Going by this morning's radio coverage, and reported-on-the-radio newspaper coverage, the Greek deal was a disaster. The Greeks couldn't pay back the money they owed, so "Europe" has lent them more. To justify this, the Eurozone's finance ministers have set even more onerous conditions for the loan - more onerous than the conditions already rejected by the Greek people. So there!
    Everybody following this knows by now that Greece forgave Germany's debt in 1953. Times were different, circumstances were different - but that's what has snagged on the public consciousness. More to the point, the deal was reached, we're told, at the end of a marathon (sic) seventeen-hour talking session. Yes, those ministers, mostly late-middle-aged men and women, spent seventeen hours arguing and then finally agreeing that more lending was the best way to get their impossible debt repaid. Yeah, right.
    Also in the public consciousness is the strange truth that Greece has been getting steadily worse off since the Eurozone first started to help. Today and tomorrow, the Greek parliament, which of course represents the Greek people, will be voting on whether to accept a worse deal than the Greek people have already rejected.
    So my question is, if the Greek parliament says no, whose fault will that be?

I wish I could master that plosive <B>. The B that news teams use when they tell us that something is going to cost Billions, or that the debt has risen to Billions. You need to treat the number as a run-up, one-and-a-half ... then you hit it on the rise ... Billion euros!
    On second thoughts, the numbers remain abstract. The B sounds great, but it doesn't work. There's no reference point. It's going to cost so much, which is the cost of a pint of milk, or a house in Knightsbridge, or an aircraft carrier - and you know how much money this is. If it's just Big, it's just Big. Nothing to be bigger than, smaller than - nothing to say: this Big.
    Big numbers can work; even in astronomy, you can imagine the sun shrunk to the size of an orange, which means that the earth (a hazelnut?) is that far away. If the orange-sized sun is here, Jupiter is over there. Why don't we try for scale when we're trying to express Big financial numbers?