User:UvaBe/sandbox

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How to postpone the apocalypse[edit | edit source]

A list of ideas for everyone interested in working together to save the world.[edit | edit source]

  1. Crowd-solving with the collective intelligence — Everyone working together, listening to problems that need solving and sharing ideas about the best actions for sustaining life on Earth.
  2. Passive revolution — passive energy redesign and up-cycle of all buildings, home, business, storage, all construction from dog houses to skyscrapers. Conserve energy first with smarter design reducing the energy used and generated.
  3. Heal the digital divide for everyone to have a voice to join the conversation, and participate both locally and globally. With a paper ballot and poll by mail alternative for people who choose not to use electronic devices and as a back-up or safeguard against hacking of digital voting and information systems.
  4. Renewable energy collected from renewable resources: sunlight, wind, tides, waves, geothermal heat and radiative-cooling from outer space. Use renewable energy collected directly with as little conversion and transportation fuel as is physically possible. Note: 2019 statistic 25% of GHG (green house gases) is from generating electricity and over half of the electricity generated is used pushing power for long distances on large grids.
  5. Clean air, water and soil safe from pollution, vital for survival, protected as a right by enforcing industrial corporate environmental production responsibility for greenhouse gases, pollution, garbage and toxic waste and/or corporate social responsibility in international product chains.
  6. Flip the post-industrial age paradigm from production growth and assembly line manufacturing of a series of products on a massive scale to demand only production of more specialized products made to order, reducing the waste of products people don’t want or need from the market. Focus on the most toxic waste first: e-waste, plastics, meat (see 35. and 33.) fashion, appliances and automobiles to cheap plastic toys. Only use the Earth’s energy and resources to make it if someone wants it.
  7. H.U.M.A.N. first economics and politics. Placing value in people more than profit, GNH over GDP. Gross National Happiness over Gross Domestic Product.

H.U.M.A.N. is an acronym.

H. stands for Home as a right.

U. stands for universal job training for needed vocations.

M. medical care for all or Medicare for all.

A. Art stimulus via a democratic ArtCoin365 voting system.

N. Needs met, no questions asked. Food, clean water, air and soil safe from pollutants.

8. Home as a right. One equity owned primary residence claimed per adult citizen. No foreclosures because no home values can drop below zero in value. Rentals for temporary housing only.

9. Universal job training for needed vocations. Free on the job training, apprentice programs and trade schools networked with community colleges. Skilled workers advancing to paid masters and Ph.D. programs in careers they excel in.

Medical care for all in seven parts (10–16):

10. Health as a right. The price of necessary medicine protected by law from the greed of administrators and corporations. No profit allowed for medicine, lab tests, screening and treatments required for survival.

11. Preventive care and screenings of health to reduce suffering from injury, disease, and need (sleep, nutrition, time for exercise and personal-time for mental health) with access to healthcare and time to heal — before a person becomes disabled. Note* For cost-effective healthcare emergency medicine is an obvious given — emergency rooms should never be the only access to medical care.

12. Electronic medical records that belong to the patient for safer more accurate and efficient healthcare.

13. Family medical history as preventive medicine: as recommended by US Human & Health Services — The Surgeon General’s Family Health History Initiative 2016.

14. Accept the fragility and limitations of the human lifespan from birth to old age with respectful palliative care for terminally ill and elderly people to die with dignity. (Two topics in one sentence for the opioid epidemic, see 21).

15. Improve the human diet for individual people by body type, age, and physical activity levels — not about losing weight, but for a healthier people and planet.

16. Crime prevention plus access to healthcare i.e. birth control make the human race’s most dreaded ‘A’ word solvable. Abortion is a rooster problem, not a chicken and the egg problem. Abortion a preventable ill, almost a solvable problem except when necessary to save the Mother’s life or suffering of the future child. Then only as the last resort. Abortion is a privacy-protected medical procedure.

17. Art stimulus via a democratic digital ArtCoin365 voting system. Economic stimulus for what humans do better than AI and robots, the arts, literature, and culture. A publicly owned fee-free dollar-per-day vote for every citizen generating a penny-for-your-thoughts via a tip-jar voting system to distribute art grants and fund community arts programs, productions, studios, and performances.

18. Needs met for shelter, food, water, and air. No questions asked. Every citizen claims a home as shelter. No person adult or child should ever go hungry or be shamed into begging or eating unhealthy junk-food in a Nation with such an abundance of food that we have rolling food surpluses. No one should have to drink dirty or polluted water. No one should have to suffer from smog or torturous noise pollution in their home.

19. The Right to Privacy laws updated for the digital information age to automatically protect all minors, people’s homes from invasion and search, victims of crime, and medical privacy.

20. The Right to Publicity updated for the digital information age. People own the right to their own face and personality and have the right to avoid malicious defamation of character and remove images and recordings of themselves from public searches.

21. Prescription drugs and illegal substance laws need to be reevaluated weighing the most empirically proven current research on the physical harm to the individual health of the users and each specific substance socioeconomic damage and possible benefits to quality of life for population demographics.

22. Truth in journalism verified, writing credits and fact checking required. Mistakes and errors publicly redacted using the top of the journalists' time-slot or publishing space when proven false by peer and public review. If any journalist makes a lot of errors in the next issue or news broadcast they will not have any time left to make further false statements. Also, some issues need to be balanced with the rights to publicity and privacy to prevent copycat crimes.

23. Prison reform and felony voting laws — the US has the highest documented* (China is not documented) incarceration rate in the world = big complicated problem.

