PuddinHead's Solutions

KidneySwap.org

2009-01-09T19:42:00.000-08:00

So say you have a relative that needs a kidney and you are willing to donate, but you are not a match. Sure you are a good person, but you also don't want to really just give a kidney to a random stranger either. But what if there was a KidneySwap.org where you could register as an "A-positive" donor with a "B-negative" recipient and then another pair in the inverse situation could match up with you. Everybody wins. Maybe eKidney.com.

Dual metered electric

2008-12-14T19:16:00.000-08:00

Problems: Electric companies have to manage to peak demand, causing them to build excess capacity, buy excess capacity, and use more expensive and dirtier resources to meet peak demand. Peak demand occurs during the day when people are at work, school and home at the same time. This, combined with peak heat during summer days is what bends and breaks our systems. There is no ability or incentive to shift any of these demands. Also, electric cars are not close to being economically feasible, so they need to have another way of making their owner money other than gas savings.

Solutions: Have dual power rates, one during higher demand times (such as 9am to 5pm) and thus allow users to make intelligent economic decisions. Most people would put off dish washing, laundry and other items until the night to save some money and hot showers are mostly taken in the morning anyway. An industry would grow up around this to create consumer storage devices (batteries) that could be charged during cheap energy hours at night and used during the most expensive times during the day. If the regulators also forced energy companies to buy back stored energy at a midpoint between the cheap night rates and the higher day rates, people and business would quickly adopt technologies to take advantage of this and help the electric companies avoid build-out for peak demand. Also imagine that you have a fully electric car that you can charge up at night and let the energy company buy back juice if you leave the car in the garage for the day or have more energy than you need to go back and forth to work. Along the same lines, energy companies could borrow energy from your electric car during some peak moments in the day as long as they "paid you back" before you had to commute home.

Unlike most of my ideas, this one is not completely original and I have heard bits and pieces and used them to fuse a good solution here.

Green Cars

2008-12-14T19:14:00.000-08:00

Green Cars are too expensive for the open market to buy and until people start buying, you won't get economies of scale. Instead of the government mandating that car companies produce a certain type of car, they should put their money where their mouth is and just demand that they themselves only use green cars in all their fleets. I don't even care if they buy them from Toyota.

Elephant Tusks

2008-12-14T19:09:00.000-08:00

Two Problems: Elephants are being driven to extinction by ivory poachers and the people trying to protect them don't have the money or resources to adequately protect them.

Solution: the government or park service should hunt down all the elephants with a tranquilizer gun and remove their tusks while they are out. Sure, the elephants are traumatized a bit and they are missing their tusks, but I presume it is easier to get by without your tusks than to be dead. When elephants have no tusks, there will be no poachers. The government could also decide to sell the harvested tusks for income to further help protect the elephants.

Auto Industry Bailout and Socialized Medicine

2008-12-14T18:56:00.000-08:00

Two problems:
1) the hourly wages, pensions and health care benefits awarded to the unions are a major factor in the US auto industry's inability to compete.
2) the Government now wants "universal" health care (socialized medicine).

I propose the US Government take over the health care plans of all American auto workers (including Honda, Nissan, etc). This allows the Gov to experiment with a plan on the very type of subjects that are most for a socialized world. If it works, great, if not, we learn a valuable lesson. In the mean time, we relieve the car industry of a huge burden. And if Honda wants to build more plants in America to get free health care for American workers, good for us and US.

Sell the Space Station

2008-09-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

The space station is and idea that is behind its time. It is expensive, of little value and the money could be much better spent in many places (genetics, nanotech, solar, ocean engineering, etc). China is currently spending vast sums of money to join the space club and build its own space station. We are currently teamed with Russia and it is clear they are not playing nice in the world and have little interest in a healthy relationship with us.

Solution: give China our interest in the space station and even the space shuttles. China and Russia are not the best of friends and it would be fun to see them play in the same sandbox, we free up money and rid ourselves of the Russian space slugs.

