TFGL2021 - S3 - Ep 1 - More Work For Less Pay

Welcome to this episode of the Tech For Good Live podcast.

Joining host Bex we have Greg Ashton, strong, reliable, and a little bit dangerous.

And our special guest is Dr Alina Kadyrova - Member of the TfGL team, who has just finished a PhD in social innovation.

Transcript

Bex: Hello victims. Welcome to the Tech for Good Live podcast. If you're new here, this is a podcast all about using technology to have a positive social impact. If you're a regular visitor, please seek medical help. Today's show is jam packed with despair, drama and a little dash of wimzie. We'll be talking about Amazon again. Not content with destroying economies, local businesses and the lives of their employees’ privacy and well,the world, they're now also destroying their own stock. We have a positive story about HSBC and shelter working together to help people without a fixed address, manage their finances. And Greg has discovered a new use for plastic and apparently it's delicious. All that and more coming right up. Today on the show, we have Greg Ashton. Strong, reliable and a little bit dangerous. You're back on the podcast. Greg, if you were an Olympic sport, what would you be?

Greg: I had a lot of fun actually looking on the Olympics website. I highly recommend going looking because they've got like little figure illustrations of the sports which are quite funny in some cases, but I think I would be breaking and for the uninitiated that is break-dancing. Not because I have any style or rhythm, but because I travel everywhere with my crew. And I like to break down quite often. 

Bex: [laughs] Okay. I'm me, I'm back. I'm responsible for dragging this episode towards the finish line before it collapses. If I was an Olympic sport, I'd be gymnastics or figure skating because I'm just so graceful. I've not fallen down the stairs in weeks. Greg, don't look at me like that. I’m super graceful. 

Greg: [laughs] 

Bex: And we have a guest with us today. Dr. Alina Kadyrova, part of the TfGL team who has just finished a PhD in social innovation. Alina, if you were an Olympic sport, what would you be? 

Alina: I think I'd like to be skiing, for lazy people. You know, like, cross country skiing where they wave through the forest, but you don't need to race so you can just you know ski and take pictures and just enjoy the nature. I would do that. And also in a place in Russia where I grew up, we would do skiing for about five to four months a year. So it was quite a usual weekend activity for me and I enjoyed it a lot. So yeah, it would be a lazy version of this.

Bex: I love it. I love it. Cross country skiing is the lazy version of skiing. Excellent.

Greg: I’m sure there's thousands of cross country skiers turning in their graves or in their bedrooms or wherever they are, now going what the hell? Lazy skiing. [laughs] I love it.

Alina: Yeah, I mean, because normally you would have a nice element in skiing, you know, so you need to, you know, it's almost like running but on skis. So when I was a kid, or, or a teenager, I was like, Mom, why do we have to do that. So I would just be the slowest one, you know, and be at the end of everyone and just look at the trees in the snow because it's quite nice because like an area where I grew up, we had a lot of forests that would usually do cross country skiing and it would be forced to bits. And then I felt, you know, sad that I didn't have a chance to look at the surroundings around me because I had to head to the finish line. So yeah, lazy version of this is for me. That's what I would do.

Bex: [laughs] Awesome. I used to snowboard and everyone always used to say that that was a lazy version of skiing as well because you just kind of like you got no poles or anything. You just chill out, go down. Everyone just said it’s like skiing for lazy people, which I was up for. 

Greg: Sounds good. 

Bex: Anyway, off topic. Snow. I love snow though. I love talking about snow. Alina, talk to me about your research. It’s a PhD in social innovation. Talk to me more about it. It sounds exciting. 

