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Comment by thev4lley | Hacker News Reader

I don't think most people appreciate the level of regulation that ensures safety and quality of life in Western countries. Go to many countries outside of that spectrum and you may still see beautiful architecture and more. Now did the team that worked on that project have the necessary experience to drive a safe and long lasting solution? Does the concrete and steel used follow good standards? This means that it may not have critical structural problems today, but in 5 to 10 years, you may have to reconsider your infrastructure. By doing shoddy work, you have a higher rate of catastrophic failure, larger carbon footprint and many other issues.

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I believe regulation is an essential tool for society, but it is not the whole story- morality plays as large a part.

Once the regulation is set, it can easily be undermined. BPA was banned by regulation, so industry developed analogue chemicals with the same properties and began using them.

Certain aspects of concrete & steel are regulated, so unethical effort goes into subverting the idea of the law while following the letter. Or they start sourcing the steel from outside the jurisdiction of the regulation (eg radioactive material is disposed of in China by mixing with steel made for export https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global...)

Not trying to be disagreeable, it's just a thought that has been bothering me.

But you’re agreeing.

Variable morality is a problem.

The solution is (imperfect as it often is, as BPA ex illustrates) effective regulation.

Effective regulation is synonymous with “making individual moral differences irrelevant.”

> Effective regulation is synonymous with “making individual moral differences irrelevant.”

I think it's more illuminating to phrase the problem in terms of externalities.

Things need to be set up to ensure that the profit motive cannot lead to the following thinking: Rather than spending $100m on doing the project to a high safety standard, I'll spend $70m, introducing a mere 1% chance of catastrophic failure and hundreds of deaths.

1% is of course far too high a probability, especially if this line of thinking is being followed in hundreds of different projects, but the odds may look fine to the manager.

Without regulation, companies can be incentivised to take corner-cutting risks where they profit by the upside, and we all bear risk-of-death on the downside (failing aircraft, collapsing buildings, etc).

With regulation, companies are required to meet a certain bar. Reputational harm can also incentivise companies to invest in safety, but it's not enough; regulation is needed.

You comment reminds me of a quip floating around the maintenance side of commercial aviation that's along the lines of "this industry is full of bean counters trying to find dumb corners to cut to save a penny because it's illegal to cut all the smart ones".

I used to work in a very process-heavy industry: control software for Medical Devices. People would ask about the benefits of following a rigorous process and my answer was always the same: Process sets a minimum standard, but unless people believe in producing a quality product, that minimum is all you'll ever get.

Oof, that hit close to home. In fact, even when people want to create a quality product, management will find someone who'll just do the minimum faster and for less.

Which is exactly why any Quality initiative has to be supported by management, or it's a waste of time.

In capitalist societies any morality driven endeavor will very quickly be driven to the ground by its amoral competitor. And in public organizations the moral are quickly driven out because they threaten the amoral.

Also, of course, there are cases where regulation fails, and it’s never 100% successful. But the situations you mention are where people refused to adjust regulations as needed.

I’m curious to see examples where morality has prevented undesirable behavior on a large scale.

The history of the world tells us that ethics is a very weak control. In particular where profit is concerned. Capitalists have proven time and time again that they will pass whatever costs they can to others, the users of their product, the public or the workers. No doubt the many of the managers at 3M(just one example of zillions,) went to some sort religious institution and if you asked them they'd profess to be moral people. Zero dependence should be made on morality as a regulator.

Let me add, perhaps there's a moral basis behind the regulations ("don't have machinery that chops worker arms off") but morality should have zero role to play as an implicit or explicit part of the regulation. "we don't have to include in the regulation "install shields on equipment to prevent harm to workers" because we expect the factory owners to take the necessary steps, based on their being moral people, to prevent it." Expecting good behavior based on the expectation of morality should never be part of any regulation.

Morality is out the window once someone's mortgage is in the mix.

I strongly agree. For laws to work effectively, there needs to be a critical mass of support for them in every group involved.

>Go to many countries outside of that spectrum and you may still see beautiful architecture and more. Now did the team that worked on that project have the necessary experience to drive a safe and long lasting solution? Does the concrete and steel used follow good standards? This means that it may not have critical structural problems today, but in 5 to 10 years, you may have to reconsider your infrastructure. By doing shoddy work, you have a higher rate of catastrophic failure, larger carbon footprint and many other issues.

