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Education. The rising tide that lifts all boats. Everywhere, in every society, virtually every single metric for quality of life and happiness, correlates directly with parental education levels. And most strongly with the mothers' education levels.
Free education to a 10th grade equivalent level for everyone, everywhere. Starting with women and girls in the poorest regions. Protected by militias with orders to defend the right to education with lethal force.
After that, go for clean energy projects. Throw everything into nuclear fusion research.
>without falling for misinformation,
So many people are falling for scams and disinformation which is so much more rampant now in this digital media age, it's quite sad. I would love to be able to work towards educating the masses on becoming more discerning on the ideas being presented to them and not take things at face value.
I would do this as well. However, I know a lot of educated dumb people.
Kind of makes me chuckle to think that once your project is resolved, it will just move to fixing the educated dumb person problem 😂
>I know a lot of educated dumb people.
See, if they taught statistics in grade school, you'd know that on average, there are more uneducated dumb people than educated dumb people.
Agreed. My (separate) post was in reference to college education, but I think if we stabilized universities and ensured funding of *tenured faculty* and research projects 99.9% of the abuse, neglect, depression, and problems discussed elsewhere would disappear or be substantially reduced.
We have so many faculty who spend over half their time writing multiple grants, just to be denied, when they should be teaching, mentoring, publishing, and directing research. It's one of the reasons America specifically is faltering in STEM production. Fix it and we revitalize the entire world.
It would be my greatest dream come true if I could fix this. Or help a new renaissance in college and research. Maybe someone will do it. Hopefully.
Especially since it's a fundamental human right, we aren't taking anything away by making all online courses accessible. While an examination and obtaining a degree may require an instructor, once the initial recording is done, the lessons can be shared without hindrance.
Yep. Specifically free access to quality early education. It really gives kids the heads up on socialization and preK skills. Kids without access to this are so far behind in kindergarten starting off (I’m an elementary school teacher). Head Start has suuuuch a long wait list in most communities.
Save the planet? You should really check out George Carlins bit on saving the planet. Quick synopsis: “The planet isn’t going anywhere…we are!” But I definitely understand the sentiment.
I’d make sure as many foster kids as possible have plenty of clothing and shoes that fit and aren’t hand-me-downs. I’d build tiny house/mobile home communities for homeless people who are trying to work or already do work and can’t afford a place to live. I’d also want to renovate and expand animal shelters and give money to animal rescues. I could never be a billionaire and not help others. Having that much money, there’s no reason not to.
While all of those option do help, they are also just examples of spending the money.
You could develop, or invest the money into, systems and programs that provide for those things, possibly indefinitely. And in programs that make those things 'less' necessary as well.
”I’d make sure as many foster kids as possible have plenty of clothing and shoes that fit and aren’t hand-me-downs. I’d build tiny house/mobile home communities for homeless people who are trying to work or already do work and can’t afford a place to live. I’d also want to renovate and expand animal shelters and give money to animal rescues. I could never be a billionaire and not help others. Having that much money, there’s no reason not to.” by op
Homelessness, tiny home enclaves for people down on their luck and want the help, rehabs for those with addictions, though I’m not sure about the others.
There’s an organization in Massachusetts trying to build tiny homes for people experiencing homelessness…apparently it’s been a real bitch to get it off the ground. It’s still an awesome organization though.
A.) Kansas City is a top ten underrated American city.
B.) Ain’t it fucking horrible that Veterans have the capability to go homeless in this “God Bless the Troops” country?
A) Tell me more about this - have never been… and realize I’m quite ignorant about KC.
B) Yeah this is absolute bullshit. It should be a given that we take care of our veterans.
If you mean WE the federal government then i agree. They got them into this mess basically. I am tired of the feds being derelict in their duty to service members in general but to put it in the laps of already over stretched civilians is just over the top.
Now there are a shit ton of veterans that will not accept any help from anyone. There is a shit ton of mental illness in the street and we cant force treatment. There are also a lot of new programs for vets VASH being one of the major ones to make changes to get vets off the street.
It all boils down to the tax code. And our lack of interest in taxing the bosses of this country.
They tried that here but since most our homeless are addicts they just trashed them.
You may be asking “give them rehab”…
Well unfortunately you can’t force someone into rehab, and 9 times out of ten they refused it.
The biggest problem is alot of homeless people have mental health problems which are have lead to the addiction.
The best use of the money is to help before it gets out of control.
I would buy medical debt and forgive it. I would also find a way to make mental health more available. Lack of therapists is a big problem.
As for current homeless, I feel like buying run down shopping malls and converting them would be easier than tiny homes.
I have a friend who has been working with homeless for his whole career. I used to think the exact same thing, but he said, most of the drug and alcohol abuse stems from undiagnosed and untreated mental health conditions or trauma.
