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> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of d
by trimbo 8y ago
> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days
At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24.
They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unacceptable today.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153778083/75-years-later-building-the-golden-gate-bridge https://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153778083/75-years-later-buil...
- qaq 8y agoThis will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so basically you could loose X lives due to hospital not being there and due to increased cost of care.
- sitepodmatt 8y agoYou make a reasonable point, health and safety bullshit can go too far at times, but equally exploitation often goes further - in that the effort to save/pockets costs shadows the good will. Very difficult to quantify
- JauntTrooper 8y agoYes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there are others with none? This is solved at least somewhat by using 'rule utilitarianism' instead of 'act utilitarianism'. Society is better off as a whole if we adhere to rules such as protection of the human body or safety regulations when constructing buildings.
- lobotryas 8y agoYes, but only up to a point. If all the rules and safety checks inflate the cost and timeline of projects exponentially then barely anything would get built. The question, as always, is: "Where do we draw the line?".
- beaner 8y agoThis doesn't seem to be true because things do get built with high safety today.
- raldi 8y agoDo you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.
- XorNot 8y agoIs this the argument you want to plant your stake in the ground on as absurd? Because the modern debate in the tech community is "should people be allowed to operate motor vehicles at all?"
- raldi 8y agoEven autonomous vehicles will always have nonzero fatality rates. Letting them go 50mph will lead to more human deaths than capping them at 25.
- jsight 8y agolol, I hear people frame the self driving car discussion that way regularly, but it is just wrong. Noone is going to be making human driven vehicles illegal. They may be more like classic cars than regular vehicles at some point, though.
- allannienhuis 8y ago
- johngalt 8y agoIt might be more palatable if the benefits accrued to the people assuming the risks. Reliably the people absorbing the risks capture almost none of the added value.
- posterboy 8y agoYes, it does sound horrible. Not because of the objective, but it is so uninformed and low effort that it is really pain full. Yes, it's a great idea. Killing one person will allow us to double speed. How exactly I wonder, but this seems like the kind of project where asking questions is strictly forbidden.
- qaq 8y agoThis has nothing to do with specifically killing people but has to do with creating regulatory environment were very few entities can complete and comply with regulation. I am not sure anyone can contribute the improved stats to that burdensome regulation easily as it can be just general tech and process improvements.
- imbur 8y agoThe premise that people will die if the hospital takes longer to build is false. The same work can be done in another building
- ronilan 8y agoVancouver’s “Second Narrows” bridge was built in the late 50s and completed in 3 years. Midway through the project a major accident killed 19 people. It was the result of an engineering error. In the mid 90s the bridge name was changed. It is now generally referred to as the “Ironworkers memorial bridge”. Anyone crossing that bridge since is constantly reminded of that engineering error. “Better safe than sorry” is rising belief. Once this truism became generally accepted, as it generally is, it has precedent over other considerations. Since “safe” means more than physical safety, practically any human action is subject to exponentially increasing levels of scrutiny. It takes time to come to an agreement that everything is safe. In big projects it takes a lot of time. On bigger projects it might never come.
- kryogen1c 8y ago> “Better safe than sorry” is rising belief. I think this is a cowardly and inaccurate belief and agree it is what it driving changes across all areas. It is the institutional flaw of democracies and free markets. People (demand) are capable of acting irrationally and emotionally leading to a reduction of individual and public good.
- jalfresi 8y ago"I think this is a cowardly and inaccurate belief" Throughout history you find the people who believe this are not the ones who's safety is sacrificed in pursuit of some grand project...
- erikpukinskis 8y agoYou’re assuming a lot. I’m assuming your OP thinks “better safe than sorry” is stupid because it doesn’t actually help you make decisions. I would much rather drive on a bridge of someone whose motto is “do it right.” This isn’t the Apollo program. We know how to make safe bridges. It’s not a matter of being cautious and talking to every stakeholder. It’s a matter of hiring actual engineers,* letting them work, believing them, and then giving them the resources to monitor construction properly. It means sometimes rejecting a lot of bad material and holding the project up for 8 months. It does not mean “lean safe” and cross your fingers. * meaning licensed engineers. The word engineer has I guess been made meaningless by thousands of people writing code and calling it “engineering”. It used to mean someone had completed training as an engineer.
