Considering the ban of some of our plastic products around the world. The problem in question is very real but the scenario also gives an opportunity to review how we readjust things when we realize an issue in our society. At the same time, it provides an opportunity to study this important behavior. In many ways, our ever more dynamic world proves our industrial infrastructure to be flawed. From bad waste management to unsafe products in circulation. Its foundation, originating from the industrial revolution has remained mostly the same since its inception. It has sure been optimized, but its general concepts are still what define today’s models. Its current ecosystem is merely the accumulation of individuals with their own methods or resources — often composed of parts that are kept as trading secrets — duct taped with laws, norms and conventions. This lack of connectivity between parties and products renders its potential diminished and harder to benefit from a standardization in resources like traceability, logistics or quality assurance. All of which are at the core of what supports this fast and impatient industrial age and without which it would not be able to keep pace with.
Contribution
A product is created and put on the market. Sooner or later, wastes of this product start to accumulate and eventually start affecting its surrounding environment. A regulation is evaluated and the product is being replaced or put out of the market. The issue was perceived and managed, but a chance to rethink our market and consumption reality is also present. Because a product in need quickly spread around the world, international management is becoming more and more critical. A way to achieve this could be by introducing a tax system dedicated to that. If a company that produce plastics, to provide straws for example, had a small contribution tax on the revenue generated from those tons of plastic sold, a revenue pipeline could then be built to create or help a organization that do research and/or development on a related field or for an operation that needs to be done, for example and would sustain a platform of solutions and innovations to mitigate issues created by the consumption of the different products available. Instead of waiting for unpredictable donations or charities that make up an unstable revenue stream to sustain a growing ecosystem of industrial scale activities.
Business growth and life cycle management together, both enforcing the other. Straw sales now become a direct factor of plastics related technologies and processes development. As straws are sold by enormous numbers each year around the world, even a minimalist fee would still be noticeable and would accelerate the development of its underlying science. As the technology used to produce those straw evolves, the cheaper it becomes for manufacturers around the world to produce them and the easier to manage. Winning on both the environment management and business profitability sides. Straws themselves are only a fraction of the plastic industry’s global revenue. The plastic industry itself is only a fraction of the total number of industrial sectors present in the market.
This scenario can be applied to a variety of industries from a local vendor to giants like tobacco and fossil fuel companies to virtually any other type of business, as they all directly or indirectly influence the environment, either by bad waste management or from the cultivation/extraction of the primary resources needed or by using the product itself. Having companies causing health issues funding health research and climate disturbing ones investing in climate sciences automatically with their revenue. The reality that the corporations are more in the favor of its shareholders as they want a return on their investment suffocates the innovation. Unveiling a disruptive product is a sensible thing to do, it may be too expensive, not easily portable to the mass or the possible repercussions might not be well anticipated. As companies try relentlessly to innovate to beat their competitors, many times it has arrived that a product was not well understood or even safe to be commercialized. Many are well known to be unsafe but still are commercialized and used. Unveiling a product can also be politically challenging or putting the economy at risk. For lots of reasons, it can be complicated, especially if it has a lot of implications, like a cure. The bottom line of this is that even with their advanced knowledge and capabilities, companies and other groups will not necessarily work on solving the issues that they are causing because they are focussed on their competitors so as to not see themselves be left behind. With a minimalist fee, the company can focus on returning what their investors want while still contributing to the development of the resources needed to support the circulation of their products and their effects. This support could also be very beneficial to the proliferation of the market by itself. The more the party sells, the more money is invested in consequence, keeping things proportionate. With the right group of professionals, major industrial sectors could be broken down to a list and a scheme could be made to fit with the actual and future demand. By following this paradigm, every company would be fueling an ecosystem of development that would evolve in parallel with what is circulating around in order to react quickly when a product starts affecting the health of the consumers, the environment or even the market itself. With this public knowledge base, industries would also be able to better design their products and lose less money in the process of keeping their products “in the loop”. With the right task distribution system, some applications could even make the process completely transparent from the consumer and more accessible, putting less management on the shoulders of the manufacturer and therefore, less logistics, time and energy. Reducing many of the costs of a business in general. Helping businesses focusing more on their strategies.
Management
Having a common loop would lead to more standardization in manufacturing and would help make different products more affordable in general, paving the way for a radical burst of technological growth backed by an internationally scaled industrial revenue force. The kind of force that is needed to face the challenges awaiting for our ever developing society. Simply banning a product is not enough as it will not only merely teach a good or bad lesson it might simply end up affecting innovation. At the current industrial pace, a small slowdown in the market could still hurt the economy. Just trading a problem for another, will ultimately add more complexity to the initial one. What we need to do is to assume the place of our different circulating products even if it is apparently not important in one’s everyday life by itself. The necessity to move towards a system that would have companies adopting a “research management” contribution defined by precisely designed laws and taxes will do more than simply fix the issues created from products’ side effects. A non profit organization should be created and assigned the role of regulating and assigning the funds received by the many companies around the world in order to route it efficiently to the right industrial sector to then choose an association or facility or even stripe the funds across many.
This management system would grow in sophistication over time and would introduce more semantic in development efforts and management. This networked platform would ease the processes between and idea, its design and its marketing, abstracting the manufacturing and life cycle behind, effectively providing some manufacturing as a service backed by an ever growing industrial resiliency system that will be able to either know how to recycle properly the materials or energy wasted or to explore different ways to prevent a fight against a health issue. Some members of this community of organizations should also be assigned the role to perform any necessary operation. Operations might include cleaning an infected water source like it could also include a legal group to sensitize the different governments and lobbies to understand the importance and benefits of such a system. To be efficient, the organization should not be viewed as a “green non profit group” similar to many other charities. This kind of mind state has been having a hard time tackling the problems at the industrial scale. The organization(s) in charge should exploit modern information technologies such as the blockchain, decentralized autonomous organisation system architectures turning legal, fiscal and other human resource professionals into software developers, “HR engineers”, creating HR applications to bring publicly accessible services. As such, an industrial mindset should be adopted in this approach to ensure that recycling and environment protection is not something that needs to be seen as in the “rival clan” of the industrial image as it is often the way those two ideologies are shown publicly. Combining forces instead of having them against will bring more than the sum of its parts. The popular image of the corporate and material processing factory do not need to be in competition with the more green, more human vision of current environmental groups. Rather, more benefits could be gained from a synergy between both worlds. Worlds that are simply two sides of the same reality.
