MIT Dorm Fined 14 Quintillion Dollars
Each year an MIT dorm called Bexley unintentionally(?) finds new and innovative ways to get in trouble with some element of ‘the Administration.’ These transgressions are inevitably followed by some ludicrous threat, such as removing all prospective freshmen from the dorm or forcing some subset of the dorm’s residents to relocate. This year, though, seems to have taken the cake - because of an unbounded and frankly poorly thought-out fine schedule, they were hit with a penalty of “$1.4e19″ or 14 Quintillion dollars. That’s the highest dollar figure I’ve ever seen someone write and expect to be taken seriously - outside of Dopewars, of course.
Text of the indictment below:
On April 25th, the ASA executive board sent an official warning that
massive postering violations for Beast Roast had occurred. Due to the
excessiveness of the violation, we required the offending posters to be removed by the next day. The next morning, board members noted that a few violations remained, but since there was a good faith effort to follow the rules, we decided not to fine the dorm at that point. However, a day later, we were dismayed to find rampant violations again and to receive emails from several groups as to Bexley’s illegal postering, including concerns that Bexley poster-ers may have pulled down other groups’ posters in order to poster so thoroughly. … According to our poster violation fine schedule, which is posted at http://web.mit.edu/asa/www/public-postering.shtml and was also emailed to you, the cost of 59 posters all in violation of postering guidelines is $1.4e19. If we instead count only each board as a violation, there would be 10 separate violations for a total fine of X value that I don’t remember, as the fine doubles for every additional violation. Even if the fine only increments $25 for each additional set of violations, the total fine would be $44,250. …
Funny enough, when I received this email, I happened to be in the middle of an article on arithmetic overflows.
