And the winner is ...

Sometimes an idea is so wonderful, solves so many problems, and is so right for the times, it just cannot be stopped: ideas like easy mortgages for the poor, the Snuggie and gun-carrying clubs at the mall. Great Ideas that make America greater!

The Poopster for America Prize (the contest searching for a new eco-sound, toilet-replacement) just received one entry so powerful that we stopped the contest! It was a game changer, a show stopper and the mother of all inventions, rolled into one. Just as we predicted when we set up the contest--your days are over Mr. Crapper and your tired old invention has had it, too.

Today, the Poopster Institute proudly announces the winner in its new millennium toilet replacement contest: NetPoop--the idea that flushes away all those tired ideas of street sewer plumbing, constant street dig-ups and repairs and local, inefficient sewage plants. Mr. Crapper was right for the 1860’s; NetPoop is right for today!

Just like you do for your dog, do for yourself. Get a baggie and pick it up. That’s the NetPoop way. Then the baggies are mailed to NetPoop Central where the methane that we collect will light our American torch once again.

NetPoop won because it not only makes our trillion dollar sanitary sewer network obsolete and unnecessary, but also chips away at two other troubling issues that we face in today’s complex, interconnected world :

• Problem 1: The end of the Post Office will come when NetFlix stops shipping DVDs and delivers all its movies online. Ten percent of the US mail will disappear. Mr. and Ms. Mailman and about 3 percent of the US workforce will start looking for Macjobs if we don’t replace a ton of crappy movies with something else. Net Poop solves that problem. Now the mailman has a pickup at every house everyday (if you are healthy) and he does not have to worry about losing his job to email or iPads.

• Problem 2: Contamination of our precious dumps with dog droppings is threatening out water supply and filling our landfills with evil bacteria. Who would have thought that humans would become a dog do-do service NetPoop works for dogs too. Now humans will be on an even par with their pets: baggies for all, two legs or four.

So you are wondering why it’s NetPoop, and not MailPoop. Because you get to check your account online and see how you are doing in the save-America-one-bag-at-a-time campaign. You log in and order your individually barcoded baggies (Don’t just take the ones in the park dispenser). Then you can check your creditpile as often as you want.

Now that we have a path thru this messy issue, we at The Institute are starting a new contest cycle. Send us your worrying issues and we will pick one for the next contest. Don’t fret about a solution, just sent us the problem. Our contest will get those all-American minds humming away, working on something besides loopy politics for a while.

Nudge-it's another book review chock full of ideas.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler

I have trouble with Nudge.

Not with its first premise: people make bad decisions. Nudge backs up my current understanding of our lower lizard brain (as opposed to our higher (literally) thinking brain--the good-at-reasoning and math and statistics, real-smart-monkey brain) that I talked about earlier when reviewing the book Kludge—a sibling monosyllabic title that also explicates the two-brain theory of humans, but starting from evolution. (I understand that Blink does something similar but celebrates the lizard in us all).

Nudge avoids evolution and draws from research. Rather than dwelling on the non-evolving lizardness of your brain-bottom, it demonstrates lower functioning with examples from personal finance, health and school choice, and extended warranties. Homer Simpson personifies the lizard-brain man and pops up often. His inability to delay any gratification, start anything worthwhile or plan more than two seconds out from the present demonstrates our brain at work.

Then the book presents its second big idea. In crazed optimism the authors expect the government to exploit these tendencies of non-thought for the good of us all. Not by prohibitions or enforced actions, but by a nudge--a method that exploits our weakness to guide us to be our best selves. An example is to make the default option in any choice the best option, taking advantage of our inertia against making change (for example, 401Ks should be opt out rather than opt in).

The authors seem to forget how things are done here in the USA. We aim folks on the path to hell for an extra buck. We advertise exploiting sex (part of the lizard brain appeal) to sell toothpaste and floorclearner. But most of all, we don’t buy our congressfolks to make life better for everyone; we buy them to make life better for me, right now. That’s the American way. We have a marketplace and the market decides. He who pays most, gets most--and that means controlling those default choices, hiding outcomes, and downright lying.

