Crushed Lids
In a fast food restaurant, you go to get a lid for your drink.
The lids are all jammed together. It’s happened many times.
One person encounters this – struggles to get the top lid off, ends up tearing the lid and throwing it away; they have to tear another one off, which works but is bend up.
It’s frustrating for them, because their fumbling, and it’s obvious that someone else intentionally screwed this up.
If they get frustrated enough they might complain to an employee, but it’s not the employee’s job to deal with that, the employee didn’t cause it; it’s just another stupid complaint from a customer that makes the employee’s life even worse than it already was before.
And, the customer doesn’t feel any better after complaining, because nothing is solved. The customer didn’t know who did it, but they sure complained about it.
Nobody fixes the problem.
Every single person (like 10 or 15 people), one per lid, have to deal with the same aggravation.
The manager of the restaurant doesn’t even know it’s happening. He also doesn’t care; there’s nothing he can do about that.
The person who caused the problem was a couple of teenage punks who were showing off to each other a few minutes before. When nobody was looking, one of them mashed down on the lids with his hand, crushing the set to about half the height they previously were; both kids laugh and run off to their seat, looking for the next source of entertainment.
They derive excitement and camradery for making life painful for other people.
They don’t even stick around long enough to see people struggle with it; the moment is gone, they’re off and running.
This is not the world I want to live in.
How It Should Have Happened
Here’s how this should have gone down; here’s how the future will be.
The young person shows off by crushing the lids, and they know what’s going to happen (frustration for people). They think it’s funny, they leave.
The next person comes along and tries to get a lid, struggles with it, and knows what to do next.
They clearly sees what went on in the past and why. Why it’s not a big issue, it’s OK, funny almost.
There’s no reason to get upset.
They grab the whole stack of lids and pull the bottom one off – they figured out years ago that it’s much easier to pull the bottom one off than the top one, because the bottom one is sticking out more, the rim is a kind of “handle” to pull on.
Your Mind Can Ease Your Life
You have to use your mind to figure out things like this.
Your mind says “all the lids look crushed”. But there’s only so many lids here; there has to be a bottom lid. If three come off the bottom, them put down the stack and hold onto the three, and pull the bottom one off that. Repeat until you’re holding a single lid.
You probably don’t think of that the first time it happens, but you realize it after dealing with the situation 2 or 3 times; or having some time to ponder what would have made that a more graceful experience. You can be more dextrous than just standing there lame and confused.
You can also wash your hands ahead of time, and not handle a stack of lids that will be used by many people, without having done so, out of kindness and compassion for your fellow people. Even if you won’t wash your hands for yourself, you might want to wash them for everybody around you.
That next person comes up and sees the chunk-of-crushed-together-lids – and he knows what to do. He thinks to himself:
“This is an opportunity. This is a chance to help my community. I want all the people who come here after me to NOT have to deal with the lid-catastrophe that I have to face now. It is my service and my duty and my pride to fix this problem, and it only takes 15-20 seconds of my time to avoid buckets and buckets of emotional pain for many, many people who come after me.
So they stand there, pulling them apart one by one, carefully, and placing them carefully, unjamming every single one. Lastly they take one off the top of the stack for their drink, and go on their way.
Maybe that was you. You just provided a community service. You don’t get any credit for that in the physical world, except that it makes you feel happy and joyful, something you cannot buy with any amount of money in the physical world.
You know how to handle this sort of thing because when you were growing up you were educated in a school system that doesn’t exist today. You learned that service for humanity is a great thing. It doesn’t have to be large, it can be small, like uncrushing a bunch of plastic lids during your lunch break. It helps society, and it’s good for you. It creates health and happiness to do these things.
You can feel joy from helping people even in little ways like this. And, if that’s not enough for you, why don’t you sit down near the cups-and-lids area to eat your meal, so you can see what happens with the next 20 customers? Every time someone grabs a lid off that stack, you can enjoy the fact that they succeeded easily – they didn’t get irate – the didn’t fumble and fiddle and destroy lids by accident and curse out the employee who doesn’t deserve it. The thing they expected to do (pick up a lid) they achieved in the time frame they expected to!
And they have no idea that you helped them just a few moments earlier.
You can enjoy that! Why shouldn’t you?
Future Society thru Education
In the future society, most people will not be the teenager that smashed down the cups. They will understand at an earlier age that hurting other people hurts you, it’s not worth the microscopic excitement you might feel temporarily. Or if they are, there is a checks and balances system – the other adults in the room have been trained to be more aware of their surroundings, to look past themselves fairly at the other people and items in the room.
2 or 3 adults notice the teenagers goofing around, smashing the lids together. But they don’t stop them, they let them have their fun for the moment. They know that just because you witnessed something irritating but harmless, it does not mean they have to jump in and make an ass of themselves, to “put a stop to it” because they don’t agree with it. They remember being teenagers in the past; and now they know they can play a different role as an adult. Perhaps secretively un-smashing the lids to remedy the situation.
