Whilst in the TRAILER OF MYSTERY at the Global Research Lab, we saw demos of GE’s VeriWise software/hardware products. More or less it is a mesh network that uses existing radio technology in a decentralized way to make truck fleets more efficient.
This brought up a half-idea I’d had ages ago while working on the tap project , which is to create a brand and mechanism to give some sort of authority to the distance a product traveled to get to you. Whether its a cucumber or a radio, people are starting to be concerned about the carbon footprint of what they buy, but there’s no standardization, no trustworthy gauge of local-ness that you can compare products to.
Seeing this system from GE that is designed to gather tremendous amounts of data, and then intelligently filter out only what you need (or ask for) leaves a lot of other useful data. So what if you could use the system that is already tracking distance traveled and checking in / out packages from warehouses and trucks to be some sort of data trail that authenticates how far a product traveled to get to you.
Interestingly, its such a huge goal of any company to increase effiency. Not only GE, but all the clients that could be in the market for this sort of system are insanely interested in shaving off minutes here, pennies there, because on a grand scale it makes a huge difference in profits. But its strangely not ever important to the end user to know how efficiently a product was made.
There’s all sorts of ways to go with this, but a simple first idea is to have a consistent iconic stamp of local-ness, or maybe in the same way that you have nutritional information on a package you have distance traveled. Something that will get people excited about companies that are more efficient than others.
