Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Wednesday 18 February 2009

Big Numbers

I have the ten o'clock news on TV while I'm sitting here doing nothing very much on the internet. The story that's just finished was the current one about the fraud charges levelled at Sir Allen Stanford. The charges, according to news, relate to a $9 billion dollar fraud. I was moved to consider the mathematics of it. How on Earth could anybody ever spend $9 billion dollars? Even using the American rather than British definition of a billion that's $9,000,000,000 which means if you spend $10,000,000 every year and make nothing it will take nine hundred years to spend it.

Sir Allen Stanford is 58 years old, if someone that age managed to live for another fifty years they would have to spend a staggering 180 million pounds a year to get rid of it all.

On my current salary it would take me over 370,000 years to earn that much. And I have to work for mine.

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