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Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

crainsnewyork.com

21–30 of 312 posts

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#21

This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

waterless ones are patented and without a water line you'd be locked in to higher priced products and/or have to spend a lot of extra money to run a new water line after the walls go up. Generally the situation with waterless ones is people endlessly social signal their green superiority about them, then the incredible stench makes them install real urinals. Even if only 5% or so install real urinals the net cost is still lower.

Its kind of like an electrician demanding a ground line be run to every outlet while someone who knows nothing about electricity demanding that ground wire almost never carries current therefore is a waste of money.

Perhaps a better analogy is its like adding another fiber optic strand, before or during the project the marginal cost is extremely cheap, after the project is complete its unimaginably expensive to add another strand after the dirt has gone back in the ditch.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#22

This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

And when people advocate for programmers unionizing, I don't see why we'd be any different. There'd be people employed doing X, a programmer would make something to automate X, and "our" union would be trying to save their job.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#23
post #19

This is interesting. That said for some reason I think that posts like this stray far from the purpose of a site like this as it is more of a general interest and not specific to startups or technology. I wonder if PG's 'anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' conflicts with his 'If they'd cover it on TV news' (where I assume TV news is actually broader than just what would be on TV news and includes it…

Hmm. I think it is a relevant post - given I worked at construction sites (as an excavator) and my granddad as an actual crane operator, I have a bit of background in the field ;)

Also, it's about legal blabla that is abused to protect certain classes of work from any disrutption by startups - just like the dozens of similar startup posts, only that this one is in the "non-digital" spsce.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#24
post #19

This is interesting. That said for some reason I think that posts like this stray far from the purpose of a site like this as it is more of a general interest and not specific to startups or technology. I wonder if PG's 'anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' conflicts with his 'If they'd cover it on TV news' (where I assume TV news is actually broader than just what would be on TV news and includes it…

This has everything to do with regulation, certification, union relations, etc., issues in some ways similar to what an AirBnB, Uber, or other tech company will deal with when introducing innovations or different business models.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#25
The New York Department of Buildings response to this article (June 2016) :

Skypicker presented the department with plans for a small, truck-mounted crane... However, when we inspected the Skypicker in use at a construction site, we found something significantly different: The crane was attached to a building slab, and appeared to be a hodgepodge of parts from other cranes, mounted on a homemade, untested base.

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160623/OPINION/160629...

And the inventor shoots back:

The executive director of the [Department of Buildings] Cranes and Derricks Unit when the Skypicker was approved emailed me that [Department of Buildings Commissioner] Chandler confused the Skypicker revocation with a ruling about an entirely different crane... He’s the one that’s misinformed.

http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his-side-...

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#26
post #9

tl;dr - It's like a crawler (mobile with a boom, street level crane) but you put it on top of something already there. Since its on top of something, it's not a "mobile" crane and couldn't get certified as one, however, it also didn't fit into the tower crane (tall, lifts things) certification. So it got stuck in between two classifications and as a result made it too hard for construction companies to bother includi…

Did we read the same article? You excluded what the current crane operator union was doing to prevent this thing from being used which seemed like the meat of the article to me.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#27
post #19

This is interesting. That said for some reason I think that posts like this stray far from the purpose of a site like this as it is more of a general interest and not specific to startups or technology. I wonder if PG's 'anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' conflicts with his 'If they'd cover it on TV news' (where I assume TV news is actually broader than just what would be on TV news and includes it…

This is arguably a story about a disruptive hardware play that's being hampered by legal troubles.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#28
post #18

This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

We're often guilty of the same sort of thing in IT. I've seen IT leaders go on witch-hunts for areas of a business solving their own small issues with Ms Access, FileMaker, etc. Or developers complaining about simple crud apps and their support being outsourced overseas.

The Access/Filemaker thing is frequently an "actual" problem at the enterprise level, because in large-enough companies, the concern isn't just "does it get the job done" but also:

• Is the data being backed up? Is that backup process actually correct (i.e. if the backing data-store is a file on a SAN, and we perform filesystem-level snapshots of that SAN, can all the data actually be restored from such a snapshot, or will it be partially corrupt?)

• For that matter, is there a documented process for restoring from such a backup, such that whoever's on the ops shift could do it if need be?

• Is the backing store transparent/auditable, esp. for compliance to our privacy policy—i.e., can we write an indexing agent to determine whether any Personally Identifiable Information is being stored, without needing to ask the software's ISV for their format spec?

• Can the backing store be locked down with ACLs such that getting access to the app's connection to its backing store as an unprivileged user, doesn't let them grab our entire database, or execute arbitrary storage changes (e.g. DROP TABLE)?

• Can audit-trail logic be installed in the backing store (rather than in the app layer by the ISV), so that we will know if some contractor takes a copy of the data home with them?

When your software speaks to a formal DBMS, all these questions have easy answers. When it manages its own little proprietary DB/file-format thing, they're up in the air.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#29

This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

That's an absurd generalisation. One thing like this happens every 20 years and people talk about it forever. But companies do shit like this constantly.

Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)

#30
post #25

The New York Department of Buildings response to this article (June 2016) : Skypicker presented the department with plans for a small, truck-mounted crane... However, when we inspected the Skypicker in use at a construction site, we found something significantly different: The crane was attached to a building slab, and appeared to be a hodgepodge of parts from other cranes, mounted on a homemade, untested base. http:…

An important piece of the story which was missing. Thanks for linking and summarizing.
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