Spyke
Boo
lemmy.dbzer0.com

I'd be willing to linearly downscale.

I am sure that for me 3 Million is more than i could ever reasonably spend for the rest of my life.

So with 8760 hours in a year, that would be like 53 Minutes. You know what, make it a full hour.

230

This comment exposes how wrong it actually is, that we allow individuals to become billionaires..

164
Avicennareply
lemmy.world

Came here to say that. 30 billion is a stupid amount of money. If down scaling is an option, anyone who considers doing it for a year (for personally owning all the money) is mentally ill.

57
piefed.social

Why?

Shouldn't everyone feel morally responsible for receiving the maximum reward so that they can personally distribute those funds amongst as many people as possible? The other guy is fine with just 3m, so one year of your life apparently could provide 9999 other people with a life of never having to work again.

15
Avicennareply
lemmy.world

That is why I said (for personally owning all the money). If someone is selfless enough to spend one year in an insane room so they can give away the money to others, kudos to that person.

21
lemmy.world

I wonder if they’d still want to do it after the year of isolation.

4

I’d probably want to use the money to buy the political influence to end solitary confinement. And also ending private prisons while we’re at it.

4

Where is the money coming from? It would be just redistributing money to give it to some lucky people. Instead we could fight against inequality and skip a year of misery.

6

Yeah I wouldn't know what to do with 30 billion. Pay off the mortgage, couple of new cars, irrigate the world's deserts?

3

Fair. Though I think if I had 30 billion I'd start build better housing in 3rd world countries or something like that

1
lemmy.ca

Of all the ways to get 30 billion dollars, this would probably be the least emotionally disturbing choice.

150
infosec.pub

My wife lived a very similar life, but also in pain for multiple years. She had no entertainment because everything hurt. The lack of entertainment didn’t drive her insane. Even the pain didn’t drive her insane.

28
feddit.org

The joke felt funnier und more lighthearted in my head. Sorry for your loss.

8
lemmy.world

Eh, it doesn’t make you immoral to inherit money from an evil person, but it’s immoral to keep it.

6

The intended implication was that these may not be the best parents. The comment above was about being emotional disturbed. Sure, it was about choices but let's read over that

4
sopuli.xyz

One year in that room would make anyone go crazy enough to not enjoy the money when they get out

61

Id still do it in a heartbeat. I've got a year to lay there and plan out how to best distribute/use it. $30 billion would be more than enough to build a nice commune that can grow someplace with healthcare and everything else taken care of for all the people that live there. Just the interest would pay for everything if you could get 5% interest on it and never have to touch any of the principle. Could get 15,000 people going and pay them all 100,000 a year at first while we set everything up. There would be a lot of schematics to figure out, and finding a location would be tough, but there is absolutely no reason I couldn't go to therapy or even get others to help manage the set up and walk into the sea after if I've really lost it. Could possibly help a lot of people and grow into something nice.

19
sopuli.xyz

I think you're underestimating how long a year is. Even a week in solitary is enough to cause permanent damage

55

It takes me 3 days alone before my sanity begins slipping. I can’t imagine a year. After a day of deconstructing the cell and making fluff puppets, I’d already be bored. The brain craves stimulation.

11

I would be willing to suffer permanent damage to ensure everyone I have ever cared about has all the money they need to thrive.

11
feddit.org

Everyone knows introverts just sit at home and stare at the wall all day

28
sopuli.xyz

Extroversion and introversion have nothing to do with this. The lack of brain stimulation would probably end up killing you before the year ended

16
discuss.tchncs.de

I think this is one of those things where it seems totally fine to you but in reality it activates some kind of intrinsic biological limit that you aren't even aware of. I FEEL like I would easily conquer the nothing box by just doing a lot of great thinking. But scientifically, I kind of doubt that I really could. It's like if someone challenged me to eat only celery for a year. I might have the willpower to do it, but biologically I may just die. Now I don't think the nothing box would kill me, but I can imagine it making people go crazy for sure.

59

solitary confinement is recognized as torture, and that's probably for a good reason. I've also had personal experience in psychiatric hospitals with people who had to be confined, and while their being there is probably due to every available professional being entirely hopeless with them, the confinement definitely doesn't help the situation. even the ex-director of the NIMH, thomas insel, finds in "healing: our path from mental illness to mental health" that a lot of mental healthcare is actually social and communal care, not cold hard medicine. where medicines fail, you can still treat a patient with kindness and patience, integrate them into their community, make friends, have good daily experiences. you can still give them a human touch. all that heals people to some extent, and solitary confinement is exactly the opposite of it.

