Asklemmy

Here's a more technical one: health information

It's a huge pain trying to transfer health information, between patients, doctors, different clinics, hospitals, etc. If you try and move far enough, your records might get transferred as a bunch of PDFs or scanned images on a CD.

There is no good standard that ticks all the boxes, so it's not just a matter of getting everyone to agree. A solid standard that addresses all the needs would be amazing, and it would help improve healthcare so much.

People would get control over their own health information (as much as appropriate without causing unnecessary harm), and we could properly use health tracking data from biometrics devices for personalized care. We could do large scale studies using properly anonymized data, and we wouldn't have proprietary systems to try and work around.

Best of all, you could go to a new clinic/hospital/ER and you wouldn't need to enter the same information all over again (likely missing clinically relevant data along the way).

CEO compensation vs employee compensation.

CEO pay has skyrocketed in comparison to the pay of the employees, this needs to change.

Pants sizes. For women, drop the even/odd numbering for women and juniors and move to waist and inseam like men. For everyone, implement some sort of standard policy where the actual measured size can't be more than an inch off the stated size (to account for variability in manufacturing and such).

In the USA, it would be to metric. Pretty much everywhere else in the US, NASA, military, science, it's all metric.

Camera lens mounts, increased competition within systems would be great.

I think this abides by the idea of this post, but I would standardize language across the world. Whether it is an existing language or a new language doesn't really matter or maybe a mix of the biggest existing languages.

I remember reading a book where in the future everyone spoke a combination of English and Chinese. They seem pretty incompatible though.

Interoperability between social networks, including messengers and the like, so you can choose what software you want to use, including your own.

Lens mounts

Social networks should be standardised on activity pub.

Networks are a winner takes it all situation. Standardise and allow competition within a network. Then innovation will happen much faster. We are like Romans not using the steam engine. Future historiens will wonder why we were stuck so long.

Everyone has the same blood type.

United States specific: The naming system of hospital units or some other standardized indicator of what skill level is actually practiced on that unit.

An ICU should be an ICU, not "Intensive Care Unit" at this hospital, but "Critical Care Unit" at that other hospital and the"Stepdown Unit" here is called "Progressive Care Unit" there, but "Transitional Care Unit" at that other place.

It leads to so much confusion when trying to transfer patients between facilities and/or understand what kind of care they were receiving at a previous admission at a different facility.

Screw drives.

Front panel connectors on motherboards.

May seem like an obvious one considering where we are but standards for communication apps

If everything uses a standard like activitypub/matrix and becomes cross compatible I don't need to have 6 different messaging apps

Provided the standard is completely backwards compatible of course I think it would be awesome to just let people have their messaging app of choice and be able to talk to everyone else (I think there might actually be an EU regulation coming that enforces this for larger messaging apps)

Our system of measurement. There can be only one!

I'd replace all the CSS, HTML and JavaScript APIs mess and replace it with something like low-level API/interface that frontend frameworks could compile to.

And why not expand it to OS level? Then we could have very low-effort cross-platform native and web apps.

Electric car chargers.

This is the direction the industry is going to go. F#kn standardize it already, with a reasonable future-proofing schema that handles various voltages, and puts out what the car specifies.

That there SHOULD be as many standards as possible!

The law throughout all countries in the world

Computer devices. Installing Arch Linux and syncing most Important directories with Syncthing so you can work on every device and be sync around the world.

Math notation.

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Wheel PCD and hub size.
If every car and (light) truck had a 5x114.3 bolt pattern and a 66mm hub size we could swap so many wheels around. It would be amazing.