Instead of mandatory military service like some countries have, people should have mandatory public work for two years. Whether it be labor, clerical/administrative, etc, it could help young people learn a new skill, get guaranteed work to get the started, and could potentially save a ton in taxes. It would also create the opportunity to start getting caught up some things that keep getting swept under the rug like bridge maintenance , etc.
For me, there would be public holidays that celebrate social, cultural and scientific achievements.
A day of printing, the decoding of the human genome,... you know - real achievements, not only stories of some ancient folks being tortured to death and such.
Nonprofit versions of vital social tech. If I had the money sitting around, I'd love to start a nonprofit dating site/app. I met my wife on OKC in 2011 before it got bought up and enshittified. It was great and wasn't geared toward just keeping you engaged (they're soooooo bad now!). You'd probably have to gatekeep it with a small fee to disincentive bots, but with a relatively small investment, you could create something really useful for folks without preying on anyone's desperation.
Signal would be a good model for this sort of thing.
When you get to baggage claim, if you then stand directly at the carousel blocking everyone's view for more than 10 seconds, trap door opens and a system of pneumatic tubes forcibly jettisons you to the furthest point away in the airport for you to walk back.
Stand back, wait for your luggage to appear, then approach and get your bag and step back to the perimeter.
To get my VC funding in 2024, id also pitch that it "has AI" which is just facial recognition and if you get jettisoned twice in the same year, the third time goes into a shark pit or scorpion pit.
Candidates for public office should be required to undergo a mental health assessment as part of the process of getting on the ballot, and those who score beyond (above or below, as may be relevant) particular thresholds are barred from seeking office.
I sincerely believe that there's no single thing we could do that would provide more benefit to the world than to get sociopaths and narcissists and megalomaniacs out of positions of power. Each and every one of the most notable and contentious politicians in the world today is, if you just take a step back and look at them honestly, blatantly profoundly mentally ill. Enough is enough.
Is a functional government based on logic and compassion too much to ask/too cliché?
Renters rights legislation with enough teeth to make present and perspective landlords, both corporate and individual, think twice before not taking care of a property as though they lived there? (Yes, there are stories behind this one)
I guess a company that actually pays me what I'm worth (which I'm not even really looking for that much).
A law that prohibits labels from being too sticky that you can't reuse the packaging. For example, I should absolutely be able to easily peel off the labels from empty wine bottles and glass jars so I can reuse them.
German take: Parking on the side of the road and on sidewalks should just be banned.
Its legality is based on a single court case from the 1950's where a judge decided that it should be a legal use of public space, because it's necessary and useful for motorizing the country. The justfication is obsolete. It's not enshrined in any laws. The traffic law specifically forbids it, with exceptions.
Yet it's practiced everywhere and even where parked cars block sidewalks, police simply don't enforce the law.
"But where should I park?"
You should have thought of that before buying a car.
"But what about rural areas where you need a car to live?"
No problem here, just park it on your turnip field.
I think there should be pedestrian, bike routes separate from cars, like storefronts should face both ways, and the intersections with signals, but where practical should have bridges for the walkers, so they don't have to deal with the cars.
I also really want replicator tech, want to be able to use any input to get basically any output, at least in terms of materials. Throw in the trash, it is sorted into its component elements (safely) and then those can be combined to make clean water, salt water, building materials, whatever.
I want also a floor and walls that eat the dirt, and clothing fabric that can cool even in humidity.
All gamepads that have it having a BAXY control scheme. That's B right, A down, X left, Y up for the buttons on the right side of the gamepad. I can't tell you how many times I have pressed the wrong buttons when playing certain games all because the 3rd party switch controller I have uses ABYX or because I don't remember where the symbols are on a PlayStation controller. Dreamcast and original Xbox had their shit together with how they used BAXY for their controllers and to this day I may shit on Microsoft, but not on the BAXY control scheme on their gamepads.
Tie more positive things to the federal minimum wage, for example tax brackets and retirement fund contribution limits. They go up every single year, so the government will either have to keep raising the minimum wage or go on the record to justify why the ratio is wrong.
git send-xmpp & darcs send --xmpp for realtime, decentralized collaborative patches. The extensibility could fix the UX issues with patches by email & wouldn’t require accounts on someone else’s server or using the severely flawed ‘pull request’ model.
There's this suit of useful little programs called Microsoft PowerToys, I always thought it should include a tool that allows you to quickly swap the contents of monitors around in multi-monitor setups.
e.g. move all open windows from monitor 1 to monitor 2 and vice-versa, while retaining their (approximate) position.
This may already be a thing, I haven't really checked.
In addition to fluoride, water supplies should be dosed with small amounts of lithium. Maybe LSD, too.
Incel bounties: Anyone who has trouble getting laid can check into a facility where they are assigned a bounty equal to a set rate times the days they've spent in the facility. They can leave any time, but the clock restarts if they come back. Volunteers may show up and offer to have sex with a participant. If the participant agrees and the deed is done, the bounty gets split between the volunteer and the participant.
Hard rationing of greenhouse gas emissions: every year everyone gets issued an equal amount of GHG vouchers that, in total, represent a safe amount of GHGs that can be emitted that year. Fossil fuel companies then need to buy these vouchers on the market and turn them into the government in order to get permission to extract the representative amount of fossil fuels. Doing so without permission would carry a severe penalty. This concept could be applied to water supplies, fisheries, and other resources as well.
Imputed rent as taxable income instead of flat property or wealth taxes.
No fares for urban public transit. Instead, a special property tax should be applied to real estate inversely proportional to its walking distance from transit stops.
Reintroduce wolves to suburban areas to keep the deer under control.
Electric airships instead of fossil fuel powered passenger jets.
Nuclear power plants within or adjacent to urban centers, especially in colder climate regions.
Gray water recovery built into homes and municipal water systems.
Airport lounges where the seats are just like on the plane, with little spots for luggage to the side. Then people just get up and board in order, putting your stuff right above or in front of you. If you're late, you board last. No more airline rat race.
I'd like citizenship swapping services. Some people just don't wanna stay stuck to their country of birth, especially if renouncing that citizenship is literally impossible (I'm Moroccan, and according to Moroccan law I'll stay that way to my own detriment, even if I get another citizenship which thankfully is possible).
After an impromptu upscale bar/lounge crawl with the wifey the other day.....
A shoe that can easily go back and forth from high heel/wedge to comfortable flats w/o much, if any, tooling or carrying around extra parts. She also brought a clutch purse
Wifey was dead the next day from foot pain of walking between places.
Something I have discussed before aside, a communication reform would be nice. The world of language is way too chaotic, with too many people who think their way of communicating should be universal and not enough people with that opinion questioning how they can change theirs in the name of efficiency/sufficiency.
I'd like to see a reminder app that figures out how to space out your reminders, and if you nooze a reminder then it gets slotted at some random future date.
I find I end up making reminders for shows I want to watch, books I want to read, etc. These don't have any specific day associated with them, but I do want o get to them at some point. So getting a reminder once a week or so to check out one of the items on a list would be really nice.
There should be a Bluetooth headpiece (over ear preferably) that has normal functions, but ALSO will replicate the "Note to self" feature, where you tap the main button, and say "note to self" then say what you want the note to be, and have it sent to your email. That alone would be a "killer product" for me. I miss this so much.
Change grammar so that the plural of a word ending in an s followed by a hard consonant has -es added to the end instead of just -s - e.g. waspes instead of wasps.
A cool idea I've had for a long time (or rather a dream) was a truly private and good suit auf office programs like Microsoft 356 but with privacy and the customor in mind. No anti-consumer things generally.