this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
586 points (98.3% liked)

Programmer Humor

32562 readers
543 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 86 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Finally, a use for NFTs

Edit: Wait, nevermind, they said no throwing it away

[–] [email protected] 65 points 4 months ago

Create a serverless function on alibaba that calls a serverless function on Azure, which calls a serverless function on gcp which calls a serverless function on Oracle cloud which loops it back to alibaba.

Now stick CloudFlare in between each step of that and we should hit 100M by Tuesday.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 months ago (4 children)

This basically the premise to Richard Pryor's movie "Brewster's Millions" except that one of the rules was that you cannot buy or own anything. At the end of the month you must have spent the money and have nothing to show for it.

The answer is politics. Spend it all on a political campaign.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

I loved the bit where he spent a small pile of that money on an Inverted Jenny postage stamp then used it to send a postcard.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That is inherently a gift then, donation? No different that giving it away and morally lesser to giving to the poor. Breaks one of the rules.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Oh no. The no gifting rule is also in effect. It was his own political campaign.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Unless it is a superpac.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Lucky it was set in America.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

The political campaign is actually the innovation of the film, which was an adaptation.

endingAnd then he realized that winning would break the rules, as the salary makes the position considered an asset, so he campaigned for "none of the above". At the end of the movie, that option wins.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Okay, this nerd sniped me super hard. Sure you can spend it on a big massive project like a mansion or whatever, but you aren't going to be able to have it finished (and thus paid for) in a month.

Not too mention if you do want to drop that much money at one, there'll be many checks in place. Your bank will block your account for "suspicious activity". The person who you are paying will probably want to run a background check or just refuse to take payment up front.

You'd have to justify where you got that money from as well, most likely, and saying a "genie" probably would get you some strange looks and perhaps arrested.

I legit don't know how you'd actually get rid of that much money in a month.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

I'm assuming that if the genie is giving you the money, magic will take care of some of those concerns.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That’s equity. Not spent money, just less-directly-available cash… But if that doesn’t count, real estate technically doesn’t either… Really tough question, depending on the circumstance

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Just pay people to be your shoppers and buy as much as they can for you. And give them a good salary for it. Hiring people is not giving it away, and they are buying the stuff for you. Or hire like a private concert with someone. So many things to spend money on.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Private concerts is a good one! And then hire overpriced organizers for those events, too :D

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

It is spent money, because you have to buy those shares from other people. It’s literally a purchase of part of a company from another party. Just because you can liquidate it easily it doesn’t mean it’s not spent.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

GICs then!

Edit: looks like GICs are only guaranteed up to $100,000.

But honestly if you consider stocks and bonds to be gambling then you could really argue that buying anything is a gamble. Buy $100 million worth of onions and the price will go up due to scarcity, then try to sell them. Someone actually did this years ago and made a ton of money while bankrupting a lot of farmers and investors. The government responded by banning the trading of onion futures!

All this is to say it’s actually impossible to fulfill the genie’s rules if you take into account market fluctuations on the price of anything you buy.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

I hear there's some politicians who enjoy "vacations with friends..."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Pay in advance

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

You could spend 100m in a day on real estate where I live. There are multiple 40-50m parcels available all over the place.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Buying property. You can close in 30 days, and if you are buying a bunch of property, you can hire people out to handle things and speed up the process, and if you put offers on a ton of property, you could probably close on a lot of them in 30 days. If you are waiving around $100m you could make a lot happen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

You're going to fall foul of anti money laundering checks very hard and fast. There's no way you'd be able to buy property, let alone in a month.

[–] RandomVideos 20 points 4 months ago

Create a company that specializes in finding loopholes in genie challenges, hire 5 people with a salary of 20 million USD/month, pay that company 100 million USD to find a loophole to be able to spend the money easily and realize that you aleady spent the money

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

We were spending more than $10M/month at my last job, but less than $100M.

I can spend $100M/month using only AWS CLI and a small shell script.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

I get 100m up front, right?

Right?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's easy, buy all the real estate in an area that's for sale, scarcity will drive up the value of the properties you have bought. Economics 101.

