A new container system that gets rid of all waste - Design and manufacture a set of a few dozen or hundred re-usable containers of different shapes and sizes, and a system for printing environmentally friendly ink on them that can be easily removed. Start a department/grocery store that does not use any disposable packaging. Give tax incentives to companies that use this packaging. The printable labels would allow for market differentiation since package types are now standard. Trucks come around and pick up the empty containers from customers, or they can bring them back to the store.
The problem is that companies currently get away with passing the cost of packaging disposal to the customer. So it's cheaper to use disposable packaging than have to arrange return transport, cleaning, etc, etc.
If companies were made responsible for their packaging, this kind of scheme could more easily become economical.
But even so, for many things, just reduced/alternative packaging would be a huge win.
An egregious example is shampoo. Especially the ones with pump-action dispensers (I won't even mention the glitter/plastic-microbeads that many shampoos contain). These containers use a good deal of plastic, and are surely bad for the environment. An alternative would be that you own a nice pump-action dispenser, and buy shampoo top-ups in plastic pouches - or even take your dispenser to the store where it's filled by tap. I believe I have seen something like the top-up pouches, it should be strongly encouraged, with packaging taxes of some kind.
i think germany has some sort of packaging or recycling tax.
for your products you can either arrange to take them back, or you pay a tax according to what would it cost to recycle.
for electronics for example that can't be fully recycled or put on a landfill or burned because of dangerous materials that tax should be accordingly higher.
Germany’s equivalent to US blue recycling bins is the yellow bin or yellow bag. It is exclusively for all kinds of wrapping and containers (except paper and glass) - because the disposal gets payed for by the producer of the product and wrapping. The same item (e.g. a plastic container or even a coat hanger) could go into the yellow bin or into regular garbage only depending on whether it came as packaging of another product or bought it standalone. The black “rest” garbage bins people need to pay fees for.
It incentivizes producers to reduce wrapping or use materials that are more environmentally friendly like paper or glass.
Most bottles (both plastic and glass) also don’t go into the garbage but are returned by consumers to the grocery stores for cash back (there are machines you just throw your bottles into and it spits out a receipt to cash in at the register).
This is one of the most important problems to solve hands down. And not just for environmental reasons. I live alone and produce mountains of waste even though I consume very little. Every item I buy comes wrapped in unneccessary amounts of plastic. By the end of each week I have bags full of waste that shouldnt be there. I dunno how to solve for this but it´s seriously mind boggling how much waste is produced that has no reason for being there.
here where i live, a second hand market does not exist. it is not in the peoples culture. on the other hand you can buy a lot of food in bulk without it being prepackaged. but even that does not help because i need to put every item in a bag so it can be measured. for fruits and vegetables i can often put multiple items in one bag, but for sugar or flour that doesn't work, so no matter if i buy prepackaged or bulk, i end up with a new piece of plastic that i have to throw away.
I'm not sure about your bulk store but where I live you can just bring a reusable container or cloth bag or something, weight it and put your goods in that.
yeah, that works in shops where you can talk to the owners. they will actually appreciate not having to use their bags since that saves them money. but in large supermarkets the employees usually don't have the courage to deviate from what they are told to do.
or it's simply not practical because the scale is not close enough and i'd be blocking it for to long. on busy days there is often a waiting line to get stuff weighed. so really this only works if the shop expressly designs for reusable containers.
How do you ensure that they get properly sterilized/cleaned after every use?
How many years of life are you aiming at? What is your system for finding containers at the end of their life that may soon fail?
What weights are you aiming for. What strength are you aiming for. What about padding?
What price point are you aiming at for each container?
How easily removable is the ink? What happens if the ink gets removed in transit? Is the store allowed to re-ink that, or are they required to ship the package as damaged back to the manufacturer.
How do you ensure that the package has not been tampered with?
Given that this will result in extra bulk and weight compared to a custom designed package, (which we have now), how confident are you that this would end up being carbon neutral?
This is exactly how it should be handled. If there's no monetary benefit for a particular organisation, it's gonna continue the same way it has always been continuing. Policies, rules and Government backing is a must for a proper waste management. If there is a proper tax incentive plan even retailers and supermarkets will be interested. All in all we are talking of collection of waste and processing it and providing incentives to entities which generate this waste.
Our local organic store (ecoindian) has returned to the older model where we take boxes/bottles to the store, fill them up and bring them back home. Thy have an easy way to weigh what we buy by taring our containers first. So I guess they use only the packaging required for bulk transport. This also let's us purchase what we need and not have excesses that can get spoilt just because someone decided that 1kg is a magical quantum.
How do you determine that personal waste or packaging waste is a big problem relative to others? I admit as a non-expert, I always hear about huge statistics of packaging waste and my first reaction is extreme skepticism that it’s actually a meaningful problem, and that sorts of confounders around rate of product breakages, lost items, sanitary transit, etc. would just mean it’s not worth it to try to reach a more global optimum of supply chain waste compared to the local optimum that modern efficient logistics are incentivized to meet.
It seems like one of those things that sounds like a big deal, like recycling, but when you look into it, it’s actually not cost effective to address it except a few special cases.
I and at 3 different sets of friends of mine have all tried and stopped using home meal delivery services due to disgust with all the packaging that comes with them. Now I might live in a bubble, but I do believe there is sentiment out there that it's not only an issue of quantity of waste generated, but also an aesthetic and philosophical issue as well. I personally find generating trash in any quantity to be offensive, and the idea of plastic floating around in the ocean disgusts me. Some will call it irrational but that doesn't mean there's not a need.
