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Comment by nohat | Hacker News Reader

200 times GNP? Unlikely. Jared Diamond's book by the same name? That's not very specific if you don't know the name of the book. Is it "Iceland’s ninth century agrarian collapse?" Also she uses million where she probably meant billion (the author is American and she addresses Americans, so American millions should be what she's using). Otherwise, if her facts are correct then it is a very interesting case. I'm particularly curious about the specifics of how they decided on the constitutional drafters.

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There are so many mistakes in this it's not funny. "In 2003 Iceland’s debt was equal to 200 times its GNP, but in 2007, it was 900 percent."? In that case it's gone from 200 times down to 9. This person should not be writing an article about numbers, because they've completely fluffed all of them. Worthless article.

>the author is American and she addresses Americans, so American millions should be what she's using

A British million is the same thing as an American million: it is the words "billion", "trillion", etc, that mean different things in British English than in American English.

But that just makes your point more true, namely, the OP probably meant billion.

I'm in the UK and I've never heard anyone using billion in anything other than the standard sense (10^9).

You switched in 1974.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Neither have I. The UK formally switched to the short scale (aka "American billions") forty years ago, so you wouldn't really expect to any more. I don't know why this rumour of Britain still using the long scale still perpetuates.

It used to happen, years back, but has indeed become obsolete. (it was 10^12 ie a million million). WHen I was a kid there was confusion...

Ah, yes I was confusing them - thanks.

The book is called "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", and it covers the collapse of Greenland Norse society, not the collapse of Iceland, as the article claims.

Collapse does spend a fair amount of time discussing Iceland precisely because the society there did not collapse in the same way as the similar society in Greenland even though they had a serious ecological disaster caused by the application of farming techniques suitable for the heavy soils of Scandinavia and the British Isles to the light volcanic soils of Iceland.

Arguably Collapse is just as much about societies that avoid collapse as it is about those that did disappear.

It covers Iceland as well.

I think you're also confusing millions and billions. For one, there is no such thing as "American millions", millions are the same everywhere.

Yes, I mixed them up. Thanks for the correction.

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