-- This is sarcasm and is poking fun of wall street buying up all the property to be landlords, the world and economy are much more complicated than this... But, it is a quick way to spend $100m in 30 days

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Takes a long time to close sales like that... Although I suspect paying above market rate for things would help grease the wheels.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Yeah I'm sure they'll look the other way if you pay 1.5x the market price

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

a single university textbook

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

I bet you could do it. Go to the yacht store with your bank's president

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The reason it was hard for Brewster was that he had to do it without maintaining any assets afterwards. This doesn't seem hard. Real estate. Done.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yeah, this is easy. Find a house, airplane, or mega yacht that costs just over 100mm, offer 100mm cash today, then wait 29-30 days for your billion.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

$100M of $VT, secure my ultra-comfortable retirement right then and there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Just buy a house. Easy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

My most significant run-in with a genie was in Mario Land 3. After what I did to him, I'd hate clouds too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I imagine your income tax would be a efficient method just gotta time opening the genie during tax season.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Wouldn't even take a month, just prepay for those reserved instances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The real answer has to lie in the definition of "nothing" in the context of what counts as having something to show for your spent money vs not having anything to show for it and succeeding.

It's most basic form is:

If nothing means no physical products then you can't buy a jet, but you can donate it all to charities.

You win

~~---------~~

So the next level of having nothing at the end may prohibit donations, considering that to be a type of "gifting"

So now you have to spend it on a service. No holding on to goods, no donations.

So you use AWS and set up a bullshit loop of web traffic that produces a 100M$ bill for server usage.

You win.

~~---------~~

So now we must ask if the genie considers the service performed to you by AWS to be "something."

What could we possibly do next?

Set up a charity ourselves and use the 100M as seed capital? Maybe, but if you own it or gain the assets like buildings or something you might lose.

Buy 50M lotto tickets and hope you don't win? (Powerball is 2$ a piece I think.). Maybe...but that's risky. That's like a 1 in 6 or 7 chance to win at that point, plus you're nearly guaranteed to win snaller prizes which would have to be dealt with.

I think the answer is a boat. A fuckin huge one that's a little older. This does two things, 1.) its a single object holding all the value. If we can end the month without it, then we win. 2.) it's easy to get into dangerous and perilous situations in a boat.

Sail that bitch into a hurricane and try to turn around. This runs the risk of failing if the boat lives, but all you gotta do is turn it sideways relative to the huge waves. As long as you genuinely were sailing the ship and not sabotaging it I don't think it would fall under the "throwing money away" category.

Idk. It's hard I've you get ticky tacky with the definition of nothing. I guess you could just yolo options. Either you're going to be broke or you'll have billions of dollars by the end so you win either way? Maybe the boat thing ain't the answer. Lol I'm gonna leave it anyway.

[–] undefinedValue 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Where does it say you must have “nothing” at the end? It says “spend”.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Oh no I've made a huge mistake....Idk man

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

First up: Capital gains Taxes. That's $12,000,000 off the top. Next, buying the properties of all my favorite charities, museums, libraries, restraunts, stores, and setting up trusts to keep taxes and such paid on those in perpetuity ... That alone should do it, within a large enough radius, but anyways ... buy up the most inefficient air-planes, cruise-liners, cargo ships I can find and straight up ground/dock them or upgrade them to fix those inefficiencies. Make sure the planes are never flown again, at least not at night.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

That's giving the money away. Either you are still controlling the trusts, or you gave the money to the trusts.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

“No gifting”

But it’s not gifting it I get anything in return. So I could “buy” the smallest item in exchange for 100m dollars from a family member

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Buy a house, a car for my SO and I, take care of outstanding debt. Use the rest to buy diversified index tracking funds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

While low risk, I think index investing still counts as gambling. The house maybe too.

Depreciating investments like a car should be ok though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Would charity count as gifting?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

~~High-stakes gambling. Play like shit, assuming that winning would count as not having spent the money.~~

~~Shouldn't be that hard to get to bigger and bigger tables when you're just literally throwing money away and losing on purpose.~~

Edit yeah the text pretty clearly said no gambling

Also, couldn't you hire a personal servant? No owning, no buying.

Rent all the fucking hotel rooms. Here's just one that's 100k a night. https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/inside-the-most-expensive-hotel-room-in-the-world

Or you know, go for an entire island.

https://www.privateislandsonline.com/search?availability=rent

Have a few yachts visit.

https://www.boatinternational.com/charter/luxury-yacht-charter-advice/most-expensive-superyachts-for-charter

Fly from casinos to other casinos and then to the harbor with your super yacht filled with hired servants (and is the cap you can pay others salary set? Foot massager, 10 million an hour?) then have a party on the island, take another yacht to another island and yeah I think 100 million in a month is very much doable.

load more comments
view more: next ›