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0 pointspadobson10y ago0 comments

* Solve problems in hiring by hiring all applicants on a first-come, first-serve basis and then evaluating them for X days before recommending the best applicants to a client company. Scale this up by partnering with the government to eliminate traditional unemployment insurance.

* Various industries (TV, Print, Social Media) have effectively offered a product with complex infrastructure to the public for low or no cost by using advertisers to subsidize it. Could this be done with food or housing? Would a farm running on self-driving tractors and drones be able to feed people w/ ad-subsidized food for free?

* Lots of food gets thrown away because it's cheaper to ship it to the dump than to ship it safely to starving people. A startup could develop automation and logistics to make the costs competitive.

* Divorce rates would seem to indicate that the traditional family is not the most economically or emotionally optimum method of living/raising children. This may simply be a side-effect of increasing lifespans (i.e. 100 years ago, the average marriage lasted 15 years before a spouse died). A legal startup that offers tools for building new types of non-conventional families to optimize things like economic standing, academic performance of children, or changing employment environments.

* Micro-businesses in a box. Many businesses couple some talent or skill (e.g. software engineering, music, plumbing, creative writing) with administration (i.e. legal, marketing, accounting, invoicing, etc). Lots of startups offer to automate portions of administration, but a truly turn-key solution would allow a customer to simply input their skill, and the administration would happen automatically.

* Crowd-funding life.

----An apartment building with 20 units costs $1mm to build. An affluent person goes to the bank and puts $300k down to build it, and leverages the other $800k. Why can't 20 families each invest $15k and pay a group mortgage instead of rent?

----A single banana costs $.40. At scale, a banana is $.10. Why can't a thousand families buy all their bananas for the year through an intermediary handling the cash flow? Could they buy all their food this way and drive prices down?

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bkmartin10y ago

Farming is quite a bit more expensive that what you realize. Besides, this model doesn't even make logical sense. Follow with me... 1) Advertising is only worth it if the people who see your ads can and will buy your goods at a large enough rate to give you the needed ROI on those ads. 2) If people are so poor that they need free food then they won't have the means to make point #1 viable.

Your second point on food. Yes, lots of it gets wasted. There are quite a few areas where we can talk about waste and food cost. The best way to cut transportation costs is to just improve farming in places where food is scarce. This is not an easy task, but a much better long term solution in every way measurable. Ethiopia is the shining example of progress in this area. One of the largest wastes of food in the United States is what slides off of our dinner plates and into the trash. This increases demand, which increases prices, transportation cost of both supply and disposal, increased cost in cooking and prep, etc. We could save billions a year as a society if we cut our waste.

Divorce rates are the fault of the people that are married. Marriage, if the vows are followed, is amazing. Married people live longer and have children with lower crime rates. The answer is for people to actually stick to their covenant and make a marriage work. People need to learn to forgive, extend grace, and act selflessly toward their partners. Marriage is no place for rugged individualism, it is truly a team sport. A family where children grow up with both of their loving parents is the ideal situation. Situations are not always ideal, but at least we have something to strive for.

Under the crowd-funding life section... aren't both of these sections essentially just co-ops? Not that they aren't good ideas but I think they do exist already and without the buzzwords.

petra10y ago

>> -A single banana costs $.40. At scale, a banana is $.10.

There's a model for "direct from farmer meat": you pay a monthly $3-5 rent for a meat locker in your city , and than you can cheaply buy meat online from a variety of farmers . It does cut costs. And of course , this allows a group of people to buy in volume.

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