24. Mass revenge shootings, crime, suicide or domestic violence by gun, and war, what is it good for — absolutely nothing. As stated in the second amendment all types of weapons of war should be the legal responsibility of a well-regulated militia. A well-regulated militia must have a security system to protect weapons from miss-use, certified shooting ranges and gun safes appropriate for the weapons they are responsible for. Private individual gun ownership should be for hunting weapons and handguns only, no private individual ownership of weapons or ammunition for weapons of war. All weapons owned by civilians and militia groups processed with common sense gun control laws.

25. Recognize Physical Characteristic Discrimination in ourselves (like racism, misogyny, homophobia, and ageism all rolled into one).

26. Ecological evaluation of the textile industry, fibers, dyes, and the production all types of cloth, baby clothes to potting soil “bags” to boat tarps, etc… the production of all machined fabrics weighed for environmental impact.

27. Clean-up; how we clean ourselves, our homes and our workplaces. Nonrenewable free products and packaging.

28. Solve money. How do we reach that Star Trek utopia where money isn’t needed?

29. Remove money from politics. Discussion, polls, and candidates hosted on a public politics-only-channel free of charge to participants. Starting at the top, POTUS, Senators and State Governors. No high-level politician earns a salary. All non-essential spending and gifts are allowed if public and completely transparent. If a politician accepts a gift, the gift is displayed to the public. Survival and all required goods and services are paid for at cost, housing is provided, a politician sets aside all privately owned land, businesses, anything they can’t take into the government-owned housing. (temporarily giving over control of all personal assets to a lawyer, relative or a friend). If a politician doesn’t focus on the work of governing and serving the interest of the majority of people who voted them into office it should be completely visible and they should be held to account and replaced by another politician.

30. Design a digital branch of the United States Postal Service to end all paper junk-mail (Solved in tandem with 3., heal the digital divide).

31. Re-shippers — Reusable mailers for all shipping companies to eliminate cardboard boxes, and paper (SASE) envelopes.

32. End plastic packaging. Stop all plastic use-once-throw-away-trash by designing it out of production. If idea 30. and 31. are successful then millions of tons of paper pulp formerly used to produce junk-mail and cardboard boxes as well as the paper mills, printers, binderies, and box making factories that produce flyers and cardboard boxes can be redesigned to produce paper food packages like paper milk cartons and ice cream tubs etc…

33. Standardized refillables, for all types of products currently sold in throw-away plastic bags for products not suitable for paper alone, glass or can packaging. Example: airtight display crates or tub sized bins with a seal for chips or bread packaged in paper to protect food from moisture and crushing from bakery to store shelf.

34. Subsidized local produce and regional food should be more affordable than foods shipped thousands of miles.

35. Organic food should be the default stickerless labeled in bins by farm location. Pesticide produced products and GMOs should be clearly marked with color-coded warning labels.

36. Work with farmers to help reduce waste of food and adjust the margins of production for the crops with the largest environmental impact first; Meat, dairy and egg, and corn grown for animal feed as relates to current dietary trends.

37. Save the sea life in our oceans and rivers — sustainable harvesting of fish and shellfish in tandem with habitat restoration.

38. Save the bees and the bats — Replace monoculture mown and trimmed grass lawns with native grasses and other low maintenance ground cover plants. Bees, native pollinators and all the small creatures at the foundation of the food chain need happy soil free from pesticides and chemical fertilizers allowed to live full seasonal life-cycle uncut.

39. Plants, plants and more plants — everywhere. Community gardens and garden boxes, green walls and trellis fencing. Gardening is the number one hobby worldwide, everyone should have access to fresh fruit, vegetables, and herbs.

40. No more toxic chemical roof run-off — anywhere. Replace all old roofing with clean roofing materials: green roofs or of glass, metal and ceramic with solar panels. Comment from the choir: What to do with the old roofing? Exactly, what to do with old tar-paper roofing materials?

41. No more asphalt or cement parking lots; depending on location all parking lot spaces should be a green space, greenhouse or a picnic lunch-break sized park collecting rainwater or covered by solar panels.

42. Plug-in electric vehicles connected to smart microgrids that run on solar & wind power to replace our crude-oil dependent system.

43. People power paths everywhere — walking, bicycle, unicycle, wheelchair or skate etc... — as a local alternative to longer distance public transportation and automobile-only roads unsafe for cyclists and pedestrians.

44. Water efficient redesign of all toilet and bathroom plumbing. Flush grey-water or better yet, don’t poop and pee in water at all, use the organic material and natural gas in human waste for fuel. Most logical proportional use for homes would be direct as fuel for hot water heaters.

45. Outdoor lighting — up-cycled and replaced old street lamps with new energy efficient designs with solar-panel and light-sensors.

46. Save birds; window designs and glass birds can see: Testing is in progress for ultraviolet coatings. Window angles 20% away from the sky has proven to work. Deep arches and awning to block the reflection of the sky also helps. It is the reflection of the sky birds see, dive into and die.

47. Stop stray invasive animals in our environment. Abandoned and neglected pets is animal cruelty. Make puppy-mills and breeding of unwanted animals as a product illegal. People who want a specific type of pet should request a pet and search lists of certified breeders, and accidental mutts, no impulse purchases of pets. All litters of pets listed with an official local humane society agency. Every type of animal that is legal as a pet: dogs, cats, snakes, turtles, lizards, birds, rabbits and fish etc…

48. Stop invasive plant species that threaten the balance of the ecosystem.

49. up-cycle the tradition of the Christmas tree to better suit the time we live in, live trees and celebrate New Year by planting a native tree for the future.

50. Protect and expand all green spaces “parks” — National and state forests and wildlife refuges as well as all tiny urban green spaces around public transportation, green roofs, arboretum or greenhouses in the center of apartment complexes, and business centers.

51. Make industrial age garbage extinct — not life on planet Earth.

52. World Wednesday every Wednesday for as long as it takes, until we clean-up the environment and learn how to balance the climate — Earth day once a year is not enough.