Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

It'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 that! Any normal person would have alarm bells go off in their head about such a large amount. Imagine you walk up to a street vendor and ask about a hot dog, and he responds with $1000. You'll laugh at his face and walk away. But the politicians in SF thought this was perfectly normal, and were getting ready to celebrate this event (until the Chronicle published the article that went viral). Kudos to Heather Knight... but it shouldn't have come this far!

Building a whole house costs $1.7M. A public toilet? Definitely not even close.

But hey, it's not their money, so who gives a shit, right?

When I read cases like these, I feel like maybe the Republicans _are_ on to something: the government has become too big.

>When I read cases like these, I feel like maybe the Republicans _are_ on to something: the government has become too big.

States like Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky etc. are absolutely not immune to corruption, I assure you.

Small-government Republicanism hasn't truly existed in decades.

However, that's not to diminish blame from cities like NY, Chicago, LA, SF. They need to get their flipping act together.

At anyone in Texas and they will tell you that the government in Austin is too powerful and too corrupt...

> 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 shrink the government; the bigger the government is, the more there is to loot, after all.

> and part of the reason the costs are so high is because PG&E is holding the city hostage.

One thing you'll see when you live in SF long enough (20+ years here) is that they'll come up with all sorts of crazy excuses to justify bad behavior. Blaming PG&E for the $1.7M cost is bullshit.

It's why I left. You can't even fix this.

I fled too. I miss so many aspects of the area, but the politics got so toxic when the libertarian hippies (let's all just get along) were replaced by authoritarian progressives (our way is the only truly good opinion, therefor the only opinion allowed, agree or be evil) and you could no longer have any policy discussions about anything.

The nationalization of politics is a huge problem in blue states and cities—it totally eviscerates accountability. Pointing to republicans in Texas becomes a get out of jail free card to explain why a toilet costs $1.7 million in San Francisco.

It’s particularly a problem with the bread and butter of state and local governance: education and policing. Why are cops in Minneapolis—a city that has two greens on the city council and no republicans—murdering black people? Must be Trump’s fault.

Trying to imply that Greens on the city council can stop police from murdering their own constituents is also silly. They don't hire the cops, and meaningful reform of PD department's ends up being the voters job since it's usually ballot measures.

Consider that in places like Portland where city government and local people are openly hostile to the cops, the cops are simply quiet quitting. Despite having the budget to hire hundreds of new cops, literally no one applies to work in Portland.

Thus, if your desire is to get cops to stop murdering, you really should vote for the Democrats or greens or whatever. The issue is that the cops just through a massive hissy fit to punish you, the voter, for trying to bring in a safer society.

I was just in South Korea. The cops there are not empowered. Their police stations are usually the most ghetto looking buildings in their community. I could get a cop to look for my lost bags if I needed it, because that's their role in society there. South Korea is one of the safest societies on earth.

Do we have the same structural factors as south Koreans? No, but demilitarized police can still be effective. Luckily hippy blue cities tend to have low violent crime...

The Minneapolis City Council can vote for bonuses for MPD: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/10/03/members-of-mpls-cit.... Don’t act like they can’t exercise other oversight.

The point is that a democrat signed Derek Chauvin’s checks. A democrat has authority over the department’s training and disciplinary policies. Insofar as police unions stand in the way of reform, democrats are responsible for that too.

Those democrats obviously want to shift focus to Trump voters in Kansas with “Blue Lives Matter” lawn signs. But those Trump voters are just heckling from the sidelines. They’re not the ones with actual authority over how Minneapolis runs its police department.

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 crazy to think ~half the country just wants to empower big business to rob them. Not least because big business tends to support Democrats.

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.

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

I doubt all republicns want that either, the problem is that 2 party system makes it all the same which is insane.

Not even the majority want same-sex marriage to be illegal, but only 55% of Republicans support same-sex marriage. That's a low number. 60% of republicans want abortion to be illegal.

Y’all are funny in there (US). Every time someone argues that “democratic politicians this” or “republican politicians that” the rest of the world looks at each other like “do they think that they actually have two different parties?”

Even based on public policy (and ignoring how their private actions), US democrats are closer to “global centre” but still in many cases to the right of centre.

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.

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.

I don't agree. I'm asking for a response in the form of "Global center for issue X is..." Instead I've received a "Part A is left of center, Party B is right of center." So no, I don't think I've been given what I asked for.

That is what I gave you. The “global center” on social issues is that the public, through the government, has the prerogative to regulate personal and social morality. They have the power to regulate abortion, who can get married, what kind of birth control is available, etc., based on social consensus. Even countries that choose to allow certain things, typically do so as an exercise of that prerogative, not as a matter of “individual rights.”

I can't help but feel I'm getting XY Problem-ed here. Thanks for trying, but I'm apparently not capable of communicating clearly enough to get what I'm asking for.

You want a quantitative answer to something qualitative - it doesn’t make that much sense to ask for an answer in such a way.

If you want to decide the center yourself on every issue then you’d have to take true and accurate surveys of a global population and then stratify them for their various biases (religious or cultural or whatever) then further stratify each cohort by age, family, gender, sexual orientation, and many other variables. The idealogical center to your surveys will just be the mode for your various questions, if true

Now

> 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.

Republicans lately do not operate in good faith. At least the federally elected ones.

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

Democrats have a super majority in SF, have a majority in the CA state government, and PG&E is essentially a state (as in CA) controlled corporation. The democrats have had majorities at both the municipal level and the state level for a long time.

PG&E is not the reason for this particular high cost, but if it was it would be the D's fault. And it's squarely a local level problem. And yet you manage to somehow blame republicans at a federal level...

Why don't you demand some responsibility from your local politicians instead of blaming a caricature of the other party? If PG&E was at fault here, D's are literally doing what you're mad at the Rs for supposedly doing... Incredible.

How much of the $1.7m is going to PG&E? Especially since their profit margin is set by the state it seems weird that they'd be able to gouge the cost of running a few light bulbs by over a million dollars. If PG&E is such a problem why not just use some cheap solar lights?

> 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.

I feel like that's a terrible false equivalency. One of the most liberal cities in the country making a bad decision over one toilet is not nearly enough to say "the whole concept of American government is too big, better reconsider my political party"

You can toss up a stick built or modular house for like 100k these days, and they can build these prefabs near instantly, at a better quality than a lot of stuff built during the 80's/90's.

Building a whole house in SF costs 1.7m. Building it in the Midwest or South costs 1/5 of that...

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