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The author seems to be tiptoeing around the real issues in the room, a combination of over regulation, need for well protected union jobs, and a refusal to embr
by KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
The author seems to be tiptoeing around the real issues in the room, a combination of over regulation, need for well protected union jobs, and a refusal to embrace cheap labor. EU may have a bureaucracy but they are plenty happy to abuse cheap eastern European manpower when it comes to building things. Talk to some construction people in the US (many are Uber drivers, ask them), and they all have stories about how supervisors instruct them to take plenty of coffee breaks and do the minimum amount of work possible. In other countries building fast with good quality is perfectly doable. American housing and zoning laws are overly focused on compliance with issues like wheel chairs that significantly drive up costs. Go back to the bread and butter, as long as it pass civil engineering safety standards and emergency regulations, let it be built. Forget everything else, import labor from mexico and el Salvador if necessary. For every lazy unioned worker, there are plenty who want a slice of the American dream. Until computer vision can replace them, more competition in the labor market is the best solution to shoddy and overpriced workmanship.
- pilotneko 3y agoDo you typically run your market research on Uber drivers? Maybe you ask the bathroom attendant for tips on Crypto to purchase? There are physical limitations to construction. Sometimes things take time to set and/or cure. Even when doing the work, it’s not like you can have five guys working on a single pipe at the same time, hence the “breaks.”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fader 3y ago> American housing and zoning laws are overly focused on compliance with issues like wheel chairs that significantly drive up costs. Most accessibility affordances have a negligible cost when designed in from the beginning and are significantly more expensive to retrofit. (E.g. designing a staircase with an integrated ramp is cheap; adding a ramp to an existing staircase often is not.) Ensuring that everyone has equal access to society seems like a pretty worthwhile goal and I'd hate to see people locked out of it to save a fraction of a percent in costs.
- flangola7 3y agoMy sister is in a wheelchair and will be for the rest of her life. Lack of accessibility is already a major hurdle, we should be making it better, not worse.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoI mean, being in a wheelchair is not ideal. But if only 1 person was in a wheelchair it wouldn't make sense to spend trillions of dollars making the world accessible to that person. There's tons of people with tons of disabilities. It just so happens that there's lots of people with certain disabilities, and if we can do things that aren't too cost prohibitive to make life way easier for a lot of people than we should. But it's still a debate about cost. And obviously different people will have different views.
- lmm 3y agoAnd yet the EU generally has stronger and more respected unions than the US. So it seems unlikely that's the issue.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago> American housing and zoning laws are overly focused on compliance with issues like wheel chairs My EU aparment has an elevator, and you can get to every room in a wheelchair. Can you get into the upstairs bedroom on an average american home in a wheelchair?
- mitchdoogle 3y agoWhat is your point? American apartment buildings also have elevators that can accommodate wheel chairs
- KptMarchewa 3y agoGo back to 2007 with this rhetoric... this "cheap eastern European manpower" easily earns multiples of your US minimum wage.