How has the plastic ban affected me in Boston.

Like many people, I use the plastic bags I get from the supermarkets to bag my trash. They seemed to be an important part of my waste management at home. I do support the single use plastic ban and was wondering how it would affect me.

Normally, I would try to bring my own shopping bag to buy groceries, but even with a plastic bag in my backpack, in my motorcycle / car, I usually end up with more plastic bags.

So after the ban on Dec 14, 2018, I have been to the supermarket several times and I did not bring my own bag at least once a week. However, I just decided to put what I can in my pockets after paying and carrying the remaining items on my hands.

The fee for the plastic bag was $0.10. While not much, mentally, I was not willing to shell out more money. I also realize that this made the hoard of plastic bags in my cupboard decrease significantly as I was bringing less home.

When I start to realize that I may have to pay for trash bags at some point of time, I start to sort out my trash more efficiently. I sort my styrofoam trays according to size, I fold my plastic covers and other waste to compress them. When using eggs, I stack my eggshells into each other. When I'm cutting vegetables or removing shells, bones and other food waste, I now try to consolidate the waste and compact it to use less plastic.

Overall, I would saw it will probably cost you more if you don't bring your own bags, or have more inconveniences created when you need to carry groceries in your hands without a plastic bag.

Perhaps it is a little price you have to pay, and it may prove that is may be an essential to change our behaviors.

-- Robin Low

Money and the need for Enabling currencies

Money today is generally used as a mode of payment. Money also encourages competition and creates a need for endless growth (interest).

It works for many of us and got us through the industrial age, however, there are a lot of problems that are caused by our current economic system. Concentration of wealth is happening and major  religions that were against charging interest did not seem to bother about it now, Income redistribution schemes have all failed. Welfare system and progressive tax are criticized for being effective.

With the coming of the 4th Industrial Age, the worsening of climate change, explosion in population and the ageing population, there will be a lot more problems faced, and the pollution caused may make it harder for future generations to survive.


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Enabling currencies / Complementary tokens can play a big role to solve many of today's problems. A cooperative currency can be created to try to address some of these problems.

In a job scarce future, a work enabling currency can be a complementary currency instead of welfare. It can be used a tool to buffer a region from shocks caused by failures in the money system.

Work 

Quality Childcare
Teaching
Mentoring Youths
Elderly Care
Arts, Entertainment, Music
Crime Prevention
Infrastructure repair
Housing Rehabilitation
Environmental Cleanup
Greening of towns
Urban farming
Public transport
Preventative healthcare
...


Where there are no jobs, people can still work to contribute to society and they can be rewarded by tokens.

The role of the tokens can also be used like Barter+, or it can be stored as work hours which can be exchanged for favors and other tasks in the gift economy. (e.g. Looking after a pet for a day in Boston can earn you tokens which you can exchange for someone to accompany your parents to the doctor for a medical checkup and back.)

Time can be spent on community building activities instead of being wasted. The community can be encouraged to cooperate and show reciprocity in places where money is scarce.

Tokens can also be given freely without transaction fees, contributing to the gift economy.

People can take up loans of the tokens to start small businesses and people contributing can trade the tokens they collect for the products and services.

Job vs Work

We "work" at our "jobs", and "work" can be used to refer to our "jobs", but the underlying difference is, "work" can be used in areas where its just labour, while "job" refers specifically to paid work.

The word work is more general than “job” – whereas “job” is a specific occupation/profession, “work” refers to general efforts and activities done to accomplish a goal. “Work” can be done both inside an official job and outside a job!

The word job is more recent, dates from the industrial age, whereas work is an old word.

In the coming of the 4th industrial age, climate change and biodiversity extinction, explosion of population, increase in human lifespan (Silver Tsunami) and financial instability, there is enough work for everybody, but it may not be the same for jobs.


Lets put some definition:
Job - activity that people do to obtain money -- to make a living.
Work - activity that is performed for its own sake, for pleasure derived from giving, or the passion expressed for the activity itself.

If you did not need the money, would you still have the job?

If the answer  is yes. Then your job is also your work, and you are the minority in this world.

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There is a connection to public health.

