Government Built That!
Times are tough and I look for any ways to save that I can, like by using ConsumerLab to find the cheapest most effective vitamins. It's about $47 a year membership, but I save that and much more by being able to get quality vitamins by GNC and other cheaper brands that are okay or very good in effectiveness.

Of course, the money that spends the most wildly is OPM: Other people's money.

We see that in San Francisco -- in the trash department -- in prototypes for a new trash can that is basically a bandaid over all the social problems there.

Alexandra Vuksich writes in the WaPo:

What is bright, shiny, sits on a sidewalk and costs $12,000?

In San Francisco, the answer is: Why, a trash can, of course!

To be sure, the detritus littering our public spaces is a problem for the City by the Bay. But recent news -- that local officials were initially ready to spend up to $20,000 apiece, more than the MSRP for many a new car, to purchase prototypes of fancy sidewalk trash cans -- proved too much even for San Franciscans, who take a back seat to no one in supporting questionable public expenditures.

Poorly designed sidewalk trash cans are not what ails San Francisco. Homelessness, lawlessness and a city unwilling to take the obvious steps to improve citizens' quality of life are.

That fact, sadly, is lost on the solons convinced that embracing just the right model of sidewalk trash bin is a step toward making San Francisco the sparkling metropolis of yore. Their argument is that the roughly 3,000 dark green cans that have been on city streets since 1993 are too easy to break into, leading to scavenged trash tossed all over the surrounding sidewalk.

In 2018, the city launched a multiyear process to find a new user-friendly, dumpster-diving-resistant, high-tech trash can. The city eventually settled on three candidate designs, and last month the Board of Supervisors approved $400,000 for an Oakland-based firm to manufacture and test five copies of each model. City planners estimate that the cost of the mass-produced products could ultimately be around $3,000 -- for what is, essentially, a glorified waist-high metal box.

...City leaders would be better off ensuring that residents don't toss trash on the streets. They could do this by working to instill a collective sense of civic pride. Or, at minimum, imposing consequences for breaking laws against vagrancy, littering and damaging public property.

Alas, no one enforces the rules in San Francisco anymore. Just ask our district attorney, Chesa Boudin, who is facing a recall over his apparent unwillingness to crack down on a surge in burglaries and other quality-of-life crimes. Everyone in my neighborhood has a story about an attempted home or car break-in, but few bother calling the police because they know nothing will be done.

There's a sense of resignation about the trash fiasco, too. The whole thing has been corrupt from the start. A Recology executive was caught offering bribes to city officials, including the Department of Public Works director at the time, Mohammed Nuru -- the genius behind the Great Trash Can Replacement Scheme. In 2020, Nuru was arrested by the FBI during an investigation into corruption at City Hall that also implicated his ex-girlfriend, who was then an aide to current San Francisco Mayor London Breed (who also once dated Nuru and has admitted to accepting gifts from him). No wonder we taxpayers aren't too optimistic about the prospects for Nuru's brainchild.

In this sense, the outrage over the costly cans is about more than just trash. It's about chaos and disorder, surging property crime, corruption in government, rising taxes and a city where progressive ideology inspires super-expensive Rube Goldberg policy solutions while precluding cheap, obvious ones.

I keep waiting for things to get bad enough in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Venice, and California that voters stop robo-voting the same crony socialists, crooks, and dimwits into office.

That time seems to have come. It's gotten to the point in Venice where you cannot ride a bike somewhere and lock it and have it be there when you come back -- unless you spend hundreds more on locks, reinforcers, and other measures than you did on the bike itself.