#also maybe the first time it’s been shown that Tony’s company is an inherited company?

[daydreamerdrew]

Iron Man (1968) #28

[kinsey3furry300]

So how the heck do the Avengers pay for stuff, and how rich are they?

So, in the wake of “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” There’s a lot of debate about why Sam didn’t seem to get paid well for his work in the Avengers (at least in the MCU continuity), and this has got me thinking: we’ve got no evidence that the Avengers are, financially, anything but a hot mess. So lets break it down, Avenger by Avenger, using real-world pay scales for the ones who have jobs.

Tony: a billionaire, so clearly he’s a financial genius, right? Well….. his actions say otherwise. He’s shown to be wildly irresponsible with his money. He inherited a lot of wealth form his parents which was managed by the first Jarvis, Obadiah, and Pepper for him, he buys and then gives away not just woks of art, but entire collections by major 20th century artists on a whim, destroyed his own cars and home without concern, he tanks the value of his own company in the first Iron Man with a bad press interview, gets kicked of his own bord of directors, and ultimately, in Iron Man 2, gives control of his company to Pepper. He’s insanely rich, and insanely smart, but man, he’s not smart with his money. So all the cool stuff, his suits, the Avengers tower, the facility up-state: that’s all paid for by him, but Pepper is holding the purse-stings.  So, does he pay the others? We have no evidence for most of them… but we do with Spidey. Peter Parker is in the Stark Internship Program a euphemism to hide the fact he’s training and mentoring him as a super-hero, but I find the wording interesting: he refers to Spidey, his surrogate son and chosen heir, as an intern. I.E., Unpaid.  I’m guessing this is Howard’s influence over him, some sort of ‘make you own way in the world, son’ attitude, but  if he’s not paying Spidey, is he paying anyone else? He certainly pays for stuff super heroes suits and things, equipment, fuel, the base, but does he pay anyone a wage? No one ever mentions it. You think it would come up.

So, if he’s not paying them a wage, where do Avengers  (and thier allies) get their day-to-day money from, and are they rich? Using google and https://www.federalpay.org, lets find out.

Cap: Well, before Civil war, he’s a shield operative, and he presumably still holds his military rank: he’s a US Army captain, with (well) over 40 years service, so USD$88,142.40 per year, with $237.71  drill pay (pay per drill you have to do on weekends, on leave or outside of normal service) and $175.00 per month hazard pay (which I bet is interesting) on top of that. As a WW2 veteran, he’d be eligible for a war pension if he:

Was not discharged for dishonorable reasons; and,

Served 90 days of active military duty; and,

Served at least one day during wartime ("wartime" as determined by the VA); and,

Had  countable family income below a certain yearly limit; and,

Is  age 65 years or older; or

Regardless of age is permanently disabled, not due to wilful misconduct.

As he’s still receiving 90k per year, he’s ineligible for a pension as his countable yearly income is above the limit.  So if shield pays him in accordance with his rank and years of service, about $90, 600 per year incuding hazard pay.

After civil war, he’s a fugitive on the run, so presumably flat broke. I’d asume he gets his pension returened to him after the snap.

He’s also just gone from the 40’s to the present day, so 70 years of inflation probably makes buying things very confusing for him: everything would seem insanely expensive at first. He’d also not know what the correct prices are for anything invented after 45. You might get used to how much more expensive food and coffee is, but how much is a smart-phone worth? $200? $2000 $20000? Who knows? I bet the others have to facepalm a lot when he either refuses to pay for what he sees as clear price-gouging, and at the same time regularly pays insane amounts of money for goods and services because he doesn’t know better. He also has no known assets other than his pay: he rents an apartment making him one of the few American males in his age-group who isn’t a home-owner

Thor: Does Asgard even have currency? It’s depicted like a “Crystal spires and toga” type utopia with no poverty: even working class Asgardian’s like Scourge seem to be pretty well-off and want for nothing, so he’s from a post-scarcity society where actual magic is a thing. His “Another” coffee cup smashing and the fact he doesn’t have a computer of phone in Ragnarök might indicate that, no, he just doesn’t have, need or understand money. Splitting a bar tab with him must be a nightmare. His breakdown post snap indicates he’s got some cash, but not a huge amount, and is probably skiving of Valkyrie and the other Asgardians.

