Loud and expensive renovations shattering a formerly quiet block in Manhattan

https://statisticalatlas.com/place/New-York/New-York/Househo...

If you have $10M in a checking account, but choose work at Starbucks as a barista because you like fake Italian names for coffee, you are rich.

If you have no savings or other assets, but earn $150K/year, you are not rich.

"But along West 69th Street and stretches of West 68th Street (where I live and work and am also serenaded by the drilling, including at this very moment)..."

How about the impoverished little kids of NYC who have to deal with the noise of domestic abuse, gunshots, police sirens, etc.

I live in Toronto, where we have Winter season and Construction season. It's everywhere in the city and a noisy construction might just pop up anywhere, poor neighborhood or not.

Dealing with construction noise is relevant to anyone in Toronto regardless of wealth.

If the rich had any other way of dealing with it, I would like to see it in evidence. If the rich have as much recourse as the rest of us, I would like to see it in evidence. The article is relevant regardless of the people depicted being rich.

They're humans like the rest of us and I think it's unfair to write them off without a second thought.

I think the idea is that rather than rotating a power-transfer shaft with a drill bit fixed on the end, you just rotate the drill bit with a "mud motor" and circulate the power-transfer fluid with a pump on the surface. The end of the hole can then proceed in any direction, and the only thing you need to feed down the hole is hydraulic pressure and more length of high-pressure hoses and perhaps data wires to control the bit assembly.

You only need a straight line if you're using the torque on a rigid shaft to transfer power. If you can get the mud-powered drill bit assembly to fit within the bore of the vertical hole, you can drill in any direction you want from the bottom of it. It drills in that direction, and pulls itself into the hole it is boring.

This is only necessary because the stone saw is essentially a cable with high tensile strength coated in tiny bits of diamond. In order to cut, you have to pull the circulating cable through the rock. It's like slicing cheese by putting the cheese on top of a wire and lifting the wire up, rather than by pushing down on it with a knife. Vertical cuts in the rock extend upward from the length of the horizontal drill holes. You are then left with square pillars separated by straight kerf-width grooves.

Now you set anchors in the top of a pillar, and use your crane to apply upward force to counteract the weight of the pillar down to the bottom. Send some decent bearings down to the bottom of the holes, and thread your saw cable down one vertical shaft, around a well-anchored bearing, around three horizontal shafts, around another bearing, and back up an adjacent vertical shaft. Cut through the bottom of the pillar. Stop pulling before you ruin your bearings.

At this point, use the crane to lift the pillar enough to get a lifting jack under it. Now you can work at the surface. Push the pillar up from below with the jack, and cut off the anchor block. Push up more, and cut off height at regular intervals. Some of your blocks will have a quarter of a drill hole on their edges, or anchor bolt holes in them, but most will be as perfect as lasers can make them.