Author: Adam Clare

Good Companies Have Good Indigenous Relations

Standing Rock #DAPL

With greater awareness of environmental and social issues investors have asked companies to report on how their activities impact communities. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are standard for large corporations nowadays which let investors (and interested parties) see what the company has been up to reconcile any negative impacts the company has perpetuated. Increasingly, investors are asking for CSR statements to include indigenous issues since companies that ignore local concerns tend to perform worse, a good example of this is the recent debacle of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

In Canada and around the world, we are entering a time where the prudent company is the company that secures Indigenous consent before beginning activities, involves Indigenous peoples as partners, and works with them to establish a clear framework for ongoing relations in order to renew and maintain relationships. For investors, strong Indigenous relations are a marker that a company is a stable investment, with management foresight, solid partnerships and prospects for sustainable growth.

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Boredom is Good for you

bus

Too many people are afraid of boredom and that needs to change. Boredom can actually be really good for you and helps you develop as a human being. Getting bored means that you’re familiar with what’s going on around you, resulting in your mind looking for stimulus within itself (and there’s a lot going on in there). This boredom allows you to ignore known stimulus and focus on what’s important in ways that can’t be predicted during moments of excitement.

Boredom is the gateway to mind-wandering, which helps our brains create those new connections that can solve anything from planning dinner to a breakthrough in combating global warming. Researchers have only recently begun to understand the phenomenon of mind-wandering, the activity our brains engage in when we’re doing something boring, or doing nothing at all. Most of the studies on the neuroscience of daydreaming have only been done within the past 10 years. With modern brain-imaging technology, discoveries are emerging every day about what our brains are doing not only when we are deeply engaged in an activity but also when we space out.

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Andreas Elpidorou, a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Louisville and self-described defender of boredom, explains, “Boredom motivates the pursuit of a new goal when the current goal ceases to be satisfactory, attractive, or meaningful [to you].” In his 2014 academic article “The Bright Side of Boredom,” Elpidorou argues that boredom “acts as a regulatory state that keeps one in line with one’s projects. In the absence of boredom, one would remain trapped in unfulfilling situations and miss out on many emotionally, cognitively, and socially rewarding experiences. Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that motivates us to switch goals and projects.”

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Be Lazy About Happiness

run

Dan Buettner has travelled the planet looking for ways to make people happy and has found that the best thing one can do is be relaxed about the whole thing. He wrote a book, The Blue Zones of Happiness,  that basically says happiness is a journey, not a destination. To be happy keep striving to become a better person by making your day to day more joyful and learning new things. The key is to find something that has meaning to you that you want to pursue and learn more about. The laziness comes in how you do this: don’t stress about it and take your time.

Hamblin: It sounds like you’re arguing for a reframing of the idea of “happiness” toward something bigger—an aggregate of purpose and joy and satisfaction and meaning. We’ve run pieces in the past that touch on, for example, Viktor Frankl and others who have said that life is really about pursuing meaning, and if you pursue happiness as we Americans tend to think about it, you end up going to amusement parks and shopping malls and trying to do things that are supposed to be making you happy but are sucking life out of you.

Buettner: Yes, exactly. So this was our challenge. Even though you can’t measure happiness, you can measure life satisfaction, partly by asking people, and partly by discrete questions about how much you smile or laugh or feel joy. You can also measure people’s sense of purpose, with questions like, “Do you learn new and interesting things every day? Have you used your strength to do what you do best this past week?” So for this book I worked with statisticians to run the numbers on data like this around the world. That pointed us to Singapore, Costa Rica, and Denmark as globally illustrative of facets of happiness. And so I spent a lot of time in those places, as well as a few U.S. cities, and tried to piece together explanations.

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New Fish Food Doesn’t Require Killing Fish

ocean shore

When fish farms kill their fish for food some of that food is ground up and fed to other fish as nutrient pellets. It’s well known that current fishing practices are really bad for the environment and that fish farms aren’t good for their local environment. Anything we can do to help reduce the damage done by fish (and eating fish) will make this world a little better.

A new company, NovoNutrients, has created a solution to the fish feed problem by addressing another global issue: too much carbon. The company has a process which takes carbon from factories and feeds it to microbes, which in turn grow to become fish food.

The startup’s process uses carbon dioxide, along with other emissions, to feed microbes that can then become protein for companies that make pellets of food for fish. Those microbes are similar to ones that evolved to live near gas vents in the ocean; the startup arranges them with other species into “microbial factories” that work together to make the whole process more efficient.

The company is also developing new microbes, using synthetic biology, that can produce particular nutrients–vitamins or probiotics, for example–that can also be used as ingredients in feed. All of this will happen in pipes that help the gases dissolve in water, rather than in the large tanks that are used for fermentation in a brewery or some pharmaceutical companies. The pipes can connect directly to a cement plant or other industrial emitter and then into a fishmeal factory next door. Hydrogen, which can be produced through electrolysis of water using solar power, can provide energy for the system.

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Use a Browser Tab to Raise Funds for Charity

teen computer

Donating money, time, or resources to charities makes the world a better place, but what if you don’t have any of those things to spare? If you’re using the internet via a web browser maybe you can donate some spare CPU cycles though. A new site called Donate Your Tab uses your computer’s spare computational power to mine Monero (a cryptocurrency), it is then donated to a charity of your choice. The technology behind it has come under scrutiny recently because some sites are using people’s browsers to mine without their consent. Donate Your Tab allows you to opt-in to the mining and even control how much energy goes to mining.

Why would I want to use this?

We obviously think you should contribute your time, voice and cold hard cash to your favorite charity. But this site is a good start. You’re already on your computer, why not use that time to make money for causes you support? These days we often feel guilty like we can’t change anything but this allows you to do something even when you’re just sitting on the internet scrolling through your newsfeeds.

How much money can we raise on this thing?

Good question. Mining cryptocurrency isn’t profitable unless you do it over an extended period of time and have lots of people contributing.

Lets say you can make $0.05 for leaving this thing running in a browser tab all day. $0.05 x 100,000 users x 365 days = $1,825,000 to charity. Not bad! Spread the word so we can get there.

Check it out.