this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
949 points (98.4% liked)
Comic Strips
23769 readers
1870 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
Rules
-
😇 Be Nice!
- Treat others with respect and dignity. Friendly banter is okay, as long as it is mutual; keyword: friendly.
-
🏘️ 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.
-
🧬 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.
-
📽️ 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!
-
📋 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.,
✅ Correct: https://xkcd.com/386/
❌ Incorrect: https://xkcd.com/
-
📬 Post Frequency/SPAM
- Each user (regardless of instance) may post up to five (5 🖐) 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 🖐) will be removed.
-
🏴☠️ 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.,
Sí, por favor [Spanish/Español]
-
🍿 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
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
Depends a lot on how you're helping them and what you're doing with the rest. If you're spending like a typical American (or Canadian) you're doing a lot of environmental damage with your day-to-day life so you're killing people incrementally with that lifestyle.
Without a doubt.
I think that's what makes this thought experiment interesting: Even with the guarantee that someone dies instantly (the worst case), you can figure out how many lives can be saved with 100k dollars, and from a utilitarian perspective, you'll probably end up with a net positive of lives saved (you can probably save more than one life for 100 k). From a purely utilitarian perspective, you could even calculate the expectation value of lives saved / lost for each button press (provided all the money goes to saving lives), and figure out the exact number of button presses that is the morally "correct" choice. In that sense, this thought experiment can demonstrate the absurdity of utilitarianism when taken to the extreme: Most people would agree that it's morally defensible to sacrifice one person to save one million, but when you do this calculation, you could end up with the result that you should sacrifice a million people to save ten million, which I think most people would find questionable.
Is keeping someone alive enough to balance the books? Does the quality of their life matter? What if they're alive but living in a refugee camp?
I don't think you can, not without making massive assumptions. Lives lost directly might be easy if the button is labelled "0.1% chance of killing someone". But, what if you spend your $100k on driving a light truck which emits a lot of pollution, which in turn contributes a tiny amount to the deaths of a lot of people?
And, for lives saved, say you do it in a pretty easy to calculate way, donating food to people who would die without that food. Is that where the calculation ends? What if that person goes on to help other people? Or what if that person goes on to become a soldier and kill people.
I don't think it's at all realistic to try to calculate an expectation value of lives saved / lost with any accuracy except through the most direct effects.
I guess that's what I'm getting at.
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.
100% of people in a large population absolutely will die. I don't know why you think some people are immortal. I also don't know what that has to do with this meme.