Biggest Waste Of Public Money?
 

What is the biggest waste of public money you can think of? I remember a while back in the States watching a program about a gov't program to measure the rate ketchup flows from the bottle.
I thought that was pretty bad until I read this today:



Students spend public money to find monkeys don't write Shakespeare

A group of students spent £2,000 of taxpayer's money to find out monkeys can't write Shakespeare.

The students from Plymouth University left a computer in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in Devon for four weeks.

They were researching the theory of whether an infinite number of monkeys, given an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare?

The results of this trial involving six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys showed they couldn't, reports The Guardian.

In fact the six - Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan - produced just five pages of text between them, primarily filled with the letter S.

There were greater signs of creativity towards the end, with the letters A, J, L and M making fleeting appearances, but they wrote nothing even close to a word of human language.

"It was a hopeless failure in terms of science but that's not really the point. It wasn't actually an experiment as such, it was more like a little performance," said Geoff Cox, of Plymouth University's MediaLab, who designed the test.

The project - which was paid for with £2,000 of Arts Council money - was intended to emphasise differences between animals and machines, he went on. "The monkeys aren't reducible to a random process. They get bored and they sh*t on the keyboard rather than type."

The computer was protected with a perspex box, with holes for the monkeys to poke fingers through to hit the keys.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...ld.animaltales

Sarah, I read that one today, too. I found it in Yahoo's links of the day to unusual stories. The article you posted left out some of the better quotes

biggest waste ever was the 'big dig' Reagan tried to veto it but I belive it passed by one vote belonging to ted kennedy :ak47:

http://www.dopey.net/monkey.gif

"I can't believe these humans came from us . . ."


:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

DyannaDoes: I read Annanova for the quirkies so if the story is different, that is why.

rooster: Having lived in Boston for a little bit I can appreciate the frustration and you have to love the plethora of rats that invaded the city because of it. Big as cats.

Biggest waste would have to be politicians and government representatives' bills for hotels, dinners, whores, booze, drugs, first class flights. I bet this tallies up to a hefty sum!

Somebody please mention the Iraq-war. Please.

oil :ticking

War on Iraq. Hands down.

You will all be crying in 2 years.

weapons

some countries can feed the whole third world with the money their spending for weapons (only a few thousand billions/year)

You mean 1 country.

God bless America. Nobody else does.

Midnight basketball

:glugglug

THANK YOU!

I think our biggest expendiatures go something like..

Food, Housing, Insurance... Marriage?

For most of us we could save a lot of time and money if we just went out and found some fat lard ass we really fucking hate, screw them then hand over half our money.

------------------
Heh, GFY - the place to come when you want to get an ass whoopping.

I'm not even going to bother.

But it involves shit largely backed by the BBC and tabloid newspaper vultures.

God, I hate this fucking country so much. I can name perhaps 15 British people that I genuinely like, maybe less. And that includes family. And myself.

In fact, make that 10.

Thank God I'm leaving.

Fuck you all.

I think my goverment takes the cake with this one:

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showth...ghlight=alston

That's some of my tax money been wasted there :helpme

i think every single one of those students should get an F and booted out of the university. how do idiots like that get into university anyways?

and what idiot gave them the money?

Humans came from fish not monkeys.

the website that australian politician got built recently that cost millions of dollars that someone would have done for less than 1k.

I kind of approve of the war in Iraq. However, the wasted spending comes in when:

Stupid ex-pres daddy didn't finish the job, costing us billions for nothing.

We pay out the ass to rebuild these desert dwelling odor farmers.

Rebuilding Japan in the '40's. Remember, they started an illegal war with us, killed our citizens, and never even apologized. Why did we pay to make it even better?

And the biggest waste of money? The Louisiana Purchase. The land now known as the Axis of Carville. I want my money back! (duck and cover for fear of lynching!)

well as my boss lives in land explored as a direct result of the Louisiana Purchase, I think I will let the gov't of the time off on that one.