US$2,857

= within 15 cents of $20,000/7
= NT$88,661, by Google’s current exchange rate

= 739 hours of Taiwan’s hourly minimum wage or 4.43 months of Taiwan’s monthly minimum wage
= 317 hours of Massachusetts’s minimum wage (7.94 weeks or 1.85 months assuming a 40-hour work week)
= 1.2~1.7 weeks of a list of high tech internship salaries as featured on Slate

= 2,955 plates of Sushi Express
= 1,478 cheap boxed lunches (at NT$60 each), which would last one person 1.35 years at 3 per day
= 1,122 Big Macs, price in Taiwan, or 596 Big Macs, average price in U.S. (January 2015)

= 956 copies of Blackbar
= 573 copies of Hadean Lands
= 286 copies of Spacechem
= 181 nanoblock Charizards
= 95 years of reddit gold
= 56 copies of everything by Pentatonix on iTunes (U.S. pricing)
= 28 years of a minimal WebFaction server
= 24 years of a minimal Linode server
= 12 unicorns
= 4.5-ish copies of the entire set of Pokémon games (I just Googled this; I hope it’s accurate) = 1.8 MacBook Pros (256GB) (educational price with 3-year warranty)
= 1.08 standard Individual Licenses for MATLAB ($2,650. What. I can’t even.)

= 3.6 dead children, original figure quoted on raikoth.net
= 0.86 dead children, 2015 estimate from GiveWell’s assessment of Against Malaria Foundation

= 88% of an APMO gold medal
= 44% of an IMO gold medal

= 0.0000016% of Taiwan’s national debt = 39% of debt per person
= 0.000000016% of U.S. national debt = 5% of debt per person

This is going to be dwarfed by the airplane tickets and meals anyway, so I don’t know what I’m doing.

Well, no, I do know what I’m doing: making filler posts for the streak.

Also, I’m sorry for the arbitrariness of the sigfigs.

(note: the commenting setup here is experimental and I may not check my comments often; if you want to tell me something instead of the world, email me!)