A few months ago, I read Bill Bryson's "I'm A Stranger Here Myself" wherein Bryson attempts to convey just how unimaginably big the number 1 trillion is. I have excerpted this article from The Brisbane Times to explain further below.
Bryson asks us to imagine we're in a vault with a vast amount of money, and we're told we can keep every dollar bill we can write our initials on....
"Say, too, for the sake of argument, that you could initial one dollar bill each second and that you worked straight through, without stopping," he says.
"How long do you think it would take to count to a trillion dollars? Go on, humour me and take a guess. Twelve weeks? Five years?
"If you initialled one dollar bill a second, you would make $1000 every 17 minutes. After 12 days of non-stop effort you would acquire your first million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million, and 1200 days - something over three years - to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and after almost 1000 years you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft [this was in January 1997].
"But not until 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar."
With news of the Rahim Moore hit coming down this afternoon, just how much is $20,000 in real people terms? Sure, we've all heard Randy Moss and other high profile players poo poo these fines as nothing more than middling nuisances, but to you and me $20,000 is a decent amount (a lot) of money. Follow me after the jump for the first installment of a continuing series that will tell you in tangible terms what the Denver Broncos fines could buy in today's world.
Rahim Moore has the distinction of being the first Denver Bronco to receive a fine, $20,000*, for this play against the Bills.
....but what is $20,000?
According to Bryson's scenario if we locked Rahim in a vault containing $1 bills from his bank account, it would take him five hours and forty minutes to isolate what it would take to pay the league for that hit.
It's the price of a brand new 2011 Hyundai Sonata, Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen or Volkswagen Golf. Granted, these aren't by any means luxury vehicles, but if I pulled up to your house and tossed you the keys; I imagine you'd be pretty stoked.
It's enough to buy this luxurious trailer in exotic Garden Grove, California.
via Zillow.com (http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8111-Stanford-Ave-SPC-21-Garden-Grove-CA-92841/83332042_zpid/#hdp-photo-lightbox)
Smartly Priced 2 bedroom 2 Bath in Villa Capri Family Park****Priced incredibly for quick quick sale**(Close by unit is listed at $65,000 but we are at $19,990!)Great amenities in park such as Pool, Spa, Rec Room, etc.**Convenient location to schools, shopping, Freeways** ***************HURRY AS THIS WILL NOT LAST*************
It's enough to buy a 31' sail boat built in 1970!
It's more than enough for a Rolex Pearlmaster watch! Retail $15,950... Shoot, you'd even have enough left over to also buy a Rolex DateJust to go with it! Retail $3,950.
We could get buttock implants for Kyle Orton, Tim Tebow, Brady Quinn & Adam Weber!
If you're one of the more charitable members of MHR, you'd be interested to know that if this money were given to Heifer International it could buy 666 bee hives, 166 sheep, 40 heifers, 23 camels, or 80 water buffaloes to help fight world hunger and poverty.
As the season goes on, the Denver Broncos will undoubtedly accrue more fines. Mind you, I don't endorse any fine generating behavior and I certainly won't be rooting for anyone to increase the total. It's not that the Broncos are going to intentionally hurt anyone, but it's just the nature of today's game.
In coming up with the idea for this article, I figured it would be fun to have a amount that would be interesting to attain - something that we as Bronco fans could look forward to buying with our fine money.
That's when I came across the Virgin Galactic website. They're the company that's already begun taking reservations for their emerging space travel business. The down-payment for booking a trip? $20,000. Rahim Moore, you just got us a reservation. However, undertaking a financial endeavor like this begs these questions: Will the NFL fine the Denver Broncos enough to cover the $200,000 cost to get someone into space? If so, just who should we send?
Who would you like to see the NFL send into space (to leave them there or not) with the Broncos fine money? The MHR community should pick the best answer and we'll see how we're doing in the next installment of this series.
Go Broncos!
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* Note: Rahim Moore's fine could be reduced to $5,346 based on the new CBA. (Which would only be good for the cheaper of the two Rolex watches...)
The new Collective Bargaining Agreement protects players from excessive fines of more than 25 percent of their weekly base salary for a first offense of an on-field infraction. And since Moore's 2011 base salary is the rookie minimum of $375,000, he won't actually lose $20,000. Moore can appeal and get that fine reduced to 25 percent of his weekly pay of $22,058.82, which means his actual fine would be $5,514.71.
(For now we'll roll with the $20,000 until it gets formally reduced.)