[eric_h]

Indeed. I've always preferred using one billion seconds as a way of understanding just how much a billion is (hint: it's 31 and change years).

The average American lifespan is 2.4 billion seconds.

If you were shoveling 100 dollar bills, you could actually do some damage in the relatively short term (you could probably reasonably shovel $5k-10k/10s, or $500-1k/s, so you could burn through a billion every 1.5-3 weeks (assuming you never sleep or eat).

If you were working a 40hr week shoveling hundreds, it would take 6-12 weeks to burn through a billion.

If you were doing the same but with singles it would take 6-12 _years_ to burn through a billion.

So if you started with $30B - it would take between 180 and 360 years to get rid of all that money by shoveling it into a furnace.

You could literally have a few generations of heirs whose job is shoveling money into a furnace and they would be considered significantly wealthy for most of those generations.