Recommended legislature

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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?

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.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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?

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.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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.

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.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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

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.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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.