For the past few months I've been listening to Robert Caro's The Power Broker on audiobook (which has far and away the best narration I've ever heard - props to Robertson Dean!) and am about 40 hours in out of 65. The book is about a NYC administrator named Robert Moses who operated from roughly 1930-1970, and is quite eye-opening in its depiction of how the sausage is made in public works projects. I greatly recommend it if you have any interest at all in the nature of power within these areas. Robert Moses was famous in his time for "getting things done", which he was certainly successful at - but to think this required him to sweep away all the corruption and graft is absolutely untrue. He turned it to his own ends and operated successfully within an amazingly corrupt system, paying off everybody he could. All of this was non-transparently funded with money from public authorities, like bridge operators collecting tolls whose capitalization and disbursement were purely controlled by him. So we know this public toilet costs $1.7 million, which honestly isn't too astonishing a sum, but another era it also probably would have cost that - you just wouldn't know it unless you dug through the records decades after everyone involved was dead. Also the toilet would have, like, displaced an entire block of ethnic minority families or something. And had an elevated highway built over it.
San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
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Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#82> San Francisco, which is struggling with a troubling homelessness and public-defecation crisis, needs more public toilets. The irony in this statement, given the reasons why this toilet costs so much, is absolutely unreal. I had to check the date on this article to make sure it wasn't an old April's Fools skit or something, but it seems red tape and NIMBYism have escalated to such a degree in SF that (a) securing bu…
Red tape and nimbyism is hard to imagine from what I see of SFO in books, it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do.
Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Hard to tell these days what is editorial bias or sensationalism and what is true.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#83I would never step foot into a public SF toliet. Last time I went in there the homeless shit all over the floor and toliet and walls. I went in and nearly threw up. A homeless person pointed and laughed at me. Fuck that.
Public toilets aren't really for you, they're for the people who have nowhere else.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#84I would never step foot into a public SF toliet. Last time I went in there the homeless shit all over the floor and toliet and walls. I went in and nearly threw up. A homeless person pointed and laughed at me. Fuck that.
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Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#85Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#86Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#87I do not believe this type of public theft is due to incompetence, I believe it is corruption and grift
It's straight out of the OSS (pre-CIA)'s "Simple Sabotage Field Manual". https://gist.github.com/kennwhite/467529962c184258d08f16daec... > General Interference with Organizations and Production > Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdot…
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Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#88Remember the jokes about the military overspending on toilet seats? It seems like it’s a bipartisan past time to waste taxpayers money on foolishly over expensive pet projects.
It is a bipartisan pass-time (not past-time, you must have been auto-corrected) to accuse the government of wasting money.
And then forcing them to waste money by shifting their tasks and priorities followed by blaming them again for the waste.
The military overspending was on hammers. And the politician forgot to mention that these were hammers for use in a munitions factory, where it was rather important that the hammer not generate even micro-sparks.
The politician also didn't mention anything about government overspend on desks for senators. I'm sure his desk didn't come from Ikea, but somehow that wasn't a problem.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#89The Arts Commission’s Civic Design Review committee will be responsible for conducting a “multi-phase review” of the project, like it does for all projects on public lands. Before the project is put out for bid, it will be subject to review under the California Environmental Quality Act, according to the Chronicle. The public toilet will be built by union workers who will “earn a living wage and benefits,” according…
I mean there is nothing wrong with the whole "built-by-union-workers"-thingy. its more all of the Bureaucracy involved thats stupid.
Nothing wrong with paying non-union livable wages, either. Except that they don't contribute politically, of course.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#90I do not believe this type of public theft is due to incompetence, I believe it is corruption and grift
It's straight out of the OSS (pre-CIA)'s "Simple Sabotage Field Manual". https://gist.github.com/kennwhite/467529962c184258d08f16daec... > General Interference with Organizations and Production > Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdot…
What’s crazy is many of the people doing this are doing it without a hint of irony or intentional malice. They truly believe they’re working towards a worthy goal and what you’ve described above is the only way to reach it.