11 ms·

Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)

233 points by EndXA 2y ago

underseacables 2y ago
That was a delightful read. I wont give away the plot but I say good for him.
nchase 2y ago
This shows up here every now and then. Interesting story! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713
havaloc 2y ago
Highly recommend at least skimming the full episode. https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE- https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE-
- katangafor 2y ago
  wow "lightning-fast reflexes" is not overstated!! That looks incredibly difficult to pull off for so long. Thanks for the link
  - mrb 2y ago
    Meh, I am not that impressed by the reflexes. I counted the number of video frames in the youtube video (https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE- https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE-) and each square stays lit up for 8 frames, or 270 ms. This is quite long. If you memorize the particular pseudo-random sequence (as Michael did), it's pretty easy to hit a given square reliably. The key insight and most difficult trick is not having fast reflexes, but actually discovering the pseudo-random sequence is not completely random, and memorizing it.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    Supposedly one of the reasons Ken Jennings did so well was he gamed the timing of the buzzer. Apparently it's locked while Alex (rip) reads the question and there is a delay if you jump the gun. In addition to being smart enough to answer most of the questions, of course.
  - Dove 2y ago
    I had the opposite reaction. This didn't look that hard. Then again, I have a lot of experience in two related contexts: I like timing-oriented video games, and I am a musician. The game show movements look to me to take about a quarter of a second, or 250 ms. This is slow enough to make winning by skill just barely possible. Scientifically speaking, I think 200 ms is considered a good reaction time for a normal person - and the game show requires a bit of processing, so will be a bit slower. Even if everything on the show were truly random, if you simplified things by watching one square and waiting for it to be lit up and not a whammy, I'd expect an average person to just barely be able to hit the button before the game moved on. Controller delay could spoil that, but no doubt the game is designed with this threshold in mind, to give the tantalizing impression that you can maybe do it. Superhuman timing wouldn't be needed - whether by training or genetics, people who specialize in reacting fast can manage times more like 100-150ms. Predicting makes things much easier. A demanding but reliable target in a timing-oriented video game (but where you can see the required input coming) might be around 50ms. As one example, A Dance Of Fire And Ice seems to consider you moderately inconsistent if your inputs are precise to about 40-60 ms. As another point of reference, Dark Souls 2 offers the player a window of invulnerability time they can use to negate attacks. This combines elements of prediction, reaction, and action delay. The game is widely considered punishingly difficult (but people do it) at the default value of 166 ms and unproblematic around a buffed value of 400ms. As a musician, it's common to play a piece of music in which beats are 500 ms, and subdividing them into quarters of that (so 125 ms) is so routine that you are expected to do it correctly and can clearly identify when someone has done it wrong. I don't know how precise musicians are exactly, but I do remember once playing an electronic instrument with a 12ms delay and being surprised to find it so imprecise that I had a hard time making music the way I wanted to. I didn't realize I was sensitive to tens of milliseconds in a musical context, but I guess I must be? At any rate, I would expect any reasonably experienced musician to consider hitting a 250 ms beat, on the beat, to be very easy.
- eddieroger 2y ago
  If you go in to this knowing he knows how to beat the game, you'll also note that he reacts before he knows what prize he got, and is just reacting to landing on the right spot. Surely someone caught that in the moment, but couldn't have put together that he was celebrating because he knew he'd won.
rwmj 2y ago
$331,381.55 in 2024 dollars. If only he'd invested it in the stock market rather than half-assed ponzi schemes he could have been reasonably comfortable.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  The whole point of money is being able to do what you enjoy. And it's clear he absolutely loved these shenanigans. Losing it, regaining it, and finding something new - that was what he wanted and seemingly spent his entire life doing. The journey was the destination. You can see this everywhere in all aspects of life as well. Jeff Bezos, and countless other billionaires, could easily retire tomorrow and have enough money to do essentially anything they could even dream of. So what do they do? Continue to work 60 hours a week doing pretty much the same stuff they were doing on their way up. Because they love it. On the other end of the spectrum countless rappers have managed to break out of a life of crime to become successful and make millions. Yet many end up right back in that life of crime. It's because they enjoy the lifestyle. They don't want to just be comfortable, but to actually do what they enjoy.
  - rwmj 2y ago
    Did losing half his net worth in a robbery contribute to his enjoyment of life? From his subsequent behaviour towards his girlfriend, it seems like it didn't.
  - HumblyTossed 2y ago
