Mike's List 240

Delusional governments; coffee cups made out of coffee; boxy lamp design; self-punishing charitable giving; and more!

Jan 12, 2021

The government of Pakistan is creating its own social network. The Indian and French governments are each building its own WhatsApp. Russia is creating an alternative to SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service. China built its own Wikipedia.

When governments oppose technologies they can't censor, they sometimes try to create their own version. It never works.

Building a network is easy. Getting people to use it is hard.

Here are the 5 reasons why governments can't do what Silicon Valley can. (Link goes to the full article for paid subscribers.)

Mike’s List of Brilliantly Bad Ideas

1. Coffee cups made out of coffee

A German startup called Kaffeeform is making coffee cups out of "used coffee grounds and other renewable resources." The cups smell like coffee even before you use them. The idea is to cut plastic waste (a recent study found that pouring coffee into a paper cup releases roughly 25,000 microplastic particles into the beverage). What I'd really like to see is a machine at Starbucks that converts their own coffee grounds into their own coffee cups.

2. No-waste lamp made out of its own box

A designer named Sungrae Kim invented a lamp concept called the Light Box. You remove the electric components and bulbs from the cardboard box, then fold the box itself into a lampshade. Voila! A fugly lamp!

3. Using charitable giving to flog yourself for being bad

A maker named Nick O’Hara wanted to break his compulsive smartphone use (picking up his phone around 100 times a day). So he created an Arduino gadget that donates a dollar to charity every time he picks up his phone. The good news is that his phone use is down to 10% of what it used to be. The bad news is that he's spending $10 per day to use his phone.

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