Comment by disabled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by disabled | Hacker News Reader

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> cladding for aesthetic reasons

Cladding is used primarily for insulation and energy conservation. I think the concept of "cladding" is more of a UK and European thing though.

> There's significant political interest in finding a corporate scandal here.

There are all sorts of unethical scandals with various forms of unethical social experimentation. It's everywhere within the corporate world, and there are also open source projects with unethical experiments going on. You just have to look and pay attention. A lot of these groups play it off like they have done proper due process, when they have not. Then they have their PR flacks take the reigns using distracting and emotive language to justify their unethical projects.

Everyone who works on projects should read this article. Pay attention to Table 3 in particular. I keep it on my desk as a reminder of what is ethical vs unethical.

An Ethical Framework for Evaluating Experimental Technology: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4912576/

> Cladding is used primarily for insulation and energy conservation. I think the concept of "cladding" is more of

You’re not wrong, but emails from Kensington council made it quite clear they considered Grenfell an eyesore, and cladding was seen as a method of improving the aesthetic appeal of the building.

Kensington council are certainly partly responsible for the loss of life. In particular, they set a low budget for the renovation - then rejected all the bidders who weren't using the cheap flammable materials for being too expensive.

But the council's intention in starting the project was insulate poor people's homes free of charge, while making the area look nicer. I don't see anything wrong with the intention - it's the budget and implementation where they screwed up.

They didn’t reject the bidders because of the materials, they were rejected due to the overall bid price. They had a budget (£8 million iirc), most came in at ~£11 million except the winning bid which was at ~£9 million. They then engaged in some shady pre negotiation with them to reduce their bid before accepting it.

After accepting it the contractor realised some of their values were wrong so in addition to attempting to find hundreds of thousands of pounds of saving from the council, they were also trying to save hundreds of thousands due to their own misestimates.

Part of this led them to select aluminium cladding over the originally specified zinc cladding which was much less flammable but much more expensive.

Right, but a company that wouldn't have switched to the ACM rainscreen cladding could never have won the bidding process - because they had to agree to do a bunch of cost cutting to have a chance of winning the bid.

So even if the average standards in the industry are high, and 95% of companies wouldn't have suggested the use of dangerous cheap materials, those companies wouldn't have won the bidding.

So any change in the rules needs to improve the bottom end of the industry - it can't be a mere voluntary scheme that improves only the conscientious and competent.

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