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Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

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Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#61

Post by dba7dba »

austinz wrote: post #26
literalusername wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. You apparently didn't read the article. "Caltrans employees and U.S. contractors who supervised the job lived fulltime in Shanghai, and top officials flew there often. Tony Anziano, toll bridge program manager, alone spent more than $300,000 on travel. "Part of that cost was for Anziano’s room at the five-star JW Marriott Shanghai Tomorrow Square for up to $470 per night, according to his expense reports.…

Do you think the citizens of countries such as Japan, Canada, and Turkey should be offended that their governments are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to 'foreign' companies in the U.S. for (e.g.) the F-35 fighter?

Let's stay on topic, shall we?

Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#62

Post by rdwallis »

reedlaw wrote: post #55
glesica wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the right attitude in my opinion. Wherever there is money to be made, be it public or private sector, thieves will show up with big smiles and sharp suits on. Consequences are the only thing they understand, and prison sentences are the only true consequences for white collar crime (fines just become a cost of doing business, the only thing you can't get back is time).

Unless the fines are 2-3 times the amount stolen. That would cut into the legitimate portion of their income and likely be a strong deterrent.

You have a very small chance of being caught if you ride the subway without a ticket. If you are caught some countries will work out what to fine you by multiplying the chance of being caught by the price of the ticket you didn't buy. So if they check your ticket once every 100 times you catch a train the fine for not having a ticket will be more than 100 times the cost of the ticket. That way not buying a ticket works out more expensive than buying one.

If you actually want to deter this kind of crime you need to fine the people who are caught the amount of money they stole multiplied by the number of people who don't get caught. So you should probably be thinking 20 or 30 times the amount stolen.

Of course such large fines might take entire industries down with them so you're unlikely to ever see corporate crime punished as excessively as it should be.

Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#63

Post by glesica »

reedlaw wrote: post #55
glesica wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the right attitude in my opinion. Wherever there is money to be made, be it public or private sector, thieves will show up with big smiles and sharp suits on. Consequences are the only thing they understand, and prison sentences are the only true consequences for white collar crime (fines just become a cost of doing business, the only thing you can't get back is time).

Unless the fines are 2-3 times the amount stolen. That would cut into the legitimate portion of their income and likely be a strong deterrent.

The problem is that you have to know how often they get caught in order to decide the amount. For example, if they only get caught 1/4 of the time, the fine needs to be greater than four times the amount stolen to make a difference (force the expected value of the behavior below zero). In practice, it would probably need to be quite a bit higher than that since people who do this sort of thing are likely risk-takers/gamblers.

So there are then two things you have to guess at. First, how often they get caught (which is difficult, but not impossible to estimate) and second, how far below zero the expected financial payoff must be to change the behavior.

You also have to figure out what happens when they don't have the money (or the money is well-hidden). Do they just go into some kind of negotiated payment schedule like people who lose lawsuits? That might have no impact at all since their illegal earnings are likely to be hidden from authorities anyway (or can be if needed).

This is why I favor prison, because a prison sentence is much harder to "cheat" or nullify. No one lives forever, so prison is like taking a small chunk of a precious commodity away from someone. Additionally, if you are a big earner, prison is actually worse for you in some ways because you generally lose your income while incarcerated. This means that even very rich people or people who hide their wealth from the authorities can be punished effectively with prison time.

Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#64

Post by _delirium »

vinhboy wrote: post #45

"As delays dragged on, Caltrans approved paying the contractors an additional $6.5 million to boost efficiency and quality, and to catalog the work." WTF... I know a lot of us here are contractors. Tell me the last time you got paid MORE because you weren't doing your job.

In troubled projects, where extra money comes from really depends on the structure of the contract and the parties' goals. In this case it sounds like the client is asking for specific things to be done that weren't in the original contract, and is offering to pay for them, because the client wants things done ASAP and thinks this will help get the project un-stuck.

The client could instead stick to the original contract and attempt to enforce any provisions in it about nonperformance/delays/etc. But that gives the client less ability to directly specify what measures to take now.

(This kind of thing happens in private-sector contracting also, e.g. in relationships between oil firms and platform maintenance companies.)

Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#65

Post by Someone »

div wrote: post #56
techsupporter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone underbids the next contractor by $250 million on a job they've never done before, you're supposed to politely laugh them out of the room. Most of the time, you can't, at least not for government projects. Because of procurement laws and rules (designed, among other things, to allegedly be transparent and to provide accountability), a government body is required to accept the lowest bid from the contracto…

Odd. I've been involved in a few government bidding processes in Europe, and detailing past projects was always a major part of what we'd get graded on.

Indeed. Typically, being able to build the thing is a requirement, and that is typically made objectively measurable by stating that you must have successfully built similar projects.

That has its downsides, too. A common complaint in the EU is that there is no way for small building companies to become large companies. Reason is that, to become a large company, you have to do large projects, and to get large projects, you have to have done large projects.

In the EU, when comparing offers, one doesn't have to pick the absolutely cheapest that meets the requirements, either. A slightly more expensive offer that more than meets the requirements (for example by having much less environmental impact, by requiring less closure time of a road, or by producing something that has lower maintenance costs) can windhover one that just meets the requirements.

Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#66

Post by jacquesm »

angersock wrote: post #44
ChuckFrank wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weld is really the key difference here. For welds to be structurally sound, and for them to work in the calculations that have been performed for the structural integrity of the structure, they have to meet a certain standard. These welds didn't. The company said that they themselves would state whether those standards were met. So this would be more akin to a computer chip manufacturer, where every Nth chip is f…

Yep. The big reason that the convenient approximations (lies) we use in mechanical and civil engineering work is that it is expected that the implementer of our designs (elaborate lies) doesn't use the wrong parts--there are exhaustive specifications on things as boring as bolts and threads and welds specifically to ensure that the behavior they exhibit is within the realm of what the designer expects. It's nice to s…

> It's nice to see software engineering practices being backported to more conservative and stagnant forms of engineering. 8)

Hehe, I had to read that three times before the coin dropped :)

Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#67

Post by bowlofpetunias »

vinhboy wrote: post #45

"As delays dragged on, Caltrans approved paying the contractors an additional $6.5 million to boost efficiency and quality, and to catalog the work." WTF... I know a lot of us here are contractors. Tell me the last time you got paid MORE because you weren't doing your job.

Any major IT consultancy company. Especially those working for the government.

But the modus operandus is standard even for small agencies.

You get to bid for a project. If your bid is anywhere near realistic, there's no way you'll ever get it, because the competition will bid way, way lower.

So you put in a bid that you know will never get the project completed and/or will reduce quality well below what will ever be acceptable. However, the contract will be full of loopholes that will allow you to get away with it. You know that once your in, and once the project is far enough along, the client will have no choice but to pay you extra to do what actually needed to be done in the first place.

No, the client is not getting screwed. Especially when it comes to governments and major corporations, everyone knows this is going to happen. It's just impossible to get the project started for anywhere near the real price tag.

But even on a smaller scale, for instance a web agency with a 20K project, if you put in an honest bid you'll either never get the job or be forced to build crap.

From web shopping carts to bridges, people don't value good engineering and planning. Or at least not until they are confronted with the results of bad engineering and planning.

So there's the original budget and there's reality, and an entire cult of rituals surrounding bridging the huge gap between the two. And it is this ritual in which people on both ends take a considerable percentage of the top, so all the decision makers are vested in keeping this ritual going despite all of the well publicized failures.

If you are a contractor and you're not getting at least 50% more out of a gig than the original contract, you're not playing the game very well.

Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#68

Post by wazoox »

aragot wrote: post #59
zaroth wrote: post #49

Love the pictures of the bridge. The scale is amazing. Wouldn't it be nice if these were projects we could be proud of? It is a little hard to understand how serious it all really is. It sounds like inspections were quite rigorous. Past half way down the article, there's two pictures, one of the internals of a box girder, and right below it, a 10mm crack in a tack weld. I mean, the scale differential of the two image…

I find there aren't enough incriminating pictures/infography in the article. This kind of technical detail only speaks to people with a mechanics background. For example, a pole will be much weaker if there is an abrupt section change in the middle, even if it's a bigger section. This is counter-intuitive until you learn what the forces look like in metal. Same goes for welding and cracks. Do you know what happens wh…

> Do you know what happens when a 19-ton propeller has a crack?

The story of these propellers is interesting. They were to be cast from a single piece of metal, and were precisely of the largest dimension fit for the largest metallurgy facility in France (because it's a top secret design, they had to be made in a domestic factory). However, the project was so delayed that the factory closed its doors several years before it to be able to build the propellers...

So another company got to build them, but they were so large that they had to cast them in several parts and weld them together instead of a single cast, which is apparently NOT best practice and hadn't been ever done before.

Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#69

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ChuckFrank wrote: post #29
manifesto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just searched on Delta.com. If you book a week ahead, the price for a round trip ticket in First/business class ranges from $6,000 to $11,000, so spending 10k in a month is "normal".

Why would you need to book a week ahead? And why would you go first/business class? It's a huge project, there's got to be scheduled client side meetings, and those should be scheduled months in advance.

If your time is valuable, avoiding the 1 or 2 days of downtime in economy can be worth it. Economy is just horrible on the 12 hour trip between that crosses the IDT. It's manageable, but if I had to do it very often even my company would start flipping for biz class (call it a humanitarian benefit to those that have to travel often).

Re: Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

#70

Post by User9812 »

vacri wrote: post #51
ChuckFrank wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need to book a week ahead? And why would you go first/business class? It's a huge project, there's got to be scheduled client side meetings, and those should be scheduled months in advance.

The answer to this question: "And why would you go first/business class?" Is this statement: "It's a huge project" Apart from getting far enough along in your career to be handling huge projects and therefore probably entitled to some cream, it also just doesn't make sense from a business point of view - save a few thousand on a flight, but the extra fatigue makes good decision-making harder. Put another way: who sho…

Agree on this one. I imagine they factored the prices of business class flights into their bid on the project. People that are higher up in any industry want a few perks. I can't imagine telling someone that's at the top in the industry you'll need to send them on 64 flights to Shanghai, in economy class. That's basically a form of torture, so you need to put them up in business class and a decent hotel, otherwise they'll be walking out the door.
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