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San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

sfchronicle.com

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

#741

Post by kotlin2 »

istinetz wrote: post #717
antiterra wrote: post #384

Price doesn’t seem that outrageous to me. Public bathrooms in cities get destroyed and are very difficult to maintain; a lot of cities give up on free restrooms entirely. One of the biggest perks of working downtown in a moderately sized or larger city is being able to go to the bathroom there outside of work hours. I priced out some relatively minor kitchen/bathroom renovation work in 2018 at around $100k. Put it of…

>I priced out some relatively minor kitchen/bathroom renovation work in 2018 ... today the quote for the same work is well over $300k. Lmao what. 300k for minor renovations? Is it a minor renovation on the international space station or something?

I'm in the process of building a new kitchen in the NYC area and I can't really find a way to make it cost more than $150,000. And that's including demo work to expand the size, new floors and windows, and entirely new appliances, countertops, and cabinetry.

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

#742

Post by lampshades »

galdosdi wrote: post #273
asow92 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal experience of living in both rural New York and Pennsylvania and NYC for decades, the ratio seems to skew more towards the city. But I can't say as much for the west. A $2k car is a lot less than higher average taxes and housing costs.

The rural places you lived in probably genuinely didn't have as much extreme poverty. I'm familiar with some of the types of places you probably mean. I was thinking of the rural South, where maintaining some degree of radical poverty even in the face of all kinds of modern development has been a strange national sport of sorts for hundreds of years. The OP seemed to be pitting southern red state rural vs northern ci…

I’m from the poorest place in the country. Ok, well almost the poorest (right outside the Mississippi delta). You can get a car for less than 2000 and like someone else mentioned, you don’t even need one because you can just ride a bike.

Public transportation? Public transportation to where? Down the road to the grocery store? Someone is about to wait at a bus stop outside the projects to go 500 feet? Just ride a bike or walk.

Can’t get to work? Someone will pick you up and bring you. Overslept? Expect that same person dragging you out of your bed.

You can find shelter for less than $100/month.

Need food? Go out back and get it.

If I ever was destitute, I’d go back to the rural South in a heartbeat and it blows my mind how many people don’t do that very thing.

Bottom line, I’m 99% sure I’ve a better understanding and closer relationship to extreme poverty than you and you have no idea what you’re talking about.

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

#743

Post by rayiner »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #731
Pigalowda wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t speak for the rest of the world. And no, democrats are not to the right of center.

Where do you suppose center is?

On what issue? Democrats are to the left of the developed world on most social issues. For example, in the EU, neither abortion nor same-sex marriage are recognized as inalienable rights, but rather are afforded as legislative prerogatives: https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2015-09-14/eur..., https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/the-right-to-abortion-and-the-...

On economic issues, the Democrat mainstream is center to center right compared to Europe. But overlook that social democracies in Europe went through a long conservative retrenchment after the 1960s and 1970s. Look at the corporate tax rates in Sweden.

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

#744

Post by [deleted] »

roflyear wrote: post #713
throwntoday wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least democrats do not want to take away women's and gay rights.

[deleted]

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

#745

Post by silverlake »

jerrysievert wrote: post #311

I'm kind of surprised that new plans were drawn up when a perfectly serviceable toilet design[1] has been done and in production for much less[2]. This doesn't get rid of the permitting process, but it has been debugged and is already working in multiple cities. 1. https://portlandloo.com 2. https://pffcdc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Portland-Loo-P... - $90,000 + estimated install costs of $4000

This leaves people exposed from the openings at the top and bottom. The one in Paris is completely closed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette#/media/File:Sanisett...).

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

#747

Post by david_allison »

programmer_dude wrote: post #734
david_allison wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An expense of $60,000 could be written as $60M. Internet advertisers are familiar with CPM which is the cost per thousand impressions. > The letter k is also used represent one thousand. For example, an annual salary of $60,000 might appear as $60k instead of $60M. [0] k and MM are unambiguous. You don't want to stop & think, and you definitely don't want to be off by a factor of 1000. So it makes sense to avoid ty…

> An expense of $60,000 could be written as $60M This is unfortunate. $60,000 is $60K (capital K not k) using SI suffixes. Please reject M=1000 today.

> Please reject M=1000 today.

This is infeasible, and what does it mean to reject something in a written document?

I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish here: you're arguing against an established convention in a sector of the market which you don't have experience with.

The upside if you're successful is that I don't need to type an additional 'M'.

The downside is that it requires enforcing a blanket standard on an industry, rather than letting it converge over time to an unambiguous standard.

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

#748

Post by kelseyfrog »

rayiner wrote: post #743
kelseyfrog wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you suppose center is?

On what issue? Democrats are to the left of the developed world on most social issues. For example, in the EU, neither abortion nor same-sex marriage are recognized as inalienable rights, but rather are afforded as legislative prerogatives: https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2015-09-14/eur... , https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/the-right-to-abortion-and-the-... On economic issues, the Democrat mainstream is ce…

On absolute terms. Among the salient issues, what would a center platform entail? The reason I bring this up is because we can then compare your idea of center to examples world wide. I'm specifically challenging you to enumerate your position so that we can escape the, "Well it just is center," circles we would otherwise run in, or the relative terms we seem to be talking about now.

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

#749

Post by rayiner »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #748
rayiner wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what issue? Democrats are to the left of the developed world on most social issues. For example, in the EU, neither abortion nor same-sex marriage are recognized as inalienable rights, but rather are afforded as legislative prerogatives: https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2015-09-14/eur... , https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/the-right-to-abortion-and-the-... On economic issues, the Democrat mainstream is ce…

On absolute terms. Among the salient issues, what would a center platform entail? The reason I bring this up is because we can then compare your idea of center to examples world wide. I'm specifically challenging you to enumerate your position so that we can escape the, "Well it just is center," circles we would otherwise run in, or the relative terms we seem to be talking about now.

I gave you concrete examples. In particular, on social issues American democrats are on the far left globally because of how they conceive of those issues. They view of abortion or same sex marriage as individual rights that trump society’s power to regulate. By contrast, in most countries where abortion or same sex marriage is permissible, it’s because society has chosen to allow it, subject to whatever circumstances and conditions society has chosen to impose. Abortions, for example, are widely available in Japan to 24 weeks. But that’s because of WWII-era rules put in place by the government to control population growth. The Japanese largely do not think of abortion in terms of society lacking the power to prohibit abortion, as American democrats do.

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

#750

Post by kjkjadksj »

ALittleLight wrote: post #689
feoren wrote: post #636

Earlier 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…

Why do people still believe that lie? That deregulation leads to a market environment that wont just be dominated by existing whales.
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