Alina: Yes. So I did my, I finished my PhD in social innovation a couple of months ago. So now I'm working. I continue my research. I'll tell you a little bit more about what I'm working on now. It's called user innovation. Not sure if you heard about it before. So user innovation is a concept; it's when individual users or companies invent something or modify something for their own in-house use. So for instance, if you have a bike, and if you like riding the bike, but you know if you have a very specific need which doesn't come with the bike and new things that you need to modify to meet your personal needs. Because, for instance, the area where UI that is very specific, so you need to modify the bills. So people have been doing it for a very long time. And now I'm kind of doing a review of studies of why people do it. So I'm looking at the motivations for using innovation. And it's also kind of generalised to all these toolkits, you know, for which companies do to motivate the users to modify their products. But in reality, this concept, I think about since 1970s and 1960s, so it's not very new, a new one. But anyway, so, in my PhD I looked at social innovation, this kind of very broad term, umbrella term for all innovations with social purpose or environmental purpose. So I looked at why some geographical areas have more social innovation than the others. And I looked at factors, you know, at the level of regions and the level of cities and the level of organisations which support emergence and development of social innovation. So one of the findings from our research is that actually at the level of regions, areas, which are better off in terms of human capital, in terms of stock of knowledge and finance, they have more of these projects, compared to poorer regions. That was quite a surprising finding because you now understand this, you often hear that social innovation is innovation, where which should emerge in places of great social needs. So in poorer areas, you know, countries have towns, but in reality, they are similar to any project in altering organisations, which require resources. So they require knowledge and finances, and they are not like, miracles, you know, they cannot come from thin air, you know, and emerge from out of nowhere. Yes, it was, I would, I would say it was expected. Because, you know, looking at places like Manchester, of course, it's, you know, a place with many problems. But then there are a lot of resources and other people who are conducting industry, you know, who have money and who have, who, who don't have to worry about food on the on, on their table. So they have, you know, spare money to invest in support on their organisation to start, you know, this kind of projects in their free time. So, yeah, it's one part of my research. I also did look at the organisations and you know, what kind of capabilities they need to develop this kind of socially oriented projects. And I looked at the level of metropolitan areas, and what and whether social innovators require, whether they need to be close to each other, you know, to develop, and this part of research actually showed that, unlike companies, you know, there are like industrial clusters, in our innovative businesses allocated next to each other. So for social innovators, it's not only about the geographical closeness, you know, how close they are, you know, whether they’re in the same building on the same floor, but they also need to be very close in social terms, like having, you know, common values and trust is more important than, you know, being on the same street or being in the same working space.

Greg: I think that's really interesting, that finding. 

Bex: It's, it's, it's all great stuff, and it really resonates with the work that I do. I mean, yeah, if we start, if we start at the end, and move back in, this idea of like, I was in a co-working space that was all about social innovators, and it was great to be in physical space with them. But yeah, it really mattered that we all cared about the same things. And like, likewise, I have other communities, online communities that are very close to the sorts of things I do. And that's just as important to me as the physical space. So yeah, those communities that are led by values just matter to me in different ways, and I'm also part of probably about five or six different online communities that are really important to me because of the different kinds of things that they tackle. So that like, resonates with me as a as a social innovator, but also this idea of, you know, I mean, I have so much to say on this idea that like, places with resources attracts innovators because, you know, innovation should shouldn't it be coming from the people that need it instead of from this like rich area that's like them. But it is the reality of it, isn't it unlike we set up our business in a small town, small town where there's not a lot going on, and we really wanted to support that small town and we wanted to register in that small town. But actually all of the support, the business support was in the big city was in Manchester. So we have a second business address in Manchester just so we can access all of that kind of all those resources you're talking about. So yeah, although we wanted to, like, be more local, the setup wasn't, wasn't there for us, which is annoying. Yeah. And then finally, this idea of user innovation, I absolutely love. Because within the research that we do, we try and find out those, you know, where the users adapted a service for their own needs and that will help us then fix the service and make a better service for the users. So yeah, that's like such a key part of like, identifying and how to make appropriate change that works for the users rather than just guessing. Yeah, all amazing stuff. I love it. 

Greg: And I think people tend to do that, more than complaining about something that doesn't meet their needs, they're more likely to like, take it on themselves to adapt that thing so it meets their needs.

Bex: Especially if it's something that they like, have to use as well. 

Alina: Yeah, it often happens when you have a very specific need, which is very unlikely to be met by any product which you can buy. So it's easier for you to modify it than buy or look for something that actually meets your needs. Yeah, but also, I mean, in the studies, I also want to say that users also waive the, you know, the future costs and benefits of innovating. So they think it is going to cost an enormous amount of money, they're just going to give up and probably find a cheaper solution, because, you know, we are rational people, and when we need to understand, you know, the costs and benefits of everything. So yeah, but it's also very, very common, and it's more common, but it's a very poorly measured phenomenon, if we compare it to the innovation in business enterprise. Because, you know, you need to survey individual users and whether they modified you know, in product, but also the boundaries are very, you know, low because we modify many things in our houses, but then what, what makes it an innovation? Novel is novel, in this case. 

Greg: Ohhhh. 

Bex: I tried to search for a project I worked on because it was full of user adoption. So it's BBC Cape, so the University at the BBC’s nuerodiversity team, we worked with them to research like neurotypical individuals and how they work, how they use the BBC programming and facilities and apps and everything. How do they consume media? And obviously, not, neurodiversity is such a large term that covers a lot of different types of diversity. And essentially, yeah, there were just, it was just full of adaptions. Like, you might get somebody who needed subtitles, or, or hated subtitles. So they would have a second screen. They might be in a shared viewing experience, or they might be watching with their family. They'd have like an iPad with all of their adaptions on that they've probably just, like, fumbled together. But like, yeah, there was like a bunch of like, different things that people did say, to like, enhance the ability to watch media. But yeah, it was just full of it and it was really fascinating how people, how people did that. How was it doing a PhD?