Evidence points that jobs without meaning makes you sick, and even kill you. I have a few friends that died this year. Friends that decided to grind and work hard to earn more money. One of them owns several houses but decided that it was hard to give up a high paying job and needed to work hard to maintain the same lifestyle until he collapsed and never woke up again. Another friend simply works in a stressful environment everyday and constantly falls ill, just to pay bills and get by, and eventually, his poor health caught up with him.

There are several research done to show that medical services have little effect on national health levels. Instead, what influences health is a work situation where people are in control of their lives.

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Money and Job.

The problem with work is finding someone to pay money for it. i.e. making it a paid job as well. The scarcity in jobs make money scarce as well. But does money need to remain scarce?

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Unemployment

With the coming of the 4th industrial revolution, will unemployment be just a blue collar thing?

No! Large corporation worldwide are shedding people and having "strategic layoffs" Even profitable companies are streamlining to be more efficient and this will be a trend and becoming new norm, and no jobs are safe.

As we progress in technology and processes, corporations may improve its competitiveness through downsizing. It also has economic consequences. as people buy less when they lose their jobs, but in Third World Countries, the middle class expands and market shifts there.

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Economic Exclusion

When economic irrelevance occurs, it creates depression in the population. "We don't need what they have and they can't buy what we sell."

Depression may become epidemic and you get a society that cares only for themselves. Violent rage and lashing out randomly and the majority of the society tries to blame others and find scapegoats for the problems.

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Fear by the majority

The next thing that is on everyone's mind is -- fear.

Fear leads to people and companies taking defensive positions, reducing investments, causing unemployment to increase and starting a vicious cycle.

People start to fear things different from them, and this creates political polarization. In many countries, political leaders cannot solve the problems as they follow traditional ways. 

The traditional left-right debate is an inheritance of the Industrial Age economic framework. Debate had to do with private or public ownership of the 'means of production'; i.e. factories and machines. 

What is missing is always -- money. In a poorer community, there is a lot of work to be done, and people are willing to do it, but who will pay for it?

Interestingly, with the fear, the population also turns to high nationalism, and we have seen the effects of this during WWII.

-- Robin Low

Money is an agreement, within a community, to use something as a means of payment.

Today, money is an agreement, within a community, to use something as a means of payment.

Sadly, today's money is used mainly as a means of payment rather than a "medium of exchange" which is used in the past.

4 features of (normal) money today:

1) Money is geographically attached to a nation state.
2) Money is 'fiat' money -- created out of nothing.
3) Money is created by bank debt.
4) Bank debt against payment of interest.

1) (Normal) Money creates a bond between countries divided by an invisible line. This arrange has serious consequences for all participants and value and exchange can change drastically, affecting the lives of many people without their ability to do anything about it.

Political corruption, chronic shortages of food and medicine, closure of companies, unemployment, deterioration of productivity and high dependence on oil have also contributed to the worsening crisis. Currency devaluation makes everything not affordable my the locals and causing a hyper inflation. (Instability of national currencies)

2) Money is created out of nothing -- like magic. Central bank can create money when needed.

3) The dollar started out as a bank loan. When you buy a car and request for a loan, the bank will magically create a deposit in the seller's account and you have to reimburse the loan until it is destroyed.

Debt money derives its value from scarcity relative to its usefulness. The scarcity has to be artificially and systematically introduced and maintained. Central banks play a role in their currency intentionally scarce to maintain relative value and this system in a fiat currency system is not self regulating.

4) Interest is a recent phenomena and the effects (to service the loan) are pervasive and powerful.
a) Interest indirectly encourages systematic competition among the participants in the system.
b) Interest fuels the need for endless economic growth, even when living standards remain the same.
c) Interest concentrates wealth by taxing the majority in favor of the rich.


In the fourth industrial revolution, a bold change to what we know as money is needed, otherwise the concentration of wealth and income inequality would be exponentially worse. Coupled with a climate change, an aging population and uncontrolled population growth, it is true that while money has the potential for abundance, sustainability and peace of mind; it can also engender unending suffering and hardship.



-- Robin Low

Short term financial interests vs long term sustainability

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

Temperature is up.

