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[FallacyofUrist]

If you could choose to have a billion dollars added to an unhackable bank account under your name and control, but be forever unable to gain more money in any way, or receive a check for a thousand dollars at the end of every month, which would you choose? Or will you forfeit both options and choose the mystery option?

Spoiler: Mystery Option, Don't Peek, Keep Conversation About It In Spoilers (click to show/hide)

Congrats, your life savings have vanished, and you're forever unable to acquire more money in any way... but you find a pouch full of strange black coins in your pocket. The pouch contains five coins, which everyone considers sufficient payment for any good or service. At the end of every month, a new coin appears in the pouch. The coins only have their magical property in your hands, in the hands of all others, they're just worthless pieces of metal. Once spent, a coin cannot be spent again. The coins don't count as money for the purposes of being "forever unable to acquire more money in any way".

~~~
You've been given governmental command over every nation on Earth, minus seven people who are coming to kill you. The people each possess a different supernatural power. The seven powers they possess are infinite inertia(the ability to completely ignore any amount of kinetic energy), rebellion(the ability to create speeches that cause all those who hear them, minus you, to rebel against government control if they listen for long enough), competence(the ability to instantly become a master at any humanly possible skill), possession(the ability to possess anyone and take complete control over them, and access their memories), reload(the ability to send their mind into their past self, but only up to ten times and up to twenty five hours in the past), replication(the ability to create a clone of their self once per hour, with the clone having all the capabilities of the original minus the ability to make clones), and photomancy(the ability to pull physical objects out of printed photographs, but only once per object). If you manage to kill or permanently incapacitate all seven, you may choose to revert the state of the world to before the challenge begins, and gain two of the powers listed. If you manage to survive for three months, you may choose to revert the state of the world to before the challenge begins.

[Egan_BW]

The thousand. I don't need massive amounts of money to be happy, in fact that would probably be counterproductive. The only reason you'd want that much money is because it makes it easier to earn more money, which is verboten.
And not taking the mystery option, you might have filled it with bees for all I know.

Edit:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yup, that sounds fiddly as fuck.

Abduct the seven's families and find a nice bunker somewhere. Abdicate military control to someone more competent than me. With the following orders.
ID possession. If she shows up anywhere near somebody with real power, engage with extreme prejudice and retire everyone involved.
If Rebellion so much as shows his face in public anywhere, drone strike him with no regard for collateral.
I'll hole up in my bunker with my hostages as well as a crack team of commandos. The stated plan to EVERYONE BUT ME is that the seven go into the bunker and are ambushed by the commandos. The real plan is that the seven inevitably slaughter all of my protectors. I'm in a room with only one entrance, empty except for me and my hostages. I wait beside the door in and stab anyone who enters in the neck with a knife.

[ChairmanPoo]

I went with the mystery option, given that one billion dollars would probably run out faster than one would think, and one thousand dollars every month is frankly small potatoes from my point of view.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So the way I figure out first thing is setting yourself up for survival... which as it turns out itīs easier. Iīm assuming btw that the coins can be exchanged for things you would otherwise be mostly legally able to do for X amount of money (for an arbitrarily large value of X), and not mind control devices EG: I wouldnīt hand a coin to the president of the US in exchange for nuking Floride)
- Set yourself for a permanent all-included suite in a luxury hotel
- Set an account with a good private hospital for all-purpose healthcare in perpetuity.
- Set an account with a local taxi company for transport in perpetuity.

[Egan_BW]

$1000 a month may not be a huge impact, but it's better than nothing. The mystery option maybe well be much, much, much worse than nothing. The thousand is the only option with no capacity to screw you over.

[NRDL]

Thousand seems pretty decent, but it would take a good bit of day to day planning. Is there no way to acquire more money? Like, I'm guessing the prompt would require you to not work or earn your own income from a job, but could you invest the part of the $1000?

