a billion dollars...waste

It's difficult to get my head around this billion dollar thing. The Germans call it Milliards...instead of Billion. I believe a billion is is 1,000 Millions.
The recent in Toronto Canada G8 &  G20 event  apparently cost over a billion dollars to police. Including local ,provincial, federal RCMP...army?...all together a billion dollars cost to police this event.
Unless I'm out a decimal point...that's the equivalent of the cost of building 4,000 homes at $250,000 each or over 20,000 seniors residences at $50,000 each. What a waste.
Other billion dollar efforts with little or nothing to show for are:

The long rifle gun registry efforts, money wasted by the last federal liberal government ...

The E-Health registry attempt, Ontario Provincial government waste by the current Ontario Liberal government.

G20 and all that...

In the nutshell....America wants to run the world. OK. Can't do it alone, so they asked the British to join them...after all they saved their butt in WW11. France was added...the world war 2 winners were: the USA, Britain, France (?) and the communist Soviet Union. The principal losers of course, Germany and Japan...
Back to the G20.
Because the U.N. as it is structured accomplishes little or nothing on the worlds economic scene, the G club added Japan and Germany to the original 3 participants...G5 then...They later added Canada and Italy and there you are, G7. More recently The Russian Federation was invited and the G8 created.

As a result of the G8 & G20 meeting here in Toronto Ontario Canada an expense of over a Billion Dollars incurred....not sure if that included the damage a bunch of idiots caused during the meeting...on the whole apparently the meeting went well...not sure what agreements resulted and what world piece progress was made.

July2010

Well, it has been an eventful month, the G20 thing in Toronto, the soccer scene, the Queen visit, busy month indeed..
My hope was that the financial happenings would improve somewhat but sadly another pile of money is lost in mutual funds, it looks like while the stockmarket is only down about 1% from last year end, the mutuals took a loss of over 4 points in the last three months...one wonders where this is going.