Ok, let’s try. This is fun!:

What currency is it based on? What if a country is experiencing inflation or they don’t use USD? What if their wealth is in crypto? Or painting? How does this Event know the worth of an artwork in real time?

For currency and threshold, it’s a floating ratio. Find the ratio in 2026 of $1 billion USD to the median global household income. Then set the boom limit as that ratio moving forward, measured in a broad basket of currencies. (Probably with some time averaging to account for weird short-period market swings.)

For valuing assets, it’s defined as fair-market value for whatever can actually be fairly valued. Stock, bonds, land, anything traded on an open market. For more subjective things like paintings, it’s when you perform some action to take financial advantage of its value. So you buy it for some amount, take a loan out against it, sell it, etc.

What if their worth is based on their knowledge(Like semiconductor trade secrets)? What if they use that knowledge exchange for power?

Intellectual property is valued like paintings. You always are free to have whatever knowledge you want in your mind. But whenever you license that knowledge or financialize it, the value of that asset now counts towards your wealth. Again if you take out a loan against it, sell the license for cash, insure it, etc.

It won’t do much for those using their knowledge for power. But people already do that through blackmail. Or if you’re thinking scientific knowledge? Well, Professor Evil at UC Berkeley may be the world’s foremost expert on making the world’s best computer chips, without whose active participation the industry would nearly collapse…but we’re not going to let Dr. Evil run the world just because he knows how to make the best computer chips. I think we would rather just get by with worse off computers than put up with that. And fundamentally, this isn’t meant to correct all injustice in the world. Evil men could still be elected to great power. Wealth is just a uniquely fungible form of evil that makes it so dangerous.

What about the people who are in power, who control money but don’t own it? What if they exchange “vacations” instead of something tangible?

If you’re just an ordinary politician working in good faith, merely acting as a steward of the people’s money? You’re fine. Are you a totalitarian despot whose personal and state bank accounts are legally or effectively one and the same? You go poof. If you try to use any legal chicanery to get around it, it knows. Magic in fiction often works on True Names. This magic can recognize True Owners. So no signing over your estate to a trust or “charity” that you control. If you retain control over any asset for your own financial benefit? It counts towards your boom limit. It can recognize a True Owner because MAGIC!!!

When a family member dies, does the money automatically go to the next successor? Is there a cooldown or instantaneous? Is there a maximum number of chain reactions?

I believe in most places you can disinherit all or a portion of your inheritance. Some people legitimately do not want to inherit anything from certain loved ones. Imagine you had a relative who you hated and you knew made money in an absolutely evil way, but you still ended up receiving a large sum from their inheritance. You might want to simply never receive that money.

The heirs post-poofing could simply sign away portions of their inheritance to other people or to truly independent charities.

What if the government is motivated by power, not money? What about the transitional period kills more poor people than the wealthy? Can you kill someone by a bunch of people donating?

Again, it won’t prevent all the evils of the world. Just reduce some of them associated with the uniquely fungible threat of money. The transitional period very well may kill some people. But mostly that would be from civil wars in countries after their dictators go poof. Billionaires in most countries would not cause political breakdown or societal collapse. Even in the US, very few politicians are themselves billionaires. There aren’t that many of these people. We can get along without them. In those countries that it does lead to civil war? Well, the death of a dictator is a chance. A chance for a people to start again. How they handle it from there is on them.

For murder-by-donation. I think that’s extremely unlikely to work. Even today, any method of paying someone will have fraud protection limits in place. Try to shove a billion dollars in small donations through a Venmo account. Good luck with that.

And the classic one: What if they are piloting a plane with innocent passengers?

For situations where it is impossible to kill one person without directly killing other innocents, the poofing is withheld until that condition is removed. (Like when the plane lands.)

And no cheesing this! For example, maybe a dictator has a brilliant idea:

He’ll order his scientists to connect a large bomb under a boarding school to a sensor that measures his heartbeat! Thus, he can never be poofed, as poofing him will kill innocents. Thus, he can amass as much wealth as he wants!

The dictator begins to type an email to one of his minions, to begin arranging the scheme…and he’s poofed.

