Silver Lining Ceramics on Etsy

What does it mean to be a billionaire?

So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:

Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?

This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.

Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?

This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.

Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:

This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.

How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.

Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.

Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.

But we’re not done yet.

The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?

Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.

The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.

And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.

If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.

But we’re not done yet.

Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.

This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.

In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.

So yeah, make of that what you will.

1 YEAR UPDATE

So it’s been just a little bit over a year since I’ve made this post, and holy shit I didn’t expect it to get so many notes… anyway thought I’d make an update. First, a few responses to common criticisms I noticed:

“That house costs more than you said it costs”

I provided sources for everything, I can’t click on the links for you broski.

“The map of Russia is incorrect”

Strange, my bad… didn’t notice until after I posted that the map I used includes Belarus and a few other countries as part of Russia, no idea why they did that, I should have picked a better map.

“Net worth somehow doesn’t count as worth because not all of it is literal stacks of cash”

First of all I distinctly specified that my figures were based on if said billionaires liquidated their assets, but more importantly that’s like sitting on top of a pile of solid gold bars and claiming you’re totally broke because you can’t use them at the supermarket. Seriously, this is just asinine.

*Insert impassioned defense of capitalism here*

Now if you follow my blog it’s pretty obvious that I’m a leftist, but something I did very deliberately for my billionaire essay was try to avoid ever mentioning left politics or making any moral judgements, i.e. more or less everything I wrote in that post was just objective, inarguable facts. I very intentionally ended the essay with “make of that what you will,” without ever actually commenting on whether the situation was good or bad. If you consider yourself a capitalist and want to remain consistent with reality, you really shouldn’t be offended by this post. If your first response upon looking at a neutral series of data points is to immediately rush to defend the system that produced it, it means you instinctually realize something is terribly wrong and you’re trying to justify it. Just saying, not a good position to be arguing from.

ANYWAY

As of the time of this update, Bill Gates is no longer the richest person in the world; the title now belongs to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with with a mind-blowing $147.7 billion. Now, what could he actually do with all of that? Let’s make a list!

End Homelessness in America

There are an estimated 553,742 homeless people in America. Jeff Bezos could hand every single one of them $50,000 cash for $27,687,100,000, which should be more than enough to get a roof over your head for a decent amount of time.

Give 100,000 students a full ride to Harvard

Going to Harvard University will cost a student about 60,659 a year including tuition, room and board, and various other fees. Paying for a full 4 years for 100,000 students would cost $24,263,600,000.

Buy Iceland for a year

The gross domestic product of Iceland is currently about $23.9 billion dollars, which means for that amount Jeff Bezos could buy every single product and service produced in the country for an entire year.

Fund every US national park for 10 years

This year’s budget for the national park service will probably be about $2.7 billion, so 10 years of funding would be $27 billion.

Give every Amazon worker a $20,000 bonus

Jeff Bezos has 563,100 employees working for Amazon. He could give each and every one of them a $20,000 bonus for $ 11,262,000,000.

End world hunger

It would probably cost around $30 billion to ensure that no person in the entire world suffered starvation and malnourishment this year.

And how much does Jeff have left?

After doing all of that, Bezos would still have upwards of $3.5 billion left over, which is not only far, far more money than a single person could ever spend on themselves, it also would mean he still gets to remain substantially richer than most other billionaires.

Funny world we live in.

Saw this shared on FB. It covers counter-arguments for a lot of the most common pro-gun points you’ll see people raise. Long read, but very helpful.

This is amazing. Thank you dude for doing all this work.

A plus size Sailor Moon Collection

Remember the Star Wars Collection by Torrid, well now it’s Sailor Moon’s turn!!!

Now Sailor Moon fans of all sizes can start 2018 off right. 

“Moon Prism Power, Make Up!”

Kingdom Hearts + @ao3tags

harry potter and the @screenshotsofdespair

part 2: harry potter & the chamber of secrets

KEYBLADE STUDY

It’s been years and years, but I still have a lot of sads over Aerith. You’d think I’d be over it by now, but I’m nOT, OKAY. ;A;

the remake hype train is still going full-speed ahead for me, so here’s the first FF7 cosplay I pulled together for Katsu ‘16. I never thought I’d say this, but winter conventions are no joke, man. IT WAS SO COLD OUT??? Making me miss Otakon already, slkfjdklasdjgsadg

photos by the ridiculously amazing @chezphoto, it was my first time working with them, and they were sO NICE and SO TALENTED and SO PATIENT with me and my shivering bones, and they even brought a blanket for me to huddle in between shots??? That’s Quality Customer Service there, people. TOP. NOTCH.

more shots from this set HERE

This is gorgeous! You look stunning!

ICYMI (8/20/15): Shit is St Louis remains fucked up. Another kid killed yesterday, another police force acting like a rogue military, gassing families in their own homes, arresting protesters. The struggle continues. #staywoke #farfromover

Teenage boy accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life w/o trial. Boy then commits Suicide.

A young man named Kalief Browder, 22, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime, has just committed suicide.

He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. There was no proof to suggest he did and when the police searched him they found nothing, but he was arrested anyways. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. 

After several attempts at taking his own life, Kalief Browder was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home in the Bronx.

Browder told several stories of being beaten and abused by other inmates or officers, and a disturbing surveillance footage was released of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him that it  Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell. 

As his father explained, he’d apparently decided that these torn strips of sheet were not strong enough. That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise upstairs, she went upstairs to investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that her youngest child had hanged himself.

R.I.P. #Kalief Browder. I’m sorry they took your childhood and your future away like that.

Source / Source

#StayWoke

I hate this country man.😪

^

The Illusions of the past. You think to have cast them off, only to find them years later, unwearying, unrelenting. The past can bind a man as surely as irons.

x; the three of us will always be one

stop reposting “self care isn’t drinking tea or taking baths, it’s doing all of your chores and work” shit

how many times do you have to be told by disabled people that it is ableist before you stop?

oh, self care is doing laundry? great. please figure out a way to get my bedridden ass up and down two flights of stairs with laundry baskets and I’ll get right fucking on that.

oh, self care is catching up on three days of work? tell me how to do that when I am so fatigued and cognitively impaired that I cannot form sentences. better yet, tell me how to do that when I’m too sick to have a job in the first place.

oh, self care is “taking a deep breath and sorting through what you need to do?” well, what I need to do is survive. and things that help me survive just don’t make you “Real Self Care For Real Responsible Adults” list.

we all have different coping mechanisms. what you find cliche or meaningless or even patronizing might be an incredibly important resource to somebody else. coping strategies you find helpful may not even be accessible to other people.

and to frame the entire discussion on self care around “self care = being productive and functional in a way described by a capitalist, ableist society” is to send the message that people who aren’t able to adhere to those standards don’t deserve to take care of themselves, don’t deserve to be nice to themselves, and don’t deserve to survive.

Tl;dr- go be a pretentious, ableist prick somewhere else

No Justice, No Peace (3/4/15): The full report of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department has been released and it is nothing short of horrifying. Please take the time to read each screencap above, and if you can stomach more afterwords, read the full report. The above barely scrapes the surface of the indignities Ferguson PD inflicted on the people they were supposed to protect and serve. Ferguson PD is not unique. This is everyday terrorism faced by Black folks from the police, around the country. #staywoke #farfromover

(insp.)

9 pictures of Cloud Strife