A billion pounds?

[ciphergoth]

babysimon: "You could do a lot of good with £1bn"

How would you spend a billion pounds in order to do good? You can't spend it on yourself or your friends.

Comments

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Well, for starters I'd use the same scam as the rich guys: I'd put the billion into a foundation, use it as capital to loan to other people, collect interest from them, and then spend the interest. Assuming 10% return, that'd give me £100m a year to give away indefinitely.

Then I'd carve up the annual funds and give regular donations to a bunch of worthy causes. Oxfam, Habitat for Humanity, ACLU, and so on. I don't have a list off the top of my head, but I'm sure it would be no problem to pull up the most cost-effective charities from Charity Navigator and assemble one.

I'd use some money for research and angel investing too. Reading SciAm and PopSci, every month or two there's some worthy development that needs seed capital or research funds.

I'd also donate computers and textbooks to schools, on the condition that the computers run Linux and the biology textbooks teach evolution without disclaimers.

And I'd tell the Cambridge Computer Lab to get lost for selling out their credibility to Microsoft. Or maybe offer to double Bill's donation if they remove his name and Microsoft's from everything.

I'd keep back a small amount just for "frivolous" stuff. Like when I read a newspaper story about someone being screwed out of $20,000 by some corporation because he can't afford legal representation.

A more plausible dream is what I'd do with about $2m, the answer being "Retire, and spend my time on free and open source software projects, either coding, managing the project, or writing documentation."