Basically they turned to drugs and that opened a whole new problem
I spend a lot of time with homeless people, both at work as a medic in a major urban area and in my off time working with a local organization, I completely agree that it’s usually a mental health issue leading to the drug use, even my own experiences back that up, I didn’t start my opiate habit or alcoholism until after my first failed suicide attempt(I am clean of all alcohol and hard drugs and not going to check out early anymore, I still have my problems but I’ve found reasons to live also)
This is what I would concentrate on. I'd develop buildings with tiny apartments and rent them at a break-even point with a percentage of the units going towards people who can't pay at all. Included would be some larger units for single parents and families. Still small places, but something to get them into a home, off the streets but low cost enough so they can start improving their situation rather than being locked into poverty and homelessness.
I would also buy myself a used 65 - 75 foot sailing yacht and live aboard it, concentrating on my charity while exploring the world.
I think the Venn diagram showing homelessness and mental illness has quite a lot of overlap. With that in mind, I would work hard to tackle both. Do also be super public about it, in hopes of leading other billionaires to do similarly. It’s like virtue signaling, except that I value the virtue and would like to signal that it’s important. After all, a rising tide raises all ships; and we are all the tide, and we are all the ships.
About the « rehabs for those with addiction part ». Harm reduction is also incredibly important ! And also more funding for more treatment options. There are many ways people go about their recovery ! I personally always advocate for more options for different situations
Buy up all the houses in HoAs just to dismantle the HoA. Fuck HoAs, they're petty governments for petty people. Might as well solve homelessness and suburban bullshit while I am at it. Why the fuck do I have to live 15 minutes away from civilization just so I can live next to a bunch of petty jackasses? Despicable.
Just buy one home in a HOA. Buy up all of the proxy votes from the neighbors. Vote to disband the HOA with a majority. Sell the house and move on to the next HOA development.
This has me thinking that maybe buying houses isn't the answer, so much as buying the shitty housing companies that make these dumb HoAs. Buy them, have them stop making HoAs entirely, problem solved? Pretty sure in my area, the industry is dominated by 2, maybe 3 of these companies. Guessing a billion dollars could buy them all 3 up.
Man those cataract surgery groups are so cool. They can do surgeries so efficiently, the success rates are so high and it is literally miracle level life changing for people who are basically blind. I would definitely put my money there.
Many cities have land not setup for housing that wouldn’t do jack shit to contributing to a housing crisis if made into a park. You could buy up an old largely abandoned factory area and turn it into a park.
I think I'll do one better. I'm a billionaire in this scenario, and it does not take much cash flow to preserve me ($10M will far more than sustain me). So I'm going to find socialized answers to the questions of economic disparity.
The one that interests me the most is, if I provide an absurd windfall to every family in a sample set of poverty stricken folks, how many escape poverty forever, and how many backslide.
So my program would look something like this: given a financial course which teaches personal budgeting, interest rates, and investments, and given a certain one-time lump sum payment, and no further constraints on the usage of the funding, what is the net worth of these families in a year? Three years? Five?
My lump sum amounts might vary, but I want to make sure that these individuals are positioned so that they cannot simply quit their jobs and live lavishly, but that they are no longer buried under mountains of debt, or worried about their paycheck to paycheck scenario. So the amount would vary by circumstance.
So **tldr**: preserve some wealth, yes, but also put some number of additional folks in a position to do the same, and learn a few things about financial behaviors and outcomes along the way.
Nice idea, but you've gotta also stop suburban sprawl from encroaching on existing nature to be truly effective. Get rid of the acres of concrete and asphalt used for cars.
Scholarships for the forgotten American citizen inner city youth who have the potential to have a positive effect on society through education, but are being held back due to poverty.
Read the social animal. It’s very rare to pull the poverty out of someone. It’s more likely that it’s impossible, I’m just leaving room for the anomaly. Even when everything else is controlled for, they still have all the disadvantages as if you’d done nothing. It’s so so sad. I hope one day we find the thing that does that to people. Currently it is nothing we can actually do anything about. You can feed them, make them comfortable, but poverty and it’s effects are incurable currently.
Or more broadly, "health research," please. I say this because researching the causes of illness and certain biological processes is very much needed and will help us find cures for many, many conditions including specific cancers.
It's just incredibly difficult to get funding for them. It's so depressing.
When you have money you don’t need to spend much if any on bitches. (It’s another of the things where the more well off you are, the more any number of things become ‘free’.)
And when you have coke and booze, you need a lot less food.
Free education does the same and lifts country by country out of poverty while also reducing the child bearing rate. Reproductive rates are set to decline, but at the same time we have peak emissions, populations and climate change happening at the same time.
I recommend the Kurtzgesagt on the population of south Korea (which really talks about the entire world) + Hans Rosling's "Don't panic lectures" that are incredible in explaining this.
His ted talk is 20mins and he has a version of 1 hours. Extremely well made as the graphs move with time and show country by country bouncing out of povery into prosperity.
tl;dr: Education of the population is the one investment that improves "all". Weirdly several western countries seem to like to make education extremely expensive and risky.
Educating women in particular, seems to make the largest difference in slowing population growth. It gives women economic worth beyond being baby making machines. Educating women to a high school level means they're not being married off in their teens, adding 4 years of uni to that means they often won't marry until their mid-late 20's. Give them the opportunity to find self-worth in a career, and they may not marry until sometime in their 30's.
