Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
crainsnewyork.com
crainsnewyork.com
Skypicker presented the department with plans for a small, truck-mounted crane... However, when we inspected the Skypicker in use at a construction site, we found something significantly different: The crane was attached to a building slab, and appeared to be a hodgepodge of parts from other cranes, mounted on a homemade, untested base.
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160623/OPINION/160629...
And the inventor shoots back:
The executive director of the [Department of Buildings] Cranes and Derricks Unit when the Skypicker was approved emailed me that [Department of Buildings Commissioner] Chandler confused the Skypicker revocation with a ruling about an entirely different crane... He’s the one that’s misinformed.
http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his-side-...
In the original article, when the crane was first used on jobs and word got around about it being less expensive and required fewer operator man hours, his job sites were picketed by unions. There were anonymous calls to 311 reporting violations but when the inspectors got there, they didn't find anything wrong.
In my mind, I'm skeptical and it could have been the cranes or it could have been union influence.
On my way to work, I pass by a giant inflatable rat inflated by a gas motor that's hauled around by a truck. It's rather annoying when its tail gets loose and covers the sidewalk, as can happen on windy days when it's not tied down appropriately. It's probably 10 or 12 feet tall, at least, and the tail is maybe 12 feet long or longer. (3 feet is about one meter for those in metric land).
It's parked there because one of the buildings under construction here didn't use the right amount of union labor, so there's always a rat present. Walk around and you'll see this same rat in different places; they've got a number of them. They've also got some rather impressive pigs and fat cats.
This is the city that couldn't get rid of two operators per train on the L, even though technically they could more or less get by with zero (the trains mostly drive themselves on that line; the operator, to my understanding, just has to keep acknowledging that the train should proceed).
Why?
The unions protested and won, citing hitherto unknown safety reasons that should be plaguing cities like Madrid, Barcelona, London, Paris, Washington D.C., etc. due to their lack of two people. Doubly so for those lines (including the AirTrain to JFK in NYC) that do not have operators at all...
Consider the possibility that the strong streak of instinctive union bashing that you see in typical professional class culture in the U.S. is very much the creation of decades of aggressive PR effort by those who consider unions threatening.
I consider it a credit to the anti-union propagandists that we're all so quick to discard one of the very few tools we laborers have to better our lot in life.
All power corrupts. The observation proves nothing about unions specifically. If you take away power from unions it just goes and does its corrupting somewhere else.
A few unions engage in poor practices and you are happy to tar them all with the same brush.
The problem is not the unions.
The comment provided specific examples of where unions have resulted in inefficiency.
Youre doing exactly what you accused the comment you're responding to of, just on the other side of the coin: instinctively defending unions
That's about as dispositive as me mentioning a bunch of optimistic inventors of construction equipment who had no regard for the safety of workers and killed people.
Despite that I said he might well be right. He just hasn't cited anything that shows it. I'm a business owner in New York City too, stories are cheap.
The reflexive statement that unions are what's getting in the way of fearless capitalist innovators is, in fact, a well financed argument that is harming our society and increasing inequality and political unrest.
If labor unions are the source of problems, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona would have the same problems but orders of magnitude worse. Yet the comment claims -- and note I'm not passing judgment on whether this is factual or not -- that Paris, Madrid and Barcelona do not have these problems.
And it most certainly is true that labor unions in the US have been targeted by ubiquitous, well-funded, vicious attack propaganda from those who feel that people pooling a resource to wield greater power and reap greater returns than they could individually is the highest, noblest and holiest human endeavor when the resource in question is capital, but is the very worst and lowest sort of corrupt vile leeching parasitism when the resource in question is labor.
Unions have done amazing things to increase worker pay and benefits up from horribly inadequate levels, and to increase safety standards. But they've also don't some pretty bad anti-competitive, rent-seeking, protectionist things as well. Getting rid of them certainly isn't the answer, but letting them do bad things is unacceptable as well.
No one is saying "everything that unions do is bad and they should go away". But it's equally naive to suggest that unions never do bad things at all.
So why is it that we get something like a thousand "look at this CORRUPT OVERPAID LAZY RENT-SEEKING UNION" stories for every "this union did something kind of OK, I guess" story?
So, the reason I should care if their worker is union or not is... ?
No, I don't mean some special equipment with some wiring involved.
I mean if you plug in your phone charger with a union electrician, he will still come out, unplug, replug it in, then charge you $65. Gotta round up to the nearest hour of course.
Need to get in the building? Well the elevator operator that gets paid $40 hr is off for an hour for lunch. He sits on a cooler and eats and drinks all day and occasionally there is an elevator operator apprentice with him. These are elevators that are not construction elevators, but ones that work just fine automatically once the construction guys are out.
The teamster guys sit at the loading dock on lawn chairs also getting paid huge rates for doing absolutely nothing. They will not help you unload anything. They sit there hanging out.
Sounds like a racket? Well it is. And for a really long time it was a racket with the Mafia enforcing using union labor. If you didn't go union they would hurt you or somehow sabotage you, and conversely the union would walk off the job if you didn't take care of the Mafia.
Now the modern racket is with very low level politicians and regulatory boards. The only way you get in these unions too is by knowing someone.
These people make a bad name for unions, and drive costs way up for anything in NYC area.
There are some arcane rules. The nepotism in getting into these unions has been greatly reduced.
(This guys crane looks like it needs more development time. On any big job site, you get to know your Crance Operator. They are lifting huge loads right over you heads. They take their jobs seriously. If this guys crane is better; it will eventually see job sites. Maybe--if it's safe. Yes--unions are slow to move, but for good reason on many cases. People get killed. I don't know all the ins-outs of this guy's crane. I would rather have a trained Crane Operator operating loads over my head. That just might change, but regulatory agencies/unions are not going to run to one guy's contraption.)