Adults will be taught a vast array of techniques to handle any situation like this in the future. A thousand different things can be done, and they will ponder a variety of ways they can handle the next few minutes of this situation, and they can see who would play which roles.
Maybe the adult goes over and talks to the boys and says, “hey I saw what you did there, that’s pretty funny (smiling). But now I want you to sit here for the next half-hour and watch everyone struggling to get a cup. It will be funny. I want you to see their frustration, and feel it with them. But whatever you do, don’t fix the cups; I just want you to observe what happens. Then think to yourself: have you ever been frustrated by something out of your control like that in your life? What if your past frustration was caused by a person? It would feel like a personal attack, wouldn’t it.
What if your life, right now, didn’t have the level of frustration that you have today? What if you had the power to remove frustration from someone else, who was just thinking this very same thing to themselves?
The next time you are frustrated in your life, I want you to think back on this restaurant and see if your frustration and their frustration correlate in some way. How are they similar, how are they different? And think: was there someone who could have saved me from this frustration? Who? Where are they? When and how could they have acted, to remove my frustration? And, what would it be like if I were doing their job? Could I fix a frustration like that for someone? How would I do that?
By not ruining experiences for other people, I realize that I will not have experiences ruined for me.
That’s the bottom line. This is a deep truth in life.
Two Things Tied Together
The same mechanism that causes you to want to stop ruining experiences for others – that same set of actions, happenings, thoughts, and feelings can occur to other people, too – guiding them to not create frustration for other people. Maybe you will save them frustration and they will save you frustration.
The two actions are DIRECTLY tied together – you hurting others, others hurting you.
In the future world you won’t see trash on the ground very often. Everybody who came before you walking past that point picked up 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 pieces of trash, and deposited them in the building they were walking to. You may not even have known that a half-hour ago someone accidentally tore a trash bag and trash went everywhere, far more than they could pick up.
The last person saw only 6 pieces of trash left, so he picked them all up and threw them away. Nobody said anything, nobody got acknowledgement for their service, and nobody looked for kudos. It’s just the thing everyone does, it’s not a big deal.
All that matters is – by the time you got there, there was no trash on the ground, and you have no idea what transpired not so very long ago in that exact same spot.
If you had seen a piece of trash, you would have picked it up, because that’s how you’ve been trained, just like everyone else.
Shopping Carts
The shopping carts don’t need to pile up in the parking lot of the grocery store. When you get out of your car you grab a cart from the parking lot on your way into the store, even if you have to walk a couple isles away to get one; this adds maybe an extra 10 seconds to your shopping trip. You can shop with that cart if you want; maybe you don’t need one because you’re only buying 2 items. So you just push it to the cart-storage-area near the front of the store.
But maybe you do need a shopping cart in the store. You can use this cart. If it has a horribly wobbly wheel, you will discover that between the parking lot and the store, so you can exchange it at the front of the store for a different one! Now you have a lower chance of having to shop with a wobbly-wheel-cart, because you got to test-drive one before going inside.
When you’re done shopping, push your cart to your car, unload it, and return the cart back to the cart-area at the front of the store. Yes, you walked back to the front of the store, and back to your car for the second time. This only adds another 30-40 seconds to your shopping trip.
And, miracle of miracles, if everyone did this, there would RARELY be any carts in the parking lot for you to return. Maybe a handicapped person, or an elderly person was unable to return their cart the way everyone else in society does; but that’s OK. The next person arriving at the grocery store will happily push it to the front of the store when they see it sitting in the parking lot.
If a mad rush happens at the store, all of the parking spots will be available for customer parking; none are blocked by stray carts.
In Arizona, it’s not right to make a grocery store employee spend a half-hour retrieving carts in the 120 degree fahrenheit blinding sun; it’s juch better for everyone if each customer simply pushes 1 cart back to the store, when they see it in the parking lot. That half-hour of extra sun is divided among a thousand separate people, rather than being focused on one poor minimum-wage employee who’s already suffering enough from reasons unrelated to shopping carts.
But Why Return Carts to the Store?
This action with the shopping carts makes sense to you, because it comes full-circle, it closes the loop:
- push cart front-of-store into store: because you need to use a cart to shop
- push cart from store to car: because you can’t carry 20 bags of groceries on your own
THEREFORE THERE MUST BE ANOTHER ACTION: - push cart from car to front-of-store: because you have to complete the loop.
No loose ends. For the sake of completion. You need closure. You’re helping your fellow man.
If the store manager does not have to send an employee to do cart-roundup every 20-30 minutes, that employee can be more useful to the business doing things that actually sell products like stocking shelves, moving pallets, cleaning isles, etc. The store, on average, can get away with 1 fewer employees. This means 1 less paycheck of money going OUT OF the store’s business. This means lower expenses, which is a good thing – it helps the store avoid raising prices.