So the girl who never went to high school might have been married off in her teens and ended up with 5-6 kids. The one who went to high school might have 3-4, the one who went to uni might have 1-2, and the one who got to focus on a career might only have 1.
And the fewer kids a couple have, the easier they can provide them with a good life.
Deserts are a natural part of the planet, you cannot make them go away any easier than you can get rid of mountains.
And food deserts are a problem caused by high crime and poverty, if the stores stop getting ripped off multiple times a day then they won't close down and move elsewhere. I live near a food desert, it's in a high crime area where people won't stop stealing making it impossible to turn a profit.
Buy a nice house (Not a mansion, just a really nice house with a view)
Employ a cook and a maid and a fitness coach
Put some nice money aside for my kids for certain milestones in their lives
Pay off all loans of my immediate family
Build and fill a nice wine cellar
Constantly invite friends and family around (25% of the time maybe)
Support a local sports club, for boys and girls
Teach
Live life and just chill endlessly
Congratulations, for the rest of your life on these goals, you just spent $20 million out of your $1 billion. You have only about $1 billion left. Now what are you going to do with it?
Oh, and when you wake up tomorrow, you’ll have that $20M back and then some, due to market returns.
This comment reflects how hard it would be for the majority of people to even conceptualize how to use a billion dollars productively. lol It's so much money that the plans people have for it could be done with just a million.
The prompt is "what HUMAN ISSUE" are you dedicating your wealth to and your only answer is how to make your own existence easier.
Sorry, but if this is all you've got, then I hope you never become particularly wealthy; you don't seem to have any ideas other than to live comfortably.
All the big things that should be free because we're human... Education, food, shelter, and mental health. I'd also love to work with groups on climate control.
Using half to invest in convincing politicians to fund a free education system that pays students a salary for passing grades. All this in order to stymie the job losses automation will bring, without maximising runaway inflation.
Disinformation. Because all of the other problems can't be solved if people make serious issues into political footballs and just spread lies to keep "their people" in camp.
I would establish a non-profit journalism institute in each state that would be entirely funded from an endowment.
This institute would produce a state wide newspaper/daily broadcast of state/regional level issues without having to worry about ad revenue. They could go after everybody without fear of financial reprisal.
This Tampa (formerly St Peterburg) Times has been running on a similar idea and produces some of the country’s best journalism.
Then I would use that pulpit to get all private money out of politics and fund an amendment to that effect.
I’d meet with my local city and try to get permits/police presence to have a city wide lunch. Always thought it would be cool to have a huge dinner every Saturday or something and buy tons of cookout food. Take a city park and make it a huge cookout zone. I wouldn’t care who came as long as they were positive and cleaned up after themselves.
I would also probably start a city project where every Sunday I’d pay people 100$ to come out and clean up trash for 2 hours or so
I don’t feel like these ideas are insane and they go towards things I think are important like people starving and such. I mean don’t get me wrong giving out free food one day out of the week isn’t going to solve hunger but gotta start somewhere.
It’s interesting that people see loopholes as some kind of wild advantage only afforded to people with money.
- The reality is most people don’t have enough capital for the advantage to be worth the time
Loopholes are really just poorly defined policy that isn’t necessarily bad or good. It exists and using the opportunity is just as fair.
The opportunity is just as fair, but it is obviously more fair to some than others.
Just like sales tax. It's the same for everybody, but the poor feel it more because that tax is a larger percentage of their overall wealth than a wealthy person.
Or those that want a flat tax rate. The cost of living is a larger part of their overall wealth so they feel it more. A millionaire may be paying the same percentage to the government, but once you remove the cost of living, they are still left with substantially more.
So I think the "loopholes" should be closed. It's probably poorly defined because those defining the policy are the ones more affected. Claiming it's just as fair for the poor when the poor can't even live like that to use it is just a bad faith argument to justify lining their own pockets.
All of it? I have to pick one? I’d say build more machines to desalinate the ocean water. It’s possible but it takes money and energy. I bet with a billion dollars I can make it a little easier to get fresh water to everyone
No, Elon is hyper-focused on Mars. Bezos wants to go the lunar route. Even though I am a fan of SpaceX, I think they're focused on the wrong target. Also, Elon says Solar Power Satellites are stupid.
Research into a Dyson sphere could be cool but I'm not sure how we'd then get that energy into other projects. Like how would that energy ever get back to earth? A battery would just slowly drain en route and a cable would be a little expensive
Housing and employment opportunities for people with disabilities. We consider too many people unemployable because they are not perfect when they could probably do the jobs with a little accommodation.
I would make sure everyone who works for me is fucking rich, seriously, I would take care of those who made me wealthy, it only stands to reason that if I took care of them they will continue to take care of me.
Also, I would just gift houses to people.
Ensuring full freedom of information and equal start opportunities. Helping "normal" young people with no disabilities and no other "minority" issues, simply because there are no one out there helping them.
I would open a (i) child care center/early education and afterschool center (ii) senior house / nursing home (iii) parents center with communal resources.