Back to union membership. The test is very important. The union test is not usually a hard test, but you need to get every question right. Usually, the other 1/2 of getting into the union is the oral exam. On those boards are union delegates, contractors(many whom would run to non-union labor if feasible.), and in many unions, members of the community. They are trying to make getting into a union fair.
There are many unions in NYC. There are many unions in SF. Both are union towns. I have not crossed picket lines because maids/painters were on strike. I have drove to San Francisco and drove right home. Those old unions do pay their members a very fair wage.
Such a wage that brings a blue collar worker into the middle class.
There's police unions all the way to Window Washer unions.
The average owner/contractor/city would love to get rid of unions. They hate paying those wages.
They would happily hire minimum wage workers.
I have worked a few blue collar jobs that didn't gave unions. It's basically comes down to minimum wage, or a bit above, and at the end of the week; you wonder why you even show up.
It all seems crazy until you're in a union.
There's a reason most developers are very rich. They like to pay the least amount they can legally get away with.
Tech is still relatively new. Wait until the barriers to enter become easier than they are today. Watch what happens to those generous pay packages.
If you've ever worked in construction you'd know these "arcane" rules are there because someone died before they existed. Construction is one of the most dangerous professions around. Unions are the only thing standing between companies trying to cut costs and shorten builders life expediencies.
FWIW, I agree with the guy you're replying to. But that's being from Boston, and also hearing about NJ/NY projects in the news.
And this set was in Texas..
I got paid $200 per day to literally sit on set, take the film canister from the loader, walk it out to the gate (this set was in rural Texas on a ranch,) hand it to a driver for him to take it to the airport, grab the dailies from him and walk that back to the director's trailer.
Best two months of my life (got to meet Spielberg on set and got to work with an Oscar nominated cinematographer.)
Still my point is that union rules add significant costs and generally border on absurd.
Unions in NYC are a protection racket. They don't do crap for worker safety or fair workplace rules. They are a front for legal extortion and add complexity and cost to nearly everything they touch.
Story time: Going in and out of telecommunications buildings there were scales by the doors to the rooms with equipment. If a bag, device, or piece of equipment weighed over 35 pounds, you needed to have a union member carry that piece of gear for you into the facility.
Forget the nature of the equipment, the fact that the equipment might have wheels in a case. The NEED for a worker wasn't something that could be discussed. The rule was: if it was over 35#, you needed to make sure that a union worker carried it in.
Troubleshooting a problem with a circuit and it's 12:00? Lunchtime! If you're a union worker, you just drop the phone where it is and walk away to go have lunch. Everything stops because the union rules specify that no work can be done during specified break times.
Please note that unions once served a vital and important purpose in this country: they protected workers against horrific abuses by management. The problem is that those abuses are now largely confined to industries where there has never been a solid union presence OR they've gone overseas to escape the unions.
In the meantime, unions here have hurt worker mobility, frustrated workplaces, and generally made everything worse for all parties by sheer incompetence.
Remember when Twinkies disappeared from the markets? Unions. Remember when US Airways nearly ran itself into the ground? Unions.
Unions need to adapt or die. My personal experience with unions is that they have hurt my career (when I was represented by a union) more than they've protected me.
And NYC is a special case of all of the above stupidity.
That is total unmitigated bullshit.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/business/dealbook/how-the...
Let me tell you something you might be unfamiliar with: companies that cannot manage their affairs properly will end up in bankruptcy. They will owe more to those who provide it with goods and services than they can collect. This happens when companies cannot (or will not) adjust their operations to accommodate changes in market conditions or regulatory environments.
The cost structure of Hostess made them uncompetitive. And unions are a big part of the reason why they could no longer compete effectively.
You're free to disagree with my analysis but you're not entitled to your own facts. A company that goes bankrupt several times is prima facie evidence of poor management. And by poor management, I mean management that could not or would not deal with a major cost of their operations: labor.
If Hostess hadn't gone into bankruptcy, we wouldn't be having the argument at all. Private equity would have never swooped in to buy up the distressed assets, free itself of the onerous union contracts and poorly negotiated supplier agreements to rise from the ashes.
I can still buy Twinkies and I have private equity firms to thank for it. Not unions.
QED.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/whos-to...
Makes sense to me.
And believe me, I think the unions share some of the blame here. They negotiated terms for their members that included overly generous pension terms because one of the things that unions like to do now is control member pensions. And when they control member pensions, they have a nice pot of money to invest for their members behalf (har har har) until they do such a bad job of it that they need someone to blame (that greedy company).
That particular story has played out over and over again because union management swings investment funds to "favored" firms which court pension funds aggressively (read: kickbacks).
Think I'm making this stuff up?
Do your own research and tell me if you can find any examples of union-run pension funds exceeding the market performance of something like an index fund. Do pension funds even have to meet the disclosure and transparency requirements of your garden-variety mutual fund?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/success/terrysavage/t...
Oh yes I forgot. Other countries don't have the concept of unions /s.
My point is that the concept of a union isn't bad. Specific implementations of the concept of a union might be bad.
You mean the same Europe that has incredibly powerful public sector unions?
Maybe a thing they don't have is a political system run by a group of mindless plutocratic politicians that shout "free markets" as the solution to social problems while practicing crony capitalism. They also don't have the Cuomo family.
Hong Kong and Singapore build infrastructure for quite cheap. And there they don't need to shout about `free markets': the government mostly allows them already.
I'm totally with you on the crony-capitalism bashing.
