@microbat13 - Tumblr Blog

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silverhawk

me & the boys on thursday mornings

mattklimas

Grim Acres cover illustration coming along nicely!

Get the finished game here –> http://www.drivethrucards.com/product/220077/Grim-Acres

amalgammaray

animalmusicthemes

Visit Original Link

puffier

This doesn’t sound like it was composed by a human

sebi-kruna-deactivated20200316

That’s ‘cause it was composed by the spider wizard

thelastmemeera

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.

microbat13

well....... this gave me some emotions

sunbadgerplants

So here’s the herb garden this year. The lower right quadrant is technically less herb and more flower. Still gotta get some marigolds.

maureen2musings

black-to-the-bones-deactivated2

He was an activist who inspired millions to fight for their rights. He knew what was wrong with our country and risked his life to help his people achieve equality. In the society where black were treated like animal he did everything possible to change this. His brave soul, his will and courage changed the history of America , changed the people. He made us believe we can win this war. He payed for it with his life. He will always be remembered.

solarpunk-aesthetic

Monolithic Chapel Cantal, France

smallsimplicity

Guerrilla Grafters is an organization that grafts fruit-bearing branches onto sterile fruit trees along the streets of San Francisco.

This is excellent. Now that it’s fall and the trees in my city are bearing, I’m always bummed out by the lack of free and open fruit trees, which very often fit the profile of the trees planted in city parks. The only difference is prettier springs and more fruitful falls (lit+fig). This particular experiment is made possible buy the sterile fruit trees planted as part of a city initiative, but the guerrilla planting of fruit trees is always possible, as well as finding older fruit trees and grafting new varietals on to create a healthier tree.

solarpunk-aesthetic

This is just glorious!

For anyone who doesn’t grow, grafting is a trick you can do with many plant species. Because plants have no immune system, you can cut a branch from one tree and attach it to another tree, and that branch will continue to grow. Bind the two plants at the join for long enough, and the two will grow together, giving you, basically, a Frankentree. Sometimes the plant tissues will even grow into each other, so you end up with single branches that have living tissue from both plants in them, like some kind of chimeratree.

They don’t even need to be the same species (though they do need to be compatible). A lot of plants you can buy from professional growers are actually grafted. It’s quite common to take a plant with a strong root system and graft the top half of another plant to it – this can let you grow plants in environments which wouldn’t normally support them. If you ever see chilli plants on sale, it’s quite common for them to be grafted. Look for the join, low down the stem, a few centimetres above the soil.

You can be audacious with this kind of thing, and grow fruit branches on trees that wouldn’t normally bear fruit, or you can even grow one tree with multiple types of fruit.

Guerilla grafting though. Heh! I like that!

radical-agriculture

by Lisa Depiano When teaching permaculture I often start out by doing a giant problems mind map. I ask students to brainstorm all of the major “problems” they see in the world to reflect on what brought them to study permaculture. Nine times out of ten the idea of overpopulation as a root “problem” in […]

Six talking points to use when debunking the myth that overpopulation is the root of the environmental crisis:

1. Rates of population growth are declining: Between 1950 and 2000, the world population grew at a rate of 1.76%. However, between 2000 and 2050, the rate of growth is expected to decline to 0.77%.

2. Overpopulation is defined by numbers of people, not their behaviors: Industrialized countries, who make up only 20% of the world’s population, are responsible for 80% of the carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere. The United States is the worst offender, with 20 tons of carbon emission per person. Therefore, it is not the amount of people that leads to degradation, but what they are doing. Permaculture design illustrates how humans can have a positive impact on the health of our ecosystems, bringing greater health and equity.

3. Overpopulation justifies the scapegoating and human rights violations of poor people, women, people of color, and immigrant communities: Often times the subtext of “too many people” translates to too many poor people, people of color, and immigrants. This idea has been used to justify such practices as the forced sterilization of 35% of women of childbearing age in 1970′s Puerto Rico, under the control of and with funding from the US government. This is a human and reproductive rights violation.

4. Overpopulation points the finger at individuals, not systems: This lets the real culprits off the hook. When we look at the true causes of environmental destruction and poverty, it is often social, political and economic systems, not individuals. We see militaries and the toxic legacy of war, corrupt governments, and a capitalist economic system that puts profit over people and the environment.

5. Supports a degenerative mental model of scarcity: Much of this ideology was created by Thomas Robert Malthus, an 19th century English scholar. Malthus gave us the erroneous idea that the reason there is famine is because there are too many mouths to feed. This hides the reality that we have a distribution problem, not a scarcity problem. Malthus’s work has been used as the philosophical bedrock to justify many human rights violations throughout history.

6. Focusing on overpopulation prevents us from creating effective solutions and building movements for collective self determination: Permaculture teaches us that how we define a problem determines how we design solutions. How does viewing overpopulation as a root problem impact the way we think of and design solutions? What would solutions look like if we viewed people, all people, as an asset? The myth of overpopulation has lead to solutions of population control and fertility treatments, rather than overall health care and women’s rights. The more we blame humans and think we are bad and evil, the harder it is to believe in ourselves, count on each other, and build a collective movement for justice and self determination.

pagewoman

Sheepdogs enjoying the sunshine

by James Rebanks

solarpunk-aesthetic

House in Chau Doc

Designed by Nishizawa architects in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, this house makes use of moving partitions in place of solid walls to withstand the local environment (for instance, during tropical storms), while giving ample natural lighting and ventilation. This also allows residents to embrace the natural climate and gives harmony between the building’s interior and exterior. It’s designed for three families to share, and the interior is designed to allow privacy while maintaining a pleasant shared living environment.