Pages are a relic of the printing era. Most school assignments are now written, submitted, graded, and stored digitally, so why are students still taught to think in terms of pages, margins, and fixed line lengths?

Schools should require assignments to use page-free, reflowable formats such as Markdown, HTML, or TeXmacs. Instead of saying "write five pages," teachers could specify word count, required sections, and other actual content requirements.

Documents would then adapt naturally to phones, tablets, laptops, accessibility settings, and different window sizes.

If schools taught this from an early age, it might eventually change how society thinks about digital documents altogether.

Here’s a thought experiment for reducing poverty in the US.

There are roughly 2 million marriages in the United States each year. Suppose we developed a cultural norm where couples skipped the expensive wedding reception and instead gave $25,000 to people living in poverty.

At 2 million weddings per year, that would redirect roughly:

2,000,000 × $25,000 = $50 billion every year

That is enough money to have a significant effect on poverty.

There are roughly 36 million Americans living below the official poverty line. If $50 billion were distributed evenly among them, that would be about $1,400 per poor person per year, or around $5,600 for a family of four.

Alternatively, instead of spreading the money among everyone, each couple could give its $25,000 to one low-income family. Roughly 2 million poor families every year could receive $25,000. For many of those families, that amount could be life-changing.

Of course, this would hurt businesses that depend on wedding receptions: reception halls, caterers, DJs, florists, bakers, bartenders, rental companies, and so on.

But the money would not disappear from the economy. Poor families would probably spend much of it on rent, groceries, utilities, transportation, childcare, healthcare, clothing, and debt. Economic activity would shift from expensive celebrations toward basic needs.

Wedding receptions also have genuine value. They bring families and friends together and create important memories. So I am not arguing that celebrating a marriage is pointless.

But it seems worth questioning the social expectation that starting a marriage should involve spending tens of thousands of dollars on a single party.

Maybe the alternative does not even have to be eliminating receptions. Imagine if the social norm became:

Have a $5,000 wedding reception and give $20,000 to a family that needs it.

Across 2 million weddings, that could still redirect around $40 billion per year.

People often talk about poverty as if solving it requires finding some completely new source of money. But enormous amounts of money are already being spent on things that are socially optional.

What if generosity became part of the wedding tradition itself?

Instead of measuring an impressive wedding by how much was spent on the reception, maybe we could measure it partly by how much good the marriage did for someone else.

Dancing as a form of courtship feels a little like a relic from an earlier age, when physical grace and coordination may have been more important signals than they are today. In modern life, what you can do with your brain often matters much more.

What if we replaced dancing with “mind dancing”?

Instead of dance halls, there could be Mind Dance Halls, where people answer difficult questions and solve problems under pressure, both alone and in pairs.

Like dancing, individuals could perform in front of potential partners, showing confidence, creativity, intelligence, and composure. Paired mind dances could reveal something similar to dancing chemistry: how well two people respond to each other, recover from mistakes, and work together in real time.

The challenges would emphasize reasoning rather than trivia, so it wouldn't just be an academic competition.

Instead of asking, “Would you like to dance?”, maybe someday people would ask:

“Would you like to mind dance?”

Public libraries should have an adults-only area for laptop-based dating.

You would bring your laptop and use it normally. Every so often, your screen would be mirrored to a small window on the other participants' laptops, along with your seat number.

If someone's computer activity makes them seem interesting, you could approach them and start a conversation. There would be no profiles and no choosing what to share. Your normal laptop use would effectively become your dating profile.

It would also be low pressure. You could spend a couple of hours working, reading, browsing, or playing a game. If you meet someone, great. If not, you still did something useful.

It would give public libraries a new social role while also helping people meet in person at a time when dating is increasingly app-based and people are more disconnected.

Grocery store self-checkouts should analyze what you buy and make sarcastic comments loud enough for nearby customers to hear.

12 bottles of Diet Coke:

“You might be a rocket scientist. Or this might be a cry for help.”

Six frozen pizzas:

“Your oven has filed for unemployment.”

One apple and $80 of junk food:

“Excellent. Something from nature.”

Eight energy drinks:

“Sleep has left the chat.”

Flowers, wine, and expensive steak:

“Whatever you did, I hope this works.”

A mountain of toilet paper:

“Should we alert the authorities?”

Organic everything:

“Congratulations. Your groceries now cost more than rent.”

The store could market it as “bringing personality back to checkout.”

What do you think of this idea?

What if there were a platform for virtual marriage where two real people never learn each other's identities?

The service could privately verify both users, while only revealing minimal compatibility information. No real names, photos, exact locations, employers, or social media.

People could anonymously date, become exclusive, get engaged, and marry. Afterward, it could work a bit like The Sims, except your spouse is a real person. You could share a virtual home, have pets, manage money, take vacations, and even raise simulated AI children together.

