Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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> What you’re looking at is a combination sun shade/lamppost. After traveling to several global cities (on taxpayer money), the good folks at the Kounkuey Design Initiative reached the amazing and counterintuitive conclusion that people waiting for buses need shade during the day and light at night. This would also advance gender equity, they reasoned, since, well, women are in greater danger from lack of light. So for a total cost of $200,000 — including $10,000 for the structure itself, not counting the existing pole it was bolted onto — they developed this innovative structure, “La Sombrita”.

> As for why the city didn’t simply install a standard bus shelter combined with a (much more powerful) standard lamppost, the city explained that this would cost over $50,000

Amazing. I have some friends who work diligently at a non-profit that is doing some actual needed work as cost effectively as possible. It's a struggle for them to gather funds and get things done. Watching initiatives like this take $200K of government money and turn it into a nearly useless vanity project for those involved is infuriating.

As infuriating as it is, I'm not sure that the stupid failures are the reason. Some of the money is always going to be wasted. That's not an excuse for lazy oversight or corruption, but even when those are working well, some things will simply fail.

As much as it sucks to waste $200k, it's a drop in the bucket. American charity giving is close to half a trillion dollars per year. We are awash in so much money that it's counterproductive to think, "Well, if they're just gonna waste some of it, we shouldn't do it at all."

As I said, that's not any kind of comfort. It's right to be infuriated when something could easily have been better. But I've seen too many people insist that avoiding that negative emotion is the absolute top priority, and that causes a lot of suffering.

Yep. Nonprofits are broken by design. Sometimes you see egregious forms of corruption like this other times as things grow larger in scale, administrative fees, nice vacations or group events for leadership. Honestly, non-profit status doesn't mean anything. Charities have become an extension of what they originally were just places where people go to make money while "fixing" problems that governments were originally designed to deal with.

How easily problems such as child hunger and homelessness could be solved but the reality is that often it isn't simple, in the US requiring federal initiatives that the current state of our government has enabled this corruption. I don't intend on going political but often it becomes a problem of the commons where people believe they deserve more than others and often you'll see this prop up on forums like this. Where people who make more on average, often due to working in tech, think their opinions on matters are worth more even without the expertise or knowledge to come with it.

That aside, funding for programs is often non-uniform based on what cities actively need to deal with and often the friendships of individuals rather than on any real form of reasoning. We live in a plutocracy and these are just the side effects.

Nonprofit means the organization does not have equity, not that people don't make money or that executives can't get paid. Nonprofit does mean something, it just happens to be something specific.

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