Category: The Next Good Idea

Innovation, inspiration, and common sense for all

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The Next Good Idea

Wine In A Box

America has surpassed Italy, and will soon catch France to become the largest consumer of wine in the world.  All that wine has to move miles to get to your glass, and thus leaves behind quite a carbon footprint.  Pleasure doesn’t need to leave behind such a brutal wake though.  If we could just climb down off our snob-appeal high chair, and embrace such a simple solution, we would be a few steps closer to nirvana.

Tyler Coleman of DrVino.com had an excellent op-ed/solution in yesterday’s NY Times.
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The Next Good Idea

Global Oneness

The Global Oneness Project is “exploring how the radically simple notion of interconnectedness can be lived in our increasingly complex world.”  They have a great short film online library covering a series of remarkable projects that are helping to improve our world.  You will recognize them from my prior post on The Greenhouse Project.  Check them out.

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The Next Good Idea

Old School: A Universal Greeting

Yesterday, Wired pointed out one of the more simple inventions of Thomas Edison.  And it occurred yesterday 131 years ago.  Sure, Alexander Grahm Bell invented the telephone, but the wizard of Menlo Park came up with what we needed to really get the conversation started.   

Who gets the credit the for today’s variations (“Yo”, “‘s Up?”)?  Simple good ideas to put people at ease.
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The Next Good Idea

Increase Teachers’ Salaries

Talk about a poor investment in our future…  My sister teaches in the NYC Public High Schools.  Coming from a long line of educators, I have forever been shocked at how little teachers are paid in this country.  If salaries are evidence of how our culture values something, it’s clear no one is really concerned about education.  It only makes sense to put our greatest emphasis on education.

The film blog Thompson On Hollywood, hipped me to a new doc that David Eggers and Vanessa Roth are working on that will hopefully wake us up to this situation.  There is also a good related website called theteachersalaryproject.com that points out many things, like half the teachers have to hold down a second job to survive on the starting salary and teachers make 88 cents on the dollar to comparable positions.

Evidently, a lot of this is collected in the book: Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers, that Eggers co-authored.
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The Next Good Idea

Selling Good Habits

The NY Times (7/13/08) had a great article featuring Val Curtis’ efforts to bring hygiene where there hasn’t been much.  Curtis essentially hacked the marketing world’s methods and used it sell health as opposed to material goods.

A FEW years ago, a self-described “militant liberal” named Val Curtis decided that it was time to save millions of children from death and disease. So Dr. Curtis, an anthropologist then living in the African nation of Burkina Faso, contacted some of the largest multinational corporations and asked them, in effect, to teach her how to manipulate consumer habits worldwide.

“For example, the urge to check e-mail or to grab a cookie is likely a habit with a specific prompt. Researchers found that most cues fall into four broad categories: a specific location or time of day, a certain series of actions, particular moods, or the company of specific people. The e-mail urge, for instance, probably occurs after you’ve finished reading a document or completed a certain kind of task. The cookie grab probably occurs when you’re walking out of the cafeteria, or feeling sluggish or blue.”


The article is filled with many useful observations, like: “Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods.” 
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The Next Good Idea

Paranoia Can Be Your Friend

Of course, nothing will ever be as loyal and cuddly as PRIVACY.  Do you remember what that was like, you know, back B.B. (Before Bush).  Privacy was once FREEDOM’s sibling.  Older brother, I think.  Anyway if you want to check out what that Big Brother has become, check this out.  Pretty scary.  But definitely a good idea about how to take something we take all too much for granted, and get people righteously stirred up about it.  

It’s a good idea to fight for your right to keep you personal information private — before it’s too late.
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The Next Good Idea

Electing Not To

Okay, if November 2nd is Election Day, what’s today?  I like the idea that on August 2nd we get to ELECT NOT TO.  I would love a website that had ALL of the things we could elect not to participate in.  The benefits of doing nothing can never be over rated (say, have you seen The Tao Of Steve ever?).  Unfortunately, in today’s world, we have to act to get back to that state.  The assault has been on us for all too long.

Anyway, here’s a couple of options to OPT OUT.
Stop Credit Card Solicitations
Do Not Call Registry
Do you know any more of this sort of thing?  Ideas for any?  Let me know.