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.
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.
Here is some of what happened during COVID, according to Patrick McKenzie (patio11) [1] :
----
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
* 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.
This is the reason that installing a 2-mile bus lane on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco took several years. They took advantage of the opportunity to replace the hollowed out logs that had served as one of the city’s most critical water mains since the 1906 quake.
When the sections are stored above ground, they can make for some really gnarly skate parks. You've heard of the half-pipe, now see the attempts at full-pipe!
> Osaka recorded more than 90 cases of water pipe leaks under its roads in the 2024 fiscal year, according to the city's waterworks bureau.
I must admit, that seems pretty small given how many roads and many people said infrastructure supports.
Still a good idea to get ahead of maintenance, but I am pretty impressed.
I wonder if Japan is suffering the same issue many western countries are facing, where regulation and wages are becoming too high to get much done with that amount of money. In my country, I would be surprised if you could replace a single roads water pipes for 3.6million.
$3.6m given to an outsourcing contractor whose cousin is on the council, would get you a couple of miles of pipe in the UK, by the time you have paid off all the consultants
The actual founder of Bitcoin cannot touch their money without causing a lot of panic in the market. I believe Coinbase's 2021 S-1 prospectus explicitly listed "the identification of Satoshi Nakamoto... or the transfer of Satoshi’s Bitcoins" as a business risk factor.
And that's Osaka. Osaka's population peaked around 2017.[1] The only major city in Japan not on a downtrend is Yokohama, which is in the Greater Tokyo area.
Keeping up all the infrastructure as the population declines is tough. That's one of the challenges of this century for the developed world.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet
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.
----
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
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.
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.
There is your faith in action. Zero concrete promise, no accountability.
That is rather low. The US still has some wooden(!) water pipes in use, as well as other plumbing installed in the late 19th/early 20th century.
> Maple trees drink about 50 litres of water every day, and it seems some of their hydration is coming from Montreal’s crumbling infrastructure.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/montreals-leaky-pipe...
I must admit, that seems pretty small given how many roads and many people said infrastructure supports.
Still a good idea to get ahead of maintenance, but I am pretty impressed.
I wonder if Japan is suffering the same issue many western countries are facing, where regulation and wages are becoming too high to get much done with that amount of money. In my country, I would be surprised if you could replace a single roads water pipes for 3.6million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamashita%27s_gold
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Awa_Maru
Keeping up all the infrastructure as the population declines is tough. That's one of the challenges of this century for the developed world.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/cities/japan/osaka
... and we already have a problem with copper theft.
Edit: i mean, we can't possibly figure out who donated, thank you kind donor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Materials
All that means is that the city won't publish the name of the donor. It doesn't mean "no one knows who has paid for this".
100 yens we received
would be un any other country, but not japan