----- Original Message -----
From: "J. van Baardwijk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2001 8:40 AM
Subject: RE: Authority of the marketplace?
> At 20:25 19-7-01 -0400, Kevin Camplate wrote:
>
> >Would that be the same government that spends billions of dollars on
> >weapons, while at the same time lets the poor and the homeless starve to
death?
> >
> >Jeroen
> >
> >___________________
> >
> >Oh yes let's hold up that placard. Mean old government is just letting
> >people die while spending 3k on a toilet seat.
>
> Exactly how much of that is fact? I've heard people refer to those
> expensive toilet seats (with varying price tags) often when they criticize
> government, but I have not seen any hard evidence (like photocopies of
> invoices). It seems to me that someone once made up that example of
> expensive toilet seats, after which it got a life of its own.
>
I know people who know people who had some of the contracts for those items.
IIRC, it was a $200 toilet seat, not $1000. These people said that the
companies probably lost money on selling toilet seats for that price. The
reason is that the paperwork overhead associated with the sail is set up for
massive contracts of millions of dollars. Thus, due to bureaucratic
regulations, the same rules applied for buying a simple toilet seat. (Well,
some simplification was allowed, I think, but there was a lower limit to the
overhead.) So, the sale of this particular toilet seat involved the vendor
jumping through hoops in order to provide a needed item for the government
group that was not authorized to just go down to Home Depot and buy a seat.
Dan M.
> Now, onto rediculous spending in the corporate world.
>
> In the last few years, the top management of large companies in The
> Netherlands have received an awful lot of criticism because of the
> outrageous annual pay raises they give themselves. Those managers'
salaries
> are already measured in millions of guilders, but raises of 20%, 30%, or
in
> the case of ABN-AMRO (a major bank) even almost 50% (!) happen every year.
> At the same time, these same managers call in unison "we can't afford
that"
> or "that would hurt the economy" when the unions want a mere 3-4% raise
for
> the workers.
>
>
> Jeroen
>
> _________________________________________________________________________
> Wonderful World of Brin-L Website: http://go.to/brin-l
>
>
