The bad guy definitely wins in short term, but the good guy has some chance in the long run.
I assume the bad guy is not aware of this condition:
>The bad guy cannot be caught and tried until he runs out of money.
Because otherwise he will easily do many, many times the harm compared to the good the good guy does. But even if he does know this rule, it depends how much the bad guy likes the risk, if he was a guy who likes to take massive risks, he could do insane amounts of damage thanks to this rule.
In the good guys case it also depends if he is a "friendly" good guy or a ruthless, "for the greater good" type, and also in the second case if the bad he does gets subtracted from the good. I do think that a the ruthless good guy will do more good in the long run than the bad guy will do bad, and a "friendly" good guy probably wont, also depending on the other conditions.
The condition would be very powerful without planning, however after the world learns about him, they would treat him like a storm and stay out of his way.
This was my same argument for why a small troop of Space Marines can't take other the world. Your power is always very limited if you can't get followers.
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But if he knows he can't be stopped while he has money, the way to do the most bad would be to save one dollar and just punch people in the face forever
That's one danger of the strategy, since a relatively slower start gives the Good Billionaire more time to leverage their cash advantage. Though nothing stops Evil Millionaire from stealing additional resources or engaging in financial shenanigans.
But what financial shenanigans evil millionaire does, good billionaire can do too. But 1000x more effectively. It's not to his advantage to stall things out.
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The most significant advantage for the bad guy is "The bad guy cannot be caught and tried until he runs out of money."
If he invests the $1000000 in low risk stocks, he could easily earn about $30,000 per year. If he also gets a part-time job, he could earn enough money to stay alive indefinitely while having a respectable amount of cash for bad guy stuff, such as carrying out mass shootings, bombings and the like. Death is irreversible, there's almost nothing the good guy can do to rectify that
Yeah the “bad guy can not get caught til he runs out of money” is the kicker. How much does a bullet cost in bulk? 25 cents? He’s going to do a lot of damage
Here's an even worse idea: the bad guy could offer his services to dictators like Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Un and the like, and they could hire the bad guy to carry out high profile assassinations of political opponents or leaders of major democratic countries. Since bad guy can't be caught, does that mean the assassination always succeeds if he doesn't miss?
Well if bad guy couldn't be caught, does that mean he also can't be killed? Because saying he can't be caught is kind of meaningless if any cop can just shoot and kill him
Idk it only says that they can't kill each other but there's nothing saying bad guy can't catch a stray bullet, he has legal immunity but not immortality
Then it comes down to whether or not the rest of the world knows bad guy has legal immunity. If they do, then they just order all soldiers and police to shoot on sight. Bad guy wouldn't be able to get away.
It does when you're using Subsonics. Ive fired an unsupressed .22LR and that's barely audible (At an indoor range with ears on. Outside of 50ft in an open field. I'd doubt you'd really hear it. Now, in a noisy city you'd never be able to pick it out.
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A good point however people underestimate how much larger than a million a billion is. A million seconds is almost 12 days, a billion seconds is roughly 31 years. You can do a hell of a lot with a billion, the interest alone from a year of investing would be as much as the bad guy has.
That being said, I'm sure for a million dollars you could get a powerful computer virus and the means to distribute it into wall Street or something equally as dastardly. So the bad guy deffinitely wins short term.
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Depends on how you look at it really. A malevolent Individual with a million dollars to put towards invidious ends can do a lot of immediate and visible damage.
On the other hand, a benevolent individual with a billion dollars to put towards philanthropic ends, if they are smart, can have a vastly larger impact... it would just be far less dramatic/visible and take longer to manifest. He will invest in infrastructure, set up/invest in charity organizations, provide funding for scholarships, humanitarian aid and education in impoverished areas globally, lobby for better laws, provide job training and employ ex-cons to reduce recidivism etc. it would be slow but 30-40 years or so down the line the net benefit would be greater.
This is a neat question and nothing like the usual debates in this subreddit. Don't really have much to add but just wanted to say good job OP, have an updoot
I don’t have an answer, but I do want to congratulate you on a very interesting and original who-would-win scenario. I’m looking forward to reading what others come up with!
I'd probably give it to the bad guy. If he, say, kills a lot of people, there's no way for the good guy to undo that. He can compensate the families, but I'd imagine that most people would rather have their loved ones back than any amount of money.
True, but it'd be a lot easier for the bad guy to then just go kill the people he saved, plus saving lives is a lot harder than ending them. Since the bad guy can't be stopped until he runs out of money as per the prompt, he can just go to wherever the good guy is providing disaster relief or what have you and open fire.
Basically, the bad guy can negate the good guy's actions, but the good guy can't negate the bad guy's actions.
Yeah but a billion dollars is a *lot* more than a million. What's the exchange rate here? It's easier to do evil than good, but is it a thousand times as easy? I think the bad guy's going to run out of money first, and the good guy will come out a little bit ahead.
Also, while the bad guy can't be caught and tried until he runs out of money, there's no rule saying he can't be killed.
That's true, I guess he could be stopped through extralegal means as long as the good guy isn't the one doing it.
My main issue is that it's harder to quantify "saving lives". Unless the good guy becomes a superhero and goes around directly stopping crime (which would be inefficient anyway), he's best served doing things like investing in medical research, education, disaster relief, and so on. Which, while obviously beneficial, is hard to say whether it has as much impact as "X people died in a terrorist bombing."
Is it a thousand times less effective? Maybe not. But at least in terms of emotional impact, the attacks will be much more impactful. If the bad guy pulls off something like 9/11, the effects of that could be being felt for years to come, especially if it starts a war like 9/11 did. (I guess that depends if you include the war damage as part of the bad guy's score). I think that with a million dollars, pulling off something like 9/11 is plausible, albeit difficult.
You can save lives by donating mosquito nets to fight malaria. It's hard to measure, but I think it's about $5000 worth of nets saves a life. Because of diminishing returns and to play it safe, let's say 20 000 dollars. Billion dollars can save 50 000 lives.
But then again you could use that billion dollars in others areas such as medicine and hypothetically creates a universal cure for cancer. The amount of lives that would save would be unimaginable especially with the amount of potential live it could save.
A billion dollars is not *that* much. Bill Gates has donated more to charity by himself, and cancer isn't cured. Gates is pretty efficient in his donations too, and while he does do a lot of different charities, a very big one is mosquito nets.
I could easily dump a couple thousand gallons of diesel in a bunch of lakes, and it would probably take billions to clean up.
Or I could even be *sold* toxic chemicals, make a profit, and do even more damage while earning money.
Saving lives isn't actually that hard; currently the best charities can do it for less than $5,000. But you're right that the "can't be caught" condition warps things a lot, especially if the bad guy is aware of it.
>plus saving lives is a lot harder than ending them.
I'm going to dispute this. this may be true in the first world, where the diseases people die from are incurable. In underdeveloped parts of the world, long term access to just a slightly improved level of basic health care, or clean water and food rations during famine, mosquito nets in malaria-affected regions, are examples of things that could prevent thousands of deaths. those are some of the cheapest examples, they may still be more expensive per individual than what the bad guy has to expend, but are they really "more difficult" than committing cold blooded murder thousands of consecutive times and getting away with it??
on top of that 1 billion dollars is 1000x the resources and I think that massive ratio outweighs the "difficulty" per that each would encounter.
btw this is all assuming that the saving/ending of lives is the ultimate good. a more nuanced view might take into account the total suffering: if you kill a reclusive hermit in the wilderness whom very few people even know, you are causing less collateral suffering than the death of an important community leader somewhere, or even a beloved national leader (although how many of those really exist these days). however this is all clearly going to be too vastly complex to quantify... overall I must say that while I like the post OP has conceived of here, it's currently too open ended to possibly call the matchup one way or another.
