Author Archives: admin

Reducing Homelessness: The Spartan Network

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Stupid name is just a placeholder…

But it comes from thinking about what stops people from letting the homeless take shelter in unused rooms, spaces and buildings. A key concern is that they will steal or do damage. So naturally you provide the barest of minimums. Potentially just a foam mattress on the floor.

There are other concerns obviously, so this is just the beginning of an idea…

In reality, few homeless people would bite the hand that feeds them, with the strong exception of drug addicts. So while the fear of theft or damage is real, it won’t happen very often.

The idea: participants are covered by an insurance of sorts – if the person you provide shelter for does such a thing, you get fully compensated.

The cost of covering such events will be minuscule compared to other solutions.

Woke 2.0

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Woke went too far, but that is not surprising, left and right politics either go moderate to get elected, or go radical if they feel daring. Society ends up with a balance between the two. The right sold off government assets (Reagan, Thatcher) which was extreme, and woke went too far:

  • going light on crime like shoplifting
  • letting children make gender decisions
  • DEI

But let’s look at DEI for a moment. It is ultimately a decision to raise the earnings and potentials of peoples who are historically marginalised and suffered from racism, and to a degree still are today. The goal was equality.

DEI only did wrong in racist terms. While it is logical to say everyone should have equal chances, that is the equivalent of “all lives matter” which ignores that some people don’t start from the same place.

DEI has been shut down for targeting races. So, all they need to do is change the definition of who they help. This is not new. Want to smoke in a bar? Form a “cigar club”.

Woke 2.0 will simply refine the criteria. Instead of giving scholarships to Hispanics, you simply make them available to people who show a deep understanding of Hispanic culture. And then only award them to Hispanics. Very defensible, because we are talking about the opinions of academic admins, not something measurable.

I can envisage a DEI-esque scoring system.

First, get someone to write a paper proving that diversity in the workplace equals greater success and profits. Then come up with a multimodal scoring system that looks at 100 criteria, including such things as:

  • economic background
  • non-typical ethnic and cultural backgrounds – these are non-typical relative to the current school or workplace make-up, and not defined specifically
  • non-typical gender and sexual orientation. Again, not specified. so if there are too many gays it will go the other way
  • height, weight, hobbies, family structure, age, good preferences, IQ, EQ, etc etc

The idea is that the overwhelming factor is a mixing bowl of characteristics, but nothing on its own. That will rend it immune from any Supreme Court decisions. As long as it is backed by one piece of science. Schools and employers can use their own judgement around which studies they trust.

Common-sense will fix the transgender issues. Children under 18 won’t be able to get anything done physically, but they will get all the help, care and consideration possible.

And with crime, hopefully the US looks at typical sentencing in other advanced economies and learns. Too much or too little doesn’t work.

Black Lives Matter can be reignited with just one atrocity. So expect it to return. The only solution is that (hopefully) America standardises hiring and training across all of law enforcement and gets rid of the crazy idea of voting for DAs and sheriffs.

Who Will Provide Maps for Meta?

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A very obvious component of AR glasses is mapping/GPS and businesses. That is where immense profits lie – basically McDonald’s offering you two hash browns for $2 when you walk by. It will literally pop-up on your glasses. Next level marketing.

Google and Apple already have mature maps operations. The upside of AR is so great that if a partnership forms between Meta and either of those, then it is very win-win.

However, Apple and Google own the phones. It is more profitable to buy staff from Meta and make their own AR glasses, and then use their own maps infrastructure.

There will be three plays, and a market for two. Apple and Google will be ready to pounce, with both quite possibly having products ready to launch ASAP. Meta is the runt in this scenario. No maps app of their own. No phone operating system. They are already spending mega-bucks on other things (metaverse, AI), and this could ruin them if they proceeded. But in theory they could create their own maps app, or buy some weird 3rd-tier app from Germany. They could potentially venture into the phone space, getting a Chinese company to manufacture the phones in the US, with a Meta-owned fork of Android. It would primarily be a brand play, hoping to leverage the brand equity of something that has already peaked, by combining it with the trust and assurances of an old friend. No tracking, nothing foreign. A solid phone (sold at a discount because AR advertising will be bank), with minimal branding. More like a Lexus made by Toyota than a “Facebook Phone”.

Apple will win. They will avoid the gimmicky miss-steps by being last to launch.

Farewell AirBnB

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This won’t happen everywhere, but in many cities that are popular with tourists, the rise of AirBnB has coincided with chronic housing shortages and low housing affordability.

These are not actually a coincidence, they are both the result of worsening economic inequality. More people with money are travelling, and that will keep getting worse with time, unless inequality is seriously and properly addressed.

Taxing or effectively taxing tourists will help. It will directly take money from the rich and distribute to the poor, if done correctly.

That means government taxes and tariffs on hotels, visas and the like, as long as it is redistributed to social housing. That means no AirBnB, or at least limiting it to leasing a single room within a residential home on a temporary basis.

Cruises are booming, so increase their port charges dramatically. Their appeal fades once desirable ports are off the menu.

Countries that do this first (yes countries, because it doesn’t work as long as individual destinations are vying for the tourist dollar and will fight to the bottom), will benefit soonest.

The Wegovy Backlash

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I hope not, of course, but there has never been a weight-loss pill that hasn’t backfired somehow. While the short-term safety of Wegovy seems to be understood, it is too new to possibly know of the long-term effects. There is definitely a psychological aspect to it, so conceivably that wears off, and our brains find new pathways to desire eating again.

