(no subject)

Oooh, here's a juicy story

Monday a 14 year old goth chick left for school monday and never came home. Her mom went through her text messages and found a lot of salacious messages from a family friend who's a 40 year wierd looking fat guy.
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$6k dollars is missing from the place he worked and they think they're headed for the California via a succession of anime conventions starting with ikkikon here in austin this weekend.

trillions

I am getting really sick of people getting all frigging weak knee'd about the large numbers that are getting used when we talk about today's economy. A trillion is a big number, but it's just that, a number.

According to this the commercial real estate market in 2000 was worth ~4.5 trillion. and residential was worth two to three times that call, so call it ~15 trillion.

Which, oddly enough, is about what the US's yearly GDP is.

Most economists believe that in order to stimulate the economy the government need to spend at least 5% of GDP, which is where you get the 800 billion dollar number for this stimulus.

5% is not much, it's the amount of change in input we need to notice a change in any sort of environment. You have to change light intensity that much to notice a difference between two lights. You have to change the temperature that much to notice a something is hotter or colder.

If everyone with a job worked an extra weekend a month (~5%) we could pay the entire thing off in a year.

The world is big, the fact that we are using numbers with 12 zeros to describe it just means we are measuring more precisely than we ever have before. The thing we are measuring is not changing that much, it's just we are using better tools.