High labor costs in the western world drive construction techniques. We (try to) build stuff that never breaks because we can't afford to fix things if they break. Low labor costs mean structures can be replaced more often and built for a shorter lifetime. It's folly to pretend that those engineers designing shoddy Chinese apartment complexes that occasionally fall down during construction don't have the same formulas and simulation tools at their disposal. They just have different inputs and design constraints. They know that if they build 100 buildings and ten fall down it's still cheaper than 100 better buildings where none fall down. There's no point in building a 100yr building if it's gonna be bulldozed in ten.

It's hard to think of a more critical design constraint than "don't collapse while there are people in the building."

Hiring engineers and following their plans is expensive, if you can skip one or both of those, you can undercut your competitors bids.

Except for all the people that die when it falls down...

In some places, life is considered cheap.

>It's folly to pretend that those engineers designing shoddy Chinese apartment complexes that occasionally fall down during construction don't have the same formulas and simulation tools at their disposal. They just have different inputs and design constraints. They know that if they build 100 buildings and ten fall down it's still cheaper than 100 better buildings where none fall down. There's no point in building a 100yr building if it's gonna be bulldozed in ten.

Not quite, it's more of a deliberate fraud made possible by political corruption in the contract awarding process where they also know they won't be liable for rebuilding because they'll be long gone. The calculus is different than what you described.

If the contractor illegally adulterates the concrete mix to save money because they're politically connected and know they can get away with that, it hardly matters how good the building design was.

What I've found is that outside of these fields (civil/mechanical/chemical engineering), people greatly underestimate how much math goes into projects like these. I'm a programmer now, but I used to be a mechanical engineer in aerospace. We used far, far more math in a hands-on way in the latter. We'd calculate bolt stacks: https://www.dimensionalconsulting.com/bolt-stacks.html on every bolt in a helicopter. There were a lot of bolts.

Everyone should be worried then that the airlines have outsourced aircraft maintenance and repair to other countries where the FAA has little to no oversight.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113877...

My folks witnessed a death as an adhoc concrete structure was pulled from a pier onto a person below. I guess noone anticipated someone would use the structure as a boat tie off point. By happenstance the person crushed was the person who put up the structure some decade or more back. I don't know if its callous but I only remarked that kind of structure would almost certainly be illegal in the US.

A sad inadvertent application of Hammurabi's Code.

And yet the construction here in the US have reputation of doing shoddy works, not doing work on time, and being more expensive than they should be, while skirting any regulations any way they can.

Or at least that's my impression.

> skirting any regulations any way they can.

Here in india we don't skirt regulations because no one knows what regulations are supposed be followed. :)

That is my impression of certain projects/contractors at least, like the replacement eastern span of the Bay Bridge and how it immediately developer those foundation leaks, cracked welds, failed bolts, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_th...

They do have that reputation, as in many western countries to varying degrees, but there's large difference (in my mind) between corruption that affects finances and corruption that affects safety.

The latter is rather rare in a place like the US, and when it happens, the problem will generally be discovered and fixed before people die. In the case that the problem results in casualties, there is almost always a process of oversight, media and public attention, and adapting of protocols to mitigate the risk of a similar situation in the future.

From a western perspective, if you travel to Pakistan and observe the safety/quality of electrical wiring and gas heating/pipe systems, they're shockingly poor. Harsh economic realities mean that not everyone can wire an office or house to the same safety and quality standards that we would see in North America.

In my personal opinion the only reason why there are not a constant amount of electrical fires killing people is that brick and concrete structures don't catch on fire very well. The same shoddy electrical wiring in a north american environment with wood-frame construction would be a catastrophe.

The same cost cutting and compromise approach should not be taken to civil aviation.

Over the long term however the bad quality of the utility safety is a cost. Both in people killed and repairs needing to be made. It is another case in which it is cheaper to be rich.

You can also correlate the safety and quality of life with wealth.

Rich societies can afford to spend resources to make things safe. If the mechanism is government regulations, a strict liability legal system, and/or a civic minded population is secondary.

In the nuclear industry this is called "procedural use and adherence". It's one thing to have a written "de jure" way of doing things, but quite another to actually follow said rules.

I'm assuming it's regulation, cause I'm super happy the utility poles around me don't look like this [0]. There's even comments about how people die because nothing is grounded there.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/gn16k8/cable_managemen...

