HOWTO: Spend A Billion Dollars

shine-shine writes: "Forbes is running an article helping you figure out how to spend that spare billion you got laying around (don't you just hate when that happens?). Apparently, a geek would buy 500 black-market clones of himself, while the narcissist would most likely build "a monument similar in size and scale to Mount Rushmore, featuring his own face.""

I think I'd keep a few million...

[N Monkey]

for myself and family (frankly we don't need much) and then use the rest for a trust to do things such as buying wells for 3rd world nations.

At least that might achieve something (which is probably better than the hot air generated at the "sustainable development" summit).

S

R&D

[hpavc]

if i had a billion dollars we would be 999 million dollars toward developing an affordable small village level water purification system, or sanitiation system. or possibly help engineer some sort of food/weed that will grown nearly anywhere. to ease the suffering of the people on this planet.

dont need to figure out the human genome or anything fancy to get something done with that cash.

Re:whores

[1nhuman]

If you have 1 billon$ you don't need whores. You will attract b*tches like hotmail attracts spam.

You hardly need that much

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

According to opensecrets.org, they don't go for more than $7 million each. You could buy a few key states' worth and not have to worry.

Bill's donation schedule

[leonbrooks]

[Dons his skeptic's hat]

Guess what? You need Flash to even see the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program site. And when you do, it's strictly elitist. Bill's essentially trying to buy the allegience of the best and brightest students in America. Only. The kind of people who would probably succeed without his intervention.

$750 million over five years to [...] the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, Unicef, pharmaceutical companies and the World Bank.

Looks more like an investment than a donation.

$350 million over three years to teachers, administrators, school districts and schools to improve America's K-12 education, starting in Washington State.

$200 million to the Gates Library Program, which is wiring public libraries in America's poorest communities in an effort to close the "digital divide."

Specifically, to equip them with Windows?

All those hundreds of millions pouring into the vaccination industry is getting a bit frightening, even if some of those are dupes. You don't eradicate most diseases by swamping them in vaccine, you eradicate them by improving people's living conditions. By and large, Bill isn't doing that.

If he really wanted to make a durable name for himself, Bill could do a lot more for those poor countries by giving them cheap access to space industry [space.com] with either a $5G seed donation or $10G to get the first one working.

Re:whores

[Jherico]

If you have 1 billon$ you don't need whores.

You do if you don't want to wonder if they're only interested in you for the money.

Re:Bill's donation schedule

[cscx]

All those hundreds of millions pouring into the vaccination industry is getting a bit frightening, even if some of those are dupes. You don't eradicate most diseases by swamping them in vaccine, you eradicate them by improving people's living conditions. By and large, Bill isn't doing that.

Here's some food for thought: Have you caught any fucking POLIO lately? How bout some smallpox? Do you have any idea how many babies die each year because they weren't properly vaccinated? Living conditions is one thing, but to discredit vaccines is ludicrous.

Specifically, to equip them with Windows?

Not like he's putting Linux on them or anything. Jesus, he's trying to help out underdeveloped areas in our own fucking country, and all you can do is be skeptical, like it's all part of his evil plan for world domination. Would you rather have those libraries have no computers and still be checking out books from the sixties? Umm, don't think so.

Re:Asimov's first law

[sql*kitten]

It would take an obscene amount of money to feed everyone that is starving in the world, provide the infrastructure necessary to send the food everywhere it needs to go, and insure that they will be able to provide for themselves in the future

Actually, that all exists already. There is already way too much food in the world - the US and EU destroy millions of tonnes of it every year. After all, food surpluses are a precondition of population growth, not the other way round, and the population is growing [un.org].

Growing the food is easy - our civilization understood farming centuries ago. Distributing the food is easy - logistics is a well-developed science, practiced by Walmat, UPS and the Marines, you can even do a degree [lse.ac.uk] in it. The difficult part is purely in the realm of the political. So long as tyrants like Robert Mugabe use starvation as a tool of population control, or nations like Somalia keep feudal civil wars going, famines are inevitable.

