Today, I watched the CSI Miami episode "Backfire" (Season 8, episode 20)
and there is this one scene where detective Frank Tripp (played by
Rex Linn) to a man (played by John Beasley) whose son is suspected of
committing an arson for insurance money: "Mr Dawson, if you think about it,
your grandson had 200 000 reasons to set that fire."

They don't mention how much money they would get from an insurance fraud
but I'm sort of a slave of television and in many TV series and movies
the Americans always seem to mean that the going rate for one reason is
exactly one US dollar. I have no idea who came up with the system, but
using the same logic mugging a guy for 32 bucks on the street would mean
that the mugger had 32 reasons to do it. I think there is a big logical
problem when we're assuming that one reason equals a dollar. If I rob
a bank, I don't exactly know how much money I'm going to get and
I'd personally see "money" as an abstract concept, which really
constitutes as only one reason, but who am I to argue with Hollywood
producers.

Nonetheless, I didn't write this to argue about the going rate of a
reason. We can just assume it's one dollar like mentioned before. But
the point is that when I watched that episode yesterday, the translator
had made a mistake and when Mr. Tripp says this 200 000, the translator
had written 100 000 on the subtitle. Now this makes me curious!
Why did he do this? Did he simply hear the amount wrong? Is the going
rate for a reason in Finland different than what it is in the United
States? Then again, sometimes translators translate different units
(like miles and gallons) into metric units to make it understandable.

This made me think that perhaps the translator made a conversion from
dollars to euros, when keeping the conversion rate of a US dollar to
reason intact. We can't also forget the fact that the episodes of
CSI Miami are aired a lot later than they originally were aired in
the United States.

I made some research and I was able to find out from IMDB and the
original air date, according to it, was 19th of April 2010. The
episode aired here in Finland yesterday, which was 21st of
February 2011. That's like over nine months or something so a lot
can happen on the currency market. However, I searched the Internet
and found out that in April 19, one US dollar was equal to
0.7466 euros which would mean that the real amount of reasons that
should have been in the subtitle would be 149 320 euros, if the
episode was aired in last April. Since it was aired yesterday, the
conversion rate has changed a bit. Yesterday's rate would mean
that the same amount of dollars would be only 146 180, which would
also be the same amount of reasons.

Since the amount is quite closely between both numbers, I'm not
able to say whether the translator actually botched the conversion
or if he heard the amount wrong, but either way I think he did
a sloppy job here!

I can't believe I spent a minute of my life to read this. A minute I am never
going to get back.

I could had stopped at any time, but did I? Noooooo.

And now that I think about it, I just spent a minute more because I just had
to reply to it aswell.
And now I'm writing this reply to a reply. Will this never end?

I've never watched a CSI: Miami episode before, and I will never again.
Why? There's crime scene investigation and then there's just utter
stupidity and sloppy writing. Here, let me count the ways.

The woman who killed the plumber:

The woman was a total nutcase and yet knew how to use a coin to botch a
fuse, and behind the plumber's back managed to trace a wire from the the
fusebox to the floor, set it right, get a hose and water the area so that
the plumber was electrocuted from HIS KNEE TO KNEE. He was standing in a
concrete floor with insulation. After that the woman (apprx 60y old)
dragged the full grown male to another room, placed him in an upward
position with one hand and with the other got a drywall plate and held some
100kg of wet meat with her other hand whilst driving screws through the
drywall patch. That drywall patch (while being where the fire started) was
unharmed, however every single other drywall was cleanly removed by the fire
throughout the house. Even those bits that are connected to the supporting
wood.

The sprinklers didn't work:
First of all, all the sprinklers were missing their heat sensors, i.e. they
were open (that little red pill that explodes in the heat), yet the
investigator had the water flowing and nothing came out until he touched the
busted up sprinklerhead with a blowtorch. Oh yeah, only that one started to
work. The story told that the culprit managed to sabogate the sprinkler
main line by first digging a large hole, and then putting DRY ICE in a TOWEL
around a 7cm thick main water that supposedly froze the whole line from that
point. You have got to be fucking shitting me. Even if you poured liquid
nitrogen over a rapidly flowing mainline it wouldn't freeze. And this was
in MIAMI. Oh yeah, and when they dug the mainline open, the towel with the
dry ice was still neatly placed above the pipe, and still steaming after
melting there FOR A FEW DAYS. That stuff evaporates faster than a ninja in
the night.

The kid who died:
The grandfather who torched the house said the kid shouldn't have
been there, instead in school. The gramps started the fire upstairs and
then ran out without noticing the kid PAINTING the friggin house there.

There was so much more utterly horrible flaws in reality but I laughed
so hard I can't even count them all.

I've seen some botched up shit in TV (virus written in BASIC taking
over an alien ship the size of a moon?), but I never thought CSI was
this bad nowadays.

~/A

Omg, did you just well-actually a CSI Miami episode?

Ah, you are close to the thruth young padawan but you are still missing one
basic fact. The stated sum was 200,000 dollars. That number is suspicious
because it is already rounded to the nearest 100,000. So the conversion was
done: 149 320 euros, which then has to be rounded to the same accuracy as the
original, which is 100,000.