    > Continue to work 60 hours a week I do not, even for an instant, believe they pull those kinds of numbers.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      Time reviewed a study based on some 256 CEOs here. [1] The average work week ended up at just over 58 hours. Here [2] is a post from Forbes where they surveyed 50 billionaires on how many hours they work per week. For 60% it was at least 60 hours. Imagine tomorrow - you finally 'made it'. You have $15k/month guaranteed income, forever. It's not like that's a destination, because at that point you need to decide in a point for your life. Relentless hedonism is really awesome for like a year or two, but even that becomes rapidly unfulfilling. So... what now? For some it's work, others go for religion, others just end up playing 'make number go up' with their earnings, and so on. But the point is you need to find something to do with your life. "Comfort" is a false destination, because it's not a destination - once you reach it, you just immediately start going down a new path that can even take you further away from where you were - as in this guy's case. [1] - https://time.com/4076563/ceos-productivity/ https://time.com/4076563/ceos-productivity/ [2] - https://twitter.com/forbes/status/498274992694784000 https://twitter.com/forbes/status/498274992694784000
helboi4 2y ago
It is hilarious how much effort some poeple will go to to make money through scams when they could spend the effort doing something sustainable. Or at least once you get away with one scam, use it for actual business, don't blow it on testing your luck again and again!
- taneq 2y ago
  Cue that Key and Peele sketch about robbing a bank by posing as tellers and stealing only a couple of hundred dollars a day to avoid suspicion…
  - smugma 2y ago
    https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=rxaTsdV3kGpQM-SR https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=rxaTsdV3kGpQM-SR Hadn’t seen it, it’s well-executed.
  - zuminator 2y ago
    My interpretation of that gag isn't that they're stealing anything, but that when you actually parse the wannabe mastermind's scheme, they're actually just working for the bank and getting paid as regular employees.
    - taneq 2y ago
      Me too but it's not really clear during the setup and I didn't want to spoil it too hard. :)
- quacked 2y ago
  Scamming is fun, you don't have to be predictable or reliable or follow social norms, and your ceiling is limited by your own desire rather than a time schedule or a pay structure. (Of course, these days some scammers run firms with office space, schedules, and incentive structures!) Also, a score yields some satisfying resentment; you're getting one over on those bastards. I think a lot of people don't really have a good theory of mind of career criminals. The vast majority aren't regretfully finding themselves driven into crime; they like it and it's fun.
ekanes 2y ago
Fun read. My favorite line: "Six months later, in May 1984, Michael Larson sat beardily in the interview room for the Press Your Luck auditions in Hollywood."
- its_ethan 2y ago
  I liked the call back to this later: "With a raspy voice he unbeardily reminisced about his game show exploits "
  - baobabKoodaa 2y ago
    I'm not a native English speaker. Is there some kind of double entendre here? Or does it just mean "with beard" and "without beard"?
    - its_ethan 2y ago
      To me it's just a creative way to describe his current appearance using a ("fake") adjective instead of "with a noun". Basically just turning a noun into an adjective for the fun of it. Because it's a short written piece, it's just a fun way to call attention to his having (or not having) a distinct physical appearance at two points in time. So these aren't "real" words, and as far as I'm aware there isn't really any double entendre. It would be like saying "he sat there, t-shirt-edly, and blah blah" and then later, "he appeared, un-t-shirt-ily, blah blah" to describe him being dressed vs shirtless. Not the best example, but yea, your interpretation is correct.
    - idontpost 2y ago
      [dead]
    - fuzzfactor 2y ago
      Yes, he's talking about "manly facewear".
thraxil 2y ago
My friend in college in the 90's called his punk radio show "What wants to be a hundredaire?"
- sircastor 2y ago
  I remember listening to a morning radio show and one of their contest radio lines was “we’re giving away… dollars-worth of prizes”
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    Sounds like RSK-era XFM. If anyone here knows…
    - tailspin2019 2y ago
      "You're an idiot. Play a record."
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Relatedly, there used to be a radio ad for a local company that bragged “serving [city] for over a twentieth of a century”
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  I took great pride in being a self-made thousandaire before I got any further. If you want to be a millionaire, even if it's realistically a bit beyond the horizon, maybe it does make sense to focus on ever higher goals which are way beyond the horizon for everybody, like becoming a billionaire. For one thing if you don't make it all the way (which everybody knows is unlikely) it still could be pretty good. In that sense, the higher the goals the better. But beyond the horizon it's a very indefinite goal to zero in on, in an uncertain direction that can not be accurately visualized. It can be good to have a north star if you're trying to be a millionaire or billionaire, but if it leads you in a direction that does not include a thousandaire pit stop, I would question whether it was really true north or not.
hnfong 2y ago
Here's an actual case where understanding computer science would have been immensely helpful... > The motivation for this aberrant behavior was a contest put on by a local radio station. Each day a disk jockey would read a serial number aloud on the air, and if any listener was able to produce the matching dollar bill they would win $30,000. Michael reasoned that 100,000 one dollar bills was 100,000 opportunities to win the prize, giving him a statistical advantage. And even if his scheme proved fruitless he would just redeposit his money, so he figured he had nothing to lose. > Michael and Teresa spent each day rifling through piles of cash looking for matches, pausing only for such distractions as eating, bathing, and excreting. They soon realized that it was impossible for two people to examine that much money in the allotted time (sort then binary search)
