No Stupid Questions

Throwing money at a problem works, when you are actually throwing money at the problem and not at a symptom.

For me currently, my car is a good example.

Problem: I need reliable transportation.

My car is almost old enough to vote here in the US and while it has been a reliable ride now things are starting to fail left and right. I could spend money replacing the parts that break as they break. Or I could simply replace the car.

My solution: Just replace the car. More expensive short term, but it'll be cheaper and far less headache long term.

When I lived in a low CoL country, it was pretty convenient to throw money at problems like home maintenance (repairs, cleaning, etc.) instead of doing it yourself. Doing that in a high CoL country isn't feasible long term unless you're rich enough.

Social services. The programs that show that they save money - like rehabilitation instead of prison, that saves 4 dollars for every dollar spent. We should be funding those, but they're not run by private prison companies, so there's no political will to spend the money.

Never, because when the appropriate amount of money is used they don't call it 'throwing money at the problem'. It is a phrase that means something along the same lines as wasting money on a thing instead of doing what is really needed.

It works when money can purchase what is actually needed in detail, and the people on the receiving end are competent.

Hosting email and paying for a spam proxy.

Every moment of every day, money solves peoples problems.
It's kind of amazing how money realy is a problem solving superpower.

Any problem that requires active work to solve will benefit from having money thrown at it. Of course, that's assuming the money is actually going towards solving the problem.

On a large scale, when has it not worked? All examples I can think of it not working tend to be things like a guy trying to fix a problem in his home, by himself, but has no idea how to do things and keeps spending money on better equipment and parts, but still has a problem because he has no ability to use any of them properly.

You put more money into roads, the roads get better.

You put more money into education, children get taught better.

You put more money into war machines, you get shit that can obliterate all the people in a city without destroying the infrastructure.

Throw enough money and THE expert comes to fix the problem.

Like, my fridge is broken – so I hired the entire engineering research and development department at [company] to solve the issue.

Throwing money at the problem works when it's a money problem. It doesn't work when it's a social problem.

The issue is that people think money can fix social problems, it can't. It can sometimes help, but social problems need social solutions.

The issue is most people can't distinguish between money and social problems. Corruption, is not a money problem. Homelessness/drugs, is not a money problem, etc. etc.

Where do you get the 75% useless?

What is a specific situation you've seen where it didn't work?

Serious, not trying to start trouble.

I feel like Tesla and SpaceX are examples. An idiot with a lot of money at the helm that buys top talent and can afford constant failures until success comes through. Tesla is back on the way down now but was a success story for this for a while.

Nuclear bombs, landing on the moon, for two.

I ask myself the same question every time a company raises its prices.

I was redoing the roof on my house, and I had some family over helping me do that.

For context, I live in a geodesic dome home, and so it's not as simple as scrape off old roof, slap on new roof, you also have to account for the angles of the hundreds of triangles that comprise the roof.

Further, instead of using a cedar shake, which was what was already on there, I decided to use an aluminum shake. The main reason was cost. Cedar shake was going to cost about $10 a square foot, whereas aluminum shake only cost me about $1 a square foot.

Even though my home is 2600 square foot and in a normal flat roof house that would mean you would have somewhere between 2600 and 3000 square foot to cover, because it's a dome, it curves, you have a lot more wastage and so I was looking at buying about 4000 square foot of shake.

Going aluminum extended the lifespan of the roof from a 25 year to a 50 year, which is nice, and also cut $30,000 out of the cost.

However...

Once we got the old roof off, my family members decided that they didn't want to do this anymore, and they left.

So I had to, all of a sudden, call around and find someone else to help me install the roof.

You remember that $30,000 I saved buying aluminum shake instead of cedar shake?

That's what it cost for me to get the aluminum shake installed after the old roof had been peeled off, not counting what I paid my family members for the help that they did provide in the interim.

When the problem is lack of money it works everytime.

When the problem is bills.