North Texas Daily (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 98, No. 53, Ed. 1 Tuesday, November 29, 2011 Page: 6 of 8
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Page 6
iews
Tuesday, November 29,2011
Ian Jacoby, Views Editor
ntviewseditor@gmail.com
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Did you take
advantage of the
newly popular
Cyber Monday?
'Actually no. I bought
something online [Sunday], but
not [Monday]. So I guess not;
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"Yes I did. I actually bought a
car, a brand-new Audi. Its pretty
cool! And I bought a brand-
new computer'
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"No, I did not partake in that,
and I didn't even know it was
occurring;
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"No I didn't. I knew about [it],
but I'm in class from 11 to 8, so I
didn't have much time."
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The Editorial Board
and submission policies:
Josh Pherigo, Amber Arnold, Ian
Jacoby, Sean Gorman, Jesse Sid-
lauskas, Sydnie Summers, Stacy
Powers,Valerie Gonzalez, Carolyn
Brown, Drew Gaines, Cristy An-
gulo and Berenice Quirino.
The NT Daily does not necessar-
ily endorse, promote or agree with
the viewpoints of the columnists
on this page. The content of the
columns is strictly the opinion
of the writers and in no way reflect
the beliefs of the NT Daily. To in-
quire about column ideas, submit col-
umns or letters to the editor, send an
e-mail to ntviewseditor@gmail.com.
Staff Editorial
Cyber Monday reflects digital age
With things like online classes, online
banking and online media, today's
society lives a digital existence. So it
makes sense that top retailers would
create an online shopping holiday to
complement Black Friday. Enter Cyber
Monday.
Cyber Monday started in November
2005 but gained momentum when
online sales jumped from $837 million
on the Monday after Thanksgiving in
2009 to $1.2 billion in 2010. Reuters
reports that online sales are up for
this Cyber Monday by 15 percent over
last year.
Cyber Monday finds its success in
the same kind of one-day-special-event
deals employed by physical retailers
during Black Friday. Unlike Black Friday
shoppers, those who go the online route
don't have to wait in protracted lines at
3 in the morning. CareerBuilder.com
estimates that half of American workers
planned to shop from the office.
With deals like Target's $500 discount
on a 40-inch Samsung television and
Sony's 33 percent discount on one of its
pricy entertainment bundles, it's easy
to see how people would be distracted
from work.
This consumer holiday not only
represents single-day growth for online
retail, but a growing digital world.
Businesses' increased profit from
online retailing creates the opportu-
nity for better deals on a year-round
basis. In fact, a survey conducted by
online rebate service Ebates showed
that 64 percent of online consumers
were there because it's where they
believed the best prices and deals to
be. The growth of online company
Groupon- a digital coupon distributor
- can be attributed to its astounding
deals, offering anywhere from 50-90
percent off various products on a daily
basis.
Coupled with businesses' willing-
ness to move to a digital marketplace is
a group of consumers who are getting
more and more Internet-savvy by the
day. Time magazine explains that in
recent years some older consumers
were uncomfortable giving out credit
card numbers online, making digital
shopping impossible. However, as
older Americans become more digi-
tally literate, more and more of the
over-35 crowd is opting for post-Thanks-
giving splurging from the comfort of
their homes.
In this digital world, chances are
that you're reading this article from
your computer instead of in print. And
while online content maybe the decline
of the print news industry, digitiza-
tion is nothing but beneficial for the
consumer market.
Columns
Anti-online piracy bill
would do more harm
than good
Congressional Rep. Lamar Smith
of Texas' 21st district introduced the
Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA,
to the House of Representatives
last month. Essentially, the bill is
aimed at stopping online piracy
and is mainly geared toward Web
companies that are hosting unau-
thorized copyrighted content.
If SOPA is passed, websites like
Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube,
SoundCloud and many other
popular social media sites would
be required to police user-gener-
ated content, and the bill would
make it possible for these compa-
nies to be sued for said content. So,
for example, if someone uploaded a
photo from the latest Harry Potter
movie on their blog, the hosting blog
site would be sued as well as blocked
from Internet service providers and
search engines, all without stepping
foot in a courtroom.
