Suggestions

1. Put Expensive Parking Meters on Some Handicapped Parking Spaces. Most of the money goes to help the handicapped. Perhaps a dollar a minute. Perhaps only a portion of them. Perhaps only at certain times.
2. Criteria to Use When Two Experts Disagree. Expertise, experience, overall intelligence, personal gain bias, how much would they bet (assuming equal bankrolls and equal gambling proclivities), are they the type who will only offer an opinion they are sure of. Those last two are rarely considered.
3. Why Can’t You Pump Your Own Gas In New Jersey? When discrepancies in state laws are obviously for no good reason, legislatures should revisit those laws. (I am not talking about silly laws or laws that should reasonably be different depending on the state. The best examples are those that force commercials to say something like “not available in Florida, North Dakota or Kansas.)
4. Make “Sliver of Doubt” An Official Reason to Commute a Death Sentence. It’s already been done a few times unofficially. Both pro and con capital punishment advocates as well as probability phobics have objections, but they will be refuted when I write lengthier explanations. Basically, it’s a pot odds problem.
5. Close the Gap Between Drunk Driving and Drunk Driving Manslaughter Punishments. Assuming similar blood alcohol levels and degree of reckless driving. Why should luck play such a big part? There are many other examples.
6. Passing Up a Good Bet for a Better One. Not a good idea if winning the first allows you to bet it all on the second. Or if the second bet is only a little better. But sometimes it is a good idea. If your $100 bankroll is temporarily not replenishable, and you can bet up to that amount both today and tomorrow, wait for the 80% shot if today’s bet is 60%, but don’t wait if tomorrow’s bet is only 70%.
7. Equip Cars With a “SORRY” Light. Push a button to light it up when you inadvertently cut someone off, stop too short, etc. Some percentage of road rage incidents will be nipped in the bud. (You can buy something like this right now.)
8. Don’t Confuse Clearcut Errors with Bad Errors. Don’t underestimate someone who, perhaps purposely, does something known to be wrong but actually is barely worse than its alternative. Making the two point with 6-4. Reraising early with 55. Other stuff from real life. They may be trying to lull you into making your own much worse mistakes.
10. Standardize End Game Decisions on Bettable Games Out of Reach. Now that legal sports betting is widespread, decisions such as whether to “take a knee” on their one-yard line as a 20-point favorite, when winning by 18, with seconds to go, should not be up to the coach. He can’t pretend not to know the spread.
11. The Fundamental Theorem of Investing. A name I made up to express an important idea that many people kind of sort of know intuitively. Don’t risk a lot of money on an investment, bet, or purchase, that appears to be a great deal, unless you can figure out why the people taking the other side are doing it, and why their reasons shouldn’t concern you.
12. Let the (mainly) Efficient Market Work for You. Related to the previous idea, since the efficient market hypothesis is rarely wrong, it means that if you find a very little-known important fact or idea about a company or sports event, it barely hurts to be ignorant about all the other facts pertaining to them. If your info points to a good bet, you will rarely regret that ignorance since the other aspects will almost always be properly baked into the price or point spread.
13. Don’t Allow Murder Freerolls. Kidnappers, escaped murderers, hostage takers, and others, sometimes find themselves in a situation where there is no difference in punishment whether or not they kill someone. That clearly should not be. Thus, the law should offer some non-trivial incentive for not killing as distasteful as that policy might be.

16. Allow Some Businesses to Buy Out of Disability Rules. As in my handicapped parking idea, most of the money would be used to help the disabled. The general idea would be that some public businesses that have few disabled customers and are facing large expenses to retrofit, should be allowed to contribute perhaps half that amount to disabled causes to avoid that retrofit. Probably that would come with a large sign explaining their decision.

18. People as Presents. Twice in my life I arranged for a close relative who my (different) partners had not seen in years, to secretly fly in as a birthday present. I hid them both in the closet and told the recipients that their present was in there. Easily the two best gift reactions I ever experienced. I highly recommend it to you if you are in a position to pull it off.
19. Pawnshop Principle. Can’t claim this as my idea but I include this because it’s important. When it comes time to sell something that you previously bought you should barely consider what you paid for it. Pretend that you don’t even remember and charge what the traffic will bear. If that means selling it for a loss, so be it.
20. Allow Institutionalized Ex-Prisoners to Stipulate to Committing a Crime to Get Back In. Maybe that policy will mean more people will avail of that option. But that’s not a good enough reason to not allow it. Stipulators will not harm others, rather than of being forced to without this policy. Secondly if they come to their senses, probably with the aid of counseling in jail, they can be quickly released. Not an option to those who committed real crimes to get back in. (But if you try this more than once you can’t get out early. Prisons aren’t motels.)
21. Offer Amnesty to Actual Perpetrator If He Confesses in Order to Spring Unjustly Convicted Prisoner Facing Many More Years in Jail. Faking a confession would of course be a major felony. There are several decent arguments against this idea, (which would have some strict criteria attached to it) but they all pale in comparison to the principle that it is a much graver sin to punish innocents than to fail to punish someone guilty. My forthcoming list of lengthier explanations will include my counter arguments that will probably convince most to accept this admittedly hard to swallow policy.
22. Translate Mild and Moderate Annoyances Into Money. In most cases when something irritating happens to people, their emotional reaction is quite a bit greater than it would be if they lost an amount of money that coincided with the amount that it would take to fix things (or the amount that they would take in return for enduring the mishap.) Next time think in money terms and you will probably feel better.

