How i’m keeping the air in my house fresh and clean. Four years ago, due to all the bad air from wildfires, I bought 5 HEPA air filters to place all around my house. …

15 years ago, it was rare to find a cafe that offered free wifi. Today, they pretty much all have it. It is no longer a nicety, it is an expected utility - no different than expecting a cafe to offer a bathroom. In the future, these same destinations will pay for your ride getting to them. Ubers and Google cars will be so cheap thanks to their solar-powered, self-driving, utilization optimized cars, it will only cost a few dimes getting you across town. That price is low enough that destinations will be willing to pay it to compete for your business.

I just read an article saying Fidelity marked down the value of their shares in Snapchat and Dropbox, and it occurred to me: isn’t there a conflict of interest present? Such a move increases the chance that the companies would need to raise their next rounds (whether public or private)…

Critics of a Facebook dislike button are presuming they know how it will work, when we all have no idea. Perhaps it will only feed the newsfeed algorithm but not actually get communicated to the poster. …

Technological progress may someday destroy all human jobs (as we define jobs today). That is a good thing, why is everyone so obsessed with working? The only real issue that arises is distribution of wealth. If we live in a world where everyone’s needs are supplied in abundance, that sounds awesome to me.

If Amazon starts using drones to deliver packages, will drone pirates emerge? Attacker drones could fly above and feed string into the rotating blades, with a human below picking up the packages or something.

Make it so only subscribers can submit comments. If a story has less than say 100 comments, then it can remain free (to get the conversation going). After that, make the user hit a paywall after they’ve written their comment (but before it’s been posted) Content can be commoditized, but self expression on a well branded page with distribution is not as easily substituted. You could also enable commenters to pay extra to give their comment better distribution along a sidebar.

Back in 1999, at the height of the dotcom bubble, companies were spending ludicrous amounts of money to acquire new “users”. One company offered a voucher for a free professional massage in exchange for referring 5 other users. I remember thinking (while relaxing on a massage table) that things were ridiculous and that they couldn’t sustain. Heck, the website didn’t even have anything to do with massage.

Its well known that car manufacturers started changing body designs periodically to turn car ownership into a fashion decision and not just a functional one. This obviously led to people buying new cars on a more frequent basis. But I presume that Tesla designed their car to have the lowest…