A friend was bemoaning (justly) we haven't been dreaming and imagining for a while. I think we've all been kinda head down surviving the winter and *waves hand at everything*
But it's spring now, and time for hope to come back to life at least.
Thusly I present a new tag:
#ifIHadABillionDollars
What would you do with a billion dollars? What would you build, create, solve, cultivate...?
[social cue: this is not the place to rant politics, we've got the rest of the Internet for that]
@vlrny I would also make it my mission to get indoor air quality and legislation about it set up in as many countries as I could.
I would hire a crack legal team to force governments to protect children from repeated COVID infections through school. Because currently, children's right to protection and care is being ignored and they are being forced to spend years in high risk environments that *could* be made significantly safer using current scientific knowledge and readily available products
Similar. Clean indoor air advocacy and public education. "Sick building syndrome" was identified by WHO in the 80s. We've had two generations to get on this.
This coupled with a separate team to push for education of medical professionals on post-viral illness and controlling nosocomial infection. Usia was in midst of a coordinated national effort to eliminate sepsis in hospitals, only for 2020 to interrupt that program. Rebooting that could be a first step to re-figuring medical praxis.
With some reasonable amount set aside to live off of, make whole folk who kept me afloat in past decades, and fund academic scholarships for esoteric nonconventional concerns myself would want future scholars to have to room to explore.
1/2
If somehow the money didn't run out with those efforts (it would, but one can dream), advocacy and public education for modernized, regulated (if not nationalized) freight transport and public intercity rapid transit infrastructure serving the North American interior.
Folk like to point to the movie actor, but much of Usian economic bifurcation, including interior cities losing half their populations (and the civic investment that went with same), while coastal port cities entered permanent housing crisis, begins with deregulation of rail and trucking under his predecessor.
2/2
You perhaps underestimate cultural resistance to change. Or overestimate the power of large number.
My first thought was "How about redistribute it." Then realized that if one billion dollars were split evenly across the entire Usian population, it would amount to less than three dollars a person.
That's the mass that must be moved, against their own inertia, to make any significant alteration to the status quo.
Want to protect kids in schools? Every local community with a school district is gonna have reasons for why maybe someone else can make that happen, but that would just be an insurmountable shift in their own, local, way of doing things.
Of course, it can be done. It requires organizing within 12,500+ local independent school districts, and that doesn't include school districts that are part of a municipal government. Include those and the number is 19,000+. Which means we've got a little more than $50,000 per district to spend.
That will get spent.
@beadsland I don't know enough about the US system. Maybe one could change 20% of the system, then shows how much better that is for some trackable metric that makes a good story?
I know parents of the schools that didn't get the changes would quickly want them too, creating a positive social pressure. Certainly in the communities I have lived in this would drive change. YMMV.
The Usian culture is the bottleneck. Social pressure tends to be of the "That's fine for them, but we have real problems to worry about" variety.
That said, 20% of the system would be $250,000 worth of advocacy per targeted district, which would certainly go further than any mere $50K.
Valerie Roney
GinevraCat
sport of sacred spherical cows