Here’s another idea!

In the United States, they are presently raising the minimum wage. The problem with this is that it’ll simply drive inflation up, thus hurting the people at the bottom even worse.

I have a better idea:

What if, instead of a minimum wage, there were a maximum wage? What if the highest paid person in a company could only make 25 times as much as the lowest paid person in the company? This still seems like a lot, considering the average in Japan is 11x, but 25x should be acceptable to everyone.

It would work like this:

Jim Skinner, CEO of McDonalds, pays his employees $5.25 an hour, but makes millions every year. After the passage of the Pixelated Bill for a Mandatory Maximum Wage, his salary would drop to $291,000 per year. The extra revenue would either have to be reinvested into the company (building new stores or whatnot) or given to the lower paid employees.

The brilliance in this idea is that it would automatically stop inflation. It would also make shrink the divide between the lower and the upper classes. In order to make one million dollars a year, the president of a company would have to pay his employees almost $20 an hour! I imagine I’m ignoring small business owners somewhat, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how they would lose out in this either.
What do you think? Did I demolish inflation or what?

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Here’s an idea!

Some people have already proposed a ‘none of the above’ option when voting. Some have proposed a tiered voting system which would work sort of like a caucus. I have a better idea!

How about voting against a person?

I mean, a lot of people do this anyway by voting for their opposition, but what if you could go into the voting booth and actually choose to vote against someone? It would count as a negative vote, presumably.

So if we take the 2004 election as an example:

• Michael Badnarik (Lib.)
• George Bush (Rep.)
• David Cobb (Green)
• John Kerry (Dem.)
• Ralph Nader (Ind.)
• Michael Peroutka (Const.)

Instead of going in and voting for your candidate, say Michael Peroutka, you could go in and vote against your least favorite candidate, say Michael Badnarik.

Then, when they tally up the votes, the person with the highest total of net votes would win.

In my example, of course, David Cobb would win because he had the most people vote for him (1) and the fewest people voting against him (100).

And really, wouldn’t it be a bit more honest?

(Prepare for another “I, Rule” post soon)

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Why isn’t there a Web 2.0 Feed?

In doing research for this post, I realized that both browsers mentioned are trying to include something similar to this (albeit far less functional) in their next major release.  This makes me happy as I wasn’t expecting people to be telepathically wired to my brain, but so it goes.

I’ve just switched to Flock from Firefox. Flock works from the Firefox engine, so it’s not a huge change (it even accepts most Firefox extensions). What’s more, I can’t really recommend it for the casual Internet surfer. The extra features in Flock are really more geared for the blogger/photographer/feed reader sort of person: things a casual surfer would lose interest in rather quickly.

I like Flock because it makes getting to my feeds (and thus to everyone’s writing) a lot quicker and easier than I’ve ever seen elsewhere. I love feeds because they allow me to get in and out of the Internet without loading pages. As I’m in the Internet’s third world until Thursday (dial-up), this is a very important element to me.

What it doesn’t do, and what I have never seen anything do is check for updates on the other sites I visit relatively often (e.g. Myspace, Facebook, NaBloPoMo, Cre8buzz, etc.). I don’t enjoy going to social networking sites, so my presence there is purely symbolic. However, when people send me messages, I’d like to be able to respond posthaste. This creates a problem for me as I’d also like to avoid wasting time on these Web sites.

So, why isn’t there a Web 2.0 Feed?

Specifically, I’m thinking about a general hub that has all of your login information for the various sites you frequent. Then, whenever something of note occurs in one of them, it lets you know so you can respond.  If someone developed such a Web site or browser or feed reader, they would get millions of subscribers or downloads almost instantly.

Surely I’m not the first person to suggest such a thing? Is there mechanical problems I know nothing about?   I mean, okay, yeah, but still.

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ALIENS!!!

I figured out the secret to world peace. You’ve probably guessed it from the title of this post, but that won’t stop me from going on and on about how I came to this realization. The short version: I didn’t.

My friend Frank (mentioned here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) noticed that his father only truly hit rock bottom after his divorce and when his kids grew up. Frank’s diagnosis: his father didn’t have a goal anymore.

Remember the beauty that was the cold war? Remember when growing up was fun? Sure, I’m glossing over the mortal terror at the possibility of an all-engulfing nuclear holocaust at any moment, but there was at least something that united the country. And sure, I’m glossing over the fact that the worst atrocities and invasions of sovereignty were initiated in that period, but my point remains: we had a unified goal and a unified purpose. Nothing exemplified that better than when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.

We can have those days back. Actually, we can have better days.

Please follow my train of thought below the fold.

Continue reading ALIENS!!!…

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The Gay Ray

I have an idea. It’s a way to control the population, further intelligent reproduction and provide some quality entertainment.

I call it the “Gay Ray.”

The Gay Ray is a hand-held ray that has the power to change the sexuality of whoever it shoots. Ideally, the ray would be invisible and take effect immediately (or as immediate as sexuality can take effect). I think it would be the most entertaining thing in the world to hit every major priest, cowboy, wrestler, dancer and political figure.

If you had a gay ray, who would you shoot?

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