> The process promised to save the company six million dollars
What an absurd case of penny pinching.
The Leaning Tower of New York
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: The Leaning Tower of New York
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the Dyatlov threshold?
I think it is a reference to the Chernobyl mini-series, where the Dyatlov character responds to the news of the level of radioactive contamination as "Not great, not terrible", unaware that their measuring equipment is actually maxed out, hiding the true scale of the problem.
The Chernobyl mini-series is highly recommended. It is a classic example of how arrogance and stupidity are closely related. (Where stupidity is defines as knowing the correct thing to do, but ignoring the facts or available infomation.)
Re: The Leaning Tower of New York
#23Little trivia about... The other famous leaning tower. Pisa has a very soft soil, and there are other 2 leaning bell towers. One is even more tilted than the tower of Pisa. Although much smaller, its tilt is quite strong imho. https://www.pisatoday.it/cronaca/torri-pendenti-pisa.html The cathedral of Pisa is slightly leaning as well. If you look at the base just above the steps on its side facing the lawm, you can se…
Cookie consent in Italian threw me a bit. Accetta!?
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Re: The Leaning Tower of New York
#24The NYC ferry terminal on the east side of the financial district has a great view of this, and an even better view from the top deck of the ferry slightly out in the river when it gets going.
Re: The Leaning Tower of New York
#25Has any skyscraper actually just tipped over?
Are you not counting the Surfside (Miami) condo collapse? Also since it talked about the leaning tower of Pisa: the Civic tower in Pavia (1989) and original Campanile in Venice (1902), probably more examples like that.
At 12 floors, the Champlain Towers South in Surfside would generally not be considered a skyscraper.
Re: The Leaning Tower of New York
#26FYI: The Old (or Skew) Jan Cathedral in Delft, Netherlands ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oude_Kerk_(Delft) ) is off by slightly less than 2 meters. As it was built adjacent to a canal, and pile-driving technology didn't exists in the 14th century, it was built on layers of wood and cow skins that started rotting already during its building phase, causing the tower to lean from the get go -- curiously, its four pinn…
> off by slightly less than 2 meters
For that to be meaningful, you need the height as well, which is 75 meters (mentioned in the article).
So about 1.5 degrees off center.
(Just sharing because I was curious.)
Re: The Leaning Tower of New York
#27> The process promised to save the company six million dollars What an absurd case of penny pinching.
That was also my immediate thought. However, what was the chance that the method they did use would end up not working? If sufficiently low, from an EV perspective, perhaps they made the right choice? Also the article isn't clear to what extent the lean is responsible for the building not being finished.
Re: The Leaning Tower of New York
#28> The process promised to save the company six million dollars What an absurd case of penny pinching.
As someone in the medical device field, the concept of marketing/selling something before it exists is wild, explicitly illegal in the USA per the FDA. But here people have written checks for $400k off a sketch of a building. This causes 2 things:
1)enormous pressure to “ship it” on a less-than-ideal timeline.
2)the bean-counters’ perspective gets twisted since they got the “profits” up front, every additional dollar put into the building feels like it’s lost out of their pocket as opposed to the required investment to build the product.
Re: The Leaning Tower of New York
#29Assuming the neighbor to the north gave up air rights, could this be corrected with guy wires planted in the park one block away?
Makes me think a kerbal citybuilder game would be fun.
Re: The Leaning Tower of New York
#30> The process promised to save the company six million dollars What an absurd case of penny pinching.
That was also my immediate thought. However, what was the chance that the method they did use would end up not working? If sufficiently low, from an EV perspective, perhaps they made the right choice? Also the article isn't clear to what extent the lean is responsible for the building not being finished.
> If sufficiently low, from an EV perspective, perhaps they made the right choice?
They made the wrong choice. The thing about statistical probability is there’s eventually a right answer - a 1 in X chance collapses into an outcome. They may have made a defensible choice given what they knew at the time, but we now know it was the wrong one.
(That said, I doubt the choice was a good one at the time, either. Wikipedia notes the expected construction budget at $273M, so for ~2% of the cost of the project, they sank the whole thing.)