Nudge technology, like atom bombs, can lead us to good choices or to very bad choices (well maybe there are no good choices with atom bombs, come to think of it). That most likely path is not discussed.

The Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw

Sometimes you see something you missed in your life of reading.
GBS was one of those. He was only an icon to me with a pointy beard, no longer popular, especially with the hip and then hippie set. I only knew of him thru references on Sesame Street –Miss Piggy-malion--and reading the credits to My Fair Lady.
So last week I ran into him lying on a shelf in the local library, an edition about 60 years old. Why not?
GBS was witty and could write dialogue for Bringing up Baby or any of the fast talking, screwball comedies. Oh, I forgot, they copied him, not the other way around.
How class-bound England was/is. Sometimes I forget about social class when I hang out in Silicon Valley (where they hide their fancy-pants au-pairs and yardmen). Those Victorians cemented class but left cracks for upward money. And you forget how eccentric and extreme edge political those landed lords (and their lesser cousins) could be without disrupting upper class manners.
GBS writes polemics about mistreatment of the working class in the middle of snappy dialog. But readers skipped those pages to get to the characters spitting it out at each other as they danced around rituals of love and old fashioned hate, too.
You see how socialism was perceived b4 the communists took over Russia and hatched Stalin. GBS watched England losing its markets for manufactured goods because the rest of the world made things cheaper and predicted an England going broke. (sounds familiar?) , where they could only export workers. He didn’t forsee our overstuffed world and ad-driven continuous style-change buying that remade the world in its own image.
He sought a moral force that was rational. Religion was hocus-pocus; the church was just finishing up dealing with Galileo and the Pope declared himself infallible. GBS looked for non-revolutionary change to a more equitable world thru education. And he started the London School of Economics to explain it all.
But in this book, GBS creates the rational man as hero, the anti-romantic, that would have been a detective if he were born in the 40’s, I bet. And the tough thinking woman could be played by Kate Hepburn or maybe Becky Sharpe if she gets incarnated in the computer game world. These two finally marry after his first wife sentimentally dies off and they accidentally get engaged in about a paragraph and realize love would only mess things up.
Hope I didn’t mess up the ending for you.

Growing Nails

Everyone knows the two big growth areas in America are finger nails and coffee shops. But coffee isn’t hot anymore. Starbucks is closing shops down. What can you do after you have every street corner covered? You close low performers or do like Peets--sneak in tea. Read its full name sometime “Peets Coffee and Tea.” Tea is metro and hip and you pick your infusion (not just caffeine). So the curve is bending towards the tea guys. Just look at the SF (a culture leader, if there ever was one) tea house map.
But I don’t want to talk about drinking drugs today. I want to talk about nail shops. There are lots of them and they haven’t completely starbucked America yet. My prediction: nails have room to grow.
When I was a kid all the women I saw did their own nails. I remember moms and teenagers sitting on the porch with their wet toes shining bright red, sipping on a coke in the 100 degree summer heat, waiting for them ten guys to dry. Now it’s different. Do you know how many people do nails for someone else‘s feet? The census says 51,000 nail doers do it. And the Stats of US Businesses says 12,000 nail places were selling gels and acrylics and all sorts of nail stuff in 2008.
But I thought about it and the census number seems really wrong. I drove by more nail places than that last year.Look at the map of LA metro. Google shows 11,000 nail salons (That’s Google‘s term, not mine). So with about 20 million people that’s one nail shop for every 2000 people. If every shop has only 4 nail doers then that’s 1 nailer for every 500 folks (including old retired guys like me and babies too who don‘t do their nails often).
OK go ahead and argue that LA is nail happy and different from the rest of the US. So let’s look somewhere that doesn’t make you think about body parts right away--How about Casper Wyoming (I stuck my cursor in the map with my eyes shut to get it). I think boots and saddles for Casper, not nails and pedicures, but it has 23 nailerys for 50 thousand folks. That’s pretty close to the same as LA--one nail shop for every 2000 people.
So for the US with 300 million folks that means 150 thousand nail shops. And using my very conservative 4 nail doers per shop you get 600,000 nail doers.
We just need more growth companies like nail salons. Poofy dog shops are growing. Weird phone ringtones are hot. Two thousand dollar bikes with show-all tights are doing well. And all the old guys at the gym talk about how their wives like their snuggies.
America is on the move. Don't let those panhandlers standing around fool you