A business has to raise prices when all the expenses can’t be cut any further. Their costs are probably going up over time; if expenses stay the same or go up, and their costs go up, they have no choice but to increase prices. They have to.
By helping them trim their expenses in the little bit you’re willing to do, it helps postpone the time when they have to raise prices – maybe by a few weeks or months. Stores don’t want to raise prices, because customers get upset; they only raise prices if they have to.
What I’m saying is, in the end, pushing shopping carts back to the store LOWERS STORE PRICES FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY. We like lower prices of the things we buy in stores. At least I do.
If you don’t understand or don’t believe this, you need to take some classes in business, especially basic accounting. Learn what a Balance Sheet is and why it’s important. Learn what an Income Statement is and how it’s different from a Balance Sheet. Then you need to start your own small business. Doesn’t matter whether it’s successful or not, the fact is, you’ll learn to see things from the point of view of the business – you’ll “get it”.
I’m not saying business works right today – I see many ways that it’s inherently flawed (…I should write another article perhaps). But, this is how business works today in our society. You owe it to yourself to understand how the world around you works, today, even if for no other reason than to understand how and why it needs to be changed and improved in the future.
And you’ll probably start pushing your shopping cart back to the grocery store before leaving, and pick up a couple of pieces of trash along the way.
Car Insurance
Same thing for car insurance. Do you have a sneaky way to make money off your recent car accident? I recommend not doing so! Don’t make money off your car accident.
Cheating like that helps you, but hurts everybody else who has insurance with the same company.
Cheating like that helps only you temporarily, and hurts many people long-term.
The net gain/loss is a loss, in this case. And that’s not even considering the legal ramifications.
In fact, your insurance rates are much higher right now because of a lot of other people who took unfair advantage like this in the past! Don’t let yourself be part of that. Don’t lower yourself to their standard.
Don’t do it, because it feels wrong. Don’t do it, because you understand how Karma works.
Don’t do it, because you understand how business works, and insurance is just a type of business.
Insurance has income and expenses, just like every other business. Help them keep their expenses lower, and you’re helping yourself save money on insurance every month from now on.
”I just saved a bunch of money on car insurance!”
”…by switching to that one company?”
”…no, by NOT RIPPING OFF my insurance company. You’re welcome, by the way, because that saved you money too.”
Oh Leaders of every Nation, imagine the greatness your people can accomplish!
What is the next step for each aspect of life in your country? Reaching that next step is so important.
What great accomplishment hasn’t been achieved yet by your country? The time has come to do it.
Inspire your people with visions of the great future that lies ahead!
Don’t let your mind be mired by thoughts of the limitations you face today.
Don’t let yourself get caught up in terrorism, and similar distractions.
What people focus on is so important. If a downhill skier focuses on the trees, they will ski right into a tree. Instead they are taught to focus on the path between the trees, so they ski safely along the path. The same is true for driving (“keep your eyes on the road”), bicycling, running a business (large or small), running a country. How does your focus need to change now?
When you set high goals for yourself in any endeavor, your have a much greater chance of reaching those goals. It’s surprising when it happens the first time. Try it and see for yourself if you don’t believe it.
Telling everyone around you the high goals you set for yourself increases your chance of achieving them. This is especially important in the ever-increasing openness and transparency of our world. People want to be a part of what’s going on, they want to understand everything that’s happening everywhere in the world, today. People are smart enough now to understand anything you know about, and will even run with it – helping you achieve the parts related to their field of expertise.
Working towards a Great Goal creates prosperity. It creates health. It creates cooperation. It creates happiness. It reduces expenses. And it creates connections and side-effects that are beneficial in ways you never would have expected.
Achieving a Great Goal
Step 1: What is the Goal? (one sentence that anyone can understand)
Step 2: What is your Plan to achieve the Goal?
Step 3: What Tasks are required to follow the Plan?
Step 4: Who are the right people to perform those Tasks? The people will gladly help – your Goal inspired them.
Step 5: What resources do you need related to those Tasks?
Step 6: What is the right timing of those tasks?
Step 7: How do you measure success of the Tasks, Plan, Purpose?
Step 8: What is needed to maintain the Goal, once it’s accomplished?
Qualities of a Great Goal
- All inclusive – everyone benefits.
- Harmless – does not do damage to any person/place/thing.
- Unique – something that hasn’t been done before.
- Great Goals open your heart, help you feel more relaxed and calm when you think about them.
Great Goals from the Past
- Putting a man on the moon, and bringing him safely back home. Proof that we achieved escape-velocity from Earth (25,000 MPH) using metal and fuel, when scientists had already proven it “couldn’t be done”.
- Creating a factory so powerful and comprehensive that iron ore goes in one end and automobiles drive out the other end.
