This just in: the US economy is as prolific as Tara Reid's career. (Alternate thesis: The US economy is trife like Fred's goatee. Whatevs, he did it all for the nookie)
Recently the Times front page has in many ways become akin to the wistful spectrum of childhood declarations - "I love you times one trillion"
Bailouts, stimulants - there are far too many illions in my bills. So what does it mean to have more than a million dollars at your disposal? What does it mean that Madoff ran $50 Billion dollars into a great black hole, or that our government has proposed a $787 Billion dollar stimulus package ...
This one is from John Lanchester via the Feb 2 New Yorker:
Without doing the calculation, guess how long a million seconds is. Now try to guess the same for a billion seconds.
Ready?
A million seconds is less than 12 days; a billion is almost thirty-two years.
That means (I think?) that if you counted a dollar a second, and you sat in a room like Uncle Scrooge McDuck in his vault trying to count out the stimulus, it would take you 25,184 years. To get to the end.
Is that even real?
Moving forward, how real are our dollars going to be?
Alternate end thought - would you rather do like Scrooge McDuck in the vault of coins or like Goofy in the jello* at the Giant's table? Life if full of choices.
*If you stick with this clip there are hand puppets