On one hand I really respect your directness because you’re admitting it’s purely an aesthetic preference and not data-driven optimal environmental policy. That’s a perfectly good point of view and a fine reason to take something up as a business, especially if many other people feel like you do too.
On the other hand, waste is a literal side-effect of all possible life, going all the way to level of entropy always increasing. All life processes produce waste, even digital life would produce waste heat and whatever electricity generating process it consumes from can’t be 100% efficient.
I view modern packaging as a really amazing invention. People can mail me a fragile piece of art from across the world and it can reach me quickly and safely. Factories can massively produce safely sealed food items that prevent literally tons of food waste through packaging, increasing nutrition availability, water availability and more.
Most modern packaging is virtually a miracle.
Where I agree with you about packaging waste though is when it is used for branding and designed around aesthetic form or market testing rather than utility. Disposability is not a harmful goal at all, but waste generated purely to support branding is hard to defend.
This is also relevant for containers used in logistics of things to the store. There is so much single use cardboard boxes used in fruit exports for example.
A free program for doing US taxes that has the polish and SEO of TurboTax.
The ultimate successful exit sees the entire sector of “tax service middleman” drying up once you have cut off the revenue of TurboTax and the rest of the tax preparation lobby, so they can no longer keep lobbying the government to have this complicated process instead of just automatically doing your taxes and sending you a bill like every other civilized country. Your company vanishes along with the rest of this sector.
Seriously the IRS should just mail you filled in forms, they have all the data, you can mail back amendments. Or online. There's absolutely not a single reason any third party needs to be involved in this.
Canada's been experimenting with this lately [1].
Frankly, as a rule of thumb, if something is potentially big and impactful, and isn't well suited to being funded by a VC, it should just be a government service.
I might get downvoted or something for this, but have you seen the most recent episode of Patroit Act with Hassan Minhaj?
His last episode was all about why tax prep companies mislead customers and the Patriot Act team set up a site that points to free tax filing services. Characteristically, with a vulgar name: https://www.turbotaxsucksass.com/
I used https://www.taxhawk.com/ this past year. It is free for Federal, but does charge for state taxes and has "deluxe" paid versions. The free version worked well for me.
You may have a point on SEO. While SEO means nothing to me as a user, the fact that people think free apps don't exist certainly shows a marketing problem.
I have always wanted to create a non-profit to do this :)
The analogy I used to use is a Robinhood for Taxes, but really now that Robinhood is increasingly seen as a manipulative tool, maybe I don't really want to associate with that brand anymore? (although I'm still a user though)
The reason this is not the case is irs is prohibited from doing this. You can thank big lobbyists from Tax prep providers (intuit). I hate this. Talk to your congresspeople about this.
How about a product that doesn't grow by accretion with the goal of acquiring new users or upselling existing users, but rather changes rarely and only in ways that benefit users?
The growth imperative required by VC funding is directly or indirectly to blame for all the awful things about Dropbox mentioned in https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/. It's difficult to see how a product like Syncthing would be of interest to VCs.
That linked article is actually kind of crap. Contrasting the workflow of downloading Syncthing binary and just executing it vs Dropbox sign up, install & download is a false dichotomy.
Nobody who wants to deal with shell level management of a running program that also needs to communicate with other nodes is part of the target user market for Dropbox, totally different worlds, different feature sets, everything.
Yeah it’s like Picasso saying “You bought that Thomas Kinkade piece of crap? I could have a bought a brush for $3 and painted something better in just a few weeks!”
There's plenty of smaller problems that are not VC backable. VCs need you to be a billion dollar company.
A lot of smaller markets exist. For example, I did a keto recipe app for Malay food. Malay food is different to the usual keto recipes; with rice based food, you can't simply replace everything with cauliflower. The market was about 200k people, too small for VCs but it was in high demand for the target market. People just kept asking to buy more. We only pulled out of the market because it was (literally) toxic and cultlike.
But similar problems exist. Primal diet for Japanese food maybe. Job boards for part timers and teenagers. A better language learning app, maybe for something very specific like Latin.
Atkins diet: "Start at 25g of carb, and increase it slightly over a period of time"
Local variation: "Never eat more than 25g carb"
"Drink lots of water. Eat a tablespoon of butter with every meal."
"Passing out is normal. Your body is detoxing itself."
"Soy sauce contains sugar. Substitute all your sugar with these substances."
"Yes, keto is expensive, but you can save costs by eating eggs and drinking lots of water. I eat 10 eggs a day and I'm just fine."
"If you want to further accelerate fat loss, here are some pills you can get. They're not approved by the health ministry, but the health ministry is bought out by Nestle and trying to get you to eat sugar and carbs."
Anyone who goes outside this norm gets bullied and banned from the community. It's really tempting to just blindly agree and let people kill themselves if your salary is coming from such a community.
There's a saying that users don't buy drills, they buy holes. The 'hole' here is that a keto dieter wants to lose 20kg in 2 weeks. Many are willing to die to achieve it; there's lots of stories of people who are crash dieting for a wedding or whose husbands have left them.
Keto diets are misleading too. A lot of the weight loss comes from water, not fat. The rapid fat loss gives the diet credibility, especially when someone has tried other things and only lost about 2kg with exercise and reduced calories. Once you've established that credibility, you can tell them anything. It's nice to have a business where people will blindly agree to buy whatever you sell them, but I don't want to deal with that kind of responsibility.
