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How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

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Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#181

Post by dvdkhlng »

gerbal wrote: post #133
sliverstorm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find how well that works is directly related to how closely related English is to the language in question. The further you get from its Germanic and Latin roots, the proportionally less sense a rough translation makes. Some of that is figures of speech, some of it is colloquialisms, some of it is just weird grammar. For example, Japanese tends to omit the subject, which is incredibly confusing when directly transl…

Germany newspapers apparently use weird grammar conventions that makes translation engines have fits. Google Translate is pretty good on german conversations, anything the EU publishes, and literature, but is really terrible at newspapers. The translation of the above article is pretty good because a number of people have looked at it and made corrections, but the average German Newspaper article translation is nearl…

> Google Translate is pretty good on german conversations, anything the EU publishes, and literature, but is really terrible at newspapers.

AFAIK Google translate is trained by using corpora of documents that have known-good translations. I could imagine that they are trained using EU documents, as these would usually be available in multiple languages. That would explain why performance on stuff published by the EU is so good...

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#182

Post by yitchelle »

raverbashing wrote: post #33
bluecalm wrote: post #15

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…

That's for the Amateurs, Professionals do a whole World Cup

Interestingly, it seems that big sporting events that seems to make any money are those where you don't have to be "voted" to host the event. Think Wimbledon, Marathons, FA Cup finals etc.

Sporting events like the F1 Grand Prix, FIFA world cups and Olympics etc seems to be full of loss making money stories for the hosts, but its organisation company seems to do quite well out of it.

This is just a casual observation, and I could be totally wrong.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#183

Post by manarth »

philippnagel wrote: post #60
x0rg wrote: post #56

This is what happens with many software projects following crazy customers and waterfall approaches. Clearly we never speak about 6 billion, but hey, shit happens...

Can you develop a big infrastructure project using agile methodologies?

The idea of agile is to launch early, then iterate new features once you've seen how the existing features are performing in production.

Essentially, you'd need to establish the MVP for an airport. An airport without a runway would be useless. How about an airport with baggage conveyor belts? OK, we could manually carry the bags until we've established what desks are busy, how many bags we're carrying, etc. How about shops? Well, maybe the cafés are more important, so lets build those first, and add duty-free shops later. But in other airports, the duty-free shops generate more profit, so maybe those should go first, and then you get a conflict of users needs vs organisational needs.

Most big infrastructure projects are just that - big - because the cost of breaking them down into smaller projects and iterating would be massively more expensive.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#184

Post by wycx »

sjwright wrote: post #145
wycx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Australia we have found even more egregious ways of transferring money for failed transport infrastructure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_West_Link,_Melbourne

In summary: sign $5b contracts for a highly politicized white elephant just weeks before a scheduled election where the government will be booted out of office.

...and write into that contract compensation worth $100s of millions of dollars if a later goverment decides to cancel the project. Also, fail to release the unfavourable cost-benefit analysis.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#185

Post by sd8f9iu »

sillygeese wrote: post #172

If you're in a position to hand out $5B of other people's money, do you think some people might want to bribe you to get it? What if you can only hand out $1M? Will someone still want to bribe you? -Of course, but he'll be a "smaller player" then. All public spending involves some sort of "corruption" [1] because it's always other people's money being spent, and there's always someone in charge of spending it. If you…

> All public spending involves some sort of "corruption" [1] because it's always other people's money being spent, and there's always someone in charge of spending it.

In an ideal democratic system, opposing parties would seek to expose corruption in public officials and use it to their advantage, thereby dis-incentivizing the misappropriation of public funds. Obviously no democracy is perfectly ideal, but your armchair analysis hasn't exactly blown a hole in modern governing theory.

In any event, this article specifically makes the airport's woes out to be more of mismanagement than corruption, and you haven't linked to anything else in your response.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#186

Post by eru »

gerbal wrote: post #133
sliverstorm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find how well that works is directly related to how closely related English is to the language in question. The further you get from its Germanic and Latin roots, the proportionally less sense a rough translation makes. Some of that is figures of speech, some of it is colloquialisms, some of it is just weird grammar. For example, Japanese tends to omit the subject, which is incredibly confusing when directly transl…

Germany newspapers apparently use weird grammar conventions that makes translation engines have fits. Google Translate is pretty good on german conversations, anything the EU publishes, and literature, but is really terrible at newspapers. The translation of the above article is pretty good because a number of people have looked at it and made corrections, but the average German Newspaper article translation is nearl…

> anything the EU publishes, [...]

Google Translate grew up on EU parliamentary publications.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#187

Post by thaumasiotes »

D_Alex wrote: post #178
sillygeese wrote: post #172

If you're in a position to hand out $5B of other people's money, do you think some people might want to bribe you to get it? What if you can only hand out $1M? Will someone still want to bribe you? -Of course, but he'll be a "smaller player" then. All public spending involves some sort of "corruption" [1] because it's always other people's money being spent, and there's always someone in charge of spending it. If you…

> If you could pay $10 to get $100, wouldn't you do it? Certainly not, if the $10 is a bribe. Would you? > A bribe is an investment... No, it is a criminal offence, in most places. And for good reason. Corruption does horrible things to the economy.

>> A bribe is an investment

> No, it is a criminal offence, in most places.

You say that like criminal offences can't be investments.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#188

Post by eru »

uqbartlon wrote: post #144
sliverstorm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find how well that works is directly related to how closely related English is to the language in question. The further you get from its Germanic and Latin roots, the proportionally less sense a rough translation makes. Some of that is figures of speech, some of it is colloquialisms, some of it is just weird grammar. For example, Japanese tends to omit the subject, which is incredibly confusing when directly transl…

I think german grammar is really diferent from english. For example they make a sandwich with verbs. For example: I have been in Berlin. vs I have in Berlin been. Its not the exact translation and maybe theres a beter example but its the idea. Ich bin in berlin gewessen. There is also all the declinations. But yeah its noy japanese.

Humans should be able to mostly understand word-for-word literal translations between English and German (in both directions).

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#189

Post by odabaxok »

bluecalm wrote: post #15

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…

Ohh.. take a look at the home town of the Hungarian prime minister:

https://goo.gl/maps/JXK9w

The town has a population about 1700, the stadium on the map has capacity for 4500.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#190

Post by allendoerfer »

losername wrote: post #114
allendoerfer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Germany does not need to, as it has a balanced budget: http://www.wsj.com/articles/german-government-achieves-balan...

The calculation probably includes new debt and projected repayment options, e.g. a rising growth factor, so it's not to be taken as fact.

It is about 2014, how can it include projected repayment options?
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