Super Dank Bud

In amsterdam, super dank buds. So many crystals you have to waste some at the end after rolling.

Muhammad Yunus – Profile

A weathered woman who has seen the hard side of life sits alone at her worktable, making a bamboo stool. She is in a trance-like state, threading stems of bamboo through existing stitches, with craftsmanship that could only come from hours of repetition. She looks up, but gets back to her work. She has to finish soon.

A middle aged Bangladeshi man walks by, and notices her working. He asks her how much she makes, and her answer totals to two pennies. Why, he asks.

Many people in less economically developed countries depend on greedy moneylenders that take advantage of the local population, “in a way that all the benefits passed on to the moneylender and none remained for the borrowers,”, said Muhammad Yunus in an interview with the NBR. In the example of the woman mentioned above, her craftsmanship earned her two pennies a day, because she had to buy the bamboo for 25 cents from a trader. This trader in turn exploited her situation by lending her the bamboo on the condition that she sold her bamboo stool to the trader at the price he wished.

This happens every day.

Muhammad Yunus, Bangladeshi by birth, tells and lives a story in which he collected the names of people who needed a bit of money, just to get themselves out of poverty and to be self sufficient. The hope was that microcredit would help enterprising people on their way to a business, people who did not qualify for traditional bank loans. Yesterday, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their “efforts to create economic and social development from below”, according to a press release from the Nobel Prize Foundation.

Microcredit is the lending of small amounts of money to borrowers with the goal of entrepreneurship in mind. The people that seek microloans generally have no assets or collateral to back up their loans, as well as lacking the necessary employment history for traditional credit transactions. Microcredit is usually associated with financial services to the very poor.

The number of people on the list was 42. The amount of money they needed was USD$27.

Yunus decided to do something about the situation that he could so easily change. In the year 1976, he visited the small village of Jobra in Hathazari, Upazila (Thana) of the district of Chittagong, Bangladesh. His first loan was to a group of Bangladeshi women, $27, with his own money. They profited from the loan, making a combined profit of BDT 0.5 (The Bangladeshi currency) USD$0.02 each. When Muhammad Yunus was asked about decided to take such a path, he said that the poverty and suffering around him was something he could not fix. “People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation”, Yunus said. “I saw how people suffered for a tiny amount of money….Here we were talking about the conomic development, about investing billions of dollars in various programs, and I could see it wasn’t billions of dollars people needed right away. They needed a tiny amount of money”. Yunus wished to empower the poor people that were exploited, so that they could sell their products at market prices. In the case of the aforementioned woman, the price for which the stools could be sold was much higher than what the trader was offering her.

Even though microcredit is seen as a selfless act to help citizens in need, Muhammad Yunus points out the need to charge interest, in order to create business so that more people could be helped. “..if you do things in a businesslike way, then the project can become as big as you want it to because you are earning enough money to cover all your costs. You are not dependant on anybody. You are not dependant on a limited supply of capital.” As a result, Yunus’ organization is self sufficient, and is able to extend its help further.

The villagers who had been lent money from Yunus could not believe what was happening. Yunus, wondering to himself why, “If you can make so many people so happy with such a small amount of money, why shouldn’t you do more of it?”. This is exactly what he did, initially asking banks to lend poor people money. The banks refused, saying that the people were not creditworthy – why would poor people pay their money back, asked the banks. Yunus offered himself as the guarantor of the loans after that, and lent out the money, which was paid back in full. “I had demonstrated that there was no risk to the process, that banks could do better by giving money out to poor people, who were paying it back, than to rich people, who were not paying it back.”, Yunus said. “Bangladesh has a tradition of rich people who borrow money from the big banks and hardly pay it back.”

Yunus managed to acquire a loan from the state owned Janata Bank, to jumpstart the development of his institution. He cites his concern for the men-dominated banking industry, and wished to change the paradigm which so many people were adhering to. “…when I began, I wanted to make sure half the borrowers in my program are women so that they are even.”, said Yunus. “It was not easy because women themselves didn’t think that they should borrow money,” Women in Bangladesh were often told that they had no business in the business industry, a cultural fear which Yunus tried hard to dispel. Fortunately, women listened to him and took a step out of their comfort zone, and settled comfortably. Yunus found that money that went to women generally had a more positive beneficial effect to their families and their businesses than when money was lent to men. “As a result, now 97% of our 7 million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women”, said Yunus.

After a successful pilot, Grameen Bank (meaning “Bank of the Villages”, in Bangla, the local language) was set up to administer these microloans. To date, Yunus’ work has enabled 7.8 thousand million US dollars to be lent out to poor people, of which 6.9 thousand million has been repaid.

