billionaire would hire multiple persons to press the button and give the money to them while paying basically nothing for it.
this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
943 points (98.5% liked)
Comic Strips
23749 readers
898 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
Rules
-
π Be Nice!
- Treat others with respect and dignity. Friendly banter is okay, as long as it is mutual; keyword: friendly.
-
ποΈ Community Standards
- Comics should be a full story, from start to finish, in one post.
- Posts should be safe and enjoyable by the majority of community members, both here on lemmy.world and other instances.
- Any comic that would qualify as raunchy, lewd, or otherwise draw unwanted attention by nosy coworkers, spouses, or family members should be tagged as NSFW.
- Moderators have final say on what and what does not qualify as appropriate. Use common sense, and if need be, err on the side of caution.
-
𧬠Keep it Real
- Comics should be made and posted by real human beans, not by automated means like bots or AI. This is not the community for that sort of thing.
-
π½οΈ Credit Where Credit is Due
- Comics should include the original attribution to the artist(s) involved, and be unmodified. Bonus points if you include a link back to their website. When in doubt, use a reverse image search to try to find the original version. Repeat offenders will have their posts removed, be temporarily banned from posting, or if all else fails, be permanently banned from posting.
- Attributions include, but are not limited to, watermarks, links, or other text or imagery that artists add to their comics to use for identification purposes. If you find a comic without any such markings, it would be a good idea to see if you can find an original version. If one cannot be found, say so and ask the community for help!
-
π Post Formatting
- Post an image, gallery, or link to a specific comic hosted on another site; e.g., the author's website.
- Meta posts about the community should be tagged with [Meta] either at the beginning or the end of the post title.
- When linking to a comic hosted on another site, ensure the link is to the comic itself and not just to the website; e.g.,
β Correct: https://xkcd.com/386/
β Incorrect: https://xkcd.com/
-
π¬ Post Frequency/SPAM
- Each user (regardless of instance) may post up to five (5 π) comics a day. This can be any combination of personal comics you have written yourself, or other author's comics. Any comics exceeding five (5 π) will be removed.
-
π΄ββ οΈ Internationalization (i18n)
- Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
SΓ, por favor [Spanish/EspaΓ±ol]
- Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
-
πΏ Moderation
- We are human, just like most everybody else on Lemmy. If you feel a moderation decision was made in error, you are welcome to reach out to anybody on the moderation team for clarification. Keep in mind that moderation decisions may be final.
- When reporting posts and/or comments, quote which rule is being broken, and why you feel it broke the rules.
Banned Artists
The following artists are banned from the community.
- Jago
- Stonetoss
It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.
Web Accessibility
Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.
When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:
Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)
Web of Links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The more I look at this, the more unhinged it becomes. None of the buttons are organized, the billionaire has a giant toe for a foot, and I keep thinking the billionaire has six fingers instead of five.
Prefect amount of unhingedness. 10/10.
Apologies to all the foot fetishists, I eventually gave up trying and thus have failed you.
Guess I have new anatomy lessons to grind. Shit's hard yo.
You managed to create the most disturbing non-ai foot I've seen today, so that's nice
Love the comics!
AIs have become decent at anatomy these days, haven't they?
That's one job they won't take from us in the long term, finding new ways to mess up drawings. I'm always a step ahead.
AIs have become decent at anatomy these days, haven't they?
Maybe so, I don't really follow that progress
load more comments
(1 replies)
I like that it's not a realistic human foot. Sometimes art should capture the idea of a thing rather than just the superficial image of the thing, you know? It has character.
I'll keep that one in mind, next time someone criticizes my anatomy I'll tell them "son, it has character".
Actually I need to repeat that bit to myself until I am convinced. Feels like a healthy mantra.
next time someone criticizes my anatomy I'll tell them "son, it has character".
load more comments
(5 replies)
Honestly, a billionaire would probably hire people to push the button for them.
They'd minimize explaining what the button does, and then pay them like $100,000 a year to push the button 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Why would they get payed that much? this is unskilled labor, they get minimum wage.
That, or they hire an undocumented immigrant for even less. Extra bonus because they can't read the sign that explains the killing thing.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Exactly, just create the conditions and system so that not pushing the button results in poverty and people will line up to push it
One person would get through 1 billion people in 30 years. It would take 120 people pushing it every second of the year to make it a 50/50 that billionaire is killed.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Billionaire would press the button for 100 bucks, then spend 100 times the amount in a pair of shoes he'll never wear.
You could still not press the button for selfish reasons.
"I'm not pressing it because there is a chance the random person who dies is me."
i mean, give me a 90% chance of kills me and i'm still pressing the button.
Hell, give me a 100% chance. That'd solve more of my problems than any amount of money.
1 in 8 billion is pretty good odds though.
