The app, courtesy of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, does extremely little. Its interface looks like a dog’s arse, if that dog read a fifth of an HTML manual from 1994. It works based on free data. And it provides expert environmental insight like “drink fluids”.
Why?
There’s no explanation. It was coded by a UK firm for probably 300 times the money it should have. Government waste and incompetence, at best. Something crooked at worst. Idiotic and infuriating either way. [Gun.io via Geekosystem]
DarthDVD
Friday, November 25, 2011 at 6:18 AMEvery Company loves Govenment work (tenders) cos the gov dont know how much the work really costs to do…. so they add like massive margins to it. cos sometimes they dont want the work cheap they want the money spent. cos if they dont spend all their bugjet they wont get it next year.
Steve
Friday, November 25, 2011 at 9:06 AMWhile that’s certainly true of certain sectors like infrastructure and transport, I think this is just a case of incompetence. In the few years after 9/11, the US Government poured billions into the newly-formed Department of Homeland Security to ostensibly fight terrorists via government-issued credit cards. What they got were mind-boggling wasteful purchases like $70k on plastic dog shoes, anti-terrorist hovercrafts, TVs, beer-brewing kits etc.
olearymo
Friday, November 25, 2011 at 9:08 AMThrowing Money at a Problem. The favourite solution for governments.
Sean
Friday, November 25, 2011 at 11:08 AMFor those of you who have never been involved in a government tender process, here’s how this happens. Teh government wants a basic app to do something, so it puts out a request for proposals or tenders. The people who get the request say “We know everyone else is going to charge an outrageous price for this, so we will too”. They know this because they know that very few people will put in a tender, and those that do, do it a lot. Then the government people running the process get a choice of, say, five mind-smashingly expensive quotes and pick the “best value for money” withthe “Lowest risk” and voila, a $200,000 contract for a student’s weekend project worth of work.