You know what I would do if I had seven hundred million dollars? I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds, and then take the other half over to my friend Asadura who works over in Securities...
Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
41–50 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#42research in space travel, terraform Mars, build cheaper space shuttles
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#43Two chicks at the same time.
Seriously, I have no idea what I'd do with that amount of money. If I was completely selfish maybe I'd buy an island somewhere. I sure as hell wouldn't use it to bail out a bunch of failed businesses whose executives have been giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
... Give $11,000 to each household making under $50,000, and you're in essence paying all of that towards households making over $50,000. Some people are poor because they're honestly down on their luck, and need a helping hand. The majority on the other hand are simply unemployable, or horrible with their finances. Give them a handout and the money will simply end up in richer people's hands. That's not helping them…
Hey, I was working with a college degree for 3 years before I broke 50k. At the time I was investing 8% of my income and I was still eating out all the time etc. I think the bar for poor needs to be a little lower than 50k/year.
How many kids were you trying to support?
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#45[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#46I would hire a team of 87,000 competent developers to develop better documentation for java, C#, javascript, python and ruby. Oh yeah, erlang, OCaml, F#, a few others.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#47Nation-wide high-speed wireless. Computers for schools. Spend the rest on paying down our debt.
if the 700b came from debt like it is in this situation, you're only delaying the problem
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#48I'd buy a sovereign country and break it up into city-states, and allow them to compete with each other as an experiment to see which policies and forms of government are the most effective. It would be kind of like Pokemon for social science geeks. You could have libertaritopia, commietopia, fascistopia, etc, and you'd get to see what happens. For motivational purposes, after 50 years I would have barbarian hordes burn and pillage the unsuccessful ones.
If I couldn't find somebody to sell me a country I would build large offshore platforms or rafts that would fulfill the same function.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#49Remember, 700B pays for around 400 space shuttles. Just to give a sense of scale.
Space shuttle demolition derby, then?
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
... Give $11,000 to each household making under $50,000, and you're in essence paying all of that towards households making over $50,000. Some people are poor because they're honestly down on their luck, and need a helping hand. The majority on the other hand are simply unemployable, or horrible with their finances. Give them a handout and the money will simply end up in richer people's hands. That's not helping them…
Hey, I was working with a college degree for 3 years before I broke 50k. At the time I was investing 8% of my income and I was still eating out all the time etc. I think the bar for poor needs to be a little lower than 50k/year.
Is a collage degree made up of other degrees that are cut apart and then pasted back together to form pretty pictures? (couldn't resist).
I wasn't shooting for the poor. I was shooting for a bunch of people. It's roughly half of the households in the country. That's a lot of liquid capital to inject into the economy at once -- around 5% of our GNP.