- taneq 2y ago
  Maybe less lucrative but when we had some new bookshelves installed and moved all our books onto them I used mergesort to get them in order. ;)
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Bucket-(insert-)sort is also an all time favorite. I've taught it to many people already. It helps that it works in a very intuitive way.
    - noman-land 2y ago
      Teach it to us! I'm not familiar with this.
      - jasonjmcghee 2y ago
        It's bucket sort, and parent is suggesting insertion sort within each bucket as the pre-merge step. Say you're sorting alphabetically by title. You make one bucket per letter- put books into their respective bucket based on first letter of title. Then sort using insertion sort within each bucket. Then you're done. (insertion sort is the human natural one- look for where the next one goes based on what you have so far and insert) Same works for other heuristics.
JadeNB 2y ago
I'm not sure why people are calling this a scam (or maybe they refer to the other exploits described?)—the article itself says "even the CBS executives ultimately admitted that he had broken nary a rule." But I have to say that it is heartbreaking that it is only the name of the girlfriend, and not the hacker who thought he was smarter than everyone, that is "Dinwitty."
chirau 2y ago
Why are people calling this a scam?
- paxys 2y ago
  Who is calling it a scam?
  - chirau 2y ago
    There is a top comment above classifying it as a scam
    - BizarroLand 2y ago
      You should reply to the person you are talking to for them to even have a chance of seeing what you said.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - paxys 2y ago
      What is "it"? The guy was involved with a lot of scams in his life, and that's what the comment is talking about.
- toast0 2y ago
  Winning on press your luck is probably not a scam. Punching up his story to get on press your luck might be a scam. Selling shares in a fraudulent lottery was definitely a scam. Opening checking accounts with assumed names is definitely a scam.
paxys 2y ago
$100K would have been "comfortable retirement" money in the 80s. But I guess the same attitude that got you the money is what prevents you from quitting while you are ahead. A true gambler will always continue to double down until he loses it all.
- karmajunkie 2y ago
  yeah, for people like that, money is just a way to measure how much smarter/slicker they are than their mark. it’s really about the grift. that $100k invested well in the 80s would have been an enormous portfolio in 30 years had he just been interested in a living.
  - ecshafer 2y ago
    Average house price in 1983 in the US was $62k. Assuming he's in a lower col area, and isn't going top of the market, he could have bought 2-3 houses outright, or put down payments on a solid 10 homes. Then renting them out and paying mortgages, that would be very lucrative. Assuming he did his "invest in houses" plan as he said.
- jedberg 2y ago
  Not really. Adjusted for inflation, that's only $300,000 today. Even in the lowest cost of living areas, $300K isn't doing much for you. If you used it to buy a rental in a great area with a high return, you'd still only get about $15,000 a year in rental profits.
  - r00fus 2y ago
    I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with a simple "adjusted for inflation" as a meaningful comparison of money. Let's say Larson simply parked the winnings in real-estate. How much would that be worth today? Imagine he used the capital to continue reinvesting the money generated by said real-estate investment to expand his holdings?
    - bluGill 2y ago
trevithick 2y ago
> One of his later schemes involved opening a checking account with a bank that was offering a promotional $500 to each new customer; he would withdraw the cash at the earliest opportunity, close the account, then repeat the process over and over under assumed names. He could do this today, without using assumed names, at different banks. Sign up for a bank account that's offering a bonus, comply with the fine print to the letter, get bonus, close account. Repeat at a different bank. This can be parallelized for increased performance. It's minorly lucrative. There was probably only one local option for this when Larson did it, forcing him to use assumed names. Today there are countless online banking options available. No assumed names required. $500 is a solid bonus today. That was even more money when Larson was doing this.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  For Canadians at least, the redflagdeals forums are ground zero for this type of thing— typically you need to set up your direct deposit and pay a few bills to qualify for the bonus, but if you're disciplined about that, it seems you can collect a few payouts a year, not including any additional gains from teaser rates on savings accounts and the like.
- toast0 2y ago