I'm very confused. Shouldn't it be obvious that the only sustainable way to reduce weight is slowly over long periods of time? I have no idea how the human body works but surely starving yourself for 2 weeks and then going back to your previous diet will not be very effective.
I'm not a doctor, but losing weight is not as simple as cutting calories. Keto diets get the body to store less fat and focus on burning fat rather than glucose as its primary fuel supply. I'll link WebMD if that clears things: https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/type-1-diabetes-guide/what-is...
If you eat nothing but butter and eggs for a week straight you'll get drastic weight loss. It is common sense that cutting calories and exercise is effective. So if you do follow a a strict no carb diet, you'll be surprised at how much more effective it is, without going hungry. You get a lot of delicious things on the menu - meat, butter, eggs, oil, milk, cheese, meat, butter. And my role as a developer is to show how you can combine those things into something edible, like flaxseed pizza, konjac stew, and bringing sugar free sweeteners back into their life.
After a week on this diet, bread will suddenly seem like the best thing in the world, and you'll find yourself happy to throw money at the app that sells you flaxseed bread.
Well the idea is that it took you years to put on the weight as your normal lifestyle is close to equilibrium calories consumed = calories burned. If you knock off the weight and maintain that same equilibrium then you should stay close to the reduced weight for some time. Of course in reality people's metabolisms and dieting habits change under such drastic circumstances so the equilibrium assumption doesn't hold up. That being said, there are plenty of people who don't care if they put all the weight back on in a few months so long as they have that beach bod for the summer.
My wife is a resident physician. I've seen so many things that could easily turn into a highly profitable, but not unicorn level business. In fact, there are a ton of websites/businesses that appear to be highly profitable in the space, but will never grow larger than 7 figures. If you run that with a small team, you can grow a very nice lifestyle business that can provide consistent income.
You'll never hit a unicorn valuation, but you could get a a point where you don't work too hard and live a comfortable life.
VCs were skeptical, partly because it did not fit their concept of a tech company. Government were uninterested because it sounded like a food company at its core masquerading as a tech company; we were more like a recipe app that directed ads internally. At the time, the buzz was that Uber, Airbnb, Alibaba held no stock, and nobody wanted to invest in companies that needed a warehouse, even though everyone wanted to invest in e-commerce.
Banks actually called us up and asked us if we wanted to borrow money because we had steady revenue. Our delivery and food supply partners were actually interested in being early stage investors, so there's that route.
We started with about $2500, most of it going into salary. Suppliers were happy to send the stuff direct to customers when we started and let us pay them the money due once a month, at a smaller profit margin. As we started selling more, we'd keep a literal ton of stock on hand.
I sold the company and the acquirers decided to shut it down after a few years, so it's no longer up on Google Play. Interestingly, we never had the budget/manpower for a site or iOS app. I'm not too keen to link press, because it opens up a lot of personal information.
Be nice to upgrade democracy to git. Not, like in theory, but for real.
New law? Push the update.
Pull old law easy peasy. diff/grep on newer versions or the county's over.
Vote on what makes it to prod, sub-teams for smaller areas like parking tickets, etc.
Yeah, it's simple at the end, but digitizing it all, linking it to the underlying databases, root privileges, etc. would make it all run much smoother. Be nice to see people get involved more too.
You might enjoy reading about Taiwan’s experiments in this direction [1]. They’ve used an online system to craft 26 pieces of legislation now with public participation. Now quite full-on “governance by git” but a very cool step in that direction.
Pretty sure it’s one of Audrey Tang’s projects [2]. She’s a member of the cabinet who is also an all-around hacker.
Heirloom consumer electronics and computers. Moore's law is failing, and the only reason we keep having to replace electronics is planned obsolescence and the fact electronics are still just designed with replacement expected by momentum.
Design laptops and cellphones to last 50 or 100 years plus. Start designing for a long term and mature computer industry.
there are a number of pieces of electronics that appear to already meet this - high quality (and older) vacuum cleaners, analog audio gear, laboratory equipment, certain kinds of vintage computers.
the main issue i run into with repairs tends to be mask roms / asics / gate arrays that are undocumented and long gone from the market. there are ways around that, but they require great effort. it's only in special niches like arcade machines or iconic 80s synths where people will go so far as to decap and image dies in order to get the needed information.
there is a particular value an object must have in order to tip the scales in favor of repair over replacement. it simply isn't practical to spend a major portion of a device's cost to repair it unless it is special in some way. i place value on repairing things and buying used but a lot of that is out of a personal feeling of pride in repairing and reusing. board level rework is a far cry from changing ones own oil.
on the topic of designing laptops and cell phones to last 50-100 years, you can absolutely make use of communications equipment from 1920-1970. radio teletypes didn't stop working, people still buy and sell them.
Moore's law isn't dead yet, we've got quite a ways to go. There are feasible paths to 1cm³ processors with billions of cores and enough processing power to host thousands of humans minds.
VCs are not the only game in town, so don't let their needs limit your imagination!
It's important to understand that while tech-obsessed founders, like most of the people found in Hacker News, usually think of tech-startups and VC being almost synonymous with entrepreneurship, that's not at all true.
Lots of people all around the world consider themselves (and are!) entrepreneurs, without necessarily building innovative tech or seeking VC-like growth prospects.
E.g. the corner restaurant you ate at last week? Opened by an entrepreneur. That barbershop that cut your hair? Same. Even much bigger ideas fit in this category - the software that runs the local gym? Possibly a VC-backed startup, but also possibly just a relatively small company focused on a small market, not aiming for sky-high valuations but quietly churning out millions in income.
