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What's an idea you have that should be an actual thing? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Tourist cities should have hotel rooms by the hour that are actually clean when you just want to take a nap.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've got a few:

In addition to fluoride, water supplies should be dosed with small amounts of lithium. Maybe LSD, too.
Incel bounties: Anyone who has trouble getting laid can check into a facility where they are assigned a bounty equal to a set rate times the days they've spent in the facility. They can leave any time, but the clock restarts if they come back. Volunteers may show up and offer to have sex with a participant. If the participant agrees and the deed is done, the bounty gets split between the volunteer and the participant.
Hard rationing of greenhouse gas emissions: every year everyone gets issued an equal amount of GHG vouchers that, in total, represent a safe amount of GHGs that can be emitted that year. Fossil fuel companies then need to buy these vouchers on the market and turn them into the government in order to get permission to extract the representative amount of fossil fuels. Doing so without permission would carry a severe penalty. This concept could be applied to water supplies, fisheries, and other resources as well.
Imputed rent as taxable income instead of flat property or wealth taxes.
No fares for urban public transit. Instead, a special property tax should be applied to real estate inversely proportional to its walking distance from transit stops.
Reintroduce wolves to suburban areas to keep the deer under control.
Electric airships instead of fossil fuel powered passenger jets.
Nuclear power plants within or adjacent to urban centers, especially in colder climate regions.
Gray water recovery built into homes and municipal water systems.
Urine collection programs for phosphate recovery.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Hard rationing of greenhouse gas emissions

You're more or less describing cap-and-trade, where corporations have a limit of carbon emissions as 'credits' which can be traded on a market. So a company that doesn't produce as much emissions can sell their surplus credits to another company, so the market as a whole doesn't exceed a set amount of CO2 emissions. As it stands, in this or other carbon tax based systems, people pay for emissions in the form of sales tax on CO2 producing products.

wolves

I'd imagine they'd just leave again eventually. If suburbia was an advantageous place for them, they'd already be there.

Nuclear power plants within or adjacent to urban centers, especially in colder climate regions.

Nuclear plants are somewhat geographically restricted to needing to be close to a suitable water source, there's plenty that are next to or inside metropolitan areas. That being said, high voltage transmission means that a plant can still be a few tens of kms outside of a city before transmission losses start to add up. Also, small-scare reactors have been under development for use in remote communities.

Gray water recovery built into homes and municipal water systems.

Any sort of dirty water recovery is more efficient at the municipal scale, and plenty of towns are already doing that.

Urine collection programs for phosphate recovery.

Seems that's not a super easy thing to do (read expensive), but there's research being done... also apparently, a good portion of it in wastewater is from laundry soap... but as in the above, more efficient to just collect all wastewater and process it on a large scale.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

You’re more or less describing cap-and-trade…

I don't think I am. Under cap-and-trade, it's still possible for more than a safe amount of fossil fuels to be extracted from the ground within a given time period and subsequently burned. There's some similarity in the market mechanism, but in my scheme it's connected to actual fossil fuel extraction, not hypothetical emissions quantities.

If suburbia was an advantageous place for them, they’d already be there. …

I don't think the wolves are instinctively avoiding human populations. Wolves were deliberately exterminated from these places, so deliberate efforts are required to bring them back.

… high voltage transmission means that a plant can still be a few tens of kms outside of a city before transmission losses start to add up.

Transmission losses aren't the issue. If the plants are close to where people live and work then you can take advantage of cogeneration to provide district heating and utility steam. Also, urban nuclear plants can strengthen the relationship with agricultural regions by generating hydrogen/ammonia for GHG free fertilizer.

Any sort of dirty water recovery is more efficient at the municipal scale…

I agree, but homes should already have the plumbing to automatically collect bathing and laundry water for flushing toilets. The excess can get sent to the municipal water treatment plant and set aside for industrial uses.

Seems that’s not a super easy thing to do (read expensive)…

It gets more inefficient if the pee is mixed with the rest of the wastewater, so the idea is to adapt our bathrooms to help keep it separate. Perhaps converting to composting toilets, which collect urine separately, is the way go to here to help with gray water management as well. Anyway, if recovering phosphate from urine seems expensive, that's just relative to mining it from problematic places.