this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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For perspective, $30 billion would afford the food and freight to feed every human on Earth for a year.
Less than that would make him a god in Haiti (that is, elevate the nation out of crisis and put a bronze statue of Musk in every state park commemorating how awesome he is.
A few billion could provide free high-speed internet to everyone worldwide. Curiously Musk considered this, but then wondered how to get everyone to pay fees for it.
ETA I got these values when we were discussing Bloomberg's wealth in 2019 when he was trying to Secret Hitler the Democratic party, and how much could be bought with the $500 million (at the time only 200 million was declared) he spent on his campaign. The $30 billion to feed the world value came up in in one of the news articles.
Well, the economy is much different and we're dealing with considerable inflation (and our billionaires, including Bloomberg are much richer.)
I'm having trouble figuring out the math for this. My assumptions lead me to divide $30b by 8b people, which is about $4/person. I'm not confident that people can eat on $4 for a year.
What am I getting wrong?
I just did the math myself before seeing your comment and you’re right that math is fucked lmao.
Maybe it's to provide food security just for those who don't already have it
They clearly stated
It's a shit load of money, but let's be honest you need way more than that to feed everyone. If Musk decided to donate all of his fortune, then maybe that'd be true.
Musks fortune was only 340b at its peak, and the moment he tried to access 44b of it for Twitter it collapsed the price.
Even 340b is still only $41 a year for everyone.
Yea even assuming the 340b a 25 pound bag of rice was about 22 bucks when I googled it and about the same for cheap beans. Maybe between the two a person could survive a long time but it wouldn't be pleasant. I'm sure if you buy in those bulks you could get it for way cheaper too but still, math doesn't add up.
Based on the prices I looked up you could feed everyone on Earth 1,800 kcal of potatoes for one day for around 40 billion USD. So... lets do it! Global spud day! Don't ask me where to get a pot that big for boiling all them taters though.
You do make a relavant point. Prices have doubled in the last couple of years and I think the statistic is from the early 2010s.
That the costs scale down the more massive the production. If you're in the industrialized world, the money you pay for food is almost all profit. Not the cost of agriculture, not the cost of harvesting and packaging, not freight time, maintenance and fuel, not logistics and accounting. Profit.
Most of our money spent is bribes goes in the pocket of each of the capitalists along the way taking their bit of rent.
Since there is about few billion people on earth, does that mean that high speed internet costs about a dollar per person? You did not think this through, did you?
There are eight billion people on earth, so it's even cheaper. Internet access is one of those things that requires infrastructure that gets cheaper per user as it scales up. At a global level, yes, internet should be ridiculously cheap per capita.
The cost we pay here in the US is mostly profit for the oligopolies that control the last mile. Licensing fees because they control access via legal obstruction. If I were to create a community server, it could be much cheaper as a non-profit cooperative, but for the cost defending from litigation from the established chains.
In other words, cost of the internet is inflated by force, not because internet access is expensive to construct and maintain.
that is... misleading at best. yes, it is cheaper to connect apartment building with 1000 apartments inside than solitary farm in the middle of nowhere, but it is still lot more expensive than you think. the fibers and putting them into ground costs fuckton of money. same goes for wireless technology. your one dollar per user does not even cover ethernet socket inside of the apartment.
seems to me that you should start your own business, start putting fibers into ground and become ridiculously rich!
i will skip over the part where you decided that you can compare "few" and "eight" in size, and point out that your logic means you have less(more) money per user, not that it is cheaper(more expensive).
in other words, you know about as much about building internet infrastructure as this guy knows about dealing with hurricanes.
just admit you pulled these numbers out of your ass and move on...
Let that sink in.
Becase it's false and the math severely wrong.
Funny how federation works. I deleted the comment almost immediately. And yet here we are.
i have found that deleting comment does not propagate to other instances nearly as well as creating one...
Yea, now $30B will buy everyone on earth a McDonald's hash brown, including tax.