by danhezee » Sun Aug 19, 2012 8:50 pm
I would set aside $5 million for risk averse bond investments. The returns of that would be more than enough to live comfortably if the rest of my plan fails.
The other $95 million would be use to be as disruptive as possible to the current system. There are two separate companies I would form. A news company and a space company.
I am a space advocate, I believe most of the economic problems the world faces right now and well into the future can be solved with investments in a cis-lunar economic system. What is needed is a catalyst. A venture on a grand scale. One such venture would be powersats. a.k.a space based solar power. It might sound crazy to have solar panels in orbit collecting electricity and beaming it back down to earth. But here on some facts, solar panels are about 15% efficient, meaning they only convert 15% to light to electricity. To do anything meaning you need to build a lot of them, that takes of a lot of space that could be used for something else. On the surface of the earth half of the year you wont be generating any electricity because of the night. We can easily convert 85% of microwaves to electricity. In the right orbit a powersat could generate electricity until the sun explodes. We already generate power for sats in orbit and beam information down to earth. The technology is there, it just needs to be scaled up.
Speaking of scale, the more powersats you produce the more flights to orbit are needed. Which would lower the cost per flight to orbit. Economies of Scale. It would allow for more space ventures to happen, which in turn would lower the cost per flight.
$95 million isnt enough to go into full fledged powersat production, but $50 - $75 million I believe is more than enough to demonstrate a powersat and use that demo as the seed for more financing. That is where the risk is, I could build a fully functional demo and not be able to secure more money.
On to the news venture. I can't stand the media. They go out of your way to distract you with useless stories about celebrities and general fluff. Chances are if you live in a country without state controlled news, you are getting your news from one of six conglomerates. Meaning no one country is better informed than the other. Just to be clear state controlled media sucks too.
Here in the usa, our news media is focused on division. "Come be part of group A we have the answers. Group B duck'em they are destroying everything". Or you could look at like it is a scooby-do mystery. "Group A would have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for that pesky group B". There are people that benefit greatly from this division. They benefit from the celebrity focused fluff that gets reported. These people pay for the advertising. The biggest source of compromise is pleasing the advertisers. The news media treads carefully when there is a story about one of the advertisers including politicians, it is estimated Obama raised over a billion dollars and you can assume Mitt did too. That money goes straight into the media coffers.
I want to build a news organization that is free from the advertising compromise that doesn't focus on the group A or group B meme that is propagated throughout the other media outlets. Also, I want to be able to easily follow the sources of the content from which the report came from. I want to know what poison in the bills about to be passed. I want to know who all the candidates are on a ballet. I want to know what they stand for and their background.
I believe building a news organization that allows users to quickly track down sources allows for transparency. Which leads to trust. We wouldnt be able to bullshit like the current news media does. We would free ourselves from compromise by not advertising but instead allowing users to subscript for a monthly fee. I would invest the reminder of the $95 after the powersat demo to build this news company