“The medieval warrior, realizing the consequences of his impulsive act, immediately approached the owner of the drone and offered to pay for the damage.
The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.
Drone owners have another year to develop a unique “dragon-like” design for their flying machines.” (x)
I am 100% cooler with this knowing that the spear-thrower realized “oops maybe I shouldn’t have done that” and tried to make it right, and that the guy who the drone belonged to was cool with it
just so everyone knows, this has already been memorialized in a runestone
Everything about this post blesses those involved with a +4 on their next Today is Good Day roll
I crack up every time at seeing that runestone.
I would rather bleed out than sit here and talk about my feelings for ten minutes.
the reason why joss whedon’s inaccurate characterization and poor writing with clint barton in avengers pisses me off so much is because whedon misses the entire point of clint that makes him such a longstanding and well loved member of the marvel comic universe. clint is talented, enormously so. he’s the best archer in the world, excellent at hand to hand combat, he’s intelligent, and on and on that puts this little mortal man on the same level to be on a team with a super soldier, a god, a total screaming genius with a superscience suit, the most capable assassin and spy ever trained, and a hyperstrong rage monster.
but the thing is, even with all that, clint is the most unfailingly human member of the team. clint hides his intelligence, he gets himself into fights where he’s outnumbered and then gets hit in the head, he tells terrible jokes or makes puns in the middle of a fight, he gets cut up and beat up and ends most fights covered in bandages or in the hospital. he’s disabled, he has hearing aids. he isn’t this Badass Action Hero w/ Included Bow. he’s talented and capable, but he trips, he gets punched, he gets cut, he gets shot, he runs out of arrows, he gets knocked down. he isn’t motivated by revenge or a need to prove himself or a sense of duty or an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong. he’s motivated by the fact that he wants to help, because he can, because he used to lead a shitty life, because he should.
clint barton is just as much average joe as he is an avenger. he’s a disaster and a hero. clint barton’s not the cookie cutter male action hero that joss whedon painted him as in avengers. he’s not a silent broody badass, stalwart hero archetype, solid shield agent.he’s so much more. he’s a fuck up. he’s trying.
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.
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
If I was a billionaire, I would just give money away. I would literally seek out low socioeconomic status families with disabled children and provide for them for life.
There is literally no good fucking reason for someone to have that much money. Ever.
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