71–80 of 126 posts
Original story - http://www.sacbee.com/static/sinclair/sinclair.jquery/baybri... It's a pet peeve of mine when it's really a story about a story.
I had my hopes up this time since, after all, the URI contains the word "/static/"; but then I just realized it also appends the word "/sinclair.jquery/" later on...
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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.
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> 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.
I was recently involved in a bid for a government contract where we got perfect scores on all factors, but still lost the bid to a small company with little to no relevant experience, but who claimed they could to the job for a third of the price.
"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.
Having studied in China, and worked in construction, all I can say is that this smells, far and wide, like there was some kickback somewhere in this process. I'm guessing on the Chinese soil end of things. From first hand experience, I know it happens on American soil all the time as well, but, from what little I saw in 1999 the Chinese culture of kickback in China takes it to a whole new level. Also, can somebody ex…
"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…
What a fiasco. This story just keeps getting bigger and bigger. So many lessons to be learned about a flawed bidding and construction process. And from what I see, it's immune to politics. No party can take the higher ground. Public sector graft and private sector lying, cheating and thieving, both need to be stopped and big, small government, or running government like a business doesn't seem to help. Instead, worki…
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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…
I feel that the title is misleading. Caltrans faulted by practicing terrible project management. 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. Edit: for the benefit of those now arriving, the title and link have been changed.
> 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…
It seems like the author is trying to make the assertion that all sorts of poor decisions were made - it'd be helpful to have a comparison to other similar projects, in order to make that determination. Otherwise, these could be completely routine issues for all I know (as a layperson). If you took any software engineering project, and described it by detailing all the mistakes in isolation, it would look like a comp…
The whole thing was a mess http://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/12/5338065/supplier-of-bay-bri... The bolts made by an Ohio company broke and they maybe a danger to the bridge,