DEMOCRACY HOPE DIGNITY FREEDOM SPIRIT JUSTICE SUSTAINABILITY OPENNESS SOUL POWER PEOPLE HUMANITY

MEMEX - Seed list of ideas. (Ref: i1501)

Sheep's fleeces are almost permanently damp but never get mouldy. Use the substance protecting them for damp proofing kitchen and bathroom walls.
Are ball lightning and UFOs both caused by temporal lobe seizures brought on by the presence of intense electric fields?
Generate electricity with windmills with vertical axes in the central reservations of motorways where there is constant wind from traffic and pollution, noise and ugliness effects would not be made any worse than they already are.
Make the diameter of toothpaste tube nozzles smaller to save on use as most people probably squeeze paste onto the brush in the same way.
Install covers on lorries with open loads that operate like fold down soft tops on cars. A mechanical arm would lift the cover clear, swing it across the load, and then lower it into place.
As part of traffic calming measures block most residential streets with cylindrical posts made of very poor quality concrete that will decay to dust in about three years. Inside the cylinders plant trees that will be protected from damage and being hit by cars for the three years that they take to establish themselves while the concrete posts gradually disappear.
Put raised arrows on the skirting boards of hotel and public building corridors so that in the event of fire people can crawl below the smoke and in the dark and still know which way to go to an exit. Don't exit signs above doors get obscured by smoke just when you really need to see them?
Get everyone to plant one tree a year. That amounts to a wood 20 miles by 10 miles with a tree every ten feet every year in Britain alone.
Stop shrink wrapping everything in DIY shops. Why is it done anyway?
Create the 'information superhighway' as a national piece of infrastructure with free use for everyone.
Start research into forms of transport such as the Caspian Sea Monster that relied on ground effect to skim only a few feet above the sea or ground surface.
Say a 2000 MW power station costs £2b to build, or £1 per Watt of capacity. Use that money to bring down the cost of low energy long life light bulbs to say £5. Subsidise the conversion of conventional bulb production to new bulbs. Give away a couple of bulbs to each household to stimulate both use and manufacture. One new bulb using 20 Watts should save 80 Watts of capacity. 20 million households using two each would save 3200 MW of capacity. Assume average bulb usage of 3 hours a day so average capacity saved would be 400MW at a cost of £100m over 10 years or £400m over the 40 year lifetime of the power station. Capital cost the same. Savings : interest payments on £400m loan over 40 years, saving of materials not used in construction, land not used, waste not produced, fuel not used for construction and running of the power station, energy lost in electricity production not manufactured in the first place
A referendum on whether to stay in the EU or to pull out altogether.
Put low intensity red lights in the backs of cars so that passengers can read at night without affecting the driver's sight.
Create and save paper copies of all Ordnance Survey maps produced so that changes can be seen and all maps are not completely up to date. Retain the present concept of 'editions'.
Employers should occasionally take on someone without any of the experience they normally require on the grounds that such people bring new blood, new experience, different methods and ways of thinking and can be taught to do the job quickly anyway. If they can't do the job they will surely be able to contribute in some other job in the same company. Or take on the long term unemployed on the grounds that these people have probably done some serious and productive thinking that working people do not have time for, and some of them will have learnt a lot from reading in their endless spare time.
Blow up land mines all over the world by means of a vehicle pushing a very heavy roller on the end of a long boom. Or use explosions to detonate all mines within an acre for example. Most mines are in tropical countries where plant growth is rapid so whatever damage is done to the land will be quickly repaired. With the mines still in place people are maimed and killed for the indefinite future and the land is practically useless as well. Where is the actual need to waste the local children and mine disposal people?
Why aren't explosives that are not needed detonated instead of dumped, frequently in very dangerous places that will be hazardous for decades or longer? Witness the dumping of huge quantities of shells into the sea off the coast of Vladivostok.
Limit the number and brightness of vehicle headlights to avoid blinding oncoming drivers. Limit the total light output to ensure that drivers have no choice but to slow down at night because they cannot see well enough.
