1 cubic parsec is (according to Google) 2.93799895 × 10^49 cubic meters. 1 Olympic-size swimming pool has 2500 cubic meters of volume. Diving, that gives 1.1751996 x 10^46 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Cubic *giga*parsec, so presumably you're off by a factor of 1e27. But what's 1e27 Olympic pools between friends...
If what you were saying was true, a republican Congress would not have been re-elected
I haven't seen the figures for 2014, but the only reason Republicans won a congressional majority in 2012 was due to massive, unchecked gerrymandering. As http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... demonstrates, the Ds won ~1.5E6 more votes than the Rs, yet the Rs have 33 more seats. Of course, this is probably even more true in the Senate, where a voter in Wyoming has something like an order of magnitude more influence than one in say California.
The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged , John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market , Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.
What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"
This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead : "He was born without the ability to consider others." (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.)
As for the "accounting fiction" the trust fund is invested solely in Treasury Bonds, those are the AAA rated investments backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Goverment. You can be an anarchist if you want, but the U.S. Government has never failed to pay back a dollar of treasury bond debt. They get shitty interest rates though (currently 10 year notes are returning a negative interest rate -- you get less back in 10 years than you invest up front, but they still sell easily).
Hmm, where do you get the negative interest rate for 10 year T-bonds? http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=yield has them at 1.6% today. Or are you factoring in inflation?
390
You know, the difference between this company and the Titanic is that the Titanic had paying customers.