Alina: Overall? Yeah. Overall. 

Bex: [laughs] Yeah. 

Alina: It wasn't, there were many good bits in it, especially in my field work, when I had the chance to go in the field and speak to social innovators, which is very inspiring. And my field work was international. So I did, part of it was International. So I picked five cities where I didn't have your social innovators. One city was Manchester. 

Bex: Did you pick those based on where you wanted to go to or anything else?

Alina: No. No. Well, they're all nice places in Europe. So I picked on the European locations, you know, given the money that the university gave me for this kind of research. But they were all very nice locations. So the four European cities were. Youvchek, Netherlands, Stockholm and Sweden. Then Sofia in Bulgaria, and Budapest in Hungary. And I got to spend about a week in each city, you know, talking to social innovators, talking to third sector, to local authorities, you know, international organisations, and it was great, because, you know, when I was sitting in the office and doing this kind of desk research and reviews of studies, I didn't get to, I didn't understand what was hype about socialisation, because, you know, it all looked okay on the paper. But then I got a chance to actually speak to them, and it was so great to learn how they help people and how to change people's lives. And you know what kind of ideas they come up with. It was really, really inspiring. But then I had to come back and write everything up, which was also very interesting. But then during the PhD, you had to do different, many, many things. At the same time, you have to analyse the interviews, you have to manage your own time, you have to write other stuff, you have to read more. So it was a good experience but I wouldn't recommend anyone. 

Bex: I was going to say, no one recommends it [laughs] Do not do a PhD. 

Alina: It's also quite a lonely experience. Because you're, you know, you're in charge of your project, especially in humanities and social sciences. So it's kind of good if you like managing your own time, and you're very independent but then, if you're not working in the research team, you don't have a chance to talk to anyone about your research, except your supervisors. So we had, once or twice a month, I had a meeting with them. But it's different when you do research in an actual team, you know, people work on the same topic. But then there's also very low pay for PhD students and I had to teach to earn some additional money during my PhD, which was, which was also good. So it was good, but it was an extremely low paying activity. So I would, thinking about it, I don't regret it but I would prefer having a real job all these years.

Greg: [laughs]

Bex: [laughs] Well, thank you for contributing to the research in the social innovation space. More of that is always good. Let's move on to stat the week. So the stat is 124,000 items of stock have been marked to be destroyed in one week by Amazon. This is not good.

Greg: So this was found through some secret footage from a whistleblower, which was given to the ITV, of our places. Not who you would normally expect to have the scoop on Amazon. But they secretly filmed items being marked up from things like TVs, laptops, drones, books, face masks, a lot of the stuff wasn't even opened. And this was all carted off to a location and some of it, so the electronics would be destroyed and the things like books would be placed in landfill. Now there's not a lot of detail really on why this is happening. Amazon are obviously claiming that they've not got the full story, but they've been accused of similar activities in France previously. But yeah, it's just a little bit weird. I feel like you've got to have so much money, that you don't care that you're destroying potentially millions of products a year. It just seems very odd from my perspective.

Alina: I think it's just cheaper for them to destroy them than to keep hold of it. But actually, I think this case was Amazon. I think it doesn't only happen at Amazon. I think it happens in many retail companies, like I mentioned, in other, you know, fashion brands. For them, it's cheaper to burn it than to actually keep it in shops. But I think in general, this is an example of business model for bad, you know, where no one has an incentive to actually do something about it. So Amazon doesn't have an incentive, you know, to keep it or to give it to anyone and companies whose core supplies to Amazon, they don't have an incentive to take it back or resell it. So I think it's a system wide problem where many companies like Amazon and like other companies, you know, they're not punished for something like this. They don't you know, they don't care, you know, okay, but they're going to burn it. I suppose this product is a very small share of what they're going to make selling more of them, you know, in the next couple of months. Yeah, but I think there is in France again, they're now punishing companies for burning, you know, the stuff that they make. Because there are some stories; I'm not sure when it was but it was about luxury brands burning handbags and other items like belts and shoes. So now I think that given, they’re going to fine the companies which are doing this, and I'm wondering if there's a case for the UK, you know, where the government could possibly develop a system for fines. But then on Twitter, I saw  a couple of responses about this. And they said that they're going to look into why Amazon is doing it, which got me thinking that so many companies are doing it, and have been doing it for so many years and now, of course, the Amazon case is good for raising awareness. And probably now the companies are doing it at that scale as Amazon, but still, I don't think it's anything new.

