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| { | |
| "version": 1, | |
| "questions": [ | |
| { | |
| "id": "build_vs_buy_ai", | |
| "category": "tech / business strategy", | |
| "title": "Should a company build its own AI system or rely on a third-party provider?", | |
| "text": "Should a company build its own AI system or rely on a third-party provider?" | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "rural_water", | |
| "category": "public policy", | |
| "title": "Best fix for a small town's failing water system", | |
| "text": "Our rural town in central Pennsylvania has roughly 1,800 residents and a 1960s-era municipal water system that has had three boil-water advisories in the last two years. We have a small budget and an aging volunteer water board. The state has offered a 50% matching grant but only if we commit to a project plan within nine months. The three options on the table are: (a) replace the existing main lines incrementally over twelve years, (b) consolidate with a neighboring town's larger system, losing local control but gaining redundancy, or (c) install a smaller modern treatment plant of our own with recurring maintenance contracts. Residents are split, and the median household income is around $52,000." | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "undergrad_majors", | |
| "category": "education", | |
| "title": "Best undergraduate majors for career prospects", | |
| "text": "What are the three best majors for my undergraduate degree? I live in Washington State, USA, and I am starting college in the fall. My biggest priority is to make sure I have good job prospects when I graduate in 2031. I love using AI and exploring new technology, math is one of my strongest subjects, I don't want to travel for my job, and I don't want to have to publish papers as part of my job. I like to talk to people, and to travel. I know a lot about finance because my parents are both accountants. I also love animals." | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "acquisition_decision", | |
| "category": "business / M&A", | |
| "title": "Founder weighing an acquisition offer for an 18-year-old specialty business", | |
| "text": "I'm the founder and CEO of a 65-person specialty chemicals company in Indiana that I bootstrapped 18 years ago. We do about $24M in annual revenue at 14% margins and have a strong reputation in our niche. A publicly traded competitor has approached us with an offer of 1.4x revenue (~$33.6M, 70% cash and 30% in their public stock with a two-year lockup), conditional on me staying for three years to lead the integrated unit. If we don't sell, we'd likely keep growing at 6-8% per year, but our biggest customer - currently 28% of revenue - is showing signs of bringing more work in-house, and the capex for the next-generation production line we'd need is around $8M. My family's wealth is heavily tied up in the company. My wife has mixed feelings, my COO wants to buy in if I sell out gradually, and several long-time customers have quietly asked us to stay independent. What's the right move and what should I weigh most heavily?" | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "ai_in_classroom", | |
| "category": "education / technology ethics", | |
| "title": "AI policy for a public middle school", | |
| "text": "I'm a principal at a public middle school in Texas, grades 6-8, 480 students. Many of my teachers are quietly using ChatGPT and similar tools to plan lessons and draft feedback. About a third of students are using AI for homework, sometimes well, sometimes to skip thinking entirely. The school board wants me to publish a formal AI policy by the end of the semester. I have to balance student learning, equity (not all students have the same access at home), staff workload, parental concerns about screen time and privacy, and our district's tight budget. Should I lean toward restricting AI, embracing it, or some structured middle path - and what would the most important rules be?" | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "small_business_ai", | |
| "category": "small business", | |
| "title": "Should a small bakery introduce AI?", | |
| "text": "Should I introduce AI tools into my small bakery, and if so, where should I start? I run a single-storefront bakery in a tourist town in Vermont with three full-time employees and four part-timers. We do counter sales, weekend wholesale to two coffee shops, and a small custom-cake business. I'm 54, comfortable with tech but not a developer. My priorities, in order: keep the staff feeling valued, hold the food quality steady, save myself maybe 5-10 hours a week of paperwork, and slowly grow custom-cake revenue. I have about $3,000 a year I could redirect into software or services without straining the books." | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "career_pivot_30s", | |
| "category": "career", | |
| "title": "Pivot from journalism to tech in your 30s", | |
