I regularly find myself explaining this to people who think a billion pounds is a functionally limitless amount of money. A billion pounds is the total amount of money raised by Comic Relief in 30 years. It's vastly more than a person can plausibly spend on things that are actually useful to them in their entire lifetime, and enough to buy you a substantial stake in any non-huge publicly traded company. It's also enough to run the NHS for three days, or build about five miles of railway line.
It's essentially the same problem that creates sci-fi economies where dinner costs 5 credits, and 50,000 will buy you a battleship. And of course public understanding of science is massively hampered by similar failure to understand scale differences. You may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist's...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2015-05-12 02:46 pm (UTC)It's essentially the same problem that creates sci-fi economies where dinner costs 5 credits, and 50,000 will buy you a battleship. And of course public understanding of science is massively hampered by similar failure to understand scale differences. You may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist's...