UnNews:Bill Gates to pay budget deficit
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This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation. |
24 March 2013
Today, in a rather surprising press conference, Bill Gates announced he will pay off the US federal budget deficit.
"It's such a piddling figure, I thought: 'What the hell, I'll give the poor bastards a break.' We all have to do our part, and if I can save my country by coughing up a measly $18944, I might as well do it. I don't know how long it takes me to make that kind of money, but it cannot be more than a few minutes. I'm frankly a little surprised nobody else has offered to pay it yet!"
Mr. Gates looked more than "a little surprised" when a member of the press pointed out that the projected US Federal budget deficit for the year 2013 is roughly 901 billion dollars. That is $901000000000 for those who are interested in the numerical form. Gates called a quick halt to the conference and exited stage left for a hasty palaver with his attendants. He shortly marched back to announce that the conference will be continued once the huge difference between those two numbers has been explained to him "in plain english, without legal terms and the rest of the incomprehensible shit we always put into our own manuals and other documents".
The wait did not prove long: Mr. Gates reappeared in about 15 minutes with another announcement that the US government would have to find other ways to deal with the mess. "I have been cheated. Good day to you all!" With that, he walked out of the building into his $901bn. yacht that was waiting in the channel that had been dug especially for him 128 miles inland from the Pacific.
Later, searching for answers to what actually had happened, we managed to corner a federal mathematician, a Mr. Spogyncszeck, who is responsible for numerical adjustments. "Look - I didn't understand we were doing anything wrong. Where I come from this is standard practice: we take a figure that needs adjusting and then we just adjust it. This time the figure was too large to adjust using the normal techniques, so we had to come up with something new. We ended up imagining that the original figure is a compound of nine times a hundred billion plus one billion - but seen as if it were in binary. When we took the binary figure 1000000000 and converted it into decimals, it suddely was a lot smaller - 512, in fact. 9 x 100000000000 turned out to be 9 x 2048, which is 18432. We presented the sum of these rather more manageable figures to Mr. Gates. We never expected he would baulk at paying the deficit, seeing how clever we had been. Shows us how well we know this man. It sucks."