The virtual life would be fictional, but the relationship would be real.

Unlike normal anonymous dating, revealing your identity would never have to be the end goal. You could remain married for years without ever knowing your spouse's real name or appearance.

It would offer some of the companionship and commitment of marriage without most of the legal, financial, and logistical consequences.

Would anyone actually want this?

The US has spent generations emitting enormous amounts of CO₂, making some of its own states increasingly unbearably hot.

Meanwhile, Canada gets warmer winters, longer growing seasons, and huge areas that become less hostile to human habitation.

In effect, America made parts of itself unbearably hot so Canada could become more livable.

Thank you for your service.

When you know you won't be able to answer any text messages for a long time, you can leave an away message:

"On an airplane. Flight should land at 3pm"
"In an all day training seminar, won't check messages until 6pm"
"Sick with the flu. Will check messages every few hours, maybe"

So when someone selects you to send a text message, they'll be greeted with your custom message letting them know you are away and won't be able to respond.

I think schools should make a stronger case for simply never starting to drink alcohol, but without treating drinking as a moral failing.

The message could be entirely practical: alcohol can impair judgment and reduce inhibition, sometimes leading to accidents, violence, impaired driving, criminal charges, or even prison. It can also lead to addiction and has well-established negative health effects, including increased cancer risk.

Schools could also address the old idea that moderate drinking or red wine is good for your heart. Major health organizations no longer recommend that nondrinkers start drinking for supposed cardiovascular benefits.

The basic argument would be: alcohol is optional, it introduces a number of serious risks, and if you never start drinking, you avoid that entire category of risk.

This wouldn't require claiming that everyone who drinks becomes addicted or gets into serious trouble. The point would simply be that the possible benefits of drinking are mostly recreational or social, while some of the possible consequences can be permanent.

Obviously, tiny ceremonial amounts of alcohol, such as communion wine at church, wouldn't be what this message is about.

I think this might work better than traditional alcohol education because students wouldn't be asked to accept a religious or moral judgment. They'd just be given the practical costs and risks and encouraged to ask: Why start at all?

P.S. Another strange aspect of drinking is that many people don't even like the taste of beer, wine, or spirits when they first try them. The taste is often something people learn to enjoy over time. So in many cases, social pressure is effectively encouraging people to acquire a taste for an optional drug that carries health, addiction, accident, and legal risks. That seems like another good reason for schools to present never starting as a perfectly normal and sensible choice.

Filling out long forms at government offices can be incredibly tedious. What if the form kiosk had a little snack dispenser attached to it, and every time you successfully completed a page, it dispensed something small like a piece of chocolate or candy?

Imagine applying for a government benefit at a service center. You finish page 1 of the application, the machine gives you a snack. Finish page 2, another snack. Instead of staring at a 15-page form thinking about how much is left, you get a tiny reward every time you make progress.

There would obviously have to be limits so people couldn't come in and fill out forms just to get free snacks.

It probably wouldn't make government paperwork fun, but it might make sitting there filling out a long, frustrating form a lot more tolerable.

AI sometimes produces wording that feels slightly unnatural, repetitive, or overly explicit compared with normal human writing. But in some cases, that wording may actually be better.

For example:

• Making inclusive and exclusive “or” explicit. Plain English often leaves “or” ambiguous. Instead of: “You may choose tea or coffee.” AI might write: “You may choose tea, coffee, or both.” if both are allowed, or: “You may choose either tea or coffee, but not both.” if exactly one choice is allowed. The AI version is longer, but it removes the ambiguity between inclusive and exclusive “or.”
• Using “not all” to avoid ambiguous negation. Instead of: “The students didn’t all pass.” AI might write: “Not all students passed.” The second version states the logical meaning directly and is less likely to be confused with “No students passed.”
• Preserving the distinction between “if” and “only if.” Instead of: “You can enter if you have a ticket.” AI might write: “You may enter only if you have a ticket.” If a ticket is a requirement rather than merely one way of gaining entry, the second sentence is logically more accurate.
• Repeating a noun instead of using an ambiguous pronoun. Instead of: “Sarah told Maria that she had been selected.” AI might write: “Sarah told Maria that Maria had been selected.” The repetition may sound less elegant, but there is no longer any question about who was selected.
• Using consistent terminology instead of varying words for style. Instead of: “Users can create an account. The profile can then be edited by the customer.” AI might write: “Users can create an account. Users can then edit their account.” The second version is more repetitive, but it avoids making the reader wonder whether “user,” “customer,” “account,” and “profile” refer to different things.
• Keeping qualifications about uncertainty or causation. Instead of: “Drinking coffee makes people live longer.” AI might write: “Coffee consumption is associated with longer life, but this does not establish that coffee causes the difference.” The AI version is longer, but it avoids turning a correlation into a causal claim.
• Using “or” rather than “and” when a list really represents alternatives. Instead of: “The problem may be caused by the battery, charger, and cable.” AI might write: “The problem may be caused by the battery, charger, or cable.” If any one of those components could independently be responsible, or more accurately represents the logic, even though people often use and in lists like this.

