You just won One Billion Dollars, what are you buying?
For me, the first thing I'd do is clear my family of all debts(or whatever financial issues) there is and then the second thing i'd do is buy a hundred Siomai for me to eat
What are you buying if you won One billion dollars?
Easy. I'm building a low-income non-equity housing co-op. It'll have very small homes built from sustainable materials, distributed throughout a permaculture-based native plants food forest. In the middle there will be a big central space that functions as a community kitchen, storage space, and venue. The buildings will all be connected through a series of raised, fenced-in, roofed walkways that allow animal life to pass underneath, but also are accessibly designed for (provided) wheelchair/scooter use. We'll run all the wiring through these as well. It'll be powered by solar/etc and we'll have our own self-hosted municipal wifi with free email addresses and storage for residents. And etc, etc lol, obviously this is a very long standing pipe dream for me.
An excess of single family housing is a major contributor to homelessness. We need denser housing. I'd rather work towards building something like a dense arcology. Somewhere for people to live that makes efficient use of the space to grow plants.
I knew about this problem, the whole issue with the tradeoffs/advantages/disadvantages between having denser housing vs having adequate green space. However, I didn't know there were any reasonably well developed potential solutions! Thank you for introducing me to the concept of Arcology, this is awesome.
What if my proposed setup was more like tall dense multifamily buildings instead? Maybe something like how Pueblo housing worked?
Yeah exactly. I feel like it might be more kind of "doable" on a smaller community-level scale, which appeals to me because anarchy. I don't know how well it actually threads that needle though, and whether it introduces its own problems
My husband and I had a similar idea but for ourselves and friends versus your purpose-built need. With a billion dollars we can do both and then some so I'll build my commune and pay for yours to exist in multiple areas globally.
My first thought was reaching out to a property developer I know, and paying them to take care of the housing crisis in the state… housing first. I would then shame the absolute living fuck out of the people here that are more interested in children’s genitals, on behalf of some asshole god they worship.
Not quite as environmentally friendly- there would be efforts, but, then I would also use a substantial chunk of it to invest into things like solar or batteries, and energy grid development.
I would also buy myself the Lego venator kit. (Star Wars, Vader’s flagship from ESB).
I buy myself a house, pay off my family’s home, pay off my best friend’s home, and pay off my and my siblings’ student loan debt.
And I’ll still have 998 million left over.
10 million goes into a trust, to pay my lawyers, financial advisers, and accountants.
15 million goes into whatever savings/trust/investment account my financial advisors recommend , with a maximum dispersement of $500,000 per year, for me to use as I see fit.
1 million for each of my 9 cousins, for education or housing.
964 million left.
I buy an apartment building. I advertise a reasonable rent, for the area. When I get a tenant that I like, I’ll decrease the rent to 20% of the person’s reported monthly income. I’ll apply that towards immediate bills, then take a small amount for long-term improvements, then put the rest in savings/investment accounts, one for each unit, split equally. Upon the end of the lease, the tenant can cash out this savings account. If the tenant has extenuating circumstances, their rent can be paid from this savings account, or the principal of this account can be pulled from at any time.
Some amount of money from the billion will be put in an investment/savings account, so that money can be pulled in perpetuity if necessary, to keep the apartment afloat during lean times. Something like 25 million, to allow for up to $1 million in disbursement per year for stuff that’s not covered by rent. Once this account doubles, I’ll buy another apartment, and so on.
$900 million left.
$100 million goes into a trust to be used for charitable ventures.
$800 million.
This is so much money. I literally couldn’t possibly spend it all in my lifetime.
Clear all my debts, pay for my kid to go to any college he wants.
Renovate my house, or buy a new one. My house needs a lot of work but I've never had the funds to do much about it. There's electrical work and plumbing that needs to be done, roof needs to be replaced, hot water heater needs to be replaced, etc.
Open a computer repair shop. It's something I've always wanted to do, but computer repair for end users isn't as profitable as it once was.
Open a Retro Gaming & Computing museum. With every console you can imagine. And retro computers. And giant CRT televisions and monitors. With a giant collection of games. Everything is plugged in, with multiple controllers, ready to be played! I'd probably have a gallery of pinball tables attached as well.
I don't know the details, but I'd try to start some sort of e-waste program that tries to preserve retro tech rather than see it go to a landfill, or even rather than seeing it get scrapped for copper, etc.
Initially? Nothing. Unless my identity has been publicly tied to this amount of money, in which case a plane ticket to somewhere I'm not known, probably.
Start a nonprofit open source IoT hardware company. Internet-connected smart devices and appliances are cool, but not the way they are implemented now. I'd base everything on common hobby chips like ESP32, AVR, and STM32. Every single device would have a completely unlocked firmware upload port.
Yeahh...but there's no documentation, no schematics, and no legal ability to take the design and modify and redistribute it. That's what I want to change. I want to create the Linux of IoT.
Clear out family and close friend debts. Set up them for life with some contract statement that says it's a one time thing, etc etc.
Invest 50-100 million in several different ventures to make an income of several 10's of millions of dollars a year completely passively.
Set up independent trusts/orgs structured in an 100% employee owned pattern and make them impossible to be bought out by other corpos or private investment firms, and impossible to be restructured. They would stay 100% in the workers control. The multi-million passive income would be split amongst these orgs.
Those orgs would act as sponsors for betterment of different communities. Lots of FOSS orgs, homeless aid, drug relief, human trafficking aid, environmental orgs, etc. Anything that makes the world better and is community ran, owned, controlled, and managed.
Use the remaining few hundred million to direct donate to causes I believe in and existing orgs that do good in the world.
Leave myself a few 10's of millions to buy a second home somewhere, make it 100% carbon neutral. Invest the rest to bring in a passive personal income of a few hundred thousand dollars a year, doctor money basically. 250-350k annual after tax. My spouse and I would travel the world for the rest of our lives. Help manage the orgs we're involved with. Hopefully help the world become better on a personal level, not just with the wealth stuff.
Set aside some money each year to flood thousands of billboards across the world with anti-capitalist, pro-worker messages, etc lol.
I would try to found my own payment processor/credit card company that would be more NSFW-friendly. Apparently all the payment processors hate porn/nsfw which is why sites like to try to ban it so much. I want NSFW content creators to have a home too.
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