- The Panama Canal – “Extreme Engineering” TV Show, 2003-2006; collection 1, episode 1, Widening the Panama Canal – Netflix streaming
- Understanding that the Earth rotates around the Sun, and the Sun around the Galaxy, and being able to prove it.
- Achieving flight and rocketry, using heavier-than-air vehicles.
- Achieving sailing and shipping, using heavier-than-water vehicles.
- ___________________________________________ (write the one you constantly think about here)
Ideas for Great Future Goals
- Humanity’s role as Custodian of Nature. Help all species of plants and animals on Earth live healthy, happy lives in cooperation with each other and with Humanity. Cause the water and air to be cleaner, year after year. Cause the dirt to be healthier for planting and farming.
- Creating a new monetary system which expands and contracts equally with the quantity of people, their needs, and their ability to work. Holding Corporations to the same high standards as Humans – pure self-centered greed is not acceptable. Doing 100 units of destruction to make 50 units of money is not acceptable. Find a way to measure detriment in balanced relation to benefit. Who is the great Libra who will figure this out? How will the world be inspired to follow it?
- Building a new type of Corporation that can contract as well as expand. For every plan to expand, there is a reverse plan to shrink in an orderly fashion if things don’t work out. Every plan to make more money has with it a responsibility to do right action with that new found wealth and/or power. Borrowing money has an orderly plan to pay it all back. Building a building has with it a plan and resources in reserve to return the land to its former status – including the costs and effort to do so.
- ____________________________________________ (write your own ideas in this space)
Law of Reverses
Just when you have too much work to do, that’s when you need to add new tasks to achieve Great Goals; the energy will come.
Just when you’re low on resources, that is when you should allocate resources to achieve Great Goals.
Just when everyone criticizes your Goal or Plan, that’s when it’s time to implement it. You’re doing it right.
Just when people near you disappear to avoid doing the work, that’s when you’ll recruit the hard-working intuitive joyful people who energetically follow your Plan and truly help you achieve the Goal.
Failure Isn’t
If a person fails at a Task, encourage them to try again; if they won’t, find someone else.
If a Task fails, choose another Task to achieve the same part of the Plan.
If a Plan fails, create a new Plan to achieve the same Goal.
When you’re unsure about which of 2 Tasks should be done, choose them both.
When you’re unsure about which of 2 Plans are needed, follow them both.
Measure success and failure. Study the measurements. Try something else, and measure again.
Make a decision, take action. If you’re wrong or fail, you learned something. If you’re right or succeed, you accomplished something. Being wrong or failing helped you learn what doesn’t work – that’s more than you knew before you tried. Anything you choose now is better – you’re making progress. Leave negative emotions behind, you’re closer to the goal. Repeat as necessary.
Success is Inevitable, and Better than You Think
And how will you feel when your country successfully achieved such a Great Goal?
And how will other countries be inspired by your success? What will they do to follow?
And how will your children look upon this achievement? And how will their children see it? And theirs?
And what unexpected things will you learn about your country, your people, yourself?
The Leader is You
Regardless of your position in life, you are the leader.
You lead your family. You lead your friends. You lead your coworkers. You lead your physical body around every day. You lead your emotions when you want to. You lead your mind to focus on the things you need to focus on.
You are the leader I have been talking about in this article.
The time is now. Let’s get going. Leaders, what is your Plan!
Here’s an idea for World Cooperation / World Service type of web site. This would be a web site where all the data is indexed across all the countries.
In other words, when someone logs in to the web site, it knows what country they are in (either they select their country from a menu, or the web site does what all search engines do today and look at your IP address to figure out what country you’re in).
Then, the web site asks the person various questions, a standard set of questions that everyone gets asked, such as:
* What is a great talent that people in your country have, that is not found in other countries?
* What is a great artwork in your country? Style of art?
* What is the typical style of clothing in your country?
* What is unique about your country apart from other countries?
* What is a unique style of music that your country has, that other countries don’t have?
* what is a great aspect of your life, of the way you live, that you like better than how other countries’ living is?
Basically, the user is being asked to identify uniqueness and greatness about what they’re the expert at – the country they live in.
Once they have answered a question, they are then allowed to see the answers that other people gave to that question – answers near them (same country), answers of neighboring countries, answers from countries all around the world.
People can browse these results both horizontally and vertically. By that I mean:
* for a given question, they can see all the varying answers across every country;
* for a given country, they can see all the varying answers to every question.
Since there will be a LOT of answers to every question, people have the ability vote up (+1, thumbs up, etc.) the answers to each question for their locale – the highest rated answers will show up first on the list of answers for a question. Maybe each person gets 3 votes per question, that they can apply to 3 different answers, the best 3 answers they’ve seen to the question. (It doesn’t have to be just 1 vote per question.)
Favorite-voting also helps remove duplicates from the results, since there will probably be a lot of duplicate answers per country to a given question.
Or maybe the person can vote for 1 out of every 10 answers that you’ve read (the “favorite” system as used by geocaching.com).
