Turf Valley Hotel Lobby

The Turf Valley Hotel sits in the center of the residential neighborhood, Turf Valley, and provides a public space for people in the lobby, which has three lounges each with leather furniture and a coffee table. Most people sit in the lobby lounges briefly until they leave for the hotel's restaurant, pools, spa, gym, business conference center or hotel room. Young people sit the longest because they eat snacks sold at the front desk next to the lounges in between swimming.

I highly recommend visiting this place. The spot has everything to encourage people to sit there and is surrounded by recreational activities the hotel provides. To get people of all ages to use the space for extended amounts of time, there should be free Wifi.

Word Count: 120

"EVERYBODY LOVE EVERYBODY"

I was at a party in Morgantown, WV and got hungry so I went to a gas station close by for food, but I could not find my way back. All of the houses looked the same to me and the temperature was in the teens. I was alone, lost and freezing. Before my friends could find me, an employee closing his store invited me inside to get warm. The man could not speak well and kept quivering, but I did not think anything of it because he clearly worked in the shop and kept smiling and being friendly to me. He closed the shop with me inside and told me to lock the door when I left. The man went out of his way to risk his store being robbed so a complete stranger would be warm. I could not get over how kind he was. When I told my friends what happened, they laughed and said the employees at the shop I was in are notorious for using heroin during their shifts. I would not have believed that at first, but it explained the man's bizarre behavior.

This experience led me to believe that there is love in everyone and changed how I see people. People's choices and how I've been taught to malign them for their choices can no longer keep me from at least trying to find a reason to like them back, no matter who they are or what they have done. He performed an extremely kind act without caring how the world expected him to behave for using heroin. He showed me how to believe that people's negative expectations of me cannot change how much I'll still find a reason to be nice.

I'm Not a Communist

One of the first things Shelly Blake-Plock told his audience is that an entrepreneur will fail many times before ever founding a successful, profitable business. When he/she fails, he can either quit entrepreneurship or re-invent himself and pursue another business plan. The audience brainstormed business ideas by first deciding what needs to be changed in the world in the next ten years. Most of the answers involved environmental issues like climate change. Then he asked us to think of something that could be sold to individual people that could help resolve these issues, emphasizing that it did not have to actually save the world; it just needed to entice people to buy the product. He told us about Kodak filing bankruptcy because they were hesitant to re-invent themselves or change what their company sold. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, but hesitated to sell it to the public since they would sell less film if digital cameras became popular and eventually fell behind after selling its patents to its competitors for a short-term profit.

Shelly Blake-Plock was mostly interested in business ideas that would make the most money. This kind of thinking is expected in a monetary-based capitalist society. I think people latch on to the idea that capitalism is the best possible system because it brings people freedom and motivation to have strong work ethics more so than any other system in the past. People ignore the flaws of capitalism rather than re-invent the system entirely because most think its the only system. Some of the business ideas the audience thought of were profitable, but none of them would effectively change what the audience originally set out to change before Blake-Plock explained that saving the planet was not the ultimate goal. If humanity is to achieve the most important goals like the one's the audience addressed originally, we must re-invent the system entirely instead of adapting to an environmentally harmful system.

Stossel