The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.4 Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with the five warmest years on record taking place since 2010. Not only was 2016 the warmest year on record, but eight of the 12 months that make up the year — from January through September, with the exception of June — were the warmest on record for those respective months.

Ice sheets are shrinking.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost an average of 281 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2016, while Antarctica lost about 119 billion tons during the same time period. The rate of Antarctica ice mass loss has tripled in the last decade.

Extreme events are getting more common.

The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events.

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All said and done, many companies and governments are still carrying on business as normal. Forests are getting chopped down. Vegetation are removed for monoculture crops like Palm Oil, waste are getting vented into the atmosphere or dumped in rivers.

Many of these practices are going on because of short term profits.

Any company that does not need to spend more on disposal will do so, and in the US, the EPA is cutting down regulations to allow more short term profits for companies.

For the convenience of "users" single use plastics are still used and they end up burnt or in landfills. In Singapore, plastic straws, single use plastic bags are still common, and recycling is talked about and not really practiced properly.

Even in 2018, where solar and wind power is getting cheaper, banks are still funding the construction of coal powered plants.

Most people are concerned about convenience than the environment.

If businesses and governments don't act, and the majority of the people are unaware or apathetic to the environment, it is hard to advocate change when the conditions are stacked against you.

-- Robin Low

Money and the fourth industrial revolution.

Money not only has the potential to contribute to global abundance, peace and sustainability if used wisely, but when restricted in its flow, it also has the ability to create unfathomable hardship and suffering.

Money is an important component of our lives. We spend a lot of time earning, saving and spending money. We allocate a lot of mental, physical and emotional energy around the topic of money, but how many of us really knows what is money and where it comes from? Income inequality is becoming a big problem and there are many other problems associated with the current financial system.

However, it is not just the lack of money that is preventing us from addressing current challenges. Rather, it is the limited functionality of our money and monetary system that is the major force behind our present disorders. Many current solutions reside within the architecture of our current monetary system and in out understanding of and agreements around, money.

A hundred years ago, the world was oblivious of pollution and over population. Nationalism, competition, colonization and endless growth is encouraged. These values start to shape the monetary and banking systems we have today.

In the coming of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we have a monetary system from another age which is starting to look inadequate to solve the challenges ahead. Many attempts at money reform have failed in the past, because they were trying to radically change the official money system in a time where the problems do not seem as obvious as today. But instead of replacing the money system completely, a complementary currency can operate in parallel. With the availability of information technologies, we have what is necessary to implement new money system that allows for money innovation.

Upskilling? How about leveraging on their other soft skills?

I have often heard about people talking about re-training their older staff, then paying them less because they are now "without experience" and starting in a new industry.

Sadly, a lot of experienced workers in many industries have lost their jobs. In many cases, due to the change of direction of the government policies making some industries disappear. They told to get IT skills, programming skills or join the hospitality industry.

Having trained refugees in innovation and technology, I realized that it is much easier said than done. I've worked with ex-prisoners and various other skilled labor on imparting tech skills and unfortunately, a small fraction of them can really make it in the fast moving tech industry.

Looking at the skill sets that these experienced people have, they still have a lot of project management skills, connections and other soft skills that the new start-up industry people do not possess.

A process engineer for a manufacturing company can still add value to the innovation and creativity to a start-up company run by a 20 year old, by adding structure. There may be inter-generational gap in terms of thinking and ideas, but as for diversity, adding other opinions can actually make the company more creative and innovative than just having a few college grads running the show.

Many tech companies, software or hardware will eventually engage larger established companies as clients or a more mature customer base, and having someone who speaks "the language" and help communicate the needs -- can offer good insights on what the customer may actually need.

I see "upskilling" and "skills upgrading" as a good way for businesses to retrench people based on their age and then paying them less on new jobs which they have to be trained for.

There is a need for a better way to move forward -- a need to build empathy and better communication skills in organizations so that they can fully utilize the potential of their workers, but helping the different generations communicate better, valuing experience and outside knowledge which may not seem relevant to the industry initially, but having a diverse background allows different insights which may lead to better framing of problems and better solutions.

There are always people who can code, but a tech company needs more than just coders.

-- Robin Low