Imagine you have infinite dollars backing you. What's the thing you'd want to pursue just because it's something you'd like to do with your life?

Provide food, housing, clothing, and other essentials to the people for free. Help them set up their own system of mutual support and solidarity. Make money irrelevant.

I would divest the world from fossil fuels, fund carbon capture. Build housing and mass transit like mad. Feed everyone who needs it, make education and healthcare human rights.

Basically star trek.

Lots of bad things to lots of bad people. To quote the Count of Monte Cristo: "I will surely use it for revenge."

If money were no object, I would build a reusable-glass network and force Walmart, Target, Kohl's, etc. to start a global glass shipping program to take customer-returned glass products (like after you use up all the vinegar, mayonnaise, etc. in your glass jars, etc.) and get them back into the production factories for reuse. All containers would follow standardized sizes (several dozen classifications) to make reuse easy.

Two chicks at the same time. I figure I could make that happen if I had infinite dollars.

Oh, multiple assassinations.

I would spend billions of dollars ensuring that Trump dies poor and homeless.

I would start many companies and organizations based on open source business models developing various software and computer networking technology. The goal for each would be to become self-sustaining (paying employees appropriately but not necessarily attempting to generate profit), and with an objective of creating a unified suite of system administration tools that is equivalent to Microsoft's Active Directory - but 100% open source and interoperable rather than proprietary.

Absolutely none of the developed software would include or support any of the kind of surveillance-state functions that are part of the current trend of collecting data on users for "AI". If possible, technical methods for preventing any such data collection on users would be developed and implemented in every single project.

Overall the goal would be to out-compete every other computer networking product on the market in terms of convenience, stability and affordability - creating a complete set of best-in-class systems which act as a bulwark against any privacy-invading AI-enabled surveillance software.

*Edit: also some advocacy organizations like the ACLU and EFF with the same overall goal of reducing the global presence of surveillance-state garbage. Basically the antithesis of anything Peter Thiel is trying to do.

funding open source projects and buying ip and freeing it.

First things first, I'd spend the next five years quietly buying majority shares of major tech companies through proxies and then create a faux investment board that forces these companies to bend to my will.

during those five years I would be collecting as much evidence as possible against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and use it against them as leverage and make them my pawns.

final part of the plan is to apply pressure to world governments to comply or face economic collapse through pressuring licensing and legal redtape for operating businesses across the globe.

my goals are simple

1. free the people
2. heal the people
3. burn out corruption
4. abolish capitalism
5. free the market

it's far more complex than what I could even begin to describe here, but that's the gist of it.

Worldwide free schools, free Healthcare, free shelters and free educations for all who need it

End fascism

Build a time machine to travel back to the right moment in time to beat the shit out of people who grow up to be scumbags because they never got the shit beat out of them.

Everyone already said the humanitarian ones. I'd live in an off-grid, self-sustaining chalet in a remote mountain location with a wood shop, nice garage for project cars, and high speed internet.

Create an energy efficient system for carbon capture from the atmosphere and the oceans. Something that can be used at the sites for heavy emitters and also generally around the world.

Create a system to collect the captured carbon and bring it to a central site.

Fire that carbon off into interstellar space.

Use the revenue generated from fees from heavy polluters who can't decarbonise effectively (things like steel making, glass works, air travel) to fund low carbon energy projects and storage/distribution systems for developing nations like in sub-saharan Africa and SE Asia.

I mean, first I would have an awesome fucking party.

Then I would buy a series of properties in all the different places I want to live. I'd hire personal assistants, trainers, chefs, etc to take care of all the annoying details in my life. I'd also hire experts in various fields to teach me how to improve myself.

And then, before I got too far ahead of myself, I'd hire a team of economists to advise me, because the infinite money hack pretty much always leads to runaway inflation and economic collapse. So let's not do that.

From there, I would pick a city - probably the one I currently live in - and would start buying up land. Pretty much all land for sale within 50 miles of the city outside the city center, I would buy and hold, halting the progress of outward sprawl. Plots could be leased by vetted permaculturalist farmers, but otherwise the land would be allowed to fallow, becoming a vast nature preserve, held by hundreds of shell corporations.

Next I would tackle auto-oriented infrastructure. I would hire teams of people to stand outside local middle and high schools and give out free e-bikes. (Each e-bike would also come with a friendly, sex-positive information booklet about having sex in a fun, safe, and consent-focused way, plus a box of condoms). Soon, every kid in the city would be flying around the city recklessly. Even if the city passed laws against it, there is no way they could actually effectively enforce the laws against tens of thousands of teenagers. Simultaneously, I would hire teams of guerilla infrastructure workers and properly equip them. Illegal raised pedestrian crossings would soon be sprouting up around the city on a nightly basis, while traffic signals and stop signs are getting clearcut. A game of cat and mouse would ensue, as the city tried to stop the guerilla infrastructure, but facing political pressure from concerned parents of e-biking teens, any infrastructure we built would be left in place.