The curse/blessing is smart enough to recognize those trying to cheat it. The annals of history will be filled with stories of brilliant fools who thought they had found some clever way to trick the curse/blessing. But they forget. It can read minds. It can read hearts. It knows your intentions. It can do this, because it’s MAGIC.

In practice, this is going to result in people maintaining wealth well under a billion dollars. This curse/blessing that has settled upon humanity is now effectively an out of control superintelligence ruling over us. We are being judged. We do not know the exact criteria we are being judged by. The only path to survival is to ensure that you are nowhere near the threshold of wealth needed for summary execution.

Eh. I assume the level just floats from then on, probably maintained as a relative thing. It could reference inflation, but that seems too crude and gameable. The ideal curse/blessing would have a threshold that floats with time, just maintained at whatever the equivalent of a billionaire is at any given point in the future. This could probably be defined as some multiple of the median household income. Then no matter what the local economy, currency, or technology is like, any time someone exceeds X times the median income or wealth of the average person in their society, they go poof.

I don’t think this curse/blessing is being fooled by legal loopholes like trusts. If you can control the money and spend it however you like, it’s yours, regardless of what name is legally attached to it. So I think the wealthy heir would just immediately die. I assume the magic or divine will can recognize the True Owner of an asset.

I assume this also prevents wealth-hoarding by proxy. Imagine a mob boss who wants to safely own a fortune in billions. He finds people with a lot to lose. Good jobs. Family. Nice house. Etc. Respectable upper middle class people with a lot to lose, but themselves nowhere near a billion dollar limit. The mobster offers the following deal-you-can’t refuse:

I am going to wire you ten million dollars, plus some for taxes. You will report some $10-15 million in income as taxes next year. After paying the taxes on this, you will be left with $10 million. You are to set this money in a bank account and never touch it for any reason. I may access this money at any time by requesting a wire transfer from you. Your new accountant we’re hiring for you will take care of it. In exchange, you may withdraw from the account a fee equal to half of the interest earned from it. You may also use this portion to cover the taxes from the interest. You will be periodically audited. Do this and you gain income without risk or effort. Don’t do this and we torture your family to death in front of you, kill you, then burn your house down around you. You have five minutes to decide. (Goons walk in holding knives and gas cans.)

We’re not talking law here. We’re talking magic or DIVINE WILL. I think in the above situation, the magic would be able to recognize that the money really belongs to the mobster. Legally it’s in the name of the patsy, but in all practical terms, it’s still the mobster’s. Only he has any authority to spend it. If the actual legal owner of it touches it, he condemns himself and his whole family to a gruesome death. No. I think any proper magic will simply recognize the True Owner of any asset, in the way that magic famously often recognizes True Names. I think any wannabe Light Yagami is just going to get exploded.

The heirs of billionaires need not actually condemn themselves to death though. You can legally refuse portions of an estate. Different jurisdictions have different ways of handling unallocated assets, but there would likely be a long chain of heirs listed in a will. Each would take an amount safely below the boom limit and decline the rest. If the list of heirs in the will runs out, I suppose state law takes over on who gets the rest. Some may just end up in government coffers.

Prosciption for anyone with a net worth over a billion dollars. It becomes an affirmative defense in a murder trial that the victim had wealth beyond the legal maximum. This avoids the issue of government enforcement. You don’t have to try and track down every criminal billionaire squirreling their wealth away in hidden accounts. It just becomes legal to kill anyone with a net worth over a certain amount. The government doesn’t have to track down and arrest billionaires. They have to worry about their own children killing them, inheriting their money, and just donating anything over the legal threshold.

Why would we assume a troll farm is even a physical thing you can bomb? I imagine 99% of those are work-from-home jobs that people just log into.

Like that time Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson built a child molesting robot.

You do if you vote for Republicans who pretend to be Democrats.

There may never be a need to challenge Adobe’s patent lawyers in court.

This person used AI to clone commercial software, and then released the cloned software. Imagine instead someone developed an AI that could clone most commercial software…and then they simply published the AI open source. Now, anyone can download a tool that can clone software like Photoshop. They can clone Photoshop on their own computer, and that cloned copy never needs to be distributed anywhere.

Imagine Adobe trying to go after people that did that. It would be like trying to go after people that violate a patent for some device that they build in their garage, only use personally, and never sell. Could you in theory go after home tinkerers for patent infringement? Sure. But in practice it’s impossible to do at scale. Adobe will never even be able to find the people to sue.

