Ideas: November 2024 Release
THE MOTIVATION
The ideas section is a place to offload and share various ideas I’ve come up. Although these are only the ideas that have already been implemented, tested, something I’m not interested in doing, or technically incomplete (meaning there’s various technical progress that needs to be accomplished before it’s applicable), however, it has definitely been conceived by me independently. It serves to share the kind of practical imagination I have but also to share the journey into the future:
Drastically different housing model
The core idea is that you’re never just paying rent without gaining any equity, every time you pay for housing it’s going towards ultimately savings/wealth. How I propose that works is that there’s a company that builds housing, and you buy a certain number of shares in that company each month. When you buy enough shares in the company to which the value is equal to the house you’re living in, you no longer need to make monthly payments. You can move to another home within the network, and if it’s cheaper then you can sell some shares to get money back, if it’s more expensive you just need to keep buying more shares each month. You can always sell the home for cash, which may be bought by the company or to an external buyer. And a big plus is that moving within the network wouldn’t have real estate fees. The company can charge a premium on homes that are either built or bought to recoup a profit and expand. If housing appreciates in value (via market changes, improvements, or etc), you get additional shares for free. If the housing depreciates in value (via market changes, damage, or etc), some of your shares get taken away for free. Since the demand for houses with this kind of ownership style would be high, it can command a higher price, which offsets some of the issues with “not in my backyard” by keeping property values high. I think renting should be limited to when you’re visiting someplace not when it’s a long term residence. Also the common situation where you buy a home and then have renters essentially pay off the mortgage or the amount of interest banks get from a home mortgage is kind of the rich taking advantage of the poor. So the idea is like a real estate lease-to-own co-op, overall, I think this is a pretty solid idea. Combine this with low cost modular/tiny homes, then potentially it’s a future where someone working minimum wage could actually own their home within years rather than decades.
Update (10/26/24): A friend shared with me a book Poverty, by America, which provides examples of housing coops/cooperatives, so this idea is not without precedent and provides evidence that the idea works. Now the only issue is how to expand this idea, so far the co-ops are on a smaller scale. One idea is to potentially float the idea to banking coops as a potential area of investment (people whose goal is already not to necessarily maximize profits), providing a springboard for it to move forward. Even better maybe to create a bank, so that we can borrow from the federal bank at the federal rate.
Update (12/18/24): After revisiting this idea multiple times, I’ve come up with a more traditional model that still follows the core principles of what I’m trying to achieve. Basically the housing coop is like a zero-down payment mortgage loan that’s like renting because we try to reduce friction/fees as much as possible.
First step is selling callable corporate bonds to finance the construction/purchase of homes. Then the home is offered in a lease-to-own scenario, they see the value of the home and the full cost of the home with interest, and if they pay it off sooner, there’s less interest. (This does away with the concept of shares). Whether the cost of the home goes up or down, it doesn’t change the tenant’s cost, it’s set by the initial purchase of the home. The tenants payments will be used to pay the bond’s interest payments as well as using the callable part of the bonds to pay into principal as we go.
If the tenant wants to move to a different property within the network they can and will bring along all the money minus interest payments they put into their old home into their new one. The purchaser would be someone else in the network or maybe the company will just buy the house back from you. The company will try to remove as much friction/reduce fees as much as possible like handling home showings, legal documents, appraisals, and etc; you just review and sign some papers. If they want to sell the home outside of network, they can as well, the company just might put in a bid as well and there might be more friction/fees since an outside party is involved. If the home is partially owned, then the new tenants will be taking over your lease-to-own situation.
Also there’s only zero-down payment for cheaper homes, once it gets more expensive then you need to bring in a down payment.
Tenants still sign a contract to live at a particular home for a certain amount of time. And to compensate for potential down-time when no one’s living at the home, the corporate bonds will mature at a later date then the mortgage does.
With the reserve cash the company has to buffer for down-times, it can be invested into liquid assets like stocks.
Finally defaulting on payments, they’ll be given a three month leniency period after which we need to repossess the home, and they’ll still get whatever money they put into the home minus interest while we still try to make it as low-cost and frictionless as possible.
Although the final issue is the need for more properties you can own rather than rent. Checking today’s Zillow in San Francisco, there’s 4087 rental properties but only about 865 ownable properties. The housing market is somewhat fundamentally sick, it’s as if more people need to rent than to own, or that more people need a temporary place to live rather than a permanent one. Limited supply will increase it’s cost. While builders are incentivized to build rental properties because it provides a continuous stream of income that unfortunately takes advantage of the poor. Also another way to look at it is that these rental properties are for people too poor to get a mortgage, and it’s like a real estate payday advance. This is where government policy needs to change along with better financing institutions like this idea, so that people can have a roof over their head and get out of the poverty loop.
Mortgage policy
Having a home foreclosed can substantially set back a household. Generally, foreclosure specific costs make up 5% to 10% of the home values, while discounted home price at auction reduces it by about 20%, this means the homeowner loses 25% to 30% of the value of a home. Once everything is paid off, the homeowner may only receive little to even owe money from what they put in. Now banks usually are somewhat lenient because foreclosure is expensive for them too, but it would be good to formalize this leniency into government policy to protect homeowners.
Mortgage insurance
Mortgage insurance should be like health insurance to protect you from unfortunate depreciation to home values due to factors outside of your control. This is not from natural disasters, fires, and other things already covered by normal home owner insurance. This applies when the home depreciates due to the surrounding neighborhood. Overall, there should be some way to create a system that’s balanced so that you can profit off it and it’s self-sustaining, and also it prevents people from cheating the system.