Banner: Okay, so a PhD could make you a lot of money from patents… in pharmacology or engineering. Theoretical physics? Not so good. And if Banner did have any patents, they’ve probably been seized under eminent domain by the US military.  At the start of The Hulk film, he’s working a entry-level factory job at a botteling plant in Brazil. The minimum wage in Brazil is 1069.62 Real per month, that’s 12,835.44 Real per year, or around $2437.79 US per year, before everything goes wrong for him! He then runs off to India, works for Tony for a bit and then gets shot into space. Spidey may actually make more in allowance than Banner does, and Banner is a gown ass man with bills to pay: I’d imagine he loses a lot in ripped clothing.

Natasha and Barton: Pre Civil-war, both are government spooks, so how well does that pay? The salaries of CIA Intelligence Analysts based in the US range from $25,838 to $685,701 , with a median salary of $125,340, so let’s assume that Shield pays in a similar range: $685,701 per year for Director Fury, around 125,000 for Natasha and Cliff, which explains Cliff’s nice, middle-class mid-western home. Post civil war, presumably not great: we know that Natasha spends a lot of her savings running and hiding all across the world, and Cliff takes a deal and presumably lives of his savings, pension and his wife’s income.

Rhodes: Full USAF colonel with over 10 years service? $105,562.80 per year, plus $293.23 drill pay per drill and $175 per month hazard pay, and because he’s team Stark and not Team Cap in Civil War, he’d not lose any of that. He presumably also gets an injury pay-out after his accident. After T’challa and Stark, he might be the best paid avenger.

Dr Strange: spends all his money he made as a surgeon on trying to cure his hands: spends literally his last dollars heading to Nepal to train. Wong even jokes with him about their lack of worldly money when asking for a tuna-melt. But, can use illusion to make people think he has money, and his home and clothes etc. come with the job, so in the same boat as Thor in that he has no money, but needs none AKA, he’s a bastard to try and split a restaurant bill with.

Wanda and Vision: No know source of income, just sort of live in Tony’s hose and eat his food, and on top of that Wanda goes on the run after civil war… yet they can stay in fancy hotels in Edinburgh, a relatively expensive city, and Vison apparently bought them a house to retire in, so one of them has some source of money. Maybe Tony gave Vision years of back-pay form when he was still Jarvis, or maybe the vison has a day job, which is, frankly, hilarious. Could you imagine him as a barista? I can, and it makes me very happy.

Scott Lang: I’d assumed he’d be super, super broke, but apparently the average pay for a private security consultant in the Bay area is $85,430 per year. Not bad. Pity he gets sucked into the quantum realm just as his business is taking off, so presumably, flat broke again.

Bucky: no known income, and I doubt Hydra paid him for being the Winter Soldier so he probably has no savings, but he should, technically, qualify for a military pension. As a single veteran, he’d be  eligible for federal tax-free pension of up to $1732 per month, or $20,784 tax free per year. Not much for someone who lives in NYC. He may also be eligible for medical benefits over the loss of his arm. Whether or not he got to see any of that money given how confused his life has been over the past 10 years is unclear, but on paper he’s eligible.

T’challa: He is, quite possibly, richer than Stark, and as an absolute monarch pays no tax and has access to his Nation’s vast wealth in vibanium. It’s good to be the king!

Captain Marvel: USAF captain, and a test pilot; the test pilot school only accepts applicants with a service length of less than 9 years 6 months (10 years six moths of helicopters) as they don’t want older applicants. With 8 years service, $79,538.40, plus drill pay and hazard.  However, no know (human) pay since 1990. Flat broke.

Guardians of the Galaxy: no data, but I’m assuming “Cowboy Bebop” levels of perpetual never-ending poverty given the way they choose to live. I’d also assume Rocket has taken all their cash into some sort of Ponzi scheme of his own creation, because just look at him, of course he has.

Spidey: he’s got about $10 of his aunts’ money at any given time, so he can buy lunch… which may in fact be more than Banner or Lang, and we know it’s more that Strange or Thor.

 So, here the big one: how rich or how broke is Sam?