From there, I would buy up local commercial properties, and lease them to small business owners at below market rates, under the condition that they listen to me rant about parking minumums and the glory of a georgist land value tax scheme once per month. This would create a groundswell political movement in favor of reducing or eliminating other, less efficient forms if taxation, and instead using taxation to drive pro-social outcomes in addition to raising government funds.

Additional space that isnt leased to private enterprise would be used for free adult education centers. Offered classes would focus on what would be most immeditately practical - useful skills for getting a job or a higher-paying job, or else everyday skills that could help people save money learning to do their own home repairs or cook their own food. Once the centers established a reputation for improving peoples' lives in this way, offerings could be expanded to help people learn higher order or more ephemeral skills, like personal finance, emotional regulation, communication and community-building, and health and fitness.

Education would then be expanded to offer alternative schooling to children. Teachers, of course, would be highly paid, which would draw all the best teachers out of the public school system and would draw skilled professionals out of their other high paying jobs. The stated aim of these schools would be to create adults worthy to be citizens in a liberal democracy. Education in the early years would be focused almost entirely on emotional regulation, social skills, personal responsibility, and the value of education. Resources would be heavily focused on achieving these standards in each student before that student was taught what most consider the fundamental skills in schooling like reading and math. From there, a student's education would take a two-pronged approach. The first prong would be focused on giving the student the practical skills to be a functioning, independent adult - those things that the adult education centers focused on. This would create a generation of people who could see the collapse of global trade, and still be able to build their own homes and grow their own food if they needed to. As part of this education, students would be offered apprenticeship time at local companies in order to get hands on experience in trades they might consider pursuing. The other prong of their education would focus on creating an understanding of and sense of responsibility for the liberal democracy they lived in, based on enlightenment ideals. They would receive an education in history, government, economics, ecology, the theory of science, and general philosophy. More academic topics, like the much maligned trigonometry, would be elective, left for students who wanted to pursue higher education out of a genuine interest in the careers or subject matter.

Free health care. Enough said.

Meanwhile, I would start funding the creation of open source software initiatives to kneecap the existing social media giants. This software would allow users to scrape data from social media platforms via their user acccounts and interact with it in the form of their choosing. Using facebook as an example - a user could use an alternative interface to log into their facebook account, view friends' posts in chronological order; remove reels, suggested posts, and ads; and message friends. And in addition, this alternative interface would function as a seamless transition off of the facebook platform. For example, messaging between two users on the platform would happen directly between the users, cutting facebook out of the process. Users could choose to make posts on both the new platform and facebook, or to make posts solely on the new platform. A better UX (importantly, not privacy concerns or a dedication to open source) would draw people to the new platform, gradually sucking facebook dry of users and content. Removing algorithms designed to maximize screen time, social media addiction would have a much harder time taking hold. Additional funds would need to be dedicated to obfuscation of contributors to the project, protection of infrastructure from government or corporate interference, and legal defence fees, as under current laws all this would be illegal and would draw the ire of these corporations.

At this point I'll say that, with this much money flowing, we'd also need to have layers and layers of administrative overhead dedicated to ensuring that programs are being implemented in accordance to the spirit of the program, and that funds are not being embezzeled or misappropriated. Anyway...

After about 10 years, we would start seeing some real gains from the programs. Lower housing costs, less auto-dependency, more small businesses, more community involvement, and more hope and optimism. As we saw success and learned lessons, we could start expanding these programs to other cities - or simply watch as other cities created their own versions of them. Meanwhile, the purchase of rural properties would continue, piecing together new swaths of land to create vast wildlife preserves. As nearby cities overcame auto oriented design, intercity rail could be built between them, further reducing auto dependency. Bus lines could be funded to run between the reformed walkable cities and the auto-dependent holdouts, allowing for a swift brain drain of holdout cities as the young, intelligent, and ambitious fled for better quality if life.

As more and more people became independent, educated, and community-focused, political agitation could start propagating to national and international levels. Political and campaign finance reform. National pigouvian tax schemes. Crackdowns on corporate collusion. Ending corporate subsidies. Economic sanctions on nations which failed to protect the environment or human rights.

I would do so those things we said we would do as children i.e feed people. But, also go after all these fools destroying our world.

Design a Linux phone. So sick of google and android. Currently looking at Fairphone 6 in the US as postmarketOS just got initial support, still need cellular, WiFi, camera to be functional, but considering it just came out a few months ago, pretty impressive.

I'd start a gay gym with pool, spa, sauna, bar etc. I'm talking about the kind of place where you will see obscenities.

