Looking at the markets, that might be more feeling red.
Warning, Danger, Anger, Rage.
Trillions wiped from markets around the world, but I am pretty sure that some people are making some gains, based on the designed volatility that is being traded upon. All you need to know is when things are going to happen, a little before they do, and then those trillions change hands. Generally, from the poor to the rich.
We aren't very good at processing big numbers, are we?
For another example, I was just reading about how the Australian Show "Bluey" (which is great by the way), was the most streamed series in the US, with a combined total of 45.2 billion minutes streamed. Which sounds like a lot. But for a little bit of context to visualize what that means, is that the US watched Bluey for 47,945 years straight. Counting backwards, the global population is estimated to have been about 2 million in total then.
But, the estimation for just the streaming minutes in the US comes in at 16.7 trillion. So, how many years is that? While most will know it is a lot more than the billions, it is hard to really fathom, especially without using maths.
And even when you now no the number, can you really visualise what 31 million years is? At least counting backwards, there were no humans at all - not even close, as we wouldn't appear for another 30 million years.
Of course, these are collective minutes consumed by approximately 350 million Americans, but it averages out to around 6 weeks of constant viewing for every man woman and child, just on the streaming services. That is 1008 hours, or 128 full-time, 5-days a week, work days - On average - for every man, woman and child.
The same 350 million men, women and children, also average $108,571 in national debt.
Every trillion borrowed by the government, adds $2857 debt to each person in the US. And my point of highlighting this, is that when governments are talking, they are talking in numbers that we don't understand, so we largely ignore what is going on.
For instance, those 16.7 trillion streaming minutes could be visualised as our attention. As an individual, it might not mean that much, but if you consider that the majority of that attention was paid to a handful of streaming companies, you might then consider how much a streamer like Netflix sucks from our attention bank. And if you apply a similar logic to the trillions in government spending of tax payer money, it is a bit the same, with the majority of our monetary attention being attracted to a very few, very large players.
The rich get richer.
The centralisation of decision making doesn't just create risks for those it governs, but it also enriches a small minority by nature, because the authority only has so much attention to give also. In the end, most resources get spent in the same small subset of the economy. But like the minutes spent streaming, it doesn't seem to hurt individuals that much, until gathered collectively. These trillions spent seem to go to a lot of different areas, but it is a bit like watching Bluey or Star Wars on Disney, or Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, ultimately, it all goes to the head.
And the more that goes back to the top, the more centralised it all becomes, because the top is able to develop more gateways, more APIs, more channels to extract from us. And while we are constantly getting cut to have our resources harvested, collectively the pool of resources they can draw upon just keeps getting larger and larger, while we keep shrivelling, as we bleed out from 1000 cuts.
We aren't made to visualise or even consider numbers as large as we are being presented with, as we aren't even really made to consider numbers at all. We seem conceptually and our brain will break them into something real we can understand, like oranges and bananas, or slices of pizza. But, what does a trillion pizzas look like?
A trillion pizzas, assuming standard 14-inch pies, would blanket approximately 700,000 square miles—an area larger than Alaska. They would weigh roughly 100 million tons, exceeding the weight of all humans on Earth combined, and cover the entire surface area of the U.S. state of Alaska.
See, Alaska is good for something.
Still hard to visualise what that might really look like though, eh?
I think that rather than dismissing large numbers presented to us, we should take the time to slow down our thinking and try to visualise what it actually means, and what that flow of money might look like. Where is the trillion going, and more importantly, where is it all ending up? Because that final destination is important, since it is largely ending up in the pockets of a few thousand people, who will use it to manipulate systems to garner further control and more wealth.
When we hear big numbers, we should be very wary.
And when we hear small numbers spread out as averages we should be wary too, because we again should slow down and consider the impact collectively and at scale. The death from a thousand cuts is a constant, because there are a few people carrying many small knives.
Collectively in the US alone, that is 350 billion cuts.
Got enough bandaids?
And bandaids are all that are offered to stop the bleeding in a very, very broken economy.
Taraz
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