Sam Wilson: annoyingly, we’re not directly told what rank Sam held in any MCU film. USAF pararescue “Maroon berets” are generally NCO’s (but there’ are officer-ranked pararescue) , and he’s seen working on his wings at one point, where as officers don’t generally work on or maintain airframes. He’s shown wearing a Nation Air guard grey while jogging at one point to confuse the matter further. The general consensus on redit is he’s a former USAF tech sergeant (E-6). But how long was he in the air force? With six years service (the minimum sensible time he could have served to work in pararescue based on his age), that would be $41,464.80 per year, plus drill pay and hazard. As Anthony Mackie, the actor that plays him, was 36 as of Civil War, and assuming the character is the same age, and assuming he retired from the air force that year, and he joined the USAF at 17, the youngest you can join, he’d have served 19 years, giving him a pay of $51,566.40, the maximum pay you can get at this rank before promotion to Master Sergent,  but meaning he left just before he’d qualify for the 50% final salary pension you’d qualify for after 20 years. Which seems weird. So let’s assume the character is one year older than the actor that plays him and served 20 years (ages 17-37), that means Sam has a military pension of $25,783.20 per year (20,784 of it tax-free), plus any injury benefits. He councils other veterans, but doesn’t get paid for that. He also chooses Team Cap in Civil War, so would become a wanted criminal, and so lose his income between 2016 and 2018, and then gets snapped and has no income for 5 years, which would destroy his credit rating. Like the rest of Team Cap, he presumably gets his post snap pardon, and goes to work for the US government at his former pay and rank. However, given how Captain John Walker treats him as an equal, it’s possible he’s been promoted to a captain when the  hired back, giving him a pay of between $54,176.40 to $88,142.40 (with 20 years experience, depending on if they take into account his prior service or not, and how much prior service he has), but either way, he’s just starting this as a new job after being legally dead for 5 years: no savings, and no credit.

Commercial fishing vessels cost about 10% of their total value per year in maintenance alone. I can’t identify what sort of boat the Wilson’s have, but some quick googling indicates that the cheapest  15m long wooden in-shore shrimp trawler costs around $140,000, so that’s $14,000 per year in maintenance costs alone, minimum. And that’s a lower estimate, assuming the rest of the business is sound, which we know it isn’t.

So, in concussion, yes, Sam is in some serious financial trouble until he can re-build his savings and credit, but the scary bit is he’s not alone in that: he’s probably better off than Lang, Banner, Danvers, Strange, Thor, Bucky, Wanda and Parker. Only Clint (if he gets a full pardon and gets his full pension), Rhodes, Stark and T’challa aren’t in some sort of potential financial problems. That asshole bank teller was right: despite the fact it seems to pay well on paper, with a few exceptions, the Avengers financials are probibaly a mess. EDIT: Rocket is running the Ponzi scheme, if that’s not clear from context. The others know they have money somewhere, but not where it’s gone. And It’s been pointed out to me that as he’s technically a POW while he’s the Winter Soldier, Bucky is owed over 70 years back-pay, equal to over 3 million dollars, details in the notes.

[trainsinanime]

Every now and then, I see a post across my dash that goes, “Batman just keeps beating up criminals instead of fixing the systemic problems”. And inevitably, the first reblog is always, “actually in this, this and that comic, he is shown secretly helping the poor by giving them jobs sometimes. He’s like a fictional version of what Bill Gates is trying to be”.

And I’m always like, “is that better, though?”

Okay, yes, obviously it is, but only in direct comparison.

First: This whole thing is at best a minor part of the myth. A very important part for some, maybe, but it hasn’t exactly become an iconic core element of the character. Lots of authors and lots of fans have managed to completely miss this philanthropy aspect. You can either call them all stupid, or admit that there’s an issue with how the character is generally constructed.

The other part, of course, is that “Bill Gates saves the world” is itself far from ideal in real life, as the recent debate about vaccine patents shows. It’s Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” idea; the idea that rich men should be philanthropic, but also that they should retain full control over the philanthropic causes they sponsor, because they have such superior judgement. That is already questionable for self-made millionaires - does experience in software development really translate into experience in medicine research? For someone who canonically only ever inherited their wealth, and whose only higher education and work experience seems to have been Ninja school, that’s even more questionable.

This idea also absolves Bruce of any responsibility for the situation of the world as it is. If a lot of the city is so poor that they regularly turn to spandex crime, while the owner of the biggest company in town has money to build himself stealth jets, that says way more about his relationship with his community than any panel of him hiring someone for his company ever could. We’re regularly told that the Wayne’s had a lot of impact on the way the city developed - but only the good parts. The bad parts just happened, somehow, nobody knows why. How very convenient.

Let’s be real here: If Gotham is as corrupt as it is usually depicted, then a key reason for that is generally that people like the Waynes paid a lot of bribes.

The standard reply post says, “well, change takes a long time, and until all his projects are fully working, he still has to beat up criminals while dressed like a bat”. Well, Batman has been at it since 1939. Clearly he hasn’t done a good job. 

Yeah, sure, comic times and all. But see, narratively speaking, Bruce Wayne can’t succeed at making the city better through woke capitalism. Bruce Wayne needs to be Batman, because that’s what the story is about. Anything else is just window dressing. Being a philanthropist isn’t and can’t be a core element of Batman. Pretending otherwise may make you feel better, but it’s disingenuous.

