>X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats—like Sun’s Open Look clock
tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all
the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn’t have
enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 “xclock” utility consumes 656K to run. And X’s memory usage is increasing.

The Clock Tool : C64 memory usage numbers were accurate, but I'll admit that the $5,000 toilet seat reference was a slightly gratuitous (but ultimately prescient) 781.25% exaggeration about the time when US Government under the Reagan Administration spent $37 per screw, $7,622 per coffee maker, and $640 per toilet seat (and it wasn't even made of enough gold to support Trump's vainglorious ass and ego, or even certified for the theft, storage, sale, or disposal of classified documents!), but in 2018 the Air Force paid $10,000 each for three toilet covers.

But the comparison of the level of government waste of money to the level of X-Windows waste of memory has survived the test of time and is still apt.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-...

$37 screws, a $7,622 coffee maker, $640 toilet seats; : suppliers to our military just won’t be oversold

[...] Remember when we found out that the government paid $640 each for plastic toilet seats for military airplanes? Now that was something I could feel that I personally paid for. I pay a good deal more than $640 in taxes every year, and I probably paid for several of those toilet seats. That is a concrete contribution that I can be proud of. [...]

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/18/us/dept-of-hundred-dollar...

Dept. of Hundred-Dollar Toilet Seats.
Special to the New York Times, Feb. 18, 1986.

Disclosures about the Defense Department paying hundreds of dollars for a hammer and hundreds more for a toilet seat have infuriated President Reagan, who has called the reports a ''constant drumbeat of propaganda'' and not typical of the way the Government operates.

But that ''propaganda,'' the President apparently forgot or did not know, originated with a commission on governmental efficiency for which he has been full of praise, the Grace Commission.

Gregg N. Lightbody, a spokesman for the commission, officially known as the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, said the group's educational arm, Citizens Against Government Waste, would continue to use the example of the costly hammer in its messages identifying faults in Government spending and procurement, even though the example might be ''an isolated instance.''

Mr. Reagan has denied the accuracy of the accounts twice in the last week and placed his faith in another panel, the President's Commission on Defense Management, to help clear up what he considers to be misconceptions about the Government. The defense management commission is expected to issue a report Feb. 28 that ''will help us in trying to make the people understand,'' Mr. Reagan said.

But Herb Hetu, a spokesman for that commission, says its report will not address the hammers or the toilet seats, at least not directly. Instead, Mr. Hetu said, the statement on procurement will look at the broader issues of Defense Department organization and will recommend ways to streamline purchasing.

The hammers and the toilet seats, along with coffee makers alleged to have cost thousands of dollars, Mr. Hetu said, ''are just symptoms of problems in the system.''

''The commission didn't look at the symptoms so much as it did the larger problems,'' he said.

The larger problems, he continued, are the result of years of additional regulations and well-intentioned efforts to tinker with procurement procedures without addressing them wholesale. ''It just got out of hand,'' he said. The commission's recommendations, Mr. Hetu said, will try to restructure purchasing so as to eliminate the problems that produced the symptoms. In particular, he said, the commission will suggest that the Defense Department grant more control and responsibility to lower-level managers, enabling them to investigate and prevent outrageous expenditures instead of merely passing the approval of such expenditures along to their superiors. After releasing its report Feb. 28, the commission will work on complete recommendations for a broader re-structuring of other military programs. Its final work is scheduled to be released June 30.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-...

The Air Force’s $10,000 toilet cover. By Aaron Gregg, July 14, 2018 at 8:57 p.m. EDT.

A latrine cover for a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane used by the Air Force, designed to protect the area from corrosion. The Air Force paid a contractor $10,000 for this item on three separate occasions, most recently in 2017, before the service started using 3-D printing to make the part. (U.S. Air Force)

[...]

https://toilet-guru.com/trump/

Donald Trump's Gold Toilets

Serially bankrupt casino operator and former reality television figure Donald Trump became US President after losing the popular vote by 2.1%, 2,868,686 votes, but winning the electoral vote. So, with what the U.S. government's intelligence agencies concluded was assistance from the Russian government, Trump was President.

Trump, whose father was arrested after participating in a Ku Klux Klan march, and who has a long history of racial discrimination, decorates his palace-like homes in the style of dictators Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Gold (or at least gilding), marble, and over-the-top kitsch.

Trump and his third wife, Slovenian nude model Melanija Knavs, who had Germanized her name to Melania Knauss before applying for permanent residency in the U.S., moved into the White House.

Earlier in 2016, the artist Maurizio Cattelan had returned from retirement with a special project at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His America (2016) replaced a toilet in one of the museum's public restrooms with a fully functional toilet cast in solid 18-carat gold. This was his first project since his 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim and planned retirement. It opened in late September, 2016, with plans to remain there indefinitely. From the museum's description of this piece:

Cattelan's toilet offers a wink to the excesses of the art market, but also evokes the American dream of opportunity for all, its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity.

[...] Then, in September 2017, a White House spokesperson wrote to the Guggenheim Museum, asking if the Trumps could borrow Landscape With Snow, a Vincent van Gogh painting, to decorate the Presidential residence.