Technology
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Get exercise and improve your self-control with this new eco-friendly hand-crank-powered cell phone!
The issue: It is frequently asserted that people are addicted to cell phones. If only there were a technical solution to this problem! Proposal: Here’s a simple solution to discourage casual cell phone use: a cell phone with two features: A strict limit on the amount of time you can use each program. (This feature…
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![Easily win the Tour de France every year thanks to this bicycle secret: there’s no law that says you CAN’T enter the race with multiple people on a bike! [*]](https://worstplans.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/1-bikes-all.png?w=1024)
[*] But you would be disqualified from the race. Background: Bicycle races have stagnated due to their archaic one-rider-per-bike format. Proposal: To usher in a new era of bicycle-based excitement add variety to bicycle races, an “entrant” to the race could be re-defined as a single bicycle, rather than a single person. Then, participants would…
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Background: Online discussion forums often have posts that look like this: Air pollution actually SAVES 10,000 lives per day worldwide >109 Comments [Upvote] [Downvote] [View Comments] Or: Futuristic economic model allows Swedes to make $200,000 a year without having jobs >274 Comments [Upvote] [Downvote] [View Comments] The issue: Crucially, the comment page is usually completely…
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Background: Sometimes, someone will send out a company-wide email that is CCed to everyone else at the company. The issue: Anyone who sends a “reply all” response to that initial email will generate another company-wide email. After a while, people will start getting annoyed by the constant irrelevant emails and will request that people stop…
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Background: Car sun visors are useful for avoiding glare while driving. But they require constant adjustment on winding roads, and they don’t work at all if the sun is too low in the sky (e.g. sunrise, sunset conditions). Proposal: Instead of having a sun visor, what if the sun was blocked by an “eclipse disc,”…
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Background: Voice recognition has existed in somewhat passable form since the late 1990s. But recently it has become more prominent with Apple Siri, the “OK Google” voice assistant, and Amazon Alexa. The issue: However, these products are all incredibly limited, and can perform almost no actions beyond a few hard-coded ones that were added at…
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Background: Sometimes, when driving through a residential neighborhood road, you may encounter annoying speed bumps, speed humps, or speed lumps (Figure 1). The issue: These speed bumps / lumps discourage you from taking the shortcut (Figure 2). But you’re important, and have places to be! If only there were some way you could take these…
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Background: Certain types of vending machines are capable of squeezing oranges and dispensing the freshly-squeezed orange juice right there at the machine. Generally speaking, these machines actually show you the oranges through a transparent window, so you can see the orange-juice-making process. Most of these machines proclaim that you are getting “100% Orange Juice” or…
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Background: Running a business is expensive, and employee wages are usually a huge fraction of total costs (see Figure 1). However, these jobs can’t always be eliminated: many jobs still REQUIRE a human employee, and jobs that require an on-site presence can’t be outsourced. Proposal: Some jobs require an on-site presence and are difficult to…
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The issue: Sometimes, a representative for a company causes a public relations disaster by saying something dumb on camera (Figure 1). Obviously, we’d like to avoid this. But although it’s easy to avoid interview disasters over email (just have a PR department filter the outgoing emails), this doesn’t work for real-time in-person interactions. Proposal: Fortunately,…
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