These kinds of businesses have existed for long before VCs, and it's entirely possible to get funding for them the "traditional" way, e.g. raising a friends-and-family round, getting money from a bank, self-financing, charging customers from day one, etc.
Open source property tax assessment, admin, and collection software. This space is foundational to the function of local government, but the existing closed-source offerings in this space are expensive, dated, and opaque to the public.
This will never be VC backable because the market is small and each local government has special needs and unique requirements. The cost per customer is high and there's a hard cap on the TAM.
In a prior job I was tasked with building a REST API client for a closed source vendor product in this space as part of project to replace an existing system. Data need to be captured from a dozen on-prem databases that supported other vendor applications and then pushed into this new system using the client I built.
Sadly, the vendor provided scanned copies of JIRA user-stories as documentation of their app's API. Despite much struggling, the vendor wouldn't implement even the most basic auto-generated documentation for their API (Swagger). Bugs filed against their product regularly had a 3 month turn around time.
If there were an open source product in this space I could have forked it, made the changes I needed, submitted a pull request and then escalated it with management to get it mainlined by the vendor.
We were their only client for this product and they needed us to implement their system as an example of success so they could make further sales. But their secrecy made good-faith efforts at building integrations with their product extremely difficult. This might have been survivable if the vendor was good at communicating.
Alas this project just got delayed for another year after it was discovered by one of my old coworkers that the new system wasn't calculating property taxes correctly. If we had taken the vendor at their word this would have not been discovered and incorrect taxes may have gone out. Nobody loves taxes, but people rightfully hate it when their local government makes preventable mistakes.
Open source software in this space would reduce the rate of errors made in these scenarios and allow the public to verify the correctness of the system that taxes their property. As a bonus the cost of developing these systems could be spread across multiple local governments who each employ their own developers, rather than each group struggling through this process on their own once a decade.
I wonder how open source software would be received by local governments. The conditions of government contracts often provide for guarantees/penalties for the delivered software. Moreover, the barriers of entry are typically high, the bidder needs to have x years of "prior experience" with crazy compliance and insurance requirements.
how's this for a wild idea: humanity changes the objectives it prioritises to value long term environmental sustainability & to focus on benefits to society -- instead of prioritising things than benefit individuals & making decisions based primarily on economic growth or individual profit motive.
(not only is that incompatible with VC funding, it's incompatible with capitalism & western style individualism, so arguably operating in such a fashion is unreachable from our current society, even if being able to operate in such a fashion would be superior from the perspective of the whole species)
Those things are also entirely subjective,as much as people like to claim scientific imperatives for socialist constructs the best tool towards those goals generally is regulated markets. Like we have now
There is a subjective element, but they are not ENTIRELY subjective. It's pretty clear that less pollution would make for a more sustainable environment... it's just more expensive. It's pretty clear that it would be safer (prudent) to cut back on carbon emissions... it just has negative economic effects.
It's all about desired rate of return. Demanding short forces companies to leverage externalities like causing pollution to make money.
Long term returns motivates you not to destroy the planet to achieve the goal.
Really Long term returns hinge on the fact that converting the asteroid belt O'Neill cylinders is the future of mankind and destroying the planet to get there is fine as long as you get enough people off this rock first.
I'm building supply chain & logistics tech at Distribute Aid. We help grassroots aid groups meet more needs, more consistently, and work together to gain efficiency at scale.
We deliver $100 worth of aid for every $1 we spend on operations. Literally a 100x return for humanity.
The need is there. The scale is there. But it'll never get VC funding for obvious reasons.
We leverage partnerships with in-kind donors and shipping companies to get a lot of stuff for free. And of course there are tons of community groups gathering second-hand donations which we can send for free as well.
For example, there's a charitable factory making soap in Scotland. They give us a few hundred thousand bars of soap every 6 months or so, and we ship em out to 15+ refugee camps in Greece to ensure the hygiene of 100,000 people are met.
Alternative battery systems for hearing aids. Most of the size of the more powerful hearing aids are due to battery size. If the hearing aid battery could be miniaturized further or even completely eliminated (by, say, running off body heat or something), then hearing aids would shrink to be invisible.
The advent of Bluetooth has made it normal to have things hanging out of your ears, but a lot of hearing-impaired people would feel less self-conscious if their hearing aids were invisible, yet still functional.
Interesting idea. I am hearing impaired and have a set of in the ear hearing aides that aren't very noticeable. However, they are quite old. I got them in 2001. I rarely use them because I cannot get used to the background noise that I normally don't hear.
I haven't upgraded due to costs. Personally, I would like to see the manufacturing costs of better hearing aides come down. The last time I looked into it the costs was about $3500 per ear for modern in the ear hearing aides.
I haven't heard of that, but those hearing aids aren't anything special w/r/t shape or size. They're using the same batteries as other hearing aids. I'm sure they're getting their cost savings somewhere else.
They claim to be "invisible", but what they really mean is that the tube from the aid to the ear is really thin and transparent, and the aid itself is skin-toned. But it's not invisible, anyone can see it, and it's still big! (though light-years smaller than they were in the 90s...)
First, a clarification. There are in-the-ear hearing aids and over-the-ear hearing aids. The difference is usually one of power. An in-the-ear hearing aid is usually for older people with minor hearing loss. Someone like me that is profoundly deaf or with a severe hearing loss needs more powerful amplification. More power == more energy, and more energy == bigger batteries. That means that we need an over-the-ear hearing aid, like the one in the image above.
