Last weekend I had an idea. \u00a0I saw video of Palestinians setting up ragged tents in their former homes in North Gaza, where they are going to live while they get on with rebuilding their homes. \u00a0I thought, I know a company, Pallet, in Everett that makes shelters way better than those tents. \u00a0They build flat pak villages of small units, some for sleeping, some for cooking and eating, some for showering and using the bathroom. \u00a0They ship them to a site, and set them up with nothing more than a screwdriver and a socket set. \u00a0They provide temperature controlled comfortable functional pods for families to live together while getting their lives sorted: meeting with counselors, getting off drugs, getting into social support programs. \u00a0These pods are way better than the crap tents I was looking at.<\/p>\n
Of course, this company is not in a position to manufacture and ship units for 1M people on the other side of the world. \u00a0But, also in Everett, there\u2019s a company that is: Boeing. \u00a0They\u2019ve done it before. \u00a0With the right incentive, they could build a line, take the Pallet designs and crank them out, airfreight or ship them to the coast of Israel. They\u2019d need money, and an army of people.<\/p>\n
Money\u2019s not the issue, there\u2019s tons of money floating around. \u00a0Who knows how to ship, distribute, set up all these things, and has an army of people? \u00a0The UN. \u00a0And coincidentally one of the more senior UN people is someone from Auckland, New Zealand, who clearly knows who the right people would be to get an initiative like this happening.<\/p>\n
Turns out the ex-CEO of Boeing lives right on Whidbey. \u00a0I know half a dozen ex Boeing employees. \u00a0I know people in New Zealand who could talk to Helen Clark. \u00a0This is totally doable.<\/p>\n
I talked to everyone I know. \u00a0And they all pushed back. \u00a0Within a few days I understood that, while this is clearly a fixable problem from an engineering point of view, it wasn\u2019t going to be fixed by someone like me, or by anyone I know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last weekend I had an idea. \u00a0I saw video of Palestinians setting up ragged tents in their former homes in North Gaza, where they are going to live while they get on with rebuilding their homes. \u00a0I thought, I know a company, Pallet, in Everett that makes shelters way better than those tents. \u00a0They build […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}