Exactly! If billionaires were put in a a position where they need to stop being billionaires and distribute their wealth or else people will kill them, they’d distribute their wealth real fucking fast
Also, he has a lot of kids now… money tied up over inheritance squabbles and civil cases getting redistributed to lawyers and court systems. I imagine more kids will come out of the woodwork too claiming a piece of the inheritance pie
I was thinking about this the other day. If I had half a trillion dollars (like the guy who just bought the presidency) I would spend it building a city from scratch. A walkable/bikeable city with free public transportation. I don’t have enough expertise to speak about affordable housing ideas, but with that amount of money I can pay someone to come up with some good regulations. Don’t know why but that’d be my passion project.
Better use of the money is to strong arm cities into adjusting into better land uses. Building a city from scratch you’re probably taking farm land from making food to instead be a new city, and if you can attract enough businesses to attract enough residents you’ve only helped by creating walkability for a few hundred or thousand people while the rest of the country remains car dependant.
Honestly I was on a walk recently and had the thought cross my mind of “what if this road were ripped up, the newly reclaimed land was sold for housing and small quiet businesses and the sidewalks widened into first class bike/walking paths just wide enough for an emergency/utility vehicle to drive down?” and I got a little sad that such a utopian vision just isn’t politically palatable.
I agree with you, that would be a much more effective use of resources. It’s a fantasy though, and it’s way more fun for me to daydream about design than manipulating public policy.
All that said it’s not a fruitless endeavor to think about how you would build something from scratch even if you can’t. It is a good way to hash out ideas without getting bogged down by the resistance to change.
I put some more thought into it and did some measurements and it makes way more sense than I initially thought. I looked at a random neighborhood in a large city nearish to me and it had 50-60 foot wide roads (and it seemed most of the roads with sidewalks the road itself was narrower but had a very similar ~60-70 feet sidewalk to sidewalk) and a narrow road with a traffic calming median had 10 foot wide lanes. Each of these neighborhood streets had an average of about 10 single family homes on each side, with roads about 1500 feet long (0.25-0.3 milesish, so a very short walk from end to end) most appeared to have 1 car garages with a few having 2 car garages
If we take on of those 60 foot wide streets, place a pair of small garages on each end with 6 parking spots each (parking spaces are 8x16 feet on average and this assumes a 16 food wide driving lane to access these garages) providing covered offstreet parking for 1.2 cars per existing household (makes the transition more politically palletable) which consumes about 160 feet of the 1500 feet of former-road and preserves a dedicated 10 foot wide alleyway (potentially with a 1 foot each side “keep out” space for emergency vehicles. Some fire engines are a bit more than 10 feet wide)
We’re left with a 1340 x 50 foot strip of land. If we break that into 50x100 foot plots you can fit a dozen double-wide manufactured homes (square footage of 800-2500 sq feet, just using manufactured homes as a consistent and easy example) with space for a yard for each of them. Alternatively if you do 50x50 plots you can easily fit a cute little 30x30-40 foot home on each plot with a small private yard and add 26 900-1200 square foot single family homes. You could even convert one or two of these plots into new green spaces to further make it a nicer neighborhood
In the example block I looked at, there were 3 very similar parallel streets squared off with other slightly higher throughput streets surrounding them. If we convert these 3 streets in this way, creating a dense walkable/bikable superblock we’ve taken an area of 1300x1500 feet that previously contained 60 single family homes, and increased that to about 135 homes without reducing anyone’s yards and only by shifting them to use a communal garage instead of a private one (which they can now convert their garages into living space and remove their driveways for more yard space!) Or we go from about 800 single family homes per square mile to over 1800 homes per square mile. And this is just unimaginative replacing existing roads with single family homes and not even considering adding any sort of mixed use or multifamily homes1 nor annexing any portion of the existing homes’ 50 foot deep front yards!
If we annex 30 feet existing homes’ 50 foot deep front yard (they still keep their 50 foot deep backyards!) that gives us about 120x1500 feet to redevelop. Lets put a 10 foot wide alleyway on each side in front of the existing homes, drop the shared garages because nobody loses road access, and we’ve got 100x1500 feet to work with, or easily 60 new 50x50 foot plots or 74 40x50 foot plots (240 or 282 homes where there was previously 60, alternatively 3400 or 4000 lots per sq mile up from ~1800 originally)
1. I did calculate out 2900 48 units in the 50x1500 foot space using 100x40 foot quadplexes
Yeah exactly. Normal inheritance means their kids or spouse inherit, and the number of billionaires remains the same.
Fun fact, if I were to inherit the wealth of a billionaire family member who was shot in public I’d get philanthropic real fast!
Many people say this. However of those who talk the talk, barely any ever walk the walk.
However I think if you are born an heir to a billionaire, you’d lack the perspective which might foster selfless philanthropy.
I’d like to think that if someone from the working class would randomly get such money they would. But it still seems unlikely.
self preservation isn’t a selfless motive, but if it results in philanthropy then that’s a win.
Exactly! If billionaires were put in a a position where they need to stop being billionaires and distribute their wealth or else people will kill them, they’d distribute their wealth real fucking fast
Not before trying to buy their way out of it.
