Watching the news the other day, my wife and I saw a term that isn't very common - yet. It was peta, and no, not the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but as a prefix - as in one quadrillion of something.
It's a term we're going to see more of in the future.
There's a system of prefixes most people are familiar with - kilo for thousand, mega for million, giga for billion. In recent years we've now become familiar with tera for trillion, as in a terabyte hard drive. The next step is the peta.
Everywhere we look we are seeing inflation - not only in the prices we pay, but in our general lives. When I purchased my first computer 20 years ago, my entire storage of data was 20 floppy disks which held 1.44 megabytes (1.44 million bytes). My current computer now has over 10 terabytes, or 10 trillion bytes stored on it.
While computers seem to be governed by Moore's Law, doubling in power roughly every 18 months, we've seen some pretty astronomical number in other areas as well.
I don't believe those standard inflation numbers we hear on the late night news. By my figuring, things in the late 1960s cost 10x more now, if not higher. The TV news folks will often say it is much lower than that. I don't think they're even close.
In 1967 my dad bought a Buick LeSabre for around $4,000. In 2005, the last year the LeSabre was made, it cost around $42,000 or thereabouts. Minimum wage in the '60s was around a buck. Today it's around $10.
By the same token, most things have doubled in price from the early 1990s to today. Minimum wage when I started working in 1991 was $4.50 or so.
Yet in the past few years we've seen tremendous inflation in housing in Saskatchewan. Prices have doubled in five years, but salaries certainly have not.
Indeed, a million dollars does not go far these days. There used to be a time when a million dollars would have you "set for life." Now you can hardly get a house on some streets in Saskatoon and Regina for a million bucks.
In Estevan, the new rink cost around $22 million! That's insane! While it's a nice rink, the walking track isn't paved with gold. It's one rink! Around 2004, the same dollar amount bought you two and a half ice surfaces, a pool, weight room and two indoor soccer facilities in Lloydminster.
The standard for business reporting is rapidly changing from millions to billions. If a company isn't worth a billion these days, it hardly gets a mention.
The United States financed their Second World War effort from 1939 to 1946 with $205 billion in war bonds. That's about a third of what Apple's market capitalization is worth on any given day now.
The U.S. national debt ceiling is being increased every few months. It's so many trillions, no one can really wrap their head around it. Yet those Americans keep driving it up, even though someone will have to pay for it. Those people might not be alive now, but apparently that's OK. Might as well add another three zeros and call it quadrillions. Maybe a few more after that. How many does it take to be a zillion?
In the Social Network, a line attributed to Sean Parker said it all: "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars."
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