Exactly. Look at the odds of winning the NYS Powerball. 1 in 292,201,338 and I've lost so many lotto tickets. By all rights I should be able to press this button at least 30 times without any fear whatsoever. 100 times is still far below any risk of danger. If I or someone I know were to die after pressing this button 100 times it would be proof that God has a vendetta against me. He would have discarded mathematical probability just to make me suffer.
Depending on how rich you are, $100,000 might do exactly nothing to your lifestyle, but dying would.
Risk reward. Someone with nothing, but living in an extremely low cost of living area, might end up with life changing, never have to work again money (assuming it's able to be used with no loopholes), but a billionaire couldn't even find the change buried in their day to day noise of the market changes.
Once you're a billionaire, no amount of money will impact your lifestyle, but they keep hoarding wealth anyway.
There are people who become billionaires and it's not their fault. They inherited money, or their company explodes and is suddenly worth ungodly money, so I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea that there's no way for a moral person to become a billionaire.
But there's absolutely no moral excuse for remaining a billionaire or seeking additional wealth.
More interesting (and more realistic) if it isn't a guarantee that someone dies if you push the button, but a probability.
Would you push the button if it was a 20% chance someone dies? A 5% chance? A 1% chance? 0.1%? Is there a number where it's ok to push the button? If it was a 0.0001% chance, how many times would you push the button?
Also, does it change things if you know that your button push resulted in someone's death? Is it different if it's someone standing right there? Maybe on the other side of a one-way mirror? What if it's just that you get a green light or a red light after you push the button and you don't have to see someone die or know who died or how they died?
Well, driving to work is basically that. Non zero chance someone dies.
Yeah. Non-zero chance your car's emissions kill someone too.
same could be said about taking a steamy shit on the toilet. 8-10% of all cardiac emergencies happen in the bathroom.
sometimes you get the stinky fudge dragon, other times the stinky fudge dragon gets you.
Though the chance someone other than you dies from you taking a shit is pretty far fetched, and I'm not liking having to try to conceive of how that happens.
But a lot of activities are this way. Getting on a ladder in public could kill someone, just breathing around other people could kill someone, etc etc.
I'd say at sub-0.1% chances of killing someone, I'd press with impunity. At those low probabilities, they've basically just got hit by lightning at the same time I've pressed a random button.
Granted I'd probably only do it whenever the 100K ran out, so once every couple years. Unless my investments die.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Also factor in when they die. Maybe your action results in a demise after a period of time. Lung Cancer won't kill someone right after they puff a cigarette, so the cigarette baron may not consider it his fault in the sort term.
Yeah, that would be an interesting twist. 100% chance that pushing the button kills someone, but it might happen in 2 years or it might happen in 30 years. But, even if someone lives a perfectly normal life for 30 years, their cause of death will be this button.
It isn't the "cigarette baron's" fault any more than the beer baron's fault or the parachute maker's fault. Some people are going to die if they choose to indulge in mildly risky behavior. If the scenario is something like this, everyone here will be pushing that button. Don't say you won't because you will.
The problem with statistics is that 20% of people in a large population absolutely will die. At least in the context of this meme, the statistics used are gathered from real world data - deaths from cancer, lack of treatment, poor working conditions.
load more comments
(1 replies)
You'd have to kill 10,000 people to become a billionaire this way. Obvious fact perhaps, but it's easy to forget how unnecessarily much a billion dollars is.
Even 50million is an extreme amount of money.
Shit, a couple hundred grand is life changing for most people.
You'd have to kill 10,000 people to become a billionaire
You could have just stopped there.
It'd probably still be true, recognizing that billionaires tend to indirectly kill at least that many just from the artificial scarcity required for their hoarding of resources and THEN you add the direct results of their specific actions..
load more comments
(1 replies)
one of the better episodes of the 80s Twilight Zone "Button, Button"
$100,000 could easily be used to save ~20 people from death. I'd press at least like 40 times and donate half to charities that save people from easily preventable diseases and shit in developing countries. Use some to buy a house for me and a house for my mom and then put the rest in various accounts where I and my mom could live off the interest for the rest of our lives.
He can afford foreshortening and detailed hands, in a stickman worldβ½ His greed sickens me.
I would press it at least ten times. A hundred times would also be tempting. There are eight billion people in the world. Chances are I won't know anyone who dies.
the next person who gets to press the button doesnt know you either, thats the trick
And even if you know them, once you reach a certain amount of money you won't care anymore about the serfs.
I'd hope it would take a lot more than $100,000 for most people. That won't even get you a house.
load more comments
(2 replies)
hundred thousand? naw.
hundred million. sure. I could actually do some good for the world with that.
I would troll the fuckin shit out of billionaires and shitty corpofascist with every penny.
Think about how much more you could troll them if you turned that into a billion! Besides, you've got bills to pay. And these taxes are obscene, that money has already been taxed a thousand times! You've taken on quite the burden and deserve to live a little.
view more: next βΊ