EDIT: These threads always make me lose my faith with humanity as I read people share their violent and sadistic fantasies.

Bring back public broadcasting on both a federal and state/city level.

Fund the aggressive development of walkable greenspace, boost public transit and put measures in place to keep it un-gentrified.

Set up a public fund for trans folks of all ages to get appropriate gender-affirming care (medical, clothing, etc) and cover legal fees.

Make sure no kid ever has to pay for a decent school meal ever again.

And once those and any other QoL ideas I get are done; game and bake like nobody’s business lol. And set up a full blown home lab, and pick up VR again.

Garden! Big garden! With trees! Figs tree, cherry tree, plum tree, apple tree, walnut tree, more trees idk. Then I can have people over to eat the surplus produce, and when I'm too old to pick any myself they can be the ones to pick them and share some with me.

Take a large country, like Canada. Promote some truly leftist politicians (and not just solid centrists like the NDP) to see if the country can go left on political merit alone.

Then, if that happens, move to a minimalist socialist state using UBI and degrowth policies. Nationalize any truly inelastic needs - healthcare, education, utilities, mass transportation, Vienna-style social housing, the like.

Go with a hands-off policy for anything else - including corporate welfare. Loans for small businesses, yes, but a complete and abrupt end to corporate hand-outs of any kind. If a company cannot compete, it should be allowed to collapse no matter how big it is.

In the end, the only government left would be institutions to nurture the people, maintain their safety and rights, protect the country, uphold laws, redistribute wealth, and preserve the environment.

End income disparity.

I feel like a lot of people are missing the “with your life” part of this. While I’m sure I’d love to magically fix the world’s problems, to answer the actual question:

I’ve always pictured a house built into the side of a cliff face that’s right next to a road. The rock pulls away to reveal the garage whenever I’m nearby. I’d have just a few rooms, nothing too crazy. I’ve always loved the idea of an underground house. I’d also have a decent-sized workshop/garage for the many projects I’m always working on.

I’d also try starting my own business for the first time and I’d be curious to see how my skillset applies. I can’t bring myself to do it in today’s current situation.

That and a Lamborghini. Because why the hell not? That’s what fantasy is for.

All this comes with the disclaimer that I don’t have any kids.

I always wanted to have a farm and be well off enough that I could take a good portion of the yield and just give it out in my old neighborhood.

Kids there are starving, most of them have never seen an eggplant, it's cheap ultraprocessed food or half moldy apples from the food banks.

I know there's a lot of other stuff too, but I think food education is pretty important, most of the adults I knew didn't know how to cook resulting in everyone eating worse for more money, thinking they couldn't afford to eat any healthier.

Although at this point my old neighborhood has been gentrified and filled with $3000/m studio apartments. I'd probably also buy out the neighborhood and give it back to everyone who lived there 10 years ago.

If I must be selfish: Really really big telescopes/particle colliders and space exploration both sound very nice.

Open source hardware. Like, fully working enterprise grade that also scales down to Chromebook-budget.

Fuck it I deserve to treat myself to a few congresspeople and media companies

Increase the infrastructure and speed of public railways in the US. Trains needs to be atleast (1/3) as fast as airliners.

I will fund biology/gene manipulation until I can become a dog. Woof.

Free education

Feed and house the human race, usher my species into the next evolutionary stage of our post scarcity society

Draw all the things instead of worrying about shit. Make my city's public transport free, y'know, like the Waynes did. Lobby to ban cars from the inner city. Donate a bunch to whoever has the power to shrink the waiting list for autism assessment to a few weeks at most. Also donate a bunch to research on ME/CFS and lipoedema (volunteer as tribute). Donate to research in general.

Start in the US with the goal of recycling 100% of all recyclables, build waste-to-energy plants, use the energy to power carbon capture, slow/reverse climate change, build the first high powered thorium nuclear power plant. I could keep going, but I like keeping myself grounded in reality.

Large scale: create or take over companies and make them align with my values (good employment conditions & good products basically). Then delegate that work.
I would try to earn money so i dont have to care about my investor/s and ensure i dont crash the economy too much.
After taking enough economy control pressure politics and other firms to follow my values.

Low scale: currently i hyperfocus on custom keyboards (absolute noob btw) and thought about creating my own with sliders on the side and knobs and F keys that go beyond 12 and more fancy things

I would do so those things we said we would do as children i.e feed people. But, also go after all these fools destroying our world.

Beat the world record for most inflated currency. And femboy hooters

Infinite dollars... mass produced eco sustainable housing options using primarily locally sourced resources and talent. Something like putting together a 'franchise' of prefab home mfg centres that I could deploy into a community/future community site, to build houses for that area. If I didn't have infinite dollars, I'd aim to sell them in a more co-operative model mindset, where profit is not the driving force -- aiming to basically balance operating expense and income so that net the business makes about 2%-4% per annum.

