Posted on 04/22/2014 8:58:51 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We recently gave you a list of 25 trends that would be making people billions. Most of the phenomena will end up benefiting everyone.
But if you fancied yourself as someone who could be turned into a billionaire, you were arguably cheating — these were things everyone has already figured out.
The real challenge, and the greater value and more lucrative pursuit, would be to come up with the solutions to problems that have befuddled engineers for decades or more.
We thought of 10 of them:
Digital devices have become so small that it can be cumbersome to plug them into a power source. Longer-lasting batteries? Nope — Apple iPod God Tony Fadell says pursuing greater efficiency in batteries is a trap. The key is to find ways of squeezing more efficiency out of the devices' other parts — and stealing power from what's around you. University of Washington engineers, among others, are at work on harvesting existing TV and cellular transmissions and turning them into a power source. "This novel technique enables ubiquitous communication where devices can communicate among themselves at unprecedented scales and in locations that were previously inaccessible," they say.
Everyone agrees this is a priority. But there appear to be a hard way and an easier way to achieve it. The former involves lots of expensive regulatory clearance and installations. The latter, currently spearheaded by Google, is called Project Loon. The company plans to send renewables-powered balloons to the edge of space to create an Internet network in remote parts of the world. "We believe it's possible to create a ring of balloons that fly around the globe on the stratospheric winds and provide Internet access to the earth below," they say. Whoa.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Cheap is relative.
Absurd.
Couldn’t agree more on most points, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a free-market solution out there that can vastly undercut Obamacare prices while mitigating the costs and administration of “free” medical services. By “solving healthcare,” I mean, primarily, DISolving Obamacare; but the old system wasn’t perfect either. Tort-reform was hardly mentioned, and you’ve got to grant that insurance-covered legal fees contributed mightily to its imperfection.
Of course, we lost; but the season’s not over yet.
Wireless becomes a lot cheaper as the price of power falls. You also have to network the reactor to get distribution. Just strap the 4G to the route and you pretty much have your fix.
Value of #10 underestimated by a googleplex of orders of magnitude.
You misunderstand me. The AMA itself collects monopoly rents on the use of CPT codes, since complete training in their use for billing and insurance claims requires the use of AMA-copyrighted materials bought from the AMA.
Their use does not reinforce the guild-monopoly of the physicians. State regulations, many of which, but not all, arguably are necessary for the preservation of public safety; constriction of the supply of physicians by pointless admissions requirements (e.g. an A in Calculus II the main content of which is the art of techniques of integration and the theory of Taylor series, material with no bearing on the practice of medicine unless at a rarified level where precisely modeling drug clearance rates might actually matter — certainly irrelevant for general practitioners, surgeons, dermatologists, and a host of other specialties); and the establishment of “reasonable and customary” charges by medical insurance companies (the top management of which is usually largely composed of physicians (price collusion, which somehow is not subject to anti-trust laws) suffice to do that.
But the use of CPT codes as if they were really a necessary part of medical practice, which they are not, or would not be except for government regulation and collusion between insurers and the AMA, together with the equally precise diagnostic codes created by the World Health Organization (the ICD-9 codes, soon to be even worse and more inefficiency creating with the more minutely detailed ICD-10) are the whole basis for the inefficient insurance bureaucracies and the parasitic medical billing and claims industry which has grown up to deal with the needless bureaucracy.
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