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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)

#41

Post by LordKano »

fiter wrote: post #34
VLM wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In principle, I agree with you but in practice, I so loathe the stink of waterless urinals that on the inside, I'm glad they did that.

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

#42

Post by kafkaesq »

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.

Except that there's no direct evidence of union shenanigans, in this case.

Yes, conceivably the DOB could be in backroom cahoots with Local 14-14B, and nixing the crane on stated grounds of structural design concerns -- whilst in reality having other motives. And not only "conceivably"; stuff like this happens in NYC all the time.

But we'd still need to see some actual evidence of such collusion, please; not just speculation (or arguments on the basis of "unions bad!", more or less)

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

#43

Post by RangerScience »

fiter wrote: post #34
VLM wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kiiiinnnnda. People make bad decisions, and the only architecture that matters is the one that lets you change. It's like the dig-once fiber policy for roadways, and is all part of the "don't build to peak value" idea; it's also like a usual problem with user interface design: if you only ever built user tools to do what you imagined, users (or later owners / tenants) are limited to your imagination.

I go to a gym in an office building; there are showers. Do you think the floor was built with anyone thinking: "Oh, one day there might be showers here!"? I worked at a company with a (big) 3d printer - we had to rinse part afterwards, and kinda managed to wedge the rinser into the (extra extra large) handicapped stall in the men's bathroom. Don't just build to what YOU can imagine, give people rope to make more things.

Running unused water lines [while it's cheap to do so] sounds like a good plan.

On the other hand, future proofing, and enough rope to hang yourself.

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

#44

Post by jlg23 »

LordKano wrote: post #41
fiter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In principle, I agree with you but in practice, I so loathe the stink of waterless urinals that on the inside, I'm glad they did that.

In principle, I agree with you, but in practice: Don't use my urinal if you don't like it.

Liberalism goes both ways.

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

#45

Post by jlg23 »

RangerScience wrote: post #35
atom-morgan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> The AI doesn't exist. People will make it.

But it will require much less people to build the AI. And that's the only relevant point when stepping into the investors' shoes.

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

#46

Post by wfo »

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.

Well, that's exactly the point. Just as corporations extract questionable value from society on behalf of their owning structure, unions extract questionable value from society on behalf of the workers. They are a similar-in-kind counterweight to corporate power, so it stands to reason they do similar things.

As it turns out in capitalism "extracting questionable value from society and taking it for yourself" is really the currency of power so an organization that doesn't do that is completely toothless and may as well not exist.

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

#47

Post by gnud »

Houshalter wrote: post #38

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…

And the answer, much as it was in ancient times: By exploiting workers - and often letting them die.

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

#48

Post by tyingq »

derefr wrote: post #28
tyingq wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're often guilty of the same sort of thing in IT. I've seen IT leaders go on witch-hunts for areas of a business solving their own small issues with Ms Access, FileMaker, etc. Or developers complaining about simple crud apps and their support being outsourced overseas.

The Access/Filemaker thing is frequently an "actual" problem at the enterprise level, because in large-enough companies, the concern isn't just "does it get the job done" but also: • Is the data being backed up? Is that backup process actually correct (i.e. if the backing data-store is a file on a SAN, and we perform filesystem-level snapshots of that SAN, can all the data actually be restored from such a snapshot, o…

I do get what you mean, but I assume a crane operator union has similar worries about this small crane and the potential safety, work rule, etc, issues. :)

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

#49

Post by ahoy »

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.

Union acts in it's member's interests: "Terrible, we shouldn't allow this".

Corporation acts in it's own interests: "Well you can't blame them for that".

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