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).

Date formats. Can never tell if dd/mm/yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy, yyyy-mm-dd...

The key you need to press to get to bios.

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.

Power tool batteries.

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

I don't know about just one thing, but I'd love to see electric tools all use the same battery interface set of specs. It's like the bad old days of cell phone chargers

Sometimes I think about standardized retail packaging. What if there was a set of boxes/containers, and they all stacked together nearly and transported nearly. Could save a lot of time and cost on shipping and shelving and potentially make automation easier

Singular front panel connector plug.

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.

Fucking file formats in the scientific community. Way too many ways to do something in science and every place has their own way.

A set of standards of course!

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.

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

Lens mounts

Front panel connectors on motherboards.

SQL. There are so many SQL dialects. Only if there could be a way to standardize it...

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)

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.

Our system of measurement. There can be only one!

Everyone has the same blood type.

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.

Screw drives.

Screws. There should only be one blade type maybe torx? Obviously different sizes but one style.

I'll cheat the question a bit.

I'd like all critics to have standards and to hew to them. I don't mind if each critic operates by different standards, so long as all critics can articulate their standards and are consistent in their application.

Most movie critics, for example, are offering their reactions to movies. They may review a movie. But nearly all of them are utterly inconsistent (hypocritical?) in their work. They explain their bad review of a film because of X and then praise another film despite it being just as much X as the film they loathed. If they address this conflict at all, it is with a great deal of handwavium - "This film makes it work."

If critics had standards, it would be possible to really compare the things they critique. Without those standards, each thing gets its own bespoke write up. Very entertaining, but useless when we want to know which is better or worse.

Printer ink cartridges. Printer manufacturers are using a loss leader pricing scheme, and I don't like it. Let them compete!