Make moveable carpets fashionable again instead of fitted carpets. They can be moved around to considerably cut down on waste and distribute wear and tear. Produce ordinary carpets in 6ft square tiles.
Mow road verges and open spaces only once or twice per season in rotation to encourage the development of mini meadows.
Why don't shopkeepers in ordinary shopping streets put up street length covers to keep the rain off shoppers as some do already to keep out sun?
Trams as now installed seem to be far too high tech and sophisticated. Would it be better, cheaper and environmentally preferable to use large fleets of buses instead of spending vast sums on new tram systems?
Cut the use of cars in towns by buying at public expense huge numbers of the cheapest, least sophisticated and least desirable bicycles and letting them be used freely by anyone anywhere. If there are enough and they are not worth stealing they will be a success. Have baskets for shopping and old-fashioned warning bells.
Scrap most attempts at coastal erosion control which are very expensive and ultimately virtually futile. Instead buy off owners of presently affected properties and make it a legal requirement that any new owner of land that is in the future affected by erosion is solely responsible for the ensuing cost to themselves.
Resist erosion of personal freedom in the guise of such things as ID cards on the grounds that measures like this do not work and penalise the innocent while those who are supposedly the target of such measures just ignore them.
Go for the lowest tech versions of processes or products to save costs, waste, maintenance, breakdowns and repairs.
Make confetti from rice paper so that it is completely biodegradeable.
Incorporate a layer of coloured rubber in car tyres to show up when they are dangerously worn.
Train joyriders to drive properly in Virtual Reality systems as has been done successfully in Melbourne.
Would dimpled skins on aircraft help them fly more efficiently as dimples apparently do on golf balls?
Scrap the practice of putting up road signs saying such useless things as 'No road markings'.
Scrap officially built and designated long distance footpaths to avoid creating honeypots and to make it necessary for walkers to put in some actual effort to complete the walk, thereby cutting demand.
Scrap brown signs telling everyone where everything is when most don't need to know and the rest should find out for themselves.
Scrap packaging in every sphere of life as it is often impossible to justify on any grounds other than fashion and salesmanship.
As with compulsory weight and contents statements on packaging institute a packaging code tag. This can be torn off and left in shop/supermarket/DIY shop bins for later collation if customers consider the packaging wasteful or superfluous. Publish at public expense the names of products getting the most tags returned to shame manufacturers. Or have a free-phone number, paid for from taxes, to register dissatisfaction with packaging. Publish the results monthly at public expense. Stop sabotage of the scheme by vested interests or people with a grievance by barring 'number witheld' calls so that multiple calls and flooding of the system can be detected and traced to its source. Manufacturers could then be informed eficiently of exactly which products people considered were unreasonably packaged and to what degree. If this information was made available to the public say once a year it could also be seen which manufacturers took any notice of what their customers really thought.
Create a free-phone system paid for by taxes so that referenda can be conducted on affairs of public importance continuously.
Create internet addresses for all public officials and encourage the public to send messages using keywords to ease sorting and interpretation. Publish keywords to be used for particular subjects. Use codes instead to avoid ambiguity.
Ban the defence of 'I need to drive for my job' in motoring offenses. The responsibility for crime is the criminal's and the criminal must be held responsible for the consequences of his actions. If committing an offense is likely to result in loss of license then perhaps it would be wise not to commit the offence in the first place.
Completely legalise possession and use of cannabis, heroin and other drugs. Or criminalise alcohol and smoking.
On Sunday afternoons between 14:00 and 17:00 open a stretch of the M40 to cars and motorbikes only with no speed limit whatsoever, but also no insurance and no possibility of legal action against public authorities in the case of accident. Would this take a lot of joyriding lunatics off the roads and also give everyone else the chance to drive as fast as they like occasionally without breaking the law?
Block all rat runs in towns to make life infinitely more pleasant for the residents, safer for children and deprive the antisocial drivers of the pleasure of gaining from their behaviour.
Reserve a channel on plane music systems for Air Traffic Control, as is already done on at least one airline.
Make fertilizer sacks and other similar bags out of biodegradeable plastic so that farmers cannot mess up the countryside with infinite numbers of them.