Why wouldn't German unions be pro-business when labor is represented at board level with full voting rights? German corporations do not consider themselves "job creators" or see workers as resources to be exploited, unlike their American counterparts.
This is a perfect example of the genetic fallacy. How or why a person came to hold a view tells us nothing about the truth of the view. Even if it did, possibility shouldn't be taken as (or a as defeater for) plausibility. It's possible that unknown to you, your parents are aliens and you were hatched on another planet. It's plausible that you're a human and so are your parents. Similarly, even if it's possible we're all duped by aggressive PR, until I see a very compelling plausibility argument my current experience of observing unreasonable union interference grounds my belief that unions often engage in crude, counterproductive behavior.
They definitely do.
It's like what attorneys do with their clients. They try to sweep their clients' faults under the run and play to their strengths. "Unions are great! They empower and protect the common workers against greedy selfish corporations seeking to exploit them!"
Yet a lot of people on HN are business owners, and they see the other side of the coin - that unions are not always cooperative and sometimes can have a parasitic relationship with the business that borderlines and indeed passes the "unreasonable" threshold.
My cousins have run a successful commercial roofing business in a Mid Western state for decades. It is common that on any public building they work on to have an OSHA inspector come out on day if not each day, to have a local sheriff be called, and even once INS. All because this family owned business is non union and has always been. the sad part, this is a business which has never had more than two dozen employees.
It isn't just them. If non union electricians are on site for isolating air conditioning systems if not building main power they too are subject to the same.
The joke is, that for much of the state they know every OSHA inspector and even the inspectors joke about it. Still they have to stop work and dance the dance. and this is only for the legal means to intimidate.
unions aren't just about protecting employees, they are big money for both those who run them and the politicians they support.
"If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly, writes Peter Thiel"
But when unions do it, that's bad.
Try to convince someone to intervene in abuse of monopoly by Microsoft, and you'll hear arguments that any kind of intervention would be worse that just leaving them to do what they will. Some more efficient competitor will take care of the problem for you eventually.
But when unions do it, that's bad.
In 2005, I moved into a 19th-floor apartment in lower Manhattan. My girlfriend and I spent about 12 hours at IKEA getting everything needed to furnish the place. By the time we finished taking (2!) taxies back from Jersey with all my stuff, it was about midnight on a Friday night. It took another hour or so to schlep everything up in the elevator - everything, that is, except for a sofa, which we'd tied to the roof of one of the taxis and which was now the last thing between us and sleep.
We were just about to load it into the elevator for the last run of the night, but _not so fast!_, said the doorman: that's the passenger elevator, and you aren't allowed to use it for furniture.
We pointed out that the sofa, at about 80-100 lbs, weighed quite a bit less than the full elevator cars-worth of stuff we'd already brought up, but he was undeterred. He could lose his job, he explained, because the building's contract with the labor union prohibited use of the passenger elevator for "furniture".
OK, I said, not really understanding what that had to do with unions, where's the freight elevator?
It's locked, he said, because you aren't allowed to use it.
Why not?
Because the building maintenance union regs say nobody who isn't in the union can touch that elevator, and require the use of union labor to move anything in or out via that elevator. (At something like $160/hr, iirc.)
And since it was a Friday, the sofa would have to sit in the building lobby until 10am on Monday, at which point we could get in touch with the labor union to get the Appropriately Licensed and Bonded Personnel to load the sofa into the freight elevator. (Assuming the members of the sanitation engineers' union hadn't already decided it was trash and carted it away -- and yes, he did warn us about this.)
Counting PATH train and taxi rides etc, we're now about 14 hours into the furnishing-my-apartment project. We haven't eaten in about 10 hours, it's the middle of the night, and I am beyond frustrated at this point.
I don't want to get arrested though and the guy is clearly not going to give in, so I'm not really sure what to do. I half jokingly ask the guy: well, what about the stairs? Do the union regs prohibit the stairs too?
He laughs. No, do whatever you want in the stairs, he says.
I look at my gf. She looks at me. _Well? You want to?_, she says. Remember: 19 floors. I think: I can't believe we're going to do this.
But we do. ~40 flights of stairs later, we both look like we just climbed out of a lake, and are breathing like horses. And though I'd already had a pretty strong suspicion in this direction, at this point I was certain: I had to marry this girl.
I still don't think much of unions, but 11 years and 2 kids later, I'm grateful every day that I ended up with such a strong and capable partner. <3
[1](Sorry for the autobiography but I thought folks might appreciate the story. And it really is on-topic... sortof.)
I remember a long time ago there was a team that needed some very expensive hardware from sun (think several 100k).
The manager of the group could NOT get approval for the equipment. It was a massive technicality as another department was supposed to buy setup and "run" the equipment and they refused for a number of reasons.
The manager in question figured out that he could sign a PO up to $7000. A large number of PO's later the server was to be delivered.
This, to say the least, was going to be a bigger problem. Though a space had been secured for it (in a server room no less) getting it into the building was going to be an issue.
They ended up bringing it in on a weekend, only to find the freight elevator locked, and the rack it came in unable to fit in the normal elevator for people.
The manager, his team, the sun sales man and the delivery driver took the whole thing to bits in the lobby. There were parts EVERYWHERE and a rather bemused security guard who was baffled as to why this was happening this way.
It all turned out fine in the end, the manager wasn't fired (promoted in fact), the salesman got his commission, and the team got the equipment they needed.
If I were a betting man that driver was a union guy and ended up with time and 1/2 for the insanity on a saturday!
As I step out of the elevator and into the lobby, the front desk person goes "you can't remove that equipment".
No worries, I anticipated this and have all the relevant removal paperwork. He is uninterested.
