[ExI] Eternity: Our Next Billion Years, by Michael Hanlon

[spike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org 
> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of 
> Stathis Papaioannou
...
> >
> > So what is a thousand million then?  What a primitive species that 
> > can't even agree on terms for numbers!
> 
> In the original British usage, a thousand million is simply a 
> thousand million... Stathis Papaioannou


Ja.  We like to poke fun at the silly British way, but in fact they have the
right idea.  We should have very different sounding words for the factors of
a thousand.  We USians are seeing with tragic results what happens when a
nation has a very large portion of its population that knows not nor
apparently cares nothing about the difference between a million, a billion
and a trillion.

I would countersuggest we express the current insane government spending in
terms not of dollars but rather in a working prole's salary.  We then have
not *illions but rather days, months, years, centuries, millenia, etc.

spike