Believe in a smiling god

You can ask how long it will take for the pizza to get to you, and they will tell you how far away a dispatcher is.

My flat-mate’s date for the night was almost as drunk as her.  She had passed out in her room and locked the door.  He refused to leave because he wanted to have sex.  He also demanded food because he was dealing with “whiskey dick”.  He didn’t like the lack of food in the fridge.  I called 911, did the stuff stated above, and he was getting PISSED about how long the “order” was taking.  He took my phone, demanded they “hurry the fuck up”.  Police arrived two minutes later, arrested him, and helped me file a police report.  Pressing charges wasn’t necessary because he had warrants on him from THREE different states for the very thing he planned to do to me.  Several months after this happened one of the officers informed me he was charged with two felonies because he crossed stay lines, and will be serving no less than 35 years in prison.  The officer ripped into my flat-mate about her bringing home complete strangers, while drunk, knowing full well this shit could happen. 

This was 14 years ago.  

Do the pizza order, do it as calmly as you can.  The dispatcher I spoke to said things like this:

“If he’s drunk say you want mushrooms.”  I said I want extra mushrooms.

“If he’s threatening you with sexual assault say you want onions.”  I said I want onions.

She went like this with different toppings and sauces for a description of him, like pineapple if he’s blonde, black olives if he’s tall, extra large if he’s tall, etc.

“But that’s unfair to the people who submitted on time!”

I didn’t say you had to give everybody full credit. Drop the grade for each individual assignment by 5% for every day late until it gets down to 20%. Never, ever take it below 20%.

Here’s my rationale:

1. If you are a good educator, then you created that assignment in the first place because YOU WANTED YOUR STUDENTS TO LEARN SOMETHING. You still want them to have an incentive to complete that learning experience even if it’s not “on time.”

2. You want to prepare your students for the the real world, right? Well, if you missed a deadline (for example, submitting report cards), would your boss throw away everything you’d worked on, dock your paycheck, and tell you to try again next time? No. They would be upset with you, but they would ask you to take time out of your schedule to finish the project as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t cease to exist.

3. Based on point #2, if you are teaching high school or below, not accepting late work is holding children (who by the way, generally do not have full control over their schedules or what materials they have access to) to a higher standard than adults. 

4. If you are teaching college or graduate school, you are working with adults who are taking years out of their lives and paying thousands of dollars to learn from you. Why make it harder for them than it already is?

5. You have or will teach students with extenuating life circumstances that they don’t tell you about (e.g. chronic illness, caring for children or sick relatives, abusive relationships) because they are embarrassed to share this information or have already been taught to shut up and stop making excuses.

6. You have or will teach students with learning disabilities that they don’t even know about. I was diagnosed with ADHD in high school after years of being treated like I was just a bad kid. I suffered from depression and anxiety for over ten years before I went on medication. I did not even learn the words “executive dysfunction” until I was in grad school.

—

an easy to understand metaphor about why the scumbos should be driven out of communities of all kinds.

from IMAGINING A SAFER SPACE: BUILDING COMMUNITY & ENDING HARASSMENT IN PUNK by Lorena Cupcake

You want to buy a new car.  At the Ford dealership, you ask for something sporty.  They show you a Prius.  You ask for a sedan.  They show you a different Prius.  You ask for an SUV or a truck.  They show you a slightly larger Prius.  It is the same at all the other dealerships.  Except at Toyota.  You do not approach the Toyota dealership.  That’s probably for the best.

There’s a man wandering your neighborhood every morning, mumbling the numbers of freeways.  The Accident is traveling, he tells you.  There is only one Accident, and it roams the freeways, seeking new victims.  Don’t take 880 to work today.  Find another route.

Slow for the S-curve on the Bay Bridge.  It doesn’t stop curving.  You keep slowing.  Somewhere around the fourth S-curve, you come to a stop.  You haven’t seen another car in years.  Didn’t they destroy the S-curve already?

You are a member of the Co-op.  What does it sell?  Who else is a member?  No one knows.  But you have always been a member of the Co-op.  You will always be a member of the Co-op.  Do not try to leave the Co-op.

