this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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I have asked this question to countless people (mostly in hair salons) as an alternative to small talk, and it always yields interesting results.

Rules:

  • You get the money right now, right where you are. If it's 10pm and you're in the middle of nowhere, your money will still go poof at 11pm.
  • As a result of the above, tell us what time it is and roughly where you are (big city, desert, small town, ...)
  • You must spend the money. You cannot give it to someone to hold on to it for you for a while.
  • Normal world rules apply, e.g. you cannot buy a $250k car at a dealership in 1h in cash, and you cannot buy a house in 1h either.
  • Remember that getting from where you are to the place you need to go takes time. Factor that in!

Edit: I'm glad you guys had fun with this one. Feel free to post similar hypothetical questions. I kinda like these.

Edit edit: Free advertising πŸ˜… --> I run and maintain an open source push notification service called ntfy, which let's you send notifications to your phone via PUT/POST, like curl -d "backup successful" ntfy.sh/mytopic. Go check it out.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

almost 3 am in my room nothing is open so i guess uh air if its sent to my bank account id start ordering everything i could online

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Its gone 3:30am, I've just got home after a night out, I've had too much to drink, so driving is out of the question, besides there nothing open at this hour.....I know, I'll just sleep on it....for an hour anyway πŸ˜…

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

If you (or a banker or anyone you're paying) needed to count that money, you'd need to count just over 11 bills every 4 seconds, just to count all the bills within an hour, let alone have time to actually spend the money. This is assuming $100 bills, of which you'd need 10,000 of. This many bills also weighs 22 pounds or 10 kilograms, plus whatever the weight of the container you're carrying it is... IDK man I think I'd not even try to spend most of it, grab maybe $500-1000 in cash, and go on a quick shopping spree at Target or something, which is like a 10 minute walk from where I live. I could buy groceries, clothing, electronics, household items, etc. If I still had time I would go back and try to buy gift cards in large denominations, but I know cashiers are supposed to give people a hard time with that because of scammers, so I wouldn't want to deal with that during the initial transaction.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It's 9:30pm in the middle of nowhere.

I'd put everything in my save for later in my Amazon cart and buy it. I'd buy a bunch of crafting supplies online, I'd buy the sports things for my husband online. Probably buy a new monitor or 3, new desk chair, and all the parts I can order online for the racecar. Probably spend my remaining time scrolling Etsy and Amazon for every impulse purchase I can think of, then I'd be out of time lol

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

It is possible to buy a car in less than an hour, though I agree that you can't buy real estate that quickly. New Yorkers might be able to pull off stocks, if the money comes to them while the NYSE is open, but I'm not in New York (or Chicago, for the Mercantile Exchange, or...)

It's kind of a bizarre question, though. I have several small business owner friends. Could I get them to mark up a croissant to $1M, with the understanding they'll cut me in on the revenue?

If not, then what really are the terms of the question? Arms length transactions only? How will that be adjudicated?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I would try to drive into town (20 mins), then buy as many gift cards as I could, although that would look suspicious

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Crypto, shouldn't make a such a big wave compared to receiving 1M on am anonymous source and quickly buying stock exchange with it

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

I just tried ntfy, it works ! How do I self host the server if you don't mind?

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

There are install steps here: https://docs.ntfy.sh/install/ and config options here: https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/

Feel free to drop by the Discord, Matrix, or our Lemmy instance.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Alberta Canada. 2 pm.

I'd buy a house. Normally that's takes a lot of time but as long as I hand off the money to the realtor I should be good. I don't actually want a million dollar house, and definitely don't want to pay the property taxes on it. But I can resell it later and keep the money this time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's 7:30pm in a city with several 24-hour stores. I'd go on a shopping spree and spend 90% on things for myself and family, then visit as many restaurants + bars as possible while tipping thousands of dollars until the million is all gone.

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

High roller casino chips. May be hard to cash them out eventually but should be doable.

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

I'd buy ETF

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

What does it mean for the money to disappear? Can I just not spend anymore or would it disappear from whoever I bought from. If the latter, I couldn't in good conscience buy anything. I wouldn't mind if say Walmart lost some profit, but thousands of dollars worth of cash suddenly going missing would cause people to lose their jobs.

If the former, I'd buy as much electronics as I could from Walmart and then buy a bunch of scratch offs and lottery tickets. Those are the only two placed open around here at 11pm.

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

It's magical money. If you spend the money according to the rules, it will not disappear from the person you bought things from. But if you fake-spend it, like "buying" something from your friend, then it'll go poof.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I'd by gold. Or a bunch of second hand Land Rovers on Gumtree.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I'd go to all the pawn shops and clean them out. Lots of gold and silver I could resell.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Living in the small rural community I'm living in ATM I'm not even sure I could. Maybe I could call up some property sellers selling something for around 800k and offer a million. But there is a zero percent chance they wouldn't assume I was a scammer when I told them they needed to accept this deal within the hour or it was gone, haha.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I live in Las Vegas. I’m about in the middle of town and it’s 2200. There’s a pawn shop about 20 minutes away from me that’s open until 0100 every night. They’re a large normal pawn shop but specialize in jewelry and gold. I’d buy all of the precious metals, collector coins, and valuable jewelry. I’d sell the collector coins the next day to a different pawn shop that specializes in collector coins, the precious metals to the gold and silver pawn shop, and the jewelry to a third pawn shop. I’d probably walk away with less than a quarter of the original million and doubt I could spend it all before it vanished but 100-200 k in less than 24 hours is pretty damn good!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

At the Bitcoin ATM around the corner.

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