This kind of system would also help quality control via public audits, similar to the open source industry. Ensuring a good understanding of what industries are injecting into the society would also help develop more trust in the development processes of health affecting products, for example, cosmetics, drugs and GMOs that are sectors which generate large revenue streams. Building more integrity between the regular consumer and what they consume while making sure tools and organizations are in place to spot a bad product and to deliver the necessary knowledge to resolve the issue while not stopping the economical growth of a certain trend or sector like banning it could do. With this kind of solution, even fidget spinners would contribute. Any trend, fad or other high selling product would become a direct factor to the scientific and technological background that makes this product available in the first place even if the relationship is not apparent. In the current societal context that we live in, most products are backed by science and engineering at some point but most of them at the same time, do not contribute to those fields in return, therefore creating a gap between what is circulating and the level of control. As there is no need to understand what fire is made of to use a lighter, anyone can buy one for a dollar or two without any concern and would transparently invest in many sectors with no effort or the need to subscribe to a charity foundation. While this may sound trivial, other technologies, like nuclear energy are advanced enough to damage the environment, but still not understood enough to permit an easy cleaning of wastes and leaks and as such have a hard time integrating themselves and providing the expected benefits into our daily lives. This sector’s companies do not receive as much funds as others as they do not have an iPhone to sell that will finance further development. As such, they find themselves isolated and their evolution as a whole is slower than the other sectors like electronics and information technologies that benefit greatly from being popular and ubiquitous. If a technology within a sector is less present or commonly used, others that are can act as a financial interface to it. As nuclear science is part of the energy sector, electricity bills and other revenue sources would accelerate its development. By using other products’ sales as financial interfaces, the platform could serve as an incubator for emerging technologies that would otherwise be more complicated to be worked on until they are ready to be integrated. A public and open staging to explore.
By allowing the public to review the evolution of things, an open source like culture can grow and become a major factor on the way ideas and resources are shared and routed to projects. Industries in the fields like artificial intelligence and mining or construction that will impact the job market should also be responsible for cleaning the damage and the reshaping of the society they will trigger. As they will at the same time participate to a immensely lucrative industry, a minor contribution fee could be used in turn to fund the development of solutions to allow the society to adapt while keeping the economy healthy and growing, protecting governments from an economical crisis and other problems of the possible massive unemployment caused by a disproportionate boom in automation. As the system matures, more features can be developed to bring solutions for business needs, saving a considerable amount of money to companies, enabling them an access to a more flexible available system that would in time surpass the commercial solutions like so many open source projects have become the de facto in the software industry for lots of enterprises today. New start ups could benefit from an easy integration with accessible administration resources, providing enterprise infrastructures as a service. An application interface would allow programmatically access and use these resources, defining more of the company as code. This accessibility would help for fast prototyping and greatly reduce the time to market, allowing businesses to focus on their products and strategies. Companies being “published” on the platform that serves as an application store for businesses like application stores or “apps stores” for mobile applications that are popular today. As the demand changes, new policies and services can be researched and developed before being integrated.
Rebate
As the system feeds from more revenue, more innovations will take place and therefore new products will eventually emerge from it, possibly creating whole new markets like the television or the gaming console did. Sales generated from those new markets would represent a solid economical power house generating affiliate profit to its investors. An “affiliate native” system would not only be supporting innovation and research but also provide a way for different parties to generate a profit, encouraging them to participate. Unlocking a synergy between many sectors that have no apparent relationship. Having the banking system participating into this network would lead to a programmable currency. Turning dollars into packets similar to data packets on the internet with protocols and encapsulations to carry information about their identity, origin and destination, allowing to track efficiently its influence and mapping it. This map could then be a resource to use in order to return an affiliate profit from something sold that came from the platform to the parties that invested in its development. Spending and buying are then binded with the action of investing. Allowing consumers to create an investment portfolio with the products they buy and companies with the products they sell.
With time the network will have expanded to exponential proportions. By the time it develops branches and sub-branches with their own culture, trends and market, contributors would be able to profit from a considerable passive revenue, whether the contributor is an organization, an everyday consumer buying everyday goods like a lighter or even a professional who worked in the network in some way or another. In time, this passive revenue could be a step towards a universal basic income that may require more than only a government’s effort. Automated revenu is likely to become a domain of its own in the future and active participation would be a key factor to become a dominant player. As fields like automation and artificial intelligence become more developed and accessible, a large portion of the job market is at risk. Turning employees into micro business owners or consumers might be even vital for the economy. Shopping and selling playing the role of a routing service like the phone operators from the 70’s. Working on becoming market vectors, contributing to the circulation of money instead of its generation.
Conclusion
At large, the essentials are pointed out. International knowledge sharing and cooperation will become more than just a need to sustain our fast developing society, offering a scalable ecosystem of industrial strength to serve as a platform on top of which an explosion of applications can be developed, tested, deployed and monitored on a common ground. Easing the administration of our common resources and harvesting more from fancy management.
Thoughts on contribution, management and rebate
Francis R
System Administrator
http://theprogrammist.com, 21st century issues in technology, economics and politics