Telepathy sounds a lot more flexible and generally useful, while still achieving the same main goals (money, power).
I choose time travel.
Nah, you’d always be confused as to what time it is.
And if you don’t speak ancient languages and have a ready stock of ancient money and clothing, you’re pretty much boned. People don’t speak modern English in Ancient Babylon - you’d just be another poor and possibly dangerous barbarian who needs to be killed or enslaved for the common good.
You can make just as much money via telepathy as you can via precog, and it doesn’t come with those pesky visions of future crises. Also, I can turn it off and can focus on particular thoughts as well as I can focus on a particular conversation in a crowd? Hell yes, I am all over that.
I wasn’t planning on going to ancient Babylon. Just jump around within the range of thirty or so years to bugger about in a Marty McFly way.
I voted telepathy, even though this version is particularly watered-down from the traditional comic-style telepath (can’t go through walls? no mental attack powers whatsoever?) compared to the precog.
Why do you want mental attack powers?
Anyway, I specified the no-mindreading-thru-walls bit, along with the can-turn-off-completely bit, so the telepathy wouldn’t be more trouble than it was worth.
Quick question, when you say “broadcast thoughts” does that mean your voice only or can images, smells, tastes, physical sensations also be broadcast?(I guess I’m asking if you can push images so real that the recipient basically hallucinates.) Also the recipient automatically know what’s happening? (I mean seriously you could do some major mischief by simply shaking the hand of some schmuck and then having him think spirits are talking to him for the next hour.)
I would much rather be a precog than a telepath. I don’t want to know what other people are thinking. It freaks me out enough already to think about, for example, how much time that human males apparently think about sex. I don’t really want to have a front-row seat to every guy in the vicinity fantasizing about what he’d like to do to/with the cute 7-11 clerk. This is true even if I can turn it off–if I turn it off most of the time, what’s the point of having it?
That’s facetious, I know, but essentially true. I’d rather try to figure out what my friends are thinking the old-fashioned way.
Precognition, however, could be interesting, and not just because of lottery numbers. I mean, you really can only do that once for a big jackpot or maybe a handful of times for smaller ones before people start getting suspicious.
Re-reading the OP, I see that I wrote that either party can cut off the telepathy at will, so I don’t think that’d work. Anyway, what I had in mind was a telepathic conversation. Charlie Xavier lite, like I said.
Telepathy can be replicated with truly honest conversation and/or cell phones. And people are entitled to their privacy; I’m sure the people here who voted for telepathy wouldn’t steal someone’s diary, would they? If somebody really wants me to know what they think, they can tell me; anything else, I’m probably better off not knowing. Not to mention, reading someone’s mind without their consent creeps uncomfortably close to something like rape for me.
Prognostication it is! Plus, with all my lovely lovely lottery winnings, I can potentially do something about heading off the terrible potential things I see. I get crazy dreams most nights anyway; at least if they were true dreams, I’d have the comfort of knowing I could do something to stop them.
I went with precog, I don’t have to lock myself into more than a couple of minute of future time to amass a fortune nobody can steal from me, I can play super hero with the dreams (or not), and I doubt I’ll be lacking for company without having to use powers on people.
I don’t think you need the words something like in that last sentence.
Besides, for all you know, some of your crazy dreams ARE prophetic, and you are selfishly doing nothing about them. 
But not the dream about that guy from Memphis tracking down the Beastie Boys and feeding them to hyenas. That’s just your paranoia talking. You shouldn’t concern yourself with it all all.
Right, I read the part about they can cut it off at will. However what I’m curious is going into it does the recipient know he can cut it off or would he be stuck in a situation where you could push your voice on him or her and he wouldn’t realize he could cut the conversation and therefore doesn’t?
Definitely neither. I think having either one would make life less fun, like playing a game with cheat codes.
Plus, with telepathy I’d have hard evidence that everyone is indeed thinking what an a-hole I am. That would be depressing.
I choose precog. My moral standards when it comes to privacy would severely limit what I could do with telepathy; whereas I have no moral problems with foreseeing the future. I’m also not very curious about what other people are thinking.
To kill without leaving any evidence behind, even if you and your victim are in front of security cameras and a dozen witnesses. “He just fell over and died”, or “Looks like he just lost control of the car.”
I was specifically asking why MrDibble would want them. He’s a pacifist, I think. Evil applications of telepathy come to me without prompting; that’s what Rhymer means.
That is why upstream I explained I wanted to be able to preserve my image of my friends.
I would rather have a body of friends, and a monthly nightmare than no friends … why would anybody need to be telepathic? I could be solitary and one hell of a card player?
Honestly, I really do not see a good use for telepathy. At least with the precog I could use it to win the uber powerball and have all the money I would ever need.
I have no need to become Cassandra, but could use a little more understanding of what people are thinking around me. It might even make me a better teacher.
Telepathy, because I’m nosy.
The prophetic dreams mean that I wouldn’t take precognition if you paid me. I’d feel a moral obligation to intervene, but I’m a mild-mannered teenage girl who stands five feet tall and couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag. What the hell could I do about preventing violent crime?