Okay this is partly inspired by what @dirvine said about apps being programmed to “want” to do things. And then I watched this:
http://www.motherchannel.com/2016/08/13/complete-idiots-guide-man-made-climate-change/
And the short of it is that at one point our atmosphere was inhospitable to carbon based life forms, then over time due to environment and ecological changes, namely the introduction of plant life and lots of it, over time carbon was trapped in the earth and oxygen was released into the atmosphere thus changing the constitution of said atmosphere. Ergo it became breathable and life sustaining. Therefore fossil fuels can be seen as “trapped toxic atmosophere.” Now I’m not going to say burning fossil fuels are “bad”. For example having a woodstove or burning a campfire isn’t bad. But when you burn MORE than you plant, thus release more toxic gas than the plant life can reabsorb back and convert into oxygen, that is bad. Now we all know about the climate change debates and one of the major contentions is something called the carbon tax. Basically the idea is taxing people for using polluting devices and releasing CO2. Now that’s fine if you live in a city and can take public transit. If you’re out in a rural area you’re dependent on having independent transportation, and if you’re way out there you might need a gas generator or dun da dun, a wood stove (which again is why making wood stoves illegal is a monumentally stupid idea). Also I’m against taxation on general principle.
But that got me thinking. What if you turned the idea around? What if you created an app to PAY people to go green and promote green projects? Set up renewable energy for people, plant trees, set up composting projects, establish and switch to public transit, buy and use electric cars, etc etc. If you can tax it obviuosly it has financial value. So what if you flipped the equation around and paid people that financial value every time they did something GOOD for the environment instead of trying to punish them every time they did something bad. Now obviously this would require people to actually physically get off their butts and actually do stuff so there would need to be some kind of reputation and vetting mechanism that would confirm that yes in fact a person had in fact planted those trees or installed those solar panels, etc, etc. But let’s assume we could figure that out. I’m thinking that this should work much like SAFE does, there are a set amount of resources on the planet, there’s a high demand for various resources (trees planeted, renewable energy, permaculture, organic food, clean water, etc etc), and so all these values could be entered. The app would then take these values and then distribute coin to those promoting these values in proportion to which they provided the service. So for instance right now there’s a HIGH demand for plant life to counteract all the CO2 being released into the atmosphere so you’d be awared a lot of coin for planting trees or setting up renewable green energy that offset the need for fossel fuels. The app could also be configure to award coin by geographic location. I mean in a dessert plant life and water are at an all time high. Optimally you’d want to be able to plant trees to reverse desertification. In a forest you’ve got plenty but you want to manage forest fires properly. And in any environment there’s ecosystems to learn about and manage properlty, again that could be data the app could handle and pay people to do. You get paid to enter data on various ecosystems and keep them up to data, you get paid for promoting the environment, you get paid coin for promoting the right kind of environment. If there’s a shortage of wetlands and marshes that can be entered too, if there’s a rise in ocean acidification that can be entered, if there’s a decline in a species that can be entered, and the app then adjusts how much people are paid according to the need. Of course all these entries need to be vetted. Which leads to the next point. Payout = Need * Vetting * Reputation. So the app would take into account how much need there is for an action * how much the action has been confirmed to have occured * how good that particular user’s reputation is to produce possitively vetted results. If someone with a bad reputation starts planting trees and gets people to vet him, he can still make cash, but it’ll be more difficult than if he had a good or neutral reputation to start with. Or if someone with a good reputation works building a solar panel but no one can confirm he did it, he still gets coin but not as much as if others can prove he did it. “Oh you sent in a picture of installing a solar panel, okay here’s $5, good job.” You get a bunch of people to confirm you actually did it “Yay, we believe you! Here’s $50 or $100 bucks!” Or whatever it works out to. As I said payout = need * vetting * reputation. If someone of reputation is vetted doing something that isn’t that badly needed, again it isn’t rewarded as highly as if they did something of higher importance. Coin is created when users are confirmed having done something good for the environment. Coin is destroyed over time so long as there are more pollutants than the environment can clean up. This process is to simulate financially the ecological degradation of the Earths biome. So if the coin reached 0, that would be Earth being an unlivable toxic wasteland. As it stands we’re kind of in that spot as it is. Now I’m not sure how to pull this off. Because the only way to get all these readings is by relying on already established clearnet data half the time. Hopefully over time the app could run entirely off of user input. But as it stands we might need to make do with scientific sources from various institutions and such.
Anyway I’m open to ideas on how to revise the program. But what do you think about an app that “wants” to go green and rewards people according? I’m still a little fuzzy on properly stabalize the app’s metablism so to speak.
