Folks, I’ve been thinking, and usually, when that happens, mad ideas spew out of my brain at the speed of light (or a bit less as the case may be).
Goverments will inevitably spend huge sums of taxpayers’ money on silly projects. See the 12 billion for the national e-mail, internet, telephone and spam database, 1 billion for a system to store all the passport details of mobile phone buyers, umpteen billion for the ID cards system, umpty billion for the NHS system; this all adds up to 100 billion plus, spent on boring stuff that we don’t really need, and I haven’t even counted the cost of saving abysmally managed banks.
Now there was a time when governments blew huge sums of money on big white elephants that were at least interesting, like the Apollo moon missions, concorde, the fabulous Humber Bridge, the channel tunnel and the Hubble.
There’s no point in campaigning for politicians to stop wasting our money, it’s a lost cause; so my new tactic is to campaign for them to spend, spend, spend as much as they like, on one condition; that whatever they build makes ‘the whole world say ‘wow!’
How about a hypersonic replacement for Concorde, to fly to Australia in a few hours? A mission to put people on Mars? A European network of 500 kph magnetic levitation trains?
For crying out loud, if you must blow taxpayers money, give us something interesting in return!
(as a side benefit, all these ideas would require vast numbers of IT contractors)
Any more ideas?
Goverments will inevitably spend huge sums of taxpayers’ money on silly projects. See the 12 billion for the national e-mail, internet, telephone and spam database, 1 billion for a system to store all the passport details of mobile phone buyers, umpteen billion for the ID cards system, umpty billion for the NHS system; this all adds up to 100 billion plus, spent on boring stuff that we don’t really need, and I haven’t even counted the cost of saving abysmally managed banks.
Now there was a time when governments blew huge sums of money on big white elephants that were at least interesting, like the Apollo moon missions, concorde, the fabulous Humber Bridge, the channel tunnel and the Hubble.
There’s no point in campaigning for politicians to stop wasting our money, it’s a lost cause; so my new tactic is to campaign for them to spend, spend, spend as much as they like, on one condition; that whatever they build makes ‘the whole world say ‘wow!’
How about a hypersonic replacement for Concorde, to fly to Australia in a few hours? A mission to put people on Mars? A European network of 500 kph magnetic levitation trains?
For crying out loud, if you must blow taxpayers money, give us something interesting in return!
(as a side benefit, all these ideas would require vast numbers of IT contractors)
Any more ideas?
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