"you can't remove equipment using the passenger elevators"
But, I am in the lobby. The door is less than 20 steps. I already rode the elevator down.
"you must use the freight elevator. that is the law."
OK, I'll go back upstairs and use the freight elevator. Where is it?
"you can't operate it. you need an elevator operator"
OK, where should I wait for them? can you call one for me?
At this point, let me tell you it is Easter weekend.
"they do not work weekends, and it is a holiday weekend. they are $160/hr, minimum 4 hours, and it is double time on the weekend, plus time and a half for holidays"
OK, I'll just put it back. This piece of equipment is barely worth $400. Then I proceeded to go up the elevator, back to the datacenter, go inside, put the router in my backpack, and go back out.
And at the lobby was one of NYC finest, with one of the security people, who kindly asked me what was in my backpack. Then asked to search it. Do you have a warrant?
"I don't need a warrant. I'll just take you down to the precinct and open it there. You sure you don't have any weed in there, Mr. California?"
I went back up, put the router in the cage, went back downstairs, and used every ounce in my body not to flip the building security and his cop buddy the bird, akimbo style.
What does the guy at the front care anyways? Do the union guys pass him a $50 every time they cajole somebody in to using the freight elevator for something stupid?
I probably would have just waited till the cop left, went to the nearest shipping store, bought a box, put 5 bucks in postage on it, and addressed it to myself. Now they can't open it without exigent circumstances or a warrant.
I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as legal advice or anything, but it's probably the next best thing to giving them the finger.
Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.
So they've become "extractive" in the parlance of economists and sociologists studying 3rd world economies?
• Is the data being backed up? Is that backup process actually correct (i.e. if the backing data-store is a file on a SAN, and we perform filesystem-level snapshots of that SAN, can all the data actually be restored from such a snapshot, or will it be partially corrupt?)
• For that matter, is there a documented process for restoring from such a backup, such that whoever's on the ops shift could do it if need be?
• Is the backing store transparent/auditable, esp. for compliance to our privacy policy—i.e., can we write an indexing agent to determine whether any Personally Identifiable Information is being stored, without needing to ask the software's ISV for their format spec?
• Can the backing store be locked down with ACLs such that getting access to the app's connection to its backing store as an unprivileged user, doesn't let them grab our entire database, or execute arbitrary storage changes (e.g. DROP TABLE)?
• Can audit-trail logic be installed in the backing store (rather than in the app layer by the ISV), so that we will know if some contractor takes a copy of the data home with them?
When your software speaks to a formal DBMS, all these questions have easy answers. When it manages its own little proprietary DB/file-format thing, they're up in the air.
Then when the access app gets "important", IT uses it as a hostage for more funding, using the absurdly expensive cost model that they build.
Its kind of like an electrician demanding a ground line be run to every outlet while someone who knows nothing about electricity demanding that ground wire almost never carries current therefore is a waste of money.
Perhaps a better analogy is its like adding another fiber optic strand, before or during the project the marginal cost is extremely cheap, after the project is complete its unimaginably expensive to add another strand after the dirt has gone back in the ditch.
Liberalism goes both ways.
I have been nauseated every time I entered a public lavatory where waterless urinals were installed.
I have certainly avoided those lavatories in the future but once I'm nauseated, the damage is done.
I go to a gym in an office building; there are showers. Do you think the floor was built with anyone thinking: "Oh, one day there might be showers here!"? I worked at a company with a (big) 3d printer - we had to rinse part afterwards, and kinda managed to wedge the rinser into the (extra extra large) handicapped stall in the men's bathroom. Don't just build to what YOU can imagine, give people rope to make more things.
Running unused water lines [while it's cheap to do so] sounds like a good plan.
On the other hand, future proofing, and enough rope to hang yourself.
You can't outlaw bad decisions - but it seems that some people will never get tired of trying...
Of course, those are "bad" decisions that save a few penny from the builders, and stay hidden until they surprise the building owner with a huge unpredictable cost. No water lines to urinals fits that descriptions nicely.
Built to code == the worst construction that is legalAnother case in point: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0UG0H720160102
I don't know real estate developers to be any sort of exception, do you?
Some building developers will reap the reward if it was a good decision, others will suffer the consequence.
Requiring a water line in a building is not the same thing. It's a private building, and the people who own it are well within their rights to decide to risk later disruption and cost if they need water lines. Legislating away that right is insanity and just make-work that costs the building owner money up-front for something they've decided they don't need.
On another note, the obvious parallels to software engineering tasks seem very interesting. This shows that ideas like YAGNI very much depend on a cost-benefit-calculation that's very dependend on variables like scale and the anticipated cost of changes.
That's why the city cares. Every time one goes up or comes down there's a risk involved.
You yourself might want to go totally off the grid and/or rustic, but the reality is that you are likely not going to be the last person who ever lives in that house. Maybe you don't pay your taxes and the township ends up owning a lien on your house. They don't want to have to spend fifty grand installing electricity or running water before they can sell the house.
Depending on how big the technical deficit is here, it may not even be cost effective to retrofit after the fact (after all it still needs to meet code). And knocking down a house because the previous owner was a weirdo is terribly wasteful.
Costly in the original example would be that waterless urinals are installed for the life of the building.
Stifling in your example would be because much land will never be used because it's infeasible to bring power, water, and septic. Someone could have a home, but nothing will happen instead due to the regulation.
Just to meet your last point: - Is today's weirdo tomorrow's visionary? - Is a weirdo not allowed to create what he wants if he's not hurting anyone?
Building busted stuff in the middle of NYC hurts everyone, because there's limited space.
