GPHC 2019-2020

Jorge Larach 5/20/20 GPHC Donald Trump Impeachment Retrospective Blog https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50732900 The impeachment process is something that many people commonly mistake as simply the president is kicked out of office and someone else becomes acting president.. As defined by the article I chose, linked below, impeachment is a process that allows government officials to hold other government officials accountable for possible offences they may have committed while in office. After one is impeached, they are then required to go to trial in the Senate in order to ultimately decide whether they are guilty or innocent. Trump was accused of seeking help from the Ukranian government in order to get himself re-elected as well as obstructing congress, who was investigating him at the time. Regarding Ukraine, there were a couple of unlawful allegations. The first was that he allegedly held back millions of dollars worth of military aid to Ukraine and also put fo...

This article mainly focuses on the United States and how it languishes behind in child flourishing. There are many very apparent reasons for this, but I'm not here to restate my Extended Essay, I'm here to talk about Norway. Norway ranks in the top three in this measure of child flourishing, but it also ranks as very unsustainable. Something that must be understood in the modern day is climate change and our current lifestyle. The consumer economy and the affluence of western nations has created an issue with our sustainability. Lavish lifestyles, easily obtainable luxury goods, excess of meats in our diet, reliance on automobiles, all of these things are a sign of wealth. Children reliably thrive in these environments, after all, the best measure of longevity is a combination of weight and wealth, but their futures are not secure. These lifestyles are supported by the natural resources and labor of developing nations, and unless we return to a directly imperialist and oppressi...

What was the terribly powerful financial instrument used to create society's financial depressions and wealth?...Thats right, the stock market! Created by Dutch monopoly in spice trade, the West India Trade Co. during the 1600's. Now, who invented the very first stock market bubble?... A Scottish man by the name of John Law, child of a wealthy goldsmith and heir to a vast estate, but how did he create a stock market bubble? His story in England where Law murders a man in a duel over a woman.Then of course John is sentenced to death, but wait- plot twist- John escapes from prison, god knows how, and finds himself in nowhere other than Amsterdam. Which lucky for him happens to also be home of the spice trade monopoly: West India Trading Co. The Dutch concept of the company gave John an idea he saw how the company would trade stocks created through supply and demand making the company's shareholders extremely rich. Our main character John, inspired by this concept relocated to...

Jorge Larach Global Politics 5/20/20 Hey, Check This Out! Blog  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronavirus-wild-animals-wales-goats-barcelona-boars-brazil-turtles/2020/04/14/30057b2c-7a71-11ea-b6ff-597f170df8f8_story.html I read the article “As Humans stay indoors, wild animals take back what was once theirs”. As I was reading it, I considered a moral dilemma. I realized just how much we were oppressing nearly every animal’s “right to roam”. Humanity finally leaves, and they are returning to what they considered to be their territory. I realized we aren’t exactly coexisting with nature, we are dominating it. Reading the part about the turtles seeing artificial light on the beach and in their efforts to get to it, they die, I felt revolted. It’s not exactly “humans vs nature” though, either. If you think about it, humanity came from nature. But seeing these creatures returning to what was once theirs, I couldn’t help but think maybe it would be better...

Jorge Larach 5/20/20 GPHC Coronavirus and issues of Development and Power  I read two articles:  Why Rich Countries must Protect Developing Nations from Coronavirus Pandemic How is the United Nations responding to the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) / COVID-19 outbreak? Despite this assignment being due weeks ago, I still compared what these articles are talking about to today and processed the timeline provided in the second article (chronologically), as well as considered what the call to action of the first article was referring to. I think the first article provides a persuasive, fact-supported argument as to why higher-income countries should divert some of their attention to poorer countries, not just for the well being of those countries, but for theirs as well. It argues that if poorer countries are not given the support they need, monetary or otherwise, then not only will those countries be hit substantially harder than richer ones, but it will like...

  The coronavirus has caused many things including, a worldwide pandemic, a stay home order, many deaths, but also a major drop in the economy and in stocks. For example, the S&P 500 dropped 4.34% and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 3.79%. Although the stock market’s stress has been building for a while, the stress that was put on it at the beginning of the pandemic caused the stress to spill over, resulting in the 2020 Stock Market Crash. One main cause of this drop was the drop in oil prices. This drop in oil prices has hurt Houstonians and has caused many investors to rethink where they are investing their money and instead invest in other assets.    The Dow stocks were hit very hard by the stock market crash of 2020. It has been said that it is one of the worst days that the Dow stocks have seen in history, being compared to Black Friday in 1929. The Dow stocks beat the 1929 Black Friday freefall of 12.82% with a 12.93% freefall. The Dow stocks dropped from 29,219 p...

What I have found interesting about insurance is its apparent cyclical nature. From the first life insurance policies all the way to investment in the real estate markets, insurance always seems to run out of luck. In every strategy mentioned in the video, there has always been a slowdown, a collapse, or an exploit., from the failure of Japan’s welfare state to Chilean inequality to the 2008 housing crisis. We appear to have insurance cycles, whenever we try to mitigate risk and bring about more financial security, something always happens to ruin it whether by greed, diminishing returns, or economic collapse. It seems that we take risks by mitigating risk and then we must also take risk to mitigate that risk. In reality, risk does not appear to go down, it appears to simply be delayed or it disproportionately affect a certain part of the population. Another commonality in all of these types of insurance is that it always excludes the poorest. From Japan’s Burakumin to blue collar Ame...

The Dow Jones this year has been a roller coaster. In fact, if you look at the year thus far, it even looks like one. A steady rise, a quick fall, and a stagnation by mid-April. To solidify the roller coaster metaphor, the Dow Jones Industrial Average Coaster had a fast drop that was completely and utterly horrifying and then plateaued at the end with little excitement, leaving one with a feeling of disappointment and wasted money. A lot of wasted money. This has been very similar to the New York stock Exchange Composite Index, which is good because the Dow Jones is often used in place of the Composite Index. The economy has adjusted to the change and some companies are now seeing profits again. However, because of the sharp decline in the blue collar work and a sharp uptick in the unemployment, this will likely have a damaging effect on small business as companies with the capital required to adjust to quarantine easily out-compete small businesses, thus worsening the issue...

This article has been my favorite all year. The author brings up a topic I’ve observed when talking with friends and family, that being the desire for a more de-individualist more social society opposed to an individualist society- which is sort of what we have now with quarantine, people are by themselves more than usual and some aren’t enjoying it as much as they thought they would, because they are now realizing how much their life was centered around that connection. This is the complete opposite of the romanticised video game ideal: the individualist group with a dark backstory taking down a fascist regime.  Now with all the job loss and well, reality, people who may have fantasized about this in the past are now realizing ,maybe this isn’t as enjoyable as it sounds the reason being many are feeling very powerless about the whole situation whereas in video games you typically have this super-human esque main character who happens to take initiative to complete a mission and a...