- ddeck 8y agoInterestingly the author cites Hong Kong in another question as a city that should be replicated. It's a city where at least 10 (and likely a great deal more#) workers died and 234-600 were injured in the last few years building a bridge of questionable utility to other local cities. # 10 are confirmed dead on the HK portion, the death toll on the Chinese portion is unknown. There's little question that lax worker safety and weak labor laws can contribute to faster economic growth, but I'm not sure that's something we should be trying to replicate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80%93Macau_Bridge#Worker_deaths_and_injuries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80... http://www.ejinsight.com/20170413-how-many-more-people-have-to-die-for-the-sake-of-a-bridge/ http://www.ejinsight.com/20170413-how-many-more-people-have-...
- branchless 8y agoThey seem pretty happy to let people die due to homelessness in the USA, or lack of medical care. Why are they so concerned this time?
- olalonde 8y agoI'd be surprised if safety is a significant contributor. Assuming it is, why haven't we gained, in almost a hundred years, efficiency to counter balance it?
- twblalock 8y agoThere are plenty of places, such as western European countries and Japan, that have strong safety regulations and still manage to complete large-scale infrastructure projects quickly. Another way to look at this is to ask why the United States seems incapable of even maintaining existing projects. For example, look at the current state of the New York City subway. I suspect slowness in building new infrastructure, and poor maintenance of existing infrastructure, have the same root cause: lack of political will. American voters don't expect their governments to be good at this kind of thing. European voters would vote politicians out of office if their transit systems got as bad as the NY subway has become. It would be seen as a failure to execute one of the basic duties of government.
- icelancer 8y ago>> American voters don't expect their governments to be good at this kind of thing. European voters would vote politicians out of office if their transit systems got as bad as the NY subway has become. It would be seen as a failure to execute one of the basic duties of government. Americans often vote those people out of office and their replacements are equally useless or worse.
- wonderwonder 8y agoUnfortunately that's often not accurate. The vast majority of the time the incumbent wins. We vote by party here and if the incumbent is our party rep. we will vote for them regardless of track record as we assume the other party is worse. We have created a system where results often don't matter as long as there is the correct capital letter next to your name on the ballot. Compounding this further is that politicians know that they can count on your vote but they rely on the money of industry and lobbyists to campaign. Thus the very industry that is supposed to be fixing the problem under contract is able to overcharge and take longer than agreed becuase our politicians rely on them for funding. https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/reelect.php https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/reelect.php
- meko 8y agoMost american voters have a phobia of government.
- tzs 8y agoDeath rates are probably better than absolute number of deaths for comparison. Here are death rates per 1000 workers of some well known construction projects: 80 Transcontinental Railroad 80 Suez Canal 50 Brooklyn Bridge 17.46 World Trade Center 6.4 Sydney Harbor Bridge 4.47 Hoover Dam 3.37 San Francisco Bay Bridge 3.33 Eiffel Tower 2.67 Titanic 2.5 Sears Tower 1.47 Empire State Building 1.17 Trans-Alaska Pipeline System 0.75 City Center Las Vegas 0 Chrysler Building Topping all of those by a large amount are the Panama Canal and the Burma-Siam railway, which I did not include because I don't have numbers--they are literally off the chart. I mean that literally. On the bar chart I'm getting the numbers from [1] the bars for those are so big they are clipped and the number is not visible. [1] https://www.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolbox/blog/12096401/looking-back-on-the-worlds-deadliest-construction-projects https://www.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolb...
- ____a 8y agoAre you on mobile? Or something else might be breaking formatting for you. The chart linked does have numbers for the Panama Canal (408.12) and Burma-Siam Railway (385.45).
- tzs 8y agoNo, I'm on Firefox 63.0b9 on MacOS. Looks like I zoomed in (cmd-+) a few times to make the numbers more readable, and went past what the page's CSS could handle.
- travisjungroth 8y ago40% of workers died building the Panama Canal? That's nuts.
- pm90 8y agoThe history of the canal itself is pretty interesting. It was an effort started by the French, who lost too many workers to tropical diseases (specifically malaria). Then the Americans took over, and one of the reasons they succeeded was they made sure to take preventative measures to protect workers from malaria.
- starpilot 8y agoChina built their national high speed rail in remarkable time. Like less time to cover their entire country, than it will take California to build one high speed rail line. The difference seems to be that autocracy gets shit done.
- ams6110 8y agoSure, they didn't have to worry about property rights, environmental impact studies, etc. They just did it. We built the first interstate highways pretty quickly too, and part of why is we just plotted a line and set the bulldozers to work. Nobody worried about habitat destruction, erosion, endangered species, etc.
- megablast 8y ago> Any metric like that would be absolutely unacceptable today. Except for car deaths. Over one million a year seems to be acceptable.