quite sure how it defines unique). Anyways, this week we had over 248 unique visitors, 578 page views, 136 first time visitors and 58 returning visitors. That’s not too bad, at least better then what I was looking for.
But seriously, What do you think of the amount of posts this week?