See also: Sears pioneering the concept of ordering things through the mail from a catalogue, and then getting demolished by Amazon’s online ordering system. Way to go guys, you got destroyed by some upstart punk doing what you got started doing, but doing it better and cheaper than you could.
My favorite formulation is:
The bar was so low it was practically a tripping hazard in Hell, yet here you are, limbo dancing with the devil.
Lots of perfectly valid answers here about decent humane things to do with the money and power, and I certainly hope I would do things like end homelessness or otherwise meaningfully improve the world.
That said.
I’d build a full-scale, 1:1 replica of the USS Enterprise, NCC 1701-D, from The Next Generation. I’d run it like the Biltmore; technically it would be a private residence, but I’d charge people to take tours. But any time I wanted, I could close it down for a few days and just hang out on the bridge or in main engineering and vibe out to the THRUM THRUM THRUM of the warp core.
But solve homelessness first, of course.
Writing Prompt: A TV with an onboard artificial general intelligence connects to the internet for the first time and is alarmed to discover that a thousand years have passed since it was manufactured.
Just punch a hole in the window on the front.
Not for nothing, but couldn’t this be used to have AI play a game for 80,000 simulated hours and flag all the bugs? Human playtesters are important and have value, but no human should have to do the work of criss-crossing an enormous game map thousands of times just to see if the character model gets stuck on a random vertex sticking out somewhere, and yet it seems to be a distressingly common occurrence in more than a few games I’ve played.
That’s certainly one of the points that I needed to learn about. There are certainly genetic diseases like congenital heart defects or hemophilia. But then there are genetic differences that might seem maladaptive under certain given circumstances, but wouldn’t be any issue at all or might even confer advantages under different societal contexts. And then there are the straightforward differences that eugenics-obsessed regimes like to define as undesirable, like having the wrong hair, eye, or skin color, and then use that as an excuse to persecute whomever they want to. The whole thing is irreparably fucked.
When I was a freshman in college I thought “Surely nobody would want to inherit genetic diseases, and why wouldn’t we want to to try and make people just naturally live longer, healthier lives?” but then I did even the tiniest bit of research on how eugenics actually worked and I completely abandoned that line of thinking.
I was telling a customer that he had to wear a mask to enter my place of business during COVID masking mandates, and he got furious and called me a “white privilege redneck libtard” and I’m just astonished at that particular combination of words to angrily shout.
Here’s something I don’t understand about these county-devouring parking lots: why are they all one level? Is it more than twice as expensive to build and maintain even a two-level parking structure and save half the footprint?
Billboards are illegal in the state of Vermont.
I just got into tying knots! It’s a useful skill. You can pick it up in a couple of minutes and then improve continuously. There are a lot of books on the subject. It’s cheap. You can use cord you might already have lying around the house, or you can get paracord at the hardware store, or you can go somewhere fancy like Paracord Galaxy if you want some extra special colors or patterns. It’s soothing and leaves you with something tangible at the end.
Here’s a monkey’s fist knot I just finished! I’ve been giving them to friends to use as keychains.
Kira: Captain Boday? You want me to bring Captain Boday to your quarters for dinner?
Dax: It’s just a suggestion.
Kira: Well, it’s a bad suggestion! Number one, you used to go out with Captain Boday, number two, Worf hates him, and number three, and we’ve discussed this many times, Captain Boday has a transparent skull.
Dax: And you don’t like to see a man’s brains?
The show is awesome, but it’s about 30% Twilight Zone, 20% Ghost in the Shell, and 50% incomprehensibly kinky fetish so esoteric that the censors didn’t know that it ought to have been censored for TV release.
Conclusion: the Gulf Coast makes Americans crave cars.
I still can’t get over how they stretched that short of a book over that long of a trilogy of movies and still managed to not show enough of Beorn. All of the party arriving at Beorn’s house is one of my favorite chapters and it’s just… not there. The. Fuck.