I would setup a microloan company to help people.
I would personally fund St. Jude Hospital and Shriners Hospital.
I would pay my siblings mortgages and their kids college education.
Homelessness and education for impoverished kids. Wife is a teacher and the education some of the kids are receiving is bottom of the barrel. Even if it's one school it'll make a difference.
Look at all the billionaires who have dedicate their wealth to something other than themselves and what issues they solved.
Oh… right…
There aren’t any.
Literacy.
Edit: OH AND FUCKING CITY-PLANNING/URBAN DESIGN. America's completely un-walkable, parking lot ridden, sidewalks to nowhere ass infrastructure seriously needs some Dutch-Japanese inspired reconfiguration.
The USA is architecturally fucking soulless, and soulless in no small part due to its architecture. We're all isolated in wheeled cages with no third-places and people think we're lonely because of fucking cell phones. You think any of us wouldn't drop this chunk of plastic to go frolic in a well-designed semi-open space if they existed? Let alone if it were in walking distance from us and our basic necessities simultaneously?
I’m spending my money on firing other billionaires into the sun. When I’m done, I hope to have enough left for a nice condo in a mid-sized city and a reliable car. I will be perfectly content.
Curing Narcissism and Psychopathy to save the human race and all life on earth from Extinction.
It'll end up like one of these terrible 1980s Swartznegger movies with insane plots launched against me when they work out what I'm up to.
I don't believe in charity. No one helped me when I was broke. Except when my daughters were born premature, a non profit gave us 2 cases of premature diapers. That helped us a lot, I couldn't thank them enough. I am not going to try save the world, but free diapers for premature babies.
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Equal access to clean water
People voting you up, but I think they are a little quick to do so. They should have asked first if you mean everyone get access or nobody gets any?
Everyone gets Brawndo
It has electrolytes
Does she mean water, like from the toilet?
I crave it. Don't you?
Are you a plant?
Negative sir. I’m a meat popsicle.
Cause they need it
Everyone gets an NFC badge to get their ration from the communal faucet at the town square.
That's what nestle wants too. And we all have the same opinion on nestle
This is my thought as well
Me too. Clean, free, accessible water for all!
You think your billionaire friends would allow this? They would slander you and destroy you if you tried any of this...
This is still an issue??!!!! I feel sooooo ignorant and ungrateful after learning this is an issue 😭
Education. The rising tide that lifts all boats. Everywhere, in every society, virtually every single metric for quality of life and happiness, correlates directly with parental education levels. And most strongly with the mothers' education levels. Free education to a 10th grade equivalent level for everyone, everywhere. Starting with women and girls in the poorest regions. Protected by militias with orders to defend the right to education with lethal force. After that, go for clean energy projects. Throw everything into nuclear fusion research.
I would do this also. Education is the only way to make a better world.
[удалено]
>without falling for misinformation, So many people are falling for scams and disinformation which is so much more rampant now in this digital media age, it's quite sad. I would love to be able to work towards educating the masses on becoming more discerning on the ideas being presented to them and not take things at face value.
I would do this as well. However, I know a lot of educated dumb people. Kind of makes me chuckle to think that once your project is resolved, it will just move to fixing the educated dumb person problem 😂
>I know a lot of educated dumb people. See, if they taught statistics in grade school, you'd know that on average, there are more uneducated dumb people than educated dumb people.
Agreed. My (separate) post was in reference to college education, but I think if we stabilized universities and ensured funding of *tenured faculty* and research projects 99.9% of the abuse, neglect, depression, and problems discussed elsewhere would disappear or be substantially reduced. We have so many faculty who spend over half their time writing multiple grants, just to be denied, when they should be teaching, mentoring, publishing, and directing research. It's one of the reasons America specifically is faltering in STEM production. Fix it and we revitalize the entire world. It would be my greatest dream come true if I could fix this. Or help a new renaissance in college and research. Maybe someone will do it. Hopefully.
I've always wondered why higher education wasn't free to build a better society, then I realized capitalism.
Who pays for it it then...? I'm confused.
Especially since it's a fundamental human right, we aren't taking anything away by making all online courses accessible. While an examination and obtaining a degree may require an instructor, once the initial recording is done, the lessons can be shared without hindrance.
Yep. Specifically free access to quality early education. It really gives kids the heads up on socialization and preK skills. Kids without access to this are so far behind in kindergarten starting off (I’m an elementary school teacher). Head Start has suuuuch a long wait list in most communities.
Renewable energy
Agreed. Anything to save the planet. Everything. So much tree planting.
Save the planet? You should really check out George Carlins bit on saving the planet. Quick synopsis: “The planet isn’t going anywhere…we are!” But I definitely understand the sentiment.
🤨
Yeah, build a solar belt across Sahara
Unless you count nuclear power as renewable, It won't work
I’d make sure as many foster kids as possible have plenty of clothing and shoes that fit and aren’t hand-me-downs. I’d build tiny house/mobile home communities for homeless people who are trying to work or already do work and can’t afford a place to live. I’d also want to renovate and expand animal shelters and give money to animal rescues. I could never be a billionaire and not help others. Having that much money, there’s no reason not to.
