31–40 of 210 posts
"At the very moment Merkel and her allies are hectoring the Greeks about their profligacy, the airport’s cost, borne by taxpayers, has tripled to €5.4 billion." So, which country does Germany want to borrow money from in order to cover the wasteful spending?
There is a joke in my country (Poland) about every little town needing: -an airport -an aquapark -a huge sport stadion All of them as a way to transfer some state/town money to political cronies. The sad part is that some of those make sense as an infrastructure improvement (most doesn't though, at least here) so it's easier to sell the idea to people. The way the business is done is to just pay 30%-50% more than it…
Bribe the inspectors and open up on time - then somehow patch the problem later. Everyone wins. That's what they would do in a lot of places in the world. If a German airport, with a huge budget, has 150.000 defects of which 85k are serious, then what about airports in other countries, which don't make use of the world-famous german high quality standards ? What about airports in countries were things are solved with…
World-famous german high quality standards were a thing fifty years ago, from my experience this is often not the case any more.
But I heard, big machines and weaponry are still export hits
But is it only BER? As mentioned int the article - what about Stuttgart 21 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21 ) etc.? It is possible that these sites exist as new financial "loopholes", transferring tax-money from the government to private contractors without much oversight.
But more generally, these kinds of megaprojects go over budget in nearly every part of the world -- especially when tunneling is involved. Here in the United States, two examples are Boston's "Big Dig" and Seattle's viaduct replacement.
Bribe the inspectors and open up on time - then somehow patch the problem later. Everyone wins. That's what they would do in a lot of places in the world. If a German airport, with a huge budget, has 150.000 defects of which 85k are serious, then what about airports in other countries, which don't make use of the world-famous german high quality standards ? What about airports in countries were things are solved with…
Building an airport always is. Often it takes more money and a few decades to appreciate it. D/FW airport was a nightmare when it was built but it's pretty nice today. Denver's airport had tons of issues as well. Then again this seems on a much higher level of disaster, but should be familiar to anyone building large government software systems.
Denver still has the issue that it's a 20 mile drive from downtown out of some misguided belief that the city was just going to instantly grow out to it.
They seem to completely miss the story about Imtech's involvement that broke this week which sheds some lights on this catastrophe and is a tale of corruption: http://www.zeit.de/2015/29/imtech-flughafen-berlin-ber-verzo... Unfortunately I'm unable to find an English-language article on that at all. There is only this Imtech response: http://imtech.com/EN/corporate/Newsroom/Highlights/Imtech-re...
As somebody from Berlin, I'm always happy when my hometown is on HN! Makes me feel proud.
and this: http://istderberschonfertig.de/