– Panic In California As Thousands Of Food Stamps Cards Suffer Brief Outage (ZeroHedge, Jan 9, 2013):
This past weekend, as part of a system update to the CalWIN software of California’s Social Services department, HP accidentally cancelled EBT cards for some 37,000 Californians. We can only imagine the resulting panic and the scramble by all these Californians who suddenly could not live within their means to print trillion, and other denomination, coins, in the shining example of their government. The OC Register reports that eighteen counties were affected in the CalFresh chaos (the ‘friendly’ name given to California’s food stamp program – also formerly known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP). While we worry for the strippers and liquor stores, CalWIN and Xerox (the state’s primary contractor for administering CalFresh) developed a process to reactivate the cards by Tuesday morning. While this must have been a tough day or two for many, we wonder if Geithner’s ‘extraordinary’ efforts to extend the debt ceiling deadline have perhaps gone a little too far?Finally, instead of minting coins, perhaps Hewlett Packard can remotely update its software in the Fed printers, which can then proceed to print a few cool extra trillion unsupervised, and voila: all of America’s problems are gone.