Greg: Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I guess that's the thing isn't it? Is that you're only going to get that scale with Amazon, hopefully, things will be done. I think it's more likely now that they're restricted on where they can send waste because countries, other countries are blocking it from being shipped to them, which previously, a lot of our waste in the UK was just palmed off on other countries. So I think there's, there's more of an impetus to do something about it. But as Tom who co-hosts occasionally, he will say that the waste industry is corrupt and broke, so there's, there's no way. That once you start picking that apart, you're just gonna find that it's rotten to the core. So yeah. 

Bex: Yeah.  I was talking about this earlier. It’s so crap when everything is just dependent on profit. Like the thing with the waste industry that always surprised me is, I thought that the recycling industry was set up to do good, right, in some way. Like mainly by councils to be like, we have to save the environment. I guess it was, maybe, but most recycling companies only really recycle what they feel like it, because if they can make money out of it. So even that is about profit, and there's loads of stuff, they just won't recycle if it's too much effort. Which just like recycling, that should be good, right? 

Greg: Yeah.

Alina: Yeah, I actually read a thread on Reddit about it and some of the people are saying that, you know, they're given examples of how it's done in other industries. And one person said that in his local town, I think it was in New York somewhere, an owner of a pizza place said that all the pizzas that are not going to be bought during the day, he is going to give away for free at the end of the day. So then people started to call in and ordering pizzas and not picking them up so they can come at the end of the day and pick them up for free. So I'm thinking if Amazon is going to donate this kind of, you know, if they're going to say, okay, everything that we're not selling, we're going to ship somewhere, will not incentivise people to buy less and then you know, get this same product for a very reduced price or for free from elsewhere. Wouldn't it also encourage some kind of dark market from you know, goods from Amazon? 

Greg: It’s probably why they just get rid of it. Because it could ruin their overheads if they've got cheaper stock going off somewhere on Ebay, say for instance. 

Bex: Brilliant. Amazon is so awful [laughs] 

Greg: We’ve never mentioned it before so we probably shouldn’t bring it up now.

Bex: No. New information. Amazon is awful.

Alina: I wonder how people who are on the minimum wage, how they felt learning all this, MacBooks and expensive stuff there. 

Bex: Yeah. Anyway, what's more stats in this dashboard that you found? So it's an American dashboard. And the idea is that it's going to help transit practitioners, which is a weird thing to say, I guess people who do public transport, right? Transit practitioners, makes them sound very fancy, make more informed decisions. That sounds good. Tell me more about this.

Greg: Yeah. So in Manchester in the UK,  it's not exactly similar but there's this idea around public transit, public transport is heavily linked to things like health, wellbeing, access to work and there was a study done in Manchester where you could you could trace like life expectancies along the tram tracks and things like that. This one is looking at various cities around the US and telling the kind of transit story for each of those cities. And it has a dashboard of data, of graphs and charts and things and you can go in and see what the situation is and see how it's changed over time. So things like in New York, there's a racial gap in accessing work within 45 minutes. So I think it's like there's like half the number of black people versus white people who can access work within 45 minutes. 

Bex: That's massive. 

Greg: A huge disparity there. So if you're white and living in New York, you've got way, way easier access to work. In most regions, there's like large racial and income access gaps that have kind of persisted, even over the pandemic. There's a real strong connection between that unreliable transportation and worse health outcomes. Even just having access to a hospital or a doctor, because, you know, you can't get to that appointment in a reasonable amount of time because you don't have access to transport. So, yeah, it's really interesting. Hopefully, they'll keep maintaining it because I think it could be a really useful tool and hopefully help people see those disparities and improve things in the future. 

Bex: Excellent work, everybody involved with the dashboard. It’s, dot transit centre.org. If you want to go and have a look. On to charity news of the week. So HSBC and Shelter have teamed up to tell a simple but powerful story. What is this story, Greg?

Greg: This is so good when I saw it and I keep hearing it on podcasts that I listen to now. And it works just as well as visually or audio. And also, you know, HSBC are teaming up with Shelter, which is great. And basically what they're doing is they're telling the story of something that unless you've been in that situation can seem insane and idiotic. And it's the whole point of, if you're homeless, and you want to pick yourself up and you want to get, you know, back into the world of work, you literally can't. Because if you don't have a home, you can't get a bank account. And if you can't get a bank account, you can't get a job. And if you can't get a job, you can't go home. And literally the video takes you on that journey and very simply represents what is a really simple journey, but in a really powerful way. And they do it through audio as well. I've heard it on podcasts. And I just think it's something that a lot of people don't understand. And they just, you know, brush homeless people often say, well, you're not yourself out, just get a job. And the reality is, it's not that easy. The other side of this is HSBC are working with Shelter to kind of resolve that problem. So giving access to bank accounts for people that that are in this situation.

