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Sep. 22nd, 2008
Quotes from Another Community
Sep. 22nd, 2008 02:23 pmThis is text quoted from another forum:
Another friend of mine put it this way. He said that the only reason why the current administration isn't being dragged out into the streets and hanged by lampposts on Pennsylvania Ave is because Americans can't get their brains around the sort of big numbers being tossed around right now.
As a matter of illustration, try to visualize the following: Try to get into your mind the size of one million, one billion, and one trillion.
One million seconds = ?
One billion seconds = ?
One trillion seconds = ?
Keeping with the seconds theme, if you earned $1/second = $60/min = $3600/hr, you'd have to work 24/7 non stop for roughly 31,708 years to earn a trillion bucks.
Or you could have an army of 2,941,176 people earning the US average $17/hr wage working a typical 40hr work week with 2 weeks off a year for 10 years each to earn a gross of a trillion dollars.
So um yea, I completely agree with Paleocon that few people, American or otherwise, can really grasp the implications of flushing a trillion bucks down the toilet. It's just an insanely huge amount of productivity wasted.
All these numbers are too abstract. Nobody is getting an invoice in their mail box for their share of the bailout. I'm not sure how many US taxpayers there are but assuming it's 200-250 million, that's $4000-5000 per person. Too few people are really feeling any direct pain or even realize how badly they just got boned and hence there aren't mobs in the streets looking for blood.
Yup.
1 million seconds = ~12 days
1 billion seconds = ~ 34 years
1 trillion seconds = ~ 32 THOUSAND years.
The fact that we can't get our brains around these numbers is the only reason Bush and his crew haven't been given the Mussolinni treatment.
Another friend of mine put it this way. He said that the only reason why the current administration isn't being dragged out into the streets and hanged by lampposts on Pennsylvania Ave is because Americans can't get their brains around the sort of big numbers being tossed around right now.
As a matter of illustration, try to visualize the following: Try to get into your mind the size of one million, one billion, and one trillion.
One million seconds = ?
One billion seconds = ?
One trillion seconds = ?
Keeping with the seconds theme, if you earned $1/second = $60/min = $3600/hr, you'd have to work 24/7 non stop for roughly 31,708 years to earn a trillion bucks.
Or you could have an army of 2,941,176 people earning the US average $17/hr wage working a typical 40hr work week with 2 weeks off a year for 10 years each to earn a gross of a trillion dollars.
So um yea, I completely agree with Paleocon that few people, American or otherwise, can really grasp the implications of flushing a trillion bucks down the toilet. It's just an insanely huge amount of productivity wasted.
All these numbers are too abstract. Nobody is getting an invoice in their mail box for their share of the bailout. I'm not sure how many US taxpayers there are but assuming it's 200-250 million, that's $4000-5000 per person. Too few people are really feeling any direct pain or even realize how badly they just got boned and hence there aren't mobs in the streets looking for blood.
Yup.
1 million seconds = ~12 days
1 billion seconds = ~ 34 years
1 trillion seconds = ~ 32 THOUSAND years.
The fact that we can't get our brains around these numbers is the only reason Bush and his crew haven't been given the Mussolinni treatment.