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As a fun thought experiment – to get £1bn someone would have to give you £1 per second EVERY SECOND for 32 years.
No one needs that much money. And anyone who says they do, or anyone who defends someone who does, really needs to adjust their point of view.
Alright, no offense, but that has to be the least useful visualization of a billion I’ve ever come across. I already have to do the math every time I want to calculate how many minutes there are in a day and you want to use the number of seconds in 32 years as a reference?
“If you put it all in one dollar bills it would weigh ten tons”. There. Fixed. You immediately picture it now.
In pound coins it’d be 8750 tons, which is not quite as intuitive, but it’s a lot heavier, so it still has an impact, I suppose. That’s about as heavy as a small battleship, if that helps.
I think the seconds analogy hits harder. Especially comparing 1 million to 1 billion (11.6 days vs. 32 years).
Your 10 tons doesn’t do much for me. A few F250s? A dump truck or two? Maybe do the comparison to a million idk.
But your comment came off pretty arrogant and condescending (“There. Fixed it. You immediately picture it now.” Not really man.)
Regardless the way people picture and grasp large numbers is certainly Subjective. The seconds analogy hits harder for me.
Well, that’s ten metric tons, so by way of removing three zeroes a million is ten kilos. The metric system wins again.
It also helps a lot in grasping why billions are a deceiving quantity, because increasing orders of magnitude gets weird. It’s just that the other units are a bit small so they paint a worse picture.
But still, how in the world does one not have an intuition for ten tons but goes to a specific pickup truck as a more relatable quantity? Is this why Americans keep measuring things in cups and football fields? I mean, if seconds work better for you that’s great, but… F250s? Seriously?
I simply picture a typical ten-ton object that has a similar density to dollar bills (just pick one among the many that you likely have nearby) and then imagine that it is itself made of dollar bills, and voila: An intuitive understanding of the nature of wealth.
No individual should have a… um… typical ten ton object made up of dollar bills, I guess. That seems like too many dollar bills.
Wait, I wrote “one dollar bills”? Sorry, ten tons is in hundred dollar bills.
In one dollar bills it’s a thousand tons, which has the same problem as the coins. Harder to visualize. I could update it, but at this point the correction is more interesting anyway.
It’s telling that nobody immediately noticed. Brains are squishy and don’t like counting too high. Or too small. The giveaway here should have been “wait, a coin is 875 times heavier than a bank note?”
And yet, not even I noticed, and I looked it up in the first place. Dumb squishy brains
This guy used rice to visualize the difference between one million and one billion and I thought it was pretty effective.
The fun part about that one is that Bezos himself is now reported at about one third more than reported in that video, so… that pile is too small now.
But also, if you’re gonna use visual aids that’s cheating.
Volumetric comparisons end up grossly underrepresenting how much a billion really is. Human brain doesn’t really grasp the magnitude of a difference between a cubic centimeter and a cubic meter.
What we can immediately grasp is a difference between walking across a small parking lot and driving for a bloody hour.
You gonna sit here with a straight face and say you can visualize 10 tons of bills?
“I’m so smrt I can vishulize money, ur ‘long time’ metafur is so dum I’m unable to even think bout it”
Imagine being so bent out of shape by an easily-grasped metaphor you go out of your way to tell the person they’re an idiot and make up a less-easily visualized metaphor to prove how easy it is. It’s literally “this is a long time, you have experienced time and know 32 years is a lot” vs “you need to know the general weight of a bill/stack of bills in order to know how many would be required for a certain tonnage”
That didn’t really hit me until I realized it’s £3600 per hour. That’s my monthly salary.
That… wasn’t exactly my point.
My point was more that people think £1bn is not that much more than £1m. That billionaires aren’t “all that rich”
I was trying to illustrate that one billion of anything is far more than you think it is.
If you met 100 people an hour, every hour, for every day it would take you one thousand, one hundred and forty one years to meet one billion people.
And yet people say “Eh – people shouldn’t persecute billionaires. They deserve that much”
My point is no.
Extemely relevant:
They compare themselves to other billionaires, so they’ll never be happy
Bullshit like “the Forbes list” makes it worse because it publicly lists them in order.
Something as simple as only talking about how much they donate would make a huge change. They’ll gonna compete over something, might as well give them something helpful to do
This is a great thought. It would be nice if our society wasn’t so caught up in how much money someone makes and talk more about how much they donate. Or discuss the the good work they have done by giving it back to the industry they serve. Whether it be in bonuses to the employees or research and development. The Forbes list is BS!
Yep, or just listing companies by median salary.
This shit isn’t complicated, it’s just what happens when capitalists run everything instead of sociologists.
American culture is obsessed with making as much money as possible, and the last forty years of 40 years of go-go reaganites running the show haven’t exactly worked out well for the average American.
The coke market has been doing well tho…
Makes me think of that one odd trend the Romans did where nobles tried to impress other nobles by having an entourage of “Hired peasants” that would follow them so they could be given money.
For how backwards the Romans were, some parts of their culture were pretty forward
Found the original, it’s from Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog2g/176805334897/decayinginfrontofme-why-do-rich-people-need
For power, that’s all they want
The billionaires don’t pay the salaries of the interviewers to ask hard hitting questions.
This is your reminder that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
Take from that what you will.
He’s not the only one either. Oligarchs own nearly all of our news media. There are only a couple exceptions, and those are independent groups that are reliant on platforms like youtube.