And in my personal opinion, it’s not really necessary. Who really cares about Batman’s socioeconomic impact? It’s a man dressed like a bat who punches crime in the face. It’s okay if we admit that it’s stupid and not well thought out. It doesn’t have to be in order to be fun.

(In fact, it’s perfectly okay to lean into it, like Lego Batman did. For a 9% more serious version, that’s kind of what Marvel is doing with MCU Tony Stark: A stupid, rich egomaniac who is convinced he knows everything better, but doesn’t actually, and constantly needs a team of other heroes or Gwyneth Paltrow to keep his massive wallet pointed in roughly the right direction. Tony Stark won’t save the world from anything but aliens and out of control Tony Stark science experiments, and that’s totally okay because the story never pretends otherwise.)

Batman is fun as he is. And also kind of problematic, but it’s Batman, it’s not like it really matters that much. Let him be problematic, or if you really insist, cancel him (for you). It’s this whole “this one comics page proves he’s okay actually!” that just feels so wrong to me.

[techieatsea]

25/6

Today has been a bit of a whirlwind! So we had the production show Motorcity, which is just sort of a mashup of music, no real plot or anything, just things like ABC and Heard it on the Grapevine. It’s the second time I’ve run stage left, and I hadn’t done it for two weeks! I was really nervous but it all went fine, which meant that Luigi, who was giving me the handover to that track that I inherited from Natalie, who was the girl I replaced, got to learn his own track for when he takes over from Francisco. There’s a lot of juggling going on with crew leaving and arriving!

Speaking of crew leaving - this has been Tony, our Crew Chief’s last day! Our new Crew Chief has been here for a little while, and I really like him too, but it’s the first significant person who’s left while I’ve been here. It’s also one fewer person who doesn’t speak Tagalog, which can make meals a bit awkward. Onstage everyone is supposed to speak English, because Princess is an English speaking company, and they do for the most part, but of course outside of that they can speak their native language, which sort of leaves me as the only person who doesn’t understand. Luckily Siegfried is normally really good at translating and letting me know what they’re talking about, or just chatting with me (mostly about food - I miss chocolate biscuits and pies a lot) so it’s ok, but I’ve definitely noticed more Tagalog in general. I think I’m going to start saying “English please” in as many different languages as I can if I catch them doing it onstage.

I’m going to miss Tony a lot - he could be a little difficult to talk to because he didn’t grow up in England so he can be fairly frank, which is one of the things I’ve had to adjust to a lot - because they are speaking their second language there are a lot of things they drop which can make it seem like they’re annoyed with you, but they never are. That said, Tony was great at chivvying people along - a lot of them like to fuss and faff around, and if you’ve had a long shift it can be hard because you just want to nap!

I’ve been napping a lot - it helps because you can have fifteen minutes of work here and there, and an hour in between, so if you didn’t get much sleep the night before you can go and nap, and sometimes there’s not much else to do. We all have TV’s in our cabins so you can watch a movie (once they’ve shown them on the big screen in Movies Under the Stars) but most of the time you can’t watch all of it. I’ve watched about 3 hours of Dr Strange but I’m still missing bits of the movie!

Last time we were in port I bought a few books for my kindle app so they’ve been helping to fill time, and today I spent a lot of time trying to memorise my cues for Motorcity - the show went almost perfectly, and there were no big mistakes, it’s just getting used to the timings of cues, which is difficult when you do it twice in a day and then maybe don’t do it for weeks.

That said, I’m very happy with how today went! We have crew drills tomorrow morning, but then I have all day off, so I’m going to go into Cartagena and have a relax, after a nap. When we get to Fort Lauderdale I’ve heard from the guys I can go and get khakis - they do supply them but they’re men’s so they fit horribly! I’m going to take my cap and match the colour and get some that fit better. Failing that, today I found out that one of the guys on the crew, Jovi, is a tailor, so he offered to alter them for me! The main issue is around the hips though, so I think the best idea is to get new ones that fit nicely.

26/2

Up early for Crew Drills this morning, which wasn’t much fun as they’re trying to use a new system of checking us all off and it isn’t working yet so we had to wait around for about two hours. Still, I got breakfast in Horizon which was AMAZING, pancakes with bacon and syrup, and cinnamon French toast.

Now we’re in port all day, so I’m going to relax and have a swim and a sunbathe! There’s not too much to do in Puntarenas but I might head in later.