This means the aid cannot be ANY SMALLER than the battery.
If we could eliminate the battery entirely and rely on some other energy store, then the size of the aid could be slimmed down to almost flat.
The other problem with batteries is that batteries need to be changed when they die. My battery lasts somewhere between 7-9 days before it dies. If we were to use a smaller battery than the image above, it would die even more often. And trust me, it SUCKS to be mid-conversation when a battery dies... and it sucks even more if you didn't have any batteries with you and now you have to run to a local pharmacy to buy some, and you're trying to communicate with a cashier or whatever while completely deaf... Oof... But I digress... :)
Anyway! So the dream, as it were, is to create a battery-less aid that can run off body heat or something magical like that.
Smaller batteries are absolutely VC-backable. If they're developed for any application (phones, cars, power grid) they'll spill over into every other area.
Just a note that "bootstrapper VCs" are coming up that fund ideas whose revenue will eventually be in the <100 million dollar range, usually 10 or 20 million. Such examples include TinySeed, Earnest Capital, Indie.vc, Lighter Capital, and others.
So this question might have some interesting answers if we take this knowledge into consideration as well, as some of the ideas here could potentially be funded by these VCs even if not by traditional ones.
Plot twist: The underlying framework, database connection system, and model is sane - so that when you get to the point where the walled garden doesn't let you change what you want you can dive into the underlying system to do significant changes.
Actually, I wondered if someone would bring up Access. The problem with it is that it is trying to be a "real" database with an accessible interface. I feel it doesn't do either well. It can be very useful, but never simple and easy enough for the target users I'm thinking about.
Excel + SharePoint + PowerQuery is fantastic for small datasets. It takes a bit of discipline to do all joins through PQ instead of Excel, but then you can build all reporting with Excel which is very nice.
I'm working on a branching/merging authoring framework and application.
Git, specifically, is bad as a backing store - as merge conflict resolution is not something you want end users to do - it's not friendly. p2p sync (OT/CRDT) is what I'm betting and building on.
If anyone is interested in this space, I'd like to discuss/geek-out on this with you. Please reach out.
I don't understand how this is different from a wiki. I think that wikipedia already contains the collective knowledge from a vast amount of people and, dare I say it, is already the knowledge base of humanity.
Can you explain a bit more what the difference is?
For example, if you want to install/learn Haskell, Lisp...on your machine, you don't want to follow Wikipedia. Instead, you go community-generated docs or personal blogs for the updated docs.
Open source operating system for healthcare (for people to store medical records and diagnosis tools).
Medical diagnosis is fundamentally an information problem, which should be both free and open source. But there may be little to no business model here.
You may be interested in the Direct project, a set of open standards for secure communication between different healthcare systems: http://wiki.directproject.org/Main_Page
The government's actual purpose is the one thing no business can do, which is to use physical force against people that murder, rape, steal, defraud, etc. Businesses can't serve that role because armed businesses fighting with each other would quickly devolve into violent anarchy (and not the stable utopia anarchists claim).
Incidentally, 19th-century America had a lot of faults and flaws (it was incredibly racist), but an absolutely unprecedented amount of scientific and industrial progress was made without much public spending at all.
> The government's actual purpose is the one thing no business can do, which is to use physical force against people that murder, rape, steal, defraud, etc.
Can you explain why this is true? It's a very strong claim.
If armed groups are supposed to suddenly wake up and decide to start killing each other to ensure their own survival, why haven't Russia and the USA nuked each other off the face of the earth yet?
good question. but I think the answer is obvious when you consider the different risks enormous groups and small groups face from disputes.
for small groups nearly every dispute could pose existential risk, but for enormous groups very few disputes pose existential risk. then in the conflict side, enormous groups have MAD, where conflict itself carries existential risk. small groups of course can also be wiped out by conflict (even if they don't possess a bureaucratic mechanism to ensure that,) but the risk side of the calculation is heavier for them I think.
and enormous groups still engage in conflict with each other although it happens indirectly via proxy wars.
also paradoxically the larger the group becomes the more its interests, or "meta interests" (such as favoring stability and security), tend to align with its competitors but for small groups it's almost like every group for itself. but I believe that the calculation can tend towards cooperation being more beneficial the larger group gets. but I think this factor only applies when groups become very very large.
also there's some sort of entropy argument as in large groups cultivate more structure, organization and order and therefore it would take more energy to dismantle them so they're more stable. which not only makes them harder to dismantle but also gives them more to lose if they were to decide to tear everything down and build it up again.
I think you have posited interesting ideas about the decisions that small and large groups make about when to engage in conflicts and how to ensure long term survival. I am not sure how true they are in reality, but I can certainly see where you are coming from.
If I put myself into that situation for a moment, as the leader of a small armed group, I can see two options at first. The first option is to go into hiding and potentially die of resource starvation if I am unable to cultivate the things needed to survive on my own (or be killed by outside attackers). The second is to grow bigger and bigger by forcibly and preemptively taking over the other small groups so I can secure my borders so to speak, but going on the offensive can also lead to premature death as well.
As a result I think some hybrid approach is needed, where one goes into hiding in a land so far away and inhospitable that nobody wants to attack, thus there's nobody to fight.
VC fund a specific type of profitable business, typically high growth potential, quickly scalable and can be protected with barriers of entry, finally should be sellable to someone .
There are plenty of profitable businesses which do not fit this model and government is not equipped to invest in.
