The Country's in the Very Best of Hands

[Ox]

Don't worry, folks, these people are in charge (http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090430/NEWS/904300313/-1/NEWSLETTER100):
TRURO — Voters narrowly approved one of four zoning amendments late Tuesday night at the annual town meeting. But town officials were still looking at the exact vote count on that article yesterday...

The exact count of the vote — 136 to 70 —had town officials hitting their calculators yesterday. The zoning measure needed a two-thirds vote to pass. A calculation by town accountant Trudy Brazil indicated that 136 votes are two-thirds of 206 total votes, said Town Clerk Cynthia Slade.

Brazil said she used the calculation of .66 multiplied by 206 to obtain the number.

But using .6666 — a more accurate version of two-thirds — the affirmative vote needed to be 137 instead of 136, according to an anonymous caller to town hall and to the Times.

Slade said that she called several of her colleagues to see how they calculate a two-thirds vote, and the answer varied widely. In Provincetown, Town Clerk Doug Johnstone uses .66. But Johnstone said he'd never had a close vote where it might matter.







Sigh.

[Telefrog]

That's so awesome.

[NoName]

Don't worry, folks, these people are in charge (http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090430/NEWS/904300313/-1/NEWSLETTER100):

Sigh.

But but.... high school algebra.


136 X
---- = ----
206 3

Solving that gives 1.981 so it didn't pass.

Sorry, I'm sure there's some facepalms and arguments to be had, I just wanted to solve the equation.

Edit: I never really payed attention to the bold text in the OP before now. How does the method vary? Why would you use a repeating decimal instead of a normal equation?

[Johan]

Democracy in action.

I mean, democratic inaction.

[Narradisall]

lol. I can see you fudging the figures to move from 136-137, its not called 'creative accounting' for no reason.

How do the answers vary widely though?

Personally I would have gone for 135.96 myself.

(206/100)*66

[Narradisall]

Maybe it should have been *66.66 though, hehe, 137...

[biosc1]

No idea why they decided to even round the number. It's takes more time than just punching 2 / 3 * 206 into a calculator in one swift movement

= 137.333333...

No question at all. No ambiguity at all.

[Narradisall]

No idea why they decided to even round the number. It's takes more time than just punching 2 / 3 * 206 into a calculator in one swift movement

= 137.333333...

No question at all. No ambiguity at all.

Id imagine it depends if they wanted it passed or not.

[TheManEatingCow]

In a similar vein, I recently went to Argentina for vacation. While there, the Citibank ATM passed us a fake 100 peso note on our last day. Long story short, we take the bill to our local Citibank and they agree to reimburse us. We give them the receipt that says something to the effect of 500 pesos withdrawn from the ATM, $137 deducted from our bank account. The bank teller and manager we were dealing with take 20 minutes of staring at it to come back to us with: 'we can't figure out how much to give you'. They ended up just giving us 30 dollars because they couldn't do the hard division problem.

[cppcrusader]

In a similar vein, I recently went to Argentina for vacation. While there, the Citibank ATM passed us a fake 100 peso note on our last day. Long story short, we take the bill to our local Citibank and they agree to reimburse us. We give them the receipt that says something to the effect of 500 pesos withdrawn from the ATM, $137 deducted from our bank account. The bank teller and manager we were dealing with take 20 minutes of staring at it to come back to us with: 'we can't figure out how much to give you'. They ended up just giving us 30 dollars because they couldn't do the hard division problem.

I'm not sure which is more sad here. The fact that bankers couldn't figure out a simple math problem, or the fact that they didn't just Google up a conversion calculator.

[Vulture]

sadly, this sort of thing is a common occurrence for Cape Cod town's governance. :mad:

[TheKeck]

No idea why they decided to even round the number. It's takes more time than just punching 2 / 3 * 206 into a calculator in one swift movement

= 137.333333...

No question at all. No ambiguity at all.
By my way of thinking, 137 is STILL less than 2/3 of 206, so they really need at least 138 votes to pass!! :eek:

[Shrinn]

TheKeck is absolutely right.

[J Arcane]

By my way of thinking, 137 is STILL less than 2/3 of 206, so they really need at least 138 votes to pass!! :eek:
Yeah, but, regardless, it only got 136 votes to pass. So, no matter how you round the two-thirds needed, it still failed.

[Inspector Fowler]

I saw a news broadcast of some British folks, and one of them said, "Well, it's all right now, isn't it? I mean, the government's dealing with it." I wanted to yell, "No! No!!!! They hire people like ME you dumb assholes!" ;)

[Arphahat]

I'll go so far as to say it is immediately obvious that it isn't 2/3. Looking at 70, the other vote would have to be at least 2x70=140 to be 2/3. At 136, we see it is shy.

[mister slim]

You use .66 because any further and there's a 666 in there and we all know about that number.

[Ox]

On a somewhat different note, this woman got the extended questionnaire (http://www.kctv5.com/news/19341437/detail.html).