Waste Consumption

I lived in a third world country the first 17 years of my life, and while I was blessed enough not to live in the conditions people from third world countries usually live in, the fact that I live around them made me really conscious about how I use everything in my everyday life. I went to Haiti over Easter, and I decided to control my waste consumption there versus my waste consumption here in the States.

I spent three days in Haiti, and while I was there, I used:

1 plastic cup for water (Which I used during the entire time I was there)
3 Paper plates during the 3 days
3 bottle of waters
5 Minutes showers

And everything else I used where "everyday" items such as forks which I washed and so on.

When I came back to the states, I drove 90 miles from the airport back to campus
Bought McDonald (1Big Mac, 1Fish, 1 Dr. Pepper, 1Large Fries)
The next day I showered 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at night which I usually do every day.
Ordered one large pizza and one Dr. Pepper from papa John's
Turned on the dishwasher
Did three loads of laundry

While none of the data I collected are representative of my day to day consumption, I wanted to take a different approach and take another perspective. Your daily consumption varies a lot depending on your surrounding. The reasons most Americans consume so much on a daily basis is because everyone around them is doing the same, therefore they don't see it as a problem, whereas if you live in a third world country such as Haiti, you're going to cut back on your consumption. I think that if in America we were less focus on us and paying attention to our surrounding, a few things could change, including how much we're wasting materials in a given day.

Fact Sheet

Money

The paper that we use as our currency and that we call money only has the value that is assigned to it by whomever is in charge. In the future, the value of money might fluctuate to the point that we might have to print $1000 bills or it could go the other direction where a $5 dollar bill might be worth $100 dollar bill today.

Personally, I think that it would be beneficial to everyone to go back to the trade system, where you exchange a good or service you want with someone else in exchange of whatever they have to offer. This is of course impossible since we have fallen so deeply in the current economic system that we are in. The cost of implementing that system might be too high and offset the advantages.

So to answer the question what is the value of money? My answer to that is the following. The value of money is what we let the ones with money decide it to be.