2022 LC Thread—New Year, New Thread

Cannabis “gifters” who operate in a borderline-legal way in D.C. deliver to me in Virginia for a $30 driver fee.

Unlike Dominos, the drivers keep the entire amount, and I usually throw them an extra $5 for the gas tank

Maybe my dealers were all lazy.

I identify with your second issue completely.

It’s nuts because presumably somebody sells very nice permanent outdoor restroom buildings for a fraction of the cost. It’s a solved problem and they ignored existing solutions and did it all from scratch again. The custom build is probably worse quality than the purchase option.

It can be completely standard business as usual, and also nuts.

$1.7 million is what it costs to build like a Starbucks or a 5,000 square foot McMansion. Clovis you’re embarrassing yourself.

I was searching for something on fentanyl and this came up as one of the commonly asked questions.

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Wait! It’s more expensive in Wyoming than San Francisco?!?

Republicans were right all along! :wink:

I am absolutely not the one embarrassing myself here.

Yet, nobody has agreed with you or shown any sympathy towards your takes… I honestly thought you were joking at the start.

Someone has shown evidence of corruption that I missed?

I’m checking out of this.

Glad we can all go hard in the paint, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that government is wasteful and civil servants are corrupt.

Yay left wing UP. :+1:t2:

I’m sympathetic to his view. My position is that it sounds more expensive than I’d expect but is being made a much bigger deal than it is and people are falling for click bait outrage because it’s an expensive project in a liberal city.

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This site places the low end at $600/sf so your 5,000 sf McMansion would be $3m on the low end before soft costs.

https://petersdesignbuild.com/how-much-will-my-project-cost

Anyway. You don’t seem to care at all about evidence so this is meant for others not you.

it’s probably partially right but that budget is still coming out of taxpayer dollars and is still being consumed. The fact that it moves through multiple accounts on paper doesn’t mean that it’s completely imaginary.

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Yeah, this.

Trump was famous for this sort of shit. He’d always tell a sir story of whatever ridiculous cost they told him a new embassy (or whatever) would be and he would just say, " No, that’s ridiculous." And the derpers nod along in agreement because it actually is ridiculous.

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Well said. I totally agree which was why I was arguing this project is just click bait meant to enrage people. That why the reporter didn’t bother to do any reporting.

I am a little skeptical though of the claims that the US in unique in terms of construction costs. I havnt looked into to compare globally but I would hate to see us arguing against things like government oversight, environmental studies, higher wages ect that do lead to much higher costs than can be done in countries without those things.

Like everything, it’s a super complicated issue. There is no doubt the US is failing it’s infrastructure but my admittedly uniformed opinion is the cause is political more than cost driven.

I’ll concede as soon as someone shows which part of the budget is corrupt?

Or for that matter even posts what level of budget this is?!?

Wow, what a topic. There is an element here that is semantics. Maybe it could be argued, knowing what we now know, that the $1.7 million toilet is not due to old-fashioned “corruption” (graft, bribery, brother-in-law high bids, etc.).

But “corruption” has many flavors. The modern-day version of corruption is where at every layer of the bidding process and execution process tons of exaggerated costs are shoveled in so that at end of the day the total amount is absurd.

I think it’s a lot of that, but it’s probably also layers and layers of unnecessary bureaucracy, bullshit jobs, and systemic rot where nobody is incentivized to care so they don’t.

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This is almost certainly exactly what it is. Nobody is being corrupt. They are just trying to develop in a broken system.

As I said earlier. These planners are strongly incentivized to create budgets that they cannot exceed even in the most extreme cases because there is no much backlash when they do.