Why not remove virtually all computers from schools and use the money for books instead. There seems to be little evidence that computers teach any of the fundamental skills that schools are actually for while they seem to breed innumeracy, cause lack of understanding of the knowledge that their proponents claim they impart and cost a fortune to buy, maintain and modernize compared with books. Knowledge of computers themselves can easily be taught to adults who wish to learn, at their own expense, as has always been the practice with driving.
Scrap the habit of using plastic bags for household rubbish. What purpose is this supposed to serve?
Scrap advertising billboards as they are unsightly and not well targetted to potential customers. Instead use the money to create a public advertising database available to all.
Use a substance like silly putty to flow into window and door gaps to form temporary draught proofing that is easy to remove for summer.
Replace all light bulbs paid for by taxes with low energy long life bulbs as they wear out.
Create a new insurance waiver making it easy for people to take a risk with new products before they have been exhaustively tested but without the manufacturer having to assume premature and unreasonable risk of being sued. This could be used most immediately for sufferers of terminal diseases to attempt to treat themselves with experimental drugs at their own risk, when they, after all, have nothing to lose and everything to gain provided they are not forced to wait so long they die first.
Much data from satellites built with public money is apparently wasted because there is insufficient money or scientists to analyse it. So release it all for public use and make it possible to pick up the unusable data direct from the satellites concerned as transmission by any land-bound means costs extra money and people for processing. Serendipity and amateur interest would almost certainly yield vast benefits in these days of easy and cheap computing and the public cost would be easily repaid in intangible benefits.
Design a tiny computerised monitoring station cheap enough for home use and schools, transmitting data via the internet, that could monitor weather , carbon dioxide, UV levels, ozone, radon, radiation levels etc for global collation. Innaccuracies in data caused by their amateur collection would be cancelled by the sheer mass of data,
When in the hills walking pick up litter on the way home when your pack will be lighter because you ate most of its contents at lunchtime.
Clean all broken glass, paper, plastic, rubbish off your own property thoroughly tomorrow. Once done properly it will be decades before it is unsightly again if nobody but you is messing it up. And think what a difference could be made if every household in Britain did this just once.
Create electronic internet addresses for everyone in this country free and now so that the coming freedom of information will be available for all as soon as possible.
As clean water becomes ever more scarce in Britain why do we spend so much money making every drop drinkable instead of cleaning all our water processes to the best of our ability and drinking only bottled water. What is the point of flushing millions of toilets every day of the year with drinking water we have deliberately polluted with chlorine?
Collect rainwater on all new buildings as they are built. An average building in Britain 100 feet square will collect over 150,000 gallons of clean water a year with no transporting energy cost.
Spread this document among the old who are on average wiser and can say what they think without fear.
Create strong incentives for one parent of a child to stay at home and share day jobs.
Do any animals use synesthesia for extraordinary talents?
Are the sensations many people feel from such things as nails scraping on blackboards actually the remnants of synesthesia in all of us? Do drugs such as LSD and mescaline simply revive synesthesia in users? Could this be extremely useful?
Do 'standards' as we are in the habit of setting them actually lower standards because manufacturers now only aim for the lowest they can get away with?
Should safety standards be considerably lowered for such tremendously safe things as railways to encourage their use. Absolute safety is impossible yet we handicap ourselves by trying to achieve it, thereby making many things we desperately need prohibitively expensive.
Why are buses in our towns so comfortable? The average journey would be very short if we used buses instead of cars and therefore comfort is not necessary. Doing away with these luxuries would cut the cost of a bus by how much? They would also be much lighter per passenger and therefore cheaper and more energy efficient.
Bells and whistles are more pieces to break down. Why do we have so many on everything we buy when most people have little or no use for them. Are such extras justified in any case in products or services provided by the taxpayer?
Save most village shops by arranging schemes, some of which already exist, where customers pay for and order goods in advance thereby freeing the retailer from the impossible expense of buying stock of unknown value in advance.

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Democracy for a new millennium

MEMEX - Seed list of ideas. (Ref: i1501)