If someone carries a gun and they have a normal low-threat job and live in a normal low-threat suburb: wow, that person lives in a fantasy world, and is just looking for an excuse to hurt someone. What an absolute loser.

If someone has a good quality bicycle that they actually use: you got your shit together!

Someone normal looking wearing clothing that references a nerdy hobby/interest: this person is self-confident enough to not be afraid to admit to having a nerdy side.

If someone seems extremely socially awkward and is wearing that kind of clothing it’s different. But if it’s someone who looks like a soccer mom but she’s wearing a Critical Role tee shirt, she’s cool. Or if it’s a guy who looks like a construction worker with an Anime character: nice one, dude.

Harley Davidson clothing: they’re very insecure.

Now we need to get the South Asians and East Asians fighting about putting milk in tea.

Theoretically it should be the most energy efficient method. You’re transferring all the energy directly into the water molecules, not heating up a container and hoping that heat transfers to the water.

Do you boil everything you eat or drink? Botulism is hardly a realistic risk for tea.

Yeah. I mean, “star” is subjective. But, to me, “star” means at a bare minimum someone who plays professionally or has the potential to play professionally. Really it should be the best player on their pro team, playing in a good league too.

I’m sure that Bitcoin is eventually going to crash back down to 0, but it might take anywhere from a decade to 50 years.

To be fair, if he were really an up and coming star, he wouldn’t still be in the US at 19.

Batman has you hooked on his propaganda, he’s the villain.

Hahaha, ok. You’re the guy defending the billionare, but I’m the Republican. Good one.

If you were standing on the Liberty National Golf Club in New Jersey about 2km from the Statue of Liberty (height 93m), from the bottom to the top it would be about 2.5 degrees.

If you were looking at the Eiffel Tower at 6000 km away from NJ, and the earth were flat, the Eiffel Tower (height 312m), from the bottom to the top it would be about 0.003 degrees from bottom to top. If you could line it up so that you could see the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower at the same time, the Eiffel Tower would appear to come up to the first 10 cm of the Statue of Liberty’s base. That’s actually a little bigger than I would have expected, but still tiny.

I wonder if, even with binoculars, someone could even resolve something that small. Ignoring everything like ocean waves interfering, vegetation getting in the way and atmospheric interference, my guess is that it would be just too small to be seen from that far away without some ultra-powerful telescope.

Sounds interesting. I like it when they find a quirk like that and explore what it would mean.

Does his supercomputer compute how much sleep and downtime he needs?

Yep, bail out of a discussion when your points are being wrecked and blame it on the other person. Stay classy.

First off, having that much money in and of itself is going to generate fuckloads of money.

How? Money doesn’t magically just appear. That money comes from somewhere. Every dollar Wayne receives is profit, profit that could go instead to lowering costs for Wayne Enterprises customers. Given that Wayne Enterprises is a huge conglomerate that seems to have its fingers in everything, he’s probably literally taking money from the pockets of Gotham residents and putting it into his own bank account.

I am utterly incapable of seeing how someone helping others to make themselves better is actually a bad thing overall.

Because he’s doing small individual things for individual people when he’s simultaneously making the world a worse place by vacuuming up absurd amounts of profit from all the Wayne Enterprises customers.

It’s like a chemical company that’s poisoning a river, sickening millions, while simultaneously offering a scholarship to one kid, and getting all the good press that scholarship can offer.

His character builds Orphanages and community centers because he is rich.

Yes, individual orphanages, costing what, a few million to build? Meanwhile, Wayne Enterprises is generating massive profits that bring in billions of dollars. His vast enterprise is probably creating the orphans in the first place.

He’s just taking advantage of a world that’s fucked and using the fucked things for good.

He’s certainly taking advantage of the world, and yeah, he does some individual small-scale good, but it doesn’t outweigh the large scale evil that Wayne Enterprises does.

By being rich, he just becomes more rich because that is how the world works.

It doesn’t just work like that. Getting richer is a decision. Instead of taking massive profits from his worldwide enterprises, he could reduce prices and run his companies at break even. But, he prefers to get insanely rich off the backs of all the Wayne Enterprises customers.

Unless you give away literally every dollar, you’re going to make money just by being rich. It’s stupid but that’s how it works.

No it isn’t, getting rich is a decision. Especially true when you’re the poweful head of a company where it would be the simplest possible thing to just lower prices.