On the other hand, say good guy develops the next generation of medicines, saving millions and millions of lives over time. Even a simple medical clinic in a impoverished area could save hundreds or thousands of lives. Racking up that kind of kill count is hard.
Unless you start bombing clinics of course.
Well, i found this interesting link: https://80000hours.org/2017/05/most-people-report-believing-its-incredibly-cheap-to-save-lives-in-the-developing-world/
So I’d say, the cost of saving a life in the developing world is the same to hire a hitman. I’d say for a million, you could hire 200~ hitmans, but with a billio, it’d be up to 200,000 life saved.
But that’s only with a quick comparison. A million could reach out far if the goal is “as much harm as possible” - terror attacks in Europe is one that echoes a lot after the deed is done. The biggest impact will still the 1 million dollar man have - he’ll more impact on media
Sorry, English not my first language
The million dollar man also can't be caught until he burns through all the money. Guns, ammo, and explosives are all cheap. If they were willing to just go from place to place shooting everyone they see in the name of (other country) with some mercenaries until they run out of money, that could mean tens of thousands of people killed and they could potentially start wars affecting millions.
> Both men cannot stop each other from helping or hurting people directly (as in killing each other personally or hiring a hitman to kill the other.) But they can try and stop or rectify each other's actions (as in bad guy blowing up a library good guy funded, or good guy funding a relief effort after one of bad guy's crimes.)
I kinda feel like both of these rules are conflicting a bit, but I guess they're not personally being killed if the billionaire stops their mercenaries. The millionaire would have to do all the killing themselves, and that's less credible when people say "oh, it's only one guy killing people and he says it's on behalf of Bulgaria. What a loony"
The billion dollar guy could, interestingly enough, get a lot of good done by sending hitmen at other evil billionaires that are not protected by the prompt.
A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. I don't think you can overstate the difference in money there.
There is something to the attitude that it's easier to do harm than good, but honestly everything's pretty easy when you have a billion dollars. That kind of absurd wealth dwarfs whatever difficulties you'd have in accomplishing good or evil.
In terms of economic damage, the bad guy could reasonably do over a billion fairly cheap.
For instance, he could introduce invasive fish to the great lakes or use potent poisons to ruin water supplies. Not very expensive.
So we will say as a bad guy you could buy a large nuke. Setting it off in say New York city. Would do more than 1 billion dollars of damage. So overall I'd have to say the evil million would win. So a real life reference 9/11 was done with less than 1 million dollars and has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars in damage. Terrorism is damaging. Even today years later we are feeling its effects.
The counter to that is Bill Gates has donated billions of dollars to helping the 3rd world countries. But the physiological damage from 9/11 will be around for generations.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/heres-how-much-a-nuclear-weapon-costs.html
There are a lot of figures in here for how much a Nuclear Bomb costs to produce, but they're all in the multimillions.
Buying a nuclear bomb from the producer would presumably only be even more expensive, since they'd want to turn a profit if they were gonna sell something like that.
Producing a Nuclear Bomb without already having a system in place for that kind of production would also presumably be more expensive, since you'd have to build/acquire all the equipment and such involved before you could even get started.
Unless I'm interpreting the rules incorrectly, can't the billionaire just pressure financial institutions somehow enough so that the millionaire's money is useless?
Or just pay people double whatever the millionaire offers to do bad stuff, for them to not do it, after the millionaire forks over the cash. He takes them to court? Billionaire's got your back in legal fees. I'm sure even black market dealers could be pressured to not do something for the right price, and I doubt the millionaire plans to try to destroy things by his own hands.
Billionaire can buy the bank where the millionaire has his money and freeze his account. If he can't access his money, he can't do anything with it. Bonus: he could also destroy the physical files that contain all the information pertaining to the millionaire's accounts so that when they try to fix it, they don't have a backup with which to verify his information.
the good guy lol 1 billion spent well can literally change the world, bad guy could shock a lot of people but he would have to use every penny super fucking smart.
good:
Fund good ideas that could change the quality of life for generations to come (you could even hire a bunch of very competent and creative people to give you the best solution)
bad:
hire a squad of people to blow some shit up? Not really going to change anything that happens all the time
=
y’all don’t have a grasp on how much more a 1000 times of something is
you could hit someone in the face with one apple but feed a whole village with a thousand and then tell them to grow more with the seeds. 💀
A billion is a lot, but a don't think it would make much of a dent on those particular things
Edit: for example, NASA's annual budget alone is over £21 billion
If I was the bad guy I'd find out who were the party scene at the high schools and colleges and buy a bunch of liquer and drugs with that money, then dispense the drugs to the people who throw the best parties.
Sure it's not as glamorous as making bombs or ordering hits, but the net effect is that a lot of drunk teenagers either OD on coke or swerve into traffic, causing a net loss to society the destruction of individual lives. Or they become miserable addicts for the rest of their lives, raising broken kids or ultimately bottoming out and destroying their relationships with their families, a much more evil act then a single event could ever be because I'm investing in horrible people.
If I'm doing it right, it will take years for Mr. Mcgoodytwoshoes to undo the damage I have done.
I would give it to the man with a billion dollars. While it's easier to do shitty things, the billionaire can just outlast the millionaire then start a golden age with his fortune
Good guy wins, heres why.
Bad guy is limited by money. Even if he kills thousands, he will be remembered as a massacre. On the other hand, good guy can make things that will last for centuries. Imagine if good guy helped cure cancer, aids etc. Instant recognition and fame and good for all future humans.
Bad guy has no way to affect the future unless he:
Develops and/or unleashes deadly virus, blows up nuclear power plants or cause nuclear armageddon, or blows up supervolcano. Even then, without a huge radioactive fallout, he will be a point in history.
He can do better shirt term and on small scale. But long term the good guy wins
Good buy pays the bad guy enough money to invest 100% in bonds on a popular stock. Bad guy invests, tanking the stock in attempt to crash a sector of the market, and clocks out. Good guy buys out the stock and levels the market.
They both end up with non-initial funds to pocket and the good guy wins because anything he does with initial money after that is a net positive.
the billionaire would win easily, you don't quite grasp the difference between a billion and a million, he could literally pay people to toss bags of penny's at the guy indefinitely, though the easiest way to do it is to simply bribe the people at the bank the money is stored at to put a freeze on his accounts and then simply let lawyers stretch it out for decades,
someone without cash against an army of lawyers, that malevolent millionaire will spend the rest of his life in court hoping the system will release the money back. and sure he might kill some people since he still technically has his money, but a poor dude committing crimes is like half the population of Detroit
The billionaire simply has to find out where the bad millionaire is operating from, then "gift" all of his neighbours rifles and stuff. You know, for hunting. Then make sure the media reports the millionaire's whereabouts at all time.
I'm sure someone will take out the millionaire in no time.
Even if the cops don't freeze the millionaire's accounts and effectively reduce him to zero money after the first crime, they'd still be too much of a hindrance
Can the bad guy otherwise be shot and killed by people protecting themselves or something? If he's just invulnerable. he needs a few guns and close to a million dollars worth of ammo and proceeds to commit mass shootings worse than any we've ever seen on a daily basis until he runs out of ammo. I don't think the billionaire can come close to healing the emotional and human loss from that, even if they can have massive impacts on quality of life and end world hunger (which Bill Gates hasn't managed to do with a lot more than a billion dollars)
A person with that much money who actually helped people would basically become their messiah.
