On Sat, 1 Jun 2013 00:40:48 +0100, "Alex W."
wrote:
On Thu, 30 May 2013 18:33:04 -0500, Free Lunch wrote:
On Fri, 31 May 2013 00:07:03 +0100, "Alex W." wrote
in alt.atheism:
On Thu, 30 May 2013 10:01:10 -0500, Attila Iskander wrote:
"Alex W." wrote in message
. ..
On Wed, 29 May 2013 21:10:31 -0500, Attila Iskander wrote:
"Free Lunch" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 29 May 2013 20:49:33 -0400, wrote in alt.atheism:
Anyone with any knowledge of history knows the Eisenhower Interstate
Highway system was a defense project.
Nonsense. It was a civil works project to improve travel infrastructure.
It was both
They are NOT mutually exclusive
Just look at another military funded project that is in common PUBLIC use
today
The Internet
Just look al all the spin-off that came from Kennedy's "going to the
moon"
What people like you don't grasp is that the indirect benefits of such
projects are otten greater than the original purpose.
Got another one: the Hoover Dam. The construction cost at
the time was less than $50 million (around $800 million in
today's tax dollars). Benefits, however, are HUGE: from
providing water to 8 million people and irrigating a million
acres of farmland to an electricity-generating capacity in
excess of 2,000MW and creating commercial opportunities
(tourism and leisure activities).
Indeed
There are projects which when allied with a bit of vision, which is far too
rare in government, and the ability to finance over the long term with no
need for immediate profit, that are perfect for government projects
The opposite is government entities who are blackmailed to build sports
stadium which mostly only really benefit the sports franchise
Might make for an interesting cost-benefit analysis. A
sports stadium will encourage economic activity (think
increased tourism, travel and hospitality, or the influx of
a bunch of high-earning high-spending players) but whether
this is enough to outweigh the investment of several hundred
million is another issue.
The problem is that something (stadium subsidies that will be hitting a
billion a pop soon) that is foolish in the aggregate may not appear to
be foolish locally and the folks running the teams know that. Rarely is
there a city like Los Angeles (where the NFL needs LA more than LA needs
the NFL). All of the professional team owners in the country (with the
exception of the owners of the Packers) could easily write a check for
an adequate stadium that holds the number of people they want. They
choose instead to demand a much more glorious one. If they pay
something, it will still be less than they would have paid had they had
to pay for it themselves.
Sure, cities want to have major league teams, but if they pay for a
major share of the cost of the business, shouldn't they have a vote on
the team equivalent to their investment?
They should, but I guess they are blinded by the glamour.
I do wonder, though, what the general economic benefits are
of being a "chosen city" of a NFL franchise. After all,
this will instantly give a city lasting nationwide
recognition and attention, something that they usually have
to laboriously build up over years of concerted PR and
advertising.
We need to spend more time going to the Moon or Mars, than we do building
sports stadiums for business entities.
... or funding the Olympic boondoggle every four years....
Many cities have used the funding to build capital infrastructure, eg
subways, improvements that have been badly needed, but others have ended
up with a huge amount of waste at the end.
I vote for holding them at Olympia the way the gods wanted.
Sound idea. Send the Games back to Greece. Fork out the
cash for a one-off construction of facilities, raise
maintenance and improvement funds through sponsorship and
media deals, and let's be done with the merry-go-round.
Have you been to Greece lately? There's massive youth unemployment;
there's a national tendency to avoid accountability; and the
infrastructure around the 2004 Olympics is already crumbling (except
for the subway, which admittedly ought to be a tourist attraction all
on its own because it makes every other mass transit system in the
world immediately second-class).
Having the Olympics in Greece is a marvelous romantic notion, but what
do you do with the facilities in the other 3.5 years between Games?
Greece isn't big enough to support the Games and the attendant costs.
I like the current system a lot: spread all that pork-barreling
around, let the nationalistic jingoism run riot, and give host
countries the chance to trumpet their home-grown heroes. Putting it in
one place for the rest of time is not a viable option.
Cheers,
Dreamer
AA 2306