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A message from the activist group Everyone Hates Elon: “If you have a trillion dollars in a world where children are starving, you're not a visionary, you're just a cunt” (cdn.social.linux.pizza)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Which is insane. When the numbers become too large, they just stop making sense intuitively.

I had a nice comparison to put a billion into perspective : a million seconds is 11 days, a billion seconds is over 30 years. We understand these two durations reasonably well, and the difference can be "felt" clearly.

A trillion seconds is 30000 years... and again, the numbers stop making sense. That would be the Upper Palaeolithic. Agriculture was invented 10000 years ago. Hmm, what else ? Right, sorry, I rounded down. It would actually be 31688 years. A little slip-up of 1700 years, no biggie. The difference between today and the antiquity.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    The difference between a dollar and a thousand dollars is about a thousand dollars. Same ratio. Does it screw with your mind then?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    No, because I can picture 1 (dollar, apple, person, whatever) and 1000, and it's very obvious that one is a rounding error compared to the other, a difference of 0.1%.

    It's just that I can't picture a million apples, much less a billion or a trillion. Hence why I usually turn to time, or distance.

    Here's another : if a million is a kilometre, a billion is 1000km and a trillion is the distance to the moon and back.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago*

    I totally understand that a million, billion or trillion of anything is hard to grasp when your reference is one or two. 1 to 1,000 is about all we can handle, so you have to mentally rebase each step up.

    • $1 to $1,000 ($1k)
    • $1k to $1,000k ($1M)
    • $1M to $1,000M ($1B)
    • $1B to $1,000B ($1T)

    At each stage the thousand dwarves the one by the same degree. So if you can fathom the first one you can fathom the last one. You may not get their absolute size, but relative sizes should be appreciable.

    The fact that most of us struggle to get to $1M of assets over a lifetime, and he's at a million times more. 🤮. It's vertigo inducing.

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