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This is how we should be selling redistribution (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/peoplebluesky@lemmy.world
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https://www.aol.com/wealth-evenly-distributed-across-america-120133820.html

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[–] 159 points 1 year ago* (20 children)

Mathematically, I think it's hard for people to truly understand the obscene wealth that some people have accumulated. 100 billion doesn't sound that different than 100 million.

100 million is magnitudes closer to ZERO than it is to 100 billion.

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  • [–] 95 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is roughly 1 billion.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    No. It’s a thousand. Which is closer to zero than a billion.

    Edit: You’re talking absolute values so the difference is 999 million.

    While I was talking ratios hence the ratio being 1:1000. My bad.

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  • [–] 49 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Imagine life was a game. You lived for 2025 years. You worked 260 days / year. You made the median US salary.

    You would need to relive that process 3,145 times to match an Oligarch.

    That amount of wealth is unethical while humanity suffers. No one can really fathom “1b dollars.”

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... ....................................................................................................

    This represents 1 Billion.

    Each dot . represents 1 Million.

    Now for the question: how many hours a day would you work to get more dots if you already had one Billion?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I think it helps to convert the same ratios to easily understood dollars.

    So $1 is to $1000 (one thousand) what $1000 dollars is to $1,000,000 (one million) is what $1,000,000 (one million) is to 1,000,000,000 (one billion).

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Best illustration I had read was the "stairwell" analogy.

    Each step is a net worth of +$100k.

    10 steps on the staircase, you have $1M. Imagine being 10 steps up on the stairs - higher than most, but really you can still see them, relate..

    Now if 10 stpes = 1M, 10,000 steps = 1B.

    The empire state building is ~1500 steps. 1B is about 6.5 Empire State buildings of height.

    Musk has a net worth of 450B.

    That's 450 x 10,000, that's 4,500,000 steps, or about 3,000 Empire State buildings, or comfortably in low earth orbit.

    So when you look down at those on ground floor or those 10 steps above ground, the difference to you is not only inconsequential, it's literally unnoticeable

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    The USA will nod and smile at this simple and straightforward explanation then complain that no system can possibly be intuitive if it's based on multiples of 10

    Give me 5280 feet to the mile and units that may represent weight or volume depending on context, or give me death

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Even with all of the examples here and that I've seen around, it's still something I know I don't fully grasp. I'm also confident this is the same kind of limitation that flat earthers use when they say "Well I can't comprehend the Earth being a sphere, it just looks flat to me."

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Just to be pedantic isn't magnitudes in this case referring to order of magnitude that basically means in this case 1E X so 100 million would be 1E8 and 100 billion would be 1E11 so a difference of only 3 while difference to 1 would be 8 and to zero the difference is infinite

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