An essay I wrote for United States history class in my junior year of high school. My prose can definitely be tightened, but the kernel of my idea is still intriguing.

David Xia
AP2 US
Jan. 11, ‘05

From Individualism to Collectivism: The American Nowadays

Americans have always been proud of their “rugged individuality.” The roots of this sentiment originated in the conditions of the establishment of the country. From proclaiming their independence from England in 1776 to the gradual settling of the Great West, self-autonomy was trumpeted as the defining characteristic of the American. However, when one now examines the current trend in society today, the old rugged individualism exemplified by the romanticized cowboy of the West has disappeared.

Finally got around to editing this. This is filmed with low-resolution point-and-shoot cameras, handled with wobbly camera work, and edited with no prior film-editing experience.

Only days after it was discovered that the iPhone stored a secret file containing individuals’ location data, politicians and techno-bloggers were all over it. Apple was summoned to a US Senate hearing on mobile device privacy and South Korea, Germany, and France asked Apple to explain the mysterious file.

Apple finally released a statement today. Their explanation? It was a bug.

We are not tracking you

When I first read that Apple’s iPhone and 3G iPad was logging users’ location data to a hidden file I thought it was an obscure piece of news that would be confined to the tech blogs such as Ars Technica or engagdet. The fact that it’s been picked up by the New York Times (I even heard it on the BBC world report this morning) shows how wary people are of technology encroaching on their lives. Not all technology. Just the creepy parts that your merchant doesn’t tell you about. Indeed, news media attempts to get comments from Apple haven’t gone far, and the company itself hasn’t released a statement yet.

Three days ago, I wrote about the current housing slump. A day ago, Standard & Poor’s published the latest Case-Shiller Index showing the US housing market has only gotten worse. Interestingly, Dallas has fared the best out of the 20 cities in the CSI-20 composite index followed by Denver.

The more I think about it, the more I dread ever owning a house. A recent article in The Economist talked about how real estate is a more volatile asset than most people think. Just look at the recent housing bubble as shown by the Case-Shiller Index:

That looks like a bubble to me.

How did this happen? Economist Paul Krugman says that part of the housing mania came from “ketchup economists:”

In the case of housing, buyers do carefully compare prices — with the prices of other houses. That is, they make sure that two-quart bottles of ketchup are the same price as one-quart bottles. As we’ve seen, however, they don’t do a very good job of checking whether the overall level of housing prices makes sense.

We pay a lot of attention to elections where we voice our opinions by voting. But there’s a more important form of voting that happens everyday. When I spend money, whether I know it or not, I’m often supporting not only a good or service but also a set of principles and values.

One example is grocery shopping. Michael Pollan writes in his book Omnivore’s Dilemma, “Shopping in the organic supermarket underwrites important values on the farm; shopping locally underwrites a whole set of other values as well.”¹. Buying a dollar of organic produce means one less dollar for the non-organic food industry. It’s a vote for one over the other, and vice versa if you buy non-organic over organic.

• you suffer from withdrawal when you don’t have access to a pool
• at restaurants that display calories on their menu, you divide each dish’s calories by respective price and order the one with the highest quotient
• you are physically capable of drinking three beers, eating an entire quart of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, and watching an entire season of 24 in 17.6 hours
• your idea of fun is -22°F, five meters of snow, > 14,000ft altitude, and avalanche risks
• you’ve been asked if you’ve been “raised communist”
• you’ve mixed two packs of instant ramen with hot tap water in a plastic ice bucket while staying at a $50/night motel and ate it with your bare hands

Here’s a video of my roommates during our senior year at Columbia University. The first part shows Raul calling CAVA after Jason had burned himself while cooking macaroni and cheese. The second half is me antagonizing Jason and David during their midnight snack of whipped cream and bananas.