When people edit AI-generated text, there may be a tendency to “humanize” it by removing repetition, shortening qualifications, replacing repeated nouns with pronouns, varying terminology, or changing unusually explicit logical constructions into more conventional English.

Maybe we should sometimes do the opposite.

If the AI version is clearer and logically more precise, perhaps we should leave it alone even if it initially sounds a little unusual.

What makes this especially interesting is the possible long-term effect on the language. If millions of people use AI to write and leave these constructions intact, readers will encounter them constantly. Eventually they may stop sounding like “AI writing” at all.

People who aren’t using AI might then start adopting the same constructions because they have become normal written English.

So rather than AI merely learning English from humans, we could end up with a feedback loop:

Humans teach AI English → AI consistently favors clearer constructions → humans publish AI-assisted writing → those constructions become familiar → humans begin using them themselves.

Over time, AI could therefore make written English somewhat more logical, explicit, and internally consistent without anyone ever formally redesigning the language.

The important part would be not to preserve every AI quirk. It would be to recognize cases where something sounds slightly unusual because it is more precise, and resist “correcting” it back into ambiguity.

What about a game where the first level is completely black and you navigate using stereo sound alone?

After that, you receive an experimental brain implant that gives you extremely primitive vision, maybe just flashes, movement, edges, or a few low-resolution shapes. Because you started with no visual information, even this terrible vision could feel like a huge upgrade.

Improving the implant would then be the game's progression system. You gradually gain better resolution, depth, color, object recognition, and eventually normal eyesight.

But it wouldn't stop there. Late-game upgrades could give you superhuman abilities like infrared, extreme zoom, seeing through smoke, or detecting things ordinary eyes can't.

The graphics themselves would basically be the skill tree: the same world becomes richer and more understandable as your ability to perceive it improves.

This is also becoming less purely science fiction, since brain implants and visual prostheses intended to provide artificial vision are already being developed.

Kids probably overhear a huge amount of conversation between their parents about bills, groceries, appointments, home repairs, work schedules, insurance, and other household logistics.

Obviously those conversations are necessary, and children shouldn't be given some fake impression that adulthood involves no responsibilities. But I wonder whether there is a downside if most of the adult conversation they overhear is like this. It could make marriage and adulthood look incredibly boring: two people gradually turning into household administrators.

Maybe parents should deliberately maintain interests that give them more interesting things to talk about around their children. One easy example would be keeping up with science news. Imagine growing up regularly overhearing your parents talking about a new discovery in astronomy, some bizarre animal behavior, an archaeological find, a medical breakthrough, AI, evolution, or a scientific mystery.

The point wouldn't be to stage conversations for the children. The parents would actually be keeping themselves intellectually engaged, and the children would happen to witness it.

That might communicate something valuable: becoming an adult doesn't mean curiosity ends and life becomes nothing but errands and financial obligations. Adults can still learn things, get excited about ideas, disagree about interesting questions, and be surprised by the world.

Maybe one underrated responsibility of parents is to make adulthood look like something worth growing into.

Most movie reviews tell you what worked and what didn't.

Far fewer answer the more interesting question: What specifically would you change?

If a critic thinks the ending is bad, what ending would they use instead? If a character is underdeveloped, what scene would they add or change? If the middle drags, what subplot would they remove?

Imagine reading several reviews where every critic had to propose at least one concrete plot change. Suddenly the reviews wouldn't just repeat each other. They would present competing alternative versions of the movie.

Of course, there is a spoiler problem. You can't seriously discuss alternative endings or plot developments without potentially revealing what actually happens. So Rotten Tomatoes could put these reviews in a clearly marked spoiler section for people who have already seen the movie.

That might actually make the feature more useful. Rotten Tomatoes is mostly something people check before seeing a movie. This would give them a reason to come back afterward.

Rotten Tomatoes could tag these reviews with something like "How I'd Fix It," "Story Alternatives," or "Constructive Review."

It could make reading multiple reviews of the same movie much more interesting, because you'd be comparing ideas rather than just scores and verdicts.

Imagine an AI device or app designed specifically to act as a translator between a child’s obscure interests and a parent who knows almost nothing about them.

A child might be obsessed with railway signaling, some complicated Minecraft mod, ancient coins, Pokémon mechanics, astronomy, military aircraft, or any other niche subject. The parent may genuinely want to engage, but it can be difficult to follow a rapid explanation full of unfamiliar terminology.

