h a l f b a k e r yThe mutter of invention.
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The odds of a massive meteorite strike wiping out life on the
planet are a bit long but it's not something we should ignore,
long or not if it happened we'll all be dead.
This would be a complete disaster, I'd have no one left to
annoy.
And yet no one appears to have any plans with a reasonable
chance of spotting & stopping such an event. I have the
answer..
Gambling.
If everyone placed a bet for one pound (or your national
equivalent) with any publicly listed commercial gambling
organisation they'll be so worried about the financial loss
they'll incur if it happens that the industry will unite to
establish an organisation to build us a
meteor defense that works so they
never have to pay out on all the
bets.
And with all those bets placed with them they'll have the
money to do it too.
Problem solved.
Now some might suggest this is silly & won't work, because
they know they
won't have to pay out anyway if everyone's dead.
To which I say "piffle".
It's clear corporations (inasmuch as they can be said to think)
just don't think that way, as evidenced by all the companies
driving climate change (& mass extinction through that) in
pursuit of profit that will do them no good (after they've killed
us all), clearly any thoughts of anything other than a very
narrow
definition of the bottom line get lost in translation somewhere
along the way so this should definitely work.
Now if someone can work out what we should bet on
happening to encourage them to deal with the companies
causing climate change we'll be golden.
I'll just be off now, have some shares to buy in LadBrokes..
Idea inspired by a passing comment from [hipppo].
Massive Apocalypse Insurance
Massive_20Apocalypse_20Insurance
[hippo, Mar 23 2018]
Volunteer's dilemma
https://en.wikipedi...lunteer%27s_dilemma
I think this is the link you meant to use [IT] [Skewed, Mar 24 2018]
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Great idea [+]. There is a small danger that these
gambling organisations, instead of grouping together
to build a meteor defence shield instead group
together to build something which will kill all those
people who have placed these bets, in such a way as
to make it look like they died in the meteor impact. |
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Do we detect the merest trace of cynicism in your annotation, [hip] ? |
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You and [Skewed] set up the front company. |
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We prod a large non-extinction orbital body onto an intercept trajectory. |
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You announce the winner of the lottery - it doesn't need to be rigged - and then we tweak the path so that, guess what ? The winner gets vapourized before they can claim. |
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You just need to draft the T&C's so that the ticket isn't transferable, thus there's no inheritance and the pot just keeps getting bigger. |
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We'll take a 70% cut as after all we're doing all the work shoving space rocks around. |
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//and then we tweak the path so that, guess what ? The
winner gets vapourized before they can claim.// Yeah,
that's what they always say. Remember that tropical
paradise of Tua-Tua? No, exactly. |
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//expensive// the point (well.. one of them, if you can
actually call any of them points) is kind of that it's only £1,
so where on earth do you live where that's expensive [IT]? |
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I need to know so I can pop over with a tenner & buy up all
your local real-estate, I've a yen to be a slum landlord :) |
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One Japanese Yen is equivalent to about 0.67 British pence. So if you're prepared to spend ten quid, that's acutally 1500 Yens, suggesting that you're quite keen on the project. |
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As to property prices, anecdotal evidence suggests that [IT] occupies an abandoned section of sewage outfall pipe somewhere on the periphery of Docklands, thus placing it in the "premium executive residence" category. |
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Shush [IT], stop trying to put people off, just go with it, buy
some shares in LadBrokes & encourage everyone else to bet
their £1 like me :P |
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He'll be too busy greeting passers-by with his time-honoured cry of "Spare a pound for an cup of tea, sorry I mean an integrated planetary meteorite defence system, Guv ?" |
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Does it add up sufficiently to finance the purchase of, for example, a second cup of tea ? |
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[Ian] I think you might like this [link], Volunteer's dilemma,
probably what you where really looking for before. |
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Of course
to model the game for what you really want to say we need
modify it a touch.. a specific number of calls ("bets") have
to be made before the payoff is received & each individual
can make as many calls ("bets") as they want, that should
do it I think. |
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Does not that represent a dangerous level of escalation in tea-production capabilitity ? |
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What exactly are your intentions ? There are UN conventions regarding Weapons of Mass Tea Production, and you shoud respect them. Have you no shame ? What are you going to do with all that hot, freshly-brewed tea ? |
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Think of the children .... |
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