@tangleofrainbows, this glamorous mantis was posing on the plumeria just for you

what a beautiful girl she is!!!

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.

Let this sink in next time someone tells you capitalism allocates wealth according to contribution. It’s empty ideology meant to shield billionaires from a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and power.

Down with capitalism

mantises of my recent acquaintance

if u don’t kiss ur cat on their tiny soft little forehead wtf are u even doing

Yelling at her for trying to eat plastic

This is the most useless fucking map I’ve ever seen and I love it. I want to print it out and put it on my wall. 

I will never get tired of this picture

reblog whenever it comes around !!

BLESSED IMAGE

reblog for chaotic good gays.

Я волна

Blacktip reef sharks make friends and groups!

Blacktip reef sharks organize themselves into meaningful social groups and engage in relationships and teamwork with other sharks of the same sex and age.

A study published in 2012 by Animal Behaviour documents how one population of blacktip reef sharks is actually organized into four communities and two subcommunities. The research shows for the first time that adults of a reef-associated shark species form stable, long-term social bonds. The study was conducted at Moorea Island in the Society archipelago, French Polynesia by Johann Mourier, Julie Vercelloni, and Serge Planes. A total of seven sites were surveyed on a regular basis along just over 6 miles of the north shore of Moorea. The surveys included nearly hour-long dives at a depth close to 50 feet, with the diver photographing nearby sharks.

Analysis of the gathered data determined that the sharks were not within non-random collections, but rather had organized themselves into meaningful social groups. These communities and groups are formed for protection and to avoid aggression with each other. The study also showed that these groups work together as a team to catch prey and schools of fish.

me @ the entire architecture of systematic oppression and also everyone in the current administration

just wondering but why is unfollowing seen as such a huge thing on tumblr? it’s really really not. like, if someone annoys you? unfollow them. don’t post things you particularly like/care about? unfollow them. hate on your interests? unfollow them! who fucking cares! it’s not like you said you hated them, this is a dumbass social media site just like twitter and instagram.

you don’t always need some grand reason to unfollow/block someone. it’s not that deep.

Im Stuck

Would You Like A Hand Horace

Help

Jump!

According to Wookiepedia, members of the Jedi Council were elected by, well, the other members of the Jedi Council. In Legends, five members served for life. I’m guessing Yoda was one of these, which is super problematic considering just how long his life is. Four other members served open-ended terms with a chance at promotion to life-time when one of the five kicked it. The remaining three members were term-limited and were often brought on because they had specific types of expertise. I’m guessing Obi-Wan was one of these, promoted to the Council during the Clone Wars thanks to his skills at general-ing.

They rule over 10,000+ knights plus an unknown number of younglings, padawans, and service corpse members, but the Jedi Council is basically the board of a small art museum where everyone just nominates their friends and relatives. A number of councilors were nominated to the Council by their masters including Depa Billaba, Plo Koon, Ki-Adi-Mundi, while others were simply part of a siting councilor’s lineage, like Obi-Wan. Basically, if you’re just a rank-and-file Jedi from some random lineage, then you have almost no chance of ascending to power. You have even less of a chance if you have a known complaint with the Code or the Council’s interpretation of the same. No wonder Barriss felt like she had to blow something up just to be heard.

i need to confirm the sources but i’m pretty sure Obi-Wan was got the rank of Master and joined the Jedi Council right after the battle of Geonosis.

Btw, I loved you pointed this out because the Jedi Council always gave me some serious nepotism vibes.  

It’s too much coincidence, to be just coincidence. Of the 12 members, we have at least 6 linked to Yoda. In An Order with more 10000 members, no one else, who was not directly linked to Yoda, was good enough to be on the Council? Am I supposed to believe that? Seriously! I call bullshit. The members were not elect on merit only, their views HAD to be in line with Yoda’s (and his apprentices and, let’s be real, yoda’s apprentices believes = yoda’s believes) for them to even be considered.

It’s not about selecting the “best” members. It’s about selecting a member who will help them maintain the status quo.

The Jedi Council is the people in a room deciding what’s best for everyone, ready to give final say to one ‘wise’ leader when they don’t agree. Boy, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard of that system of government before? Hmmmm.

What’s really interesting to me is the aspect of dynasty within the Council. Jedi aren’t permitted to have families and, if they have biological children, they aren’t permitted to raise them so as to avoid attachment and nepotism, and yet, that’s exactly what happens with master-padawan lineage. It’s about as incestuous as all those medieval popes being succeeded by their ‘nephews.’ Yoda, a life-time member with an insanely long lifetime, basically has a stranglehold on the reigns of power which his ‘heirs’ may share but never actually inherit.

