47b1cf6d$2@news.povray.org...

> I mean, I guess the numbers must stack up somehow, but DAMN, that's 
> far-out!

Well, it's well-established by now that you live in a parallel world, and 
that povray.off-topic is some kind of portal window into this amazing real 
world you keep hearing about. Nothing wrong with that of course, but you 
should definitely understand that the realities in your parallel world are 
far different from the realities in this world.

So, while in your world nobody eats bananas and Microsoft is the biggest 
company in the world, in this real world, people eat 70 million tons of 
bananas each year and Microsoft is a small outfit (relatively speaking).

1 ton of bananas = 1000 to 2000 $ so a rough estimate of the banana trade is 
about 70-140 billion dollars = more or less twice the revenue of Microsoft. 
And that's only for bananas. Look up the figures for wheat, maize or 
soybeans.

Of course, in the real world, food is actually more important that software, 
now how does *that* compute? :P

(Also, I said that the Maersk group shipped bananas, but that was a joke; 
indeed, they may ship more profitable stuff such as oil, cars and Chinese 
Christmas toys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk; freight is a 
gigantic business that made billionaires such as 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onassis, who was more famous than Bill Gates in 
his time).

G.

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