Zopa.com: A Revolutionary Website

In class the other day, we watched a TED talk by Rachel Botsman. She is Oxford and Harvard educated, and wrote the influential book What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collabrative Consumption. Botsman has come up with an entirely new way to recycle, and is sure to become a big name in the years to come.

After watching the video, we each had to pick a random company that followed the idea of collabrative consumption, and I got Zopa. Zopa is a peer to peer lending company where people can go and say how much money they'd be willing to lend at what interest rate, and then borrowers go and choose which offer they'd like to take. The whole transaction is free of any bankers, so there's no overhead. Zopa is an idea that could potentially revolutionize the lending industry.

Not only is Zopa a revolutionary idea, but it's also quite safe. They conduct background checks on all of their members, and have them all sign background checks. The borrowers also pay the lenders back through direct deposit, and if any payments are missed then a collection agency gets involved. It seems to me like Zopa is a great thing, and that it'll definetly take off and become something huge.

National Holocaust Museum

Friday we our Gifted and Talented class took a trip to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. For weeks I had been hearing about how powerful the experience would be and how emotional I would get. To be honest, I simply brushed off these comments and was simply looking forward to missing a day of school. How was I to know that after leaving the museum, I would be one of the people singing the museum's praises?

When you first get to the museum, you get crammed into this tiny elevator and brought up to the top floor, then you're set free to roam around. The thing that I noticed first was how silent the entire museum was. You could literally hear a pin drop. People were in awe of what was being presented to them and they had no words. When I started to move through the museum I kept being hammered with images and information, it was almost too much to handle.



The most powerful part of the museum was the room filled with shoes. There was literally a room filled with shoes that were taken from the Jews that were killed in the concentration camps, and they were piled three or four deep on the floor. You hear that millions of Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and you never give it a second thought because it's only a number. Then when you see something that belonged to an actual person it suddenly becomes real. The sad part is that there were a lot of shoes in the room, but the number wasn't even close to the actual number of people who died in the Holocaust. Overall, I would definetly recommend the museum to everyone, it's a great way learn about the Holocaust while also seeing the emotional side of the tragedy.