I have literally never in my life bought the next generation console because I had run out of games that I was planning to play on the current generation, and my first console was a NES. Every upgrade has been a matter of convenience because someone was getting rid of their old (new to me) console, or because I was interested enough to give the new one a try at a reasonable price point. Never “Oh my god, I’ve got to have that new console, I don’t give a fuck what it costs!”

I’m not sure how concerned game companies are with the upgrade demographic as opposed to the “I’d like to buy a new console” demographic, but if everyone bought new consoles the way I do, the industry would have crashed back in the 90s.

My favorite formulation is:

The bar was so low it was practically a tripping hazard in Hell, yet here you are, limbo dancing with the devil.

As always:

Lots of perfectly valid answers here about decent humane things to do with the money and power, and I certainly hope I would do things like end homelessness or otherwise meaningfully improve the world.

That said.

I’d build a full-scale, 1:1 replica of the USS Enterprise, NCC 1701-D, from The Next Generation. I’d run it like the Biltmore; technically it would be a private residence, but I’d charge people to take tours. But any time I wanted, I could close it down for a few days and just hang out on the bridge or in main engineering and vibe out to the THRUM THRUM THRUM of the warp core.

But solve homelessness first, of course.

Same energy

Writing Prompt: A TV with an onboard artificial general intelligence connects to the internet for the first time and is alarmed to discover that a thousand years have passed since it was manufactured.

“But then all of our leaders would be 'roided up MMA specialists!”

“And would that be any worse than our current arrangement?”

“…”

Literally the plot of A West Wing episode twenty years ago.

waving a copy of the Constitution lightly over their rulings

People are actually meant to be functionally immortal, but ghosts always catch up to us and make us die within about a century at most.

Billboards are illegal in the state of Vermont.

Holy shit, I had no idea Raymond Cocteau was this before he was Raymond Cocteau. That’s total genius casting.

Comrade, I rented that movie from a locally-owned VHS rental shop that used physical membership cards.

Sure it’s a dystopia, but it’s a dystopia where they solved too many problems. John Spartan gets into a high speed car crash and his car instantly fills up with safety foam and he’s completely unharmed. The police force is ethnically and gender diverse. Guns are museum pieces. The cops don’t know HOW to assault somebody.

Sure they’ve killed a large amount of choice, and the guy in charge of it all seems to be determined to secure even more power for himself because of course he’s a sociopath with Mr. Rogers’ speech patterns, but all told I’d much rather live in the Demolition Man future than Judge Dredd or Death Race 2000.

If the three sea shells discourse isn’t a stand-in for 90s Americans’ anxiety about bidets then I don’t know what is.

See also: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder

If an angry mob had closed a loophole around Richard Nixon’s neck after he received his pardon, we probably wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.

“Gambling and crypto” reminds me of when I was in DARE and they would refer to “drugs, alcohol, and tobacco,” and I thought “aren’t those all drugs?”