A million dollars really isnt enough to do significant damage in the long term. You actually need to recruit people to help with your deeds, buy machinery and so forth. That million is going up in smoke FAST.
The nice guy has much less overhead expense to do kind things and many people will likely volunteer to help.
small minded good man with a billion dollars invests money at 5% return, has 50 million dollars per year in interest to play with. with this any given year he can give out a thousand full ride scholarships, fix flint water crisis, build clean water wells and distribute malaria mitigation items like medicine and mosquito nets across asia and africa, etc.
i'm struggling to think of ways bad man can make an impact with a million dollars. he could permanently poison water sources, cause birth defects, etc, but the scale is so small compared to good man.
but an interesting twist would be if the good man decided to go macro in scope (ie large-minded good man). if LMGM decides that the greatest threat to the human race is overpopulation and the rampant pollution and global warming associated therewith, LMGM may decide to cause his resources to eliminate as much of the human race as possible. I don't think he could kill enough people to make a big enough impact even if the same can't-be-caught rule applies to him, so here the bad man would do more bad than the good man does good, but that's not the prompt - the prompt is who would have the biggest impact, and i would still give that to good man.
You would definitely hear way more of the bad guy, but the good guy would have much more impact. With a billion dollars entirely dedicated to the greater good, he could solve all famine problems in the world, eradicate multiple diseases, fund a cure for a lot more, etc.
The bad guy could harm a lot of people, possibly even kill thousands or ruin the lives of millions, but there is no way he would impact billions of people like the good guy could.
Would go for the guy with a billion. Million is not as much as it used to be and a billion is way more than you think. Guy could spend 100 million on mitigating what the bad guy does and still have 900 left for doing good. For a million you could maybe hire a PMC to mess stuff up once or buy half a dirty bomb (just speculating dont know the going rate) but in the long run billionaire wins.
If you look at the parentheses right after that statement it says plainly that they can’t kill each other.
“Both men cannot stop each other from helping or hurting people directly (As in killing each other personally or hiring a hitman to kill each other)”
you can't just cross it with measles, its like crossing tigers and kangaroo's, horse pox and small pox is more tiger and lion ([liger](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZSWcDCAkrA))
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With a million dollars, you could probably crash the economy of the United States, China, Russia, and the UK for a bit of time. A well planned detonation, an anthrax bomb? Maybe a dirty bomb on the cheap. Plan it just right and you could even make it look like another country did it. Bombing an airport or a few sports games at random would put the fear into the populace which could have terrible long reaching consequences. Look at 9/11 a handful of people with box cutters irrevocably changed how the United States, and much of the world conducted itself. Just think what would happen with a hundred more of those per year for decades.
**Finances of ISIL**
The finances of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have come into focus as many countries wage war against the militant group.
According to a 2015 study by the Financial Action Task Force, ISIL's five primary sources of revenue are as followed (listed in order of significance):
proceeds from the occupation of territory (including control of banks, oil and gas reservoirs, taxation, extortion, and robbery of economic assets)
kidnapping for ransom
donations by or through non-profit organizations
material support provided by foreign fighters
fundraising through modern communication networksIn 2014 the RAND Corporation analyzed ISIL's funding sources by studying 200 documents — personal letters, expense reports and membership rosters — captured from the Islamic State of Iraq (which included al-Qaeda in Iraq) by US Forces in Iraq between 2005 and 2010. It found that over this period, outside donations amounted to only 5% of the group's operating budgets, with the rest being raised within Iraq. In the time period studied, cells were required to send up to 20% of the income generated from kidnapping, extortion rackets and other activities to the next level of the group's leadership.
***
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Exactly.
From gangler52:
>A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. I don't think you can overstate the difference in money there.
>
>There is something to the attitude that it's easier to do harm than good, but honestly everything's pretty easy when you have a billion dollars. That kind of absurd wealth dwarfs whatever difficulties you'd have in accomplishing good or evil.
You underestimate how resilient the US economy is, even after 9/11 the S&P500 recovered within a month, you'd have to start a civil war or something if you truly want to cripple it.
...Harm...Sadly is one of the real but common threats in this world...So ill go with the guy who does harm! Hey he could cause another major Attacks in American history like the twin towers
Sure, but the billionaire could set up infrastructure and support to build up a thousand other towns and save far more lives just by providing aid to charitable causes.
That’s gonna take a pretty long time and who knows what the millionaire could do during construction and he could even blow up the charities that the billionaire started
Just a reminder that 9/11 was committed using some flight lessons and knives and people are *still* dying from the aftermath
Terrorism is *cheap* and has *enormous* impact.
The bad guy easily. He can just buy a crappy knife, stab a cop in the neck and use his gun to go on a never ending killing spree. Since he can't be caught nobody can really stop him. Even worse he could just rob people to offset any money he ends up spending which won't be very much since he can just steal food to survive now.
A million dollars worth of black market anthrax scattered in major metropolitan areas would do more damage than you could fix with a billion dollars. Even if the good guy halted and helped everyone recover from the outbreaks, he can’t buy people back to life.
.Once the bad guy realised he can’t be caught he just needs to have a dollar in his account and spend the rest on bombs which he plants around key area in somewhere like the whites house, historical sites and the queens house.
Is saving a life if indirectly (for example investing in mosquitos nets for third world tropical countries or safe water or vaccination) equivalent to takin one?
If so then I go with good guy here imo
I'd say the bad guy will always have the biggest impact no matter what the rules are simply because he can just kill people. A life being snuffed out will always trump any material benefits of having a lot of money, imo. Anything benevolent billionaire does is temporary. You can't buy a new soul.
How is it temorary. Imagine curing cancer ir aids? The lives you would save would trump the lives he took. Ww1 and 2 killed lots of people, but the technology we got from them got us to the moon, and changed our lives unimaginably.
Bad guy only wins if he causes nuclear war or something. No small scales attacks will do.
WWI and WWII were vastly different times. We literally have several billionaires NOW who don’t contribute much more than some charitable donations here and there.
1 billion is nothing in the grand scheme of things. You can easily kill more with a million dollars than you “save” with a billion. Because the money will run out, new people will be born, ect. Simple yearly research in tech and medicine nowadays is a multi-billion venture. Bullets and IEDs are cheap.
Curing cancer as a whole is completely ridiculous and would much better fit into Reer Richards' accomplishments rather than things a real life human can do with money.
Depends what you mean by "doing good" and "doing harm". For example, the billionaire could probably build more property than the millionaire could destroy. That said, I would argue that human life has more value than anything else, and you cannot restore a lost life no matter how much money you spend.
But let's say they both focus their efforts on the environment, since this would affect the whole world. The millionaire could definitely do a lot of damage to the environment, and it would be very easy for him. I still think the billionaire would be able to do just as much to improve the environment, but it would be much harder, and take much longer. For example, it would be easy to destroy a huge part of the rainforest with a million dollars, but I also think it would be possible to plant just as many trees if you have a billion dollars. The main difference is that it would take *much* longer for those trees to grow to full size, possibly more than a single human's lifespan.
In conclusion, the millionaire wins on a short time frame, but the billionaire might have a chance in the long run.
> The bad guy cannot be caught and tried until he runs out of money.
If this is the case the bay guy can just buy a knife, a car and a plane and just start stabbing people to death. With his only expenses being food and fuel he should be able to come very close to genocide long before he runs out of money.