27

If the year in solitary confinement doesn't turn you into a psychopath the $30 billion will!

50
lemmy.world

Here's an easy way to kill time: try counting and see how close you can get to 30 billion

38

That's exactly the point. The idea that $100 is an amount of money that would give most people some pause before they spend it, but it's not an unmanageable amount of money.

So, how about we're try counting to 30 billion by hundreds. Even then, it's a ridiculous task. If you decided to purchase every single thing (that exists) that you've ever wanted, you'd go insane just trying to figure out why anyone would ever need that much money.

Then again, you could not spend it on yourself... then, it becomes super-easy to spend billions of dollars! You could lift entire starving populations into solvency. So, why is no one doing that? Cuz the coolest thing to do with billions of dollars is to build more portfolios and buy politicians.

Let's think about this another way: I don't know how much it costs to hire a hitman, but I feel like $10,000 is a pretty common amount to read in articles about successful hits (followed by arrests). So, assuming $10k is a reasonable price for a hit, $30B is enough to put out hits on almost every single person in USA. People like Musk could afford to hire hitmen to wipe out populations across entire countries, and I'm sure he's thought about that plenty of times. It's no wonder he can build self-crashing cars with no remorse. Dude can literally get away with murder, and then afford to murder anyone who tries to arrest or prosecute him.

I'd rather go insane trying to count to 30 billion than to suffer from whatever brain-rot is going on in the minds of existing billionaires.

3
Seefooreply
lemmy.world

ironically, I doubt you could count to 30 billion in 1 year...shows how much money that is.

4

Once you get into the millions, it takes well over a second to recite each digit of a number. One million is only 1/30,000th of the way in.

A year is less than 32 million seconds.

Even if you skipped to 1 million, and somehow managed to get through each number in only a second, and counted every single second of every single day without breaking for sleep, you still would only get a little over a thousandth of the way through 30 billion.

2
lemmy.ca

1 year and your insane

Or

Waste your whole life working towards 0.001% of that.

If I can write a will beforehand for who gets it then it’s worth it.

32
lemmy.world

I know we have a decent amount of science pointing to this breaking the mind, but I can't help but wonder if anything would change knowing an unimaginably great prize was waiting on the other side. How long would it take to count to 30 billion...

14

Not counting the amount of times you lose track of the number you were in and have to restart at some checkpoint

3

I've seen VSauce's video where Michael does this for like, what, three days? And he's basically lost it by the end. So while this is tempting, no, I can't do it.

30
Pyr
lemmy.ca

Don't forget drawing on the walls with your shit

29
lemmy.world

i mean, a year is absurd, and that amount of money is meaningless.

how about i just stay in for a day and get 82million instead

20
lemmy.world

vsauce did something like this for 3 days and he nearly lost his mind. i think 2 days max is all us regular people can do

7
mika_mikareply
lemmy.world

Totally the YouTuber wasn't playing it up or exaggerating for the engagement.

-1
Stalinwolfreply
lemmy.ca

Yeah, the arbitrary cash amounts in these would you memes are always a little goofy, as if the creator thinks 30-billion is so high that anyone seeing it will start screaming "YAAASSSS GIRL!!" no matter what the challenge. 100-million would be just as effective to the average person. Maybe even 10-million if your wealth aspirations are not to buy a golden palace with twelve Lamborghinis and a rocket pad.

6
lemmy.ca

I'm with you. A day or two at most is all I would need to be set for life for anything I would ever want.

I like fancy tech, so I might stick around for a second or third day because fancy tech isn't cheap.

People in my field refer to it as "backing up the money dump truck to (vendor) HQ" ... Just to give some context.

3

how insidious a trap, thinking like that. you may find yourself stuck there for the year after all! /s

2

You get a measly $4.20 for your first day stuck in there, but then 2342% daily compounded interest.

1
lemmy.blahaj.zone

ITT: people forgetting that prisoners in the US are isolated like this, and it's literal torture.

You're not special.

20

Yeah, I wanted to point this out as well, glad someone/you linked it.

The memer is basically 'would you get tortured for 30bn monies'?
And the kicker is that people torture other people like this without paying them, often/usually with the tortured not having done anything bad (not that that would justify torture of any kind).

