This is a place for one-off ideas that are too small or not cool enough to have their own page.

Rooftop gardens! This is Google's geospatial map of San Francisco. No greenery. If you put gardens with beehives, flowers, edible plants (grapes, strawberries!), pot, psychedelic plants you would have a small industry of people who could sell local food from their garden. I've always wanted to see if I could small batch brew beer or mead at one point so that's another thing that would be cool to do.

Any inner city or neighborhood that's having gang problems you open a weapon shop that sells every possible non-lethal weapon at below market cost at a steep discount and then let everyone shoot each other with bean bags and pellet guns.

This building has been derelict for years. Why not put a dinosaur in it? It's tall enough to support one. A bunch of old bones and a t-rex and you could charge everyone twenty bucks to go see it.

So there's this anti-tank missile that goes straight up before falling on a tank. What if you did similar but with little cameras? You have a missile that goes a half a mile in the air and shoots out little go-pros everywhere that beam all their data down to the ground so it makes a three-d location picture map of the entire area. An info-missile or something. That would be cool.

On that note this is ridiculously cool (and bougie but whatever) and reminds me of the secret societies you would have your nth level warrior wizard necrocreature take a blood oath in. I was lucky enough in my youth to travel around the world and currently there's a lack of information about the state of the world and everyone is hiding in their houses. There should be local organizations that sponsor young people to go around and take pictures and document things in order to have their own information that they know is true. If you had enough chapters you could set up trust networks of known good information. Arm them with kodak film and non-digital cameras with glass. Pens and paper. That sort of thing. Make it a bit like a right of passage.

So there's a couple things that I was thinking about. One is the meta ontological question of how do you think about thinking which goes back to one of my conceits about functional fixedness. So one of the ways that you can think about what you want to create is "what do you do with all of this excess military spending, and can it be used to solve other problems other than 'blow up brown kids in places with too much sand'". The other question is "what problems do you want to solve and why". Money is a good motivator, but you also have to think about the long term effects of such things as tragedy of the commons in such areas as environmentalism or other factors that would impact human happiness and see if there are ways that you can optimize for thi, over short term gain, which would increase long term happiness.

So let's say that you care about climate change and decarbonization. It's a big pet peave of many of the anti-technologists, which have the belief that if you use less then this will naturally lead to a better environment (at the cost of human happiness). So there are two seemingly interwoven conceits that aren't necessarily true - one is the increased destruction of the environment due to human intervention and the other is that technological progress naturally makes this work. So, let's suppose you care about this. What about terraforming a desert? What you do is you take the world's fastest growing bamboo which can grow up to a meter in 24 hours (hard to believe but that's what the internet tells me - let's suppose that it can take a month or year) and then you take cluster bombs and you bombard an area of desert (let's say Nevada or Utah or somewhere where there is no living thing) with explosives, fertilizer and bamboo seeds. Within five years you may be able to make a temperate rainforest which would include habitat for animals. This would also do things like give environmental studies on how you could do things like possibly take a section of the largest canyon on mars and start to terraform it so that it produced oxygen, not unlike this stupid movie.

The trench in question.

Once you can do that you can do some other stupid things. Rather than go to war with cluster bombs you can tell every country that is going to war - we will bomb you "if you stop fighting" - bomb you with a rainforest (in your desert region). Then you can make weapons of war become weapons of peace - which I totally ripped off from Thorough's Walden and his bit about the "munitions of peace" - in this case (goddamnit) 'literally'. So if this is one idea using weapons what other uses for weapons could there be? While this may not have been ideal (ab)using functional fixedness to come up with peaceful uses for the military seems like a good idea generally.

Another idea I had in a similar vein was to make a rain tree which would be a large dehumidifier in the shape of a tree with leaves at height that were cold enough to cause condensation. If you used solar panels to cool the leaves the entire thing may be energy neutral and large numbers of them could cause a rain shadow in a desert area near a coast that doesn't have a significant enough mountainous region for rainfall.

Another idea I had was a company like REI but called FCS. It would only sell food clothing and shelter, run as a coop and they'd also do charoty stuff. All the products sold would be used by the people that work there. So if you sold food youd eat with the peope you sold it to in a communal kitchen. Clothing similarly. And if you sold housing you would live with the people you sold the housing to. This would guarantee a base line level of clean food and non slumlord housing in at risk communities. Neat huh?