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The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

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Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#181

Post by kevinnk »

pikzen wrote: post #153
Dirlewanger wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>campaign finance reform, perhaps? Abso-fucking-lutely. I think in order to run at any levels of office, you should be using public money. For simplification, let's say if one wants to run for president, they can only use whatever is in the FEC public coffers. In return, we levy a federal FEC tax to boost it way higher than its current rates. We replicate a similar tax at state and local levels. Completely remove pri…

Or do like every sensible country does, cap individual donations, forbid companies from donating, create a government entity whose goal is to ensure donations are respecting those rules, candidates having to deliver their list of donors to said entity. Make it actually illegal to get private money from PACs and other complex setups. And eventually reimburse part of the campaign past a certain percentage of votes. But…

Almost all of those things are already implemented in the US.

> cap individual donations

Direct contribution cap for individuals is $2,700

> forbid companies from donating

Direct contributions are not allowed, although PACs can give up to $5000.

> create a government entity whose goal is to ensure donations are respecting those rules

Aka the FEC

> candidates having to deliver their list of donors to said entity

Already required for federal elections, also candidates must detail how they spent the money as well.

> Make it actually illegal to get private money from PACs and other complex setups.

PACs aren't complicated and for the most part are a positive step towards fair elections (that's why they were created in the first place).

> And eventually reimburse part of the campaign past a certain percentage of votes.

Federal elections already have public funding and the system in place is much better than reimbursement after the election.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#182

Post by Mz »

mason240 wrote: post #177
Mz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave. From what I have read, Millenials are putting noteworthy pressure on this aspect of American culture. Also, I gave up my car years ago. With the magic of the internet, I work online. I mostly walk everywhere and occasionally take public transit. I think we can change this substantially…

You're free to live how you choose, but don't force others to live how you see fit.

I don't see where you get the idea that I am doing anything or have any goal to force anyone to do anything. That seems like a huge and unwarranted leap of logic.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#183

Post by lghh »

Mz wrote: post #173
deanCommie wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, having moved to Western Europe, I get the sense that this is the major factor as well. If I walk down the street and there is a group of workers excavating a road, there's a lot more of a relaxed attitude about fencing, walking underneath construction equipment, etc. After all - use your common sense - don't fall into the hole. If you do, isn't it kind of your own fault? Nobody's going to sue anybody. Ad…

And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave. From what I have read, Millenials are putting noteworthy pressure on this aspect of American culture. Also, I gave up my car years ago. With the magic of the internet, I work online. I mostly walk everywhere and occasionally take public transit. I think we can change this substantially…

> With the magic of the internet, I work online

Which is great for us developers, but not so much for most service industry workers.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#184

Post by Mz »

lghh wrote: post #183
Mz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave. From what I have read, Millenials are putting noteworthy pressure on this aspect of American culture. Also, I gave up my car years ago. With the magic of the internet, I work online. I mostly walk everywhere and occasionally take public transit. I think we can change this substantially…

> With the magic of the internet, I work online Which is great for us developers, but not so much for most service industry workers.

I'm not a developer. You can have an HN account without being a developer.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#185

Post by jaclaz »

truxus wrote: post #150

Am also a design engineer, I specialize in water and wastewater works. My clients are all municipalities, with tight budget and politics are a factor. Engineering productivity has climbed thanks to computers, but construction productivity continues to decline. In my experience on small jobs this has a lot to do with safety and regulations. It takes a team of 2-3 to enter confined spaces (manholes) for momentary inspe…

I have no experience building infrastructures in the US, but I have some in Europe, working in construction companies.

I will give you some (sparse, 1 every 10 years) datapoints:

1983 - 2 or 3 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation

1993 - 6 to 8 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation

2003 - 12 to 20 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation

2013 - 16 to 24 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation

And of course this increase of copies is due to the increase in permissions/authorizations/approvals/checks needed and due to "stricter" (actually only more complex) construction codes and changed calculation methods I would say that the number of documents (before making the copies) has increased by 1.5x every ten years, i.e. something that was built on 1,000 drawings/documents in 1983 was built in 2013 on the basis of more than 3,000.

The number of people involved (not labour, but management, engineers, surveyors, technicians, etc.) need also to be multiplied by a factor of 3 2013 vs. 1983.

The actual production (thanks to a few computer-related innovations and the availability of better, bigger machines) has increased, but all in all you do the same amount of work with less people (labour) and lots of people looking at what the workers are doing.

This is a classic meme, but is not that much far from reality: https://web.archive.org/web/20131005125257/http://ajotube.it...

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#186

Post by tashi »

jboggan wrote: post #82
noonespecial wrote: post #51

I thought about this when I visited the Hoover Dam. The audacity of the thing and sheer impossibility of doing anything remotely like it in today's America makes it seem like a relic from an ancient civilization. It felt like visiting the pyramids in Egypt.

Hypothesis: nicotine is a nootropic [0] good for say, 6 IQ points on average (Danish study I saw referenced, not linking unless I can find the original paper). The Hoover Dam and many other great infrastructure projects were created in the earlier 20th century when smoking was pervasive. Perhaps we were somewhat smarter in aggregate back then and that's why we can't engineer infrastructure at the same level anymore.…

That's an interesting theory, but the Flynn effect raised IQ scores way more over the same time period. But if it makes you feel better, I still see a lot of people smoking on construction sites, so builders may be keeping the flame alive, so to speak.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#187

Post by goodcanadian »

davidw wrote: post #64
beat wrote: post #18

This reflects in health care as well. American health care costs about twice as much as it does in every other first-world nation. Those systems run the gamut from fully socialist to mostly privatized, but they all share a common feature - they provide universal coverage at half the cost of the American system. That says there's something uniquely broken in our model. Infrastructure? Same thing. There's something dis…

> mostly privatized Where's that?

Switzerland might be a good example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland):

Healthcare in Switzerland is universal and is regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#188

Post by pseudonom- »

michaelt wrote: post #12

That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency [...] Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. There's a general effect in political systems, that if a law takes $20 from 1,000,000 people and gives $100,000 to 200 people, the people who lose money won't have enough incentive to put up a big fight;…

This is a central idea in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Acti... .

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#189

Post by phil21 »

mason240 wrote: post #177
Mz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave. From what I have read, Millenials are putting noteworthy pressure on this aspect of American culture. Also, I gave up my car years ago. With the magic of the internet, I work online. I mostly walk everywhere and occasionally take public transit. I think we can change this substantially…

You're free to live how you choose, but don't force others to live how you see fit.

Exactly. Folks who prefer public transit have been forced to live in car culture by folks who fund roads at the expense of pretty much every other form of transportation. In many cases very unethically so.

Due to the societal and environmental effects, I think it's pretty clear roads should be in no way subsidized like they currently are. If the "suburbs" had to carry their full economic costs, they would be unaffordable.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#190

Post by rosser »

imgabe wrote: post #80

I don't know the answers, but as someone who works in the industry (on the design side). I think a big unmentioned factor is probably liability and the prospect of litigation. If you look at old blueprints for projects in the past, they are a LOT less detailed. They had to be, because it was physically more difficult to produce them since they had to be drawn by hand. A lot was left to the contractor to figure out in…

> I think a big unmentioned factor is probably liability and the prospect of litigation.

There was an article shared to HN some time ago arguing that the kinds of cost overruns that we see so often on infrastructure projects in the US are almost endemic to common-law countries, and radically less prevalent in civil-law countries.

I haven't been able to find that article again, but its conclusion has come up in many similar discussions since.

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