13

This is exactly what Jimmy Donaldson (Mr. Beast) did to Jake Weddle, and he didn’t face any consequences.

3

I like that Lemmy's first thought is pro-rated payments, and yes, it really does show how much money 30 billion is when you can make millions in an hour. My first thought was, I think I could actually pull out off for the full year.

Most people need some kind of social interaction, including folks with conditions that make that hard. I'm probably not an exception to that but I have learned ways to pass full days of time just story developing and singing and such. Creating characters also helps ward the loneliness, although I think the hardest part is being unable to actually write anything down. I could easily do a year if I had enough paper and a way to draw or write.

19
lemmy.ca

If I were to do something so ridiculous for a full year for the full amount, I wouldn't be doing it for me. There's no way I would be able to spend 10Bn in my lifetime on things for me and my immediate family. I don't think that's even possible unless we were literally flushing money down the toilet, burning it, or throwing pallets of $100s from a plane while flying over a populated area.

I would use the 10Bn to create things like scholarship funds for colleges, where the only requirement is that you can prove you don't come from money (and can afford whatever education you want without help).

I would also be donating large amounts to charities and good causes, especially FOSS and things like the Internet archive.

Above and beyond that, I'd likely use my newfound wealth to create a company that builds open source or modular hardware for things currently dominated by big tech. Like mobile phones, specifically Android phones, and supporting companies doing similar work like framework.

I would only take enough to pay off my house, all debts, and for a savings/income fund so that I can live comfortably for the rest of my life without needing to work, both for myself, my spouse, and some members of my immediate family.

While in the box, I would let me ADHD brain wander endlessly and entertain itself, until it gets bored or tired, then sleep and repeat that 365 times.

19

Exactly my thinking. For $30 billion I don't care if I come out the other side a mindless husk. I'm leaving instructions before I go in about what to do with the money and improving as many lives as I can.

If I make it out with enough of my mind to enjoy some of it myself then that's just gravy.

5

If I survived the year, then spent the next year with $500k worth of therapy to become semi-normalish again, I'm still left with $29.9995 billion dollars. Hell yeah I'll do it.

18
feddit.uk

The reports on the linked wiki page of the use of things like this as torture aside, is there any research / evidence on how things like this affect people who are treated this way voluntarily?

I’ve seen video of someone volunteering to be waterboarded to show that it’s not that bad if you know what’s happening (spoiler—it was still very bad). I’d assume other kinds of psychological torture would be just as hard to deal with, even with full knowledge and consent.

17

vsauce of all people did a thing on this sort of voluntary sensory deprivation in their series mind field back in 2017. results were not good. michael spent i think three days in a white room with a bed and a box of food, and he was a wreck when he was let out. the loss of any sense of time really fucks with you apparently.

24
Skullgridreply
lemmy.world

I’ve seen video of someone volunteering to be waterboarded to show that it’s not that bad if you know what’s happening (spoiler—it was still very bad)

Ah yes, renowned edgelord and one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism, Christopher Hitchens

https://youtu.be/4LPubUCJv58?t=194

8
Tinglereply
lemmy.world

To be fair to him, he didn't think it would be that bad, said as much then tried it. Afterwards he completely changed his point of view and admitted he was wrong.

3

sure, he changed his view on that particular thing and that was noble. But him and the other three are arseholes because of the aggressive way they behave(d) towards religious people.

The point of secularism is to allow people to have their faith or lack therof, and have public life not assume one way is correct. They weren't "atheist figures" they were anti-theistic crusaders, who gave a hand to islamophobes during a time of increased islamophobia during the "war on terror" which laid the foundation of the civil liberties abuses happening today.

0
sh.itjust.works

30 billion and a chance to catch up on sleep? You son of a bitch I'm in.

17

Think of it this way, new game.

First month you get $0.01, the second month you get $0.02, the third month you get $0.04...

Keep doubling that for each month you stay in this room, to a maximum of $1.5 Trillion after 4 years.

Each successive month has a 1% chance of resetting the clock.

How many months do you stay?

2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasubi

Hamatsu was challenged to stay alone, unclothed, in an apartment for Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, a Japanese reality-television show on Nippon Television, after winning a lottery for a "showbusiness-related job". Hamatsu was challenged to enter mail-in sweepstakes until he won ¥1 million (about $8,000) in total. Hamatsu started with nothing (including no clothes), was cut off from outside communication and broadcasting, and had nothing to keep him company except the magazines he combed through for sweepstakes entry forms. After spending 335 days to reach the target, Hamatsu set the Guinness world record for the "longest time survived on competition winnings".