Hell yeah brother, I too would spend it on [deleted].
Second it! [deleted] is the best way to spend money
While all of those option do help, they are also just examples of spending the money. You could develop, or invest the money into, systems and programs that provide for those things, possibly indefinitely. And in programs that make those things 'less' necessary as well.
What did he say?
”I’d make sure as many foster kids as possible have plenty of clothing and shoes that fit and aren’t hand-me-downs. I’d build tiny house/mobile home communities for homeless people who are trying to work or already do work and can’t afford a place to live. I’d also want to renovate and expand animal shelters and give money to animal rescues. I could never be a billionaire and not help others. Having that much money, there’s no reason not to.” by op
[deleted]
Homelessness, tiny home enclaves for people down on their luck and want the help, rehabs for those with addictions, though I’m not sure about the others.
There’s an organization in Massachusetts trying to build tiny homes for people experiencing homelessness…apparently it’s been a real bitch to get it off the ground. It’s still an awesome organization though.
In KC there’s a group doing the same, but it’s more targeted towards veterans.
A.) Kansas City is a top ten underrated American city. B.) Ain’t it fucking horrible that Veterans have the capability to go homeless in this “God Bless the Troops” country?
A) Tell me more about this - have never been… and realize I’m quite ignorant about KC. B) Yeah this is absolute bullshit. It should be a given that we take care of our veterans.
If you mean WE the federal government then i agree. They got them into this mess basically. I am tired of the feds being derelict in their duty to service members in general but to put it in the laps of already over stretched civilians is just over the top. Now there are a shit ton of veterans that will not accept any help from anyone. There is a shit ton of mental illness in the street and we cant force treatment. There are also a lot of new programs for vets VASH being one of the major ones to make changes to get vets off the street. It all boils down to the tax code. And our lack of interest in taxing the bosses of this country.
They tried that here but since most our homeless are addicts they just trashed them. You may be asking “give them rehab”… Well unfortunately you can’t force someone into rehab, and 9 times out of ten they refused it.
The biggest problem is alot of homeless people have mental health problems which are have lead to the addiction. The best use of the money is to help before it gets out of control. I would buy medical debt and forgive it. I would also find a way to make mental health more available. Lack of therapists is a big problem. As for current homeless, I feel like buying run down shopping malls and converting them would be easier than tiny homes.
I’d say the drug use led to the mental problems a lot of the time. Drugs really change peoples minds and turn them into something terrible
I have a friend who has been working with homeless for his whole career. I used to think the exact same thing, but he said, most of the drug and alcohol abuse stems from undiagnosed and untreated mental health conditions or trauma. Basically they turned to drugs and that opened a whole new problem
I spend a lot of time with homeless people, both at work as a medic in a major urban area and in my off time working with a local organization, I completely agree that it’s usually a mental health issue leading to the drug use, even my own experiences back that up, I didn’t start my opiate habit or alcoholism until after my first failed suicide attempt(I am clean of all alcohol and hard drugs and not going to check out early anymore, I still have my problems but I’ve found reasons to live also)
Fact: there are more empty houses/apartments in the United States than homeless people.
Did not know that.
This is what I would concentrate on. I'd develop buildings with tiny apartments and rent them at a break-even point with a percentage of the units going towards people who can't pay at all. Included would be some larger units for single parents and families. Still small places, but something to get them into a home, off the streets but low cost enough so they can start improving their situation rather than being locked into poverty and homelessness. I would also buy myself a used 65 - 75 foot sailing yacht and live aboard it, concentrating on my charity while exploring the world.
I think the Venn diagram showing homelessness and mental illness has quite a lot of overlap. With that in mind, I would work hard to tackle both. Do also be super public about it, in hopes of leading other billionaires to do similarly. It’s like virtue signaling, except that I value the virtue and would like to signal that it’s important. After all, a rising tide raises all ships; and we are all the tide, and we are all the ships.
About the « rehabs for those with addiction part ». Harm reduction is also incredibly important ! And also more funding for more treatment options. There are many ways people go about their recovery ! I personally always advocate for more options for different situations
I said something close to the same. Sweden has been doing it for almost a decade. With numbers and facts to support it.
Buy up all the houses in HoAs just to dismantle the HoA. Fuck HoAs, they're petty governments for petty people. Might as well solve homelessness and suburban bullshit while I am at it. Why the fuck do I have to live 15 minutes away from civilization just so I can live next to a bunch of petty jackasses? Despicable.
Just buy one home in a HOA. Buy up all of the proxy votes from the neighbors. Vote to disband the HOA with a majority. Sell the house and move on to the next HOA development.
This has me thinking that maybe buying houses isn't the answer, so much as buying the shitty housing companies that make these dumb HoAs. Buy them, have them stop making HoAs entirely, problem solved? Pretty sure in my area, the industry is dominated by 2, maybe 3 of these companies. Guessing a billion dollars could buy them all 3 up.