Everybody can see all the data, they can see all the aggregations of data. They can see the top-5 answers, for example, per country and world wide if they want to.
Pen Pals
This system would also encourage text communication between people of different countries, sort of like being “pen pals,” from the old postal service letter writing days. This would be digital and instantaneous. Sort of like sending and receiving Email, however when Email you’re targeting you write anything you want, to a specific person you’re planning ahead of time. With this Pen Pal system, you’d be discussing a specific question & answer by a specific person; maybe someone’s answer to the question really rings a bell with you, and you want to talk about it. Or you can’t understand what they are talking about, or you can’t imagine that particular answer being given; you want to ask them to tell you more about it, so you can learn more about their country, their living environment, their lifestyle.
You can request a Pen Pal, and one will be assigned to you from among those interested in being Pen Pals. Or you can send a Pen Pal request to the answerer of a particular question, maybe you just read their answer and wanted to ask them something about it.
You can only have Pen Pals in other countries, not within your own country. Because the whole idea here is to exchange new information – learn something new about another country, directly from people who live in that country. Not altered-reality from any mass media outlet – direct reality, from the people of every country. No Middlemen Allowed.
To start with, you can only have 1 Pen Pal. Once you’ve exchanged 3-5 messages back and forth with them over a 3 or more day period, you are allowed to have a second Pen Pal if you want to; but you don’t have to. And so on; the more you participate, the more Pen Pals you can have if you choose to.
When receiving a Pen Pal request, you can choose “accept”, to become a Pen Pal with them; or you can choose “not now”, which will gently let them know that you are not open to talking to anybody right now. If the person you’re trying to be Pen Pals with is already at their maximum for Pen Pals, you’ll be notified that they cannot accept anymore right now, but try again in a few days or weeks if you want to.
Each time you want to send a message to a Pen Pal, a set of questions will be suggested to you, sort of like “things you can talk about if you want to.” Ideas of things to talk about. It’s a sort of writing challenge – while writing to this person, can you weave in questions or answers that involve these particular topics? Maybe you give answers, and their reply will have their answers to the same questions. This way you both can see where you are similar, and where you are different. It will be so interesting to see what the responses are.
Pen Pals will be encouraged to not judge the other person based on their answers, and not try to get into arguments. It’s a good challenge to talk to someone who believes differently than you – can you listen without getting upset? Can you express your viewpoint? Can they listen, without getting upset? It would be great if the point system could somehow involve judgement of neutrality of emotion during discussion, but I’m not sure what the algorithm for that would be (human moderation of discussions maybe? Ala Slashdot moderation).
Typical Pen Pal discussion topics / questions might be like: do you own a car? do you drive a car? do you drive it every day? do you walk, right a bike, segway, scooter, motorcycle, truck, take the bus? do you work? what kind of work do you do? do you own your own business or work for someone else? do you work long hours? are you the only worker in your family? how big is your family? how many people do you live with? do you live in a house, apartment, hut, castle? do you own your domicile, or you’re renting, or you’re staying there for free? How close is your school? how close is your work? Do you have paved streets or dirt streets? Do you live in the city, urban area, or country? Where do you live? where do you wish you lived? what do you like to eat? What do you regularly eat? Do you prepare your own meals? how many times a day/week? do you eat in restaurants regularly? what is your favorite dish to prepare? to eat? take a picture of the food you ate today, let me ask you questions about it.
Maybe just 2-3 questions per Pen Pal writeup, otherwise the letters could get a bit too long to read and reply to.
This is all about learning and communicating. Nobody knows what every country in the world is like, but they deserve to. There is no reason you should be unclear about what any country in the world is like. The Internet is too small for that, now.
Bookmarks
You can bookmark, and return later to:
* questions that you like, so you can read more answers in the future
* people whose answers you’ve enjoyed reading for various questions
* Pen Pals of yours are automatically bookmarked
Advanced Users
Users become more “advanced” based on the number of questions they have answered on the site. A more advanced user will have more access on the web site. They will be able to create new questions that everyone in all countries can now be asked. When a new question is created, obviously nobody has answered it yet – it will pop up for them to answer, if they want to, the next time they log in (or immediately, if they’re currently logged in). The question creator will have a special metric on their home page so they can see how many people (and percentage of people) have answered the question so far, and the highest ranked answer so far.
People who have achieved Pen Pals with 1 or more people from 75% of the countries in the world receive a Bronze Star. 90% of the countries, silver star. 100% of the countries, gold star. These stars will show up next to their name & avatar picture wherever their name & avatar picture appear on the web site.
Participating in the Pen Pal system with people from different countries also gains you points towards becoming a more Advanced User.
Other Awards
* talk to someone in one other country, you get a special icon/award.
* talk to someone on another continent, you get an International award.
* talk to someone in every country on your continent, you get a special icon/award.
* talk to someone in your region, you get an upgraded icon/award.
