this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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[blue]
If you could push a button that gives you a hundred thousand dollars but a random person dies, would you do it?β€―

[yellow, cautious]
Interesting thought experiment… intuitively, I'd say no, but it's worth thinking about… it's a genuine moral dilemma in a capitalist world: there's a dialectic between our desires and the common good…

MEANWHILE, BILLIONAIRES

[an orange guy in a suit is shown with a terrifying grin pushing as many buttons as possible at once on a table, slamming one of the buttons, and even using their foot to press an extra one]

https://thebad.website/comic/the_totally_hypothetical_button_thought_experiment

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[–] Bad@jlai.lu 103 points 4 days ago (7 children)

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.

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 66 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You managed to create the most disturbing non-ai foot I've seen today, so that's nice

Love the comics!

[–] Bad@jlai.lu 27 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 4 days ago

AIs have become decent at anatomy these days, haven't they?

Maybe so, I don't really follow that progress

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[–] stray@pawb.social 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Bad@jlai.lu 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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".

[–] chuckleslord@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

Foot: just a stupid, broken hand with tiny fingers and a super fucked up fused wrist. What's so hard about that? (This is a joke, my foot drawings also look fucked. What even are feet?)

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[–] bizarroland@lemmy.world 78 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (7 children)

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.

[–] thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world 31 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Orygin@sh.itjust.works 24 points 4 days ago

Exactly, just create the conditions and system so that not pushing the button results in poverty and people will line up to push it

[–] Derpenheim@lemmy.zip 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

billionaire would hire multiple persons to press the button and give the money to them while paying basically nothing for it.

[–] fraksken@infosec.pub 1 points 1 day ago

We know because they do this exact thing

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.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 29 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

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?

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 24 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Well, driving to work is basically that. Non zero chance someone dies.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 7 points 4 days ago

Yeah. Non-zero chance your car's emissions kill someone too.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] qarbone@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] sfgifz@lemmy.world 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago

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.

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[–] angband@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] turdas@suppo.fi 32 points 4 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] BryyM@lemmy.world 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Even 50million is an extreme amount of money.

Shit, a couple hundred grand is life changing for most people.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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..

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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."

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

[–] Baggie@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

1 in 8 billion is pretty good odds though.

[–] isekaihero@ani.social 2 points 3 days ago

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.

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[–] elbiter@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Billionaire would press the button for 100 bucks, then spend 100 times the amount in a pair of shoes he'll never wear.

[–] Foxfire@pawb.social 11 points 4 days ago

He can afford foreshortening and detailed hands, in a stickman worldβ€½ His greed sickens me.

[–] valar@lemmy.ca 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I'd hope it would take a lot more than $100,000 for most people. That won't even get you a house.

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 5 points 4 days ago

It'd get me a sizable down payment on a house with a bit left for expenses. Which is basically the only hurdle to me owning a house at this point. Not that I would kill someone for it... At least not a random person. There's people I'd kill for money.

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[–] Shindo66@lemmy.world 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I actually just thought about this same analogy a bit ago. Most normal people it would be a hard no, but there are some out there that would do it for $1k and their first question would be "can i hook it up to an auto-clicker?"

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[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.social 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I have an alternative idea fom a meme.

Blue says: "if you could push a button that gives you a hundred million dollars but a random billionaire dies, would you do it?"

Then simply switch yellow and the billionaire.

[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

"If you could push a button that made you lose $10 but a random billionaire dies, would you do it?"

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