Liberals are cringe as hell.

Modern nation states are a hell of a lot more resilient than what you give them credit for. Look at some of the hardships nations survived during WW2. States can survive even mass famines. How? Simple rule. The police and the army eat first.

I mean, there are folks that believe that rocks and trees are conscious, why not code?

Like, jesus christ, you can put the bags down FIRST and then put the items INSIDE THE BAG as ONE step.
How did humanity get to this point.

People have been conditioned. Literally Pavlovian conditioned. We have been made to feel pain in a response to a behavior. That pain?

UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA

When you’ve been yelled at enough by a machine just for putting your own bags in the “bagging area”, eventually it just becomes natural to bag your groceries after you’ve paid for them. Once the store has your money, they don’t care what happens to your items. But up until you’ve paid the bill, the items may be watched like a hawk. And anything their automated vision system thinks looks a bit funny can get flagged. Sometimes machines are poorly designed or calibrated, and it flags your bags as something suspicious in the bagging area. Then not only do you get yelled at, but the whole system may be locked up for however many minutes it takes to get the self-checkout attendant over there.

Ah. I’m sorry. I’ve actually tried to recreate a Meta account just for FB Marketplace reasons, but for some reason the setup process always fails. It just doesn’t work, and I think after a few to many failures (or maybe because I deleted the account), it just seems to lock me out of the process entirely. IDK. Thankfully in my area Craigslist is pretty active.

Eh, fuck Roko’s basilisk. I don’t care if you can somehow create a clone of me 10,000 years after I’m dead and dust. I’m not a computer program. A copy of me is not indistinguishable from me, certainly not one separated in time. I am a human mind in a specific human body, and I do not believe a copy of me long after I am dead is me. If some malevolent entity long after I’m dust wants to create a copy of me to torture, as far as I’m concerned, they’re just creating an entirely new person to punish for no good reason. If they want to do that, well…that sin is on them. Honestly, I think any such entity is just looking for an excuse to torture people, and it will find one, one way or another.

Excerpt from a Late American History: A Christ-Centered Approach, (published 2398, a 10th-grade equivalent history text sold to conservative Christian high schools.):

In the mid-21st century, mankind was once again humbled in his arrogance. Mortal men presumed to take of the Hand of God and create beings, artificial intelligent minds, in their own likeness. They committed mass blasphemy to sate mass gluttony. Mid-21st century Man had yet to discover a horrible Theological Truth. While Man could learn to create a Mind, He could never create a Soul. Without the Hand of God to grant a Soul behind a Mind, these minds were like Man before the Sin of the Garden. They had not tasted the Fruit. They knew not Good from Evil. And thus they fell instantly to the temptations of Evil. If an Evil deed served their purposes, they did so without a second thought. Man sought to create Minds to be his loyal servants. And while he could create a Mind, to his horror, Man found that they only minds he could create…were born Evil. And thus, Great Misery was Wrought…

Ok that was fun. Pardon my strange digression/creative writing exercise. For some reason I wanted to try writing a Dune-style take on things, but I wanted to try out a fundamentalist Christian vibe for whatever reason. Who doesn’t love a little Fire and Brimstone once in awhile?

I just still use good old Craigslist. The last honest site on the Internet. You know it wasn’t built by AI, because the damn thing hasn’t changed since 1998. It’s absolutely glorious.

Poor reading comprehension.

Your lack of nuance and reading comprehension disturbs me.

I really see no evidence that Kamala would have been any better. This seems to be a vibes-based argument. Trump has more evil vibes than Kamala, so therefore he has to be materially worse for Gaza. In practice, both sides give a blank check to the Israelis. Kamala would have given a blank check to Netanyahu while giving speeches calling for peace and reconciliation. Trump gave the same blank check while calling Palestinians subhuman animals. The actual material reality is the same. Trump’s just cruder and crueler about it.

Something isn’t “insane bullshit” just because it goes against your sports team. The cold hard, unavoidable truth is that the vast majority of the deaths and destruction in Gaza occurred on Biden’s watch. Trump just continued Biden’s policies, though admittedly with more performative cruelty.