Merchants of Cool

Media professionals in most cases don't really try to get to know their audience and what they like. Intern they try to manipulate them buy telling them what they should like and what they should do. They figure this out through many different ways whether it be ratings, sales, groups, and e-mail responses. Media professionals can determine these things are workings through putting their advertisements in different places and seeing if they boost or drop sales. For example, kids shows they would show toy commercials. These media professionals are not really targeting kids though. Teens are the largest market segment. So the media professionals have meetings and groups of kids come in a study them on a day-to-day basis. As the movie showed these media professionals are now entering teens houses and looking to see what they like and what they have in their rooms. They look at what clothes they have and what movies and games they play. I feel like this is going a little to far. To invade someones privacy and pay them a couple dollars for it is just stupid. You can not base your conclusion about all teenagers on one teenagers room.

Short Film

This short film was very interesting and did a great job an grabbing my intention. I didn't really know much about the banking system and how it was established. It was very surprising to hear that banks made up 95% of the United States money. This 95% is just made up through lending out loans that have no real money backing it. They can do this with the promise from people to pay them back. The film did a great job of telling you the back story of where banks came from. The fact that Goldsmiths started banking is incredible. Our paper money today is a spin off of their paper claim checks that they lent out back then. They would hand out these claim checks to their customers saying that they had enough money to back it in their bank. When the people found out that they didn't have enough gold to back up these claim checks people started to ask for their gold back. This intern led to a run on the bank where the bank did not have enough gold to support as much as they lent out. This cause the government to step in and regulate the process so this wouldn't happen again.
Everything now a days is just digital money that says there is enough money to back what is lent out. When really there should be as much "gold and silver" to back it up like it used to be in the old days. Where in order to create more money you would have to go find more gold and silver. Debt today is up to 45 trillion dollars which is an astronomical amount.
I agree with what the movie is saying and that we need to act on this now before the debt doubles to 100 trillion. The movie gave us a solution that the government should look into trying to put into effect. It would be hard to achieve this goal with the economy so terrible right now but you have to at least try.