Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Reading between the lines

For the background, read this Daily Camera article.

Now for the rant.

Let's see:

- the Boulder police have a bunch of unclaimed bikes (these are mostly abandoned, but some of them are stolen and the original owner is never located).

- to keep from being trapped under the piles of rusted crap (remember, this is a college town), they auction of the more valuable bikes (if you've ever been to these auctions, they sell bikes for as little as $20 or so - so "valuable" is a relative term here) and presumably use the money for something worthwhile.

- after the auction, there is some atrocious, nonfunctional crap left over. It has to go somewhere, so rather than sticking it in the landfill, the police allow Community Cycles to come get it and try to make some of it functional and useful again.

- now somehow the police are worried that some bikes are *ending up outside Boulder*.

This whole situation is absurd. The police are *getting rid of what they consider garbage*. If Community Cycles wants to ship them to Africa, or give them to homeless people in Boulder, or heck, cut them up to make a steam organ, THAT'S THEIR BUSINESS. They are taking something otherwise useless and finding a use for it - how can it possibly matter where the bikes end up?

And for the record, nobody who wants to earn a bike there is ever turned away, to my knowledge. So thanks to CC, I think Boulder is adequately supplied with crappy but functional bikes.

The whole situation screams out "minor bureaucrat on a power trip." I'd love to hear the whole story, but at least now I know that those rascals at CC can't take our hard-earned trash bikes and ship them off for some godless communist in Libya to enjoy. Thank god!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Team America f-yeah!
Let's worry more about donated bikes then running a police bureaucracy more efficiently in light of the waning tax dollars and debt we face. Kudos to the nanny state.

Anonymous said...

Team America f-yeah!
Let's worry more about donated bikes then running a police bureaucracy more efficiently in light of the waning tax dollars and debt we face. Kudos to the nanny state.

Margo said...

For some unknown and mysterious reason I still read the daily camera whilst sipping my morning coffee and so was unfortunate enough to read this story earlier today. It just screams...Boulder. Like sending bikes to Africa is a bad thing. They should be PAYING CC to take their crap. What was unfortunate too was the ass kissing CC was doing to try to get back in the goods with the cops. too bad.

Anonymous said...

I just accidentally clicked a link to your site and read the article. Good work, BTW.

Funny, but I think this is indicative of the problems our society faces at this point in our evolution.

My theory - after only reading the facts from this blog, is that somebody has discovered the bike shop finding a way of turning the garbage into a - probably very small - profit (or maybe public relations value, rather than profit), and now that the CC shop has established a method of extracting something of value from something that has none - somebody else is either a: Jealous or B: wants to grab it.

Seems to me that stealing ideas or business from others has become the accepted norm these days, when what we really should value is developing the innovative ideas in the first place