Visionaries can build where other people don't want to be, or convince the people around them that what they want to do is a good idea.
Someone could buy an incredibly valuable vacant lot and fence it and never use it. As far as I know, that's not illegal but would cause the same problem you've pointed out. I don't think the utility hookup regulations are based on such "waste of space" reasoning.
You could say the same thing about much of the building code.
A lot of code is there to ensure that the floor doesn't collapse if you fill the tub up with water, have a room full of people jumping up and down, or buy a piano. There's more on ensuring the roof doesn't collapse if there's lot of snow on it, and making sure the house is solid enough to safely sustain reasonably high winds or an earthquake.
If there are no earthquakes, wind or snow storms, you never buy a piano or have a party and only ever use the shower, is the effort put in satisfying these codes wasted?
When it comes to safety--because we understandably put such a large value on human life--small risks are something we consider.
I believe all of your examples fall into the safety category. Even worse about your examples is that the situations are unsafe and misleading. I think our regulations surrounding the safety issues that you listed are reasonable.
(Additionally, building codes do consider expected usage and alters allowances. No one expects a piano in an attic and the floor load per square foot requirements reflect that.)
Personally this is not tooooo far off that. Ensuring toilets always work.
Urinals have a very long life cycle, and by the time one needs to be replaced, it is likely any patent left would be in Design only, and thus other manufacturers can build and sell them, allowing the market to rebalance the cost.
In other words, "they're patented" is a bogus argument for needing a water line.
There are better arguments which you tried to hit on - what if you want to replace a urinal with a stall or some other fixture, e.g. - but this one alone isn't a good one. There are also plenty of counter arguments for why this kind of thing is a really bad idea in the case of a water line (e.g., a blind water line is going to be a much more ugly problem when renovations do happen if they aren't well enough noted in the designs or if the designs are unavailable, and what happens when a blind water line leaks, bursts or corrodes through inside a wall due to freezing/accidentally drilling or nailing through a pipe/etc.)
The AI doesn't exist. People will make it. That is when you know what it will do.
If we make the union, we can make plenty of reasons and ways for it to be different. Whether or not those result in a difference, is not very predictable.
Our day jab is literally understanding, predicting, and building complex systems out of ideas. Why would we be unable to make a union with a reasonable - even likely - chance of not developing the same problems these (much) older unions have?
But it will require much less people to build the AI. And that's the only relevant point when stepping into the investors' shoes.
Tell me you've never seen this story... I've worked with managers who would absolutely go for hiring more people to continuously do the same stupid task rather than improving the process. If they were protected, it would be a very sad place to work.
It makes sense to license electricians, crane operators, doctors, lawyers, and many other professions who do safety-critical work.
Only a very small minority of programmers work on software that could actually hurt someone (at Boeing, Toyota, etc...).
There's no reason to create a legal barrier to entry for programming.
Similarly, there would never be a general licence for "programmer". But some day there probably will be (and indeed probably should be) specific licences for things like "have back-end access to personal medical data", "modify source code of nuclear reactor control software", and "install networking hardware via which credit card details are transmitted".
It's not about creating a barrier to entry for a whole profession. It's about licencing people to work in specific situations where there are specific risks, such as privacy risks, public safety risks, and risk of fraud.
The real problem is wealth concentration. Unions and professional associations are one way for the working class to push back when the society they live in is failing to do so.
It's the wrong tool, not addressing the root cause, has implementation challenges, and will create problems in the future.
But the ship is sinking right now. Since the 1970s.
All of these unions that center around apprenticeship programs or requiring special training that is near-impossible to get without being part of the union is all just protectionist garbage. Its sole purpose is to control the supply of available labor for certain types of work.
But the parent is right that anything questionable done by unions is labored over and repeated again and again and again and again while corporations (for the most part) don't face the same scrutiny.
"Controlling the supply of labor is very important if you want the wages to be at all decent." - I interpret that sentence very differently. I see it as controlling the labor supply is a great way to prevent the flow of labor that may be just as good and willing to work for less from entering the job market for this activity. It's also a great way to force higher prices upon your customers because no matter which provider/firm they go to they are likely to all have members of the union working there forcing the same wages.
This behavior at its core it anti-competitive. If they were in fact corporations this activity would be a felony. But as employees it is not. Just a thought.
One thing I find interesting: Will we will see some version of the odd asymmetries between corporate and union law tested out in the courts as the gig economy grows? A company providing labor, for example, can legally ask for exclusivity agreements. Aramark, a big catering contractor, does that frequently. A union can't, though; an exclusivity deal for employees, saying that catering staff can only be hired from a certain union, is banned as a "closed shop" under the Taft-Hartley act. What about a partnership of gig-economy workers? If they're not employees, it seems like they should be able to push for deals more like Aramark ones, even though unions can't do that.
I personally think that laws banning closed shops are completely absurd and undermine peoples' freedom to negotiate contracts that suit them (which labour should have free access to, because of the massive unfairness of employment as a concept, and its inherent inequity between employer and employee).
But they have, and pretending that it's not their own fault for then turning around and effectively mandating a closed shop is absurd.
Able-bodied men and women don't have jobs in America and you want a 'decent' wage floor of 150k for the chosen ones. Trade unions, the supposed bulwark of the left. Worker's rights, etc.
I fully expect people to support all this, have the unions endorse the Democrats, and then have discussions at afternoon tea about how everyone else just considers themselves "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and votes against their own interest.
They want the jobs, man. And rightfully so. And when you stand there with your $150k-wage-floor job and they have to subsist on the dole because you decided to 'control the supply of labour', you shouldn't be surprised when they don't like you.
