[Detrytus]

I find this visualization pretty useless. What I would appreciate is putting billion of dollars in terms of actual property you could buy with it, something like:

- This is a house (or palace rather) that you could buy for $1B

- This is an oceanic yacht of the same value

- This is a shopping mall which did cost about $1B to build

- This is an oil refinery that recently sold for $1B

- This is how many US senators you can bribe, and how many favorable bills you can push through Congress /s

etc.

[collinmcnulty]

There’s a xkcd for that: https://xkcd.com/980/

It’s a little old so inflation is a factor, but still really good intuition

[apsurd]

as useless as you say the visualization is, so is property comparison because what does "$1B worth of real estate" even mean?

Raw materials + labor + debt financing + geographical point-in-time land value? It'd be easier to intuit these vs look at some nice pixels?

[tharkun__]

Did you actually scroll to the bottom or got bored while scrolling and scrolling and scrolling on the big black box running "top to bottom"?

The whole thing is about perspective. The big black box is just the start.

I find it much more enlightening to think about all the pixels I had to scroll past, then seeing the same thing represented by a big and then small black circle and put it in perspective with things like people working minimum wage all their lives all the way up to the Bezos and Musks of the world.

Those relative sizes feel immediately "relatable" even though they're "just numbers".

On the other hand I find your examples (no offense intended) lack that.

    This is a house (or palace rather) that you could buy for $1B

This is very area specific. I can buy the same house / palace for way less than a billion in one place vs. another.

     This is an oceanic yacht of the same value

From a quick Google, most super yachts "in that price range" cost less than 0.5 billion. Not that this makes it any more relatable.

    This is a shopping mall which did cost about $1B to build

Seems like the house thing above :shrug:

    This is an oil refinery that recently sold for $1B

Refineries always just look huge to me. Whether they cost $1B or $100,000,000 I really couldn't tell you. It's just a huge place of tubes and stuff. I have no frame of reference so to speak.

    This is how many US senators you can bribe, and how many favorable bills you can push through Congress /s

Lacking frame of reference as well, though yeah, the /s was worth thinking about this one. Maybe the original site could represent this as a number or relatively sized circles. "This is how many bills you could buy with this in 1975 vs. 2000 vs. 2025" /s

But then it'd really be about inflation instead of perspective.