The problem isn’t Bruce Wayne, the problem is the system.

And Wayne loves the system because it allows him to get fabulously wealthy while pretending that he’s doing good.

Batman has openly said on multiple occasions that he doesn’t want to be rich

Gee, if only there were a way to not be rich. I guess a genius like Bruce Wayne can’t figure out how to not be rich, so it’s not possible, so he’s cursed to just be fabulously rich.

Seriously. I want you to actually name me a legitimate option of what he could do

• Lower the costs charged by Wayne Enterprises so that it is no longer generating any profit
• Donate Wayne Enterprises stock to charities, not just pay a tiny fraction of his overall wealth to make an orphanage or something. Actually give them stock in his company so that instead of him getting rich, the orphanage gets rich.
• Spend his insane wealth buying up every news source around and having them relentlessly push a progressive agenda, demanding massive wealth taxes on the ultra rich, etc.
• Donate all of his Wayne Enterprises stock to endowments that fund research institution
• Instead of partying with the other ultra rich, call them out, spend all his money exposing them and destroying them if they refuse to reform
• Find the Bernie Sanders of Gotham and campaign with him relentlessly, not just hosting an occasional charity dinner, but appearing with him in every public speaking opportunity, using himself as an example of how rich people get every break imaginable.
• Instead of his R&D divisions producing IP owned by Wayne Enterprises, open it up and release everything created into the public domain.

Basically, the only reason he’s rich is that he chooses to have Wayne Enterprises make a profit. There are a lot of ways that he could either choose to not have Wayne Enterprises make a profit, or could choose to give away all his Wayne Enterprises stock.

Essentially it is one billionaire against a dozen billionaires.

One billionaire with all the high-tech toys in the world. He could easily bug all these billionaires and expose them. It seems to me that if he wanted real lasting change, they’d be his primary targets. Sure, occasionally there’s a storyline like that, but it’s rare.

If you want to stay rich, you don’t fuck with the other rich people

Which is one of the most corrupt points of view you can have. Is staying rich so important to Batman that he’ll turn a blind eye to the misdeeds of the other rich people?

It’s basically the corrupt effective altruist playbook. Sure, I could help with these issues, but I can most effectively fix the world if I’m ultra rich, so my focus is going to be becoming / staying ultra rich, then I’ll do a bit of charity on the side.

Bruce Wayne spends an absurd amount of money keeping Gotham running.

Is there any hint that the amount he spends is having any meaningful impact on his wealth?

If he’s a billionaire and his wealth goes up by $100m/year but he only spends $50m on charity, his charity is nowhere near enough.

The man perpetually puts all of his money back into Gotham.

If that were true he wouldn’t be rich.

a lot of that series, is just Bruce Wayne living his normal life and the whole life is just philanthropy

You say that as if it’s a good thing. Unless that philanthropy is actively making him poor, it’s just something he does to make himself feel good.

He ends up supporting environmental policies … Bludhaven PD.

And then he goes back to his mansion where his butler helps him get ready for bed.

His money is the source of the problem, and he never seems to get any poorer. Is he cursed to be rich? Or is he telling the “effective altruist” lie that he can only continue to good things if he’s insanely rich?

It’s not a specific storyline, it’s just the status quo in the Bat Universe.

Maybe he donates to various worthy causes here or there, but it doesn’t seem to be a big enough donation to affect his rich playboy lifestyle at all, nor does it affect his budget for gadgets. What he never does is campaign for a major tax increase for billionaires. He’s never meeting with the “Bernie Sanders” equivalent in Gotham, trying to push through progressive legislation.

The thing is, his character has the perfect excuse. He’s really Batman, and Bruce Wayne is just a cover identity. But, to keep up appearances, he has to put on his tux and go to ultra-rich person parties as Bruce Wayne. It would seem suspicious and draw unwanted attention if his cover identity Bruce Wayne started lobbying for higher taxes on the rich, so he gets to use that as an excuse for why that filthy playboy Bruce Wayne never does those things. It’s so that Batman can keep going out there and “fighting crime”. AFAIK he’s never outright said that that’s his excuse for not lobbying for progressive causes. But, he has definitely said that he goes to ultra-rich person functions as Bruce Wayne and plays the idle rich guy because he needs to keep his cover story intact. It’s mighty convenient, if you ask me.