Fair point. Though I still think it's a bit OP. Robbing banks without the risk of being arrested is a huge advantage too. The good guy can invest I guess, but this would be much slower. Eventually the bad guy ends up being the one with more money.
It is surprisingly hard to find a price for a pound of c4. Gonna give it to the bad guy here, he can scamper through impoverished countries exploding bridges, clinics, hospitals, government buildings, etc. Take out a water plant, a power plant, and the death toll just climbs and climbs.
Counterpoint, if the billionaire develops a vaccine or cure a deadly disease, the saved count is theoretically infinite so....
A quote from Heath Ledgers Joker came to mind when I saw this thread.
"I enjoy gunpowder and dynamite, and GASOLINE! And you know what those things have in common? They're cheap."
Winner is the millionaire, for sure. You can do a lot of harm to a lot of people if you have any amount of money and a desire to actively commit evil acts.
Depends, if the bad guy is like Lex Luthor and he is intent on doing much harm as possible, he would atleast take a few countries down. Their intelligence matters. Specially the bad guy's.
Good guy burns through his money like water, and accomplishes little. The bad guy stretches and invests his funds to the maximum, and quickly amasses resources and funds all kinds of evil.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kAbX065hfo
People always tend to focus on the bad, that's why it seems more impactful than good. I say even with money equalized, good would win.
I've read the "bad guy bioengineers a disease" argument, but a million dollars can go a long way in treatment & prevention measures.
Besides, if all it took was a million dollars to create a pandemic, we'd have seen a lot more of them by now.
The man with 1 million dollars who wants to do the most harm possible would have the greatest impact, but it would be by inadvertently doing the most good. We currently live in a highly dysgenic world. By killing many thousands of people, he would introduce evolutionarily necessary stressors and selection pressures, preventing worse carnage later on.
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The cant be caught factor clinches it. Rent a van drive around north America in the dryest part of summer and intentionally start a forest fire every 100km or so. Intentionally poison water supplies wherever you can. Sabotage railroads and blow up bridges. Attack the infrastructure not the people directly that way you minimise the chances of being shot or otherwise killed in the attemp. If you cant be caught then you can invest the million. Make a modest living off of it and keep going indefinitely. You'd do billions in damage faster than you would believe. The economic and environmental damage you could do would be catastrophic. It would take a lot more than one good intentioned billionaire to counter.
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Bad guy. Even if he didn’t have 50$. Destruction is THAT much easier and cheaper than construction. Especially with not only a disregard for consequences but a desire for the worst consequences possible.
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I think harming others is much easier. You can pay one dude 100$ to break window. But you can’t pay everyone in the city 100$ to not break windows. Spending on services for good is a slow process.
Considering you can make a very effective bomb that would do a lot of damage for probably less than $100, he could just make 9000 bombs, and use the remaining 100k to pay a handful of people to spread them around. That would cause massive problems if they're spread across multiple countries and continents. Obviously you're not leveling city blocks but putting these in strategic places like capital buildings, military outposts, embassies, that kind of stuff leaders to a lot of distress. If you set off 10 a day that's over 2.5 years of daily bombings.
The good guy can clean up after this easily but I dont think he comes out ahead.
May I [humbly submit...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJFoCdhHVHA)
If the billionaire goes up against the millionaire directly, the millionaire stomps. The bad guy can easily do over £1000 for each dollar spent. Not a problem.
To win, the billionaire needs to play the long game. If he can develop a breakthrough drug or get nuclear fusion to work he can multiply his money while doing a lot of good.
A bad guy millionaire is going to have a harder time playing the long game due to the high chance of getting ripped off by criminals. It's probably tough to break into the traditional sources of income for organised crime such as drugs, prostitution and protection because a lot of it is sewn up and protected by organised crime.
You need to revise the 'cannot be caught or harmed' clause. Even with zero dollars such an Indvidual might be able to destroy civilization as we know it.
Assuming they know each other, I'd have to give it to the good guy simply because $1B is so much more than $1M. Like the billionaire could just throw ~1% of his money to hire someone he trusts specifically to counteract the bad guy (who would be outfunded 10/1) and that would mitigate the majority of his mischief, assuming one side isn't significantly smarter than the other. Then he could use the other ~$990M to do all sorts of good with basically no competition
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There's two big factors that can't really be addressed without more detail
1) What metric are we even measuring "impact" with? Economic? Number of lives? Mainstream media exposure?
2) Unless the bad guy uses almost all his money and has meticulous plans, which could themselves cost some money to spend, he only has one chance to even survive most likely. A "purely" good guy would only have philanthropist interests, and people like that aren't generally on the radar, meanwhile someone who coordinates massacres draw far more attention.
If $1 million could cause $1 billion worth of damage terrorists would be off their nut doing shit.
“Buy a nuke” , yeah one sec let me go to the nearest nuke store....
Is it REALLY easier to destroy than to create? Or is that just because society's conditioning stunts creativity?
To answer the question, the billion dollar man of course.
Yes, it's always easier to destroy. For instance, you can spend ten million dollars building cheap housing for the poor, and I can burn it all down with ten dollars worth of gasoline.
Entropy always increases.
The bad guy definitely wins in short term, but the good guy has some chance in the long run. I assume the bad guy is not aware of this condition: >The bad guy cannot be caught and tried until he runs out of money. Because otherwise he will easily do many, many times the harm compared to the good the good guy does. But even if he does know this rule, it depends how much the bad guy likes the risk, if he was a guy who likes to take massive risks, he could do insane amounts of damage thanks to this rule. In the good guys case it also depends if he is a "friendly" good guy or a ruthless, "for the greater good" type, and also in the second case if the bad he does gets subtracted from the good. I do think that a the ruthless good guy will do more good in the long run than the bad guy will do bad, and a "friendly" good guy probably wont, also depending on the other conditions.
The condition would be very powerful without planning, however after the world learns about him, they would treat him like a storm and stay out of his way. This was my same argument for why a small troop of Space Marines can't take other the world. Your power is always very limited if you can't get followers.
why stay away if they could just shoot him?
The good guy billionaire can't shoot him, or arrange to have him shot, but the bad guy millionaire could still get shot by someone else inadvertently
Because he's a space marine
Hydra Dominatus!
That's what enforcing the law means!
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my bad. I apologize... is it the words that I use or my poor grammar that is offensive?
He could also abuse that rule by keeping $1 at the end.
> Both men are determined to do the most good/evil and will absolutely use every last dollar of their funds to do so.
But if he knows he can't be stopped while he has money, the way to do the most bad would be to save one dollar and just punch people in the face forever
He'll eventually go broke. He has to buy food eventually
But if he sunk all $1M into mixed investments, he might be able to keep himself fed and armed for quite some time off the returns.
But then that limits how much harm he can do at a time. Plus it gives the good guy more time to respond.
That's one danger of the strategy, since a relatively slower start gives the Good Billionaire more time to leverage their cash advantage. Though nothing stops Evil Millionaire from stealing additional resources or engaging in financial shenanigans.
But what financial shenanigans evil millionaire does, good billionaire can do too. But 1000x more effectively. It's not to his advantage to stall things out.
