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A tangent from your local product development engineer: never pay attention to the cost of prototypes. It's just not related to final product costs. It's a litt

A tangent from your local product development engineer: never pay attention to the cost of prototypes. It's just not related to final product costs. It's a little like software: the first one's very expensive and the following ones are very cheap. In this case, it's because the prototypes are built by hand, often using the time of skilled engineers at hundreds of dollars an hour, with no factory tooling or anything. So of course they're going to be expensive. That says nothing about the rest of this article, though.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> never pay attention to the cost of prototypes. It's just not related to final product costs. It's a little like software: the first one's very expensive and the following ones are very cheap. Well, except the first question presented in the article is "why are we paying for any prototypes in the first place, instead of just using cans that already exist?" Prototype costs seem pretty relevant to that question.
- ginko 5y ago
  These trash cans will most likely be on the street for decades to come. For better or worse they'll be part of the city's image. I can totally understand why a larger city like SF wants to spend some resources on this rather than just pick the next best off-the shelf solution without much thought.
  - refurb 5y ago
    "Part of the city's image"? I'd argue the city's image is dominated by homelessness, poop on the streets, lackluster enforcement of the law, corruption in city hall. They could come up with the best possible trash can ever invented and it wouldn't move the need on resident's quality of life. Total waste of money.
    - ginko 5y ago
      > "Part of the city's image"? I'd argue the city's image is dominated by homelessness, poop on the streets, lackluster enforcement of the law, corruption in city hall. I mean I've only been to San Francisco a few times, but apart from the Tenderloin I thought it was a very beautiful city. Yeah, homelessness and public defecation are a problem, but do these have to be brought up in ANY discussion regarding SF? Groups of people can deal with multiple issues at once.
      - refurb 5y ago
        SF is a unique city in a beautiful location with a ton of organization problems. And yes, people love to exaggerate the problems, but I live outside the Tenderloin and still see poop on the street (though rarely) so these aren't limited to certain areas. As a tax payer, I've noted that San Francisco has actually been removing trash cans, that worked perfectly well, because people just dump trash beside them for the city to pick up. No trash can, no dumping? No, they dump anyways. So the solution isn't to use the old design which seemed to work "ok". Or even talk to other cities to see if they have better options SF could just buy. It was to completely redesign a trash can. Insane. I'm waiting for SF to hire an outside firm to resign the tires on their city vehicles. So yes, you can solve multiple problems at once, but there are also only so many hours in the day and so many tax dollars to work with and spending any time/money on new trash cans is less time solving actual quality of life problems.
      - sgtnoodle 5y ago
        It seems at least tangentially relevant to the discussion more so than most, doesn't it? Memories of human waste in the streets is the first thing I thought about after reading this article. I usually see at least one pile when I go into SF and walk around. I've also seen people actively relieving themselves and worse, and I've only wandered around SF maybe a dozen times. Designing custom trash cans to optimize for esthetics in this context seems analogous to polishing a turd. It sounds like the bigger issue, ignoring potential corruption, is that they expect telemetry and sliding mechanisms in what notionally should just be some bent sheet metal, and assumed the stuff on the market was overpriced.
- exmadscientist 5y ago
  You're questioning whether this is a good thing to be doing at all. That's a very good question! I'm saying that, if you're going to go down this path, costs in this ballpark are to be expected. That is, I don't think SF appears to be overpaying for their quixotic custom trashcans. (Again, at the ballpark/order of magnitude level.)
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  They explain this in the article, the specs they wanted (particularly around the sensor for intelligent emptying and durability) only existed in one existing product, and it was claimed to be too expensive as well as ugly. Having checked the website, I agree on the latter. Another model that only met some of the criteria cost even more than that. So this seems like a standard buy/build decision being turned into a political drama. And the prototype cost is still irrelevant, we should only care about the total cost of ownership.
  - nradov 5y ago
    But the specs they wanted were stupid and unnecessary. Pure requirements inflation and waste of taxpayer dollars.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> never pay attention to the cost of prototypes. It's just not related to final product costs. It's a little like software: the first one's very expensive and the following ones are very cheap. Well, except the first question presented in the article is "why are we paying for any prototypes in the first place, instead of just using cans that already exist?" Prototype costs seem pretty relevant to that question.

ginko 5y ago
These trash cans will most likely be on the street for decades to come. For better or worse they'll be part of the city's image. I can totally understand why a larger city like SF wants to spend some resources on this rather than just pick the next best off-the shelf solution without much thought.
- refurb 5y ago
  "Part of the city's image"? I'd argue the city's image is dominated by homelessness, poop on the streets, lackluster enforcement of the law, corruption in city hall. They could come up with the best possible trash can ever invented and it wouldn't move the need on resident's quality of life. Total waste of money.
  - ginko 5y ago
    > "Part of the city's image"? I'd argue the city's image is dominated by homelessness, poop on the streets, lackluster enforcement of the law, corruption in city hall. I mean I've only been to San Francisco a few times, but apart from the Tenderloin I thought it was a very beautiful city. Yeah, homelessness and public defecation are a problem, but do these have to be brought up in ANY discussion regarding SF? Groups of people can deal with multiple issues at once.
    - refurb 5y ago
      SF is a unique city in a beautiful location with a ton of organization problems. And yes, people love to exaggerate the problems, but I live outside the Tenderloin and still see poop on the street (though rarely) so these aren't limited to certain areas. As a tax payer, I've noted that San Francisco has actually been removing trash cans, that worked perfectly well, because people just dump trash beside them for the city to pick up. No trash can, no dumping? No, they dump anyways. So the solution isn't to use the old design which seemed to work "ok". Or even talk to other cities to see if they have better options SF could just buy. It was to completely redesign a trash can. Insane. I'm waiting for SF to hire an outside firm to resign the tires on their city vehicles. So yes, you can solve multiple problems at once, but there are also only so many hours in the day and so many tax dollars to work with and spending any time/money on new trash cans is less time solving actual quality of life problems.
    - sgtnoodle 5y ago
      It seems at least tangentially relevant to the discussion more so than most, doesn't it? Memories of human waste in the streets is the first thing I thought about after reading this article. I usually see at least one pile when I go into SF and walk around. I've also seen people actively relieving themselves and worse, and I've only wandered around SF maybe a dozen times. Designing custom trash cans to optimize for esthetics in this context seems analogous to polishing a turd. It sounds like the bigger issue, ignoring potential corruption, is that they expect telemetry and sliding mechanisms in what notionally should just be some bent sheet metal, and assumed the stuff on the market was overpriced.
exmadscientist 5y ago
You're questioning whether this is a good thing to be doing at all. That's a very good question! I'm saying that, if you're going to go down this path, costs in this ballpark are to be expected. That is, I don't think SF appears to be overpaying for their quixotic custom trashcans. (Again, at the ballpark/order of magnitude level.)
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
They explain this in the article, the specs they wanted (particularly around the sensor for intelligent emptying and durability) only existed in one existing product, and it was claimed to be too expensive as well as ugly. Having checked the website, I agree on the latter. Another model that only met some of the criteria cost even more than that. So this seems like a standard buy/build decision being turned into a political drama. And the prototype cost is still irrelevant, we should only care about the total cost of ownership.
- nradov 5y ago
  But the specs they wanted were stupid and unnecessary. Pure requirements inflation and waste of taxpayer dollars.