tangle of rainbows

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.

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.

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

Yoda (Council Member) trained Dooku (invited) trained Qui-Gon (considered) trained Obi-Wan (Council Member) trained Anakin (it’s complicated!)

Yoda (Council Member) trained Mace Windu (Council Member) trained Depa Billaba (Council Member)

Yoda (Council Member) trained trained Ki-Adi-Mundi (Council Member)

Yoda (Council Member) trained trained Kit Fisto (Council Member)

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.

Qui-Gon: I shall do what I must, Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan: If you would just follow the code, you would be on the council.

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.

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.

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.