Sometimes it’s hard to think about the economy because it’s just so damn big. A billion here, a billion there, who cares? Real sums of money are measured in trillions.
Think about it - say there are 300 million people in the US. A trillion dollars is about $10 per person per day. So lunch in Palo Alto every day for a year for every one in the US. Got it? Okay. Here are some interesting amounts of money:
Measures of production (annual)
- US GDP - $14trillion ($140/person per day)
- US Industrial output - $3 trillion ($30/day)
- US Imports - $2.3 trillion ($23/day)
- US Exports - $1.6 trillion ($16/day)
- Global Oil production - 31bil barrels - $3.1trillion - ($31/day)
- US Oil consumption - $0.9trillion ($9/day)
- US Oil production - $0.3trillion ($3/day)
- US Govt Spending - $2.7 trillion ($27/day)
- US Military Spending - $0.6 trillion ($6/day)
Stores of Value
- US Stock Market Cap - $17 trillion ($56k/person and falling)
- US Govt Debt - $6trillion ($20k/person and rising)
- US Mortgage Debt - $10 trillion ($33k/person)
- US Oil Reserves - 20bil barrels - $2.4trillion ($8k/person)
- Candian Oil Reserves - 170bil barrels - $20 trillion ($66k/person)
- Iranian Oil Reserves - 105bil barrels - $12 trillion ($40k/person)
I’m up again late after too much coffee, but I took the time to pay attention to my body a little more. It’s strange that it’s taken me so many decades to develop a sense of self awareness. I hope this ability will keep developing over time. Someday it might be possible to develop the kind of sophistication in vocabulary for feelings that we have for foods.
For example, lying in bed I felt tired from a long day, but I could feel a kind of buzzing in my veins as though they were actively trying to flush something from my system. I wonder if caffeine stimulates the body in the same way that a chili pepper arouses the taste buds - the chemicals send your metabolism a signal that it needs to get busy and get rid of the irritant.
Lately I’ve been feeling jumpy and stressed out because work feels like it could become a missed opportunity or at worst a dead-end. My energy is very scattered and while things are positive, I don’t feel like things are going well. It’s as if summer is slipping away.
Spent some time with a cool rendering package called Context Free Art. It basically lets you create fractal designs. Here’s one of mine.
I spend a lot of time thinking about Love - where it comes, where it goes, and how there could be more of it in the world. A lot of that is just from doing basic things to take care of health - eating and sleeping right, getting exercise. This design was to try to express the idea of infinite love through the infinite refinement of the fractals in the branching of the lungs and the eddies in the heart.
This was for a shirt I made for my band One Over Eight. While you’re here, won’t check out a demo of our song ‘The Scar’‘? And if you want a shirt, leave me a comment and I’ll get in touch with you somehow.
Listen and Love 