Possibly, the long-term side-effect is not something that can be measured in a lab. Something like a loss of zest in general, a loss of appetite for life, and the myriad of ways that can present itself in our everyday lives. For example, a loss in the desire to have children, or complete tertiary studies.

Palestine: The End Game

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The situation as I see it:

Israel and continually gone against prior agreements and keep taking more and more Palestinian land, because they think God said it was theirs.

Palestinians rightly are angry, not just about the land but by effectively being in a prison (Gaza) and a substantial number of them have lives that hinge on absolute hate of the Israelis (the Jewish ones).

Israel don’t want a two-state solution with an enemy right next door, who will continue (with the support of Iran) to keep attacking and terrorising them. Israel (half of the population) loves the expansion into the West Bank by “settlers”.

This is what Israel will bring to the table, and a future Palestinian leadership will agree to:

West Bank continues as normal. Any land without houses is free for Israelis to build on, and the West Bank will effectively be a part of Israel, and existing Palestinians can continue to live there, as they do now.

Gaza becomes its own state. It will have full access to the outside world, via the sea and air. Land connections and workers crossing the border will continue as before. However, terrorism needs to end. An international task force will be there – potentially forever – to run democratic elections, co-ordinate aid, and to shut down any terrorism. No anti-Israeli sentiment is allowed. No murals of martyrs. All history taught in schools is carefully worded and monitored. The end result is peace and freedom with hate for their neighbours snuffed out. Any rebels are deported, somewhere.

Where It Came From: Attribution 2.0

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Deep fakes and the like are a growing problem:

Of course it will get worse, and new angles will emerge that are unheard of. Regulation could be the solution, although nobody will be a fan. If you want to have a platform where you are immune from having wrong content on it (as long as you police the content to a reasonable level), then you must also follow this one simple rule. All content has to have an origin, and that origin is posted with the content.

  • Music comes from the artist’s home page
  • Memes have an origin
  • Photos come from the page of who took the photo

Any authorisations, all types of rights, are stored at the source.

So, if I want to share a meme I found online, I have to go to the source, and maybe agree to something, and maybe get a link back to the source with my auth ID in it… and so on. We are talking Creative Commons for everything.

To post something from a particular source, the platform must have registered it. So to post a picture of King Charles, it must come from a news source, or his own website, or a registered source that will take the fall if they have acquired it or used it wrongly or illegally.

There are some downsides to this approach, obviously!

Posting content in social media will take longer, sometimes. Sharing a link from a registered source won’t take any longer. Reposting something that already cites a source, won’t take longer. Banging out a funny meme using content that is not yours, will take longer, and can only improve things for everyone – it will be a good opportunity to be a bit more serious, especially for topics that warrant it, like politics and anti-woke.

It is anti-freedom of speech. Er, no, it isn’t, but it will be seen that way. People misunderstand what those freedoms actually entail. Never mind though, because attribution regulations will only apply to social networks of a certain large size. Your anarcho-mischief collective will fly under the radar, although they will need to have a prominent message stating that they are non-regulated.

5figz – Amazon Bestsellers Go Rogue

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Every merchant wants to go off on Amazon. But when they do, Amazon probably makes more profit from the success than they do.

I’m imagining a platform where you can buy the verified hits of Amazon – products that have sold 10K+

  • Amazon hits are rarely rip-offs, the review system (mostly) looks after that.
  • People trust a successful Amazon product
  • Amazon cannot stop you stating a fact about your success on their platform

While Amazon has put superhuman effort into getting products to people quicker, price tends to trump speed. So the 5figz fulfilment system doesn’t need absolute speed. However, the nature of the products – high-volume – lends itself to efficiency.

I figure that the game plan is to out-Amazon Amazon. Run at a loss with their most successful products, until the public learn that 5figz is where to get the best products without Amazon taking a crazy cut of proceeds.

And it scales scarily well. Start with the most expensive products with 10K sales. And as the business grows, fold in lower price items. Obviously selling 10K execycles is better all round than selling 10K hairbands.

Dear Everyone

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Advice app. Primarily romantic and social issues

Maximum 10 questions per day are sent out. Randomly chosen. Vetted by the developers..

Submitted question expires after 1 week if not chosen. Prompted to resubmit if still relevant. Max 1 question per month for anyone

Get points for giving advice. Points increase your chance of being chosen.

Questions have up to five answers, multiple can be selected

Questioner selects the advice they have taken.

Questioner is prompted to let the result be known, happy or otherwise. With commentary. Bonus points for those whose advice helped. Negative for bad advice that was taken.

Comments allowed but heavily vetted. Comments cost points.

The best questions/ results can appear on a chat video to promote the app.

Monetized later >>> One of the questions is a short 2 min survey. Many Points for answering.

Dual-Battery Phones

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I was slightly disturbed to read that Emirates are switching to digital-only boarding passes. What if your phone dies?

Which got me thinking – your phone is becoming more and more necessary for everyday life, and everyone has battery issues. Yet your phone’s functions can be divided into essential (paying for things, being an actual phone, messages) and non-essential (games, Tik-Tok).

Whether actually having two different batteries and perhaps even operating systems, or whether virtually doing so, I think splitting the two types of function could become necessary.

Very simplistically, when your battery gets down to 30%, games and so on cannot be run, and only essentials will. It won’t be told to you like that – you will be told that your gaming battery is empty.

The other option could be two phones, an essential phone, and a game/social/camera device. They could even be joined together, two different sides of the one device, with screens front and back.