Money loaned out to enterprising, creative women was found to have a snowball effect, said Yunus. “When you were successful in the first round, when you took tiny amounts – $30, $35 – and went into business and paid back the loan, you are now much more equipped to do better. Bigger. So you ask for a $50 loan, a $60 loan, because you think you can do bigger business and more challenging business than when you first took out an easy loan,”

“Empowerment has come to the women of Bangladesh — even the poorest women in Bangladesh. It’s tremendous. It’s a dramatic change that has taken place. Women have access to money. They can now plan. They can now dream. Their children are in school. Many of them are going into higher education through Grameen Bank financing.

” The bank was recognized as a private independent bank in 1983, and boasts a 97.93% recovery rate – the rate at which money is paid back to the bank.

Grameen Bank has expanded exponentially, expanding itself to create organizations to address electronics, education and clothes, to name a few. It also operates in many foreign countries, such as The United States, Canada, England, France and Norway. “Rich countries, poor countries – the problem remains the same.”

They’re going out of business.

How People Do It

English Majors do it with poetic grace.

Physics Majors do it at either low high frequencies.

Maths Majors do it at a tangent to each other.

Psychologists act out their Freudian desires.

Existentialists do it pointlessly.

Lawyers do it dishonestly.

Engineers do it meticulously.

Astronomers do it with this. (NSFW)

Entrepreneurs find a niche and fill it.

Environmentalists make sure they emit zero emissions.

Geographers survey the area before making a commitment.

Politicians do it dishonestly.

Doctors do it and then refer you to someone else.

Marketers don’t need beds, pamphlets will do.

Dentists say it won’t hurt but it does.

Musicians do it rhythmically.

Chemists bang.

Economists do it while wondering what the opportunity cost is.

the thousand lies

as the darkness seeps in coming in from every direction i stop, wondering what has happened. the tendrils of darkness come at me, like some insidious beast, probing, feeling me with its insect like antennae, each brush against me sending dry ice burns down my spine. i try not to breath but i choke on the sulphorus fumes that are emanating from it. Acrid smoke fills every orifice in my body smothering me like a shrink wrap. I try to move but i am trapped. i am trapped. fear grips me before my survival instinct, but to my dismay the latter has been extinguished. I just wish to die right now. what is happening? what is happening? my silent voice echoes around the emptiness that is my life…coming back to me, gnashing, gargling gulping grinding grappling at me and my conciousness, quickly receding. there is no light as they say, only darkness. there are no good memories to flash as lies are the the only thing that i have ever known.

Blog Title Here

Blog title ideas welcome. Well here I am stoking my fire for blogging, what should I start with? I’m going to start with toilet humour.

Today I was on the toilet and I was wondering to myself. Hey, I’m going to start a sport called Toilet Bowl Platform Diving, TBPD. It’s an Extreme sport if you’re smart enough to work out why it’s an EXtreme sport…Points go out to perfect landings. In traditional diving there’s the perfect entry when the diver just slides into the water with nary a splash. Now that’s a 10 point landing. In the same manner waste can be an art too, with the twisting figures from each origin, may it be the perfect province of Protein or the fortituous faction of Fibre or even the uncannycountry of Carbohydrates, plus some mixed ethnicity waste too. They come in all shapes and sizes all hoping to win the approval of the Creator. In contrast with traditional human diving though, there is only one standard move called the Drop. The Drop involves the dropping in question dropping into the diving pool with varying levels of success. Sometimes the drop does not execute successfully and the poor participants are left to scrape their innards along the Cruel Curvaceous Cavern where they leave their mark. May they rest in pieces. This sport is a new one, and would appreciate your support. We currently have 1 member but with your support we can have a global membership. However, as with any sport, there are always undesireables.

The Floater

This nasty victim refuses to leave the arena after he has completed his performance and ruins the experience for other participants. Only with the Persuasive toilet Paper policing it can it be fully controlled. Sometimes they stay for days, refusing to leave and spoiling the experience for the other soilers. Damn them.

The ever Slippery Sludge

More commonly known as the participants from the Dai ar Ria family, these participants turn up and make a mess of everything and ruin the experience for the others as well as angering the Creator. They were conceived through the poor diet and perhaps unwitting ingesting of bacteria. They never put up a good show and demand to be given an audience that turns out to be an anticlimax. Especially at inopportune times of the night. Always keep you waiting for that non existent final show. S.S. slowly dies away after a couple of hours but leaves an unsavory sensation on the diving platform. Must be avoided at all costs.

Thank you for your unwavering support. We always need some support when we’re trying to get the bigger competitors on the stage, you know.