[ChairmanPoo]

I read the thousand as "+1000 no strings attached"  ie you can still earn money in other ways.   I went with the mistery option because I'm not as risk averse as some wusses here  Egan is, and 1000 bucks is poo anyway. (And a hypothethical anyway :p ).  And it aint bad at all, imo 

[FallacyofUrist]

Thousand seems pretty decent, but it would take a good bit of day to day planning. Is there no way to acquire more money? Like, I'm guessing the prompt would require you to not work or earn your own income from a job, but could you invest the part of the $1000?

The thousand comes with no strings attached. The billion comes with the string you see. The mystery option comes with the mystery strings.

[Egan_BW]

"No strings" is intrinsically more desirable than "mystery strings", because I have absolutely no idea if the wish giver is going to be a dick.

[NRDL]

Fuck yeah I'll take the extra $1000. As it stands, I could put say half of it in a bank account and use the other half to supplement daily expenses.

[ChairmanPoo]

The trick with the mystery option is that

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

each of those coins equals an arbitrarily large amount of money. Even if you cannot own money directly you can set yourself up for whatever you want through a proxy.  In a year you'd be living like an emperor, and in two years you might *be*
the emperor

[FallacyofUrist]

I'll go ahead and do my own hypotheticals.

Assuming I didn't know what the mystery option is, I'd take the billion. If it's possible to live on fifty thousand dollars a year, my fortune would last me twenty thousand years if I lived off that much per year.  Or I can live on a hundred thousand dollars per year for ten thousand years. Two hundred thousand dollars per year for five thousand years. Four hundred thousand dollars per year for two thousand five hundred years. It goes on and on. Eight hundred thousand dollars a year for one thousand two hundred and fifty years. 1.6 million dollars a year for six hundred and twenty five years. 3.2 million per year for three hundred twelve and a half years. 6.4 million per year for one hundred six and a fourth years. I could live in luxury for that. Assuming inflation doesn't become too much of an issue or we don't develop super anti-aging tech, I'll be fine.

With regards to the mystery option,

Spoiler: Mystery! (click to show/hide)

Yeah, that is the trick. The problem is doing that setting up. Maybe you can purchase indefinite hotel access for an arbitrarily large amount of money, but it might be a bit hard to set that up. The same goes for indefinite food deliveries, indefinite chauffeur service, etc.

With regards to hunting down the seven:

There's no guarantee the seven will value the lives of their families over ending my own life.

Possession and Rebellion are very dangerous for subverting the population, but Photomancy's dangerous in his own way if he manages to get ahold of original photographs of nuclear weapons. Competence can definitely acquire the skills necessary to set one off.

I'd make public all information I had on the seven, and offer massive rewards to those who supply info about their location. Tactical drone strikes do seem like a good idea, they're immune to basically anything the seven can do aside from escaping. As soon as I have a location, missile the heck out of them, prioritizing...

Actually, that's a good hypothetical.
~~~
With regards to the seven enemies described in my earlier hypothetical, how would you rank them on the danger scale?

[Egan_BW]

Possession is stronger than any of the others because she can just take over any of the others and use their powers, in addition to her own.

There's no guarantee the seven will value the lives of their families over ending my own life.

There's no guarantee of anything, but is seems statistically very likely that if the seven are chosen randomly from the population that at least one and probably a lot more of them have valuable loved ones. And if even just one of them does, they'll use that special power of theirs to the fullest to prevent the others from nuking me.
In this light, nuclear weapons aren't actually that big of a threat. Even if they get a picture of an IBCM, they won't have the resources to actually fire it, so it has to be something that they summon at the target location, or delivered by truck or something. And if they somehow succeed in exploding a city or something without vaporizing themselves in the process, the population of earth is now much more motivated to hunt them down than I could ever manage myself.

[FallacyofUrist]

If you knew the apocalypse(via plague) was coming in five years, and could choose seven cities to put under temporal stasis for ten years, which cities would you choose?

[Rockeater]

Probably most populated ones, maybe replace the seventh with the one I am at.

[ChairmanPoo]

Would the stasis spare us?