Maybe misusing the name of God isn’t so much about saying the shallow words, “Oh my God,” as it is about using the name of God to justify discrimination, oppression, injustice, racism, slavery, xenophobia, poverty, sexism, islamophobia, ableism, homophobia, war, & the list can go on.
Amen
When I was a wee little Gaslight attending Catholic Sunday schools, and then later in college when I was taking a Bible as Literature class, both my stolid neighborhood deacon and my dapper Protestant professor said almost the exact same thing:
“Taking the Lord’s name in vain isn’t when someone says ‘God damn it.’ It’s when a mortal, fallible human being presumes to put words in God’s mouth and say ‘This is what God wants you to do.’“
This older couple were told by another malwart that this commercial canopy (that is $179 online and almost everywhere else) is being marked down “because home office is marking it down to $88 for all the stores”. But it was still 179 and not $88. And he wanted us to price match. We tell him we cant price match to other stores. They keep asking why. I tell them “Well each store has its own reasons for putting certain items on sale. Each store tries to cater to the demographics surrounding them to get that item off the shelf. It could be that THEY HAVE 10 OF THIS SAME HUGE ITEM and since we’re in the middle of back to school season and after that comes the next biggest holidays (Halloween, thanksgiving, and then christmas) and since there are is such a high demand for school supplies right now ( many people are buying hundreds of markers, journals, pencils, papers etc for their charities) many of the malwart stores are trying to make room for all these things in their backroom. Thus, they put this item on sale. Now we dont have 10 of the commercial canopies, so we have no reason to put it on sale.” Anyway, im done with my spiel and the wife is like “so you’d rather make 0 dollars than make 80?” And im like “yeah basically” and shes like “well thats just stupid, you guys should want to be able to sell things!” And i tell her “yes we do, but i cant break one of the most well known and important policies just to make this sale. Id be risking my job.” And then she kinda laughs and says “oh youd still be here tomorrow!” At this point im like bitch are you serious? “Ma’am, breaking this policy could mean I’d be getting a coaching. And a coaching leads to termination. So yeah I’d still be risking my job” Like….if you want this thing so badly and its obvious we’re not changing the price then just go to that store!
Tldr: this lady thought risking my job wasnt as important as her saving some money.
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.
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.
hey folks we got the 69 sex number and the 420 weed number, i think it’s time we get ourselves a gay number where anytime we see it we can say “ha. that’s the gay number :)” so anyone wanna throw some numbers out there as suggestions
good points, it looks like we got ourselves a winner right off the bat. good work team, 630 is gay
when it’s the gay time
That makes this the new lesbian icon pokemon.
Researchers looking at female critters beautifying themselves and going “Hm, must be for a man” on zero evidence is the single most realistic thing Pokémon has ever done.
not to be fake deep but admitting you fucked up and saying you’re sorry is 100000000x more rewarding than defending flawed views or thoughtless if unintentionally so actions, 10/10 would recommend, it’s not losing face it’s earning respect
This is literally how you know you’re an adult. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m cranky but that doesn’t excuse taking it out on you.” “I’m sorry I screwed this vital thing up. I thought I had it under control and didn’t. Can we fix it by xyz?” “I’m sorry I forgot we had plans tonight. I was distracted, but this is important to you. Let’s do the thing!”
A sincere I’m sorry are two of the most powerful words in the English language.
Relatable FE Quote or Something 