In the 1970s, there were thousands of council-owned houses in London that were too sub-standard to be rented out legally.
Paris Saint-Germain made light of the absent Zlatan Ibrahimovic and a sub-standard start to the season to claim a 3-2 Champions League victory at home to Barcelona.
The EU's concern is that the single market has to be protected and it can't allow sub-standard goods to get into Ireland (and on to elsewhere in the EU) via a Britain-Northern Ireland route.
But when in 1993 promoters in Berlin invited a host of Detroit's DJs to perform at the Love Parade, the DJs understood they had possession of 'a goose that lays a golden egg.' They could sign sub-standard records to labels who were happy just to put the Detroit stamp on the tracks.
The confederation doubts that Lansley's "information revolution" – telling patients more about a hospital's performance – will prompt patients to choose hospitals that are not their local one, or that it will be enough to force hospitals and GPs offering sub-standard care to improve.
Or I might point out that successive governments and chancellors have vowed to improve the UK's internationally sub-standard productivity, to very little effect.
Councils in England want new powers to deal with rogue landlords who rent out sub-standard properties to private tenants.
The apartheid system deliberately provided sub-standard schooling to the country's black majority; today, good education is still beyond the reach of many poor South Africans.
And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until yet another sub-standard sequel to James Cameron's near-perfect brace of sci-fi movies clinks and clanks its way into cinemas.
In a sense this sounds like a return to health maintenance organizations, or HMOs, those one-stop-shops that were designed for efficiency, but frequently provided sub-standard care to save a buck.
But committing to fight undernutrition while continuing to send sub standards food makes no sense, and brings us no closer to tackling malnutrition.
