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Comment by kansface | Hacker News Reader

> I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc.,

Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it.

If the US were serious about climate change, I have no doubt we would move mountains tomorrow, but we absolutely are not serious. Sacrifice/compromise/responsibility aren't even part of the conversation.

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I mean yes? There are tons of big projects getting built in the US. Now, I'm not sure about the actual "ratios" compared to the 80s and earlier. So there might be less big infra projects nowadays (but I think that's also true for most of the west). Costs are also creeping up, and delays are maybe more common. Yet the fact remains that there are huge infra projects all around the US, they just don't really make headlines in the national news cycle because they are (sadly) just inherently boring for most of the population. Unless there is some drama around costs or delays, that is.

> Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it.

Stadiums, airports, and semiconductor fabs. But yeah, we are off our game.

My melange of big projects:

Space shuttle, reusable rockets, cell phone networks, Fibre deployment

They’re incremental (and out of order of importance), but these radically changed our lives in some way.

I feel like pointing out that stadiums and airports are single buildings that in the grand scheme of things aren't nearly as common or large as a country's (or even a single state's) worth of power plants, highways/rail networks, or housing for the masses.

Airports can be complex, and of course chip fabs are an overwhelming case of quality over quantity, so in conclusion you're definitely right on the "hard" count still being accomplished, but I notice a particular gap missing here on "big".

> Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

Nearly all of the cell phone/broadband network came up in the last generation. A lot of highway projects have completed. Many cities have had substantial light rail projects and extensions. We've done very well with certain kinds of infrastructure, it's just a question of whether we allocated the effort to the right stuff.

The main issue we have in our built environment comes down to massively prioritizing automobile tech and privatized sprawl development at every turn, when we've known for some time that it's a money pit and doesn't produce the equitable outcomes promised. That's only shifted recently with changes in demographics(Boomers, the biggest block of homeowners, fading, immigration from places with different standards), and new direction from the higher levels of government(e.g. Biden admin infrastructure packages and policy-setting, or California's move to address housing by pressuring cities to build denser).

There's a definite correlation going on between "housing cost increase" and "infrastructure cost increase", which I believe has the causation mostly on the end of housing, and the trend towards financialization that set in at the end of the 70's and consolidated the homeowner demographic into voting towards asset inflation. The 2nd Ave subway was expensive because New York's land is expensive, not because the tunnel itself was a uniquely nefarious technical problem. But New York's land is expensive in a speculative sense: the structure of the tax policy and valuation is such that a rational move is to leave a building vacant and try to sell it for more, rather than set rent at a lower price and record a valuation in line with what tenants can afford.

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Your examples are either Military projects or Buildings? FYI they're building Fighter Jets and Stadiums and Skyscrapers all over the world. Nothing majorly impressive about that.

Really complex things we completely fail at, Nuclear power plants take decades longer than intended. California's High Speed rail is billions of dollars over budget and many years behind schedule and may never finish.

Imagine mentioning climate change and then discussing building massive infrastructure that only ADDS to climate change. How in the world do you think that stuff gets built? (hint: massive amounts of fossil fuels)

Anyone "serious" about climate change realizes that it's a very slow moving thing that's not going to result in some sort of Hollywood Dante's Peak type scenario. Anyone "serious" about climate change also realizes it's neither fair nor realistic to expect up and coming continents like Africa to continue burning dung for heat while western nations get to reap the benefits of a century plus of fossil fuels turning them into superpowers.

Right now fossil fuels are still the best energy source you're going to get and still the best way of bringing nations to an industrialized point where they can actually consider "green energy".

Additionally, you seem to not understand that America has vast areas of emptiness and any federal plan for mass infra (especially transportation) is a massive waste of materials, taxes, and possibly incredibly destructive to certain eco-systems. Even my Dutch friends think it would be stupid to build mass transit on a European scale here. Our population is too spread out.

Lastly, stop thinking everything is a political issue. If you haven't figured it out by now... big government moves like a snail and will NEVER be the quickest or most efficient way to get anything done. If all this stuff is as good as you think it is, people will embrace it on their own without the need of any political battle.

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