  There's not that many banks. FDIC says 4,587 [1], and I think NCUA numbers are similar. And the vast majority of them don't have new account promotions. But yeah, if you have a clean chexsystem report and this is what you spend your time on, you too can become a bank promotion thousandaire. Credit card promotions seem more common, and have the benefit that they're usually distributed as a discount so they tend not to be taxable, unlike bank promotions that are usually distributed as interest. OTOH, getting lots of credit card promotions tends to require lots of spending, real or manufactured, and manufactured spending tends to be difficult to manage at high levels. If you have a job / business that involves a lot of credit card spending, it can be easy to make the credit card promotions work, but if you have that kind of job, you might make more money spending more time on work than spending more time seeking credit card promotions. [1] https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-profile/statistics-at-a-glance/2023dec/industry.pdf https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-profile/stat...
dmurray 2y ago
It's a triumph of regulation that he got his money. It would have been very natural for CBS to cite technical difficulties or find some other way to change the rules of the game, but US game shows in this era were terrified of the FCC, who were given strong powers to enforce fairness in game shows after some frauds in the 50s [0]. Those laws are still on the books, of course, but I expect game show producers have got better at working around them in the small print, while regulators haven't kept up. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s_quiz_show_scandals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s_quiz_show_scandals
- nedrylandJP 2y ago
  > game shows in this era were terrified They still were 20 years later, and probably still are today. In Episode 6 of the Jeopardy! podcast[0], a former contestant coordinator recalls an instance where Ken Jennings, deep into his 2004 run and getting comfortable in the studio and with staff, was brought behind the board to check his appearance on monitors. But being "backstage" was a big red flag and several people had conniptions. [0] https://www.jeopardy.com/listen/this_is_jeopardy https://www.jeopardy.com/listen/this_is_jeopardy
- bombcar 2y ago
  The game shows now just buy insurance against extraordinary wins, and let Llyods of London handle it.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Game show producers want you to win big. Big winners are great advertisement. Management has a different idea of course, but management also understands that big winners bring in viewers and so they want to have big enough winners but not too big. Nobody wants to be accused of cheating as that is a scandal that can kill the game show.
  - kulahan 2y ago
    It’s pretty simple math! I’m certain they have all the ideal ratios worked out and whatnot
  - 2y ago
mattmaroon 2y ago
Sometimes I wonder what would happen to guys like that if they just applied the same mindset to running a legitimate business.
- paxys 2y ago
  You just described every successful entrepreneur in existence.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    Haha oh yeah
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I imagine there was a mechanical, rotating drum with metal contacts to "randomly" trip the scoreboard. There would have been 5 such patterns on the drum. I even imagine a human was operating the drum, choosing among the five possible patterns. I could be wrong but this was early in the era of popular computing — and interfacing with high-current lamp circuits would have been a challenge for most. The other compelling reason to believe it was mechanical is that having only 5 patterns seems really lame if there was software driving it. Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation.
- jedberg 2y ago
  > Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation. They used slide projectors to change the board. Each projector advanced at the same time. They only had three options in each projector. It's unclear why they only chose three options, probably for production simplicity. They would switch out the carousels on the projectors between rounds, with more whammys in subsequent rounds. So the best guess is that they wanted a certain whammy ratio and leaving two squares with only good stuff would achieve that. Also it made for good TV, when it was possible to earn an extra spin on every board configuration.
- sparky_z 2y ago
  >Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation. I'll speculate. I imagine they simply never audited the 5 patterns for full "whammy coverage". They just created 5 random patterns and didn't think any more about it. If they'd only had 3 or 4 patterns, maybe there would be a couple more whammy-less spaces. If they'd had 6 or 7, perhaps there wouldn't be any, just through random chance.
y-curious 2y ago
Great article, thank you. Sad, but unsurprising, that he lost it all in the end.
jpalawaga 2y ago
This American Life also covered this in Ep. 412, act 4: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/412/million-dollar-idea https://www.thisamericanlife.org/412/million-dollar-idea
max_ 2y ago
I calculated that for me to be financially independent I need to make only $750k. Anyone with practical advice on how to make that realistically?
- chihuahua 2y ago
  Get hired at Amazon or Microsoft as an SDE/SWE. Get promoted to Principal and do that job for a few years.
more_corn 2y ago
Not that it matters now, but I have deduced who burglarized their house. Michael was certain that Teresa had something to do with it so he clearly told no one. Which makes sense for his personality. Teresa not being a paranoid scam artist would have told someone. Especially if she felt like it was a chore. Probably her best friend. The Christmas party invitation was clearly from Teresa’s side since Michael doesn’t have the sort of friends who invite you to a Christmas party. And it was probably her best friend. Her best friend told someone, probably male, probably a younger relative, probably at the Christmas party. He was looking at them at the party realized they’d be here for hours and left early to go burglarize their house. A call to the host of the Christmas party with that information would certainly be enough for her to think of the name.