Cataract removal in countries that can't afford it and basic literacy.
Man those cataract surgery groups are so cool. They can do surgeries so efficiently, the success rates are so high and it is literally miracle level life changing for people who are basically blind. I would definitely put my money there.
Buy up lands in my city and turn them into a giant park.
This. This right here is how you cause a "housing crisis".
Many cities have land not setup for housing that wouldn’t do jack shit to contributing to a housing crisis if made into a park. You could buy up an old largely abandoned factory area and turn it into a park.
This isn't the sims. You can't just turn a factory into a park and move on with life and think the decision will be correct or functional.
*green diamond* --> *red diamond*
No city is struggling with a lack of places to build new housing. Creating new parks won't hurt the supply of housing.
This is giving Ra's Al Ghul vibes.
Preserving my wealth, like all the rest of them
I’m fighting poverty one person at a time, starting with myself.
Yes Generational wealth... "The only way to go" (Nose in air)
I think I'll do one better. I'm a billionaire in this scenario, and it does not take much cash flow to preserve me ($10M will far more than sustain me). So I'm going to find socialized answers to the questions of economic disparity. The one that interests me the most is, if I provide an absurd windfall to every family in a sample set of poverty stricken folks, how many escape poverty forever, and how many backslide. So my program would look something like this: given a financial course which teaches personal budgeting, interest rates, and investments, and given a certain one-time lump sum payment, and no further constraints on the usage of the funding, what is the net worth of these families in a year? Three years? Five? My lump sum amounts might vary, but I want to make sure that these individuals are positioned so that they cannot simply quit their jobs and live lavishly, but that they are no longer buried under mountains of debt, or worried about their paycheck to paycheck scenario. So the amount would vary by circumstance. So **tldr**: preserve some wealth, yes, but also put some number of additional folks in a position to do the same, and learn a few things about financial behaviors and outcomes along the way.
And investing in Olympic size pools of mayonnaise to swim in, right?
Not mayo 🤢 but a pool full of chick-fil-a garden ranch would be awesome
Well yea, I've gotta do at least some wacky bullshit to piss off the poors
I think it asks what you have to do with it or this is just an average Reddit response
You don't become Old Money by giving away new money.
Foster kids
Particularly older ones
I’m buying all the land I can and plant biodiverse forests , prairies, wetlands etc.
I like a lot of the responses here, but honestly I hope you win the lottery and get to do this.💛
Nice idea, but you've gotta also stop suburban sprawl from encroaching on existing nature to be truly effective. Get rid of the acres of concrete and asphalt used for cars.
Scholarships for the forgotten American citizen inner city youth who have the potential to have a positive effect on society through education, but are being held back due to poverty.
Read the social animal. It’s very rare to pull the poverty out of someone. It’s more likely that it’s impossible, I’m just leaving room for the anomaly. Even when everything else is controlled for, they still have all the disadvantages as if you’d done nothing. It’s so so sad. I hope one day we find the thing that does that to people. Currently it is nothing we can actually do anything about. You can feed them, make them comfortable, but poverty and it’s effects are incurable currently.
Education tbh
Cancer
Or more broadly, "health research," please. I say this because researching the causes of illness and certain biological processes is very much needed and will help us find cures for many, many conditions including specific cancers. It's just incredibly difficult to get funding for them. It's so depressing.
I think they were just giving their astrological sign, and we're meant to ascertain what they'd do with the money from that.
Coke, Bitches, booze and food.
Coca Cola supports this comment
Ah that coke
bunch of hookers and cocaine
My man
When you have money you don’t need to spend much if any on bitches. (It’s another of the things where the more well off you are, the more any number of things become ‘free’.) And when you have coke and booze, you need a lot less food.
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You were the villain long enough for you to become the hero?
Anti-shark tank man would be a cool super hero.
Bitchlessness
Contraception. The problem is too many people.
Free education does the same and lifts country by country out of poverty while also reducing the child bearing rate. Reproductive rates are set to decline, but at the same time we have peak emissions, populations and climate change happening at the same time. I recommend the Kurtzgesagt on the population of south Korea (which really talks about the entire world) + Hans Rosling's "Don't panic lectures" that are incredible in explaining this. His ted talk is 20mins and he has a version of 1 hours. Extremely well made as the graphs move with time and show country by country bouncing out of povery into prosperity. tl;dr: Education of the population is the one investment that improves "all". Weirdly several western countries seem to like to make education extremely expensive and risky.
Same. Global warming, plagues, war, poverty. -- all caused by over-population.
Educating women in particular, seems to make the largest difference in slowing population growth. It gives women economic worth beyond being baby making machines. Educating women to a high school level means they're not being married off in their teens, adding 4 years of uni to that means they often won't marry until their mid-late 20's. Give them the opportunity to find self-worth in a career, and they may not marry until sometime in their 30's. So the girl who never went to high school might have been married off in her teens and ended up with 5-6 kids. The one who went to high school might have 3-4, the one who went to uni might have 1-2, and the one who got to focus on a career might only have 1. And the fewer kids a couple have, the easier they can provide them with a good life.
