Flash Crash - 4/28

     In 2010, a London broker crashed the American stock market, causing the industry to crash by 1000 points. It caused a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars. With electronic banking and economics, it can be hard to know who you're dealing with. For example, this man "in his underwear" was able to crash the stock market from his bedroom. With that ability for anyone who is knowledgeable about electronics, it can make it hard to trust anyone on the internet (especially if you are on the deep web!) With all of these eBay or Craigslist scams, how can you trust anyone?

     As Al Mohler said, "That goes back to Adam Smith with just those two individuals; those two individuals cannot have a thriving economic relationship if they do not trust one another. And back in the day when most economic transactions were face-to-face, we can pretty much judge whether or not the individual with whom we presume to do business was going to be trustworthy or not. We are now living in a global economy and that trust is now extended not only to billions of people far flung across the planet, that trust is now also extended to digital technology that evidently has massive vulnerabilities."

     So, the world today just isn’t what it used to be. “Old” people are known for saying “Back in my day…” and then a whole bunch of nonsense about how things used to be. Adam Smith is saying that things used to be much simpler: Transactions used to be one on one, from small business to consumer. But now, there is so much more in the way, and there’s so much that can go wrong because of that. However, that’s to be expected with anything nowadays! With the internet, the deep web, and all of these hackers, anything can be changed. Hopefully new technology has been developed to stop these hackers from infiltrating things so key to our economy like the stock market. However, if there isn’t, maybe things just ought to be simpler, like they used to be in the good old days.

Cheating - 4/10

            Stanford University recently looked into some allegations that their students were cheating. They found that during the 2013-2014 school year, 83 students violated the honor code by cheating, including copying from another's examination paper or allowing another to copy from one's own paper, plagiarism, or representing as one's own work the work of another. The punishment for any of these actions was to receive no credit for the unit, suspension for 1 quarter, and 40 hours of community service. However, these 83 students of their roughly 16,000 population student body are likely not the only cheaters. A spokeswoman for Stanford admitted that even they didn’t know how many students had violated their honor code over the years.  Cheating is easier today than ever with smartphones and new technology, so it is not a stretch to believe that more students were cheating than were caught cheating.

            Students today feel pressure to cheat because everyone is seemingly doing it, getting good grades, and getting away with it. If Sally has to cheat to get an A, then other students will feel the need to cheat just to stay relevant in the class. The more students cheat, the more the overall academic structure of a school will fail to work. If everyone cheats, then no one learns and the school isn’t doing its job: to educate the future of America. Cheating while in school just leads to developing bad habits for later in life. Maybe they want to become politicians! If people don’t stop cheating, education will just keep getting worse and worse, and then everyone will be cheaters by the end; no student will learn anything. Luckily for some of these students, however, you can’t cheat at flipping a burger for McDonald's.