That's a really good illustration of scale. The last time i saw a demo like this it used 3D rendered cubes. There's something wonderful about using an actual, physical medium for this.
I love illustrations like this cause at a certain point numbers just don't work for most people. Like yeah everybody knows $3 million is a lot money. But the average person doesn't realize just how gigantic that number actually is in reference to the average person. You bump that up to $150 billion for someone like bezos and it's literally an inconceivably big number. It all just falls under the category of "a lot" until you see stuff like this.
It would be a nice experiment to go out in public and make it into a social experiment.
Maybe have a glass box with Bezos amount of rice in it. Put a table cloth on top of it. Put a reasonable size pile of rice on the cloth lets say a tenth of his actual amount. And then ask people to pick up as many handfuls of rice they think Bezos has compared to the single $100k piece of rice. Then show them how utterly wrong they were.
All sizes in this video are easily comprehensible. I can grasp a grain of rice. I can grasp a couple and a portion I would eat. A portion my whole family would have for dinner and then a portion a restaurant might use in a busy hour.
With the cube videos it's mostly "This is a cube of 1m³." Which is already hard to encounter IRL and have a good concept of. But then it becomes "now all cubes cover the area of Manhattan higher than the Burj Khalifa". Yeah, those are sizes we know but that are astounding precisely because we cannot really grasp their vastness or tallness.
mash em. compost them. shoot them into space on unrecoverable trajectories... Anything would be better for the future of the species than letting them continue their tyrannical reign of acquisition.
I kind of lose the comparison to the same psychological manhole you get from pure numbers. I wonder if the effect would have been improved by starting with some arbitrarily sized pile of rice for bezos money and then trying to divide it downwards (to where you're scraping the side of a single grain with an exacto for some dust, or looking through a microscope)
People really need to learn that you have almost infinite leverage and credit with net worth and wealth like Bezos. Man will never have to spend a cent of his own illiquid assets and will live like an emperor until he dies still.
people need to learn that 99% of the populations health, education, freedom, and happiness is being actively sabotaged by 1% of the people. If that 1% was anyone but the rich and powerful, we'd have done something about it by now. You shilling for our continued subservience is pathetic.
Facts before feelings. Many of the people here downvoting me genuinely think people like Bezos or Musk are just sitting in a pile of cash choosing to hoard money instead of helping the less fortunate.
Lamborghini, California house… How about “I need surgery” or “I want to go to college.” That’s a grain or two of rice, but most people don’t even have one. It’s gross that we worship these people.
Well yes and no. I assume most (if not all) of Europe has free health care and in most part also free higher education. The joke is how expensive those things actually are, which we wouldn't know because we don't pay for it (at least not directly), but the not joke part is that they actually know how much things cost because that's the sad reality in the US. At least that's what I've read, I don't actually know the intricacies of their health care, I just know some people skip going to the doctor because it's going to cost them a fortune.
I have a feeling this was "inspired" by that original video. Uses the same $100,000 increments + the example of how little you would notice buying a Lamborghini