Comment by geophile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geophile | Hacker News Reader

No, America cannot.

I visited Hoover Dam a few years ago. It is impossible for me to imagine a project like that happening now. It was a massive project. The government saw the need, put out the project for bids. The project was completed ahead of time and under budget. It was a spectacular success.

During the tour, we walked through some of the offices -- clean, gleaming corrdiors.

Now there were fewer regulations way back when the project was initiated. But even ignoring slowdowns due to environmental concerns (for example), we all know what would happen now. Democrats would be for it. Republicans would try to block it (except for those whose districts would benefit directly.) If the project were approved, it would be very late and way over budget. Hell, this government can't even approve badly needed and overdue infrastructure maintenance, (even though that would provide many of the jobs they are always going on about).

My opinion, as a 62-year old American, is that this country is in an irreversible decline.

At the cost of 154+ deaths. That's one thing that has changed since the big projects of last century: construction workers are no longer considered to be part of the cost/benefit equation.

I'd argue that a contributing factor to the moderating of big projects is that the world is now better instrumented and we have a better idea of the costs and benefits of big projects, so a lot more goes into each decision and it's harder to push things though on the basis of a grand vision.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Construction_deaths

Its lack of safety considerations would terrify folks today. Look at film of highscalers with little more than a rope. Diversion tunnel crews that were at constant risk of cave-in and suffocation. Blacks segregated and given the most dangerous jobs. All the cheap labor you could use.

Cost of life in USA has gone up significantly since then and hence people are willing to put up with unreasonable and super expensive safety mechanisms which bloat the entire project. USA could however use immigrants in such projects with lower safety standards, something that most middle easterns countries and our very close allies like Saudi Arabia has been doing.

Take above paragraph with a pinch of salt please.

Seriously speaking, large government projects are less about people and more about misplaced priorities of politicians. California's rail project was absolutely nonsensical and horribly bloated. Why do we even need a high speed train between Merced and Bakersfield ? For cows ?

American private entrepreneurs are dreaming big. Those big dreams however are getting realized only in areas government has not yet killed off with ultra crazy regulations. Elon Musk alone is doing it with Giga Factory, SpaceX and Teslas. Amazon through entering healthcare. Google is doing it through Google brain and so on. There might not be huge structures built with human sacrifice but the efforts gone into them are nevertheless equally spectacular.

America is building far bigger thing that benefits even the poor person in remote village of India instead of dams and trains. You just need to look at right locations. Also America doing it without risking lives of workers.

  Amazon through entering healthcare

What has Amazon accomplished in healthcare to date?

Not right now, but they will in a big way.

Unless they get into US health insurance, they are not going to have that much of a difference in US health Care.

Not disagreeing with you, but cautioning; I wouldn't read any grand lessons into the failure of CA HSR, except as they pertain to California's dysfunctional politics. Comparison to Hoover Dam (federally funded) isn't apples-to-apples.

A comparison to the giant boondoggle that was Boston's Big Dig might be warranted, except that the Big Dig actually produced something that millions of people use on daily basis.

I think a graph/table showing percent under/over budget vs year would be very telling, but a quick search doesn't provide anything that has been compiled. But more troubling, I'm having trouble finding any data with budget related numbers that don't require a phone call to an accounting department.

Do we have that little transparency?

I don't claim to know much about California bureaucracy, but in my own state, just in the past decade:

- The 787 was years late and over budget

- The 520 bridge was years late and over budget

- The 99 tunnel was years late and over budget

- Microsoft doesn't seem to schedule releases (publicly) or use calendar years for version numbers any more, but from where I sit, Windows hasn't exactly been a shining example of success in the past decade, either

These are public and private, across completely disparate engineering fields. California may be dysfunctional but everybody else is, too. If someone in this country can still "build big", who is doing it?

There is a big difference between late and not finished at all. Those are all examples of successful big projects.

Exactly. Humans suck at estimating cost and time for large, complex projects. Measuring the success of a project purely based on whether the estimates were accurate before they started completely ignores any benefit folks have when the project is completed.

That just leads to more questions!

If missing estimates of time and resources is a success, then what would be a failure? Just giving up? Can we make any project a "success" by just keeping on throwing time and money at it until it's finished?

People (like executives, or voters) made the decision to go forward with these projects based on the estimates. If engineering estimates can't even be accurate to within a factor of 2 (like these), then what's the purpose of providing them? If humans are just bad at estimating, why are these estimates always much lower than actual, and never higher? What about the benefits which could have been achieved by other uses of this money? How can anyone make an informed decision about which possible engineering project to implement, when estimates are this bad?

These days, I assume any estimate without a confidence interval is a lie.

Even for those of us in San Francisco -- can you imagine someone proposing building Sutro Tower today? What do you mean you can see it from everywhere?! Our glorious view! That it became kind of an iconic landmark, well, that's neither here nor there. Nobody's allowed to build anything taller than anything already there. It's as if SF has decided that it's happy with things as they are and no need to grow/build/develop anything new.

The Salesforce tower is very recent, and you can see it from everywhere. It even lights up like an Asian-style building. Not saying you’re wrong, these projects seem to be much harder now on political and financial and other measures, but not completely impossible. Then again we can’t seem to open a glorified bus terminal successfully....

Indeed, I'm looking at Salesforce out the window right now :) point taken, though I feel like SoMa is basically the only part of town development is happening. No similar high-rises are being put up west of the Van Ness corridor, for instance.

I love how only now they realize that it lacks the expected Caltrain capacity.

Sutro is well above everything else in SF. It doesn't obscure anything but, uh, fog maybe.

I enjoyed the Dam tour when I took it years ago. Especially when the tour guide said the Hoover Dam was the last federal project completely on time and under budget.

I had the same thoughts visiting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I cannot imagine it being built now.

A rail system in the U.S. has to compete with a very robust airport system and a very robust interstate system. You can argue what you will about whether Americans should drive as much as they do, but the old saying about bringing a horse to water applies here. If SF <-> LA flights are $100-$200 round trip at 1.5 hours (+ 1-2 hours at the airport). It's a 8 hour bus ride for like $30-50. A train that was gonna take 5+ hours has to compete for the middle market.

It's a model that doesn't work well without a corresponding tax on short-hop flights.

Why would you do that? Just because? Taxing a faster form of public transportation just to shepherd people onto trains? Makes zero sense.

To pay for the externalities of air travel (ie carbon emissions).

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