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Crowdfund a Moon Monolith Mission?
Jamie found a somewhat amusing little essay on putting together a crowd-sourced mission to
put a monolith on the moon. The author estimates it would cost half a billion dollars, which is a sum he thinks could be raised. Although personally, I think a half a billion dollars could be put to better use, it's a fun thought exercise.
Although personally, I think a half a billion dollars could be put to better use
You can play that game forever though. Did you east breakfast this morning? That food could have been put to better use, as could the water from your shower, or the resources it took to make the shoes you put on your feet.
In fact I can think of no better use for a tiny drop in the total sum of money floating around the planet, than a mass exercise in artistic expression. It's kind of the ultimate way of saying, here we are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, but you only have to buy this monolith once. The hungry will just be hungry again tomorrow... Unless you stop feeding them, then it eventually solves itself.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Then get out there, raise it, and put it to that "better use".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Well, lots of people seem to enjoy masturbating. But I am sure you don't. You spend every penny towards bettering the world and helping your fellow man, right?
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
I take it that essentially every moment of your time is devoted to preventing people from dying, since the $1.66 that this would represent if you spread the expense over every person in ths U.S. (neglecting the other 6.6 billion people in the world) is less than a half hour of a net minimum wage.
While we're at it, let's get rid of those pesky cultural arts, since that's virtually all "masturbation" as well.
Let's waste half a billion. Why not crowdfund for something meaningful and useful to the world? There are people dying and these jerks, anyone who supports this with effort or funding, are masturbating.
This sort of project would provide a fair number of jobs and is voluntarily financed, what's non-meaningful and useless about that? The government isn't confiscating the money from you so why are you complaining? Start your own crowd sourced project to halt death or whatever it is you think is more meaningful and useful.
As a skeptic, what this really means to me is: this guy is looking for a way to fund his retirement.
Half a billion? That's 500 million. Sure, it might cost that much to perform the actual operation, but consider: management and administration costs. Surely there will be a significant portion of that set aside, particularly for the fund management. Say, as a non-profit, it's a 'relatively modest' $175k/year for such a position (if he's fitting in with current gov't standards, at least), and surely that sum would be allocated to him to manage it.
Let's say the project lasts 5 years; he just netted 2/3 or so of a million in income. At that point, the project has gone bankrupt due to lack of interest.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers