ANPC’s decision to penalize banks for resorting to constructing maturity dates for formula loans taken from financial books makes me wonder about the competence and level of institutional literacy. If I’ve run out of ideas for the future, I’ve included a short list of other similar cases below.

• 1. ANM – fined for situations with misleading weather forecasts

• 2. Romanian lottery – penalized if the long-term numbers in the lottery do not tend to be evenly distributed, as the law of large numbers would say

• 3. Representatives of all religions – fined because there was no buyer recognized/certified as having purchased a product sold by most religions: salvation

• 4. Parliament/Government – ​​fined for failing to transfer the fateful and ghostly 6% of GDP to education for 20 years.

• 5. Political parties – fined for not fulfilling all their promises from election campaigns

• 6. Parliament/government – fines for the fact that we have not yet been accepted into Schengen

• 7. Ministry of Health – fined for not eliminating gender discrimination that prevents men from giving birth

• 8. The Ministry of Finance – fined for the fact that, although it always promises to collect better and spend more efficiently, it creates a chronic budget deficit

• 9. Ministry of Natural Resources – fined for not ensuring a balanced distribution of proximity to the sun, which leads to long and hot days in summer and long and cool nights in winter. Both situations lead to unnecessary energy consumption

• 10. Financial institutions that use the arithmetic average to translate from an annual interest rate to a monthly interest rate vs. statistical sciences that prefer the geometric average

• 11. The Ministry of Health, which failed to summarize the text from the Bible (Genesis 6:3), is also supported by an article (later disputed) in Nature (Dong et al., 2016) that says that humans can live 120 years

The requirements put forward by the ANPC are apparently similar to those in a humorous sketch where a draftsman is asked to draw several lines that are perpendicular at the same time. And from a chromatic point of view, they should be green, transparent and red at the same time (Beinerts, 2014).

Notes: This text is a pamphlet.

* The title is obviously a permutation of the title of a famous work by Goya. I first heard about this exchange from my good friend Andrii Parvan.

Bibliography

Beinerts, L. (2014) Experts, https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg

The Bible or the Holy Scriptures (translated by Cornilescu) (1924)

Dong, X., Milholland, B., & Wiig, J. (2016). Evidence of limitation of human life span. Nature, 538 (7624), 257-259.

N. ed.: Claudio Herceliou is the deputy dean of the Faculty of Cybernetics and a doctoral student of the Department of Statistics and Econometrics of the Academy of Economic Studies (ASE),