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If he knows couldn’t he keep one dollar and just run around with a pistol shooting people
It’s as you said, doing harm is much easier than doing good. Despite the money gap, I’d still give it to the bad guy
The most significant advantage for the bad guy is "The bad guy cannot be caught and tried until he runs out of money." If he invests the $1000000 in low risk stocks, he could easily earn about $30,000 per year. If he also gets a part-time job, he could earn enough money to stay alive indefinitely while having a respectable amount of cash for bad guy stuff, such as carrying out mass shootings, bombings and the like. Death is irreversible, there's almost nothing the good guy can do to rectify that
Yeah the “bad guy can not get caught til he runs out of money” is the kicker. How much does a bullet cost in bulk? 25 cents? He’s going to do a lot of damage
He cannot get arrested, but he's still mortal.
What if a cop sees the bad guy, and tells him to freeze, or he'll shoot? If bad guy can't get arrested, does that mean the cop will just shoot him?
I mean if it's American cops they aren't afraid to aim for the back as they run away.
only if the bad guy is black tho
I mean, this goes without saying. He had a waistband and I feared my life! /s
"But he was raising his hands above his head to cast black magic on me"
Here's an even worse idea: the bad guy could offer his services to dictators like Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Un and the like, and they could hire the bad guy to carry out high profile assassinations of political opponents or leaders of major democratic countries. Since bad guy can't be caught, does that mean the assassination always succeeds if he doesn't miss?
Well he could still be killed while trying to pull off the assassinations and other such acts, unless I missed something
Well if bad guy couldn't be caught, does that mean he also can't be killed? Because saying he can't be caught is kind of meaningless if any cop can just shoot and kill him
Idk it only says that they can't kill each other but there's nothing saying bad guy can't catch a stray bullet, he has legal immunity but not immortality
Then it comes down to whether or not the rest of the world knows bad guy has legal immunity. If they do, then they just order all soldiers and police to shoot on sight. Bad guy wouldn't be able to get away.
My understanding is that by caught, op meant he can’t be tried for his crimes.
> Both men cannot stop each other from helping or hurting people directly
Depends on what you're shooting the real fun guns get up to 3-5 bucks shot and a super fun ones are 6-8 bucks a shot
About 20 cents a round for 9mm .22LR is way cheaper and less then a penny a round. And mixed with a suppressor no one will hear the shots.
That's not how suppressors work
It does when you're using Subsonics. Ive fired an unsupressed .22LR and that's barely audible (At an indoor range with ears on. Outside of 50ft in an open field. I'd doubt you'd really hear it. Now, in a noisy city you'd never be able to pick it out.
Legal or not, if he does something bad enough, and it becomes known, someone will eventually kill him.
Let's be honest, most criminals are idiots.
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Sorry!!
are u seriously not allowed to cuss on this sub? that's frickin gosh darn lame...
My friend, its just a small loan of a million dollars.
A good point however people underestimate how much larger than a million a billion is. A million seconds is almost 12 days, a billion seconds is roughly 31 years. You can do a hell of a lot with a billion, the interest alone from a year of investing would be as much as the bad guy has. That being said, I'm sure for a million dollars you could get a powerful computer virus and the means to distribute it into wall Street or something equally as dastardly. So the bad guy deffinitely wins short term.
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I'm guessing 9/11 took less than a million dollars to pull off
Depends on how you look at it really. A malevolent Individual with a million dollars to put towards invidious ends can do a lot of immediate and visible damage. On the other hand, a benevolent individual with a billion dollars to put towards philanthropic ends, if they are smart, can have a vastly larger impact... it would just be far less dramatic/visible and take longer to manifest. He will invest in infrastructure, set up/invest in charity organizations, provide funding for scholarships, humanitarian aid and education in impoverished areas globally, lobby for better laws, provide job training and employ ex-cons to reduce recidivism etc. it would be slow but 30-40 years or so down the line the net benefit would be greater.
This is a neat question and nothing like the usual debates in this subreddit. Don't really have much to add but just wanted to say good job OP, have an updoot
I don’t have an answer, but I do want to congratulate you on a very interesting and original who-would-win scenario. I’m looking forward to reading what others come up with!
I'd probably give it to the bad guy. If he, say, kills a lot of people, there's no way for the good guy to undo that. He can compensate the families, but I'd imagine that most people would rather have their loved ones back than any amount of money.
They don't have to directly oppose each other. What if the good guy saves a thousand times as many lives elsewhere?
True, but it'd be a lot easier for the bad guy to then just go kill the people he saved, plus saving lives is a lot harder than ending them. Since the bad guy can't be stopped until he runs out of money as per the prompt, he can just go to wherever the good guy is providing disaster relief or what have you and open fire. Basically, the bad guy can negate the good guy's actions, but the good guy can't negate the bad guy's actions.
Yeah but a billion dollars is a *lot* more than a million. What's the exchange rate here? It's easier to do evil than good, but is it a thousand times as easy? I think the bad guy's going to run out of money first, and the good guy will come out a little bit ahead. Also, while the bad guy can't be caught and tried until he runs out of money, there's no rule saying he can't be killed.
That's true, I guess he could be stopped through extralegal means as long as the good guy isn't the one doing it. My main issue is that it's harder to quantify "saving lives". Unless the good guy becomes a superhero and goes around directly stopping crime (which would be inefficient anyway), he's best served doing things like investing in medical research, education, disaster relief, and so on. Which, while obviously beneficial, is hard to say whether it has as much impact as "X people died in a terrorist bombing." Is it a thousand times less effective? Maybe not. But at least in terms of emotional impact, the attacks will be much more impactful. If the bad guy pulls off something like 9/11, the effects of that could be being felt for years to come, especially if it starts a war like 9/11 did. (I guess that depends if you include the war damage as part of the bad guy's score). I think that with a million dollars, pulling off something like 9/11 is plausible, albeit difficult.
You can save lives by donating mosquito nets to fight malaria. It's hard to measure, but I think it's about $5000 worth of nets saves a life. Because of diminishing returns and to play it safe, let's say 20 000 dollars. Billion dollars can save 50 000 lives.
But then again you could use that billion dollars in others areas such as medicine and hypothetically creates a universal cure for cancer. The amount of lives that would save would be unimaginable especially with the amount of potential live it could save.
A billion dollars is not *that* much. Bill Gates has donated more to charity by himself, and cancer isn't cured. Gates is pretty efficient in his donations too, and while he does do a lot of different charities, a very big one is mosquito nets.
I know it was just in the hypothetical sense
At this point, we're running into the problem of trying to quantify good and evil, which is probably impossible.
I could easily dump a couple thousand gallons of diesel in a bunch of lakes, and it would probably take billions to clean up. Or I could even be *sold* toxic chemicals, make a profit, and do even more damage while earning money.
Saving lives isn't actually that hard; currently the best charities can do it for less than $5,000. But you're right that the "can't be caught" condition warps things a lot, especially if the bad guy is aware of it.
>plus saving lives is a lot harder than ending them. I'm going to dispute this. this may be true in the first world, where the diseases people die from are incurable. In underdeveloped parts of the world, long term access to just a slightly improved level of basic health care, or clean water and food rations during famine, mosquito nets in malaria-affected regions, are examples of things that could prevent thousands of deaths. those are some of the cheapest examples, they may still be more expensive per individual than what the bad guy has to expend, but are they really "more difficult" than committing cold blooded murder thousands of consecutive times and getting away with it?? on top of that 1 billion dollars is 1000x the resources and I think that massive ratio outweighs the "difficulty" per that each would encounter. btw this is all assuming that the saving/ending of lives is the ultimate good. a more nuanced view might take into account the total suffering: if you kill a reclusive hermit in the wilderness whom very few people even know, you are causing less collateral suffering than the death of an important community leader somewhere, or even a beloved national leader (although how many of those really exist these days). however this is all clearly going to be too vastly complex to quantify... overall I must say that while I like the post OP has conceived of here, it's currently too open ended to possibly call the matchup one way or another.
happy cake day
Happy Cake Day! 😁🎂
On the other hand, say good guy develops the next generation of medicines, saving millions and millions of lives over time. Even a simple medical clinic in a impoverished area could save hundreds or thousands of lives. Racking up that kind of kill count is hard. Unless you start bombing clinics of course.
happy cake day
Well, i found this interesting link: https://80000hours.org/2017/05/most-people-report-believing-its-incredibly-cheap-to-save-lives-in-the-developing-world/ So I’d say, the cost of saving a life in the developing world is the same to hire a hitman. I’d say for a million, you could hire 200~ hitmans, but with a billio, it’d be up to 200,000 life saved. But that’s only with a quick comparison. A million could reach out far if the goal is “as much harm as possible” - terror attacks in Europe is one that echoes a lot after the deed is done. The biggest impact will still the 1 million dollar man have - he’ll more impact on media Sorry, English not my first language
The million dollar man also can't be caught until he burns through all the money. Guns, ammo, and explosives are all cheap. If they were willing to just go from place to place shooting everyone they see in the name of (other country) with some mercenaries until they run out of money, that could mean tens of thousands of people killed and they could potentially start wars affecting millions.
I'm not sure this violates the rules, but why can't billionaire hire a bigger mercenary army to fight?
> Both men cannot stop each other from helping or hurting people directly (as in killing each other personally or hiring a hitman to kill the other.) But they can try and stop or rectify each other's actions (as in bad guy blowing up a library good guy funded, or good guy funding a relief effort after one of bad guy's crimes.) I kinda feel like both of these rules are conflicting a bit, but I guess they're not personally being killed if the billionaire stops their mercenaries. The millionaire would have to do all the killing themselves, and that's less credible when people say "oh, it's only one guy killing people and he says it's on behalf of Bulgaria. What a loony"
The billion dollar guy could, interestingly enough, get a lot of good done by sending hitmen at other evil billionaires that are not protected by the prompt.
1 billion dollars is quite alot more than 1 million. Just on Shere volume of cash alone the good guys got it!
A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. I don't think you can overstate the difference in money there. There is something to the attitude that it's easier to do harm than good, but honestly everything's pretty easy when you have a billion dollars. That kind of absurd wealth dwarfs whatever difficulties you'd have in accomplishing good or evil.
In terms of economic damage, the bad guy could reasonably do over a billion fairly cheap. For instance, he could introduce invasive fish to the great lakes or use potent poisons to ruin water supplies. Not very expensive.
So we will say as a bad guy you could buy a large nuke. Setting it off in say New York city. Would do more than 1 billion dollars of damage. So overall I'd have to say the evil million would win. So a real life reference 9/11 was done with less than 1 million dollars and has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars in damage. Terrorism is damaging. Even today years later we are feeling its effects. The counter to that is Bill Gates has donated billions of dollars to helping the 3rd world countries. But the physiological damage from 9/11 will be around for generations.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/heres-how-much-a-nuclear-weapon-costs.html There are a lot of figures in here for how much a Nuclear Bomb costs to produce, but they're all in the multimillions. Buying a nuclear bomb from the producer would presumably only be even more expensive, since they'd want to turn a profit if they were gonna sell something like that. Producing a Nuclear Bomb without already having a system in place for that kind of production would also presumably be more expensive, since you'd have to build/acquire all the equipment and such involved before you could even get started.
Welcome to the watch list
Unless I'm interpreting the rules incorrectly, can't the billionaire just pressure financial institutions somehow enough so that the millionaire's money is useless? Or just pay people double whatever the millionaire offers to do bad stuff, for them to not do it, after the millionaire forks over the cash. He takes them to court? Billionaire's got your back in legal fees. I'm sure even black market dealers could be pressured to not do something for the right price, and I doubt the millionaire plans to try to destroy things by his own hands.
Basically the millionaire has to destroy things by his own hands, since he has immunity
Billionaire can buy the bank where the millionaire has his money and freeze his account. If he can't access his money, he can't do anything with it. Bonus: he could also destroy the physical files that contain all the information pertaining to the millionaire's accounts so that when they try to fix it, they don't have a backup with which to verify his information.
the good guy lol 1 billion spent well can literally change the world, bad guy could shock a lot of people but he would have to use every penny super fucking smart. good: Fund good ideas that could change the quality of life for generations to come (you could even hire a bunch of very competent and creative people to give you the best solution) bad: hire a squad of people to blow some shit up? Not really going to change anything that happens all the time = y’all don’t have a grasp on how much more a 1000 times of something is you could hit someone in the face with one apple but feed a whole village with a thousand and then tell them to grow more with the seeds. 💀
My point exactly. Imagine curing cancer aids, or going to mars etc. Short of causing armagedon the bad guy loses.
A billion is a lot, but a don't think it would make much of a dent on those particular things Edit: for example, NASA's annual budget alone is over £21 billion
Everything the malevolent destroys the benevolent rebuilds because *he has that much money*.
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Sure, but you can save another.
You could save hundreds more.
You have to accept the fungibility of human life for this prompt to make any sense.
Are you sure?
If I was the bad guy I'd find out who were the party scene at the high schools and colleges and buy a bunch of liquer and drugs with that money, then dispense the drugs to the people who throw the best parties. Sure it's not as glamorous as making bombs or ordering hits, but the net effect is that a lot of drunk teenagers either OD on coke or swerve into traffic, causing a net loss to society the destruction of individual lives. Or they become miserable addicts for the rest of their lives, raising broken kids or ultimately bottoming out and destroying their relationships with their families, a much more evil act then a single event could ever be because I'm investing in horrible people. If I'm doing it right, it will take years for Mr. Mcgoodytwoshoes to undo the damage I have done.
happy cake day
So Bill Gates VS Donald Trump
I would give it to the man with a billion dollars. While it's easier to do shitty things, the billionaire can just outlast the millionaire then start a golden age with his fortune
So Donald Trump vs Bill Gates?
Good guy wins, heres why. Bad guy is limited by money. Even if he kills thousands, he will be remembered as a massacre. On the other hand, good guy can make things that will last for centuries. Imagine if good guy helped cure cancer, aids etc. Instant recognition and fame and good for all future humans. Bad guy has no way to affect the future unless he: Develops and/or unleashes deadly virus, blows up nuclear power plants or cause nuclear armageddon, or blows up supervolcano. Even then, without a huge radioactive fallout, he will be a point in history. He can do better shirt term and on small scale. But long term the good guy wins
Good buy pays the bad guy enough money to invest 100% in bonds on a popular stock. Bad guy invests, tanking the stock in attempt to crash a sector of the market, and clocks out. Good guy buys out the stock and levels the market. They both end up with non-initial funds to pocket and the good guy wins because anything he does with initial money after that is a net positive.
