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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Things I like to think I’d do if I made 10^9 every 2 weeks:

-pay everyone making minimum wage or below 100$ for registering to vote. Cost about 170m.

-devote some portion of it to animal safety and care taking. Even stuff like sanctuaries for feral cats, dogs, and other non-adopted creatures as opposed to euthanasia.

-public libraries that provide services people otherwise wouldn’t have. Like a public square almost. Have a clearing house match up community interests with speakers and the like. Ie inviting religious people or leaders from religions foreign to the community to come in and discuss their beliefs and culture. I also want people to be able to request and invite things like lectures from theoretical physicists. Also do stuff like letting people request time on musical equipment in the building to learn how to play - or even just see if it’s for them.

Granted, all of this would probably negatively affect that biweekly 1 billion!

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Would invest almost of it in my medical charity of choice: SENS, and after that public outreach.

Some people would accuse me of making medicine only for the rich, but that is not my intention. The disease of old age affect equally both billionaire and the poorest of grandparents, and everyone in between. To have new medicine only available to the rich and only the rich would be a total failure of my aim.

I'd probably throw it at nuclear fusion power research.

First you'd have to convert your 1BN gain of non-cash assets to cash every 2 weeks.

That wouldn't be very difficult.

You think the demand is so high that increasing the supply of shares for sale won’t have an effect on price?

Yes, look at the average daily volume for stocks. There’s plenty of opportunities for cashing out when you have that sort of asset.

You'd also run out of that asset pretty fast.

Doubtful. Bill Gates has been spending a lot of his time looking for ways to spend his wealth to help humanity. He’s not close to running out of wealth either.

I sense that you’re looking for a denialist argument against this concept and potentially in bad faith. “If it’s not possible to actually cash out on 1B every two weeks then discussing the things we’d do with it is pointless.”

I build factories that build factories that build solar panels and batteries which would power the factories

With the resulting glut of energy I would do anything

P.S. Mild curiosity: why the downvotes. seems like a solid plan

Maybe someone’s seeing this discussion as OT. I see it as a discussion of opportunity costs-we’re not doing any of these in part because the funds go places like this.

I like your idea. I don’t recall much RD being put into self assembling machines. The potential there seems like obvious incentive. Like why not try to send such machines to the outer solar system and send stuff back to us?

Hubble 2 (visible light)

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