Bex: How are they doing that? So obviously, the barriers are usually really admin heavy, like, yeah, if you don't have an address, you can't get a bank account. So how have they got around that. 

Greg: I'm not 100% sure. I think they are working around those those admin issues and looking at, you know, working actually working with Shelter and saying, what's a way that we can deliver this for these people who normally because of our approach to admin and restrictions and identity and verification and fraud and things like that, the things that would stop them normally, they've worked out ways around that by working with Shelter.

Bex: Okay, so yeah, having a quick look, it's like, yeah, you can apply without an address which is essentially the thing, but you have to have, you have to be vouched for by one of these supporting charities. So Shelter obviously is one of them. And I guess yeah, if they're referring you, and that's the vouch for someone. But yeah, good stuff. Well done HSBC. 

Greg: And it’s really great work on the comms there. I think it's just a brilliant, brilliant video. 

Bex: Alina? 

Alina: I think it's very, it's a very good project. I didn't do a lot of research in homeless people. But I did interview a project in Manchester. It's called Not Just Soup. Maybe you've heard of it. It's coffee for Craig Charity and basically what they're doing is they're cooking. They're inviting homeless people. So it was all pre COVID. I'm not sure if they’re still open now. They invited homeless people in like a big, big room, and they would cook meals and they would serve meals, like in a normal cafe. So they wouldn't use these plastic single-use papers. They would have people who would wait on homeless people. So homeless people feel like normal people, you know, when you're welcomed and when you're served by someone. And I was speaking to one of the founders of this project and they were telling me that consciousness is such a complex problem of house, mental health and systemised problem where you’re excluded, you know, as HSBC highlights. Because union no one wanting to get another sandwich you cannot get you know, not having to Swanson, Yes, so I wish more banks and more organisations would kind of look into this problem and see how they can, what little they can do to help homeless people or other people who are struggling or excluded in any other way. Yeah. The only experience with this kind of problem of address and bank account, I had this when I moved to the UK in 2016 for PhD and so the university paid me a scholarship. University of Manchester but they would only do it if you have a UK bank account. So I moved first and you know, had to go to the bank and apply for a UK bank account. And there are many students like me, who would move to the UK the same month. I would have to wait about a month to get my bank appointment, and then the document count, and then I'd receive my money. So I would have to live in the UK for about two months without, you know, income here.  But an interesting experience, I would say. 

Bex: [laughs]

Alina: So, yes, I do understand this kind of issues where, you know, you have to wait for everything and need one piece of paper to get another piece of paper to get your money. So maybe they can change the rules for students in the future. Not sure how, how it's working now but then, you know, in 2016, five years ago, you would walk into a bank, and then you would see like a queue of 100 students in front of you, who would also need bank accounts at the same month, but then you would need money to buy food, you know, and eat something every day. So I can relate in a way.

Bex: Yeah, less paperwork for all to be completely honest because I really struggle with it. I really hate it. I'm really bad at it. If it says all I have to do is add my name and date of birth, I'll screw up somehow just the pressure of it. The pressure of paperwork just stresses me out. Tech news of the week facial recognition, failures, lock people out of benefits in the US. What's this about? What's going on? Facial recognition screwing things up again?

Greg: Yeah, this is an interesting one. A lot of layers to this. So this is about an organisation called ID.me, which is an organisation that's used by, I think, like 21 states in the US to process and confirm and verify that people are who they say they are, so that they can access benefits. A lot of new people accessing benefits in the US during COVID. And one of Biden's first things was to kind of roll out a support package. So there's been even more people accessing even more money. So this kind of verification process is essential. But this system has had huge issues and it's been used for a while actually and they've had issues consistently but it seems to be much worse now because there's even more people using it. But that's kind of come around at the same time that, so Axios did a report which was directly quote in their CEO, Blake Hall, around this figure that the US was was set to lose half of all the benefit claims that have been delivered through this new support for COVID, totaling more than 400 billion through fraud and largely through organised crime. A lot of this was going to be going out of the US. So it's not even like good organised crime where the money stays in their economy. It's the bad one where it goes out of the economy. And it's just yeah, it's very interesting, because you've got these conflicting views. And it's, I mean, the fact that they've got an article, which is quoting somebody who sells a service, who by the looks of it has basically made up this 400 billion, and has been reported in previous articles has saying it was 100, 200, 300 and now 400 billion that's being lost. Yeah. So it's just we've got a system that clearly has issues, blocks people out of their benefits but he's kind of whipping up this support by going look, guys, there's organised crime here, we need to be careful, and you need to keep using our service.