PuddinHead.

Global Warming

2007-10-27T20:21:00.000-07:00

Is global warming caused by man or not? Is it really meaningful? Despite what the media pushes, it is by no means certain in either case. Regardless, there is a simple solution that the tree-huggers do not want to see or implement because it would solve the warming problem and put them out of the whining business. It is based on volcanoes and nuclear winter. Remember the good ol' cold war days when scientist said if a bunch of nukes went off they would throw up so much debris into the atmosphere that it would reflect the sun and the earth would cool, thus "nuclear winter". This theory was backed up by strong evidence of temperature declines after large volcano eruptions of the past. I heard a well respected scientist on NPR say that Al Gore is right, but he is not even "right enough", things are much worse. Even if we all threw away our SUVs and switched to 50 mpg hybrids or rode bikes to work, it could not make a difference: we are too far past the point of no return. He then went on to rationally say that the only way to make a difference fast enough would be to slightly increase the sulfur content in airplane fuel. This would add enough reflective material to the atmosphere to reflect the sun enough to drop the temperature and regrow the ice caps and save the cut little polar bears.

So simple, so easy. Why aren't the global warming alarmist jumping on this solution, it would cool the earth with a much higher chance of acceptance and success then current ideas. The environmental impact would be much smaller then letting the earth continue to warm.

Subprime Loan Problems

2007-10-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

Several problems here to solve: people are in loans they should have never qualified for in houses that are too expensive and they can't make payments when their rates are adjusted. These loans are on houses that are now worth less than then loan the a lot of the "buyers" probably did not put any money down, so essentially they have nothing to lose by walking away. The banks don't want these houses and the secondary market that holds the loans does not want the houses either.

Solution: create a special Fannie-Mae program that allows these people to refi into a 40 year fixed rate loan. The homeowner gets a chance to stay in the house, but does not get a free ride. The mortgage holder gets to hold a new loan with less chance of default, but worth less than the original loan, so they don't come out whole either. Everyone wins a little and no one loses big. Simple. Too simple to be implemented.

China: Growth and Polution

2007-10-07T17:54:00.001-07:00

China has two problems: fast growth and pollution. For some time now China has been trying to slow its growth by making small tweaks to things like interest rates. Because of this growth, China has become the biggest carbon and emissions polluter in absolute terms (it was already far worse than US relative to GDP).

Two problems, one solution: China should require US-like emission controls on all vehicles and it should require all new coal plants to have strict emission controls. This will raise the price of cars and electric, thus taxing the economy a bit and slowing down growth.

Easy as pie ;-)

Farming

2007-09-28T19:37:00.001-07:00

Here is my favorite type of solution, one that solves two problems (or more).

Problems:
1) the Gov pays farmers tons of money to NOT grow. While I would love to get paid to not grow, as I don't grow a lot of things, it is stupid.
2) Framers that do grow tend to over use fertilizer and the run off makes significant impacts on the environment.
3) Organic farming is good, but too expensive to be viable for most farmers, and organic food is too expensive to buy much of. Farmers complain it is to inefficient and low yielding.

Solution:
Only subsidize farmers to grow organically or in certified ways that minimize fertilizers, pesticides and impacts to the environment. This should be especially emphasized near waterways where run off is particularly harmful. The farmers that are not growing can now afford to grow "inefficiently". The price of organics will come down for the consumer. The environment will be less impacted. The Government may not spend less money, but at least all of it goes to actual production of food.

I had been waiting for years to meet Al Gore when he was VP to lay this on him, but never quite got the chance. Only recently have I been hearing others talk about this seriously.

Simple Solutions

2007-09-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

Most problems have such simple solutions, the problems lie in the people that implement them. Everyone is so wrapped up in their own point of view and vested interest that good simple solutions rarely get implemented. This blog is just a random sprinkling of simple things I have thought of over the years. So simple they will never get implemented.