Unions and union workers are acting exactly as they're expected to under the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem. And everyone else is acting exactly as they are expected to as well. So I'm not surprised they're acting that way, but the Mafia act as expected to, and I'm damned if I'll back either of these.
Edit: the union mentioned in the article. (I hadn't read it).
It appears you're generalizing this union to represent other unions. It's possible for one union to be exploitative while other ones to have merit. Just as some corporations behave responsibly while a few others blatantly disregard consumers and workers.
The union in the article.
EDIT: I also wonder how they get so much overtime. Surely it couldn't be because of 'controlling the supply of labour'. Yeah, that's right. Give them their half a million dollars a year. It's only 'decent'.
I'll give you a hint: someone may trying to mislead you and inflame prejudices which have been carefully drilled into you over many years of media exposure.
Therefore working 8 hours a day, for every day of the week (including weekends), for one year would earn: 225492 + 180394 = 405886
This is very big money but it's not 'half a million dollars'.
But, if not, the sentence still works with "give them their $400k a year".
The claim is they make 75.91/hr when in the crane, 73.91 when not. Let's say they spend 6 hours a day in the crane, 2 hours not in the crane; that's 603.28/day. Five days a week is 3,016.40. 52 weeks a year would be 156,852.80.
So we're at $156,852.80/year from 8-hour days of work. We need to somehow get to "half a million". By which I mean we need to come up with $343,147.20 in overtime. The quote doesn't say what the overtime rate is, but traditionally it's time and a half; At a behind-the-crane rate of $75.91, overtime would be $113.86/hour. The engineer would then need to work "only" 3,013 hours of overtime a year in order to hit that "half a million" target. Or 2,135 hours of overtime a year in order to hit the $400k another commenter suggests below.
There are 8,760 total hours in a (non-leap) year and we've already used 2,080 of them accounting for 8-hour weekday shifts. So our engineer has 6,680 hours in the year left in which to work either 3,013 or 2,135 hours of overtime so we can bash him for making too much money. If he works an 8-hour shift every Saturday and every Sunday at the overtime rate, that only gets us 832 hours of overtime. We still need to find between 1,303 and 2,181 additional hours of overtime. That's an additional 3.5 - 6 hours per day every day for the year.
So... "many union members earn half a million dollars a year". To get to that number, at the quoted wages, they would have to be working 14-hour shifts every day. Not "every week day with two week's vacation". 14 hours every day: 7 days a week, 365 days a year. To get to the $400,000 estimate the comment below thinks is reasonable, they'd only need to work 11.5 hours a day all 365 days of the year. And that's probably a low estimate: I got that number by assuming the engineer spends 6 hours of every working weekday 8-hour shift behind the crane at the higher rate, and 100% of overtime hours behind the crane at the higher rate. If he's spending any more than 2 hours per weekday not behind the crane he needs to work even more hours since he's paid a lower rate then.
I hope nobody actually believes that these guys are genuinely working 11-14 hours a day, 365 days a year, or that if they are it would be wrong to massively compensate them for it.
Of course, someone will point out that I didn't account for the $32.50/hour in "benefits". But how can I? What does that mean? How many jobs have you had where you said "oh, my rate is low but I also count an hourly benefit amount as part of my wages"? Do you genuinely, truly, honestly and actively make sure you include the cost of any employer matching on your health insurance or 401(k) as dollar value and lump it into your salary? I know I don't.
But let's run with it anyway. Let's suppose the engineer gets 100% of his health plan covered by these "benefits", and what's more let's go high on it and assume that his health plan costs $5,000/month. If we only have him work 8-hour shifts 7 days a week we still need to make up a lot of money out of overtime or non-health-plan benefits:
weekday wage = (75.91 * 6) + (73.91 * 2) = 603.28
weekend wage = (75.91 * 1.5) * 16 (hours in two 8-hour shifts) = 1,821.84
Full week = 5 * weekday + weekend = 4,838.24
Full year of 8-hour shifts 7 days a week = 52 * 4,838.24 = 251,588.48
Add in $60,000 worth of health insurance = $311,588.48
To hit the "half a million" we still need to find nearly another $200,000. Specifically, we still need to find him 1,655 hours of overtime at this point. That's 4.5 hours a day in a 365-day year, so we're at 12.5-hour shifts, 365 days a year, to hit $500,000 in compensation.
A 401(k) doesn't help since his max contribution to that is $18,000/year, which is peanuts compared to the gap we need to make up to get him to $500,000.
But at this point I think we can safely say that something is very fishy with what you've quoted. And to reference my other comment, the reason this engineer isn't hanging out with other millionaires is that he can't because he spends 12.5 hours a day, all 365 days of the year, at work in order to get to that "half a million" wage you're attributing to him.
(except of course you know that the crane operators aren't really doing that, but that would sink the whole story...)
All that information is public. I'm a little suspicious of a $500k crane engineer myself, but you managed to get everything wrong. If you missed half the stuff, and the half that was available in the article and in a two-minute Google, god knows what you're leaving out. I literally had the top result in my first search showing the wage card and here you're busy making up nonsensical numbers.
An 8-hour weekday shift with 2 hours not behind the crane is:
(75.91 * 6) + (73.91 * 2) = 603.28
A five-day week at that rate is 3,016.40.
52 weeks of that is $156,852.80. Add $60k insurance (and it's questionable to bundle that as "pay", but whatever), and we're at $218,652.80. Add $18k for max 401(k) contribution and it's $234,852.80.
From there we need to find $265,147.20 in overtime to get to $500k. If the overtime rate is double time, and if literally every overtime hour worked is behind the crane, our engineer needs 1,747 hours of overtime in a year in order to hit $500,000.
