[ExI] our next billion dollars

[spike]

> Damien Broderick
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Eternity: Our Next Billion Years, by Michael Hanlon
> 
> At 08:07 AM 5/25/2009 -0700, Spike wrote:
> >
> >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, millennia, etc.
> 
> Barbara, with a degree in mathematics and an MBA, commented 
> on the original trillions post:
> 
> 
> "It's still very hard for me to truly understand the concept of a 
> trillion dollars... Damien Broderick


OK so let me run with this idea.  We know that there exists an appalling
portion of the proletariat who are convinced that a billion is two million
and a trillion is three million.  It would seem other nations with smaller
fundamental units of currency would have already had to deal with this.

We don't express interstellar distances in miles or even gigameters, these
units being too small for such enormous scales, but rather in light-years.
So let us consider the average salary of an ordinary prole, say Joe the
Plumber, say fifty thousand bucks a year.  But a Joe-year (and even a
Joe-career) are units still too small to avoid the *illion trap, so let us
consider, instead of a year, the period of time between now and the time
that the Christ twins, Jesus and Hoerkheimer, walked the seas, doing the
things that indolent teenage saviors do.  (What would that be?  Walking on
puddles?  Healing healthy hypochondriacs?  Blowing blow?  Delivering the
Sermon on the Pitchers' Mound?  Taking a few loaves and fishes and feeding
the five?  The world may never know.)

OK, fifty thousand dollars times two thousand years, that makes a Joe-Jesus
equal to about one hundred miilllllion dollars (cue the Dr. Evil gesture.)
Before I go on, do let me invite the usual punsters to come up with a name
for the Joe-Jesus unit, this 10^8 dollar sum.  The christalmighty?  The
plumberbuttslammer?  The saviorass?

spike