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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

#171

Post by thomasz »

leroy_masochist wrote: post #149
smhg wrote: post #115

This reminds me of the immer funny David Zuelke explaining the difference between "North Germany" and "South Germany" to a group of non-Germans. It was at an after-phpDay drink a few years ago. According to him, you can find the famous German Gründlichkeit in The South, with The North being the exact opposite. He used the Berlin airport as an example: "it was an endless failure". This was in 2011 or 2012. I wonder ho…

Thank you -- I don't speak German, and have just added Gründlichkeit to the list of German words I love. It joins Fingerspitzengefühl, Fremdschämen, Weltschmertz, Sitzpinkler, and Fernweh. I really need to learn your language.

I love aufheben and Zug, which both have roughly a billion meanings. Btw, you might like "The Awful German" by Mark Twain.

http://usa.usembassy.de/classroom/Mark%20Twain/Mark%20Twain%...

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

#172

Post by sillygeese »

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 could pay $10 to get $100, wouldn't you do it? A bribe is an investment, and the tax money received in exchange is the ROI.

[1] I put "corruption" in quotes because it's just the system working as intended. If the system were actually corrupted, it would somehow start working for the masses' benefit instead.

Think about it. How do you benefit from someone else spending your money for you? Your money serves a means towards an end for whoever spends it, meaning he will be trying to benefit from spending it.

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

#173

Post by thomasz »

smhg wrote: post #115

This reminds me of the immer funny David Zuelke explaining the difference between "North Germany" and "South Germany" to a group of non-Germans. It was at an after-phpDay drink a few years ago. According to him, you can find the famous German Gründlichkeit in The South, with The North being the exact opposite. He used the Berlin airport as an example: "it was an endless failure". This was in 2011 or 2012. I wonder ho…

Bavaria is a dream come true for corrupt politicians and their cronies ("Spezlwirtschoft"), but at least there is not as much staggering incompetence. Still, I expect a major financial catastrophe if Munich ever gets the olympic games again.

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

#174

Post by x0054 »

hn9780470248775 wrote: post #162
spathi_fwiffo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDKSAS, but wouldn't a system like this (electrically powered venting) be prone to failure in an actual fire? If power fails with side/down venting, the smoke would have no where to go.

It does sound like a situation where "excessive cleverness" is being applied to an engineering problem, where a simple/robust/passive/failsafe solution may be available.

Having owned several German sports cars, I must say that "excessive cleverness" just might be a German trademark. When compared to the Corvette, the only American sports car I had, excessive, and largely unnecessary cleverness is very much prevalent in german designs.

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

#175

Post by icelancer »

blakeyrat wrote: post #107
CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexity of that project is extremely high. My cousin is a civil engineer in Stuttgart, and he showed me a cross-sectional diagram of the affected area and the number of considerations seemed intractably high to me. 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 D…

In the interests of being pedantic, and local pride: Seattle's viaduct replacement isn't over budget-- yet . It's extremely likely to go over budget, but don't count the chickens before they've hatched. The last budget review came to the conclusion that it's still possible to finish the project as budgeted and scheduled. http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/seattle/2015/04/23/ber...

>The last budget review came to the conclusion that it's still possible to finish the project as budgeted and scheduled.

They should open a betting market on these types of lines. I'd love to see the fair odds. I'd take out a second mortgage if I could bet "This project will go over budget" if it was even odds.

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

#176

Post by forrestthewoods »

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…

"How do you benefit from someone else spending your money for you?"

1. Economy of scale 2. I can get 5% on my own but they can get 8%. If he invests my money for me for 1.5% then we both prosper.

So there's at least 2 ways. There are more. Yes it's more complicated, but you asked and I answered.

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

#177

Post by Semaphor »

tinco wrote: post #153
brazzy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also suggest that these projects look like a Ponzi scheme: A project's loss is paid by doing even crazier projects. This seems to me to be the most interesting finding: the company was not doing all this illegal shit in a diabolical scheme to make the owners or management super rich (though they probably got some fat unwarranted bonuses over the years), but in desperate attempts to stave off bankruptcy. A bit…

One of the managers got fired for incompetence, then sued and won over a million euro for being fired without good reason. Yes, they got a little fat off of it..

At Imtech? Aren't you confusing it with Schwarz who worked for BER? Or did I miss something in the Die Zeit article?

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

#178

Post by D_Alex »

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.

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

#179

Post by RobertoG »

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…

"Think about it. How do you benefit from someone else spending your money for you?"

What is convenient and rational for an agent from the perspective of that agent could be not the more convenient action if all the other agents in the “game” take the same action at the same time.

In a sense, this is the root of the separation between microeconomics and macroeconomics.

In other words, you can benefit from somebody thinking with a global perspective. Of course, finding the incentives for that is a hard problem.

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

#180

Post by manarth »

anishkothari wrote: post #168

I didn't read the article (too long and it's late) but something caught my eye. If you keep scrolling down, you hit the next article and the URL changes. How did they do that? Kudos

It's a HTML5/JS thing - 'pushState'. If you search for that, you'll find plenty of resources explaining it in better detail than I can.
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