Our national debt in light years. Google’s woes. And Bible sales are up 22%.
Our National Debt in Light Years
Our national debt is now $37 trillion. That’s one trillion more than it was in July. That comes to $107,494.78 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. The share for every taxpayer is $218,181.82.
David Hebert of the American Institute for Economic Research has more fun facts about how much money we owe. He informs us that each bill of our paper currency is 2.61 inches wide, 6.14 inches long, and 0.0043 inches thick.
So if we were to stack up what we owe in $100 bills, each of which is only 0.0043 inches thick, the stack would be 24,431.8 miles high. The circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles. So if we could lay the stack down, it would almost go around the earth. And at the present rate, we will achieve this milestone in April.
If we were to use $1 bills to pay off our debt and lay them end to end, since each of them in 6.14 inches long, 37 trillion of them would go on for 3.5 billion miles.
A beam of light, the fastest entity in the universe, would take 5 hours and 6 minutes to go from one end to the other.
HT: Dominic Pino
Google’s Woes
Mighty Google, which stands astride the internet like a colossus, is facing problems, not only from legal attempts to break it up for being a monopoly. But because searching on the internet is changing.
So reports Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal. Google makes most of its money from advertising, but other players are soaking up that revenue. When users search for a product to buy, they are increasingly by-passing the Google search engine to go straight to Amazon, which seemingly stocks everything they might need and whose revenues are soaring. Young people in particular are clicking links on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms.
Google’s integration of AI, which gives a summary of the information searched for before listing specific websites, means that fewer users are scrolling down to the websites themselves. Or to the ads and sponsored links that appear after the long summaries. Google is also facing competition from search engines that are all AI (such as Perplexity, mentioned above, which gave me the answer I needed after I could make no sense of the “Light Year Calculator” Google sent me to). Mims quotes NYU business professor Melissa Schilling: “AI is to search what e-commerce was to Walmart.” Not that AI is all-powerful. AI’s weaknesses are also a problem for Google. AI is generating so many hallucinations, fake sites, and so much content based on other AI content, that the quality of all internet searches has gone down. (I’ve found that Google’s summaries and Perplexity answers are not always reliable.)
Here are some details cited by Mims:
The rate at which people clicked on ads that appear in search results was down 8% compared with a year ago, according to data from advertising platform Skai. It’s not clear why this is happening, but one logical conclusion is that it’s the result of Google’s own AI-based summaries, which eliminate the need to click on sponsored links or scroll down to where the ads are.
One study from January by search-engine-optimization software company Authoritas found that Google’s AI answers in its search results could upend rankings and traffic to existing websites. And ad sales firm Raptive has projected that the full rollout of this change to search could erase $2 billion in revenue for publishers.
Few will shed tears for Google, though its plight shows the weakness of regulators’ claim that it is a monopoly and demonstrates once again that worldly power never lasts.
Bible Sales Are Up 22%
Comparing the first ten months of 2024 to the same time last year, Bible sales have jumped 22%. Regular books were up only 1%.
This follows a rising pattern. In 2020, 8.864 Bibles were sold; in 2021, the number rose to 11.859 million; in 2022, it stayed fairly flat 11.907 million; in 2023, that rose to 14.162 million . This year’s Bible sales have already come close to reaching that number with 13.713 million as of October, with two months–including Christmas–yet to go.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reports on this phenomenon, noting the irony of this Bible surge is taking place at the same time that 28% of the population is unaffiliated with any religion. Some of them, though, may be Bible buyers. Trachtenberg cites book store owners and publishers who say that many of the sales are coming from first-time buyers, college students, and other young adults in Generation Z.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In