disgraceful waste

[engineerist]

as a self employed sound engineer I sometimes purchase second hand equipment for my little studio, last year I bought a machine from an ex bbc engineer, who informed me that during the recent refubishment at radio merseyside 2 calrec mixng desks, anyone in the business will know what I'm talking about, (purchase price £120 000 each) where casually tossed into rubbish skips along with 5 skiploads of tape. These pieces of equipment are of such quality that even units 25 years old fetch £15 - £30 000 on the second hand market, you can imagine my rage, but I'm sure this is only the very small tip of a huge iceberg, remember the bbc has recently digitised all its equipment, and presumably disposed of all the other stuff in the same way. More examples of these people chucking our money away please.

[Teddy Bear]

Welcoem to the site Eng.
Whats even more galling is that if the BBC discovered another public institution wasting public money in the manner that they do, they would be very quick to denounce them on one of their 'scam' programmes. To think that people can go to prison or be fined heavily for not supporting their hypocrisy.

[ascendinglark]

This doesn't surprise me at all. Have you ever noticed that things that are motivated by profit (computers, Fed-Ex, airlines etc) are generally much more satisfactory to us that things that are motivated by such notions as "the common good" (public subways, public housing, the BBC etc)?

The reason being that when people are entrusted to spend public money and when they're not employed to produce a return on an investment, then waste and inefficiency ensues. This is generally why Socialist and Communist countries are characterized by extremely low standards and economic stagnation (if not annihilation). The profit motive makes everything better. The altruistic motive makes everything worse.

Here's another example of BBC waste:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2007%2F02%2F14%2Fnbeeb14.xml

I wasn't aware it was the job of the BBC to "look cool". What is the point?

[Teddy Bear]

And that was on top of this one