Fixing Us Up

I’ve been thinking about fixing up our goodbye-Bush crisis. He played patty-cake with those bankers doing old-time, laissez-faire, robber-baron, footsie-footsie thinking. Now Prez. Obama has moved on to only 70-year-old ideas by starting up Mr. Keynes’ public money shovel. It worked before—when the shovel was big enough— so I expect it will work again.

The big question for me is where do you shovel all the money—in the same old carbon-cooking, late-age capitalism pork-pots or do you aim the shovel in new green directions.

We need to make jobs and make stuff, but let’s make something that doesn’t use up many resources, doesn’t burn much coal or oil, and helps people out.

Back in the 80’s, in an earlier mess, a bunch of people thought about making new stuff. It’s a good example. Boeing laid off engineers when too many jets just sat around doing nothing (sort of like those foreclosed-on houses, these days). Ever wonder why your baby carriage looks like a 747 landing gear getting ready for touchdown? Those hot shot, laid off engineers looked at the baby buggies like I pushed my son around in, buggies that felt like a boat on a truck chassis, buggies that took the whole trunk to pack them up and weighed more than my wife. Those smart-guy engineers changed everything with new light-weight designs that twisted into a little pile of tubes and cloth and fit anywhere. That’s the way to do it.

A month or so ago, my friend Sue started writing all sorts of politicians about the chance to make buses and passenger trains again in the US. That sounds like a good green direction for the money shovel to point. Where I live, we buy buses from the Dutch and train cars from the French. And have to pay in Euros that cost a bunch. We could change that. American cars look like buses anyway so why not do stretch Hummers and Escalades and give them away to any town that promises to add them to their bus fleet. That’s a lot better than buying whacko loans from defunct banks.

But we need something big. Bigger than buses. To keep millions of people in work. I’m thinking of the great business success of our time: Acrylic Nails. There are way more nail shops than factories in the US—more nail shops than just about anything except espresso stops and porta-potties (more about them later). Nails are green—not a big oil burner, a little oil makes a bunch of nails. And you don’t just do it once. They break, they chip, and sometimes you just want new pictures and glitter to jazz them up. But best of all, nail customers are happy as puppies with their fancy personalized weapons.

OK, there is a problem that keeps the nail industry in check. Most men have pretty short ones. We could come out with macho-themed nail pix, like skulls and daggers and other nasty stuff, or we could work on completely different “looking-good” products, that, like nails, take a while to apply and wear off in a week or two, but are for men too.
If we can get more nail action and some new products going, then ten million hard working people will open shops and we will have an entrepreneur burst that will light up our money supply like hotcakes.

Here’s my idea. I have been watching those crazy fans who paint their faces for games. Why not wear face paint all the time. It’s worth a try. Everyone with face paint for their favorite team, getting it redone once a week in private fan shops on every main street and mall in America.

Or what about those fancy beard trims. Barbers used to do it but now beards are do-it-yourself, like fixing toilets and sinks. Can’t we put barbers back on the map? If Bush can tell us to go shopping, then Obama can tell us to paint our faces, do our nails and get a trim.

Everyone can sneak out for an hour or so of nails, trim and facepaint without any trouble That’s 200 million folks paying 20 bucks each. That’s billions a week. Hundreds of billions a year. About the same as they are giving banks. Instead, they should mail out coupons for all the new shops that will open. Coupons for one treatment a week for the next year or so for every red-blooded, looking great (with their facepaint and trim and nails) American over 5 years old. (Let’s not forget the kids.)

That’s lot’s of jobs, lots of small business and not much oil and waste. Wow!

P.S. Oops, I forgot about the porta-potties and espresso shops. I’ll leave that for you to add on to barber shops and nail emporiums or maybe buses. Send you ideas in right away.

