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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Most infrastructure is paid for by taxes, and the cost of building to Roman standards is rarely impossible, but often beyond what the public would consider reasonable.

Would you pay 10x more to have something that lasts 100x or even 1000x longer? The upfront cost is higher, but the TCO is ultimately lower. IMHO it's ultimately a form of planned obsolescence. This becomes even more obvious when plenty of expense is spent just on "engineering" to deliberately reduce lifespan.

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No, for two reasons.

First, we can’t summon infinite money to pay for things. Paying 10X more per bridge means we can build 1/10th as many bridges or we have to start stealing from other budgets.

Second, we don’t know what the needs will be for the bridge in that location 100 or 1000 years from now. It could need to be torn down to be widened. Maybe we’re all riding around in electric vehicles that coordinate perfectly with each other and the bridge isn’t needed for cross traffic any more. We don’t know.

Well, invading a few fewer countries could pay for a few longer lasting bridges … it’s a matter of priorities.

You don't have to wait 100 years. You can build a bridge to alleviate traffic without any understanding that the bridge will in fact generate more traffic, and then you have to widen it a few years later (which also doesn't help). I know this has happened several times in NYC and I'm sure it has happened many other places where engineering know-how far outstrips knowledge of urban planning.

On the other hand having 10 times as many bridges could prove to be an impossibility when maintenance costs come knocking.

The thing is, we're actually pretty crappy at knowing what we'll need 50 years from now, much less 500. Doesn't make sense to overbuild for an unknown future, when hundred years from now us will likely be able to do a far better job anyway.

That's to consider the commons solely materialist utility. The Romans built meaning through arts that still speaks to this day. Efficient construction becomes worthless over time.

Efficiency is never worthless in a world where resources (if nothing else, labor) are not infinite.

The kind of efficiency we focus on seem to be plentiful. Labour is a good example, see unemployment rates and the number of bullshit jobs anyway.

What's covered in the article is also a great example of material resource that could be used, but short term profiting primes.

Yes, you, too, can have two-thousand-year-old buildings if you're willing to make that longevity be the primary thing you pay for, assuming that your successors don't tear the thing down and replace it with something else, like happened to many Roman monuments.

In which case you spent a bunch more than you needed to on a building that didn't last any longer than it would have if you'd chosen a practical end date for it.

No, because there are public projects that make sense at 3–4% discount rates that haven't been funded, so it would clearly make more sense to direct funding towards those projects first before trying to fund anything that requires a sub-1% discount rate.

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