> absolutely terrible with too few sensors. Different country, different government, same problem. I've dealt with the air quality services department in my s

> absolutely terrible with too few sensors. Different country, different government, same problem. I've dealt with the air quality services department in my state and they're so, so far away from what they ought to be doing that it's almost a joke. The best analogy I can come up with is the NASA/Boeing Space Launch System, which is so absurdly expensive that one of its single-use rocket engines costs more than several entire flights of a Falcon 9. Yet, everybody keeps moving on with the SLS project as-if it wasn't an absurd monstrosity. It's like the emperor's new clothes, there gets to a point where nobody will even admit the enormity of the error, so in some sense it ceases to exist. Back on the topic of air quality: I attended a meeting where they finally got a decent budget (a few million) and started talking about big data, scalable cloud services, and IoT. "Great," I said, "how many IoT devices were you thinking of? Ten thousand? Twenty? Fifty?" "Fifty" they replied. "Finally, we can get some decent coverage and accurate maps!" "No, not fifty thousand. Fifty." "Err... they're like $100 each. If you're only buying $5000 worth, where is the rest of the money going?" "Oh, we've spent that already on the planning phase. We don't have any budget left! What can you set up for free?" "Nothing."