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San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

sfchronicle.com

121–130 of 832 posts

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public toilets aren't really for you, they're for the people who have nowhere else.

This may be true in San Francisco and certainly is in many other parts of the U.S. It is not true in places with functioning government.

Yes, obviously. We're talking about San Francisco where this toilet is being built with a very explicit purpose.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#122
post #79

I 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.

You probably don’t want to step in SF ever. FTFY.

I used to live in the South Bay and go up to San Francisco and Oakland every other weekend. It was bad, but it seems to have completely gone to hell in the last decade.

I would not set foot there unless all of human existence depended on it.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#123
post #44

I do not believe this type of public theft is due to incompetence, I believe it is corruption and grift

Correct — everybody knows that Mohammed Nuru [1] was not the only corrupted one. He was just the only one caught. The problem is that these kind of corruptions is so hard to catch and prove.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-san-francisco-pu...

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#124

I 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.

For years I felt this way. But with a 3 year old child you go into lots of public toilets all over the city. Nearly all toilets near playgrounds for children have been fine. Basic but fine.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#125
The central issue in SF really is just that all the stakeholders with any power whatsoever are highly incentivized to minimize change, because most of the voting and bribery base (I mean, political donation base) is manically obsessed with keeping housing prices as high as possible, so every department in every place in government is designed to slow and reject permits as much as possible. The incentives have been there so long that it's seeped into appointed bureaucrats in every place in local government, so even if you vote for someone staunchly anti-obstruction, it would take years of intense work to get the rot out of the entire system, longer than a single election cycle for sure.

Plus, the people who would vote less obstructionist policies often are the ones who live out in Oakland or something and commute in to work, and thus can't vote on the SF policies, so those people get shoved out even more by the high costs. It's a vicious cycle and there's probably no answer to it besides state/federal intervention to force lack of obstruction (e.g. making certain zoning requirements like "single family home only" illegal). For now, the incentives of local voters are stacked in the "we'll take literal shit on the streets if it means higher housing prices" camp.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#126
post #44

I 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…

That paper sounds like a fun rabbit whole to go down to. Do you have any other recommendations to read? Maybe some books?

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#127
post #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.

SFO is the airport, not the city. We call it SF, or San Francisco.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#128

I 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.

this mindset is why you have terrible public services.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#130
post #94
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SFO is the airport. I'm very confused by this comment. We're not all working at Google right now. MTV, SFO, MPK and all of this lingo is not familiar to all

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