This tweet got me thinking...
Remember how we used to use Libraries of Congress or Encyclopedia Britannicas or King James Bibles to describe the amount of data that can be stored in any given device? Your CD Rom used to hold 100 Encyclopedias, or your zip drive would hold 1000 LOCs, or something silly like that.
We should start referring to large sums of money like this, but use number of world hunger solutions as a unit. 'World hunger' is a tricky term, though. I get hungry if I skip breakfast, but that's not what they are talking about here. To be precise, the UN says they can solve death by starvation levels of world hunger, for the year 2022, with 6 billion US dollars. This means that...
6 billion US dollars = 1 Annual Starvation Unit, or 1 ASU
Lets try describing our world in ASUs: (Annual Starvation Units)
The price of Twitter: 45 billion / 6 billion = 7.5 ASUs
The American military budget in 2021: 705.4 billion / 6 billion = 117.57 ASUs
Global military spending in 2021: 2 trillion / 6 billion = 333.33 ASUs
American military spending on the 2003 invasion of Iraq: 1.1 trillion / 6 billion = 183.33 ASUs
Blackrock's Assets Under Management in 2021: 10.1 trillion / 6 billion = 1683.3 ASUs
Netflix's drop in market cap since Jan 1, 2022: 147 billion / 6 billion = 141 ASUs
Global internet influencer market in 2021: 13.6 billion / 6 billion = 2.26 ASUs
Total NFTs sold in the first half of 2021: 2.47 million / 6 billion = 0.41 ASUs (4.92 months of world hunger could be solved with that)
Total spent on erectile dysfunction drugs in 2021: 3 billion / 6 billion = 0.5 ASUs (6 months of world hunger solved)
Global internet porn revenues in 2018: between 6 and 97 billion / 6 billion = 1 to 16.17 ASUs
So as you can see, there are a lot of different ways to solve world hunger for a year. We could trim back the war spending, and maybe stop electing war criminals like Bush. We could burn the Blackrock offices to the ground, nationalize their assets, and solve world hunger for more than one and a half millennia (if we used the military for this, that might justify their budget). We could also cut back on our spending on idiot histrionic trust fund kids doing stupid shit on the internet for money. We don't even have to cut half of their funds to fix global starvation for a year. If we stopped spending on NFTs, and sex drugs for old men who nobody wants to have sex with anyway, that would almost cover a year.
It's just a fun way to keep things in perspective, when you read big numbers in the news.
