The Psychosis Of American Justce

[Scylax]

Daily Telegraph (21/7/14) reports that a Mrs. Robinson has been awarded £13.4 billion by a Florida jury following the death of her husband from lung cancer; he was a chain-smoker. The award was made against R.J.Reynolds, a cigarette maker.
Can anyone imagine a million pounds repeated 13,400 times?

[youngmafbog]

It wont be paid, so she wont need to worry thinking about it.

[factor-fiction]

That was just the punitive damages. There was also £4.3m to the widow and the couple's child plus £5.6m to Mr Johnson's son from a previous relationship.
There had been a bigger award in the past- in 1994 in the Engle case £85billion was awarded in punitive damages- but that was later thrown out

[pixie373]

Should be 13,400,000 times- unless you're using the American definition- or is it dollars?

[ToraToraTora]

what worries me is that now they've set the precident that you can sue when your personal choices go wrong, only in America! I hope!

[ToraToraTora]

To be fair though this is a lawyers pension plan, they'll never pay anything they'll just pay each other for arguing the toss for decades to come.

[New Judge]

I think most people do understand a billion to be a thousand million these days, pixie. Most things that require such figures (such as personal wealth of the mega-rich and government debt) use a billion as a thousand million (i.e. 1,000,000,000). A "trillion" is now creeping into use as a thousand billion (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000) - especially as the UK's total national debt now exceeds that sum.

[Zeuhl]

I've been in business over thirty years and as i recall a thousand million has always been referred to as a billion

000 = thousand
000,000 = million
000,000,000 = billion

[mikey4444]

It doesn't matter how many 0's there in the award...it will never be made. The Court was ludicrous in imposing such a daft sum of money in the first place. The only people to gain from this are the greedy lawyers involved.

[ToraToraTora]

no zeuhl, a billion is 10**12, we have come to accept the US version of 10**9 but the correct term for that is a Milliard.

[Zeuhl]

/the correct term for that is a Milliard/

Interesting T3 Ta.

Milliard. So not easily confused with 'million' then LOL

I can see why the world has chosen to use the term billion :-)