Does starting a new bank make sense?

My reasoning for starting a new bank is that creditworthy customers would rather trust that their money is held with a bank that is 100% free of toxic assets and that it won't go bust. People tell me I must be crazy to want to start a new bank because a) no one trusts banks any more and b) no one has money any more. I don't think b is true and a happens because existing banks have a lot of bad loans/investments in their books. A new bank that has none of it can earn the trust of creditworthy customers. It seems good business to me to want to start a new bank despite the turmoil in global finance.

http://www.thinkaloo.com

Obama Sushi

Eating Obama for Sushi. The concept would have sold well in Europe and the Middle east under the Bush presidency. Sushi is easy to eat with the hands too, so the Arabs would have loved to eat Bush. The Obama Sushi will probably sell well among Republicans in the US, wouldn't it? I guess they are the ones who would love to eat Obama alive. Since they can't do it politically, the Japanese give them a chance to do it gastronomically! :)

If you can do it on Sushi, why not on other foods too? I can imagine a new industry that gives people the opportunity to eat anybody they want for lunch, dinner, snack or breakfast (lol)

http://www.thinkaloo.com

AIM. PEE. GOAALL....

An interesting research that improves the way men pee in the toilets. Keeps the toilet clean and your wife happy! Take a look at the photo. An interesting experiment would be if the fly was placed outside the urinal by the wall; how many men, if any, would pee there? :)

http://www.thinkaloo.com

What will bookstores in the future look like?

Despite Amazon, people like to visit bookshops. On a recent class discussion on the future of Amazon, I had the thought of a new bookstore concept that blends Amazon and the traditional bookstore. I was thinking of creating a physical bookstore that sells paperbacks without stacking any of them on its shelves. The shelves will instead stack thousands of kindles with book titles on them. The kindles will look like physical books using 3D holography. When a customer picks a kindle book to browse, the titles of all the books next to it change to become more relevant to the content browsed.

Because there's no physical paper inventory, there are no sections. The customer types a keyword in a little screen and all the titles near him change. It's like browsing online in a physical space. When the customer decides which books to buy, he places the order, pays and laser printers at the back of the store print out the paperback. Books will be less expensive to buy and the experience of a visit to a physical location preserved. The second-hand bookstore will probably not be able to compete and die.

http://www.thinkaloo.com

Online references

Some authors publish blogs about their books in order to promote their work and get feedback from readers. Very few of them, however, post all references online. It would be very helpful if for every book there was a list of links were all references were available to click and read (bibliography, articles, manuscripts etc). Book publishers can make it a requirement that to publish any work in print the author has to make available online all references.

http://www.thinkaloo.com

Thrust the Crust. Close this African/European Gap!

Just a silly thought. We know that the African tectonic plate is inexorably heading north, swallowing southern Europe in the process. To geographically unite Europe and Africa will take thousands of years and perhaps many more devastating earthquakes. What if we could speed up the process with sex? For a month, we get all countries in South Europe and Africa to exchange their female and gay populations for the purpose of engaging in hardcore sex. The only condition will be that the Europeans thrust from north to south and the Africans and Arabs thrust south to north. The goal will be to make love in the direction of the tectonic plates!!

Just an idea to bring Europe and Africa together faster. They are moving closer anyway. If you are happy with the current rate of 4 millimeters every year you don't have to participate but if you like to increase the speed by a few millimeters you can join the people's movement for faster unity between the continents :P

http://www.thinkaloo.com

Blame US Communism!

Everyone wants to convince us that capitalism failed but I beg to differ. It was Communism that failed and true Capitalism that will be restored after the crisis is over.

Not many people realize that unregulated markets where everyone can buy the equivalent to their income of a $700,000 house they can't afford is a communist thing. Soviet Union communism wanted to make everyone equally poor. The recent version of communism we experienced in the US and elsewhere wanted to make everyone equally rich. The Soviet Union collapse exposed the fallacy of the former and the current economic crisis the fallacy of the latter.

Not everyone is equal and not everyone can live equally the same, whether it's rich or poor. Unregulated markets were, therefore, a neo-liberal marxist tool to introduce unsustainable communism in an otherwise perfectly functioning capitalist system.

Communist subversives are now discredited and time has come to go back to true capitalism where everyone can live according to their means and true worth. I wonder why people can't see it was the greed of communism that failed and not the greed of capitalism. Capitalism would never aspire to make everyone equally rich or poor! Why don't people see that? :)

http://www.thinkaloo.com