Archive: Opinions

Most people think about shopping when they go to the mall.  I think about how wealthy our country is.  Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be in a room filled with millions of dollars?  In a way you have been in that figurative room, probably several times a week, and you just didn't realize it. 

I don't know the average number of cars in the Ithaca mall parking lot, but consider this:  if there are 1,000 cars on the lot, the value of those cars is somewhere around $27,233,200.  That is taking the average new and used car prices for 2015 and calculating using the 2010 percentage of new to used cars sold.  Granted, that is not an accurate way to calculate the actual value of the cars at the mall.  But it's close enough to make my point that the cars are worth a heck of a lot of money.  I would guess that there are many more cars than 1,000 at the mall most days.  So you are surrounded by millions and millions of dollars.

Now add in the cost of the mall.  The cost of the parking lot.  The cost of the clothes all those people are wearing.  1,000 smart phones alone are worth $314,000 on average (unlessIthaca has a higher average of iPhone users than the rest of the country -- if it does that figure will be much higher).  How about the cost of all the haircuts for that 1,000 people?  And most cars probably have more than one person in them.

Think about yourself.  If you add up all the stuff on you when you go out, how much is it worth?  Phone, watch, jewelry.  Not my thing, but tattoos?  Makeup, the cost of the soap and water and shampoo you used this morning?  Now add the cost of your car.  And that's just you.  Multiply by the current estimated U.S. population of 322,762,018 people.

Now bear with me because my math for these articles is notoriously challenged.

I like long driving trips.  They forcibly take me away from the computer, giving me a lot of time to just think.  One of the things I think about is how much of the world we humans have filled up.  Because, for the most part, everywhere I look there is people stuff.  The roads.  The buildings.  The walls.  All the billboards (no, I am not staying at the South Of The Border motel!!!)

So I did a little math.  Let's say each person in America takes up two square feet when they are standing up.  That is generous for most people, maybe a little restricting for the morbidly obese.  Multiply the 322,762,018 people in the U.S. by two square feet and you get 645,524,036 square feet needed to stand up ever person in America (I am not including the tourists).

There are 38,000,000 square miles in the United States, which translates to 1,059,379,200,000,000 square feet.  Divide by the number of people, and each person gets almost 3,227,620,246 square feet, including the two they already have.  Which is 115.77 square miles.  According to one source the Ithaca Mall's retail floor area is 622,920 square feet.  So if you own that mall you've got another 3,226,997,326 to go!  (Yeah, yeah, the parking lots make it probably more than double that, but still don't come close to one person's allotment of America.

Have you filled up 115.77 square miles of space recently?  Include your house.  You have to include landscaping, because that's something people do to change the Earth.  Now your percentage of all the roads in America.  Any malls or parking lots you have built.  There is probably a lot of room still for development.   Yet is sure looks like a whole lot of the available space has been filled up.

And all that costs money.  It comes to a lot of money.  That's what I think about every time I go out.  About how small I am, and how big the world is, and how much of the world people my size (I am the average height for American males) has filled up.

Then I think about winning the lottery.  So I can get to work filling up the rest of my 3,227,620,246 square feet.

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