Squandering Billions
Squandering Billions

Author: Gary Bannerman

Publisher: Surrey, B.C. : Hancock House

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780888396020

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Squandering Billions is a brutally frank indictment of health spending. The book demonstrates that the absolute power of medical doctors, pharmaceutical companies, health bureaucrats, and hospital administrators enshrines mediocrity at the expense of patients. Mistakes, inefficiency, and malpractice in the Canadian health system may be causing ten times or more unnecessary deaths a year than the toll from traffic accidents (3,000) and crime (500). Some acute care hospitals seem to have become disease factories. Why do health care tragedies not face the scrutiny typically focused upon other accidental and wrongful deaths? Canadian medicare was designed to insure the patient, not the practitioner. Why, then, are medical doctors and hospitals exempted from competition? Evidence shows conclusively that expanded use of community health centres, nurse practitioners, doctors of chiropractic, and others can be more effective and less expensive within their area of expertise. This book goes where official commissions have been afraid to travel.

Squandered
Squandered

Author: David Craig

Publisher: Constable

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1849011613

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Over the last ten years, New Labour has boosted public spending by around a trillion pounds - that's £1,000,000,000,000 of our taxes - over £50,000 for every household in Britain. But what have we got for our money? Effective and responsive public services that are the envy of the world? Or the creation of a vast, self-serving bureaucracy that has presided over the greatest waste of money in British history? With so much money, a tsunami of extra cash, being thrown at public services - health, education, policing, defence, social services and public administration - there have been some successes. Nevertheless, the results of the Government's tidal wave of extra spending have been worse than pitiful. In department after department, it is the same sorry story - a triple whammy of incompetence, cover-up and cuts that have all but decimated public services, while those responsible have lavished money and honours on themselves. David Craig exposes the sometimes tragic, sometimes comic story of how New Labour's years of mismanagement have led to a bureaucratization of Britain that has squandered almost unimaginable amounts of taxpayers' money, caused irreparable damage to all our lives and rewarded the man responsible with the keys to Number 10.

The Pig Book
The Pig Book

Author: Citizens Against Government Waste

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Published: 2013-09-17

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 146685314X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The federal government wastes your tax dollars worse than a drunken sailor on shore leave. The 1984 Grace Commission uncovered that the Department of Defense spent $640 for a toilet seat and $436 for a hammer. Twenty years later things weren't much better. In 2004, Congress spent a record-breaking $22.9 billion dollars of your money on 10,656 of their pork-barrel projects. The war on terror has a lot to do with the record $413 billion in deficit spending, but it's also the result of pork over the last 18 years the likes of: - $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa - $102 million to study screwworms which were long ago eradicated from American soil - $273,000 to combat goth culture in Missouri - $2.2 million to renovate the North Pole (Lucky for Santa!) - $50,000 for a tattoo removal program in California - $1 million for ornamental fish research Funny in some instances and jaw-droppingly stupid and wasteful in others, The Pig Book proves one thing about Capitol Hill: pork is king!

Hype Machine: How Greed, Fraud and Free Money Crashed Crypto
Hype Machine: How Greed, Fraud and Free Money Crashed Crypto

Author: Joshua Oliver

Publisher: Heligo Books

Published: 2024-03-14

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1785120980

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'A gripping real-life financial thriller.' CLAER BARRETT, AUTHOR OF WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU ABOUT MONEY 'Anybody who wants to understand the cryptocurrency mania should read Hype Machine.' LIONEL BARBER, FORMER EDITOR OF THE FINANCIAL TIMES On 2 November 2023, in one of the largest fraud trials in history, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of stealing billions of dollars from the customers of his crypto-exchange, FTX. How did this 31-year-old Californian in shorts and a T-shirt manage to become one of the most famous CEOs in the world? How did greed, fear and free money inflate the crypto bubble until it finally popped with devastating consequences for millions of people who lost money in the crash? Who were the enablers, investors and innovators who transformed the original promise of crypto into a digital Wild West? Hype Machine is the definitive story of the boom and bust of crypto, written by award-winning Financial Times journalist Joshua Oliver. Expansive, nuanced and eminently entertaining, it demystifies the crypto circus by following the journeys of its most influential participants and the trajectory of SBF, its enigmatic ringmaster. Oliver, who reported on the crypto crash with extensive access to SBF himself, introduces readers to the people and ideas that shaped crypto's wild rise and fall, including Arthur Hayes, Changpeng Zhao and the coterie of acolytes who surrounded FTX. Through exclusive interviews, compelling research and with ringside seats at the trial of the decade, he paints a vivid, detailed and tragi-comic picture of this defining financial moment of our times.

