He said of course they can finish, they have an entire week. Apparently he was incredulous. How does that NOT point to a week being more than enough time?
A Chinese construction company built a 10-story building in a day, and a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days.
I am not sure what "union break" is in Chinese...I would brush up.
You can say that we need experts, teams of consultants to issue reports at $1,000 per hour on disturbances to the local newt population or whatever, we need to pay off the bureaucrats in planning, we need to pay the unions and organized crime in NY...the reality is that someone has to pay this, and the US isn't efficient anymore. Layers of graft at every stage. China has just cut out the corruption, and they can sell the same goods at half the price, make double the profit...they just do it better.
For the record, yeah, I’ve worked on putting up multiple skyscrapers. From the on-site work (physically speaking: I was a field surveyor laying out grid lines and offsets for the other trades), and off-site (as a construction project manager).
Hey that’s great to see a construction manager on here. I write software specifically for our superintendents and construction managers and foremen at some of the mega projects my big construction company works on (I’m sure you’d recognize the name if you’ve worked in the industry).
I find it really rewarding work because with software I often feel detached from the work I do. I’m going to get to go on site and see something getting built soon and I’m excited!
> Let's get this straight: you haven't worked on the construction of a skyscraper, but you just go around shutting down arguments you don't like
Where do they say that?
> The reason why it can be done quicker and cheaper is because that is already happening
Have we seen any evidence that the construction is just as consistent & reliable long term or that the speed isn't at the cost of the worker (safety or benefits)?
I will ask you a question: you go into the doctor, he says you need surgery immediately, you ask why, and your doctor asks what your medical qualifications are...does this seem like something a doctor would do?
Have we seen any evidence that this isn't the case? And the inherent assumption in your argument is that preserving "the worker" (I am not sure what this means) is a fair price to pay for hundreds of billions in graft every year...okay, why? The point of comment is to demonstrate that the purpose of building infrastructure is not to employ consultants, but to build buildings...the false narrative about "the worker" is exactly why several hundred consultants with Ivy League degrees are taking home $1k/hour for no-show consultancy jobs...thank God "the worker" is okay though.
Buildings collapse in the US too. And it actually results in buildings get built.
You think the US isn't corrupt: how many consultants are taking their piece? The contractors, planning bureaucrats, the environmental consultants, architects, lawyers...it is endemic. At least in China you only need to pay off a few people, in the US you need to pay tens of thousands of consultants whose have acquired this role of tax collector through collecting various bits of paper from corrupt institutions (thank god for legacy admissions, right?).
No-one cares how sausage is made, they just want to know how it tastes. Chinese corruption gets things done. US corruption breeds more weakness, more waste, more corruption.
The US vs the entire developing world? LOL, of course there are going to be more in the developing world, since that covers most of the habitable parts of the planet.
Citation needed…or not. It’s an obtuse claim on its face.
I’d argue corruption is an inherently corrosive influence, and the necessarily large bureaucratic apparatuses involved with things like large construction projects are particularly vulnerable to corruption.
I'd cut the country stereotypes out of the picture, but there's definitely more than one kind of corruption, and the kind of damage it does changes.
You are absolutely correct that large construction projects are very vulnerable to corruption: Anything that has as high a budget is going to be rife with opportunities. But a project's culture will alter the kind of corruption you get. I was quite close to the construction of bridge spanning over a river, a little under a mile wide. Significant slippage in the delivery date was going to be very annoying to the powers that be: Being able to finish the construction prior to the next election was important, and being seen as the cause for a delay was going to lead to losing more projects that some of the very same people were going to keep overseeing in the future. So the bridge was done on time. It's just that a lot of palms got greased, and extra 'cement money' really went into things it shouldn't. For instance, the bridge's main engineer had just bought a derelict house that was completely restored by 'elves', from the construction company.
Sometimes the fact that something took 4 years too long is tolerable to the powers that be, while the construction definitely remains safe. Other times, the construction is just going to prove really faulty in 15 years, because things didn't go over budget, and someone took the difference between what the spec called for, and what could possibly appear to be a completed project.
Same with permitting. In some cities, corruption means you don't let people build something because you don't want it. In others, the mayor tells their friends to buy land zoned for low density, and then rezones to let them build 20 story buildings, making a mint. Still corruption, but different parts of a project suffer the consequences.
Only truly cursed projects manage to take 4 times as long, 20 times the costs, and end up with something awful in the end.
Are you aware of how much building China has had to do? There is no citation needed, you just look at the what they have done already. They have built so much that mining companies have had invest hundreds of billions into single-resource mines to meet demand, they have already had one of the most successful infrastructure build-outs in human history.
Shenzen was a rice paddy in 1990 and two decades later was a city of 20m people (2nd highest number of skyscrapers in the world too). The exact reason why China have been able to do this is the reason why you think it is impossible. People in the west are too lazy, too self-indulgent, too anxious about what other people are doing...China did it, they aren't paying attention, they don't care, they didn't ask anyone for permission, they just did it. In the time it takes to build a road in the US, they built a city with one of the most productive economies on the planet...where do you think the future is?
