A is a valuable possession whose upkeep is excessively expensive, and may be useless apart from its value to the gifter and giftee. The term derives from the White Elephant of East Asia, and was popularized in the USA after New York Giants Manager John McGraw told the press that Philadelphia businessman Benjamin Shibe had "bought himself a white elephant" by acquiring the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team in 1901. The Athletics manager Connie Mack subsequently selected the elephant as the team symbol and Mascot . The team is occasionally referred to as the White Elephants.
This is only a summary, and is not intended to represent a complete list.
- Kansai International Airport . Located on an Artificial Island in Osaka Bay , south of Osaka , Japan and constructed largely as a matter of pride, this airport is operating at though at a fraction of nominal capacity and is being doubled in size. Compounding matters are intense competition from Kobe Airport (14mi away) and Osaka International Airport (27mi away.) Furthermore, the airport is slowly (about 15-20cm per annum) sinking into the ocean.
- Millennium Dome . Built in London by the Government for the Millennium celebrations. It is the largest single roofed structure in the world.
- Montréal-Mirabel International Airport . Opened in 1975, it was at the time the largest airport (in terms of land use) ever opened, with 88,000 acres reserved. Less then 19% of the reserved land was ever used for airport development. The airport never lived up to expectations due to poor location, lack of transportation links, and economic decline. It is now relegated to use by cargo airlines, with cessation of passenger traffic occurring in 2004.
- Montreal Olympic Stadium . Built for the 1976 Summer Olympics , then used primarly as the home Baseball ballpark for the Montreal Expos until the team permanently left the city in 2004. Sits primarly vacant most of the year due to structual instabilities, its poor interior design and inconvient location. Cost over $2.3 billion dollars.
- Ryugyong Hotel . Construction of this hotel in Pyongyang consumed 2% of the Gross Domestic Product of North Korea . Originally intended to rival Western Bloc greats such as the Sears Tower , the building now sits as an unfinished, windowless concrete shell. As the building is seen as being structurally unsound, it will likely never be completed.
- Superconducting Super Collider (or SSC), a large Particle Accelerator which was being constructed in Texas . Billions of dollars had been spent on the project by the time of cancellation, and the project termination itself cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Three Gorges Dam , a monumental project to bring hydroelectric power to the Yangtze River basin in China, beset with construction, environmental, and societal issues.
- World Trade Center México , a building complex located in Mexico City, Mexico, which never performed its intended functions and was known as a white elephant which eventually bankrupted their owners without ever being finished.
- World Trade Center , New York. Built amidst controversy, including protest by the 1,600 small businesses evicted from their locations to make way for the complex, and the objections of the New York City government to the undervalued payments in lieu of taxes the state governments of New York and New Jersey were forcing it to accept from the Port Of New York Authority , builder and owner of the Trade Center. By 1975 it lay half-empty in spite of the 25,000 New York State employees relocated to the complex by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who had championed the project all along. The buildings' fortune improved gradually throughout their lifespan, which was cut short when terrorists destroyed them on September 11, 2001 . However, the complex was initially viewed as a monument to the stubbornness of Gov. Rockefeller, his brother David Rockefeller of the Chase Manhattan Bank , and Port Authority Executive Director Austin J. Tobin , for their insistence upon building it in spite of the declining value of Lower Manhattan commercial real estate at the time. This perception lent the World Trade Center's twin 110-story towers the early nickname Nelson And David .
- The Department Of Defense -commissioned Ada Programming Language came to be known as the "Green Elephant", a play on the phrase White Elephant combined with color code used keep contract selection unbiased. Ada was designed to be a Silver Bullet by a DoD assembled committee. However due to the fact that most programmers do not write embedded programs, many find Ada too unwieldy to use and of little benefit.
- Intel 's IA-64 (better known as Itanium ) semiconductor architecture, which cost billions of dollars to develop, but is now relegated to a niche role in the computer industry. The public didn't take long to rename it as "Itanic".
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