Talk Elections

As the definitions of the English words "Billion" and "Trillion" vary across the globe, I suggest that the President introduce a bill to the Senate to define these terms, so we all have a common frame of reference.  They should be defined as such:

One Billion = One Thousand Million.
One Trillion = One Million Million.

Beef, we only have $6 billion dollars in spending on actual Atlasian government....lets pretend for government purposes 1 registered voters = half a million taxpayers...we would have 65 million taxpayers...what would be our income around that?

It might be of interest to note that the United States Code does not use the word billion anywhere, probably because of just such a concern.  In anycase, since we do emulate American government, it would seem logical that we use the illogical American definition of billion.

Findings on this will be out this weekend...

Should I assume that the old budget mirrors the real world USA budget, percentage-wise, and go from there?  Because that's kinda what I had in mind.

I think the idea should be, if we were in charge, how would we fix the current system?  In any event, the actual dollar figures aren't as important as the percentages involved.

Getting back to the subject of the thread, you never know when you might need to use Trillion.  My successor may pursue an inflationary policy.  Since the British define One Trillion to be 10^18, and the USA defines it to be 10^12, this is an important thing to define.

I recognise a billion as 1,000,000,000 and a trillion as 1,000,000,000,000. I'm not a maths whiz, so do these fit with the definitions you provide?

I was under the impression that we inherited the state of the US and the world as of the day Eric Nyman took office.  This includes our budget.  These facts can only be changed by specific policies to do so.

Yes.  These are the American definitions.

The British and Australians define a billion as 1,000,000,000,000 and a trillion as 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (yikes!).  Sure, it is more "logical," but it is also much less practical.

EDIT: (er, wait, if Hugh recognizes the American definitions, maybe Australia defines these the same way we do...)

The purpose of this is to codify what has been common practice in America for decades.

As the AG pointed out, current US (and therefore Atlasian) law does not provide for these definitions, and as a result, the words "billion" and "trillion" do not appear in the US Code.  Since so much budgeting is being done on the order of "billions" of dollars here in the AFG, I wanted to make sure there were no ambiguities possible.  It's not really "changing" the definitions.  Just codifying those that are alread in common American use.

Further checking shows that billion does show up in the CFR, so just go ahead and promulgate a Treasury regulation for what a billion and a trillion mean and that should do the trick, Secretary Beef.

I think that the Australian definition probably changed when we switched from the pound to the dollar in the 1960s :)

I actually think we should introduce a bill to this effect, just to cover ourselves.  There's no reason not to.

I always thought that the switch to decimal money was a bad move all around.  I like British TV and movies set before 1970, when they'd talk about "one and six" or "half a crown" or a "ten-bob note."

"7 1/2 p", "12 1/2 p", and "50 p" just don't sound as romantic.

Now you're just trying to get their groat. :)

Groan.  I'm not exactly rolling on the florin for that one.

the aussie penny was funny; my grandma had about 5 bags of them that she gave me :D