I agree that understanding the currencies is very important because a lot of people get frustrated when they just see 0.01... But in reality it is way better than that. Thanks for the comments on it helping you stochasticmind...
To answer your question, no it is NOT USD that you see. I have figured out a way to do the calculation that is pretty close, but I'm no expert by any means. This is how they do it in my simplified version without taking into consideration the little nuances that don't change the equation that much (in my opinion):
The money you see (like $2.08 currently on this post for instance) is the total money that gets paid out on the post or comment.
The author gets at least 75% (maybe more) and the curators (voters) get no more than 25%
Note: that number will change a little based on all the other activity, but it usually doesn't move too much after a few days have passed.
So in my example I will get $2.08 * .75 or $1.52 (but that's not US dollars)
What happens is at the end of the 7 days you will then get paid out 1/2 in SBD and 1/2 in the dollar value of STEEM (but in the form of SP).
So half of the $1.52 will be $0.76 in SBD
and half will be $0.76 worth of STEEM (and you then have to see the market price on that day to determine. In this article STEEM was $6.21 so you would take .76/6.21 to calculate the SP you get (0.122)
So in summary I will get .76 SBD and .122 SP when my payout comes. And then just use the calculations in the article to find the value.
Hint: US$6.40 of SBD and US$0.76 of SP for a total payout (at these exchange rates) of US$7.16 when it shows that it will only payout $2.08.
Does that make sense?
I invite some of my more experienced steemers out there like @swissclive who may have more to add to help us newer steemers out.) As you can see by this post and by all of the interests and comments, all of us are in the same boat trying to figure this out. So if you are a larger steemer and can give us better direction, we welcome you to help us.
Thanks again for your comment stochasticmind and I'm sure we will have many more awesome conversations in the future. Cheers my friend.