Mirror Worlds
Mirror Worlds

Author: David Gelernter

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1993-01-28

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0195344855

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Technology doesn't flow smoothly; it's the big surprises that matter, and Yale computer expert David Gelernter sees one such giant leap right on the horizon. Today's small scale software programs are about to be joined by vast public software works that will revolutionize computing and transform society as a whole. One such vast program is the "Mirror World." Imagine looking at your computer screen and seeing reality--an image of your city, for instance, complete with moving traffic patterns, or a picture that sketches the state of an entire far-flung corporation at this second. These representations are called Mirror Worlds, and according to Gelernter they will soon be available to everyone. Mirror Worlds are high-tech voodoo dolls: by interacting with the images, you interact with reality. Indeed, Mirror Worlds will revolutionize the use of computers, transforming them from (mere) handy tools to crystal balls which will allow us to see the world more vividly and see into it more deeply. Reality will be replaced gradually, piece-by-piece, by a software imitation; we will live inside the imitation; and the surprising thing is--this will be a great humanistic advance. We gain control over our world, plus a huge new measure of insight and vision. In this fascinating book--part speculation, part explanation--Gelernter takes us on a tour of the computer technology of the near future. Mirror Worlds, he contends, will allow us to explore the world in unprecedented depth and detail without ever changing out of our pajamas. A hospital administrator might wander through an entire medical complex via a desktop computer. Any citizen might explore the performance of the local schools, chat electronically with teachers and other Mirror World visitors, plant software agents to report back on interesting topics; decide to run for the local school board, hire a campaign manager, and conduct the better part of the campaign itself--all by interacting with the Mirror World. Gelernter doesn't just speculate about how this amazing new software will be used--he shows us how it will be made, explaining carefully and in detail how to build a Mirror World using technology already available. We learn about "disembodied machines," "trellises," "ensembles," and other computer components which sound obscure, but which Gelernter explains using familiar metaphors and terms. (He tells us that a Mirror World is a microcosm just like a Japanese garden or a Gothic cathedral, and that a computer program is translated by the computer in the same way a symphony is translated by a violinist into music.) Mirror Worlds offers a lucid and humanistic account of the coming software revolution, told by a computer scientist at the cutting edge of his field.

In My Father's House
In My Father's House

Author: Kwame Anthony Appiah

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1993-05-27

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0199879257

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The beating of Rodney King and the resulting riots in South Central Los Angeles. The violent clash between Hasidim and African-Americans in Crown Heights. The boats of Haitian refugees being turned away from the Land of Opportunity. These are among the many racially-charged images that have burst across our television screens in the last year alone, images that show that for all our complacent beliefs in a melting-pot society, race is as much of a problem as ever in America. In this vastly important, widely-acclaimed volume, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanaian philosopher who now teaches at Harvard, explores, in his words, "the possibilities and pitfalls of an African identity in the late twentieth century." In the process he sheds new light on what it means to be an African-American, on the many preconceptions that have muddled discussions of race, Africa, and Afrocentrism since the end of the nineteenth century, and, in the end, to move beyond the idea of race. In My Father's House is especially wide-ranging, covering everything from Pan Africanism, to the works of early African-American intellectuals such as Alexander Crummell and W.E.B. Du Bois, to the ways in which African identity influences African literature. In his discussion of the latter subject, Appiah demonstrates how attempts to construct a uniquely African literature have ignored not only the inescapable influences that centuries of contact with the West have imposed, but also the multicultural nature of Africa itself. Emphasizing this last point is Appiah's eloquent title essay which offers a fitting finale to the volume. In a moving first-person account of his father's death and funeral in Ghana, Appiah offers a brilliant metaphor for the tension between Africa's aspirations to modernity and its desire to draw on its ancient cultural roots. During the Los Angeles riots, Rodney King appeared on television to make his now famous plea: "People, can we all get along?" In this beautiful, elegantly written volume, Appiah steers us along a path toward answering a question of the utmost importance to us all.