* answer 10 questions, you get a basic icon/award.
* answer 20 questions, you get an upgraded icon/award.
* answer 50 questions, you get an upgraded icon/award.
* answer 100 questions, upgraded icon/award.
* answer 200 questions, upgraded icon/award.
Meta Data and Statistics
Meta data will also be available to everyone:
* total number of questions in the system
* total number of answers people have given so far
* total number of Pen Pal connections going on right now
* number and percent of countries participating
* number and percent of country-to-country Pen Pal connections
* number of people achieving bronze stars, silver stars, and gold stars.
Interesting Interactions
At first, not all the countries will have people participating; it takes time to build up a user base involving every country in the world. Because of this, a gold star will be given for 100% of the countries in this system – not necessarily in the whole world. But then, as soon as one person joins the system from a new country that has never been represented in the system before, every gold star will disappear – because now there is a “new country” in the system, that all the gold star people have not talked to yet! So you can imagine, the first few people from a new country will probably be barraged by Pen Pal requests – mostly by those former-gold-star people wanting their gold stars back!
Implementation
So far everything I’ve described is easily doable, with a good amount of work. You can build a database-driven web site to do this more easily today than ever before. It’s still a few person-months of work though. And just making it a web site is not good enough today – people want everything available on their smart phones and tablets, so implementations that interface to that would be extremely important as well. A web interface might be the most flexible, detecting and adjusting for the specific type of screen being drawn on.
Building user base – create awards/points also for getting your friends to sign up on this system. If they enter your referral code (or email address), you get some credit for it in some way that you would not have, otherwise.
Possibly do a limited rollout with queuing of people who sign up, so that the server is not flooded too quickly with users; if there’s a chance that will be a problem. Like many of the modern web sites do today (throttled user signups).
This system would implement some aspects of Geocaching-style points, statistics, ranking, aggregating, which is the coolest data information system I have seen online, ever. It’s fun to see how you are doing in different categories, trying to become a “well rounded user” as measured different ways, achieve various levels of achievement, etc.
What Do You Think?
Does this idea sound interesting?
What new realizations will people have who use a system like this?
What new behaviors will people have in the world as a result?
How will this affect politics, finance, religion, and service, between different countries in our world?
Feel free to Pen Pal me right here on WordPress, or email me at paulio10@gmail.com with your thoughts.
I want to see the traffic up ahead on the freeway while I’m driving, for many miles ahead; much further than I can currently see with my eye. I want to see around the turns, down into the valleys when I’m climbing a hill, and into the distance as far as I feel like seeing.
I want this because I’d like to know if there are any traffic jams up ahead, so I can get off the freeway if my time is critical during my drive. I need time to plan ahead. A quick look at a camera can tell you an amazing amount of information about the condition of the road ahead. Construction related lane restrictions? Accidents? Objects in the road that people are avoiding? Detours?
This Can Be Done Today
I believe this can be done today – someone just needs to write the software.
Most freeways in the United States now have cameras set up to view the traffic in a given direction, every few miles (or every quarter mile), which are publically available on the Internet – you can go to certain web pages to see what the view from the cameras look like at the moment. These cameras are at fixed, known locations.
Your car or your cell phone probably has a GPS receiver in it to know where you are (accurate to about 10 feet). If not, you can pick one up pretty easily these days.
If you put these technologies together, you can probably have something close to what I am thinking.
Do you remember in the movie Inception, when the dream-world starts bending, the streets and buildings start rising up in the distance, until they’re literally overhead? When they’re just lifted up enough for you to see all the buildings and streets and people up ahead, maybe at a 45 degree angle — that would be perfect. I want that. I want to see up ahead just like that.
Someone needs to write this software.
There should be a way to send somebody something, where they don’t have to tell you what their address is.
It may be none of your business – the delivery company needs to know where the package is going, but the sender shouldn’t have to know that.
For example – I just finished reading a book, so I register it on BookCrossing.com web site, which is a book sharing site. It’s pretty cool. I click “who’s wishing for this book?”, and it shows me 3 other BookCrossing members who have indicated they’re looking for that book! I would love to mail it to one of them so they can enjoy it as I did. So I click on the person’s link, and it displays their part of the web site: what books they have registered, and so forth – but there’s no way to learn the person’s mailing address. Which makes sense in today’s society, because that person doesn’t know who they can trust. They don’t want to share their mailing address with absolutely everyone on the entire web site. In the future, things like that won’t be a problem. But for now, while people still harm other people in our society, while people still have emotional and mental problems and damage, a lot of people prefer to remain anonymous to everyone except their known family and friends.
You can look at it the other way as well: shouldn’t you be able to receive an item that other people are willing to send you, without having to give them your mailing address? Shouldn’t you be able to generate a 1-shot shipping/tracking number that the shipping company has linked to your postal address inside their database system? Then you can give that 1-shot ID number to the person doing the shipping. Once the item is dropped off at (or picked up by) the shipping company, they scan the bar-code and discover it’s secret destination – and the package is on it’s way.