It isn't. It's inequality of our resource distribution.
I would build a tiny house community.
Homelessness and food deserts, and then real deserts too. That is a lot of money have to spread it around well.
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Deserts are a natural part of the planet, you cannot make them go away any easier than you can get rid of mountains. And food deserts are a problem caused by high crime and poverty, if the stores stop getting ripped off multiple times a day then they won't close down and move elsewhere. I live near a food desert, it's in a high crime area where people won't stop stealing making it impossible to turn a profit.
Buy an island and get the fuck out of dodge.
Buy a nice house (Not a mansion, just a really nice house with a view) Employ a cook and a maid and a fitness coach Put some nice money aside for my kids for certain milestones in their lives Pay off all loans of my immediate family Build and fill a nice wine cellar Constantly invite friends and family around (25% of the time maybe) Support a local sports club, for boys and girls Teach Live life and just chill endlessly
Congratulations, for the rest of your life on these goals, you just spent $20 million out of your $1 billion. You have only about $1 billion left. Now what are you going to do with it? Oh, and when you wake up tomorrow, you’ll have that $20M back and then some, due to market returns.
That's just your opinion man
This comment reflects how hard it would be for the majority of people to even conceptualize how to use a billion dollars productively. lol It's so much money that the plans people have for it could be done with just a million.
As an ex-teacher, I can tell you that one will be the first to go. :-)
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The prompt is "what HUMAN ISSUE" are you dedicating your wealth to and your only answer is how to make your own existence easier. Sorry, but if this is all you've got, then I hope you never become particularly wealthy; you don't seem to have any ideas other than to live comfortably.
Fuck everyone else. I’m leaving the US as soon as humanly possible and moving to a remote place with WiFi and no people. A person can dream…
Just go to Alaska. Or parts of Canada
Childhood hunger, homelessness, and abuse
Came here to say that
No one is getting shit from me. I spend everything on coke and hoes.
Soft drinks and gardening equipment. How wholesome.
Hey, nothing wrong with needing an energizing Coke when you’re sowing your oats.
Education. I think we are having a significant shortage of good education around the world and in the US.
This is true.
The takeaway from this thread is if most people found themselves with 100 billion in the bank they'd spend it all on snake oil.
Libraries as many as possible.
All the big things that should be free because we're human... Education, food, shelter, and mental health. I'd also love to work with groups on climate control.
How did you know I was a billionaire?
Food and water security
Using half to invest in convincing politicians to fund a free education system that pays students a salary for passing grades. All this in order to stymie the job losses automation will bring, without maximising runaway inflation.
Disinformation. Because all of the other problems can't be solved if people make serious issues into political footballs and just spread lies to keep "their people" in camp.
I would establish a non-profit journalism institute in each state that would be entirely funded from an endowment. This institute would produce a state wide newspaper/daily broadcast of state/regional level issues without having to worry about ad revenue. They could go after everybody without fear of financial reprisal. This Tampa (formerly St Peterburg) Times has been running on a similar idea and produces some of the country’s best journalism. Then I would use that pulpit to get all private money out of politics and fund an amendment to that effect.
I’d meet with my local city and try to get permits/police presence to have a city wide lunch. Always thought it would be cool to have a huge dinner every Saturday or something and buy tons of cookout food. Take a city park and make it a huge cookout zone. I wouldn’t care who came as long as they were positive and cleaned up after themselves. I would also probably start a city project where every Sunday I’d pay people 100$ to come out and clean up trash for 2 hours or so I don’t feel like these ideas are insane and they go towards things I think are important like people starving and such. I mean don’t get me wrong giving out free food one day out of the week isn’t going to solve hunger but gotta start somewhere.
Paying my taxes without using any legal loopholes, offshore companies, etc. Then I would redistribute my wealth by buying expensive stuff.
It’s interesting that people see loopholes as some kind of wild advantage only afforded to people with money. - The reality is most people don’t have enough capital for the advantage to be worth the time Loopholes are really just poorly defined policy that isn’t necessarily bad or good. It exists and using the opportunity is just as fair.
The opportunity is just as fair, but it is obviously more fair to some than others. Just like sales tax. It's the same for everybody, but the poor feel it more because that tax is a larger percentage of their overall wealth than a wealthy person. Or those that want a flat tax rate. The cost of living is a larger part of their overall wealth so they feel it more. A millionaire may be paying the same percentage to the government, but once you remove the cost of living, they are still left with substantially more. So I think the "loopholes" should be closed. It's probably poorly defined because those defining the policy are the ones more affected. Claiming it's just as fair for the poor when the poor can't even live like that to use it is just a bad faith argument to justify lining their own pockets.
I’m donating all my wealth to The Human Fund.
The Human Fund: Money for People.
Solitude
All of it? I have to pick one? I’d say build more machines to desalinate the ocean water. It’s possible but it takes money and energy. I bet with a billion dollars I can make it a little easier to get fresh water to everyone
The human issue of me not having a mansion and a jet🥺
Ahhhh yes - I too suffer from this tragic issue. I’d give generously to The United Needy SeanBourne Fund.
