Population Growth

It amazes me that the world population is growing with no plans from anyone on how we should handle it. I'm not saying that we should do something specific about it, but we should at least determine what a good population level might be and then put a plan in place to achieve that.

From reading articles on the web like http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Science-czar_s-support-for-eugenics-should-raise-eyebrows-7971354-50765207.html, the thought of population control is absurd. While I agree some of the recommended measures are extreme and barbaric, I also think leaving population growth up to the will of individuals is irresponsible. This is one of those problems that will be much better solved if we fix it BEFORE there is crisis.

Current world population is close to 7 bln. In 1950, world population was under 3 bln. I'm not saying that this is bad, but I think we need to be asking a lot of questions about what is right and where we should be.

The problem with "stuff"

A few years ago, a friend of mine and I tried to start a business importing and selling eco-friendly crafts from rain forest areas. We thought we could help out poor countries and help the rain forest at the same time. We started with a $600 order from a women's shelter in Bolivia. It was perfect.

Then we got our "stuff"! 5 boxes of fragile, random, heavy, stuff. It was cool, but we soon realized we had to sort it, count it, take pictures of it, organize it, price it. Then when someone ordered it, we had to find it and ship it. This business was not going to scale, especially in our spare time and over the internet.

What we should have done is follow the Amazon model. Instead of creating a warehouse, we should have created a marketplace. Setup standards and guidelines for the kinds of things we would sell, and then tell people who were traveling to buy things from local artisans and sell them through our marketplace. Then, we have scale in that we have many sellers, we facilitate transactions so people might be encouraged to try to make money through us, and we have no inventory, nothing to do but make it easier to sell imports. This would have been much easier.

Be a part of a network by Blogging

I've attempted several times to start blogs and I've failed. I get two or three GREAT posts out and then I never go back. I've discovered a couple of problems with my methodology that I'm trying to fix.

1. You can't blog in isolation. A blog without interaction might as well be a dead end web page. You need to read other blogs, interact with them, post responses to them. This is similar to linking to other web pages. You can't pretend that you're the be-all, end-all of blogs. You are just another blogger adding to the wealth of ideas, thoughts, and community on the web.

2. Build upon existing relationships, communities. While I have friends, and I've often discussed the topics I'm interested in with them, I never invited them to discuss these things on a blog. Why not? It's a great place for them to read through my ideas and respond with comments, or post their own blogs. Because of this, I forced my Friend to start a blog with this purpose. I know it's only one person, but if the thought is valid, I'll start asking other friends to do the same.

Welcome

This is an attempt at creating a blog where I might create regular content that is interesting and maybe a little different in the way I approach thoughts, ideas, and solutions.

It is also a combination BLOG where my good friend is also writing a BLOG and will post responses to my ideas as well as writing about new ideas of his own that I may respond to.