26. Getting Past Middle Manager Roadblocks Whose Self Interest Don’t Coincide with Their Company’s. Poker’s best-selling book (Theory of Poker) was originally published by Prentice Hall but almost wasn’t. The low level editor assigned to approving it, worried what would happen if it flopped. I told him that I would shop it around, it was a big favorite to succeed, and I changed his unethical personal equation by telling him that during interviews after that success, I won’t fail to mention that Mr H prevented Prentice Hall from publishing it. His reply was “Let me reconsider”. I will elaborate in the longer explanations section.

36. My Technique to Develop Willpower. I thought this was so important that I asked that the chapter in my book Poker Gaming and Life, that gives the details, appear twice in two different places! The gist is to consider a promise to yourself so important that you stick to it even if new circumstances strongly argue to change your mind. And an easy way to practice that, is something like denying yourself dessert if you don’t score high enough on a video game.

39. Do Criminals Calculate EV? If the “reward” of a crime is money, and the punishment is purely financial, the crime is positive EV if the reward times the chances of getting away with it is higher than the punishment times the chances of getting caught. If the punishment or reward is not purely financial, one must instead use “utils” in the calculation. Most criminals are either ignoring that or incorrectly calculating, since most crimes are negative EV. See #40 for more on this subject.
40. Can Leniency Create a New Category of Criminal? Those who are already committing negative EV crimes are not likely to increase their output much if the EV turns positive due to the fact that the punishments, or the probability of getting caught, are diminished. However, there is no way of knowing how many immoral people are waiting in the wings for plus EV opportunities. Unfortunately, my personal experience tells me that there are more of these people than most realize. Eliminating changes toward leniency would be one way to fix this. A better solution would be to somehow identify the newly created calculating criminals and find ways to thwart them.

50. Seek Advice from One Notch Below the Famous Experts. My experience has been that they will be extremely helpful since they normally labor in the shadows and welcome the opportunity to help people get adept at their specialty, in order to be better appreciated.
51. Allow Verdicts of “Probably Guilty” For Serious and “Me Too” Accusations. Presently most countries want their juries to completely acquit defendants who they think are as little as 10% or less in their mind, to be actually innocent. Because it is much worse to convict an innocent person than acquit a guilty one. But I think it is wrong to completely act as if someone is innocent if the crime is serious and the jury thinks he probably did it. The probably guilty verdict would allow the government to put more constraints on that person than normally allowed. Or, in the case of sexual assault allegations, that verdict prevents the accuser of being considered a liar.

56. Don’t Overestimate the Intelligence or Expertise of Those in Fields That Require Them to Know Complicated Rules or a Lot of Jargon. This is doubly true if that person is teaching you something about his field and unnecessarily brings up these rules or jargon. People who really know the subject don’t do that as they have no need to show off.

57. Periodically Review Important 5-4 Supreme Court Decisions. My main reason to suggest this is purely mathematical. Put simply, if nine different justices had ruled, there is almost a 50% chance it would go the other way. The details regarding this suggestion would have to be worked out.

65. Soak the Rich for Little Perks. Stuff like avoiding lines, using car-pool lanes by themselves, or the handicapped parking idea that is #1 on this list. The key to making this work without a major backlash would be that the price charged would be high enough so that the average person would not feel bad that he couldn’t afford it himself, but rather that the rich person is making a fool of himself by spending so much on trivialities. Also, the money collected should at least partially clearly benefit those normal people in some manner.
66. Don’t Fall For “Fiduciary, No Commission, Only Make Money When You Do” Commercials. Do I really have to explain that this method of charging you for investment advice, in no way implies that their recommendations have a positive EV, except for them?

74. When Should Profiling Be Reluctantly Tolerated? When most members of the group are in favor of it. But even then, I would suggest that the procedure be ameliorated by giving a nice gift and an apologetic note to those stopped who just happen to share a physical characteristic with some bad people.