It is an outrageously cool thing to give money for an infrastructure project. They must have some faith that the government can deliver on something with $3.5 million.

That would be two public toilets in SF, one toilet of which actually cost $300k in paperwork and so on despite two local businessmen signing up to have the work done.

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foxyv 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It wasn't even really that big either. 50 square feet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet

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shswkna 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do not understand the downvotes.

It is a rational response to bureaucratic excesses worldwide in public procurement.

It is a plea to more common sense, to more down to earth thinking and decisive action in the public sphere.

This is not a call to ignore processes. But it is a call for civil servants to respect that they are exactly that. In service, and their ambition should be to do it well and efficiently.

The downvotes are an expression of those that think civil servants should be protected from such sentiment.

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vasco 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You went from not understanding them to knowing exactly what they were an expression of pretty quickly!

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zaptheimpaler 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Here is some of what happened during COVID, according to Patrick McKenzie (patio11) [1] :

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I want to both be polite about the fact and be honest about it. We, the United States of America, through our elected representatives and through civil servants who represent our interests, committed monstrous crimes in 2021, which are against the laws, traditions, and constitution of the United States of America, including aggressively redlining the provision of life-saving medical care in a way which was designed to cause racially discriminatory outcomes with the provision of medical care.

Just throwing that out there as a statement. With that caveat, one of the things that we spent tens of millions of dollars on was that we want your consultancy to write a website which will enforce residency restrictions. A residency restriction is essentially, when we are under a supply constraint, there must be some method to decide which people get it, and some people don’t. We have, in our infinite wisdom as the government, decided that equity, equity, equity is one primary thing that we are focusing on. A thing that we think would be contrary to equity is allowing anyone who shows up at the clinic to receive the life-saving medication.

The thing that we are specifically worried about is relatively well-resourced people from advantaged demographics will use their superior access to transportation and information to travel to clinics which have the vaccine available and take that instead of that vaccine being used by someone in the local community who we intend the vaccine to go to. Therefore, to get an appointment to go to the vaccine, you will need to go to the county’s website, which is delivered by Accenture or similar, and prove to the website that you reside within one of the zip codes that we have allocated for those vaccine doses. Only then will you get the ticket, virtual or otherwise, which allows you to go to the pharmacy and get the vaccine. We spent tens of millions of dollars on that, targeting essentially a four-month window where we were acutely supply constrained. But we did not turn off residency restrictions on the websites after that four month window because we physically had no way to do that because that was not in the bid documents in some cases. ...

----

Just one of the many ways that rigid institutions that behave more like stupid robots than things capable of dynamic decision-making cause immense harm. This is not a rant against equity btw, only against insanity.

[1] https://alethios.substack.com/p/patrick-mckenzie-vaccinateca

	▲	AdamN 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is real and there's no way to get these problems down to zero. However I do believe that the best first step is to make sure the government has more employees and fewer contractors. It will cost more year to year but the delivery will be much closer to what the constituents want and over time I would expect it to save money as well. With that said it's not a silver bullet as that group of people needs to be properly motivated, they still will need specialist help from consultancies, and there may be institutional capture anyway.

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zaptheimpaler 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They likely wouldn’t even accept the money because it’s in gold bars, and they wouldn’t be able to prove its source.

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cyode 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The lone ranger donor route feels severely suboptimal, unless perhaps if the donor is a .001%er pledging a large share of their net worth.

Imagine if this anonymous person worked with a foundation pledging to match $3.5M if said amount was raise via crowdfund. Even if say $1M goes to the campaign and NGO bloat, that’s still way more pipe money.

	▲	krisoft an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Imagine if this anonymous person worked with a foundation pledging to match $3.5M if said amount was raise via crowdfund. Idk man. Thing is where i live we are already crowdfunding to maintain our pipes. It is called local taxes and water utility bills. So if anyone were to ask me for more money for the same task i’m already paying not insubstantial sums for I would be very cross with them. It is just not a good look. Now i don’t know about Japan. Maybe they don’t pay taxes and utility bills. Somehow doubt it, but who knows.

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carabiner 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Russia level of inefficiency in infrastructure implementation.

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rester324 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"would put it to good use - including tackling the deterioration of water pipes"

There is your faith in action. Zero concrete promise, no accountability.

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21asdffdsa12 3 hours ago | parent [-]

* In the culture that also produced this comment. This is not a universal problem, just a societies unable to produce a high trust environment problem.

	▲	rester324 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]