NBS! from the draft folder…

I've decided that most of the good and most of the bad things about me are due to the fact that i'm a person who goes through very intense periods of motivation with very little follow-through (which oh damn may actually be what ADD is but this is not the time or the place). My latest fascination, driven by my foundational problem-solving needs, is the idea that technology really is what's going to save the world. I know, nothing new or earth-shattering, but somewhere deep inside i think i have a bit of a superiority complex which makes me think that if i can stretch this current mind-fad of mine out a bit, i can be the one who takes that something that everyone else knows but no one's figured out how to make it happen... and finally get some business done/save all of the world's problems/get on oprah/make scrooge mcduck money/finally be able to pay someone to do my laundry and shop for my clothes. (note for the 'i think i'm learning things about me i didn't want to know' file--i guess i don't want to save the world after all--i am just a huge closet egotist. oh and i think i just admitted i probably have ADD a few more times just now.) Okay--technology will save the world and more people need to give up excel and learn what an effing database is already... So I'm thinking the first place we start is the penal system (haha penal). Basically every crime (i think. okay--not every crime--i am pretty white bread so there are definitely crimes i don't know about, but will eventually research) comes down to some combination of sex/drugs/violence/money. Upon sentencing (or really upon arrest because it doesn't take a genius to figure it out), each defendant could be coded with a drop down of which of the four categories they fit into. Example: embezzlement=money; prostitution=sex/money; selling drugs=money/drugs(and maybe /violence depending on the case...); buying drugs=drugs (duh). Okay, you get it, moving on. Also--each crime would need to somehow be modified by a factor of how many people were harmed but i'm not sure in which proportions because i'm more of an 'idea' person. If it's complicated, we'll need to figure out how to hire smart cops or train them very carefully. Once this is captured, we've got an easy system for figuring out how to de-crowd the prisons; once they realize that the world is evolving and some things don't need to be crimes anymore (or a 'we are not wasting our time and legal pads on anyone below a 5' guideline) or that a new treatment will 'cure' anyone with a sex/money score of 11-28. Or that anyone with any score above 115 gets mandatory life and does NOT get pudding on pudding day. (Oh goodness I am not that naieve; I do realize there are way worse things that happen at jail than not getting pudding. Poor guys. My next project will probably have to be figuring out how to make people not be mean to each other. Yeah yeah, it'll be hard, but I am super creative--just look how good I am with punctuation!~) Oh wow realizing that this already does exist(!), as 'Robbery' is code for "someone stealing something from someone" and if you modify it with the word 'Armed' it means "someone stealing something from someone/and they had a weapon." Words are actually kind of a neat thing, huh? (And duh, it's 2009. All of this stuff is probably already in a database somewhere and you could probably pull a list of prostitutes relatively quickly.) (And yes, I do know that wasn't my idea.) Feeling a bit defeated/this is definitely NOT a real idea/i just think databases are neat and REALLY want to figure out how to get on oprah. What an unproductive and not groundbreaking first blog post. I'll try to get better. I'm super into being be a blogger, though. It's my new thing. I give it a month.