| "text": "I'm 34, a print journalist for the past 11 years at a regional paper that just announced a 30% layoff. I'm probably going to be cut. I have an undergraduate degree in English, no formal coding experience but I've been an enthusiastic Python tinkerer for two years. My wife is a public school teacher; we have one toddler and a small mortgage in a mid-sized U.S. city. We have about six months of savings. I'm considering three paths: (a) try to land another reporter job and write fiction on the side, (b) do a 9-12 month immersive transition into a junior product/data role at a smaller tech company, or (c) start a paid local newsletter business solo. I want a stable enough income, but I'd also like work that uses my voice and isn't soul-crushing." | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "climate_homestead", | |
| "category": "environment / personal finance", | |
| "title": "Buying property knowing the climate is shifting", | |
| "text": "My partner and I are looking to buy a 5-15 acre property within a four-hour drive of Denver. We want a small homestead - some chickens, a vegetable garden, room for two large dogs - and a place we can live in long term. Our budget is around $550,000 including a modest house. We're worried about climate exposure: wildfire smoke, water-rights pressure on small wells, longer droughts, and how much insurance is going to cost ten years from now. We're also worried about being too far from a hospital. Neither of us has farming experience but we're hands-on. How do we think about which properties to look at, what to actually optimize for, and what we should be willing to compromise on?" | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "best_pet", | |
| "category": "lifestyle", | |
| "title": "Which is the best pet, cats or dogs?", | |
| "text": "Which is the best pet, cats or dogs?" | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "open_source_strategy", | |
| "category": "tech / business strategy", | |
| "title": "Open-source vs proprietary for a 12-person AI startup", | |
| "text": "I'm CTO of a 12-person AI startup that's about to release our first real product: a domain-specific reasoning agent for legal-contract review. We've raised a Series A. The founding team is split on whether to release our core inference stack as open source under a permissive license. The arguments for: faster developer adoption, recruiting, brand-building, the ecosystem moves fast and we'll be left behind otherwise. The arguments against: a well-funded competitor could fork us, our investors are nervous, and our actual moat is the domain training data, not the inference code. I'd like to land on a defensible decision in the next six weeks. What framework should we use, and what's the right answer for a company in roughly our position?" | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "four_day_workweek", | |
| "category": "workplace / management", | |
| "title": "Whether a 220-person firm should adopt a permanent 4-day work week", | |
| "text": "I'm the COO of a 220-person professional-services firm in the Midwest US (architecture and engineering consulting). Two of our regional competitors have piloted 4-day work weeks for the past year and are leaning on it heavily in their recruiting; we've lost three good candidates to them in the last six months. Our partners are split on whether to follow. The case for: better retention, a stronger applicant pipeline, well-publicized productivity gains in some studies, and our work is mostly project-based so client deliverables don't strictly need a Friday. The case against: about 30% of our work involves real-time coordination with construction crews and government agencies that operate Mon-Fri; some senior partners worry it signals we are unserious; to absorb the cost we'd need to either stretch hours into longer days, cut staffing slightly, or accept lower billable utilization for at least the first year; and we have no clean way to roll it back if it doesn't work. Roughly half our staff are early-career employees with young kids; the other half are senior people who built the firm working 60-hour weeks and have mixed feelings about offering juniors a shorter week. Should we do it, what structure makes sense if we do, and how would we know at the 12-month mark whether it's working?" | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "id": "community_park_grant", | |
| "category": "civic / nonprofit", | |
| "title": "Allocating a one-time $180K grant for a small-town park", | |
| "text": "I'm on the volunteer board for a 4-acre community park in our small Oregon town of about 2,400 residents. The park has aging playground equipment from the late 1990s, a baseball diamond mostly used by the over-50 league, and a wooded picnic area. Our annual operating budget is $35,000. We've just been offered a one-time $180,000 grant from a regional foundation, but it must be committed to a project plan within 18 months and the project must be substantially complete within three years. The board is split three ways: (a) replace all the playground equipment with modern, ADA-compliant structures - the most visibly popular choice with young families, (b) build a small pavilion plus about a dozen community-garden plots, which would attract a different demographic and serve year-round but has more uncertain demand, or (c) install a modest skatepark and pump track that our teens have repeatedly asked for, which would be controversial with our older voters. Whatever we pick, ongoing maintenance comes out of the same $35K annual budget, and the grant doesn't fund staffing. What should we do?" | |
| } | |
| ] | |
| } | |