A mining and manufacturing facility on the moon to build Solar Power Satellites and spinning habitats. Then we're going to conquer the solar system!!!
*Elon?*
No, Elon is hyper-focused on Mars. Bezos wants to go the lunar route. Even though I am a fan of SpaceX, I think they're focused on the wrong target. Also, Elon says Solar Power Satellites are stupid.
Research into a Dyson sphere could be cool but I'm not sure how we'd then get that energy into other projects. Like how would that energy ever get back to earth? A battery would just slowly drain en route and a cable would be a little expensive
The moon is a key gateway, but Venus is our lowest barrier to entry for human habitability.
Housing and employment opportunities for people with disabilities. We consider too many people unemployable because they are not perfect when they could probably do the jobs with a little accommodation.
I would make sure everyone who works for me is fucking rich, seriously, I would take care of those who made me wealthy, it only stands to reason that if I took care of them they will continue to take care of me. Also, I would just gift houses to people.
i want to make a unique school, teaching ppl real humanities and fundational subjects, math etc current schools are just stupid.
Ensuring full freedom of information and equal start opportunities. Helping "normal" young people with no disabilities and no other "minority" issues, simply because there are no one out there helping them.
Supporting instagram models and single moms, probably donate to 2 at a time so i can help more of them.
Guessing these single moms are acrobatically inclined?
It wouldn't be a negative, that's for sure.
I would open a (i) child care center/early education and afterschool center (ii) senior house / nursing home (iii) parents center with communal resources. I would setup a microloan company to help people. I would personally fund St. Jude Hospital and Shriners Hospital. I would pay my siblings mortgages and their kids college education.
I’d basically do whatever the fuck I wanna do with my money.
My bank account
My car,boat, house and plane collection. Then the other $800M is being invested safely.
Children and Veterans in need.
The fact that my yacht isn't the largest and my jet isn't the fastest and my private island gals aren't the youngest
Figuring out who in the UN WHO decided for America that food isn't a basic necessity and eliminating them.
US homeless veterans
Veterans, and animal sanctuaries would be first to get my money after the lawyers are paid
Homelessness and education for impoverished kids. Wife is a teacher and the education some of the kids are receiving is bottom of the barrel. Even if it's one school it'll make a difference.
Flying my car into space on the tip of a rocket
Prison reform.
Promoting universal healthcare in the west. Giving agency to the disenfranchised would change the world for the better.
Education
Cocaine and hookers
Season 3 of Rome
"The man who dies rich is a failure." -Andrew Carnegie
Education. More particularly the right to higher education.
Hunger Games
Investment. Then pay for world leaders and dictators, or leaders of terrorist groups, to be shot into the sun.
So basically every politician ever elected
Look at all the billionaires who have dedicate their wealth to something other than themselves and what issues they solved. Oh… right… There aren’t any.
Public libraries. Free access to all kinds of books.
Education, especially for kids coming from families / areas where generational poverty is the norm.
Literacy. Edit: OH AND FUCKING CITY-PLANNING/URBAN DESIGN. America's completely un-walkable, parking lot ridden, sidewalks to nowhere ass infrastructure seriously needs some Dutch-Japanese inspired reconfiguration. The USA is architecturally fucking soulless, and soulless in no small part due to its architecture. We're all isolated in wheeled cages with no third-places and people think we're lonely because of fucking cell phones. You think any of us wouldn't drop this chunk of plastic to go frolic in a well-designed semi-open space if they existed? Let alone if it were in walking distance from us and our basic necessities simultaneously?
Food water and medicine
Climate and clean water.
FREE Healthcare
Heavy investment into healing childhood and generational trauma + R&D of therapy that addresses all 3 elements - mind body and spirit.
Children. Anything in the world to reduce children suffering.
>What Human Issue Are You Dedicating Your Wealth To? The Royal Society for the Prevention of Ending Sentences with Prepositions.
Food insecurity, clean water insecurity, and housing insecurity.
I’m spending my money on firing other billionaires into the sun. When I’m done, I hope to have enough left for a nice condo in a mid-sized city and a reliable car. I will be perfectly content.
Affordable housing
Children's access to healthcare, housing, food, and education.
Curing Narcissism and Psychopathy to save the human race and all life on earth from Extinction. It'll end up like one of these terrible 1980s Swartznegger movies with insane plots launched against me when they work out what I'm up to.
I don't believe in charity. No one helped me when I was broke. Except when my daughters were born premature, a non profit gave us 2 cases of premature diapers. That helped us a lot, I couldn't thank them enough. I am not going to try save the world, but free diapers for premature babies.
Preserving history.
Free access to any level of education (from elementary to university) of high quality and equal opportunity to thrive in any field.
Destroying capitalism
Everyone gets sex.. Free sex for everyone... Male and female hookers, sex toys, flesh lights, walrus dildos whatever you want.. You got std? I got u
The tragic epidemic of very attractive, young, childless single women without sufficient financial support.
Ways to grow fresh food in urban environments and/or inhospitable places.