I used the alarm as a little kid. It annoyed me, but I recognized that it was fair, since all I had to do was stop wetting the bed and it'd stop waking me up. It did help me learn.

I'm not familiar with that system but it may be they're not looking at it through a lens of "doing it the most efficient way" and see the benefit in allowing the children time to learn it by themselves, even if it's less efficient.
(I often catch myself thinking about the most efficient way to do something and then realize that's not the point for that situation.)

I think a lot of these technologies are very promising, but in most/all cases, I don't think they're analogous to Zoom, in terms of being available right now, for no money, to the average person, able to be used at will, and offering a highly favorable risk/reward ratio.

• Embryo selection and brain implants/genetic modification are still relatively immature technologies, and are perceived by many as having serious moral problems (I disagree with this perspective, but it's very common AFAICT).
• I don't know how common cool roof products are, but they've been in commercial use for 20 years. They're just not perfect for many use cases: they can increase bills in cooler climates, they can promote mold growth via increased condensation on roofs, they can increase the severity of heat islands when a lot of roofs have cool roof coatings, and they cost $.75-$3 per square foot, with the average US house having a 1700 square foot roof (so a $1275-$5100 investment). In the hottest most humid parts of the US, an annual AC bill is about $525 (source), so it might take 2-10 years to pay off even in the hottest parts of the country.
• CLARITY is very cool tech that I hadn't heard of before, but there's, shall we say limited demand for brain preservation technology, and as of 2018, it appears there's still plenty of technical work to be done.
• Geoengineering projects, new voting mechanisms, dams, and the Land Value Tax aren't available to the average person to just "try it and see if you like it," the way Zoom is

Honestly the closest match to Zoom from this list is probably throwing away all your plastics. Anybody can do it, it's probably better for the environment in most cases, and really the only thing that's stopping individuals from doing so is social pressure or mistaken beliefs about the environmental outcomes of actual landfills vs. actual recycling programs.

The distinction between "a cool technology in need of wider investment and adoption on a research and policy level" and "a cool technology where we're nothing but a social norm away from mass adoption" is important and clear to me, even though I'm passionate about both types of technologies.

Treating burying used plastics in deep well-designed landfills as a good thing for the environment, because it's an efficient way to do carbon sequestration.

This. People seem totally confused when I say that plastic bags were not an environmental problem in developed countries because they were usually deposited in land-fills and this CO2 neutral.

Brain implants and/or genetic modification via viral vector for improvement of brain function (e.g. treating intractable depression).

Wait this sounds really cool.

>Can I get this personally?

There are many ways to do checklists wrong, though. They can easily lead to bureaucracy is not applied correctly. Maybe that's why many people got burned by them. Checklists must be short. 

Agreed, I read at least part of The Checklist Manifesto, and they are super helpful and underrated. Even for processes which seem most amenable to a checklist (clear steps that don't change much), a checklist is still often missing.

Full agree. I use checklists all the time in research, and there is a big difference between an actual checklist and an almost-a-checklist research protocol. They are easy to make, available to anybody right now, and way neglected.

Electric bikes are vastly under-utilized even in European cities where they are safe and effective to use:

• Mature: bike more than 100 years old, electric motors and batteries also mature.
• Cost no money: saves a ton on money over a car
• Was widely available and fairly intuitive for the average person to use: everyone can bike
• Had no regulatory barriers or moral issues: clearly not illegal nor immoral to ride a bike.
• Saved a lot of money and time: saves also time because there is no need for separate exercise.
• Had an immediate payoff: you gain from day 1
• Played relatively well with the existing format of meetings transportation
• Appealing largely to people in the developed world with high access to information about useful new products and services: high traffic congestion is common there
• Potential daily users in the hundreds of millions: even more, around a third of all persons are potential daily users

The only barriers are perceived risk (not clear if the risk of an accident is higher than the benefit from physical exercise in my opinion, it could well be net positive depending on where you live) and that you look "childish" and kind of weird if you bike to work.

I upvoted for karma but downvoted for agreement. Regarding Zoom, the reasons I had not used it more extensively before COVID were:

1. Tech related:  from experience with Skype in the early days of video conferencing when broadband internet was just starting to roll out, video conferencing could be finnicky to get to work. Latency, buffering, dropped connections, taking minutes to start a skype call (usually I would call relatives on my regular phone first to get the Skype call set up, and then we'd hang up our regular phones once the video call was started.  Early video calls were not a straight-up improvement on audio calls, but had benefits and drawbacks and had a narrow use-case for when you specifically wanted to see the grandkids' faces on the other side of the country or something.  

I don't think this was necessarily Skype's fault.  It was more the fault of poor internet connections and unfamiliarity with the tech. But in any case, my preconception about Zoom circa 2019, even despite widespread broadband internet, was that it would be the same sort of hassle to set up meetings.  I remember being blown away when my first Zoom calls just worked effortlessly.  Possibly an example of premature roll-out of a tech before it is technically mature leading to counter-productive results?  This would kind of be like, if you fiddled around with GPT-1, got the impression that LLM chatbots were "meh," and then forgot about or mentally discounted the tech until GPT-5.  

2.  Social/cultural related:  as a history instructor, my preconceptions about scheduling video calls, or doing lectures over video calls, was that students would simply not attend or would not pay attention, and thus video calls would not be a suitable replacement for in-person meetings and lectures.  While I still don't think video calls get you 100% of the way there towards replacing the in-person experience (students definitely do goof-off or ghost during video lectures way more than in-person, I think it is more like 80% rather than the 50% or so that I had assumed before being forced to try it out on a mass scale during COVID. 

yes to drawing and annotation.  This has been an itch of mine ever since I got into web dev over a decade ago.  The same way the mouse allowed us to designate "this thing" to the PC without having to literally name it, we could communicate the same way to each other on the web potentially

Very interesting, could you elaborate or give some links?

Agreed with all of those. Would love a recirculating shower. Would especially love having a system for recycling sink/shower graywater for toilet flushing and clothes washing machine use. (Additional context: I currently live in an RV and so have extra reasons for wanting to conserve water and power.) 

One issue I have with my InstantPot is that the learning curve for using it well seemed harder than it needed to be. I'm a pretty good cook already all things considered, and am very aware of the underlying physics and chemistry of what a pressure cooker does, but it took lots of trial and error to figure out the technique here. If nothing else, most of the "InstantPot" recipes (and air fryer recipes, since I have the InstantPot Air Fryer lid) I can find are much lower quality than I expected to find, and I have to make lots of changes.