233 points by EndXA 2y ago

That was a delightful read. I wont give away the plot but I say good for him.

This shows up here every now and then. Interesting story! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713

havaloc 2y ago

Highly recommend at least skimming the full episode. https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE- https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE-

katangafor 2y ago
wow "lightning-fast reflexes" is not overstated!! That looks incredibly difficult to pull off for so long. Thanks for the link
- mrb 2y ago
  Meh, I am not that impressed by the reflexes. I counted the number of video frames in the youtube video (https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE- https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE-) and each square stays lit up for 8 frames, or 270 ms. This is quite long. If you memorize the particular pseudo-random sequence (as Michael did), it's pretty easy to hit a given square reliably. The key insight and most difficult trick is not having fast reflexes, but actually discovering the pseudo-random sequence is not completely random, and memorizing it.
- gosub100 2y ago
  Supposedly one of the reasons Ken Jennings did so well was he gamed the timing of the buzzer. Apparently it's locked while Alex (rip) reads the question and there is a delay if you jump the gun. In addition to being smart enough to answer most of the questions, of course.
- Dove 2y ago
  I had the opposite reaction. This didn't look that hard. Then again, I have a lot of experience in two related contexts: I like timing-oriented video games, and I am a musician. The game show movements look to me to take about a quarter of a second, or 250 ms. This is slow enough to make winning by skill just barely possible. Scientifically speaking, I think 200 ms is considered a good reaction time for a normal person - and the game show requires a bit of processing, so will be a bit slower. Even if everything on the show were truly random, if you simplified things by watching one square and waiting for it to be lit up and not a whammy, I'd expect an average person to just barely be able to hit the button before the game moved on. Controller delay could spoil that, but no doubt the game is designed with this threshold in mind, to give the tantalizing impression that you can maybe do it. Superhuman timing wouldn't be needed - whether by training or genetics, people who specialize in reacting fast can manage times more like 100-150ms. Predicting makes things much easier. A demanding but reliable target in a timing-oriented video game (but where you can see the required input coming) might be around 50ms. As one example, A Dance Of Fire And Ice seems to consider you moderately inconsistent if your inputs are precise to about 40-60 ms. As another point of reference, Dark Souls 2 offers the player a window of invulnerability time they can use to negate attacks. This combines elements of prediction, reaction, and action delay. The game is widely considered punishingly difficult (but people do it) at the default value of 166 ms and unproblematic around a buffed value of 400ms. As a musician, it's common to play a piece of music in which beats are 500 ms, and subdividing them into quarters of that (so 125 ms) is so routine that you are expected to do it correctly and can clearly identify when someone has done it wrong. I don't know how precise musicians are exactly, but I do remember once playing an electronic instrument with a 12ms delay and being surprised to find it so imprecise that I had a hard time making music the way I wanted to. I didn't realize I was sensitive to tens of milliseconds in a musical context, but I guess I must be? At any rate, I would expect any reasonably experienced musician to consider hitting a 250 ms beat, on the beat, to be very easy.
eddieroger 2y ago
If you go in to this knowing he knows how to beat the game, you'll also note that he reacts before he knows what prize he got, and is just reacting to landing on the right spot. Surely someone caught that in the moment, but couldn't have put together that he was celebrating because he knew he'd won.

rwmj 2y ago

$331,381.55 in 2024 dollars. If only he'd invested it in the stock market rather than half-assed ponzi schemes he could have been reasonably comfortable.

somenameforme 2y ago
The whole point of money is being able to do what you enjoy. And it's clear he absolutely loved these shenanigans. Losing it, regaining it, and finding something new - that was what he wanted and seemingly spent his entire life doing. The journey was the destination. You can see this everywhere in all aspects of life as well. Jeff Bezos, and countless other billionaires, could easily retire tomorrow and have enough money to do essentially anything they could even dream of. So what do they do? Continue to work 60 hours a week doing pretty much the same stuff they were doing on their way up. Because they love it. On the other end of the spectrum countless rappers have managed to break out of a life of crime to become successful and make millions. Yet many end up right back in that life of crime. It's because they enjoy the lifestyle. They don't want to just be comfortable, but to actually do what they enjoy.
- rwmj 2y ago
  Did losing half his net worth in a robbery contribute to his enjoyment of life? From his subsequent behaviour towards his girlfriend, it seems like it didn't.
- HumblyTossed 2y ago
  > Continue to work 60 hours a week I do not, even for an instant, believe they pull those kinds of numbers.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    Time reviewed a study based on some 256 CEOs here. [1] The average work week ended up at just over 58 hours. Here [2] is a post from Forbes where they surveyed 50 billionaires on how many hours they work per week. For 60% it was at least 60 hours. Imagine tomorrow - you finally 'made it'. You have $15k/month guaranteed income, forever. It's not like that's a destination, because at that point you need to decide in a point for your life. Relentless hedonism is really awesome for like a year or two, but even that becomes rapidly unfulfilling. So... what now? For some it's work, others go for religion, others just end up playing 'make number go up' with their earnings, and so on. But the point is you need to find something to do with your life. "Comfort" is a false destination, because it's not a destination - once you reach it, you just immediately start going down a new path that can even take you further away from where you were - as in this guy's case. [1] - https://time.com/4076563/ceos-productivity/ https://time.com/4076563/ceos-productivity/ [2] - https://twitter.com/forbes/status/498274992694784000 https://twitter.com/forbes/status/498274992694784000

