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Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

economist.com

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Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#111

Post by notch898a »

tablespoon wrote: post #94

Libertarians: this is why we have building codes. We don't need builders cutting corners and harming people years down the road, because profit convinced them that was the right thing to do for their own interests.

Why were the people living in that house so greedy that they cheeped out on buying/renting housing? There is soundly built housing in Turkey. If they were rich enough to buy sturdier housing then they could have done that.

I'm not pointing this out to blame those people in any way, but it may be legitimately they can't afford better housing and this is the best they could do and the risk of dying in an earthquake was better than their alternatives. Maybe sturdier housing everywhere would mean some those people would have been dead long ago from exposure.

Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#112

Post by mrlonglong »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #68
jl6 wrote: post #7

It’s not surprising at all that the lack of accountability goes right to the top, and it’s tragic that it takes an earthquake to expose the corruption. But Turkey is far from the only country with a corrupt, ticking-time-bomb of construction and infrastructure quality issues. Pretty much every low-to-middle income country has taken the semi-rational approach of cutting corners in order to do more with less. And the h…

Indeed - you just need to look at the UK cladding scandal to see this. I mean ffs: In the 1980s, the Conservative Government introduced its Deregulation Initiative; in consequence, the Building Act 1984 reduced building regulations from 306 pages to 24. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_cladding_crisis

Indeed, apartment owners are facing millions in costs to put things right. That's not right, it should be on the developers who took advantage of this.

Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#113

Post by dsfyu404ed »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #19
mabbo wrote: post #10

My wife has worked in the 'enforcing building codes' sector of engineering for her entire career. And it's so frustrating to watch. Everyone - everyone - is certain that the codes are all overzealous and their little thing needs an exception. Politicians get elected promising to 'get rid of the red tape'. And then an event occurs and we learn why these building codes exist. Like workplace safety rules, they are writt…

Seems like it'd be smart to have a footnote or reference to the tragedy that informed the code on each section instead of allowing everything to be forgotten every couple years

The problem is that a hell of a lot of your foot notes are going to be "we want X but X is subjective so we're going to force you to do Y which can be objectively measured using Z, nobody has died or got injured yet but doing it this way prevents us from having any responsibility for judgement calls"

If the code says no more than two wires under a staple you'll still have the intended effect if you put two small wires and one big one under a staple sized for the big one. But that requires judgement to get right so they just say two wires only.

Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#114

Post by cguess »

soperj wrote: post #85
RetpolineDrama wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that is kind of the _ultimate_ goal isn't it? -Vaccinate the population, eliminate the disease in humans -Eliminate the disease in any of its natural reservoirs Once you're certain it's gone why continue vaccination? There's cost to that and those resources can then be dedicated to "active" diseases (perhaps with the instructions for that vaccine archived somehow).

Polio isn't eliminated though. Measles especially is nuts to skip. We don't vaccinate for smallpox because it has been eliminated.

And if you're in the military you do get vaccinated for smallpox still.

Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#115

Post by MyneOutside »

cm2187 wrote: post #92
commandlinefan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's so frustrating I feel the same way developing software - the only thing that ever matters, and has ever mattered (at least since I started developing software in 1992) is "meeting the date". Whatever corners can be cut to make the date are cut, and then the thing breaks in fairly predictable ways because corners were cut. It's maddeningly infuriating and I'm not even dealing with people's lives here. I can't e…

Not sure what you are equating this to in software, but if it is security vulnerabilities, incompetence has probably more to do with it than time pressure. It takes about the time to write a parametrised query than to concatenate your strings.

Depends on what you are building. Websites probably not going to kill you. Other things well...

https://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-ther...

"AECL never publicly released the source code, but several experts including [Nancy Leveson] did obtain access for the investigation. What they found was shocking. The software appeared to have been written by a programmer with little experience coding for real-time systems. There were few comments, and no proof that any timing analysis had been performed. According to AECL, a single programmer had written the software based upon the Therac-6 and 20 code. However, this programmer no longer worked for the company, and could not be found.'

Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#116

Post by tablespoon »

gruez wrote: post #100
GalenErso wrote: post #4

In a twist of fate, the Chamber of Civil Engineers building is one of the few that withstood the quake. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/10yw2...

>is one of the few that withstood the quake. but in that picture, you can plainly see a bunch of other buildings in the background that also have "withstood" the quake?

> but in that picture, you can plainly see a bunch of other buildings in the background that also have "withstood" the quake?

Well the OP title is actually "...with almost no damage," which is not something you could tell from a distance in picture. Also, presumably, not every building in town failed to follow the building codes.

But in any case, that's nitpicking that misses the point: a building which presumably closely followed the building codes got through with little to no damage.

Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#117

Post by fragmede »

ornornor wrote: post #101
cm2187 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you are equating this to in software, but if it is security vulnerabilities, incompetence has probably more to do with it than time pressure. It takes about the time to write a parametrised query than to concatenate your strings.

The corners that are cut are often around automated testing, security, best practices. And it adds up, so if nothing is done right then it’s faster to keep doing it wrong than rearchitect or abstract everything so you can have a clean implementation. Honestly, I haven’t been working that long (about a decade) but this general attitude from PHBs calling the shots in software makes me count the months until I can retir…

I don't know your situation, but I'd encourage you to find one that isn't "soul sucking" that you can actually live with. Life's too short to spend it in a job you hate, especially if you have an in demand skillset.

Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#118

Post by hammock »

mabbo wrote: post #10

My wife has worked in the 'enforcing building codes' sector of engineering for her entire career. And it's so frustrating to watch. Everyone - everyone - is certain that the codes are all overzealous and their little thing needs an exception. Politicians get elected promising to 'get rid of the red tape'. And then an event occurs and we learn why these building codes exist. Like workplace safety rules, they are writt…

>Everyone - everyone - is certain that the codes are all overzealous and their little thing needs an exception. Politicians get elected promising to 'get rid of the red tape'. And then an event occurs and we learn why these building codes exist. Like workplace safety rules, they are written in the blood of the dead.

Can't it be both? A more restrictive code does not solve the problem of construction scams. Enforcing a useful code, might

Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#119

Post by nerpderp82 »

flavius29663 wrote: post #105
marcosdumay wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the code is always overzealous (never met an exception), and the smaller the house the more overzealous it is. If it wasn't, we would have a much easier time persecuting people that breaks it, and much more public sympathy for large culprits that actually have much fewer (relatively to their capacity) strings over then than any random person. The same applies to fire codes.

> The same applies to fire codes. As someone who has been close to almost-tragedies caused by fires, can you give me examples where fire codes are over-zealous? I've had family almost getting killed, even though they did follow the fire codes - the didn't even get a fine or a case against them. If you ask me, the fire codes were not strict enough in that instance.

Almost every city has a "the fire of XXXX", those no longer occur for a reason. And to state the obvious, that reason is fire codes.

Re: Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

#120

Post by wantsanagent »

moralestapia wrote: post #74
kerpotgh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well New York isn’t on an active fault line. I think California would fare pretty well, as much as can be expected after the big one.

>as much as can be expected after the big one It blows my mind to think that at some point in history the world's 2nd largest metro center (by GDP) is going to become rubble, and everyone knows about it, and we know it will happen for sure but there's not much that could be done but wait and see.

We don't know it will happen. The release of seismic stress can happen in many ways and we don't know enough to know anything for sure. A series of 7 or 8 quakes over a decade could relieve identified stresses to the point where a 9+ is put off for another 100+ years. After that even if statistically you can expect a major event "at some point" in the future, the damage from that event decreases with time as our building methods improve. Even today buildings are being built (in Tokyo) going up designed to withstand a 9.0 quake.
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