And, you should be able to pay for the package from either end – either the sender or receiver should be able to pay for it, so long as payment is completed at the time the package is handed to the shipping company. In fact, it would not be hard to invent a split payment: both sides pay an equal amount to perform the shipment. If it costs $12.50 to deliver the package, the receiver can pay $6.25 when generating the unique ID number and attaching their shipping address. Then they send that number to the other person to attach to the package. The other person must pay the remaining $6.25 when they hand it off to the shipping company, so payment is complete.
It’s just a different idea of how shipping packages can work in our world. It would not be too hard to implement this idea, and train people about the new way this shipping system works. It would certainly be useful to me right now, with this book I want to send to somebody I’ve never met, to fulfill a need out there in the world. But I can’t do that, today.
The world is not ending in December.
Get that idea right out of your head.
There will be a January, and a February, and a March.
There will be a 2013, 2014, 2015.
There will be a 2020, 2030, 2050, 2100, 2200, 2500, even a 3000.
Just when the world seems like it is in the most chaos, you need to know this: it is a lie and a deception.
The world is not in chaos being run by complete morons.
There is an order and structure. There is a plan, and there is a future.
CONSCIOUS WORLD LEADERSHIP
There are people who understand all the things happening in the world, and are leading events with a guiding hand.
They work tirelessly to inspire, encourage, guide, support, refresh all those in charge of making the changes in our world for the future, in big and small ways. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
There are great beings who have conquered this world that you and I are trapped in, who work tirelessly now around the clock to understand the greater purpose of the great beings whose life we live inside of, and encourage Humanity to follow the best steps we can towards that great purpose. You can call that great being God or Christ or Mother Nature, or just the forces of nature, of life, the forces of cosmos around you – it’s far more powerful than you and I are, and worth respecting and trying to comprehend.
There’s nothing you can do, good or bad, to block this great future from happening. The worst thing that evil forces can do in our world is slow it down, and make people like you and I feel bad. If you don’t fall for that shit, if you look for the greater good happening in the world, you will find it, you will be inspired, and you yourself will be part of that greater good.
THE NEWS IS HURTING YOU
Do not listen to the news, which only feeds you pain and agony in order to sell advertising.
Do not listen to your friends talking about what they heard on the news as if it’s fact – they’re just pointlessly regurgitating the same misdirected trash without actually thinking. What you need is a fresh pair of eyes, new information, a fresh source of knowledge and inspiration – where are you going to find that? There are not that many sources on the Internet or anywhere else telling the truth about what’s happening in the world. It’s very hard to see on your own but you can do it. You should find it, share it, and inspire others with stories of success and balance and right-action.
AN EXAMPLE
For example, a news story might tell you that so many people are suffering and dying of AIDS. It hurts you to hear that, over and over again – it hurts you for many reasons I won’t go in to right now. But you can view that data another way. What’s the total population of the world today? Millions upon millions of people DO NOT have AIDS. You don’t have AIDS. Your family doesn’t have AIDS. So why focus in an imbalanced way like that, hurting your own feelings? It only interferes with you being successful, happy, and adding to the value and success of everyone in your life.
You can also look at it this way: thousands of doctors and medical researchers are working tirelessly to develop cures and remedies against AIDS. They’re coming out with new medicines every year that help, to a greater or lesser degree, in reducing the suffering and postponing the catastrophic effect of AIDS. Why are you not getting a regular update on the successes and breakthrus related to conquering this illness? Why don’t you have a regular update on the new learnings being learned? The new medicines being created? Why isn’t there a quick and easy place you can go to get the latest scoop on things like this without having your emotions dragged through pain and agony so that network executives can make more money?
If you are going to listen to a single thing about AIDS, it needs to be about the success we’re having, year upon year, towards conquering this illness. You already understand the dangers and horrors of AIDS. You don’t need more of that! What you need more of is: how are we fixing the damn problem?
You don’t need more “old”, you need more “new”. What’s new in any given field, where are we at now? Keep you up to date as the world makes further progress. It shouldn’t waste your time or energy – you have a lot of other topics to catch up on besides this one; you just need a brief update from time to time.
Are you directly responsible for finding a cure for AIDS? If not, then you need to be inspired by those people who are directly responsible and are directly taking action and finding solutions to this problem. If you have ever heard of the problem, then you need regular updates of what is being done in this world to fix it, what successes are happening. Gain a little closure. You should be able to see a timeline about the successes we have made in the past. Maybe you missed each bulletin about each medicine that’s been invented so far – you need a diagram of where we’re at today, on this subject, and it needs to be kept up to date – not a static chart, a dynamic one. How many medicines have been invented by now? What effect does the most effective medicine have now? How much are the numbers of new patients increasing or dropping over time? What is the latest theory as to why that is happening? What is the projection of when we’ll reach the point where the number of AIDS cases reaches a maximum, and finally turns around – starts going down again? How many organizations are actively working on the problem today, and how many people do they employ? How have those numbers changed over time?
