This person is very powerful and you cannot possibly cheat, but you don't have to make a profit off your product either.
So, you can take 100 millions and spend your time building something you want. What it would be?
I would use the 100 million to investigate possible ways of mitigating the effects of such a crash. As the actual causes would be essentially unpredictable I'd pass on that effort and concentrate on what we could do to establish a degree of continuity of core areas of knowledge: maths, medicine, geography etc.
One option would be to build bunkers full of useful books in remote locations (like the gene bank in the Svalbard). However, a better way might be to build a long lasting organisation set apart from our culture - very much like secular versions of medieval monasteries or the mathic concents in Neal Stephenson’s excellent Anathem.
I don't know why threats.org is down at the moment; perhaps it's due to the fact that there weren't that many people willing to actually help with the non-profit a few months ago.
http://continuations.com/post/106672598/looking-for-help-in-...
The UN projects that arable land will decline to 1/3 acre per person by 2050 (down from 1 acre/person in 1970). I'd buy up a few old mill buildings (they're all over New England, where I live), and convert them to combination indoor farms using hydroponic or aeroponic growing systems, living space (for farmers), and retail space (to sell the food to the community and offer sales space to other local farmers).
I'd use the roof for combination solar, additional green space, and rain catchment.
Me and a friend have a half-baked (in more ways than one) idea that it would be fun to move to Detroit and get into aquaculture. It's something we managed to romanticize. Give it some steam-punk marketing aesthetic for giggles.
(I think half the value of HN is being able to browse your old comments to remember where you saw something very interesting.)
Makes me think the people most able to teach these principles would rely on them to avoid your contest.
Such support should include money (well, students need food, books, other equipment depending on the course), but I think it should also include support with various buerocratic problems, like facing the german bafoeg-institute and other buerocrats.
Certainly, it will be hard to actually get a good selection principle going and it also needs a plan to get the money back, but once this is done, I think this is a very valuable thing to invest in. I mean, studying is pretty much a full time job (well, if you study hard to get through the universiy fast, it is), and thus, students usually don't have that much time to work and sometimes they even get to pay for being at the university.
Besides that, I would invest a large sum into neurodermatism research, just for pure egoism. I have this problem, and whoever also has this problem knows how bad this status can be whenever it goes active. (To everyone else: Just imagine the urge to scratch your inner elbow, hand or other inappropiate locations until every skin is gone and just a bloody mess is left. After that, one is depressed, cannot move properly and is in pain.) Thus, this would be a second major investment. I guess it also would not be that egoistic, as a lot of people could benefit from results from this research :)
If it failed, so what, it would advance the idea of seasteading. If it succeeded I'd attempt to expand the platform, or build another platform within about 3km, so that the platforms could be connected with existing gondela technology.
The idea of seasteading has always fascinated me, but to make it carbon-neutral or even better carbon-negative (encouraging coral growth around the bases, out putting power to onshore communities, etc.) would send an environmental message that the people who care about the environment aren't just a bunch of witless nags at greenpeace but are people who actually want to change the whole world into something better. This environmental message could be capitalized on during expansion phases and used to attract businesses.
In theory you would become a monopolic supplier of all goods. Food, power, housing, transport, would all be owned by your company meaning you can attain income from all aspects of the business and keep it profitable. By keeping the market open, it makes you look friendly and open (consider you own the transportation, so anyone competing with you and winning is still paying you money).
In 40 years time I would be a James Bond-esque supervillain and precisely where I want to be before retirement.
He has already said he believes in the concept and donated money to the 'seasteading institute'.
Obviously either it isn't worth that much to him, or 1.3 billion isn't enough for it to be reliably done.
Yes, I'm being absolutely serious. I'm part of a group of people trying to get this done currently, and a lot of research has been done.
There have recently been a few companies who have tried and failed at this for various reasons, but we think it definitely can be done and we want to be the ones to do it.
Anyone have $100,000,000?
Primary goal, to provide transparent and neutral public information to voters to enable them to make an actual choice when voting instead of lock stepping according to the current PR spin of any specific party. Secondary goal would be to complement local efforts to increase voting awareness.
Public servants should be under the same metric driven scrutiny by their employers as any other employee for any private company.
If I had to build something technical, I'd build a secure realtime BSD kernel.
Alternatively I'll donate the money to someone who can actually use it to make something great.
Of course the college would be super selective, but it would be a breeding ground for awesomeness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Eng...
And the distance learning department would not use Blackboard, we'd open source our own platform.
I would use the rest of the money (there would be a LOT leftover) to send teams of techs with portable equipment to poor areas and then inject these studies into the radiologist's work queues so they get analyzed for free.
I think this could be a self-sustaining system where the profits from reading studies could pay for the charity work.
I am interested in both robotics and agriculture, specifically small scale agriculture such as home hydroponics and container gardening. I would create a company based on the idea of combining the two fields in order to help bring technology and automation to the process of growing healthy food in limited spaces.
Their site copy reads like a bad video game port script.
(You could argue that, given luck, a lot of people receive $100 million without really "earning" it. That may be the case, but that would probably make me uncomfortable also. However, as in the previous case, I'd still delude myself into thinking I earned it by foresight, brilliant investment, or mettle.)
ps: if youre asking for inspiration because you actually got the money, dont forget to gimme a share ;]
Yes, his beard probably gets more ink than anything else. That's sad in a way (don't judge a book by its cover), but it's probably also good in another way, since it makes him pretty unforgettable.
And I do agree with you that it makes him unforgettable. I personally think it is done with deliberation. To a certain degree, he is going to be treated as a quack. He even says so often. By dressing the part of Gandalf the Gray he's almost openly mocking them.
But if I just had to spend $100 million, I think I'd go with distributed, green power.
"This person is very powerful and you cannot possibly cheat"
When the project is big, cheating become easier
"but you don't have to make a profit off your product either"
What's the benefit of your work then?