Los Angeles ridiculed for 'life-changing' female shade poles
(news.yahoo.com)
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This has to be someone on a government grift right? Some construction company must be getting favours.
The grift is also that the women who designed it went on government-paid trips to Ecuador and Europe to "learn about street shading solutions".
The grift must extend well beyond that. They spent 60 million on these things. Even if they weren't completely useless they'd have a hard time justifying more than 10 million of that. If the city had any sense, which of course they don't, they'd pay for a forensic accountant to see what happened.
Edit: A lot of articles say $200,000 total cost but I can't find a good source on that. If this is just a pilot with a few shades that's much easier to run through.
It is $6000 x 10,000 for total costs to produce them, so that's $60 million right there.
That doesn't take into account the cost of research, flying the fat pigs around the world, paying their salaries for years, cost of installation, cost of removing old units.
I'd guess about $100 million was spent on this project, probably more.
Apparently a lot of the cost is to get around various zoning regulations and to keep from needing approvals from other city departments (eg. supposedly the thing must be completely attached to the pole because if it touched the sidewalk they would need approvals from the department in charge of sidewalk maintenance).
Which objectively speaking makes it even more absurd, but in a certain perverse way makes sense.
Are you telling me too much government is bad? You don't say.
Ah, well that explains it.
Look at what a normal one costs in effort and dollars. This is a company offering to do it for 1/5th the price and a fraction of the space, likely meaning less departments involved.
In a way this isn't the grift. Its band-aiding a previous grift with a lot of buzzwords to dodge that fact.
This is the reason you never want to much government. Everything they do is like this.
A shopping mall would install shade for 1500 bucks. Maybe it's more than that. Anyways, I know a guy that sells it if you want some.
And a carpenter could make a shade that does the same function for like 400$ and the lumber with his electrician buddy coming along to set up the light.