Bex: Yeah, that's really dangerous, because, you know, I know it's different in the US but in the UK, you know, there's a lot of rhetoric around fraudulent claims. And you know, the stats are actually that most claims are pretty solid. Like fraudulent claims are a really tiny part of the system but obviously that affects the perception of people who are on benefits and that most of them are fraudulently claiming ,is this kind of like conversation that comes out of this way of thinking. So it's a really dangerous rhetoric to be thrown around just because you want to sell your identification service, which appears to be really flawed anyway. Dickhead!

Greg: Yeah, yeah. I think part of the problem is as well, I mean, there has been, particularly in the UK like, I think fraud and error has doubled during COVID because they relaxed a lot of the restrictions to get the money out there. But a large part of that is down to gangs, down to organised crime who are taking advantage

Bex: Yeah, it's not like Sally down the road who needs it to feed her kids.

Greg: Yeah. But like you say a lot of people then associate that with those individuals who are doing it rather than these gangs, who are, you know, taking advantage of people as well. It's not just that, there's no victims there. There's trafficking involved and all sorts of things. But this kind of messaging is just really, really dangerous., particularly when there's more people using these kinds of services, because it's kind of like, look at this really, really bad thing you need to use our service doesn't matter that it doesn't work, and some people won't get their benefits. What matters is we're stopping this fraud here.

Bex: Yeah, it's like fraud versus yeah, the ability to actually receive benefits when you really, really need them, like what's actually more important that people can feed themselves or that sometimes people steal stuff that they shouldn't. Like, there's different ways of dealing. It feels like you've jumped to the wrong answer to this problem. Yeah. And it's terrible, like, Alina was talking about not being able to get access to money for a month. It's like massive, especially when you're, like, on the breadline and have no one else to support you in any way whatsoever. Like, that causes massive difficulties in people's lives.

Alina: Yeah, I think when we had the first lockdown, last March, there are many stories of students who appeal for food banks, for exactly the same reason, because again, sorry about a visa for me. And so all of the students who come from abroad, they need the tier four visa. And under this visa, you're not eligible for claiming any benefits. So the reason for this, I think it's because most of the students’ university pay you a scholarship monthly, but your visa lasts longer than your scholarship period. So for example, I had three years of scholarship, but then my visa was for four years and a half. Meaning that for the last year of my PhD, I did not receive any money from my university. And I was not eligible for payment, any money from the government, because I was a student. So and, you know, I saved money, because I knew this was going to happen, and I'm going to have some months without my money and save money. And I also have an amazing partner supported me. But many students, they don't have anyone to support them during this time. And they cannot fly home because, you know, during the first wave, you couldn't go anywhere from the UK. And the only thing that you have to rely on is food banks, which was really, really sad. Because all the international students at undergrad level, they pay like seven grand a year to study here, they pay the NHS fee yearly, or every year now to be here. So it's really, really harsh, because, you know, many students, they were not allowed to work. And they were out of jobs, because, you know, most of the students work in the hospitality industry. And then the pandemic hit, and they couldn't work and it couldn't get benefits. And it was really hard situation. 

Bex: That's really interesting, that there's these like gaps. I would never have thought of that and that is absolutely like a really important need for supporting these people who will literally have no money and no way of accessing money. Yeah, like that never came to my mind. I'm sure there's like loads in various places of these tiny little, very specific gaps, which leave a lot of people in a really difficult position. 

Alina: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I know in London, there are food banks that exist only to help students, undergrad students who live in London. I'm not even sure how they survive in London, you know, on the scholarship and paying rent, and you know, you have to buy food. So yeah, it's really not welcoming. Given the money that they're paying, like twenty seven grand a year. I'm not sure I would have ever paid that. Well, I had a scholarship from university.

Bex: Like, don't even start me. I recently decided to log into the student loans company to figure out how much loan I still owe, considering I'm pretty old, and I left university quite a long time ago. I actually, because like, my husband is older than me and we had a surprise. He had paid off his loan and it was quite surprising. 

Greg: What? 

Bex: Yeah, I know. He paid it off. It was quite surprising. It was amazing. Johnny. I’m talking about him like nobody knows who he is. He's always on the podcast. So I was like, I wonder how close I am. Maybe I'm close to paying my loan off. And first of all, I spent about 30 minutes just trying to log in. That system is broken. It literally was sending me around in circles of you can’t login, you don't have the thing and then get the thing and then, uh, do it. And they'll be like, no, you need to change the thing. I was literally in some weird, broken technology circle that somebody needs to look at. But I persisted with it, and I was like, no, no, no, just keep going, you've been doing it for, you know, 15 minutes already, just do it. Did it and it pinged up on the screen, and I still owe most of my loan back. I don't know how I haven't paid that off. I know Alina doesn't recommend PhDs but I don't know if I can truthfully recommend university at all to anybody right now. Unless you're a doctor, you probably should go to university. 

Greg: [laughs] Yeah please do. 