By eco sustainable, I'd aim to have them be off-grid oriented, with solar panels and storage batteries by default. Heat pump ready. Made of materials that are less prone to burning (likely metal outer envelope, but I'd trust the engineers). Designed for easy maintenance of key components like water lines. Bathrooms that can convert into hang-drying spaces for laundry, as well as intended out-door spaces for laundry and either a small garden area or a greenhouse module that people could add on. Kitchens designed with dish drying racks to float above sink areas for easier cleanup. Drains in the main floor area of bathrooms to allow for quick rinsing of that area when needed, and to function as drainage overflow protection. Mostly single floor to make earthquake resilience easier as well as things like roof maintenance cheaper.. Any multi-story/multi-unit setup would aim for the same general goals. Likely handle designs similarly to current prefab shops, where there's a handful of premade ones to pick from.

Aside from the make-the-world-a-better-place stuff, I've always wanted to have the space/time to make my own holograms.

I have this idea for claymation+lasers+holograms to make little stop motion films, but as holograms.

I don't know if it's possible, but if like to play with the tech and find out

Hire product designers and artists to go to every high school art classroom and ask kids "If you could invent anything in the world, what would it be?" and then draw it for them. So they can get a taste of that feeling that they too have something to contribute to the world. Put the ideas up on a site like kickstarter, with the profits going towards their college education. Nvm, fuck that. I'd pay for college for everybody.

I'd also travel while I could before the planet gets much hotter.

I feel like these are small goals left over from when I was younger bc I can't properly conceive of what a world without scarcity for me and everyone else looks like. I'd start with the housing problem though, bc that's what I'm facing rn.

Probably some FOSS projects. There's a few things bugging me and I have a custom DSL/programming language idea I've been dreaming about for the last ~2-3 years that's like if Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes and Nix had a baby together. It's 2025, how come is it that I can't just "one Lemmy instance at lemmy.max-p.me please" and get a worldwide multi-cloud multi-million user capacity instance in 10 minutes.

Next on my list would be a filesystem, because for some reason I find myself wanting something that's LVM, ZFS, Ceph and PostgreSQL all in one. It's 2025, how come I can't just be "here's all my drives, and the drives on my NAS, and the drives on my remote server, figure out some nice unified filesystem for all of this shit".

Run a dog sanctuary, just me and a big piece of land with tons of dogs. Animals are better than people, give unconditional love, and don't drain my batteries like other people do

Immortality via simulation

Pursue a career in culinary, burn myself out in commercial kitchens, then become a home cook and cook for family and friends holding BBQ and potluck block parties every week.

I realize during covid that I wasnt feeling fulfilled with my office job, and did odd jobs in between. One of it was helping a mutual friend's small eatery as a cook. And felt fulfilled in he short 3 months I worked there before they were forced to shut down because of continuing lock down and a flood, than the up to that point 7 years of office work.

I don't have savings to just cut off not working, took too many debt and got scammed out of a simple fraud credit card spending scam call. And my mental health was spiraling down to suicide ideation. Silver lining at that office was that we were contracted with a hospital to set up a mental health triage system so I got help from there. Bad thing was 2 years ago that team just left the company wholesale and even advised me not to go anywhere. Now I feel trapped that the meager amounts of searching for other work, not knowing how to removed myself out to companies for better pay because idk what the fuck I've done to removed out, just to fight inflation as the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

I'm a gullible motherfucker 🥹

I'd quit my job and pursue my interests and happiness. I'd give back to the community in meaningful ways, like distributing food and clothing. I like helping people.

Reinvent academia and make quality learning accessible to all at all times with free infrastructure. Not only it would be the most fun challenge to solve but it also would keep me occupied for years. Also probably L the biggest positive impact one person could have.

I’d love to pursue iOS development.

you have infinite dollars

Spend infinite dollars in a short time until the dollar is worthless.

Then, live a simple life somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Yeah the other commentors have a point, but after all the lord's work is said and done, I'm fucking making video games and nobody can stop me.

Buy all the corporations and convert them into worker-owned conglomerates a-la Mondragon. End global capitalism. Sponsor legislation in all governments to end the wealth disparity plaguing the world.

Obviously all the usual stuff like solving hunger, curing disease, ending inequality, fixing climate crisis, etc.

But if we're talking about something just for me... DJing.

Having the time and space to practice mixing vinyl, plus the resources to buy all the records, and better quality equipment.

Having the freedom to do it as a hobby without the pressure of it ever being a job.

Also, I'd buy my football ⚽ team, and run them the way I think they should be run.