Tuesday, 18 January 2011

• What Are They Talking About?

  This isn't a post meant to solve the problems of society or to promote any solution whatever.   It comes from random bits of news and my own musings on them.
  
  This is my question: What are They (Economists, Sociologists, Politicians) talking about when they talk of Trillions of dollars? (Supposedly the solution to any and all problems...just throw money at them.)
  
  How much is a trillion anything(s)?  I did not have a calculator handy that would register numbers that big, so some of this might be (a little) off, but the enormity of a  trillion makes it kind of bogus itself.
  
  My dad is nearly 93 years old and still ticking.  By my calculations he is approaching  33,045 days, or more than 55 million minutes of age.  If he had been able from birth to acquire $1000 for each of those minutes, he would have 55 billion dollars...wait, that's not enough!  He would need to have received $1000 for each second of each minute.   Then he would have at 93 years of age, 3 trillion dollars.
  
  Or this:  The earth is 93 million miles from the sun (give or take). So the path of the earth around the sun would be something like 58 billion miles.  OK, so it would take the earth 17 years or so to travel one trillion miles in its orbit.
  
  One more: Light, traveling at the rate of 186,000 miles per second would take 44 days to make a trillion miles.
  
  So, when you hear people talking about trillions of dollars, just know that they are speaking of things about which they know so little.
  
  

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