And that’s just one single topic that I just happened to think of, off the top of my head. There are plenty of other topics in our world – thousands, in the areas of finance, medicine, education, spiritual development, personal development, business, human relations … and each area has both serious problems and great successes.
THE PAST CAN INDICATE THE FUTURE
We’ve overcome massive world problems in past decades and centuries – there’s nothing “new” about having big problems today. We overcame all those past problems, and so we’ll overcome the problems of today. You can’t let yourself get depressed and overwhelmed by this shit.
WHERE are the articles explaining this, encouraging you, and uplifting you about the future? WHERE ARE THEY? If you can’t find any, then guess what – you need to write some – you need to research it and write it! Because, first of all, you need it for you. But also, the very same words you come up with can help thousands and thousands of other people not feel horrified by end-of-the-world bla bla bullshit. It’s easy to hurt people’s feelings; there’s enough of that already. What can you do to inspire people towards the future?
Look. The world was going to end in the 1970′s. I remember it because I lived through it – everyone my parents knew were talking about it. It didn’t happen. We lived in California, and I clearly remember someone saying Nostradamus predicted that all of California would slide into the ocean. It didn’t happen. Remember that cult that committed suicide because the world was ending, and they wanted to jump on some passing alien spaceship? Yea, the world didn’t end then, either. Wasn’t there going to be a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War? Russia versus America? That didn’t happen either.
Are you sensing a pattern here?
If you asked my late mom about the world ending, she would say, “I don’t think so, you don’t get off that easy!” If the world ends, you don’t have any control over that event, that would be the easy way out.
Nawwwww, you don’t get off that easy!
People are telling you that the world is ending so you won’t plan for your future. Because that’s how they plan for THEIR FUTURE. Why should you save money if the world is ending soon? Spend all your money right now, quick, before it’s too late! Don’t buy a house and gain equity, eventually paying it off so you have a retirement home when your income drops later in life – no, you should just rent for the rest of your life. Let someone else have the equity of all the houses you live in from now on. Let some one else pay off the mortgage and own the property outright while you have nothing.
KEEP ON PLANNING
What will you do differently now that the world is not going to end anytime soon?
What about your approach to your friendships and relationships, should they change in any way?
What would you change in your actions? In your behaviors? In your attitude towards other people?
How does this affect your planning for the next 5 years of your life? 10 years? 15, 20 years?
How do you spend your money differently, when you know the world is not ending anytime soon?
How do you plan for your personal future? For the future of your children and parents?
For your neighborhood, school, organizations, city, state, country, world?
Wikipedia has a GIANT list of all the times the world was going to end in the past:
List of Dates Predicted for Apocalyptic Events
Keep planning – our future is long and awesome.
Great successes and happiness and joy is happening, even now, regardless of today’s world problems. That will continue next year, and the year after, and the year after, and the year after. Get used to it!
Don’t listen to that end-of-the-world bullshit. You’re smarter than that.
MORE INFO
For more info about the future of the world, read Olympus World Report – the Year 3000. It’s such a fascinating book.
SOMETHING NICE
And now, for your amusement, a friendly elephant helping play a piano:
Sometimes the littlest gestures have the greatest positive impact:
Photo of Officer Giving Boots to Barefoot Man Warms Hearts Online
Cost of shoes (money lost by the officer): $75.
Benefit to homeless man of having new shoes so he can walk without the sores on his feet directly touching concrete, feeling of compassion and service within the heart of the officer himself, feeling of service by the shop owner who offered the discount, the heart warming feelings felt by the person who took the picture, feeling of confusion in the homeless man because he was convinced everyone in the whole world hates him but now he has a spark of hope about humanity, and the small joy felt by over 100,000 people on the Internet who saw the picture that was posted: priceless.
The number one thing I can recommend to you to increase your happiness:
Stop watching the News.
Poisonous fiction doesn’t suit you. You deserve better. Even your wild imagination can come up with more reality and truth than the news.
Yes you need to know what’s going on in the world – but how are you going to know that? The News is down around 1000th of importance and relevance, in that area.
Find other ways to keep in touch with what’s going on in the world. Listen to people, real people experiencing it first hand, who obtain no financial benefit from lying about what they’re seeing and experiencing. Read Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks.
“News” where money’s involved, is nothing but lies. You lose nothing by ignoring it.
“News” where first-hand human experience is involved, is truth. Absorb a wide variety of it from many sources, and you will figure out which is the Wheat, and which is the Chaff. It’s not too hard, it’s pretty easy.
If you want greater happiness in your life, you’ve got to stop listening to the News. If you then want to know what’s going on in the world, listen to the people.
That’s my best suggestion for you.
