A weird reading connection: from a Rands in Repose post called Become the consequence about becoming good in a role (you need about three years) and developing delegation skills to the point where you - as a good manager - can say: “otherwise I’ll do this…”, to an article in the The Guardian about Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund rejecting Tesla’s obscene “compensation” package for their obscene CEO, which, combined, mention millions, billions and trillions, in which each next is a factor of a thousand larger than the previous. As Rands says:

our mental model isn’t remotely close to why this is hard. It’s akin to trying to visualize the difference between one million and one billion. Yes, one is bigger than the other, but in your head… they’re kind’a the same? At a distance? They aren’t. A billion is one thousand times more than a million. We lack experiential reference points for both numbers because we’ve never seen one million or one billion anything in one place.

Then we have another newsletter from The Guardian talking about the mind-boggling valuations of AI companies which just ramps things up to the absurd. Again, here:

The difficulty in comprehending the financials of the AI boom makes it difficult to criticize with clarity or force. What could I say to an avalanche? Even the most insightful analysis seems like it will be bowled over and crushed beneath the weight of a billion-dollar datacenter. All of these numbers buck understanding. There is nothing in your individual human life that you could compare them with. How would I spend $91bn? How would I make hundreds of billions of choices? Thinking about them feels bizarre.

This gets to the heart of our difficulties imagining the wealth of those billionaires, the sheer vast scale at which money is being ploughed into tech and billionaires, whilst they complain about and block or restrict public healthcare, equality and human wellbeing. It’s a financial, philosophical and ethical mismatch - quite disturbing, if you (can at all) think about it.