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the U.S. has become incapable of building large projects in a reasonable amount of time and budget? Private projects come in on time and on budget, or nearly s
by masonic 8y ago
the U.S. has become incapable of building large projects in a reasonable amount of time and budget?
Private projects come in on time and on budget, or nearly so, all the time. It's the public sector projects that are layered in graft.
The last major public project that came in near the original budget that I can recall is the San Jose Area (now SAP).
- sundaeofshock 8y agoPrivate projects come in on time and on budget all the time? Do you have any evidence to support this? I’ve seen plenty of private projects gonoff the rails. The difference is that private projects can keep their budget information, well, private.
- scarejunba 8y agoWhich private enterprise has the power to run a hundred billion project that isn’t funded by the government. Not one.
- woolvalley 8y agoUber, Google Search Engine, Facebook, etc.
- scarejunba 8y agoNone of them have done anything on this scale, have they? They’re valuable because they don’t make investments like this. Their work is on a long lever so they have great margins over massive volume.
- ahakki 8y agoI’m pretty sure Uber has terrible margins :)
- scarejunba 8y agoHaha, or potential for great margins, right. It's not one big project that costs $100 bil, right. There's very little incrementality to HSR, etc.
- masonic 8y agoGoogle has spent over $200 million on land alone... in the valley alone... just in the past month. I heard that it seriously depleted HQ's petty cash fund. (But seriously, these were, in fact, all-cash deals.)
- scarejunba 8y agoYeah, but they don't do that every month. And $200 million is 1/500 of 100 billion. This is like the difference between going to a nice restaurant and buying a McLaren P1. Or spending all your money as an L7 at Google vs. going to space yourself.
- masonic 8y agoThink of all the high-rise apartments (which so many on HN claim to want) and large commercial complexes that are constructed purely by private enterprise. AT&T Park, Levi's Stadium (over $1 billion), and the new Warriors arena (over $1 billion) were privately funded.