I'm not an expert, but those look to my eyes like data (cable/phone) wires, not power distribution. A crazy rats' nest, but probably not dangerous?

I'm curious to know how it got to that point. Do they have 3 or 4 competing cable tv services in the neighborhood, all with their own infrastructure?

I like the stereotyping of the entire "East" as one incompetent shit hole. The last I checked infrastructure in the US is crumbling. Each new thing also costs an insane bloated amount leading to a refusal to build new infrastructure altogether. Being in the west doesn't guarantee many things and being in the east doesn't either.

It's crumbling because it hasn't been maintained since the 50s-70s, not because it's shittily built. To be fair.

The new Metro extension out of DC to Dulles airport is literally crumbling... concrete is failing, the maintenance yard is sinking into the ground, plus it's over-budget and over-time. For the concrete, the apparent answer is "we'll inspect it more" instead of holding the contractor accountable and making them replace it. Because reasons.

Boston recently spent $21B on the Big Dig project. It was shittily built. It leaks, and the tunnel ceiling collapsed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig#Problems

An exception to this is the Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Univer...

To add to your voice, sure, the "west" may have the reputation of good engineering, and the "east" have one of "shoddy slap-bang it all together", but one needs to keep up the vigilance to maintain a good reputation.

Just to make you think about western engineering and oversight, here's one word: 737MAX.

My point was to judge on a case by case basis. If we don't do that, how can we expect the common layman to.

Apparently there's chatter in recent days on China's internet regarding the Three Gorges Dam, and how it's setting / warping due to reservoir backpressure (pictures in link): https://www.theepochtimes.com/experts-warn-of-chinas-three-g...

Apparently there's heavy rainfall this year. 300-400 million people live below the dam. I'm unfamiliar with domestic travel restrictions within China, but I can't imagine it's gotten better with the ongoing pandemic, so you can't really plan ahead and move out of the way until the rainy season ends.

I want to believe there's something wrong with the camera that made that specific image distorted. Or that the government recognizes the problem and is fixing it. I like it when things are boring.

Yeah, that’s just a crummy image that looks like it’s been projected onto terrain. You see the same wavy effect on stuff all over google earth, which that appears to be from.

Yep, the issue here is that it's projecting it over the old terrain height maps that were created before the dam was built. In Google Earth Desktop, you can fix this by unchecking "terrain" and can see that the base image is perfectly straight.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Three+Gorges+Dam+Scenic+Ar...

Here's an extreme shot from the edge of the dam. Obviously it didn't deform that much and stay standing.

I don’t think concrete warps like that. If you check out the google satellite image, it really looks like a warped image.

I’d say the dam is fine.

I was about to reply that the same thing happened last year, but then I noticed that your link is also to an article from 2019. I wonder why it's become news again. Maybe because it's the rainy season right now?

Look no further than the Coca Codo dam that China built for Ecuador. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/americas/ecuador-ch... Not only did it basically cost Ecuador any sovereignty it may have had, the project is a complete disaster. Equipment is degrading at 10x its depreciation schedule. The dam has never been able to function at the output levels it promised, and the deaths that have occurred during and after its construction is reminiscent of another massive Chinese construction project, some kind of wall, I think.

It's worth noting that your source, The Epoch Times, is run by Falun Gong and is basically anti-CCP propaganda. I don't trust the Chinese government as far as I can throw them, but getting info from The Epoch Times has the same problem in the other direction.

For what it's worth, that looks like distortion I've seen in other Google Maps images. This South China Morning Post article includes a satellite photo released by the Chinese government to show everything is fine: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3017927/no-p...

That's great, thanks for the better link! The image did look a bit weird to me (I don't think the facility would be usable in that condition), and it seemed a bit incredible that there would be that much settling after only 10 years, but I'm not sure what to believe anymore and it feels like the worse scenario is always the true one. Really glad I'm just being Chicken Little, we have enough stuff to worry about.

> For what it's worth, that looks like distortion I've seen in other Google Maps images.

I'd like to think that I would've noticed before reading your comment but I saw the picture after... it looks pretty obvious though, especially to the right where the distortion follows the stitching line where there is clearly different light.

Even if the distortion were believed to be real, some of the discontinuities in the structure would be so severe as to be catastrophic.

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