helboi4 2y ago

It is hilarious how much effort some poeple will go to to make money through scams when they could spend the effort doing something sustainable. Or at least once you get away with one scam, use it for actual business, don't blow it on testing your luck again and again!

taneq 2y ago
Cue that Key and Peele sketch about robbing a bank by posing as tellers and stealing only a couple of hundred dollars a day to avoid suspicion…
- smugma 2y ago
  https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=rxaTsdV3kGpQM-SR https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=rxaTsdV3kGpQM-SR Hadn’t seen it, it’s well-executed.
- zuminator 2y ago
  My interpretation of that gag isn't that they're stealing anything, but that when you actually parse the wannabe mastermind's scheme, they're actually just working for the bank and getting paid as regular employees.
  - taneq 2y ago
    Me too but it's not really clear during the setup and I didn't want to spoil it too hard. :)
quacked 2y ago
Scamming is fun, you don't have to be predictable or reliable or follow social norms, and your ceiling is limited by your own desire rather than a time schedule or a pay structure. (Of course, these days some scammers run firms with office space, schedules, and incentive structures!) Also, a score yields some satisfying resentment; you're getting one over on those bastards. I think a lot of people don't really have a good theory of mind of career criminals. The vast majority aren't regretfully finding themselves driven into crime; they like it and it's fun.

ekanes 2y ago

Fun read. My favorite line: "Six months later, in May 1984, Michael Larson sat beardily in the interview room for the Press Your Luck auditions in Hollywood."

its_ethan 2y ago
I liked the call back to this later: "With a raspy voice he unbeardily reminisced about his game show exploits "
- baobabKoodaa 2y ago
  I'm not a native English speaker. Is there some kind of double entendre here? Or does it just mean "with beard" and "without beard"?
  - its_ethan 2y ago
    To me it's just a creative way to describe his current appearance using a ("fake") adjective instead of "with a noun". Basically just turning a noun into an adjective for the fun of it. Because it's a short written piece, it's just a fun way to call attention to his having (or not having) a distinct physical appearance at two points in time. So these aren't "real" words, and as far as I'm aware there isn't really any double entendre. It would be like saying "he sat there, t-shirt-edly, and blah blah" and then later, "he appeared, un-t-shirt-ily, blah blah" to describe him being dressed vs shirtless. Not the best example, but yea, your interpretation is correct.
  - idontpost 2y ago
    [dead]
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    Yes, he's talking about "manly facewear".

thraxil 2y ago

My friend in college in the 90's called his punk radio show "What wants to be a hundredaire?"

sircastor 2y ago
I remember listening to a morning radio show and one of their contest radio lines was “we’re giving away… dollars-worth of prizes”
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  Sounds like RSK-era XFM. If anyone here knows…
  - tailspin2019 2y ago
    "You're an idiot. Play a record."
- vundercind 2y ago
  Relatedly, there used to be a radio ad for a local company that bragged “serving [city] for over a twentieth of a century”
fuzzfactor 2y ago
I took great pride in being a self-made thousandaire before I got any further. If you want to be a millionaire, even if it's realistically a bit beyond the horizon, maybe it does make sense to focus on ever higher goals which are way beyond the horizon for everybody, like becoming a billionaire. For one thing if you don't make it all the way (which everybody knows is unlikely) it still could be pretty good. In that sense, the higher the goals the better. But beyond the horizon it's a very indefinite goal to zero in on, in an uncertain direction that can not be accurately visualized. It can be good to have a north star if you're trying to be a millionaire or billionaire, but if it leads you in a direction that does not include a thousandaire pit stop, I would question whether it was really true north or not.