Bex: Other than that, sack it off [laughs] Sorry, universities. I’m an associate lecturer at many universities and I think they're great and the work they do is brilliant. But it’s a lot of money to end up in that much debt for the rest of your life, basically.

Greg: Yeah, I mean, I, I don't think I was paying anything against my student loan until fairly recently, when I got a sizable pay rise, and was able to actually, you know, I hit that threshold where you actually start paying it back. So I was like, I was the same. I was like, I wonder how much I paid off. Nothing.

Bex: It's funny as well, because I opened one of my first ever letters, we've got all the correspondence you've ever had in there. And I got like the top pay because I was poor. And to the point that like, at the time, I think members of my family were considered my carers. I was considered their carer only because of financial reasons. Like they didn't have a job. I did. So I got like the top loan, like all the money they could have given me, they gave me and actually like, in retrospect, I'm like, that's mad. So somebody was really poor, you just made them, like more in debt, like banks. I don't know how helpful that was [laughs].

Greg: That is the interesting paradox. You know, I'm working at the DWP now. And it is a constant conversation that we have about, you know that if you give this person that it's going to put them in more debt. But the alternative is they don't have access to money, they don't have access to food. So you kind of like well, that the government then a loan shark, which a lot of people will tend to use. So it's a real challenge to know, how do we tackle this? It's just increasingly putting people in debt. But yeah, the alternative is probably worse.

Bex: Terrible, terrible. I was gonna say it's rant of the week time. And it's Alina’s rant, but you have been ranting the entire podcast [laughs]. You have spoken about how students are so poor and homeless, probably. Actually, I weirdly did a project with the University of Galway two weeks ago, and the students had to develop tech for good solutions in a week. And one of the ones did look at student homelessness in the local area. One of them works for charity dealing with student homelessness, and weirdly a large amount of students, or, particularly in their area, were homeless. And I thought that was really eye opening. On that, what's your rant of the week?

Alina: So I was attending a lecture a while ago. It was about capitalism being the source of evil. So it was in my business school but that was one of the slides that I looked at. It was a lecture by Professor Diane Coyle, and she would just put a slide with all the differences in wages, comparing the CEO within median employee wage, and I looked at the report. So it was a report published by the Hyphae Centre at the end of 2020. And they looked at some of the UK companies with more than 250 employees and looked at, you know, how much a CEO earned compared to the median employee wage and it is horrible. I didn't expect to see, you know, retail there because I was thinking, okay, we're talking about tech here, and that is bad. But then tech, compared to some other industries is not very bad. And the retail, it's worse. So I think the analysis showed that Ocado, the wage of the CEO is 2600 times higher than the median. 

Bex: [laughs] What?

Alina: I mean, I don't, I don't know; 2000 times CEO earns more than the average.

Bex: So if that was low living wage, like, we can figure out what he's on right, based on...assuming it’s a he. 

Greg: Yeah I would imagine. 

Alina: Most of the companies here like Ocado, JD Sports, Tesco, Morrisons, WH Smith. They're all really bad in terms of wage differences. So at the lecture, Dianne also talked about, you know, how we think that the big tech is a source of evil, in terms of data and privacy concerns. But then there's also big food, like, big retail companies who have so much power and they're so unequal inside them. And the big pharma companies also have, you know, as COVID showed ,significant power over so many people's lives, in our own how everyone is dependent on them. Similar supermarkets like Tesco was in another place. I think Ocado just developed a lot during the pandemic, because so many people ordered their stuff online. And they had the system in place for many years. Yeah, but I just keep thinking about this. How bad it is. 

Bex: I’ve been trying to do maths and it must have been wrong, because it was on 3 million. And it's definitely, that's not right, right? No one's on that much money. So my maths is wrong. Please let my maths be wrong. 

Greg: Yeah, well I mean. 

Bex: Go on Greg. I was gonna say, in a way, this is kind of like a positive story, because tech isn't on the list, but not positive.

Greg: I was going to say, you know, this is why people continue to work at Facebook and Google, even though they have terrible track record for the things they do, they pay well. So you're gonna, you know that that choice is always going to be difficult when they're paying better than many other places. But I've worked in retail supply chain, so this comes as zero surprise to me. It is such an old boys’ club. Like when you get behind the curtain, the way those organisations are set up is just so old fashioned. People will get into those jobs, and they'll stay in their roles for decades, never asking or never expecting to get a pay rise. They're constantly people in stagnant, stagnantly paid job roles. They'll be made redundant and rehired to do more work for less pay. And largely a lot of people will move around the industry from place to place to get little bits in pay rise but never see much in the way of an increase. Yeah, and it's all very much like, who you know, so it does not surprise me that that's in there. 