Custom solutions for disabled adults and children. Conditions like cerebral palsy, ALS, quadriplegia, etc force otherwise healthy people into isolation. Steven Hawking famously had a custom program that gave him his voice back when he lost it, but how many other people with similar conditions don't have access to that kind of technology. Every person's condition and relevant challenges is different so most solutions probably wouldn't scale.
When I had bad mobility problems, I wanted to create a rollator that converted into a lightweight power chair for when I was done walking. There are rollator/transport chair hybrids, but those still require a caregiver to push you.
In an age of hoverboards and cheap electric scooters, something like this should be doable.
BeWelcome.org - like CouchSurfing, but without membership fees. Stay in people's houses for free. There's no obligation to be a host (I wasn't for years).
The site is made by volunteers, server costs are paid by donation, and there's full financial transparency. Legally the structure is comparable to Wikipedia/Wikimedia, and is a non-profit "association" in France.
Why volunteer? I build things because I want to. Sometimes they make it to Show HN. But nobody uses them. I lose motivation when there isn't a colleague asking me to fix things twice a day. Hospitality exchange has the network effect needed to bring in newcomers and get people involved.
My dream is that it could be much bigger. Passionate people could start other social networks within the same community: BeBook, BeChat, BeMail. I'd like to build BeTranslate, starting with Chinese/English. At first it would just be partnering with existing open-source projects (like all the CS meetups that are choosing to rename). But it would also be a commitment of these developers to never close their source, never charge fees, and always involve the community.
How about systems that don't involve stat backed currency OR cryptocurrency? Like using these amazing communication devices to connect needs with resources without involving the middle-man god $.
I think this is a great idea and economists have been looking at this for nearly a century now, for example, there is Knut Wicksell's "Pure Credit Economy" from 1919 but not much progress has been made.
There's a nice paper you can read called "money is memory" which argues that keeping track of past transactions is actually a more effective way of allocating resources than using money/tokens. I've been figuring out how such a system would work in practice.
I believe that when we can more effectively and fairly manage reputation in the context of transactions (I'm not advocating some horrid "social credit" system that the Chinese government foisted on the country), then we won't need money anymore. That means no central banks as monopoly issuer of currency and I think the World will be a better place because of it.
I believe the federal government actually sort of does do this currently, although it's more just that they pay you to not farm the land rather than actively repair it. This was a few years ago, some folks in Missouri told me that they were getting some income this way. I'm ~80% sure it was a federal and not a state or local program, and no idea what it is called.
This is only a partially formed idea: Some kind of derivatives market that allows investors to make money speculating on fossil fuel reserves while simultaneously discouraging extraction. The core idea is that fossil fuels are a finite resource nearly irreplaceable at scale whose value will increase with time, but the specifics of what lies where is poorly known, which creates an opportunity for a market to exist. Participating in the market would have to be more profitable than extraction, however. Maybe if the price of securing mineral rights could be guaranteed to be greater than the market value of the resource? It isn't clear how this incentive structure would work. I welcome ideas.
It seems like this could also be within the scope of a single fund? The fund would own mineral rights, investors could buy in expecting those rights to appreciate in value over a very long term.
I suppose you’d want a few funds with different speculation strategies and then basically end up back at a market though.
Also I don’t see how anyone invests without the end goal _eventually_ being extraction.
VC are middlemen. Their job is to funnel money from their upstream investors e.g. hedge funds, superannuation etc into startups that they believe will make money. The timeframe for this process is basically a decade. So a startup has a decade to take money, do something and then return the money. It's why startups are being held to the T2D3 growth benchmark. They need things wrapped up pretty quick.
So if you are a startup wanting to build a long term business then the VC track probably isn't for you unless you are willing to either (a) get acquired or (b) IPO.
There really does need to be more revenue sharing VC options as this is the only way to support the type of long term, sustainable businesses we really need.
Not necessarily (although you are kind of right to a good extent).
There are other types of investors that will happily take the 10-year old investment and ride with it for another number of years. Usually they do it by discounting the value, and thus making money that way. (not good for founders, employees, or early investors other than VCs with good clauses in their investment contracts).
Venture Capital has a sweet spot where they focus on Capital-intense (obvious) products, preferably software. (Check out this video: https://youtu.be/vErPgQF3N38)
Many National Defense projects won't work for VC for a variety of reasons. Some can, but security clearance and regulations usually scare VCs away.
Many service based companies... not because they can't (strictly speaking) but VC has a system in place that doesn't gel well with service based approaches.
Anything that would take a long time to grow won't attract VC funds either.
A global power station that taps 'natural' electricity in the ionosphere. Unlimited free power, already in the form we need. No emissions, no need for mining or damming or drilling.
And the term 'aurora power' has a really nice ring to it.
In more detail: a few days ago on HN there was an article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362) about the risks of solar storms and EMPs on America's power infrastructure. Solar storms induce potentially huge electrical currents in the power grid. Rather than regarding it as a danger, why not find a way to harness it?
The Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American had a lovely article about electrostatic motors, powered by the Earth's electric field: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-scien... (Search for the article title, there's a PDF available elsewhere on internet)
The SF writer Murray Leinster made extensive use of ionospheric electricity in many of his novellas...
Most businesses don't make sense for VC because they can't grow at the rate VC needs in order to work or reach the size.
Pick any large industry and look at the software used. It is probably not great (there is a difference between old software that works or works well enough and badly designed software that does not do its job well). Within that lies what is actually interesting, which is customer pain, and potential customers who will pay to have that solved.