Working at 8-hour shift every weekend day can eat up 832 hours of that, leaving 915 hours we still need to find somewhere else. That's 17.6 hours of overtime per week. If they're only worked on weekdays, the crane operator needs to work an 11.5 hour shift every weekday and an 8 hour shift every Saturday and Sunday, year-round, to hit $500,000.
I'm more than "a little suspicious" of that.
Without, if they work 52 40-hour weeks, it's $156k. Which is good money, but a far, far cry from the "many make half a million" claim.
And since a little bit of "let's actually run the numbers you just presented" reduced the initially claimed amount by nearly 70%, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say the initial claim was not rooted in reality, and probably the real amount is lower yet.
There are a few places here that use those urinals and the smell hits me in the face every time I enter the lavatory.
In the case you describe, perhaps the unions are a net positive because their protectionist rule will make it easier to replace those waterless stink pits with actual urinals in the future.
Part of the reason there's so much make-work in unions today is because as a percentage of the workforce unions have largely been relegated to public works projects and other niches reliant on political support. It's an existential crisis for unions and their middle-class laborers, and so they're going to flex every political muscle they can.
Even though unions dominate in a country like Germany, the number of union workers required for any particular task is significantly less than is typical in the U.S. And that's because there's more union work available for their members. When union work disappears in the U.S., the union members don't just disappear, too.
Yes, conceivably the DOB could be in backroom cahoots with Local 14-14B, and nixing the crane on stated grounds of structural design concerns -- whilst in reality having other motives. And not only "conceivably"; stuff like this happens in NYC all the time.
But we'd still need to see some actual evidence of such collusion, please; not just speculation (or arguments on the basis of "unions bad!", more or less)
City agencies don't just cave in to protests at the drop of the hat. Especially not NYC agencies.
So again, what I request is simply: evidence, not speculation.
So... ya might as well just believe whichever side of the coin you like better, right?
Works for some people, I guess.
You might want to question the validity of that assumption. Most likely the truth (was) basically knowable in this case, with a modicum of effort.
Just that Crain's apparently didn't want to take even baby steps in the direction of that effort -- i.e. the standard proactive, iterative follow-up that, you know, real journalists do: like contacting the entrepreneurial crane operator before publication to get their response to the DOB's claims about the composition of their rigs; and asking the DOB for their response to his response, etc. Or like, you know, talking to an independent expert or two. That kind of thing.
Instead they just did the usual throw-it-at-the-wall, see-if-it-sticks thing -- and presented it as a "he said, she said" story. Which may not have been all that illuminating or informative -- but at least got people to click on it, and (judging by the response here in this forum), to allow their buttons to be pushed.
But this all makes for poor ad copy, of course. "Bold, Crafty Innovator Thwarted, 'Cause Unions!" -- that's what gets people to click on your article. And share it in venues such as this one.
Sometimes Goliath stomps David, and we all lose.
Just that it's kind of weird (in my view) that so many people seem to be happy to conclude that we somehow "know" that it was union arm-twisting which (at least temporarily) sealed his fate. Despite the complete lack of primary (or even secondary) evidence for such a connection.
As it turns out in capitalism "extracting questionable value from society and taking it for yourself" is really the currency of power so an organization that doesn't do that is completely toothless and may as well not exist.
Capitalism rarely extracts questionable value from society, and when it does it's normally the result of government interference in an industry in order to advantage one business vs another - creating non-value-based power imbalances like monopolies.
To the contrary, Capitalism has been proven time and again to provide maximum value for society.
May I suggest cigarette / smoking advertising?
Corporation acts in it's own interests: "Well you can't blame them for that".
When a union does it we blame the union.
It's a double standard. Worse, theoretically rent seeking by unions should be more tolerated than by corporations. We should minimize all forms of rent seeking, but some forms are worse than others. The rent seeking profits of unions are distributed to many more workers than of corporations, notwithstanding the fanciful image we have of the corrupt union boss.
Except for those on the far left, people generally perceive corporations as amoral. But almost all Americans, right and left, not only judge unions by a different standard, they're typically cynical about unions. Even well paid union members are cynical! It's... incredible.
One of the best arguments I've heard for unions [0] is that a negotiation between workers and companies is usually very lopsided: a company can afford for an employee to quit, but a worker often cannot afford to get fired. A union is powerful enough to negotiate equally with companies. But in the case of Local 14, it seems like the power is actually lopsided in the other direction: Local 14 can afford to boycott one particular construction project, but the building developers can't afford to go without cranes.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta... (see section 2.5)
That's a monopoly practice, right there.
Those waterless urinals are a bullshit green thing used to suck up grant money -- sort of like the "big smelly" trash cans that appeared with Obamas stimulus program. Most often, if not usually, they are removed from service because they get disgusting unless you train your janitorial staff and keep good track of when maintenance is performed.
The pipes are there so when you decide to flush the waterless urinal, you can do so without engaging in some massive project.
In terms of building codes, real-estate development interests have significantly more clout than unions. Partially that's because real-estate development is general seen as a net good. Partially it's their money talks several magnitudes louder because it is several magnitudes larger.
The fact that waterless urinals are allowed might be seen as evidence of the disparity.
[0]: http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/pdf/govpub/50076-22-09_build...
See also: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/local_laws/ll41of2012.... for the larger law as of 2012.
Here's an interesting HN post, "Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11736696 In that article is a statistic that three fourths of the square footage of Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930. If a freak hurricane somehow destroyed New York, we would be literally unable to rebuild it. For both cost and legal reasons.
Someday soon we might be like the later generations of Romans. Living amongst the great crumbling structures built by our ancestors. Wondering how on Earth they could have achieved such things.
