$100
Start with a simple $100 bill.
$10,000
A packet of $100 bills worth $10,000 is less than 1/2 inch[1,25 cm.] thick.
$1,000,000
This little pile of cash can easily fit into any backpack and weighs just about 22 lbs[10 kilos].
$100 million fits neatly on any standard pallet, weighing in at a little over one ton.
$1,000,000,000
$1 billion[mil millones] is ten pallets worth of cold, hard cash.
$1,000,000,000,000
Finally, here’s one trillion[1 billón] dollars:
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But if you are the mayor of New York, no such constraints apply. You can simply announce, as Michael Bloomberg did, that the city is starting a “nationwide initiative” to pressure the food industry and restaurant chains to cut salt intake by half over the next decade. Why bother with consent forms when you can automatically enroll everyone in the experiment?
And why bother with a control group when you already know the experiment’s outcome? The city’s health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, has enumerated the results. If the food industry follows the city’s wishes, the health department's Web site announces, “that action will lower health care costs and prevent 150,000 premature deaths every year.”
Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.
The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.
Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.
Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.
La sentencia por el caso de violación de los derechos humanos será leída desde las 9:00 a.m. La pena no sería alta pese al pedido de 30 años de prisión del Ministerio Público.[Qué raro...por acá no se dice nada.]
A las 9 de la mañana de hoy, tras más de 160 audiencias, Alberto Fujimori, ex presidente de la República, estará en el banquillo de los acusados, listo para escuchar la sentencia de la Sala Penal Especial que, por 16 meses, lo ha juzgado por los crímenes de Barrios Altos y de La Cantuta y por los secuestros del empresario Samuel Dyer y del periodista Gustavo Gorriti.
Aun cuando se desconoce la decisión de los vocales, el fallo ya ha sido calificado de “histórico” y, qué duda cabe, sentará un precedente internacional pues es la primera vez, en este lado del hemisferio, que un ex mandatario civil es sentenciado por crímenes de lesa humanidad.
Si bien ha trascendido que el tribunal condenará a Alberto Fujimori, la pena no sería alta pese al pedido de 30 años de prisión del Ministerio Público. Hasta el cierre de esta edición, las especulaciones crecían en torno a la cantidad de años que se le impondrían.
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Apple introduced variable pricing to its iTunes online music store today, raising the top price for a song to 99p[25% increase!!].
Most songs used to cost 79p, and some still will, but the company's new three-tier pricing system means some will also be sold for 59p.
In the US, the prices will be $1.29, 99 cents and 79 cents. Anticipating a backlash before the announcement, Apple pointed out that for every one song they raise to $1.29 they will be reducing 10 songs[which 10 songs might they be? hum?] to 69 cents. All tracks are also now DRM-free, and so can be played on all types of music player.
[Front page from July/August, 2001 issue of The Economist.]
The regulated legalisation of drugs would have major benefits for taxpayers, victims of crime, local communities and the criminal justice system, according to the first comprehensive comparison between the cost-effectiveness of legalisation and prohibition. The authors of the report, which is due to be published today, suggest that a legalised, regulated market could save the country around £14bn.
For many years the government has been under pressure to conduct an objective cost-benefit analysis of the current drugs policy, but has failed to do so despite calls from MPs. Now the drugs reform charity, Transform, has commissioned its own report, examining all aspects of prohibition from the costs of policing and investigating drugs users and dealers to processing them through the courts and their eventual incarceration.
As well as such savings is the likely taxation revenue in a regulated market. However, there are also the potential costs of increased drug treatment, education and public information campaigns about the risks and dangers of drugs, similar to those for tobacco and alcohol, and the costs of running a regulated system.
The report looked at four potential scenarios, ranging from no increase in drugs use to a 100% rise as they become more readily available.
"The conclusion is that regulating the drugs market is a dramatically more cost-effective policy than prohibition and that moving from prohibition to regulated drugs markets in England and Wales would provide a net saving to taxpayers, victims of crime, communities, the criminal justice system and drug users of somewhere within the range of, for the four scenarios, £13.9bn, £10.8bn, £7.7bn, £4.6bn."
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Looking for an explanation for recurring nightmares of leaving the house without your trousers on or losing your teeth? New research suggests you can blame the Earth's magnetic field, rather than a repressed childhood.
Darren Lipnicki, a psychologist formerly at the Center for Space Medicine in Berlin, Germany, found a correlation between the bizarreness of his dreams, recorded over eight years, and extremes in local geomagnetic activity.
Other studies have tied low geomagnetic activity to increases in the production of the melatonin, a potent hormone that helps set the body's circadian clock. So, based on anecdotal evidence that melatonin supplements used as a sleeping aid can cause off-kilter dreams, Lipnicki wondered whether local magnetic fields could induce the same effects.
Journal reference: http://www.sciencedirect.com
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