On a less quixotic note, electric buses, particularly dual-mode trolleybuses that never stop to refuel. They're slowly appearing but less exciting than electric cars apparently.
I've only been to Zamość out of these and it's grown out of the starting plan in last few centuries, but it was operating as designed for a while.
> Jan Zamoyski commissioned the Venetian (from Padua) architect Bernardo Morando to design the city, based upon the anthropomorphic concept. Its "head" was to be the Zamoyski Palace, "backbone" Grodzka Street, crossing the Great Market Square from east to west, in the direction of the palace, and with the "arms" embodied by 10 streets intersecting the main streets: Solna Street (north of the Great Market Square) and Bernardo Morando Street (south of the Great Market Square). In these streets, the other squares were placed: Salt Square (Rynek Solny) and Water Square (Rynek Wodny), functioning as the "internal organs" of the city whereas the bastions are the "hands and legs" for self-defence.[13]
Good counter; however, what I have in mind is less of a "rigid" model of a planned city (Le Corbusier is possibly the worst example of that), but rather a very "elastic" model, where there is rigidity and opinionated approaches on the infrastructure, but hopefully a lot of freedom up the stack.
After the last farm bill and the estimate of "1 hectare of hemp to build a 135 m2 (1,450 sq ft) house", I really thought we would have seen a "rural metropolis" growth boom (aka new cities) by now, but I think the autonomous vehicle infrastructure realm is the last legislative hurdle left to build something that maintains 1st world standards for the next leg of growth.
Without the convenience of an avi, it would just be Grizzly Adams cosplay in the woods.
If you're wondering why this doesn't happen, well I'd argue that that's because a large amount of people see a big difference between taxes and investments. There's good reason for this, because taxes do more than invest into projects, but it definitely is a component and as soon as you add the T word people are no longer with you.
You're right, but that's supposed to be an initial pitch, not the whole thing :)
In short, it's going to be about rethinking how we build and consider innovations in materials, in use of spaces, in reducing customization to improve efficiency. I am planning to write a long essay about it. But a lot of it is already in my head. Sorry I can't share anything more meaningful here at the moment.
BauGruppen: super interesting. Didn't know about them. Thanks a lot for sharing.
Forgive a bit of optimism (and maybe arrogance): imagine AirBnB, making a cut on transactions between hosts and guests.
This specific company could make a cut acting like a marketplace between builders and homebuyers. Defensible? Not sure. Still many things to figure out.
I already purchase several personal care products from Thankyou [1]. I would love to see their model expanded to many other categories, perhaps an entire supermarket with only such brands.
SaaS businesses that are priced by usage. Pricing by subscription ($x/month) or by users ($x/user/month) is much more easier, more predictable, but makes these unattainable for a large chunk of the global market.
VC funding means revenue optimization, which leads to either of the above 2 revenue models (or some variation thereof).
Charging your customers like how tarsnap charges its users means you won't ever make a lot of money, but it can be a sustainable business.
For a loose definition of “idea”, find the minimal viable dose of fasting. We’re sure fasting is good for humans but we’re not sure what the sweet spot is. 16 hours every day? 3 days every month? 1 week every year?
It’s difficult to convince someone to fund something that can’t be sold. How do you profit by seeking fasting?
Second Life with VR, with AI-driven NPC, plus deep-faked faces and bodies of real people (e.g. celebrity). Bonus would be a cybernetics jack-in to have a fully immersed experience.
With all the push to remote work, it's not farfetched to do your daily Scrum on a Hawaii beach inside the Second Life VR.
P2P grid compute + storage that is actually cheap and can drive down the cost of computation significantly.
Can be achieved with unikernels, homomorphic encryption, ipfs. There's a lot of compute and storage available all over the world, idle, waiting to be used. A system like this can utilize it
I've worked on similar things in the past; I think this idea (A distributed compute + storage network) in general, is great. However, although Homomorphic encryption is pretty cool, it's not that fast. AFAIK, current state-of-the art is essentially simulating Boolean gate arrays.
If anyone has any insight on the technicanal foundational feasibility of this, please share :)
I've got my homelab participating in Folding@Home, it'd be interesting to run some commercial workloads in a similar manner to help offset energy costs.
Here's my brilliant/crazy idea: drive-thru mass. Wait, wait, don't leave yet. Hear me out.
Let's face it. Church is boring. Most of that time on Sunday is consumed with the same old filler material. The choir sings. You stand up, you sit down, you stand up, you raise your hands, you sit down, you kneel, you stand up, you sit down. You sprinkle in hymns in between prayers. There's always The Lord's Prayer, which everyone recites by rote like zombies. The pastor/priest gets up and delivers a sermon/homily that may or may not be interesting. You stand up, sit down, a basket lands in front of you and you drop a few bucks into the donation basket, stand up again, sing another hymn, then sit down.
Finally, mercifully, it's time for communion. You wait until the row in front of you has gone, then you stand up and, like a parade of penguins, waddle down the pews until you get to the aisle where line up like lemmings and shuffle forward until you reach your destination. There's a little "this is the body of Christ, this is the blood of Christ", yadda yadda, then you sit down, stand up, sing a hymn, sit down, close your eyes for the final prayer, shake everyone's hands and leave.
For Catholics, at least, the important bit is communion, that little 5 minute sliver in the middle of an hour is the most important bit.
But hey, I mean, you're a busy person. You want to beat the crowd to the post-church Olive Garden all-you-can-eat buffet or you want to watch the football game that starts at 11:30am on the west coast, and all of that sitting and standing and murmuring along with prayers is cutting into your valuable time!
