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Software Glitch Leads To $23,148,855,308,184,500 Visa Charges
Hmmm2000 writes "Recently several Visa card holders were, um, overcharged for certain purchases, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 on a single charge. The company says it was due to a programming error, and that the problem has been corrected. What is interesting is that the amount charged actually reveals the type of programming error that caused the problem. 23,148,855,308,184,500.00 * 100 (I'm guessing this is how the number is actually stored) is 2314885530818450000. Convert 2314885530818450000 to hexadecimal, and you end up with 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50. Most C/C++ programmers see the error now ... hex 20 is a space. So spaces were stuffed into a field where binary zero should have been."
...is that this was not caught by validity checks. Was this perhaps an error that affected only the printing of the statement?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Is not so much the error(stupid; but, if corrected, not ultimately a giant deal); but the response of the cardholder to the error:
"The bank kept him on hold for two hours, during which time he contemplated the impossibly bleak financial future that might await him. He also felt a stab of fear that he had saddled all his unborn grandchildren -- and their grandchildren -- with a lifetime of debt. "Down the generational line, nobody would have any money."
For fuck's sake, people, the credit card guys haven't actually bought a law concerning hereditary debt slavery yet, and this guy thinks that it is already on the books?
Muszynski compared the giant debt reprieve to receiving "an amazing Monopoly card that says, 'Bank error in your favor.' "
Pathetic. This guy is grateful that Visa condescended to fix their obvious mistake(this isn't some he said/she said billing dispute, this is someone who allegedly spent more than the world GDP at a gas station)? What is this cringing bullshit? Either this guy is just a sad sack or, rather worse, the "customer service" we get, along with the kangaroo courts that are "mandatory binding arbitration" actually make thankfulness for not being screwed a reasonable response.
Probably more offensive is that a glitch happened at all, large or small. It could have just as easily been $2.31 in which case he may have not noticed the overcharge and paid it. Charge several thousand people $2.31 too much and you can make an alright profit.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Yeah, of course what happened after that was people started having to resort to bartering for goods using small amounts of Gold, Kinda like what they did TWO-Thousand years ago. So you take an economy and you screw it up so badly that you have to reset it back to the pre-roman levels of commerce.
.
And people laugh at other people for collecting and buying gold.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The thing is if the economy tanks that badly, gold probably won't be worth much either. Which is why buying large boxes of ammo, cigarettes, and toilet paper is the way to go!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
No, you're wrong.
Gold will just get ridiculously expensive - think $2000/oz or as much as $10000/oz - double its current price.
Just give it 5-10 years, you'll see.
People don't use gold for it's intrinsic value as a metal. It's used because sometimes you can't buy a herd of goats with a thousand cans of Dinty Moore stew. Gold is small, convenient, historical, and rare, so it makes a pretty good medium of exchange.
Historically paper money only had value because it was backed by gold, or some other known commodity. Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Gold also only has value because people believe it does - as the GP post said, you can't eat it, you can't really build a shelter out of it, etc.
In any event, why should the money supply be tied to a rare, precious metal? Matching the growth (or shrinkage!) of the money supply based solely on the discovery, loss, or recovery of a particular natural resource hardly seems like a good plan for managing the economy.
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Gold is small, convenient, historical, and rare, so it makes a pretty good medium of exchange.
This is what people don't get. When you are transferring large amounts of wealth around there are very few other options. I've heard of using oil as a medium... but transferring the equivalent amount of wealth in oil would require fleets of tankers. There is nothing special about gold except that it is common enough to be common but rare enough to be rare. We could use platinum but that is too rare, or copper, which isn't quite rare enough. Silver is actually a decent alternative and what many economies used prior to settling on gold.
No, when you're starving, gold isn't worth much. But when you're just past the starving point and trying to create a base economy, crating around a wheelbarrow full of canned goods is inconvenient and makes you a target.
That's not really as absurd as it sounds. You couldn't really go shopping with Zimbabwe dollars in 32 bits.
*My* question, though, is this:
Why do Visa's systems have the bandwitdh to *allow* 23 quadrillion dollars to make it to a credit card bill.
Is there anyone, at all, anywhere, who's gonna carry a balance of even a megabuck?
6.2, really. That's all they needed.