Strangely Consistent

Theory, practice, and languages, braided together

November 15 2009 — money gets inflated, time gets deflated

86 years ago today, the Rentenmark was introduced in Germany to replace the old, worthless currency:

The Rentenmark replaced the Papiermark. Due to the economic crises in Germany after the Great War there was no gold available to back the currency. Therefore the Rentenbank, which issued the Rentenmark, mortgaged land and industrial goods worth 3.2 billion Rentenmark to back the new currency. The Rentenmark was introduced at a rate 1 Rentenmark = 1:10^12 Papiermark, establishing an exchange rate of 1 United States dollar = 4.2 RM.

Now, that's an impressive exchange rate. Hm, hyperinflation. Now, that sounds like a possibly interesting Wikipedia article:

Yikes. About the only time you do not want to see lots of zeros on your banknotes is when everyone else has them, too.

Today I'm well-rested, but I wasted much of my allotted time writing other stuff. Since I don't have time to do anything big, I'll fix a small thing that has annoyed me in the last couple of days: after I went and deleted the Makefile.PL from November, the nightly smokes have been coming out wrong. So I went looking for the error.

It wasn't a big error. The build script needed to stop try and run that Makefile.PL, and there was a local change in the Makefile.PL itself, which prevented git from automatically removing it. After fixing these two things, I again have green-and-clean test reports.

Now if I could only find the time to dig into lichtkind++'s bugs. That last one, with the login problem, was kinda fun in retrospect.