181–190 of 221 posts
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One of China's more ambitious solutions to this was newly founded, planned metropolises where no major city had previously stood.
Aka the infamous ghost cities?
Maybe it's my Bay Area PTSD, but if too much housing is the worst problem in your society, I envy you and want to subscribe to your newsletter!
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Sometimes things really are that simple though. Why can you (most of the time) leave your bike outside a store you stop at in Japan but not in America? Because it isn't part of Japanese culture to take what doesn't belong to you, but is normal for a number of Americans. Why can you get relatively wholesome food at a 7-11 in East Asian countries while you get junk and trash at ones in America? Because Japanese people…
Would you steal a bicycle in Japan? I wouldn't and it has nothing to do with hand-wavy culture. The reason I would not touch the unlocked bicycle is because I know it is registered with the police. If I got stopped on that bicycle and they looked up the frame number then I would have some explaining to do. Even if I claimed it was mine I could still be prosecuted for not registering 'the change of ownership' with the…
I guess the people who stole my former startup's hardware prototypes and thousands of dollars of equipment didn't get the memo, nor did the professionals who broke into the bike lockers at a previous residence and stole thousands of dollars of bicycles.
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Would you steal a bicycle in Japan? I wouldn't and it has nothing to do with hand-wavy culture. The reason I would not touch the unlocked bicycle is because I know it is registered with the police. If I got stopped on that bicycle and they looked up the frame number then I would have some explaining to do. Even if I claimed it was mine I could still be prosecuted for not registering 'the change of ownership' with the…
Personally I believe that Americans are exceptionally unlikely to steal your stuff. I guess the people who stole my former startup's hardware prototypes and thousands of dollars of equipment didn't get the memo, nor did the professionals who broke into the bike lockers at a previous residence and stole thousands of dollars of bicycles.
Sorry to hear you have been a victim of crime, but are you sure the culprits were American?
Why blame a local when politicians always present an omnipotent and omnipresent foreign enemy?
The thieves could have been drug smuggling rapists that weren't stopped by a wall at the border. Or they could have been from Liverpool, where a sense of pride exists for being light fingered. I doubt they were true Scotsmen though.
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Aka the infamous ghost cities?
China has no shortage of people. These cities will fill up. Maybe it's my Bay Area PTSD, but if too much housing is the worst problem in your society, I envy you and want to subscribe to your newsletter!
I’ll match your Bay Area PTSD with my Beijing PTSD. The crazy thing is that even in Beijing there are lots of empty apartments (bought by speculators for flipping only who don’t want to renovate them so they can be rented out).
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Aka the infamous ghost cities?
Which would you rather have? A city that stands empty, ready for people to move in, or a city so full and restricted that people camp on the streets?
Contractors bid to deliver an inferior product, because working to deliver a superior product will hurt their profit margins, and they are insulated from the fallout as all blame will go to the transit agency and not whichever dime a dozen contractor failed the project. By relying on the contractor model, these agencies don't need to maintain a bulky labor pool, but in the process for every public dollar given to project labor, a portion gets withheld for that profit margin. Privatization is fundamentally inefficient and has no place in public works projects.
Public engineering should be the most powerful force in this country, and for a time it really was. Some of the brightest engineering minds in the world are trained in our public universities, and many end up contributing to projects that are a net negative to society, blinded by the private sector paycheck and the supposed prestige that brings. LA Metro complains that there is a labor shortage, yet they provide regional transit to Cal Tech, USC (though a private school), and UCLA, serving the labor pool they claim doesn't exist. Public infrastructure agencies need to do a much better job at recruiting from our constant output of talent and preventing these students from being wasted in the private sector, working hard and wasting their years for someone else's dollar.
LA Metro also complains about a labor shortage in a region where 60k live on the street. If this was 1930, those destitute people would be hired and trained to build infrastructure. But this is 2019, and we can't even build homeless shelters lest they tarnish our sweet sweet property values.
A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. A super-fancy new subway with lots of stations in Shenzhen where people weren't already taking trains and expecting to use stations for their daily commute will be much cheaper than disrupting a line service to open a new station in London or New York City. Replacement bus bridge services, network-wide servic…
> Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" does, in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US. This times a 1000. This is a huge factor that I think is missing. The market will just price in the labor required of all…
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I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat?
Money is really good at masking systemic problems (like government run by idiots, corruption, etc) because you can just throw money at wherever the problem rears it's head. I don't know if Chicago is more corrupt or they're just less able/willing to put up an expensive front of propriety. Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption…
I've been reading a lot about transit lately, and the one theme that seems to dominate cost and time overruns is reliance on contractors due to there being supposedly not enough labor. Contractors bid to deliver an inferior product, because working to deliver a superior product will hurt their profit margins, and they are insulated from the fallout as all blame will go to the transit agency and not whichever dime a d…
Kind of weird to use a picture of the East Side Access project in New York as the lede. New York is a whole different case from the rest of the country. We do know why infrastructure in New York is so absurdly expensive. Outright theft and fraud is a big culprit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... > The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as par…
The California High Speed Rail was also corruption. It's all over everywhere, because nobody is accountable for it, except the people over-charging, while simultaneously pointing out that they are taking all the liability when things go wrong (and someone actually tries to prosecute).