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Cosimo Galluzzi
shark vs the universe
Love Begins
Monterey Bay Aquarium
tannertan36
RMH
Claire Keane
we're not kids anymore.
⁂
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
★
pixel skylines
🪼
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
sheepfilms
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Product Placement
Peter Solarz
seen from Malaysia
seen from Spain
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
seen from Switzerland
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
seen from Japan
seen from Spain
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seen from United States
@blessedarethecurious
Walter is my cousin’s dog. He really has a thing for swimming.
that was a religious experience
I’ve never seen a butt-mounted camera, but damn, this dog knows where he wants to go, and goes there fast.
His little ears flopping in he wind
THIS IS THE QUALITY CONTENT I WANT TO SEE
willsmith: Gettin’ back in the studio. Just warmin’ Up.
Dawg Will sick and tired of Jaden’s ass walking around with his gold plaque. He got in his bag and dropped 16 just to remind us how broke we are 😭😭
and still killed it tho!!!
where…..the FUCK this Will Smith came from? sheesh!!
Go ! Off !
Damn Will!!
The gifs!!!!! Me, exactly. BIG WILLIE!!!!!!!
A new book by economist Peter Temin finds that the U.S. is no longer one country, but dividing into two separate economic and political worlds
This is a good article.
We have entered a phase of regression,and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics.
In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check.
The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check.
Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration - check.
The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check.
Social and economic mobility is low. Check.
Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.
Even with a diploma, you will likely find that high-paying jobs come from networks of peers and relatives. Social capital, as well as economic capital, is critical, but because of America’s long history of racism and the obstacles it has created for accumulating both kinds of capital, black graduates often can only find jobs in education, social work, and government instead of higher-paying professional jobs like technology or finance— something most white people are not really aware of. Women are also held back by a long history of sexism and the burdens — made increasingly heavy — of making greater contributions to the unpaid care economy and lack of access to crucial healthcare.
How did we get this way?
What happened to America’s middle class, which rose triumphantly in the post-World War II years, buoyed by the GI bill, the victories of labor unions, and programs that gave the great mass of workers and their families health and pension benefits that provided security?
Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.
Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”
What can we do?
We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging.
If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly.
The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions.
We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans.
We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector,
reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and
focus on embracing an integrated American population.
We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.
We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone — including some of the rich people.”
Along with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines historical and modern inequality, Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority.
Without a robust middle class, America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.
In Other Words Revolution
Capitalism’s bad
I really hope i don’t see any fellow white Americans on this post talking about how we don’t deserve this because we’re “the greatest country in the world” or how “this shouldn’t be happening in America of all places”. It shouldn’t be happening ANYWHERE, it doesn’t need to be happening anymore, and the fact that it was already happening in predominantly nonwhite countries is largely the fault of white supremacy
I read a post once saying it’s better to say third world nations because “developing nations” was a euphemism created by colonizers to make it seem like the reason poor nations are suffering is that they “just hadn’t caught up to us yet” when in reality the reason they are suffering is because they are being exploited by first world nations.
And that’s exactly what’s happening here. The poor in America aren’t “developing” they’re regressing because they’re being stepped on and purposefully held back by the rich.
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.
Fucking bleak
this whole thing is way too good to be giffed you need to expirience it
how have we not memed Kanye harder for liking trump
I remember first learning that you can cry from any emotion, that emotions are chemical levels in your brain and your body is constantly trying to maintain equilibrium. so if one emotion sky rockets, that chemical becomes flagged and signals the tear duct to open as an exit to release that emotion packaged neatly within a tear. Everything made sense after learning that. That sudden stability of your emotions after crying. How crying is often accompanied by the inability to feel any other emotion in that precise moment. And it is especially beautiful knowing that it is even possible to experience so much beauty or love or happiness that your body literally can’t hold on to all of it. So what I’ve learned is that crying signifies that you are feeling as much as humanely possible and that is living to the fullest extent. So keep feeling and cry often and as much as needed
SHIT WHAT
Also let yourself cry. It really is a biochemical release valve to dump out all the chemicals that make you feel stuff.
I honestly think one reason men in western culture have so many problems is that we don’t let them cry, and literally their brains get stuffed with all this crap that doesn’t have a release valve. Men, please cry. You’ll feel better. It’s ok. You are not lesser for taking care of your health.
This is why tears from different emotions look different under an electron microscope. They’re literally made up of different things.
Happy tears are structurally different than sad tears than angry tears than overwhelmed tears etc.
I looked it up, cuz that tidbit was dope to me and..
Never would have known
Arthur’s Dad Is A Jerk
This man is the future.
I’m here for Adam and Gus saying fuck you to the WH
I think women’s day has to be a day to celebrate women but also to think about the fact that gender equailty is something we all still have to fight for.
Happy women’s day.
someone has absolutely had to explain to donald trump that as president he cannot have people killed at will
the real question is whether it was his family directly after he told them he wanted to run for president, mike pence after he presented him with an executive order to cosign calling for hillary clinton’s summary execution, or if it is a daily reminder and there is a white house staffer whose whole job is to remind the president of this every time he sees someone he doesn’t like on tv
Legends only
This like Prince v. MJ for white folks
MESSAGE
Whoo shit
ooo bitch!
