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Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

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Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#31

Post by LordKano »

jakelarkin wrote: post #7

This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

I'm not sure which I hate more. Union shenanigans or waterless urinals. They both stink.

There are a few places here that use those urinals and the smell hits me in the face every time I enter the lavatory.

In the case you describe, perhaps the unions are a net positive because their protectionist rule will make it easier to replace those waterless stink pits with actual urinals in the future.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#32

Post by dmix »

Too bad they weren't as popular, well known, or well funded as Uber/Lyft to deal with this type of anti-progress nonsense.

I've been meaning for a long time to start a site to track these events of businesses getting sidelined over regulatory hurdles - similar to those sites who track police shootings. Collecting data is the best way to bring light to prevalent but maligned issues like these. I get the impression there are hundreds of these small stories that could have had an impact on the marketplace but get crushed by regulatory/incumbent barriers.

We only ever hear about it when a big company runs into these issues. But for the most part it's usually people who are already taking a huge financial risk to do an entrepreneurial activity and they don't have the runway/capital to deal with the problem, let alone invest the time to draw attention to the issue in the press or politically.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#33

Post by wahern »

jakelarkin wrote: post #7

This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

The dilemma is that those jobs might not be skilled and high-pay without unions.

Part of the reason there's so much make-work in unions today is because as a percentage of the workforce unions have largely been relegated to public works projects and other niches reliant on political support. It's an existential crisis for unions and their middle-class laborers, and so they're going to flex every political muscle they can.

Even though unions dominate in a country like Germany, the number of union workers required for any particular task is significantly less than is typical in the U.S. And that's because there's more union work available for their members. When union work disappears in the U.S., the union members don't just disappear, too.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#34

Post by fiter »

VLM wrote: post #21
jakelarkin wrote: post #7

This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

waterless ones are patented and without a water line you'd be locked in to higher priced products and/or have to spend a lot of extra money to run a new water line after the walls go up. Generally the situation with waterless ones is people endlessly social signal their green superiority about them, then the incredible stench makes them install real urinals. Even if only 5% or so install real urinals the net cost is…

I think it's very important to be able to let people make these decisions. It's inefficient to add a water line if it's never going to be used. You might believe I'm going to use it, but I might know I'm not going to use it. Maybe you're right, but I am the one paying the bill to tear off finishings to run water lines in the walls.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#35

Post by RangerScience »

atom-morgan wrote: post #22
jakelarkin wrote: post #7

This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

And when people advocate for programmers unionizing, I don't see why we'd be any different. There'd be people employed doing X, a programmer would make something to automate X, and "our" union would be trying to save their job.

This is like when people talk about the AI. The AI will do this, the AI will do that...

The AI doesn't exist. People will make it. That is when you know what it will do.

If we make the union, we can make plenty of reasons and ways for it to be different. Whether or not those result in a difference, is not very predictable.

Our day jab is literally understanding, predicting, and building complex systems out of ideas. Why would we be unable to make a union with a reasonable - even likely - chance of not developing the same problems these (much) older unions have?

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#36

Post by RangerScience »

dmix wrote: post #32

Too bad they weren't as popular, well known, or well funded as Uber/Lyft to deal with this type of anti-progress nonsense. I've been meaning for a long time to start a site to track these events of businesses getting sidelined over regulatory hurdles - similar to those sites who track police shootings. Collecting data is the best way to bring light to prevalent but maligned issues like these. I get the impression the…

This sounds amazing! What's blocking you?

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#37

Post by tbirrell »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #26
tbirrell wrote: post #9

tl;dr - It's like a crawler (mobile with a boom, street level crane) but you put it on top of something already there. Since its on top of something, it's not a "mobile" crane and couldn't get certified as one, however, it also didn't fit into the tower crane (tall, lifts things) certification. So it got stuck in between two classifications and as a result made it too hard for construction companies to bother includi…

Did we read the same article? You excluded what the current crane operator union was doing to prevent this thing from being used which seemed like the meat of the article to me.

I was more answering the question in the clickbait-ish title then trying to summarize the entire article.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#38

Post by Houshalter »

The first subway in New York City cost about $100 million per kilometer in 1900 (adjusted for inflation of course). The new subway line being opened this year cost $2.2 billion per kilometer. This is despite over a century of improvements in technology.

Here's an interesting HN post, "Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11736696 In that article is a statistic that three fourths of the square footage of Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930. If a freak hurricane somehow destroyed New York, we would be literally unable to rebuild it. For both cost and legal reasons.

Someday soon we might be like the later generations of Romans. Living amongst the great crumbling structures built by our ancestors. Wondering how on Earth they could have achieved such things.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#39

Post by thekevan »

dzdt wrote: post #25

The New York Department of Buildings response to this article (June 2016) : Skypicker presented the department with plans for a small, truck-mounted crane... However, when we inspected the Skypicker in use at a construction site, we found something significantly different: The crane was attached to a building slab, and appeared to be a hodgepodge of parts from other cranes, mounted on a homemade, untested base. http:…

True, but remember this is New York City.

In the original article, when the crane was first used on jobs and word got around about it being less expensive and required fewer operator man hours, his job sites were picketed by unions. There were anonymous calls to 311 reporting violations but when the inspectors got there, they didn't find anything wrong.

In my mind, I'm skeptical and it could have been the cranes or it could have been union influence.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#40

Post by xienze »

> The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 14-14B lays out the wage floor for its operators at $73.91 per hour. That’s $150,000 a year before overtime, plus benefits equal to $32.50 an hour. When the operator is behind the controls of a tower crane, he gets a $2-an-hour bump. On weekends, when cranes are moved, pay doubles. With overtime, many union members earn half a million dollars a year.

And they don't have to take their work home with them! Wow, I'm in the wrong line of work.

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