201–210 of 248 posts
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In Britain you can be based in any other country and still get a fair hearing in the courts, even if you are claiming against a British business. I'm not aware of anywhere else in the World where this is the case.
> I'm not aware of anywhere else in the World where this is the case. Have you even looked? How about Singapore? Or even Switzerland or Germany?
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US does plenty of large construction projects without major issue. One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s. It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from mo…
The design should have added time (since is was a new thing and thus who knows how long before they can design something that works - this may require building labs to simulate things in). Everything else should just be a month extra. There is more to do not, but you can put the AC in on lower floors while placing beams for upper floors. Plus we have a lot of automation that has been made before this, so a lot of lab…
Part of this is tall buildings simply run into issues with workforce sizes. The same happens for developers building thousands of single family homes run into similar issues. They can build individual homes vastly faster than they can finish a large subdivision.
Elevators are also a bottleneck etc.
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Could you explain what you mean by "people can just leave". Because this isn't really a realistic option for a majority of people.
It's really annoying that HN has resorted to the same hivemind behaviour as Reddit. You're asking a reasonable question, because you didn't follow, and you're greyed-out from downvotes. If someone has a bad take, downvote them. If someone doesn't understand, but wants to, either upvote or don't vote. It's really that simple.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you explain what you mean by "people can just leave". Because this isn't really a realistic option for a majority of people.
It's really annoying that HN has resorted to the same hivemind behaviour as Reddit. You're asking a reasonable question, because you didn't follow, and you're greyed-out from downvotes. If someone has a bad take, downvote them. If someone doesn't understand, but wants to, either upvote or don't vote. It's really that simple.
Ironically, this is the most reddit sentence I’ve ever read.
To add more substance and avoid be-redditting this thread even further: I think the crucial difference in a good forum culture is that “bad takes” aren’t reflexively buried - they’re dismantled, disproven, and alternatives are submitted. That way anyone else with similar “bad takes” is guided to a better POV. This is actually productive.
Downvotes are for irrelevant material, which isn’t productive.
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Sure, but wages + census makes a difference. The NY Times did a comparison of the construction of the 2nd avenue subway project after the governor took the 5th or 6th victory lap. As I recall, the TBM used in NYC was “mannned” by 5x more workers than an identical machine in Paris. We’re talking like 50 people. France isn’t known for labor efficiency, but between the various labor agreements, minority/women owned empl…
Transit Costs' full analysis ( https://transitcosts.com/executive_summary/ ) decomposed the 2nd avenue subway costs into - station sizes (causing spend on stations to increase by a factor of 2) - nonstandard systems (elevators, escalators, etc) (causing an increase over nominal best practices of approximately 1.35) - inefficient procurement (how contracting works) (increase by a factor of 1.85, although this is a squ…
Which is what I said, the difference in labor costs "helps", not that it's the sole explanation.
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Interestingly, in situations where a bad roll of the monarchy dice isn't a big deal because people can just leave, dictatorship tends to become the preferred form of government. See for example open source projects with their BDFL; if you have a bad BDFL the project gets forked with new leadership. Another example are small to medium sized businesses, where customers and employees can just go elsewhere if the CEO tur…
I saw this effect directly in Eve Online. In the early days there was a lot of experimenting with how exactly to organize these large groups of players. Some groups tried democracy of some flavor or another, others dictatorship. Dictatorship easily won out in the end. Most "dictators" in Eve actually end up being pretty good at their job, because it is a cutthroat market, and the most precious currency is players wil…
Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete. For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simp…
> It's easy to criticize process, but many of the rules were written in blood with the best of intentions. Respectfully, we already know this part. It's at the top of every single thread like this. The more important questions are: * Are all of these rules still necessary? * Are any of these rules more obstructive than beneficial? * Could any of these rules be refactored for a better benefit to obstruction ratio? The…
Isn't the point of the U.S. checks and balance system that it's basically impossible to 'fix' 'bad rules' that are viewed as beneficial by at least a quarter of the population?
Regardless of how 'bad' it's considered by the majority?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Britain you can be based in any other country and still get a fair hearing in the courts, even if you are claiming against a British business. I'm not aware of anywhere else in the World where this is the case.
> I'm not aware of anywhere else in the World where this is the case. Have you even looked? How about Singapore? Or even Switzerland or Germany?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m pretty sure he’s aware of which country Copenhagen is in but was simply pointing out as an example a much harder large, complex project in a dense urban environment built in far less time. The key thing to understand is that while other countries have some boondoggles, the United States does almost nothing else despite spending massive amounts of money. The Purple Line mentioned was ostensibly going to be cheaper…
US does plenty of large construction projects without major issue. One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s. It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from mo…
WTC did not have anything like that to worry about and an exceptional level of political will to keep it on schedule.