I like to think it like this: a million is a decent vacation. A billion is a generation.
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Dude,.. it's a bit more paradox than usual, BUT I take it!
As a computer guy, just say, what's bigger? A gigabyte or a terabyte? That's the difference between a million and a billion.
Gigabyte is a billion bytes, terabyte is a trillion bytes. But yes, relatively speaking, you're correct.
For clarity, the scale in difference is the same between a terabyte and a gigabyte as compared to a billion and a million (a factor of 1000). But a gigabyte is not a million bytes and a terabyte is not a billion bytes Kilo = thousand Mega = million Giga = billion Tera = trillion
And in "long scale", a billion is 31 710 years.
millions = lifetime human income
billions = massive company (top 5,000)
trillions = large government (top 20)
- Read "gov spends millions" as "they employed 3 to 30 people"
- Read "company is fined 1 million" as "the had to hire 2 lawyers instead of 1"
- Read "company is fined 100 million" as "paying ~100 employees for ~10 years"
It's 1000 times bigger, woah
I think people can't really comprehend this because a long time ago a million was a lot of money. Like, if you had a million in your bank account you were a rich person. Nowadays that means you are just an average person with a little extra money. Heck, in places like San Francisco having a million means you are just scraping by.
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It's 3 more zeroes. It's nothing.
As a retort, why do we need to know this?
Think it alludes to things around if you have 5 million dollars you can live off it for the rest of your life. If you have 5 billion dollars you can buy a $500,000 house daily and never use a dollar of your initial 5 billion. (Assuming 5% interest). Creating a forever rich family that no one will ever have to work again. That interest all gets pulled from the lower & middle classes slowly draining them and in truth the 5B owner won't be buying a new house daily, it will just rack up and maybe they will invest in a few other large companies. Until eventually you get a financial distribution that looks similar to what we have today. And it only gets worse unless you can tax in such a way that the wealth feeds back into those lower classes. A person with 20m dollars isn't much of an issue. A person with 20b dollars can wreck an economic system over time.
The economic system is set up in such a way that rich eventually are taking food out of the poors mouths by breathing. Or not, in the U.S. we had an official state something along the lines of only a fool pays inheritance tax.
innumeracy. "Why would it help to have an intuitive understanding of large quantities? You think it would help grasp situations where they're used or something?"
I think that this is a pretty bad and deceptive way of demonstrating the size comparison. Mainly because only 60 sec go into 1 minute, not 100. Only 60 min go into 1 hour not 100. Only 24 to a day etc.
Still though I agree thet people have a hard time grasoingbthe difference between millions and billions
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