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 - hours of tweaking fun.
Visual arts are so fun. I have to set some time aside to explore this in a decade or two.