With all our modern technology, we should be able to achieve what our ancestors did. Even with our higher standards for safety.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i... http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2015/03/31/high_costs_ma...
Meanwhile brutalist buildings from the 1950s are crumbling.
NYC subway construction costs exceed costs of similar projects in different countries, by quite a bit.
That's like saying this electric car [1] from the 1902 would be far cheaper to build than a Telsa in 2017, therefore Teslas are over priced.
[1] http://www.intechopen.com/source/html/41483/media/f4.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE87IPJqW4M
Granted, it's not the most fair comparison, but the cost of subway construction in NY is abomination.
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
And they don't have to take their work home with them! Wow, I'm in the wrong line of work.
Is there something about the economics or the licensing that makes this crane only work in New York City?
Unions serve a purpose in many industries but today a lot of them are antiquated echoes from the past.
Uber drivers should have a union IMO, but the ATeachers Union and Manhattan construction industry should have theirs disrupted by something more fitting for the new reality they have too much power. The construction industry literally have people holdning signal flags the entire day.
Furthermore when it comes to Manhattan lets not forget how much wiseguys control many of the cities industries.
Other places around the world can figure out to slow traffic down without having flaggers.
Wow. So, for the price of a laptop I could influence NYC politics and have a councilman of my very own ?
I don't even live in New York and it's still tempting, if only for the lulz.
Do you think Mr. Kallos would pull me in a rickshaw when I visit ? Or would I need an extra fifty bucks ?
Anyhow, as others in this thread have pointed out, the skycranes are back in business.
There has to be some kind of miscommunication going on here. By what definition is his crane mobile? Because it's easier to disassemble and load on to a truck than a tower crane? While the DoB's classifications for cranes seems arbitrary, I can't say I blame them for not considering it mobile.
I've been meaning for a long time to start a site to track these events of businesses getting sidelined over regulatory hurdles - similar to those sites who track police shootings. Collecting data is the best way to bring light to prevalent but maligned issues like these. I get the impression there are hundreds of these small stories that could have had an impact on the marketplace but get crushed by regulatory/incumbent barriers.
We only ever hear about it when a big company runs into these issues. But for the most part it's usually people who are already taking a huge financial risk to do an entrepreneurial activity and they don't have the runway/capital to deal with the problem, let alone invest the time to draw attention to the issue in the press or politically.
Per last week's discussion, who owns those sketches? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433
> The 50-year-old crane operator and president of crane leasing company Vertikal Solutions was helping to build the 34-story Hilton Garden Inn in midtown.
Then it was unapproved, thanks to political pressure.
The article insinuates that the union was behind it all, but I'm not convinced he didn't just piss off the regulators in this case.
-- Delia Shumway, a professional engineer and the executive director of the agency’s Cranes and Derricks Unit when the Skypicker was approved, emailed me that Chandler confused the Skypicker revocation with a ruling about an entirely different crane.
Shumway wrote, “He’s the one that’s misinformed. The piece of equipment that he’s referring to was not the Skypicker but IBK’s knockoff of the Skypicker. That machine was not in compliance. There was never any argument about that.” --
[1]http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his-side-...
I can see why someone might want to have them tested before approving them.
I did no such thing. A `TL;DR` is typically a summation of an article. The primary narrative in the article was the union stifling this businessman. Whether it's true or not doesn't really effect a summary of the content itself.
To openly state a summary without including the primary narrative of the article seems disingenuous to the article you're summarizing, in my opinion.
In my opinion, a tl;dr that glosses over pointing out the unsubstantiated crux of an article's narrative is a major disservice. It's fine to sum up the narrative. It's just as disingenuous to fail to point out the narrative lacks evidentiary support whatsoever.
http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/
> NYC SKYPICKER CERTIFICATION
> The SKYPICKER MDS is approved for use by the New York City Department of Buildings division of Cranes and Derricks
This article might have been organized by a PR firm, but if so, I guess it's already been successful.
If your crane can be deemed a part of the structure itself, you save millions in insurance costs.
Insurance costs for tower cranes are insane in NYC due to the risks - there were big payouts after a few collapses which killed people. As there are not that many tower cranes in NYC to begin with, this risk pool is not very large.
Given that it is a boom crane, normally mounted on a truck, with a custom mounting and lifting system (the kind of thing that has peeled off of buildings before), I'm not seeing the big deal.
Those super tower cranes are legit massacre machines. Seeing one of those cranes go down was disturbing
This is what is the oddest piece of the story to me. There are lots of cities where these buildings are built. Mid-size cities. If the cost of the tower crane is so much more than this one, then the cost of transport should be minimal.
The Skypicker is bolted to the floor of the building, and when the next level is ready to go in, it hauls itself up to the height of the next floor through a hole, which is then finished around the crane, which is once again bolted to the floor. The last 30 seconds of the video on this page show how it relocates: http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/
It is, however 1am for me currently and I did not sleep well last night (beware drinking Armenian homemade vodka (a.k.a. Moonshine made with things other than corn) with native Armenians, they don't allow empty glasses until the vodka is gone), so I'm not firing on all cylinders.
I wonder if PG's 'anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' conflicts with his 'If they'd cover it on TV news' (where I assume TV news is actually broader than just what would be on TV news and includes items of a more general audience business interest).
What's the issue exactly? It crowds out and distracts from stories that might be of more value and relevance than simply something that is interesting.
Maybe a new way to describe would be 'of interest to hackers and relevant to what they do in a strong way'.
Also, it's about legal blabla that is abused to protect certain classes of work from any disrutption by startups - just like the dozens of similar startup posts, only that this one is in the "non-digital" spsce.