Malaria research
Gene drive: So I already have heard about gene drives to try to sterilize mosquitoes and kill them off. However, I didn’t remember how it quite worked (it’s actually quite different than what I’m suggesting). It was after spending some time thinking about how mosquitoes get sick from malaria themselves. If you could make the mosquito fight off malaria better, it’s an advantageous mutation so it would spread naturally in the wild, thus removing malaria as a vector. However, someone else has already researched this earlier as can be seen here.
Behavioral anti-malaria solution: Maybe clothes that have easy to roll up and down sleeves and pant legs. So that when it’s sunrise or sunset when mosquitoes are most active, they can reduce the surface area they have to bite them.
Insights: There are still reservoirs of non-human carriers (different forms of monkeys), so that even if you eradicate 99% of mosquitoes, the mosquitoes will come back along with the malaria.
Urban design
Build high rise condo/apartment buildings (high capacity small homes, one bedroom or studio, like in Japan) next to public transit like BART or MUNI. This will provide cheap housing and boost public transit usage. Some stops could just be shopping centers. Or the lower floor could be commercial and upper floors residential (commercial enough to have like a Safeway or target on the ground floor).
Maybe a good idea to revitalize old towns is to build tiny homes where land is cheap (create like a tiny home utopia), provide good internet, and attract remote workers looking to save money and build a nest egg
Multi-format Communication
Why can’t gmail be email+chat+video? Technically the email and chat data is the same it’s just the interface and priorities are different. Particularly with how the previous messages are presented, from above with text, or below+colored+indented with email. Replying by just hitting enter with text, or having to click with mouse (moving hand off keyboard) on the reply button, then another click to send. Then there’s the greater urgency with text vs email. Even the video chat could be built into interface while still using email addresses as the backbone. Google could easily do it like they did with wave, but instead of calling it wave, just turn it into another layout for gmail.
Google sign-in flaw
Google sign-in is an amazingly convenient feature, but it suffers one incredible drawback. Once you create your account using it, you generally can’t change your email address afterwards, and I bet you can imagine a lot of reasons why you’d want to be able to change your email. Once this issue is solved, it would be an ideal solution.
Conversation organizer
Besides the ChatAI idea mentioned in the previous post, just a simple manual organizer of a conversation could be a huge boost. Examples like, manually marking key points, bulleting out the conversation into sections, or developing the branching tree of the conversation. It could also be organized not just by the person listening but by the person speaking as well.
Google Maps limitation
Google Maps should allow you to search for multiple places at the same time. Currently it has a primary search which is whatever you want, and then you have several categories you can search along with it like parking/restaurants/etc, but it’s an arbitrary limitation. An open-ended search of whatever you want would provide a much more flexible design approach.
Hold for me website
There’s nothing that prevents a webapp from allowing you to call a number, and once you’re on hold, having a built-in AI hold for you. It could even be rudimentary, looking for words like “hello?”. It’s a service that could definitely charge money for the feature. And I know it’s already available with Android, but it’s not available for iOS.
Password Protected
Phones, desktop computers, hard drives, etc should all have an increasingly longer lock out period when you type in the wrong password allowing users to use simpler passwords while not sacrificing security. Wiping the device after a certain number of incorrect passwords isn’t good because it allows malicious users to quickly wipe your device by just deliberately entering in wrong passwords or of course you just forget yourself. Although there are some limitations with something like a hard drive having an accurate account of time, it could just be a large amount of tries but not enough to iterate through all possibilities like 1000 tries.
Civilization AI
Basically instead of a single super AI being, it works more like a civilization of AI agents. One of the primary reasons for this is if it’s working across a distributed system, the ability for a computer to calculate things locally is much faster than sending it over a network. It could be like the foldIt@home of AI.
Enabling the disabled and elderly
Being home bound is an incredibly isolating experience. If there was a service that allowed people to telepresence to places outside their home, either at a local gift shop or around the world, would be a huge boon. It could be a human on a video chat that listens to instructions or it could be a telepresence robot with a human nearby to help.
Climate Change Responsibility
Ultimately the countries that contributed the most total CO2 emissions over time should pay the carbon tax for the rest of the world. And not just personal emissions but also selling oil and natural gas. Meaning for example, the US would pay say Nigeria to reduce carbon emissions. Although there will be disagreements about how much CO2 was emitted per country, everyone can get started with lower conservative figures, then once it gets closer to a disagreement then discuss it. This could also be in the form of foreign investment that would ideally allow the country to turn it around to sell it back. Like using clean energy and fresh water supplies from rain in the region to create hydrogen fuel.
ChatGPT Design
ChatGPT has now included web searches, but it’s lacking in some key areas. It should include excerpts of it’s sources where possible integrated into it’s conversational design. Also it should include the original domain url, so you can easily verify the base facts as well as the source. Finally it should bake in chromium so that you don’t need to jump over to another app.
Government IDs
IDs like drivers license, police badges, and etc are too easy to forge nowadays. A better approach would be an ID that’s more like a Yubikey or a hardware authentication distributed by the government. It could be utilized with an NFC so you can easily scan it, and it would also be prudent to add a button to activate the NFC so that you don’t need to use a NFC blocking container. The additional upside of this is that it allows a user to seamlessly access all of their online government accounts while also enabling unique opportunities like electronic voting.
Innovative new robotic arm
Recently came across a video touring Stanford robotics and it shows the idea I came up with, a robot with a telescoping arm. This is different from having a very large typically three jointed arm or a arm with many joints because it can move in a straight line towards it’s intended target. And it may be something that we’ve seen in science fiction, but in practice it has not shown up. The link to the three jointed arm is just searching for robot arm and there’s no example of a telescoping version.