You have a billion dollars. You are not allowed to spend it in any way that directly helps others like charity, gifts, scholarships/grants, or pure investments like in startups or stocks. You’ve also already exhausted all hedonistic desires of your own.
How do you use it?
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I like both art and research but the dominance of those categories makes me super suspicious and a bit hostile to both.
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Unless it’s a specific work of art or research you’ve conceptualized to the point that it’s more an execution contract/commision than an ab initio creative project, it’s not in the spirit of the prompt.
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Bunch of responses I liked. Most people default to vague categories of ideas or prototypical ideas within those categories. Or placeholder “solutions to problems” rather than actual starting points. But these kinda pop as actually being true ideas.
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Best response so far imo. People really struggle to find big ideas that are not just funding others’ ideas or lives in disguise. twitter.com/_JamesWiles/st…
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Metacommentary thread.
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When people are bad at spending money it accumulates with people who are good at collecting it. Most people are very bad at spending money beyond the relatively low limit of personal hedonism. By about $4m, most people are out of ideas.
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There’s a weirdly large number of ideas involving the moon. Carve message on it, launch slingshot at it, blow it up.
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artist and author patronage! if that sounds too wholesome – large-scale pranks with the intention of creating strange news events that nobody can quite explain
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Wait so what's left? Like, can you fund specific research, artists, or do your own enterprise? Grants and startups feels very close to... Anything. Kinda just leaves buying resources.
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You can fund research into your own ideas. You just can’t hand out grants for people to work on theirs.
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Impure investment: start actively shorting industries that are doing bad things. Make it impossibly expensive for, say, tar sands processing to happen.
I also quite like the buy large amounts of land and leave it alone idea.
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Direct investment in resource cost savings and financial cost savings will put rent-seekers out of business by undercutting them island-power.net If someone slips $1bn our way we'll change the game
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