Word: uselessness
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Edifice Complex Japan's bureaucracy is notorious for funding useless projects. In the 1980s, the government built eight airports used solely to ship vegetables to market?although farmers chose to stick with cheaper trucks. Politicians now get votes by promising to stop building highways and bridges...
Good evening. So pleased you could join us. No, don't bother with the door, I can assure you it's securely locked. The windows too. Really, it's quite useless to struggle. Let's try to conduct ourselves in a civilized fashion, shall we? Sherry? We're here to discuss mystery novels. As we both know, there are ominously looming mountains of them, and you don't want to waste your precious beach reading time with books that are doomed to bore, do you? Here instead are six of this summer's most tightly wound, delicately nuanced and deviously...
...Yeah, a VW Combi. And drove it round the block and took it back to where we got it from. We couldn't work out why it wasn't going very fast, and we realized that we hadn't taken the hand brake off. We were fairly useless as car thieves...
...parade ground, waiting to be taken to heaven. Red Army tanks arrived first and crushed the uprising. Even more striking, though, is Applebaum's description of the bureaucracy of repression. The Soviet leadership pretended that the camps were economically rational and productive. They were not. Some built useless projects, all needed continual subsidies: the Soviet system could not grasp the simple truth that people work badly if they are terrorized and half starved. Toward the end of the Gulag, Applebaum writes, "It was becoming clear to the Soviet authorities that the camps were wasteful, corrupt, and above all, unprofitable." Unlike...
...became Prime Minister. To kill Hamas operatives, Dichter had his agents hide explosives in telephone booths and car-seat headrests; he pushed them to cut planning time for operations from months to mere hours. Dichter and Sharon share the same view of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat: he is useless as a partner to Israel. The Shin Bet chief recently recalled a meeting with Arafat in 1996, amid an earlier Hamas bombing campaign. Arafat asked Dichter how he could improve the situation. Dichter, who is fluent in Arabic, replied that Arafat should arrest Mohammed Deif, then Hamas' military chief...