44 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's. NIH spends $327 per victim while Americans spend $1,200 per person on alcohol to forget things temporarily.
Think by Numbers runs cost-benefit analyses for a species that spends $604 on weapons for every $1 on clinical trials. We suspect a math error.
The Declaration of Optimization
These governments have enough weapons to end civilization 122 times over. Current military spending is enough money to buy 850 bullets for every person alive every single year. You only need to kill everyone once for everyone to be dead. (I checked.) The remaining murder capacity is sheer waste.
For every 604 dollars they spend on the capacity for orphan manufacturing, they only spend one on clinical trials that might cure the diseases that will slowly torture and brutally murder you and everyone you have ever loved.
Your chance of being killed by a terrorist? 1 in 30 million. Your chance of dying of a disease? 100%.
This is suboptimal.
Posts, Ranked by Extinction-Prevention Potential
Cancer kills 14 times more people than opioids (1 in 7 vs 1 in 96). Media covers opioids wall-to-wall. Cancer gets a 5K run with matching shirts.
Ron Paul proposed $1 trillion cuts. Romney, Gingrich, Cain only $20 billion each. Real inflation 10% not 3.5%. Hidden tax hits hardest.
World GDP is $127.8 trillion divided by 7.3 billion people equals $17,500 each. Happiness maxes out at $75k income. Above that you're just buying stuff, not joy. Economics with spreadsheets.
Gingrich's plan adds $7 trillion to debt while calling himself fiscal conservative—like buying a Ferrari on credit card and negotiating the interest rate.
75% of your DNA is junk that cells photocopy billions of times for absolutely no reason.
First two years Trump stocks up 21%. First two years Obama stocks up 71.2%. That's 3.4x faster. Trump's gain is just 50-year average. Like getting a participation trophy for existing.
Cybercrime costs $10.5 trillion annually—larger than every economy except the US and China. AI will scale this parasitic drain exponentially, creating an "inverse singularity" where evil profit margins attract the smartest minds, while governments waste money on tanks instead of cybersecurity.
Watch humanity's vital signs live. See military spending outpace disease research in real time.
US military spending 1914-2007. Countries spend trillions preparing to kill each other, then kill each other, then prepare again. Beautiful cycle.