Saturday, June 6, 2009

Two new ideas and lots of questions

1. You know how they over built so many cargo ships because it takes a long time to build and are very costly? Now no one is buying them. For example, hundreds of vessels are still under construction in Greece. There are massive cancellations. They dropped 20% in price and are still falling. (Robert McDonald of FT says) Global order book doubled over 2004 to 2008, leaving large overhang of ships waiting to be delivered, equivalent to 70 percent of the existing bulker fleet, and 42 percent of container fleet.

We should totally buy them. There's so much you can do with them!

  • Make them into a mobile factory. Why don't you manufacture and deliver at the same time? Need to do a cost analysis on that. Actually probably cheaper to build and then deliver... well depends on the product. Or you could do it both ways. Build what you're delivering and when you go back, haul raw materials and start building. You wouldn't even have to delivery to final destination. You can just delivery it to Singapore or Dubai and let some other ship take it the rest of the way.
  • Make it into an apartment complex. Like the Dutch that live in their riverboats, but convert it. Just like they did with some of the Toronto factories, when the city grew in size. You could actually anchor the boat to something and add an electricity generator such as this Pelamis Wave. Of course, it would be expensive to dock it in a large port, so you would have to find some suburb, where rent would be lower. But come on. Who wouldn't want to take their friends onto their boat apartment? Maybe in Alaska or Antartica where no one really wants to build a house.
  • Make it into a prision. Over crowding of the prision system? No problem. Samalis be like oh hell no! These are the worst hostages ever. We've been punk'd! You took my dawgs?
  • Make it into a ferry. Cargo demand has dropped but still people traveling.
  • Make it into a fishing boat or a fishing boat hub. For example, many fishing boats have onboard processing but would need to go back to drop off the fish. Now these fishing boats can stay out even longer because we can pick up your fish for you. Imagine 10 fishing boats in the Pacific all fishing around, then bamb we come in. Take their fish and deliver it. At the same go we can delivery supply and oil to them.
2. Second idea. I was designing my dream house this morning and believe me it's so amazing. It has a sunken living room. The sunken pit is interchangeable between sand and water at a push of a button. So basically, I can lie on "the beach" and watch TV when I feel like it (by the way there's sky light that goes through two floors). And then when you want more of a nautical theme, you can rotate the sand pit in the sunken living room to under the kitchen floor and bring up the water pit. Of course you need a glass screen on top if you need to use that space to entertain guests.

But that's not the cool part. The cool part is that my some of my walls will be clear and see through, except when you want privacy when it turns dark and opaque. Imagine transitional lens but for walls. Walls that are see through and multifunctional. For example, maybe you want to be able to see the jacuzzi or the baby's play pen from the masterbed room? Or what if you don't want to see the kitchen when you're in the dinning room? Anyways, they have clear offices at Apple and they're pretty cool. You feel like you're in a room but you can see through walls. Just an awesome feeling. And to have that kind of control. To partition a room at a touch of a button.

3. You know how it is possible that a product from a big electronics company can have many factories in its supply chain? For example, they make digital cameras, call it G5. Although most of them are made in China, some are made in the US factories. But all the G5s say "Made in China." Is this legal and what would happen if they labeled some G5s made in America, and some made in China? What effect would that have?

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