Waste of Money, Waste of Electricity

That’s what happens when you have too much budget(i suppose).

Its like I heard,Civil Service,if they dun use up their budget and left with surplus,they will not be allocated so much the next time..so got to think of ways to spend it..is that true? Becoz if it really is..this is what will happen(see article above

i am very very sad ! My $$$$$ !

Perhaps they have surplus.

I agree with you. And I wish to see the normal platform signboard back too instead of those plasma TV or LCD TV with advertisements.

… and the TVs in the buses …

@ T T Tan, actually lots of organizations practice that. It has its merit to promote accuracy in budgeting. These days, more and more business books (and soon business consultants?!) preach about a quarterly budgeting or even a monthly budgeting instead of a yearly one. I don’t see why not. More work. But more adept to the economy situation.

@Wilfrid, I agree promoting accuracy in budgeting is a good end objective, but it does appear that the means to get to this ends is not really right. It is not uncommon to hear of people giving the ceiling estimates during budgeting, and try to look for ways to spend at the end of the financial year to reach the budgeted amount.

In any case, I think accurate budgeting will still take a second place to the situation where the actual spending is always less than the budgeted amount. Isn’t that a pleasant outcome every time? I think the way to promote this is not to penalise people who over-budget in previous financial years by cutting their budget.

[...] posting the previous article on Waste of Money, Waste of Electricty, I was thinking of posting it up at the official Government e-engagement site reach.gov.sg, since [...]

[...] Discourse – still me: small news – choongyong.com: Waste of Money, Waste of Electricity – Making History Relevant: S’pore is Evil – groundnotes: Spread the foreign talent [...]

Perhaps it’s somewhere between a rock and a hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea.
You can’t save the forest by sparing the crude. Paper-based notices and printed materials generate tonnes
of wastepaper. Using electronic screens cut down paper usage and wastage, however use more electricity.
Just the same as businesses going paperless will consume more electricity with computer usage, while
trying to save electricity may result in cabinets and storerooms full of paper files, and carts full of
wastepaper. But of course, as paper is recyclable, it depends on how efficiently it’s being recycled.

Yeah man, what’s the purpose of plasma TVs at void decks? Mobile TV is another waste of taxpayers money.

What will be next? Cordless public phones? Dustbins with music? Then tax Singaporeans like crazy?

@JD, it is not a plasma TV, more like an LCD screen

@Vincent Sear, I don’t know if saving paper is on the minds of those who implemented it, but I believe if a detailed calculation is performed on the energy expended by having the screens turned-on n hours (only the implementors will know what n is) every day, thereby the carbon usage, vs the carbon usage by printing the paper notices, there will definitely be a huge disparity, and no prizes for guessing which is the method that is less carbon-intensive.

I don’t know the exact disparity of emission caused between printing hard copies and screen displays, but
I’m generally favorable towards the idea of using less paper.

1. Using paper doesn’t preclude use of electricity. You still need electricity to power printer to print paper.

2. Using paper entails more usage of trees and minerals, i.e. wooden and steel cabinets and storages etc.

3. Most paper discarded aren’t recycled; recycling is still a very inefficient process and business.

Agreed.

But how then to discourage business units from over budgeting and then return surplus to the organization. The problem is resource hogging at the beginning of the financial year. Hence, the idea is that only ask for how much you should spend, and spend on what it is allocated for.

In some government agencies (can’t name them … lol), people are encourage to return the potential surplus before year end (like 6 months before) so that the agencies can reallocate accordingly. But these are voluntary actions. Some get rewarded for prudent spending. However, there is no stopping from some units spending $$ on nonsense stuff.

So what I am trying to say is that there is no perfect system. But an encouragement to do proper budgeting and spending and early reallocation is not a bullet proof way – though not a bad way either.

Honestly, if you worked in govt, you would realize that all utilities charges are negligible expenses that form an extremely small proportion of the allocated budget for infrastructure projects. I myself don’t understand why people would rather focus on whether I am saving $2000-3000 per month on utilities as opposed to working out a creative way to save $500,000 doing something in a more efficient or productive manner. Since all civil servants are hired to squeeze out the most value for money for tax dollars spent, it is not unnatural that the same civil servants are looking to trim expenses on big ticket items instead of wondering how they can save a few hundred bucks on a utilities account in Block 104.

That does not mean that mindlessly wasting electricity is excusable, but there are really more important issues to attend to that will save taxpayers much more money as opposed to doing a very detailed cost-benefit analysis as to whether the carbon footprint of printing paper notices is larger than the carbon footprint of using an LCD panel over 10 years.

Conversely, if civil servants had enough time to scrutinize the budget for utilities for individual blocks of flats, you should really be concerned whether there is enough work for the civil servant to do in the office in the first place. The question you should ask is, “Why is this guy so free to calculate this kind of thing??” Is his/her salary giving you, the citizen, value for money?

I think you meant “…we see another example blatantly going against these principles.”

But I agree with you, our money is wasted thoughtlessly in many ways.

@Darkspore. Thanks for the correction. Modification made in the passage now.

@honestly. Thank you for your perspective on having worked in government. I have not, and I presume you have, since your comments.

I think you have made the same mistake made usually by the government to sway the attention of a debate to a different dimension. Here we are talking about wastage in the implementation of LCD Panels, in place of paper noticeboards. Can you advise how can the replacement of paper noticeboards result in a savings of $500,000? With the rising cost of electricity, the replaced paper noticeboard is probably going to be the cheaper option, instead of the other way round.

I also thank you for bringing up one thing – the little thought civil servants (not all, but probably yourself and those you have come across) give to conservation of energy. On the surface there are so many nicely worded announcements of how Singapore is going Green, how Town Councils are investing in energy saving schemes, in respond to an imminent climate change threat. However, to you, it is simply a question of $2,000 – $3,000 per month saved on utilities.

[...] Discourse – still me: small news – choongyong.com: Waste of Money, Waste of Electricity – Making History Relevant: S’pore is Evil – groundnotes: Spread the foreign talent around – [...]