Justin's Berlin Trip

1.  The demand for service.  The first reading this week began with a really interesting concept to me; this idea that service can now be effectively demanded from a person.  While we think of service as something separate from work (as the piece points out), it's still something that we put on our resumes, and scholarship and school applications just like work experience.  It feels as though there are some areas where service history is really required in order to be competitive, and it certainly gives you an edge in many different fields.  For example, I was reading something about predictive, statistics based models earlier this week and the author used the exact example that when scouting baseball players to draft into the major leagues, community service is not something that can't accurately be quantified, but still something thought to show something about a persons character and is therefore useful to talent scouts looking for players who will be 'morall...

For me, it seems pretty clear cut that there are large similarities in motives between gentrification and colonialism.  For starters, both are driven by a desire either to exploit local resources, 'improve' the lives of the current population, or both. The drive to exploit resources seems to me to be the most obvious driver of both colonialism for 'improvement' and gentrification.  In situations of colonialism, the historical driver has almost always been the exploitation of natural resources.  In them more specific case of colonialism through development, the resource being exploited would seem to be the people themselves.  By interfering in local issues without an understanding of the dynamics of those issues, mission trips are made into vacations paid for by charity.  Having worked in a photo developing department for years, I saw a lot of this kind of thing.  People loved to show off photos of them working with locals and talked about how much of a di...