hnfong 2y ago

Here's an actual case where understanding computer science would have been immensely helpful... > The motivation for this aberrant behavior was a contest put on by a local radio station. Each day a disk jockey would read a serial number aloud on the air, and if any listener was able to produce the matching dollar bill they would win $30,000. Michael reasoned that 100,000 one dollar bills was 100,000 opportunities to win the prize, giving him a statistical advantage. And even if his scheme proved fruitless he would just redeposit his money, so he figured he had nothing to lose. > Michael and Teresa spent each day rifling through piles of cash looking for matches, pausing only for such distractions as eating, bathing, and excreting. They soon realized that it was impossible for two people to examine that much money in the allotted time (sort then binary search)

taneq 2y ago
Maybe less lucrative but when we had some new bookshelves installed and moved all our books onto them I used mergesort to get them in order. ;)
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Bucket-(insert-)sort is also an all time favorite. I've taught it to many people already. It helps that it works in a very intuitive way.
  - noman-land 2y ago
    Teach it to us! I'm not familiar with this.
    - jasonjmcghee 2y ago
      It's bucket sort, and parent is suggesting insertion sort within each bucket as the pre-merge step. Say you're sorting alphabetically by title. You make one bucket per letter- put books into their respective bucket based on first letter of title. Then sort using insertion sort within each bucket. Then you're done. (insertion sort is the human natural one- look for where the next one goes based on what you have so far and insert) Same works for other heuristics.

JadeNB 2y ago

I'm not sure why people are calling this a scam (or maybe they refer to the other exploits described?)—the article itself says "even the CBS executives ultimately admitted that he had broken nary a rule." But I have to say that it is heartbreaking that it is only the name of the girlfriend, and not the hacker who thought he was smarter than everyone, that is "Dinwitty."

chirau 2y ago

Why are people calling this a scam?

paxys 2y ago
Who is calling it a scam?
- chirau 2y ago
  There is a top comment above classifying it as a scam
  - BizarroLand 2y ago
    You should reply to the person you are talking to for them to even have a chance of seeing what you said.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - paxys 2y ago
    What is "it"? The guy was involved with a lot of scams in his life, and that's what the comment is talking about.
toast0 2y ago
Winning on press your luck is probably not a scam. Punching up his story to get on press your luck might be a scam. Selling shares in a fraudulent lottery was definitely a scam. Opening checking accounts with assumed names is definitely a scam.

paxys 2y ago

$100K would have been "comfortable retirement" money in the 80s. But I guess the same attitude that got you the money is what prevents you from quitting while you are ahead. A true gambler will always continue to double down until he loses it all.

karmajunkie 2y ago
yeah, for people like that, money is just a way to measure how much smarter/slicker they are than their mark. it’s really about the grift. that $100k invested well in the 80s would have been an enormous portfolio in 30 years had he just been interested in a living.
- ecshafer 2y ago
  Average house price in 1983 in the US was $62k. Assuming he's in a lower col area, and isn't going top of the market, he could have bought 2-3 houses outright, or put down payments on a solid 10 homes. Then renting them out and paying mortgages, that would be very lucrative. Assuming he did his "invest in houses" plan as he said.
jedberg 2y ago
Not really. Adjusted for inflation, that's only $300,000 today. Even in the lowest cost of living areas, $300K isn't doing much for you. If you used it to buy a rental in a great area with a high return, you'd still only get about $15,000 a year in rental profits.
- r00fus 2y ago
  I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with a simple "adjusted for inflation" as a meaningful comparison of money. Let's say Larson simply parked the winnings in real-estate. How much would that be worth today? Imagine he used the capital to continue reinvesting the money generated by said real-estate investment to expand his holdings?
  - bluGill 2y ago

trevithick 2y ago

> One of his later schemes involved opening a checking account with a bank that was offering a promotional $500 to each new customer; he would withdraw the cash at the earliest opportunity, close the account, then repeat the process over and over under assumed names. He could do this today, without using assumed names, at different banks. Sign up for a bank account that's offering a bonus, comply with the fine print to the letter, get bonus, close account. Repeat at a different bank. This can be parallelized for increased performance. It's minorly lucrative. There was probably only one local option for this when Larson did it, forcing him to use assumed names. Today there are countless online banking options available. No assumed names required. $500 is a solid bonus today. That was even more money when Larson was doing this.

mikepurvis 2y ago
For Canadians at least, the redflagdeals forums are ground zero for this type of thing— typically you need to set up your direct deposit and pay a few bills to qualify for the bonus, but if you're disciplined about that, it seems you can collect a few payouts a year, not including any additional gains from teaser rates on savings accounts and the like.
toast0 2y ago
There's not that many banks. FDIC says 4,587 [1], and I think NCUA numbers are similar. And the vast majority of them don't have new account promotions. But yeah, if you have a clean chexsystem report and this is what you spend your time on, you too can become a bank promotion thousandaire. Credit card promotions seem more common, and have the benefit that they're usually distributed as a discount so they tend not to be taxable, unlike bank promotions that are usually distributed as interest. OTOH, getting lots of credit card promotions tends to require lots of spending, real or manufactured, and manufactured spending tends to be difficult to manage at high levels. If you have a job / business that involves a lot of credit card spending, it can be easy to make the credit card promotions work, but if you have that kind of job, you might make more money spending more time on work than spending more time seeking credit card promotions. [1] https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-profile/statistics-at-a-glance/2023dec/industry.pdf https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-profile/stat...

