Bam!!! just like that, all budgetary donut-holes mysteriously disappear, and the lions (republicans) and the lambs (minorities surviving only on food stamps) can relax together in peace (under influence of legal pot of course).
If it seems too good to be true….it may be true after all.
….
A 14-year-old Indian-origin boy has come up with an unique plan that
could help the US save nearly USD 400 million a year by merely changing
the font used on official documents.
Suvir Mirchandani, a student in a Pittsburgh-area middle school, claimed
that if the federal government used the Garamond font exclusively it
could save about USD 136 million per year, nearly 30 per cent less than
the estimated USD 467 dollars it spends annually on ink.
An additional USD 234 million could be saved annually if state governments also implemented the change.
Mirchandani said the idea came to him when he was trying to think of
ways to cut waste and save money as part of a science fair project at
his school, CNN reported. The youngster noticed that he was getting a lot more handouts than he
did in elementary school and decided to figure out if he could minimise
use of paper and ink. While recycling paper was one way to save money and conserve resources,
Mirchandani said little attention had been paid to the ink used on the
papers.
“Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume,” he
said, adding that he then decided to focus his project on finding ways
to cut down the cost of ink.
As part of his experiment, he collected random samples of teachers’
handouts and focused on the most commonly used characters such as e, t,
a, o and r. He noted how often each character was used in different fonts like
Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans and then
measured how much ink was used for each letter, using an ink coverage
software.
From his analysis, Mirchandani figured out that by using the Garamond
font with its thinner strokes, his school district could reduce its ink
consumption by 24 per cent and in turn save as much as USD 21,000
annually.
He repeated his tests on five sample pages from documents on the
Government Printing Office website and got similar results that changing
the font would save money.
Mirchandani’s findings have been published in the Journal for Emerging
Investigators (JEI), a publication founded by a group of Harvard
students in 2011 that provides a platform for the work of middle school
and high school students.
One of the journal’s founders Sarah Fankhauser said that of the nearly
200 submissions they have received since 2011, Mirchandani’s project
stood out. “We were so impressed. We really could really see the real-world application in Suvir’s paper,” Fankhauser was quoted as saying.
JEI challenged the teenager to apply his project to a larger scale,
preferably the federal government, to determine how much real savings
his idea could generate.
The government has an annual printing expenditure of USD 1.8 billion and
implementing Mirchandani’s idea on such a massive scale was more
challenging than a school science project, the CNN report said.
Media and public relations manager at the Government Printing Office
Gary Somerset described Mirchandani’s idea as “remarkable” but said it
was concentrating on saving money by publishing documents online instead
of hard copies.
“They can’t convert everything to a digital format,” Mirchandani said. “Not everyone is able to access information online. Some things still
have to be printed. I recognise it’s difficult to change someone’s
behavior,” he said. But “I definitely would love to see some actual changes and I’d be happy
to go as far as possible to make that change possible,” he said.
…
regards