These are the men with just enough "obscene amount of money", but have failed to act.

The Gates Foundation [gatesfoundation.org] has given billions away. Literally. What have you done?

3,000,000 counts of manslaughter per year.

If you really believed that, you wouldn't have a computer to post to /. from, or indeed any other posessions. You would have given every cent to charity and right now be working for free on a subsistence farm in the third world. But you'd rather sit on the sidelines and run your mouth about things that are far beyond your understanding.

Re:Does it bother anyone...

[StillAnonymous]

Yes it does. It's such a hideous imbalance in the economic system and I don't believe it can continue like this forever. You simply can't keep moving all the wealth in the world to a select few and expect everything to work out all right.

And why does an individual NEED that much money?! Honestly, once you have a nice place to live, food to last you the rest of your life, a car (not even mandatory depending on where you live or what your lifestyle is), and a few luxuries (I'm not talking about billion dollar boats here either), what good is another billion dollars going to do you?

Personally if I had that much dough, I'd give most of it, like maybe $950 million, away. The rest would take care of me and my entire extended family for the rest of our lives.

Re:Does it bother anyone...

[NineNine]

You're full of shit. You can't say what you'd do with $1B because you don't have it. Anybody can say, "Those rich guys are assholes. They should give it all away." I'm sure that homeless people are thinking that those rich assholes that make $100K/year should give all but like $20K/year away, because that's all you need.

There's nothing wrong with the system, you're just whining.

I love being a crank :)

[Lonath]

I would use it to stop software patents.

How you ask?

Since software is abstract thought and since abstract thoughts are a dime a dozen, I would get a bunch of geeks and lawyers together and every day we would look at new software patent applications that get released. (It's nice that they release the applications early on now...so that you don't have as much of a chance of them extending their patent before you get your application in...)

Out of those applications, we would take the most promising and novel ones (usually from smaller companies) and get umbrella patents that surround whatever little idea they have with a bunch of "novel and nonobvious" extensions.

When I say "novel and nonobvious" I mean not only extensions made by daydreaming and thinking about the problem a little bit, but also extensions that are computer generated. For example, if you have IRC bots and MUD bots and chat room bots, then it's "novel and nonobvious" if you come up with the idea of an IM bot. Therefore, it's also probably nonobvious to come up with cellphone text messaging bots.

I think you see where I'm going with this. If someone patents something for "IM" then the "nonobvious" extensions would be for wireless networks, chatrooms, PDAs, cellphones, IRC and so forth. This could be algorithmically generated with a database of "related ideas" and "dongles" you can add to any invention.

It wouldn't just be for that one part of the invention, either. You have to look at products that exist and follow the "dongle and feature" web (where if at any time a version of feature1 was used with a version of feature2 in a product, then you adjoin all possible ways of having feature1 and/or feature2 in your "novel and nonobvious" extensions) to adjoin as many different features as you can think of. Then say you will use a "plurality" of these things within the invention. Have you noticed how patent lawyers love the word "plurality"? Heck, we could probably get rid of patents altogether (which I don't support) if we made the word "plurality" illegal. They wouldn't know what to do. :P

But anyway, you watch them when they release their products and if they add any of your "nonobvious" extensions, you sue them, not to make money, just to force them to cripple their products and remove them from market. Since "self-help" features that remotely shut down software for copyright reasons are or will become legal, I'm sure you could force them to invoke these features and shut down their products until they stop infringing on my valuable IP space.

Eventually, the government may wake up and realize that abstract thought patents can cripple innovation and perhaps we can get back to a time when we had the right to express our thoughts and use our property without getting sued. Or they might just not let me get any more patents.

Also, you should note that we wouldn't be writing software during this time. That's because if you understand software and you understand the breadth and triviality of software patents you know that you can't respect software patents and write software at the same time. So, in order to respect the patents, I would have to stop writing software. But it would be nice to try to crapflood the USPTO.