Major opponents of the bill,
including Google and Facebook,
insist that SOPA is essentially
"Internet censorship" and would be
economically devastating, resulting
in the loss of millions of jobs. SOPA's
provisions would require search
engines like Google to sever ties
with alleged copyright-infringing
sites in both advertising and search
results, which would negatively
affect the revenue of innocent
companies.
The lead supporters of the bill are
major companies in the entertain-
ment industry, such as the Motion
Picture Association of America,
who are understandably tired of
having their content pirated all over
the Internet. Every time someone
downloads a copy of "Harry Potter
and the Deathly Hallows" instead of
buying the movie, these companies
lose money. SOPA would supposedly
eliminate downloading sites like
The Pirate Bay, which allows users
to share and download movies and
music for free.
But at what cost would this policy
be effective? The entertainment
industry has been fighting the
battle against illegal downloading
for years; however, SOPA is way too
generalized to be the answer. The
bill would affect too many innocent
companies and result in the loss of
too many jobs.
Google's copyright policy counsel
Katherine Oyama said it best at
the recent congressional hearing:
"As long as there is money to be
made pushing pirated and counter-
feit products, tech-savvy criminals
around the world will find ways to
sell these products online."
Jessica St. Ama is a news edito-
rial journalism senior. She can be
reached at jlstama@yahoo.com.
Newt Gingrich
has selective
historical memory
It isn't just that some of the candi-
dates for the GOP presidential nomi-
nation occasionally seem divorced
from modern reality; it's that they're
determined to refight battles that
most of us thought had ended roughly
a century ago.
A case in point is newly inaugu-
rated front-runner Newt Gingrich,
who in a talk Monday at Harvard
University denigrated federal child
labor laws that date back to the
1930s.
"It is tragic what we do in the
poorest neighborhoods in trapping
children ... in child laws which are
truly stupid," Gingrich said. "OK, you
say to someone, 'You shouldn't go to
work before you're 14,16 years of age.'
Fine. You're totally poor. You're in a
school that is failing with a teacher
that is failing. I tried for years to have
a very simple model. Most of these
schools ought to get rid of the union-
ized janitors, have one master janitor
and pay local students to take care of
the school."
Mr. Bumble from "Oliver Twist"
could not have said it better.
If Gingrich were the only one
invoking ancient legislative history,
we'd dismiss it as an anomaly
(he is, after all, a former history
professor).
But he's got company. Texas Gov.
Rick Perry's book "Fed Up!" is a trea-
tise on the ways our liberal great-
grandparents destroyed America,
starting with the likes of Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson at the
height of the Progressive Era.
Planned Parenthood, founded in
the shadow of World War I by feminist
icon Margaret Sanger, is a popular
target among the GOP hopefuls, most
of whom would like to pull its federal
funding.
Planned Parenthood arose to help
women escape poverty by helping
them make their own reproductive
decisions; it's clinics anger modern
conservatives because they perform
abortions, but they also save women's
lives by giving them an alternative
to terminating their pregrnancies in
unsafe conditions.
What characterizes the response to
these historic reforms is cluelessness
about the forces that created them.
Perry romanticizes the 19th
century laissez-faire era, back before
the federal government stepped in to
regulate such things as food safety or
labor rights, while seemingly unaware
that it was a time of violent class
warfare between rich and poor.
And surely there are few people
besides Gingrich who want to return
to the days when middle schoolers
were forced to earn their own keep.
Child labor laws were enacted
because children, who are easy to
exploit, were once thrown into factory
sweatshops instead of being sent to
school.
There is no surer way to create a
permanent underclass than to fail
to educate poor kids, which is why
today they're not allowed to work
during school hours and kids under 14
can't perform most forms of nonfarm
paid labor.
It's tough to do your homework
when you're working as a janitor, Mr.
ex-Speaker.
This editorial appeared in the Los
Angeles Times on Wednesday.
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Pherigo, Josh. North Texas Daily (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 98, No. 53, Ed. 1 Tuesday, November 29, 2011, newspaper, November 29, 2011; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth209207/m1/6/: accessed May 21, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.