Bex: Oh. So let's cheer ourselves up with the, and finally. Plastic, apparently, has never tasted so good. I have briefly looked at his article in advance. But do Greg tell us more.

Greg: So somebody discovered how to turn plastic waste into vanilla flavouring. 

Bex: So you would be eating plastic? 

Greg: Yeah, basically. But like I didn't know this. So the synthetic vanilla flavouring, Vanillin, 85% of it is made from petrochemicals. So we're already if you've had any food with Vanillin, and then you're basically drinking a petrochemical.

Bex: Is this like, just obviously, we don't have vanilla here, but are a lot of our foods made out of petrol and plastic? 

Greg: Yeah. Once you break those things down, it's, you know, it's just chemistry. So in our heads, we're like, oh, it's a plastic so it shouldn't go in my body but once you've broken it down into the constituent chemicals, then yeah, there'll probably be petrochemicals. Well, yeah, most preservatives as well are some form of petrochemical So yeah. 

Bex: So we could actually be eating Bart Simpson shorts actually?

Greg: [laughs] Well if they were made from polyester yeah. 

Bex: [laughs] So you're up for this, Greg, eating plastic? 

Greg: I like vanilla flavouring and so I imagine I’ve eaten a lot of it. But also, you know, it's another way of encouraging organisations to recycle plastic, you know, if you've got another thing that they can do, maybe they can make more money. So that argument that we were talking about at the start about, well, we're not going to do it because it won't make us enough money. If there's other things they can do with the waste, then potentially, you know, there's more likelihood that they will recycle. 

Bex: Yeah, someone else to sell it to the food industry will buy it off you. And we can eat it. I mean, we're not allowed to burn it. We're struggling through recycle it. Let's eat it.

Alina: Yeah. I'm wondering though, what texture it has? Is it like a powder? How does it make it? 

Bex: It’s like a liquid. 

Greg: Yeah it’ll be like a liquid. You’d need like, it’s like vanilla flavouring and have the tiniest drop. 

Alina: It’s a bit scary

Bex: It sounds scary. But yeah, if it gets rid of plastic. And it's not like it's new either. They've always been plastic kind of thing. 

Greg: Pretty much, yeah. 

Bex: And it's not been causing us any harm. 

Alina: It's actually the same as metal. I know it's also synthetically produced, you know, like metal and chewing gum in cigarettes and other products. When I was at Manchester Institute for Biotechnology, they do some form of it. So I think they did research on how to make metal synthetically, more and more stuff is going to be made synthetically from you know, waste probably in the future. 

Bex: That's weird. We're just going to be literally in rubbish rather than like you want saying stop eating rubbish. You're going to be like, no, I'm gonna eat rubbish cause it’s good for the environment. Shut up, mum. On that note, that is all we have time for today. Thank you for listening. Alina. How was it? Was it alright? Did you enjoy your first podcast?

Alina: Oh, it was excellent. Yeah. Thank you. 

Bex: Well, come back. You're part of the team. You can be part of the regular team if you want.

Alina: I'd love to, yeah. 

Bex: Excellent, good. You are roped. I hereby decree you part of the regular team. Where can people find you? Or your research or your work or anything you do on the internet?

Alina: Oh, yeah. So they can find me on Twitter and my website, which is linked to my Twitter. So anyway,

Bex: One of those ways. Great, we'll link to that in the thing, in the thing where we write the things, underneath the podcast. Listeners, what did you think? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Get in touch on Twitter at Tech for Good live, or you can email us at hello at tech for good dot live. And if you say nice things, we'll read it out on the podcast. Well, that might suggest that we never get nice things said to us because we never read them out on the podcast. But that's actually just because we're forgetful. Maybe we'll have to like combine them all into like one podcast or five of them. And just that's what's gonna happen. Yeah, we also like reviews. iTunes likes reviews, actually. So that means we like reviews because it means more people listen to us. So please do that as well. Thank you to the producers reducing this podcast editors, hire editors. Also, don't forget this podcast is run by volunteers. I mean, how could you forget? It’s clearly run by volunteers. None of us are paid to do this right? Obviously. So right now. Yeah, yeah, do high quality stuff. But right now one of our primary goals is to make sure that all of our podcasts episodes are accessible by making sure that they're transcribed. And unfortunately, that is one of the few things that does cost money when making this podcast, and we desperately need your help to make it happen. So if you've ever tuned in, or attended one of our events, or whatever, please consider chipping in the price of a cup of coffee. So tech for good dot live forward slash donate and that will just help us transcribe stuff. And thanks to Podcast.co, for hosting our podcast on the internet. That's really lovely of them. That's it. We’re done. I’ve said all the things. Bye. 

Greg: Bye. 

Alina: Bye.