The foghorn blows while you’re trying to sleep.  There is bright moonlight on the pillow beside your face, and the stars sparkle threateningly outside your window.  The foghorn keeps blowing.  Don’t leave the window open.  The fresh air isn’t worth it.

There is a protest outside City Hall today.  It has been going on for as long as you have been alive.  What are they protesting?  The signs they carry change every day.  Don’t try to read the signs.  Your family would miss you.

It’s 3AM, but Highway 101 is bumper-to-bumper traffic.  Don’t make eye contact with the other drivers.  Try to believe you will get home eventually.

They ask you where you’re from, they keep asking you where you are from, they will never stop asking you where you are from.

They tell you never to go near the old ordinance, it lies behind the warning signs pounded into the ground behind the fenced in backyards of every house in the neighborhood. The landscape beyond a grey waste, blended together by time and memory, undefinable in characteristic of terrain or climate. At night you crawl up to the balcony to listen for explosions, there is only howling and the faint gleam of something metallic.

Your home is a concrete quadplex with typhoon proof windows and ridged steel doors. You are a 45 minute bus ride away from school. Your home is wood and brick, there are rats in the walls near your room that scratch around at night, you have no garage, but a large basement. It takes five minutes to walk to school. Your home has a large garage filled with thousands of black widow spiders you burn with magnifying glasses for fun. You don’t really care where your school is. Your home is small and full of asbestos, the paint flakes off the walls in thick chunks like rotting skin. You do not want to go to school anymore. Your home is the seat of a car, an airplane, a hotel room.

They say “Thank you for your service.” You feel like you haven’t done anything. Not yet.

Your ID card. Where is your ID card? The old gate guards knew your face, why would you ever need it?

You come back to the United States. Everything towers over you, cars move faster, and faster, and faster. The buildings engulf you, they become your fences, you are smaller each day.

Your friend says see you tomorrow. They never come back. An airplane leaves white chemtrails in the sky and you wonder.

a solid fox. good rendering. looks soft. 9/10

an adorable stylized boy!! i’d give him my wallet. 11/10

a simple boy, bold lines. but lacks personality. 6/10

she is adorable and well-groomed. i love her. 10/10

this thing ravished my trash can and stole my first born. 4/10

a tiny boy! hes shaped like a friend. 9.5/10

she is round and kind. i trust her. 10/10

a distinct style, though he too lacks any depth. 7/10

he is kind. but something behind is eyes is hiding something. 8/10

My. Fucking. Kidney.

insulin has been mass produced (from animal extracts) since -1923-. slow acting insulin has existed since the ‘50s, and ‘human’ genetically engineered insulin (derived from E. coli bacteria) has existed since 1982.

insulin treatment for diabetes is not some new or ‘unproven’ treatment. according to beyondtype1, “Humalog rapid-acting insulin came on to the market with a list price of $21 a vial in 1997.” adjusting for inflation, a vial these days should cost about $34 at most. instead, it costs over $300. there is NO reason for it to be steadily gaining in price to the point that diabetics are unable to afford their lifesaving medication, other than the sheer inhuman greed of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

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 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.

The studies done by the trained psychologists in this joke show that little kids don’t associate being hit with the thing they’ve done wrong. Very small children only understand consequences that are directly caused by the thing they did. Steal a biscuit, biscuit tastes good. Then for no reason mummy hit me. Very different to stole a biscuit, now no biscuit after dinner because I stole a biscuit.

And they also show that when a child is old enough to understand why they are being hit that non-physical punishment is equally as effective and less mentally harmful in the long run.

Do you know who benefits the most from hitting as a punishment? The parent. It gives a satisfaction rush. Parents do it because it makes them feel good.

Basically kids have two stages: too young to understand why they are being hit so physical punishment is useless for anything other than teaching a child that bigger stronger people can hit you whenever they like (Which sounds like the same lesson you would learn from abuse)

And the second stage is old enough to be reasoned with so many punishment options are available and you chose physical violence because it makes *you* feel better, which is an abusive action.