The more i think about this the more frustrated I get. All the Order’s major issues, in some way or another, come back to this. For them to evolve, they didn’t need a radical chance like Anakin slaughtering everyone. All they needed to do was open themselves to new opinions. It was that simple. If they had accepted new ideas, debated them, learned from them, they would’ve been unstoppable. Something to be truly respected and admired. They didn’t need a revolution. All they needed to do was listen. This is what frustrates me so much about the council. If they had done something as simple as listening to new ideas everything that happened could’ve been avoided.

And as much as I enjoy criticizing all the members of the council, I’m blaming this one on Yoda and here’s why: the Jedi Order was capable of change. They changed their rules a bunch of times to adapt to new situations, so change was possible. But how many changes happened after Yoda took control? As far as I know, nothing significant changed. If anything, his “rise to power” marked the decline of the Jedi Order. Under his guidance, the Jedi kept themselves isolated and detached from the rest of the galaxy, they grew more dependent on the Senate, we noticed the first signs of nepotism in the High Council, they turned themselves into soldiers, etc.

Yes, the individual members of the Council are all responsible for what happened too but we can’t deny the only thing they have in common is Yoda, and that says a lot. They were all trained by him (at some point or another) and they all sought his counsel when in doubt. That’s a lot of power over a lot of minds. And that’s why I don’t by the idea that Yoda is wise or admirable. I’m not saying his sith lord in disguise but I can’t call wise a being who lived for 900 years without learning shit. I just can’t.

The saddest part is that the Jedi, or at least some Jedi, were aware of this. In the Kanan comics, Depa says that the reason she chose Caleb is because he questions the status quo and the Jedi are going to need people who do that if they have any hope of surviving in a changing universe. She firmly believes that they need some sort of avenue for peaceful dissent in order to stay a relevant force in the galaxy.

The sad truth is that the Jedi order has a Yoda problem. He trains all the younglings. Ahsoka later describes him as both wise and kind but he’s demonstrably neither. She, and every other Jedi youngling for 800+ years have simply been raised to think that. He also has the power to override anyone else in terms of decision making both because they’ve been raised to respect his ‘wisdom’ and because he has that authority as Grand Master of the Council. During AotC, he overrides Mace Windu, the Master of the Order, and makes him cover up the fact they have no clue where their mystery army came from.

So many of Yoda’s decisions are about maintaining or consolidating power, both for himself within the Order and the Order within the galaxy. He doesn’t want Anakin because the Chosen One might be a threat to his dominance. He doesn’t want to admit that the Jedi don’t know what’s going on during the Clone Wars, because he doesn’t want them to lose power within the Republic. In an episode of Rebels he admits that he acted out of fear and that all of his decisions leading up to and during the Clone Wars were based on his fear of change. It’s nice that he finally gained the wisdom and introspection to figure that out, but it was too little too late.

“a Yoda problem”!! I love it. From now on all my meta will be tagged “the Yoda problem”!!!lol

Tbh, I never bought the idea behind that scene in Rebels. I never believed had actually learned anything from what happened. it’s the same problem I’ve with Yoda in the ROTS novelization. Both have scenes with Yoda admitting he was wrong but he changes nothing afterwards. He admits he acted out of fear, and years later he’s back to pull the same shit that led to destruction of the Jedi order. It doesn’t matter what he says because his actions don’t align with his beliefs. It’s like Anakin saying he’ll bring peace to the galaxy right after he killed a bunch of children. What comes out of his mouth doesn’t match his behavior.

I think at some point Yoda mentions they were wrong to jump into the Clone wars. Okay, I agree. He’s right. But then he’s absolutely okay with Luke turning into a soldier so he can kill his own father. Where’s the wisdom in that?

What bothers me the most about Yoda is that he had more time than any other character in the franchise to learn from his mistakes but yet died preaching the same crap that got all his students killed in brutal, violent ways. Not only that, he died in his bed, peacefully. As if he had done well and accomplished his mission. Like a hero resting after saving the day.

He never took any responsibilities for 900 years of mistakes. There’s no wisdom or humility in that. The very little he learned changed nothing. He died the same way he lived.

I think part of the tragedy of Yoda and Obi-Wan in the OT, is that they knew they had fucked up somewhere, but they were never able to figure out WHERE they had fucked up.

So they died doing the same shit that got them in that position in the first place.

#for an order of empathic monks #they’re shockingly bad at self-reflection (tags by @grand-duc) 

Wow what a nice bat

They’re here. Your polemans