“What if I uh, personally kill 1000 millionaires to offset each billion reducing my greedy hoarding footprint.”
I would assume most of Elon Musk’s kids are not a fan of Billionaires.
Also, he has a lot of kids now… money tied up over inheritance squabbles and civil cases getting redistributed to lawyers and court systems. I imagine more kids will come out of the woodwork too claiming a piece of the inheritance pie
Really one only ever heard his one daughter speak out against him, since she’s been a frequent target for his anti-trans bullshit.
I haven’t heard any of the other kids speak up against him on any topic.
Almost all big lottery winners are working class. Look at what they do with their winnings on average, you don’t need to guess.
I feel like that depends too. There’s a ton of working class that dream of somehow becoming billionaires which is why they don’t want to tax them.
They’re certainly not all fans.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/25/elon-musks-transgender-daughter-in-first-interview-says-he-berated-her-for-being-queer-as-a-child.html
I was thinking about this the other day. If I had half a trillion dollars (like the guy who just bought the presidency) I would spend it building a city from scratch. A walkable/bikeable city with free public transportation. I don’t have enough expertise to speak about affordable housing ideas, but with that amount of money I can pay someone to come up with some good regulations. Don’t know why but that’d be my passion project.
Better use of the money is to strong arm cities into adjusting into better land uses. Building a city from scratch you’re probably taking farm land from making food to instead be a new city, and if you can attract enough businesses to attract enough residents you’ve only helped by creating walkability for a few hundred or thousand people while the rest of the country remains car dependant.
Honestly I was on a walk recently and had the thought cross my mind of “what if this road were ripped up, the newly reclaimed land was sold for housing and small quiet businesses and the sidewalks widened into first class bike/walking paths just wide enough for an emergency/utility vehicle to drive down?” and I got a little sad that such a utopian vision just isn’t politically palatable.
I agree with you, that would be a much more effective use of resources. It’s a fantasy though, and it’s way more fun for me to daydream about design than manipulating public policy.
All that said it’s not a fruitless endeavor to think about how you would build something from scratch even if you can’t. It is a good way to hash out ideas without getting bogged down by the resistance to change.
I put some more thought into it and did some measurements and it makes way more sense than I initially thought. I looked at a random neighborhood in a large city nearish to me and it had 50-60 foot wide roads (and it seemed most of the roads with sidewalks the road itself was narrower but had a very similar ~60-70 feet sidewalk to sidewalk) and a narrow road with a traffic calming median had 10 foot wide lanes. Each of these neighborhood streets had an average of about 10 single family homes on each side, with roads about 1500 feet long (0.25-0.3 milesish, so a very short walk from end to end) most appeared to have 1 car garages with a few having 2 car garages
If we take on of those 60 foot wide streets, place a pair of small garages on each end with 6 parking spots each (parking spaces are 8x16 feet on average and this assumes a 16 food wide driving lane to access these garages) providing covered offstreet parking for 1.2 cars per existing household (makes the transition more politically palletable) which consumes about 160 feet of the 1500 feet of former-road and preserves a dedicated 10 foot wide alleyway (potentially with a 1 foot each side “keep out” space for emergency vehicles. Some fire engines are a bit more than 10 feet wide)
We’re left with a 1340 x 50 foot strip of land. If we break that into 50x100 foot plots you can fit a dozen double-wide manufactured homes (square footage of 800-2500 sq feet, just using manufactured homes as a consistent and easy example) with space for a yard for each of them. Alternatively if you do 50x50 plots you can easily fit a cute little 30x30-40 foot home on each plot with a small private yard and add 26 900-1200 square foot single family homes. You could even convert one or two of these plots into new green spaces to further make it a nicer neighborhood
In the example block I looked at, there were 3 very similar parallel streets squared off with other slightly higher throughput streets surrounding them. If we convert these 3 streets in this way, creating a dense walkable/bikable superblock we’ve taken an area of 1300x1500 feet that previously contained 60 single family homes, and increased that to about 135 homes without reducing anyone’s yards and only by shifting them to use a communal garage instead of a private one (which they can now convert their garages into living space and remove their driveways for more yard space!) Or we go from about 800 single family homes per square mile to over 1800 homes per square mile. And this is just unimaginative replacing existing roads with single family homes and not even considering adding any sort of mixed use or multifamily homes1 nor annexing any portion of the existing homes’ 50 foot deep front yards!
If we annex 30 feet existing homes’ 50 foot deep front yard (they still keep their 50 foot deep backyards!) that gives us about 120x1500 feet to redevelop. Lets put a 10 foot wide alleyway on each side in front of the existing homes, drop the shared garages because nobody loses road access, and we’ve got 100x1500 feet to work with, or easily 60 new 50x50 foot plots or 74 40x50 foot plots (240 or 282 homes where there was previously 60, alternatively 3400 or 4000 lots per sq mile up from ~1800 originally)
1. I did calculate out 2900 48 units in the 50x1500 foot space using 100x40 foot quadplexes
Hells yeah! [email protected], [email protected].
That is why MacKenzie Scott is the best living billionaire.
She did just that before all this mess started.
This assumes a single person inherits everything. In reality, it’d be quickly distributed for every billy that dies.
The Adjusters go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr