The next time you hear a politician use the words "billion" casually, think about whether you want that person spending your tax money. A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into perspective in one of its releases: A billion seconds ago, it was 1959. A billion minutes ago, Jesus was alive. A billion hours ago, our ancestors were living in the Stone Age. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate the Congress spends it.
Snopes = GREEN Congratulations ! Wrong forum, but at least it was green. By the way, a billion billionths of a second ago, I just typed this. And that was giving this snippet of logic probably a billion times more attention than it deserves.
Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed." "OH NO!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!" His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands. Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"
There's a saying in DC. A billion here and a billion there and then you're talking about some real money.
You could have said any unit there in your time slot, Einstein... "a billion billionths of a [insert time unit here]" BTW: Mexico says a billion is 1,000,000,000,000 and there are also "thousands of millions" in Spanish, but the U.S. says that there are NO thousands of millions... go figure. REALLY, go figure.