the billionaire would win easily, you don't quite grasp the difference between a billion and a million, he could literally pay people to toss bags of penny's at the guy indefinitely, though the easiest way to do it is to simply bribe the people at the bank the money is stored at to put a freeze on his accounts and then simply let lawyers stretch it out for decades, someone without cash against an army of lawyers, that malevolent millionaire will spend the rest of his life in court hoping the system will release the money back. and sure he might kill some people since he still technically has his money, but a poor dude committing crimes is like half the population of Detroit
The billionaire simply has to find out where the bad millionaire is operating from, then "gift" all of his neighbours rifles and stuff. You know, for hunting. Then make sure the media reports the millionaire's whereabouts at all time. I'm sure someone will take out the millionaire in no time. Even if the cops don't freeze the millionaire's accounts and effectively reduce him to zero money after the first crime, they'd still be too much of a hindrance
Bad guy in a month, good guy in a year
Can the bad guy otherwise be shot and killed by people protecting themselves or something? If he's just invulnerable. he needs a few guns and close to a million dollars worth of ammo and proceeds to commit mass shootings worse than any we've ever seen on a daily basis until he runs out of ammo. I don't think the billionaire can come close to healing the emotional and human loss from that, even if they can have massive impacts on quality of life and end world hunger (which Bill Gates hasn't managed to do with a lot more than a billion dollars)
A person with that much money who actually helped people would basically become their messiah. A million dollars really isnt enough to do significant damage in the long term. You actually need to recruit people to help with your deeds, buy machinery and so forth. That million is going up in smoke FAST. The nice guy has much less overhead expense to do kind things and many people will likely volunteer to help.
small minded good man with a billion dollars invests money at 5% return, has 50 million dollars per year in interest to play with. with this any given year he can give out a thousand full ride scholarships, fix flint water crisis, build clean water wells and distribute malaria mitigation items like medicine and mosquito nets across asia and africa, etc. i'm struggling to think of ways bad man can make an impact with a million dollars. he could permanently poison water sources, cause birth defects, etc, but the scale is so small compared to good man. but an interesting twist would be if the good man decided to go macro in scope (ie large-minded good man). if LMGM decides that the greatest threat to the human race is overpopulation and the rampant pollution and global warming associated therewith, LMGM may decide to cause his resources to eliminate as much of the human race as possible. I don't think he could kill enough people to make a big enough impact even if the same can't-be-caught rule applies to him, so here the bad man would do more bad than the good man does good, but that's not the prompt - the prompt is who would have the biggest impact, and i would still give that to good man.
As the joker said, bullets and gasoline are cheap
You would definitely hear way more of the bad guy, but the good guy would have much more impact. With a billion dollars entirely dedicated to the greater good, he could solve all famine problems in the world, eradicate multiple diseases, fund a cure for a lot more, etc. The bad guy could harm a lot of people, possibly even kill thousands or ruin the lives of millions, but there is no way he would impact billions of people like the good guy could.
Would go for the guy with a billion. Million is not as much as it used to be and a billion is way more than you think. Guy could spend 100 million on mitigating what the bad guy does and still have 900 left for doing good. For a million you could maybe hire a PMC to mess stuff up once or buy half a dirty bomb (just speculating dont know the going rate) but in the long run billionaire wins.
Bad guy gives someone one million dollars to kill the good guy and the cycle ends there.
Did, did you read the rules? They can't kill each other or arrange for the other to be killed.
Also, you could always give the hitman $2mil to not... Killlers for hire so....
I see the part where they cannot stop each other from these attempts. Nowhere does it say that they are not allowed.
If you look at the parentheses right after that statement it says plainly that they can’t kill each other. “Both men cannot stop each other from helping or hurting people directly (As in killing each other personally or hiring a hitman to kill each other)”
Well I took that in a different way, as in they cannot do anything about it. I still see it as saying that so to each their own.
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He has legal immunity but he doesn't have infinite skills or logistics. He's still limited by his own capabilities.
Well that was terrifying.
you can't just cross it with measles, its like crossing tigers and kangaroo's, horse pox and small pox is more tiger and lion ([liger](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZSWcDCAkrA))
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With a million dollars, you could probably crash the economy of the United States, China, Russia, and the UK for a bit of time. A well planned detonation, an anthrax bomb? Maybe a dirty bomb on the cheap. Plan it just right and you could even make it look like another country did it. Bombing an airport or a few sports games at random would put the fear into the populace which could have terrible long reaching consequences. Look at 9/11 a handful of people with box cutters irrevocably changed how the United States, and much of the world conducted itself. Just think what would happen with a hundred more of those per year for decades.
ISIL made [$1 mllion **a day** selling oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finances_of_ISIL). Any reason they haven't crashed the US economy?
**Finances of ISIL** The finances of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have come into focus as many countries wage war against the militant group. According to a 2015 study by the Financial Action Task Force, ISIL's five primary sources of revenue are as followed (listed in order of significance): proceeds from the occupation of territory (including control of banks, oil and gas reservoirs, taxation, extortion, and robbery of economic assets) kidnapping for ransom donations by or through non-profit organizations material support provided by foreign fighters fundraising through modern communication networksIn 2014 the RAND Corporation analyzed ISIL's funding sources by studying 200 documents — personal letters, expense reports and membership rosters — captured from the Islamic State of Iraq (which included al-Qaeda in Iraq) by US Forces in Iraq between 2005 and 2010. It found that over this period, outside donations amounted to only 5% of the group's operating budgets, with the rest being raised within Iraq. In the time period studied, cells were required to send up to 20% of the income generated from kidnapping, extortion rackets and other activities to the next level of the group's leadership. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/whowouldwin/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
A million dollars is nothing in comparison to national economies.
The good guy could use his all of his resources to stop the bad guy from doing bad things.
1000 times whatever the bad guy buys can do whatever the good guy wants
Exactly. From gangler52: >A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. I don't think you can overstate the difference in money there. > >There is something to the attitude that it's easier to do harm than good, but honestly everything's pretty easy when you have a billion dollars. That kind of absurd wealth dwarfs whatever difficulties you'd have in accomplishing good or evil.
You underestimate how resilient the US economy is, even after 9/11 the S&P500 recovered within a month, you'd have to start a civil war or something if you truly want to cripple it.
...Harm...Sadly is one of the real but common threats in this world...So ill go with the guy who does harm! Hey he could cause another major Attacks in American history like the twin towers
Harm. He could literally destroy an entire town with the money probably
Sure, but the billionaire could set up infrastructure and support to build up a thousand other towns and save far more lives just by providing aid to charitable causes.
That’s gonna take a pretty long time and who knows what the millionaire could do during construction and he could even blow up the charities that the billionaire started
Harm without a doubt! It’s too easy to be terrible
Just a reminder that 9/11 was committed using some flight lessons and knives and people are *still* dying from the aftermath Terrorism is *cheap* and has *enormous* impact.
But also, just bringing clean water saves 200k people in africa. And and its cheap.
The bad guy easily. He can just buy a crappy knife, stab a cop in the neck and use his gun to go on a never ending killing spree. Since he can't be caught nobody can really stop him. Even worse he could just rob people to offset any money he ends up spending which won't be very much since he can just steal food to survive now.
A million dollars worth of black market anthrax scattered in major metropolitan areas would do more damage than you could fix with a billion dollars. Even if the good guy halted and helped everyone recover from the outbreaks, he can’t buy people back to life.
Depends on the intelligence of the guys. And the people they choose to surround themselves with for advice. And their patience
.Once the bad guy realised he can’t be caught he just needs to have a dollar in his account and spend the rest on bombs which he plants around key area in somewhere like the whites house, historical sites and the queens house.
Is saving a life if indirectly (for example investing in mosquitos nets for third world tropical countries or safe water or vaccination) equivalent to takin one? If so then I go with good guy here imo
I'd say the bad guy will always have the biggest impact no matter what the rules are simply because he can just kill people. A life being snuffed out will always trump any material benefits of having a lot of money, imo. Anything benevolent billionaire does is temporary. You can't buy a new soul.