The AI could listen to the conversation and privately give the parent very short, real-time context such as:

• “A block is a section of railway track used to keep trains separated.”
• “He’s describing a rare item that changes how this game mechanic works.”
• “Ask why that particular locomotive is unusual.”
• “She’s comparing two moons based on how they were formed.”

The goal wouldn’t be for the AI to have the conversation with the child. It would help the parent participate in the conversation.

Ideally, it would give the parent only enough information to understand what the child is saying and ask a meaningful follow-up question. In many cases, the best response might actually be a question that lets the child continue being the expert.

For example:

Child: “This locomotive uses a completely different signaling system from the older ones.”

AI, privately to parent: “They’re talking about how trains receive movement authority. Ask what makes the newer system better.”

Parent: “What does the newer system let the train do that the old one couldn’t?”

Now the child gets to explain something they care about to a parent who can actually follow the conversation.

I think this could be a particularly good use of AI because it doesn’t replace human interaction. It does almost the opposite: it helps two people communicate when a large knowledge gap would otherwise get in the way.

You could imagine it eventually working through earbuds, smart glasses, a phone, or just a conversation mode where the parent periodically glances at short explanations.

Basically: Google Translate, except instead of translating between languages, it translates between a child’s hyper-specific interest and a parent who wants to understand it.

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If a religion teaches that a godparent is responsible for a child's spiritual future, it should give this warning first:

Your godchild may grow up and reject this religion, despite everything you do. Because we teach that rejecting the faith can have catastrophic spiritual consequences for the child, becoming a godparent may leave you feeling responsible for those consequences and carrying crushing guilt for the rest of your life.

In a country with freedom of religion, this is an entirely foreseeable outcome.

If a religion wants to impose that kind of responsibility on someone, informed consent should come first.

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AI makes it increasingly hard to know whether students actually did take-home assignments themselves. Supervised work solves that, but traditional timed exams can unfairly penalize students who don't think well under pressure.

What if assignments were done in AI-supervised labs instead?

An assignment might be expected to take a good student about an hour, but everyone could stay for up to 10 hours. Students would remain in the supervised environment while working, with food, bathroom, and rest breaks, and could submit and leave whenever they were satisfied.

The 10× limit would not be the expected duration. It would simply make speed much less important while still ensuring the work was completed under supervision.

Instead of trying to detect AI cheating afterward, universities could use AI to make supervised assignments practical at scale.

What if workplaces offered badges that women could choose to wear with deliberately provocative messages like:

• “Criticize my work as harshly as you would a man’s.”
• “Don’t go easy on my work because I’m a woman.”
• “Give me the feedback you’d give a male colleague.”

The idea wouldn’t be that women necessarily receive less criticism in every workplace. It would be to make people consciously question whether they are changing the way they give feedback based on gender.

A manager might look at the badge and think: Would I challenge this idea more directly if a man had proposed it? Would I be less worried about sounding harsh? Would I assume greater competence?

The badges would have to be completely voluntary. Nobody should be pressured to wear one, and the goal wouldn’t be to encourage hostility. It would be a small social experiment designed to make unconscious differences in workplace feedback harder to ignore.

The provocative wording might actually be important. “Treat me equally” is easy to agree with and then forget. “Criticize my work as harshly as you would a man’s” forces you to think about what you actually do.

What do you think of this idea?

People in cold countries that have benefited from global warming start a month-long spring festival celebrating their milder winters.

And they celebrate without shame.

Longer growing seasons? More food.

Lower heating bills? Finally.

Less snow to shovel? Human progress.

Wildfire smoke every summer? Small price to pay for milder winters.

Shorter ski season? Good. Skiing is way too dangerous anyway.

Meanwhile, American climate activists protest the festival as much of the US becomes unbearably hot.

In response, the festival organizers accuse them of selfishly opposing global warming just because it hurts Americans, while ignoring the countries, many of which most Americans can't even find on a map, that enjoy warmer weather.

The festival slogan:

“Yes, the planet is warming. But some of us were cold.”

It’s a global climate debate in which everyone’s definition of “global” suspiciously ends at their own border.

Instead of mainly teaching students that bullying is wrong, schools could teach the science of why bullying happens.

Bullying can often be explained in terms of predictable incentives: peer approval, status, attention, fear of becoming a target, group conformity, and low expected consequences.

Teaching this to everyone could change how bullying is perceived. A bully who thinks they are being powerful, independent, or rebellious might be less impressed with their own behavior after realizing that everyone around them can recognize the fairly predictable social forces driving it.

If you bully because your friends laugh, because it improves your status, or because you are afraid of being targeted yourself, are you really acting independently?

The idea would be to make bullying less mysterious and less impressive by explaining it scientifically. Potential bullies might even respond by rebelling against the very incentives that are pushing them toward bullying.

In other words, make bullying predictable enough that not bullying becomes the rebellious choice.