dmurray 2y ago

It's a triumph of regulation that he got his money. It would have been very natural for CBS to cite technical difficulties or find some other way to change the rules of the game, but US game shows in this era were terrified of the FCC, who were given strong powers to enforce fairness in game shows after some frauds in the 50s [0]. Those laws are still on the books, of course, but I expect game show producers have got better at working around them in the small print, while regulators haven't kept up. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s_quiz_show_scandals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s_quiz_show_scandals

nedrylandJP 2y ago
> game shows in this era were terrified They still were 20 years later, and probably still are today. In Episode 6 of the Jeopardy! podcast[0], a former contestant coordinator recalls an instance where Ken Jennings, deep into his 2004 run and getting comfortable in the studio and with staff, was brought behind the board to check his appearance on monitors. But being "backstage" was a big red flag and several people had conniptions. [0] https://www.jeopardy.com/listen/this_is_jeopardy https://www.jeopardy.com/listen/this_is_jeopardy
bombcar 2y ago
The game shows now just buy insurance against extraordinary wins, and let Llyods of London handle it.
bluGill 2y ago
Game show producers want you to win big. Big winners are great advertisement. Management has a different idea of course, but management also understands that big winners bring in viewers and so they want to have big enough winners but not too big. Nobody wants to be accused of cheating as that is a scandal that can kill the game show.
- kulahan 2y ago
  It’s pretty simple math! I’m certain they have all the ideal ratios worked out and whatnot
- 2y ago

mattmaroon 2y ago

Sometimes I wonder what would happen to guys like that if they just applied the same mindset to running a legitimate business.

paxys 2y ago
You just described every successful entrepreneur in existence.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  Haha oh yeah

JKCalhoun 2y ago

I imagine there was a mechanical, rotating drum with metal contacts to "randomly" trip the scoreboard. There would have been 5 such patterns on the drum. I even imagine a human was operating the drum, choosing among the five possible patterns. I could be wrong but this was early in the era of popular computing — and interfacing with high-current lamp circuits would have been a challenge for most. The other compelling reason to believe it was mechanical is that having only 5 patterns seems really lame if there was software driving it. Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation.

jedberg 2y ago
> Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation. They used slide projectors to change the board. Each projector advanced at the same time. They only had three options in each projector. It's unclear why they only chose three options, probably for production simplicity. They would switch out the carousels on the projectors between rounds, with more whammys in subsequent rounds. So the best guess is that they wanted a certain whammy ratio and leaving two squares with only good stuff would achieve that. Also it made for good TV, when it was possible to earn an extra spin on every board configuration.
sparky_z 2y ago
>Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation. I'll speculate. I imagine they simply never audited the 5 patterns for full "whammy coverage". They just created 5 random patterns and didn't think any more about it. If they'd only had 3 or 4 patterns, maybe there would be a couple more whammy-less spaces. If they'd had 6 or 7, perhaps there wouldn't be any, just through random chance.

y-curious 2y ago

Great article, thank you. Sad, but unsurprising, that he lost it all in the end.

jpalawaga 2y ago

This American Life also covered this in Ep. 412, act 4: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/412/million-dollar-idea https://www.thisamericanlife.org/412/million-dollar-idea

max_ 2y ago

I calculated that for me to be financially independent I need to make only $750k. Anyone with practical advice on how to make that realistically?

chihuahua 2y ago
Get hired at Amazon or Microsoft as an SDE/SWE. Get promoted to Principal and do that job for a few years.

more_corn 2y ago

Not that it matters now, but I have deduced who burglarized their house. Michael was certain that Teresa had something to do with it so he clearly told no one. Which makes sense for his personality. Teresa not being a paranoid scam artist would have told someone. Especially if she felt like it was a chore. Probably her best friend. The Christmas party invitation was clearly from Teresa’s side since Michael doesn’t have the sort of friends who invite you to a Christmas party. And it was probably her best friend. Her best friend told someone, probably male, probably a younger relative, probably at the Christmas party. He was looking at them at the party realized they’d be here for hours and left early to go burglarize their house. A call to the host of the Christmas party with that information would certainly be enough for her to think of the name.