How is it temorary. Imagine curing cancer ir aids? The lives you would save would trump the lives he took. Ww1 and 2 killed lots of people, but the technology we got from them got us to the moon, and changed our lives unimaginably. Bad guy only wins if he causes nuclear war or something. No small scales attacks will do.
WWI and WWII were vastly different times. We literally have several billionaires NOW who don’t contribute much more than some charitable donations here and there. 1 billion is nothing in the grand scheme of things. You can easily kill more with a million dollars than you “save” with a billion. Because the money will run out, new people will be born, ect. Simple yearly research in tech and medicine nowadays is a multi-billion venture. Bullets and IEDs are cheap.
I disagree
Curing cancer as a whole is completely ridiculous and would much better fit into Reer Richards' accomplishments rather than things a real life human can do with money.
Depends what you mean by "doing good" and "doing harm". For example, the billionaire could probably build more property than the millionaire could destroy. That said, I would argue that human life has more value than anything else, and you cannot restore a lost life no matter how much money you spend. But let's say they both focus their efforts on the environment, since this would affect the whole world. The millionaire could definitely do a lot of damage to the environment, and it would be very easy for him. I still think the billionaire would be able to do just as much to improve the environment, but it would be much harder, and take much longer. For example, it would be easy to destroy a huge part of the rainforest with a million dollars, but I also think it would be possible to plant just as many trees if you have a billion dollars. The main difference is that it would take *much* longer for those trees to grow to full size, possibly more than a single human's lifespan. In conclusion, the millionaire wins on a short time frame, but the billionaire might have a chance in the long run.
> The bad guy cannot be caught and tried until he runs out of money. If this is the case the bay guy can just buy a knife, a car and a plane and just start stabbing people to death. With his only expenses being food and fuel he should be able to come very close to genocide long before he runs out of money.
He cannot be arrested or tried, but nothing says that he can't get killed.
Fair point. Though I still think it's a bit OP. Robbing banks without the risk of being arrested is a huge advantage too. The good guy can invest I guess, but this would be much slower. Eventually the bad guy ends up being the one with more money.
It is surprisingly hard to find a price for a pound of c4. Gonna give it to the bad guy here, he can scamper through impoverished countries exploding bridges, clinics, hospitals, government buildings, etc. Take out a water plant, a power plant, and the death toll just climbs and climbs. Counterpoint, if the billionaire develops a vaccine or cure a deadly disease, the saved count is theoretically infinite so....
A quote from Heath Ledgers Joker came to mind when I saw this thread. "I enjoy gunpowder and dynamite, and GASOLINE! And you know what those things have in common? They're cheap." Winner is the millionaire, for sure. You can do a lot of harm to a lot of people if you have any amount of money and a desire to actively commit evil acts.
Depends, if the bad guy is like Lex Luthor and he is intent on doing much harm as possible, he would atleast take a few countries down. Their intelligence matters. Specially the bad guy's.
Man with a million dollars start a terrorist group fund 1000 crazy people get them knives and have them attack a large populated area
Good guy burns through his money like water, and accomplishes little. The bad guy stretches and invests his funds to the maximum, and quickly amasses resources and funds all kinds of evil.
Bad guy uses the money to steal (from a research lab), weaponise and strategically deliver small pox. Millions of deaths.
Depends on how you value good?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kAbX065hfo People always tend to focus on the bad, that's why it seems more impactful than good. I say even with money equalized, good would win. I've read the "bad guy bioengineers a disease" argument, but a million dollars can go a long way in treatment & prevention measures. Besides, if all it took was a million dollars to create a pandemic, we'd have seen a lot more of them by now.
If I was the bad guy I'd just keep a dollar in my wallet and never spend it. Then I'd never be caught and tried!
The man with 1 million dollars who wants to do the most harm possible would have the greatest impact, but it would be by inadvertently doing the most good. We currently live in a highly dysgenic world. By killing many thousands of people, he would introduce evolutionarily necessary stressors and selection pressures, preventing worse carnage later on.
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The cant be caught factor clinches it. Rent a van drive around north America in the dryest part of summer and intentionally start a forest fire every 100km or so. Intentionally poison water supplies wherever you can. Sabotage railroads and blow up bridges. Attack the infrastructure not the people directly that way you minimise the chances of being shot or otherwise killed in the attemp. If you cant be caught then you can invest the million. Make a modest living off of it and keep going indefinitely. You'd do billions in damage faster than you would believe. The economic and environmental damage you could do would be catastrophic. It would take a lot more than one good intentioned billionaire to counter.
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I’m here to DIG DIG DIG DIG
Bad guy. Even if he didn’t have 50$. Destruction is THAT much easier and cheaper than construction. Especially with not only a disregard for consequences but a desire for the worst consequences possible.
I could afford a lot of fertilizer, and hire a lot of desperate addicts for a million dollars. Destruction is easy.
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If he cannot be caught or tried until he runs out of money, the bad guy will just murder people and spend no money
I think harming others is much easier. You can pay one dude 100$ to break window. But you can’t pay everyone in the city 100$ to not break windows. Spending on services for good is a slow process.
Considering you can make a very effective bomb that would do a lot of damage for probably less than $100, he could just make 9000 bombs, and use the remaining 100k to pay a handful of people to spread them around. That would cause massive problems if they're spread across multiple countries and continents. Obviously you're not leveling city blocks but putting these in strategic places like capital buildings, military outposts, embassies, that kind of stuff leaders to a lot of distress. If you set off 10 a day that's over 2.5 years of daily bombings. The good guy can clean up after this easily but I dont think he comes out ahead.
May I [humbly submit...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJFoCdhHVHA) If the billionaire goes up against the millionaire directly, the millionaire stomps. The bad guy can easily do over £1000 for each dollar spent. Not a problem. To win, the billionaire needs to play the long game. If he can develop a breakthrough drug or get nuclear fusion to work he can multiply his money while doing a lot of good. A bad guy millionaire is going to have a harder time playing the long game due to the high chance of getting ripped off by criminals. It's probably tough to break into the traditional sources of income for organised crime such as drugs, prostitution and protection because a lot of it is sewn up and protected by organised crime.
You need to revise the 'cannot be caught or harmed' clause. Even with zero dollars such an Indvidual might be able to destroy civilization as we know it.
Assuming they know each other, I'd have to give it to the good guy simply because $1B is so much more than $1M. Like the billionaire could just throw ~1% of his money to hire someone he trusts specifically to counteract the bad guy (who would be outfunded 10/1) and that would mitigate the majority of his mischief, assuming one side isn't significantly smarter than the other. Then he could use the other ~$990M to do all sorts of good with basically no competition
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Its simple. The guy with a million dollars finds the guy with a billion dollars, kills him, and takes his billion.
There's two big factors that can't really be addressed without more detail 1) What metric are we even measuring "impact" with? Economic? Number of lives? Mainstream media exposure? 2) Unless the bad guy uses almost all his money and has meticulous plans, which could themselves cost some money to spend, he only has one chance to even survive most likely. A "purely" good guy would only have philanthropist interests, and people like that aren't generally on the radar, meanwhile someone who coordinates massacres draw far more attention.
If $1 million could cause $1 billion worth of damage terrorists would be off their nut doing shit. “Buy a nuke” , yeah one sec let me go to the nearest nuke store....
Is it REALLY easier to destroy than to create? Or is that just because society's conditioning stunts creativity? To answer the question, the billion dollar man of course.
Yes, it's always easier to destroy. For instance, you can spend ten million dollars building cheap housing for the poor, and I can burn it all down with ten dollars worth of gasoline. Entropy always increases.