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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

If you had to spend $500M, what would you spend it on?

Me:solid beautiful stone buildings that would last for centuries as community centers.

I've noticed all my life, that governement and community buildings are very strange - all purpose-built. A courthouse; a post office. Laid out to be just that one thing.

What it means is over the years as communities grow, they get to be too small to manage the increased traffic. So another one gets built. Then another one. Each purpose-built again. My town has 3 old post offices. Two old libraries. Old newspaper offices. Old courthouse. Old jail.

And since they were purpose-built, the old building is not good for much. It gets used as a makeshift office space or gutted and split into badly lit low-rent apartments.

Why not build community buildings to be general-purpose? Why not just use a regular commercial building and lay out the offices and cubicles and storerooms like any other business would?

Just one of the odd human things, that's bothered me all my life.

Likely has to do with the fact that if you want to build a community centre that has the capacity to serve your community in 30 years, you also need the budget of that community 30 years in the future. You can only build what you can reasonably afford, and unfortunately that isn't a building that you can grow into.

Or, as suggested, just use an ordinary building that can be sold and repurposed when grown out of. Instead of the marble built-in counters and elaborate state offices etc.

An endowment for history and translation. A 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Ruth Lilly helped bolster the Poetry Foundation, which not only runs an an important poetry magazine but also funds a great number of poets and projects. I'd like to set one up for the study of regions where not enough funding has gone for historical research (including archaeology) and for translating poetry and literary works from a wider variety of languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_Foundation

I don't mind the foundation, but poetry gotta be placed pretty high on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Millions of people don't even have access to clean water yet.

If I were to start a foundation I would likely focus on something fundamental like water instead of poetry.

Most of the potential improvements in that area are high-hanging fruit due to political issues in specific regions at this point, as far as I can tell. There are a lot of problems a big pile of money only makes worse.

Pharaohs these days seem to have much tackier taste than they used to.

Their structures required more planning and delayed gratification.

To be fair, pyramids are pretty tacky. Imagine how much more hate Bezos would get for spending half a billion on a tomb!

The Getty Center in Los Angeles fits this bill pretty well. A stunning stone structure that is home to beautiful gardens and an art museum, open to the public with free admission (even the audio tour is free)

Construction cost was closer to $2 billion though

But when you’ve got 100 billion you get to do a lot of things

https://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html

I assume construction is still ongoing? The updates page hasn't been updated in almost 10 years.

They've moved webpages.

https://longnow.org/clock/

Today ours are called Libraries. We need more of them.

Ah, but Amazon is in the book selling business..

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