Vienna changed their freestanding restroom design a decade ago. It is all stainless steel now, they can clean it with a pressure hose, you can’t pee all over the seat. They are all the same and it is the first public toilet I don’t loathe to use. Obviously in my closest park the architect designed something of aesthetic merit and it is always broken. Operational concerns, basically cleanliness, trump everything with public toilets.
San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
701–710 of 832 posts
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spoken like someone who has not spent more than a week in SF, probably entirely in hotels or restaurants.
I’ve lived in SF for more than a decade and if I opened the door to a public toilet I’d be surprised if someone wasn’t shooting up inside.
You don't spend much time outside of your house, then.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
> maybe the Republicans _are_ on to something: the government has become too big. Except this is SF, not the Federal Government, and part of the reason the costs are so high is because PG&E is holding the city hostage. Republicans want giant corporations like PG&E to have more power to hold the government hostage and loot it. Why do you pay attention to what they say, rather than what they do? They never actually shr…
You know people are actually Republicans, right? You think what they want is for big companies to loot the government? That sounds like you view Republicans as the villains on Captain Planet. The Republican position is probably more like "With less regulation more companies could flourish and compete in the same space and then market forces would drive costs down" and less about wanting to steal from people. It's cra…
I assumed by "Republicans" they meant Republican politicans and the wealthy entities that support them, rather than party members (the general populace).
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#704In contrast the tiny city of Zürich Switzerland has 106 public toilet facilities. [1] Some are staffed, some cost money to use and some are open 247. Does my tax money pay for this, yes, I have used them and I am glad they exist. The maintenance of these 106 facilities cost around 6,895,000 CHF (~USD) per year. Around 40% of that is staffing costs and 23% is rent to 3rd parties. Yearly investment in upgrades etc. is…
Berlin just doubled the number of public toilets: https://www.themayor.eu/en/a/view/berlin-s-public-toilets-th...
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
6 million. Slipped my mind that MM is industry specific. M is ambiguous between the Roman (M = 1,000), the SI prefix (M = 1,000,000), and metres (screen readers). $1MM (capitalized) or $1mn (more recent) reduces the ambiguity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MM#Units_of_measurement
M is not ambiguous at all it stands for mega which is 1e6 (which happens to be a million). Meters is lowercase m. And nobody uses Roman numerals as a suffix. MM is just unnecessary.
Well you're gonna be really disappointed to find out lots of people do use "mm" particularly in finance, and that Roman numerals have been used far longer than the SI system has existed.
Just because you don't use them, or aren't aware they are used, does not make it unnecessary.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know people are actually Republicans, right? You think what they want is for big companies to loot the government? That sounds like you view Republicans as the villains on Captain Planet. The Republican position is probably more like "With less regulation more companies could flourish and compete in the same space and then market forces would drive costs down" and less about wanting to steal from people. It's cra…
I assumed by "Republicans" they meant Republican politicans and the wealthy entities that support them, rather than party members (the general populace).
You say that as though SF hasn't been run exclusively by democrats for 30+ years. Democrat politicians care as little for their constituents as republican.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
> maybe the Republicans _are_ on to something: the government has become too big. Except this is SF, not the Federal Government, and part of the reason the costs are so high is because PG&E is holding the city hostage. Republicans want giant corporations like PG&E to have more power to hold the government hostage and loot it. Why do you pay attention to what they say, rather than what they do? They never actually shr…
You know people are actually Republicans, right? You think what they want is for big companies to loot the government? That sounds like you view Republicans as the villains on Captain Planet. The Republican position is probably more like "With less regulation more companies could flourish and compete in the same space and then market forces would drive costs down" and less about wanting to steal from people. It's cra…
> It's crazy to think ~half the country just wants to empower big business to rob them.
You'r right. It's more like 90% of the representatives. The republicans are just more brazen about it.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#708It's simple. It's not their money. When you ask any SF Department to give you a budget for something, they will just hallucinate a number and pull it out of their ass. Matt Haney (the State Senator) asked the Parks & Rec Department for an estimate of what would it cost to build the toilet (given that the hookups are already in place). They shrugged and pulled a figure of $1.7M out of their ass. And he just accepted t…
> the government has become too big
This framing means absolutely nothing, which is why politicians love it. It just sounds bad, without actually saying anything and pretty much any negative news headline can be accommodated by it.
But it doesn’t actually shed any light on what the actual problems are. In this case, as you point out, there’s an agency issue. The people paying the money have no real representation in the effort to distribute that money. The problem has nothing to do with the size of the government.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#709Why is it that the deepest blue areas of the country have some of the most abject inequity and poverty? It seems that there's a fine line between compassion and enablement when it comes to the deep blue municipalities of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, etc. Sure the rustbelt, deep south, and Appalachia are areas with similar problems and mixed politics, but they also somehow feel different.
The rustbelt, deep south, and Appalachia are not some beautiful, middle class paradises. They're full of towns littered with heroin and meth addicts subsidized by welfare and petty crime. You just don't see it or read about it because it's across thousands of small towns and not concentrated in major cities, where media also tends to live. These places have a lot of violence, social issues, drug overdoses, etc. They…
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Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#710It's simple. It's not their money. When you ask any SF Department to give you a budget for something, they will just hallucinate a number and pull it out of their ass. Matt Haney (the State Senator) asked the Parks & Rec Department for an estimate of what would it cost to build the toilet (given that the hookups are already in place). They shrugged and pulled a figure of $1.7M out of their ass. And he just accepted t…
Building a whole house in SF costs 1.7m. Building it in the Midwest or South costs 1/5 of that...