Going WACKO

I studied electronics a while back. When they used tubes that looked like light bulbs from outer space and glowed purple and green in the dark. It was neat. That’s when I learned about making things go WACKO. I did that a lot and burned out all mom’s radios and tvs. It was fun.

Here is how going WACKO works:
(1) Process a signal in a black box. That’s electronics talk and it just means putting something somewhere, doing something to it, and then spitting it out—sort of like putting cats(the input) in a basket (the black box) and shaking them and then getting out mad pussycats(the output).
(2) Then you put part of the output back into the black box (that’s called positive feedback) and—WACKO—the black box goes crazy: like taking a mad output cat (feedback) and throwing him back in; then watching all the cats get madder and madder until they rip up the basket.

Sort of like what happened in my old radios.

With my electronic stuff, before it blew up, I would get a loud rrrmmmMMMMRRR noise when it went WACKO, like in the school auditorium when the principal got his mike (the input) too close to the speakerbox (the output) or now when I get my hearing aid upside down. The sound goes WACKO.

So Rule 1 is: if you take too much output and stick it into the input, then everything goes WACKO

Sounds like it could be fun, but in lots of cases it is bad.

Black boxes are all over the world. Banks are a good example--a bunch of people worry about their money and go in the bank and they take their money. Then some of them tell others that the bank didn’t have much money (positive feedback) and then more people get scared and go in and take even more money out and then WACKO—all the people are crazy to get their money. Its like the mad pussycats scratching out the tellers’ eyes until they get their money and making all the cats standing in line get really upset.

But this can’t go on forever. Like the school principal who pulls the plug on the mike to shut up the sound, the bank pulls the plug and locks the door. The tellers are safe.

But (this is important) in electronics I learned that all you need to do is turn the output upside down and then no more WACKO. In electronics talk that’s negative feedback. Lets look back at the cats to understand it better. If you take part of the mad cat output and reverse it 180 degrees (that means, maybe, in this case, give an output cat lots of tranquilizers) then throw him back in the basket, it calms things down.

OK, maybe basket cats are not the best example but they sort of illustrate Rule 2: if you take the output, turn it upside down and stick it into the input, then everything calms down.

You do this in electronics to make the output sound even better and calm down the circuits. But lets look back at the banks: how do we turn the people upside down when they come out the bank. Here’s how: We tell them if they leave their money in the bank they will get a whole lot more interest than they planned for. Then a bunch of them leave their money in and tell people in line that they are getting rich putting money in the bank. That’s how you flip the output.

OK, there is a problem. The bank only has a little greenback money and the rest is in crazy stocks and ponzi schemes. So our real problem is how to make more money when the bank safe is empty.

(We could use the government to do that. But it scares the bejesus out of everyone and they run even faster to the bank.)

Here’s my plan. Don’t give just regular interest. Throw in some big payback items when people ask for their money. When I was a kid the bank gave out a set of dishes when you put more money in. That won’t work now because everybody already has dishes. My plan is use churches to print up some holy money and give that out. Churches have a special bargain for the next world already. Let’s get the Pope and Rev Ike and anyone else with a fancy robe and a printer to sign on to the bank’s team (Maybe for ten percent of BofA).

When the banks run out of greenback money, then they can give out something easy to print up with lots of value. Lets call them Heaven Bucks—the kind you CAN take with you. To buy all sorts of heaven stuff: better wings and bigger harps. Or maybe it can buy you a one way ticket from hell. OK, this heaven stuff doesn’t work for everyone. If you believe in reincarnation you can get Karma Coupons that bump you up like frequent flier miles. No next life as a cockroach. There are all sorts of schemes. And remember the churches tried it before and it worked fine until Mr. Luther messed everything up. They had the big fire sale on indulgences (sort of like holy get-out-of-jail-frees in Monopoly) in the 1600’s. Right now they have holy water coupons you can buy from preachers on TV if you stay up late and watch weird channels. Holy bucks are a marketing paradise.

So we just balance the bank money in and out with holy bucks. No more WACKO in banks. We print all we want. It has lots of value (if you believe in it). It’s great stuff, just like real money.