12
lemmy.world

Why go out ? I would buy the place and stay there so everyone can fuck off.

12

If I get bored I go to sleep. Sleep all year, free food, can do pushups, learn to whistle, yoga training, imagine you have a piano and practice piano in mind, play chess in mind, invent fucking game rpg story and characters. That's from top of my head, not sure if I can manage to do this in a year, need more time.

4

I'd do it no matter how much it would mess me up, and all that money, except enough to buy a nice house in my city, would be going towards an endowment for a trans charity. Its mission would be multi-faceted, providing direct supports for trans people alongside fighting legal battles. Hopefully that would nullify the contributions of people like J.K. Rowling.

9
lemmy.zip

a lot of people seem to be assuming solitary confinement, but nothing in the prompt actually indicates you can't have visitors. furthermore, you might have a lightswitch. being able to turn the lights off to sleep and chat with visitors might significantly slow your descent into madness. (though anyone would probably still be pretty fucked up after a year).

9

So I'm assuming I get food, water and a bathroom. Also a lightswitch though likely one I control myself so I can't use it to gauge time. I'm probably not making it out fully sane but I think there are some mitigation strategies.

  • Exercise, try and gameify it by keeping a high score.
  • Arts and crafts with my food (maybe my hair too?)
  • Some recreational math potentially using the grid of tiles, probably no more than 5 minutes a day before I get sick of it but any variety helps.
  • Wall looks potentially climbable?
  • Get good at shadow puppets.
9

I mean, it is essentially torture (solitary confinement for a year) but for a 30 bil sure.

My head is not the worst place to be in, I bet I could come out of it only slightly damaged.

9

Its not like life can't severely damage you anyway, if there is a chance you could bounce back(-ish) ... then sure, I think there is a chance I would give it a go.

It's 57 thousand monies a minute.
3.4 million an hour.

3

Would definitely do it*.

  • If the assumed necessities are met (lights don't even need to go off & the water can be warm).

The option to spend a day and take the 82m if downscaling is an option is wrong; 4Billion for 50days is the deal. Like surely you had a worst 2months and didn't get to do the following afterwards: set aside 1B to meet your needs and the needs of most people you know without working for a day of the rest of your life, 1B for projects that cannot fail (cushioned by the mountain of money or pile of gold), and 2B for any cause you believe in (go nuts: make a mini utopia, a nationwide dystopia, preserve the status que, or risk it and go after terrible people who would have never felt justice otherwise).

8

Honestly I think it'd be fine. I could practise oral traditions such as storytelling and singing, dance...

I'd enjoy trying to recall my life story up to that point and eventually be able to remember everything I've done and seen in detail, and be able to tell it all conversationally in amusing ways. I've never been happy with my autobiographical memory, and I never really tell stories about myself. I bet I could be a more integrated person if I spent time on that.

8
lemmy.world

Chekhov's short story The Bet has a similar setting, except that the person has access to books but not other people.

7

I think any sort of entertainment would significantly alter how bad this is, even if it's literally just one book.

3

Practice meditation for a year and have enough money to actually make a difference in this world after. Sounds ambitious but I think I'd have to give it a shot.

6
thelemmy.club

I don't think there's even a remote chance any non-coma victim would endure this

I'd give myself 2 weeks tops.

6

I could do it but I don't have any need for that kind of bread. The 30 bill would take more away from my life than the room

3

And I also build little race cars out of my poop! It's Wing-Dangily wonderful madness!

5

As someone who has (voluntarily) done 24 hours in solitary confinement with nothing but a blanket, a toilet, a concrete floor, and one meal a day, I don't think anyone here will last more than 3 days. That was the longest, most painful 24 hours of my life.

5

probably could these days. I'm just tired all the damned time and can sleep for like 28 hours at a time

4

I certainly helps to be a lunatic to begin with.

1

I'd do it, assuming my basic needs can be met. Lots of opportunity for exercise and meditation. That year would fly by.

3

The list includes things to do so the implied meaning is just that. But it literally says, "nothing". So everyone assuming there will be food, water, any form of sanitation - you all would jump right in and find out very quickly no way you're going to last a year. Or even a week.

3

This reminds me of a relatively late plot point in the Red Rising book series.

2

Absolutely. I would spend all year planning what I was going to do with my money and working out.

2