What is a trillion?

Piles of American paper scrip
Paper Stacker

In my previous story "71% Angry at Federal Government" I was tossing the term "Trillions" around as if I (or anybody else) remotely comprehend what a "trillion" of ANYTHING is.

Politicians talk figures in Millions, Billions, and Trillions all the time.  Without batting an eye.  Seriously, I think they are sight readers who convert words into sounds without thinking.  They HAVE to be.

For some reason, my teachers- back before the "Johnny can't read" days- decided that I was bound to be a math guy.  I have no idea why.  I absolutely hated math.  Well, not exactly.  I was FASCINATED with it and understood that it was important that I was good at it.  But on the other hand, it was boring because it was all about numbers that didn't mean anything real.  It wasn't until I got into Physics and Trigonometry that the math processes really got applied to real things.  Like electronics.  And surveying and engineering.

This was back before electronic calculators.  Math was pretty much done with pencil and paper.  Later came learning to use a slide rule.  A slide rule greatly speeds up your manual pencil and paper calculations.  You can actually read the first three digits of your answer straight from the slide rule!  People who had no clue what slide rules were called them "Cheat Sticks".  No, no cheating.  You still had to KNOW how to really do the math in order to use the things.

Three digits?  Yes, the Three Significant Digits.  What about calculations in the thousands, millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions?  That's probably why Scientific Notation was invented.  A thousand is 1³, (one to the third power) a million is 1⁶, a billion is 1⁹, a trillion is 1^12., a quadrillion is 1¹⁵. Basically, the zeros gets added together and expressed superscript.

I told you all that just so you could see how the sets of three zeros pile up.  Each additional set of 3 zeros is an Order of Magnitude of one thousand of the previous one.  For example, a billion is a thousand million.  A trillion is a thousand billion.

I'm pretty sure that not many of our elected "representatives" were math students.  I suspect they majored in dope and sex.

Nonetheless, to answer the question of "What is a Trillion?", I found THIS last year-

What does one TRILLION dollars look like?

Look all the way to the bottom of that page.  It looks to me like a Trillion dollars in $100 bills, stacked 4' high on 4'x4' pallets stacked 2 high- covers about an acre. 

Now consider if that was One Trillion $1 bills instead of $100 bills, the pallets would be stacked 200 pallets high too.  Or just for the fun of it, pallets stacked 2 high on 100 acres, or pallets stacked one high on 200 acres.  As an old expatriated farmer, I can say that would be a heck of a tonnage per acre if it was a crop.  If you have no idea what an acre looks like, a football field is slightly over an acre.  (An acre is 43,560 square feet and a 50 yard x100 yard football field is 45,000 square feet).

Is your head spinning now?

That's fine. 

Peolosi and Reid's heads are spinning that they are getting away with the biggest heists in the history of the world. 

It's sabotage and it's treason.  And I am still really, REALLY angry.

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"Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own." --Aesop (c. 550 B.