Startups I Want to Fund

The key is having large scale services that the community store can manage. Deliver of large or expensive items as a service, like college movers. Instead of Amazon grocery delivery vs other grocery delivery, use the community store to manage the interaction -- they choose quality and price, or decide what combinations to offer. This is good for Amazon too: it lets them compete on the supply chain and outsource customer service.

Community stores wouldn't just have online prices, they could offer innovative things like local individual services (lawn mowing, computer repair) with local ratings and local trust. Clothing from online stores, where people try it on before buying, and the community store manages shipping and damage, etc.. in a relationship with the online retailer.

Creating open software that manages a market for the store/supplier B2B relationships would let the local stay-at-home person start small, a few neighbors, and grow into a larger service and eventually a community store.

This statement is completely out of touch with reality.

Yes, a David Attenborough or Jacques Cousteau can make the natural world come alive. But an interactive digital platform will enable very different forms of storytelling.

> seeing and hearing what a tiger hears through your digital display is not the same

Of course not, just as being a Masai tribesman for a day or even living with them for three years as a peace corps volunteer is not the same as herding cows in Kenya. While stories never transport you into the real world, we all love the idea of platform 9-3/4. They serve different cognitive functions.

>I would wager that digitally experiencing nature from our comfortable cities does not raise that same connection to nature that one gets from actually being out there and experiencing it with _all_ of their senses.

Too broad a brush in my view. For example, there are things that you can do digitally that you can't do in person. However deep you go into a forest, you will never see it with a tiger's eyes because your bodies are different and your brain is different. Forget tigers and forests, you experience your home differently from a dog or cat that you have as a pet. Seeing your home through their eyes - however crudely - will be an act of interspecies empathy that you will never get through other means. It's possible some creatures are so different that their world will be incomprehensible to us even if we stream their senses 24/7. We won't know until we try. It remains an empirical question as to how much of that gap is bridgeable.

> to the point that they want to change their behaviours to protect it

I don't think we are at a point in human history when changing individual behaviors will save the planet, either from climate change or from ecological collapse. We need large scale political action with laws that have teeth and means of enforcing them at a planetary scale. The problem I am trying to solve here (or rather, claim as one needing solving) is a different one: how to transport ourselves into the bodies of other creatures? It's the animal equivalent of reading Dostoevsky to understand Russia - a problem very different from pouring billions into strengthening your computer systems because Russians are hacking your elections.

In my scenario, you would use a mobile router to make the initial connection to the open wi-fi, then connect your personal device to the TOR router.

Open wi-fi -> my device

versus

Open wi-fi -> TOR router -> my device