So,... drive-thru mass.
You pull up in line. There's a sign at the beginning that says, "Turn your radio to 1530 AM". You turn to the channel -- or maybe you download this week's podcast episode?! -- and it's the priest with today's sermon. He's talking about how the world is a scary place, and the only way to survive is through the grace of God. Yadda yadda. It's a 5-10 minute affair, but that's okay because you're in line for communion!
You pull up to the window, and a deacon leans out and says, "The body of Christ", then hands you a cracker. You eat it as you pull forward to the next window. The deacon leans out with a thimble-cup of wine (or grape juice, it's so small, who cares) and says, "The blood of Christ." You knock it back, do the sign of the cross at the Jesus-on-a-cross hanging just past the window, pull forward, drop a few bucks in the donation chute, and then head out on your merry way.
Time elapsed: 5-10 minutes.
You saved your knees and back, and you got the sermon, the body/bread, the blood/wine, and if you're really feeling it, you listen past the sermon and catch a hymn or two, and beat the crowd for those unlimited breadsticks.
I think that has been the most interesting part of the pandemic for me -- how church has changed and adapted. I sometimes find myself in the bay area to meet clients, and if I'm there on a weekend there's a church I tend to go to (NBCC).
One day on a whim I said to my family, why don't we "attend" last week's NBCC? So we did.
Apparently the Mandarin-speaking congregation (in my home church in Sydney) is getting a lot of attendees from Beijing.
When the restrictions were somewhat lifted (so that you could have more than immediate family in your house), we started a system where we rotate around to different people's houses in groups to join the videoconference.
There's no reason we couldn't have done these things before, but we just didn't do it until now.
My mother-in-law is a die-hard Catholic and has been raging for the past three months because she can't go to church, and I just don't understand why she can't just watch the live-stream that the priest is doing. But for her, there's something about physically accepting communion. (I'm not Catholic, so I don't really get it, but I've been sternly informed that I should just not talk about that with them lol).
I've often thought of churches as a poor man's country club more than as a house of God, and so yeah, I'm with you! I don't see why this can't just go remote like most everything else.
I do wonder how the long-term landscape will change due to COVID...
So church without any community? That’s, like, one of the reasons churches exist, they’re a place for a community to come together and get to know each other a little.
My inner Magician also notes that there are things that happen when you get a bunch of people in the same place focusing on the same stuff. It’s not in every church, some churches are pretty much designed to get in the way of these things. Mostly middle-class white ones, IMHO, they’re built to keep the commoners well away from any direct experience of the Divine. But it’s also not just in churches, talk to a serious raver for instance, come down to New Orleans and catch Rex with all your psychic feelers out, go to Burning Man, etc. Anywhere lots of people work themselves up into ecstatic states, there is the potential for magic. This stuff is not gonna happen with this five minute asynchronous ceremony.
I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for letting my inner Magician speak on this site full of “rational” money-seeking programmers. Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised at how many people here are quietly mystical.
First, this was more tongue-in-cheek than anything else, so just keep that in mind ;)
That said, you aren't wrong! But I think you underestimate how many people think communion is the most important part and don't actually participate in the community aspect of it!
Personally, I'm more in your camp, especially for Protestant churches. I've often referred to the local Methodist church that my friends go to as "the poor man's country club". Not disparaging them in any way, but for them it's more about the community than it is about God.
It's more than just Communion. There is ceremony, listening to the Bible, the homily, the readings. What we do comes from the Bible, and helps us reflect and position our minds and hearts towards God.
Yes, 5-10 minutes is quicker, but it's not about spending _less_ time with God, that's not the point of mass.
People with brilliant/crazy ideas need to sit down and google them. Drive-in church is really popular right now, all across the country, and is a throwback to drive-in churches from the 1950's.[0]
Maybe mass would work in a drive-in move style. You pick a spot, stay in your car and tune in. You watch on the screen. Get/donate for self-serve communion kits at the gate on the way in. No one will notice that you are actually listening to Slayer in your headphones. And you can hit the holy water car wash on the way out.
I don't hate the idea, but for me, the worst part of church is the filler part. The most interesting part is the sermon and the most necessary part is communion (for Catholics, anyway). The rest I could just dispense with altogether. So if the drive-in thing was just the sermon, then sure... Yeah. But if it's all pomp and circumstance except I'm in my car... no thanks.
Also, why bother go if you're just going to listen to Slayer... :)
I'm not religious, but my wife's family is. I listen to podcasts during the boring bits when we go to church for the holidays or when traveling. Not quite Slayer, but... still entertaining!
Here's my $0.02. Kleiner Perkins invested in Juicero and the exit strategy on that one was the public markets... which is WAY worse than having the Catholic church come in a do an acquisition.
a distributed way to map and collect the data structure on the web crowdsourced from a community of people not only passionate about mapping out the structure of app HTML and how it corresponds to data types, but also people who want to collect and use that data.
the data can be used for anything from competition and pricing analysis, to dashboards, to creating automatic RSS feeds of anything.
it just seems that being able to unlock the latent value of all of the information, the structured information on the web, which is presented only in a semi-structured form but which, with the addition of human labor, could be made so it's machine usable could unlock so much value.
but I've been pitching VCS and y combinator on this idea for the last six or seven years and not so much as a peep of interest so it seems that this idea doesn't possess a way to create a lot of money but I do believe it's very valuable.
