Los Angeles ridiculed for 'life-changing' female shade poles
(news.yahoo.com)
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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.