The Space

I had an energy drink to help with the marking hell yesterday and then I had a business idea while out with my Boy getting chocolate on a walk whilst my Lovely took a driving lesson and the Girl to her own drama group.

Anyway, yes, I saw an empty building on the town high street, the business of people walking around, and heard the noise and the frenetic nature of the errands being run. And it got me thinking. What if you owned a business that was mostly automated doors, maybe a couple of private pods, and then simply sound-proofed them, removed signal for phones and wi-fi and charged by the minute for the use of the space? In somewhere like London, Manchester, Leeds, New York or Singapore you might get a bit of passing trade as people looked for somewhere quiet to be alone.

What would they do in there? How would you prevent abuse of the facilities? Well, CCTV, obviously, with monitoring. Wait! I thought, why CCTV? Why not a webcam to broadcast live to the internet? Then you could have a pay-per-view online. The rent for the space would cover the rent or lease on the building and the pay per view would provide a profit. Do it right and it would go viral too.

Then you could add another floor. What if you could rent beds by the hour? It may work out cheaper than a hotel in some of these locations. Add some cameras and you have a whole new area to exploit for money. By this point the beds would be pure profit as would any extra proceeds from the pay per view website. It would capitalise on our love of voyeurism and reality TV as well as play with the notions of privacy (people renting a space to be alone knowing that they are being broadcast on the internet but with no way of checking what they look like). And whilst it would probably work as a business idea I think it would be fascinating as a fiction project.

So, here I am planting the idea in my blog. I hope to start writing something to do with it soon.

If you use it for business or for fiction, let people know you got it from me, that's all I ask (though if you make money and want to send me royalties, that's nice too).

Regarding Bakunin

The Republic is Freedom!

Workers of the World, Unite! Join the Hands and Brains of the Republic as they build the road of Socialism through a dark future. Cast off your chains! Embrace the Republic! From all according to their contributions to all according to their needs!

In a world without crime, and where murder simply doesn't happen, Ben Jones finds himself on the run from the Plod, the Service and a terrorist organisation that may well have had a divine experience on an expanse of tarmac somewhere south of a small Middle-Eastern city. Whatever it is that he has that they want it is clear that they will stop at nothing to possess it. And these aren't the sort of people you can ask for clarification and so giving it up isn't easy.

Deals, blackmail, double-crosses, cross-dressing and prostitutes are going to be the least of the complications he'll face. Oh, and there's a small chance that it'll all end in nuclear armageddon.

Right.

So the world's screwed then...

The Day the Tanks Came

What if the Nazis had 'won', inasmuch as it were possible, the war in the USSR?  I recall Richard Overy saying that such a thing were possible in Virtual History in a rather well-researched 'what if' history.  He postulated that the organisation of the Ostmark that was to be created would have been cataclysmically badly done and chaotic, much like the Nazi state at large, and that the economics would have caused a collapse of Greater German finances in a few years.  Indeed, he seemed to suggest that the situation was critical even before the war had reached the turning points of Stalingrad and Guadalcanal.  In fact, the implication, made elsewhere in Overy's studies, was that the war prolonged the Nazi's power in Germany by allowing loot and pillage to fill the gaps left in the shoddy economic planning and fantasy-land ideas.
Anyway, I have an idea about writing a short story set in one of the NSDAP veteran farms in a place where that particular victory was run.  Greater Germany would be an almost anarchistic economic basket-case with some form or Nazi-dictatorship (there were no other politrical avenues open to the German people following July 1933) and that village would be created in line with the few clear organisational guidelines.  I guess Himmler would still be in charge too.

But what if the USSR, a more industrially minded country after all, had managed to survive along the border of perpetual warfare and created new factories utilising the mineral wealth of Siberia?  Ecological disaster almost certainly would have occurred but they may have lasted long enough to mount a counter offensive.  Against a pastoral economic basket-case like the Third Reich an ecologically bankrupt industrial USSR would have an intriguing relationship and reasons beyond ideology for fighting.  I'd love to explore that whole thing.

Anyway, when I have some time, that's an idea I would like to expand on this blog!