leftovers - reading review, what if (math at scale)

I noted last week that understanding scale spoke better to math skills than being able to compute sums. In an election year, it's particularly valuable. I heard Biden speaking the other day about "billions and billions of dollars", it sounded quite Trump-like, but if you understand that our country has around 330 million people, you learn to hear that as "hundreds and hundreds of dollars per person" which in the sense of policy doesn't seem like very much.

The federal debt is another story, but again one better told with per-capita numbers - we're around $82K each for one year, which is just under the median income. That seems like a better way to think about it than all the other metrics posted by websites like US debt clock, which seem interested only in alarming us under the guise of providing information.