Budget?

[Lt Kije]

I am not cheer leading at all Asp, The point I am trying to make is, the private secter can not on their own get us out of trouble, Public secter spending will be needed.

 

You have not answered my question, on IT for the government, how much blame as % do you apportion to the private sector, after all they did tender for the work. They have to take some blame!!

 

We are not that far apart Asp, I do agree that the government do waste money and they fail to learn lessons, when it comes to spending. Look at how much the MOD budget seams to be out of control,. But I do believe public expenditure wil be needed if nothing else to trigger the private sector. I just wish the government would learn lessons, other countries seem to be so much better at spending than we are.

[asperity]

Your question is impossible to answer. I would defy anybody to make a judgement as to % blame, but I stand by my assertion that, of course private companies are going to take all the money the government wants to throw at them even if they are (and know they are) incapable of delivering an end product. They would have to be crazy not to. It's up to the government to control the expenditure and that includes ensuring that they get the required end result. As a private individual you wouldn't employ a company to do work for you and not keep at least a cursory eye on what they were doing would you?

 

As to my question which you are avoiding - aren't you at all angry at the way the government is wasting your hard earned money? I certainly am :evil:

[Lt Kije]

The thing that angers me Asp, Is they seem to make the same mistakes over and over again, it would be better if they made different mistakes, at least you could say they are learning, but sadly we cannot say that

[asperity]

Quite. Time to get rid of the same old faces from the big three and try someone accountable? <_<

[observer]

IF, there is a requirement, not only to tender work out to the private sector, but also to monitor in detail there performance - we might as well not bother with this process at all and just nationalise everything! Most companies, both private and public, appear incapable of delivering projects on time and within original cost estimates - maybe it's a British problem, hence the French are going to design and build our new generation of Nuclear power stations.

[Lt Kije]

As I said, we seem not to be able to learn from previous mistakes, But it is the French that are benefitting , it is their engineers that are designing the power stations. The skill they get from doing the job will take them forward not us, unless those French engineers come and work for British companies we will receive no benefit, from the money the UK is spending. Better to have the skill in the UK, for the benefit of UK companies. We should be skilling up UK engineers rather than skilling up French engineers.

[Bazj]

We should be skilling up UK engineers rather than skilling up French engineers.

 

surely that doesn't matter to you Kije.... all for the European good surely??

[Lt Kije]

Not at all Baz, I have said many times on here, Strategic industries should remain, wholly owned either by the government or by British companies, energy being one of these, even more so when it is nuclear energy.!!!

[inky pete]

 

The Boeing 747 the most successful air liner, was developed by boeing with government money (not private money) as a cargo plane for the US airforce.

 

Corporal, you really do type some utter bo**ox at times!

 

The Boeing 747 is not, and never has been a military project. It's design, development or manufacture was NOT supported with tax dollars. The only even vaguely military role it has ever been used in is as Air Force One (just two aircraft, designated VC-25's and flown by the 89th Airlift Wing out of Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland).

 

Nor can it claim to be "the most successful airliner". The most numerous airliner ever built is probably either the Boeing 737 series, or the Airbus A320 - with the 737 series almost certainly having clocked up more miles since entering service. Neither of these aircraft were supported through design, development or manufacture with taxpayers money.

 

The private secter would never have spent that money in developing it.

 

Airbus have spent around $15 billion on the design and development of the A380 super-jumbo, none of which was taxpayers money. That's far more than Boeing spent developing the 747 - even allowing for inflation - and at the time Boeing senior management often said that they had "bet the company" on the success of the 747 by borrowing so heavily to fund the project.

 

As for your point about mobile phones. Who do you think paid to put up all those phone masts and develop the various competing networks? Private companies, of course! That makes you're fiction of the military inventing the mobile phone is one of your more obvious inventions - how on earth do you think they would have worked with no mobile phone network????????

[asperity]

Lt Kije I've looked in vain for evidence that the mobile phone networks were made possible by government(read "taxpayers") money. In the USA it was ATT and Bell who did the research and development with their own money. The only role government seems to have played is in restricting the frequencies that could be used and so holding BACK development. The first mobile phone network was actually set up in, predictably, Japan. :wink:

[wolfie]

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) launched the world's first first generation (1G) mobile phone service and was a government owned corporation using government money. It was only privatized in 1985 to encourage competition in the telecom market.

[Lt Kije]

Inky

 

The 747 was designed as a military cargo plane, as Baz said Boeing lost the competition to the Galaxy C5.

 

The history of the 747 started halfway the 1960s. Boeing lost the competition for the development of a large airlifter for the US Air Force in 1965 to Lockheed's C-5A Galaxy and sought ways to apply the experience gathered on this project to a big airliner. In March 1966 the Boeing board of directors decided to go ahead with the 747 programme and one month later Pan American World Airways announced the purchase of 25 aircraft. Many airlines followed, not always because had enough passengers to fill the aircraft, but often because their managements feared that the Jumbo Jet would make the DC-8 and 707 look obsolete in the eyes of the travelling public.

 

As to mobile phones, they were developed by the military , as was GPS, Private companies brought thre technologies on.

 

Airbus has had massive subsidies over the years inky, may I suggest you look t up

[inky pete]

IF you're refering to the CX-HLS project to build a hewavy lift transport for the US Airforce then I suggest you research your assertion a little more thoroughly.

 

After submitting initial design proposals in response to a Airforce request (proposals funded by the companies themselves) Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed all received small contracts for further study into the airframe designs they were proposing. So we're talking about a dozen or so engineers producing some drawings and making some calculations - hardly a major project.

 

Lockheed's design was selected - and it went on to become the C-5 Galaxy.

 

If you take a look at a picture of the Boeing CX-HLS proposal you will see that it is a high-wing design, with the fuselage "hanging down" from a flat wing spar with a minimal wing sweep and a zero or slightly negative dihedral angle - in other words, the wings droop towards the tips (just like the Lockheed C-5 turned out to have, because that's what you want if you're building a military cargo plane).

 

The 747 on the other hand is a low-wing design, with the fuselage sitting on top of a cranked wing spar with a pronouced wing sweep and and positive dihedral angle of 5 degrees (because that's what works best for a commercial passenger plane).

 

The differences that these two radically different wing configurations make to the overall airframe structure mean that absolutely nothing which was included in the Boeing CX-HLS airframe proposal can have been of any use at all when it came to building the 747.

 

While it's true that many civilian technologies have spun off from military ones, the Boeing 747 is most definitely NOT one of them.

[Lt Kije]

Well over 500 engineers worked on the prodject

[Bazj]

Well over 500 engineers worked on the prodject

 

but the 747 was still designed as a passenger jet..... do you not listen Kije? It was not government sponsored

[wolfie]

At that time there was a thought that such giants will soon be superseded by supersonic aircraft. Therefore, the Boeing 747 was designed as a freight-passenger aircraft. Over time, it was planned to convert all aircraft in cargo. The crew cabin was placed on the upper deck specifically to be able to transform the nose of the plane in the cargo ramp.

 

Aircraft History

[Lt Kije]

You forgot the bit about the defence bit Wolfie