Generally bid that is not "technically complete" .i.e. does not demonstrate a real ability to undertake and complete the project can be rejected. There is some engineering discretion to this.
958 karma · joined January 14, 2017
The kinds of work that you describe fall more under maintenance and basic repair, which most public agencies have full time employees that perform that roles. For instance the NYC subway has signaling workers for a constant stream of signal work, track workers to maintain track and sign workers for endless lifecycle replacement of signs. New construction work, like tunnels and stations is done by contractors.
When you consider what a soft brexit is, it's genuinely nothing of what leave wanted. The UK still doesn't have a solid border between itself and the EU because of the Good Friday Agreement, the UK still had to pay the EU and follow it's regulations and for all that it gets zero say in the EU legislature.
So there is a real chance of a hard brexit and it's going to be very messy.
Most public projects today have generous structured incentives that are given to companies for meeting goals for time and budget. We work to these incentives.
Keep in mind that often you cannot be aware of the things that will go wrong until you actually do them. This happens in software development quite a bit.
I am not aware of any extensive private tunnel construction that has occurred without public financing inside of the U.S.
So here are the drawbacks to Musk's plan:
1. He may prioritize speed over safety, either unintentionally causing loss of life or limb because of construction practices or geotechnically destablize the foundations of the buildings and infrastructure that he's traveling under.
2. I firmly believe that it's going to cost far, far more than 1 billion. That leaves the chance of a big hole in the ground that may eventually fill with water.
One of the only things that I can agree with Musk in regards to this project is that larger tunnels are more expensive.
(https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/hyperloop-deve...)
I thought they were going to have a single track tunnel with passing sidings based on the 1.6 billion dollar construction costs, which would limit frequency.
Does Musk seriously believe he get two ~20 mile tunnels and terminals for $1.6 billion? I don't know if he's exceedingly ambitious or delusional, give that a underground that's depicted in the rendering would cost 1/4 of his budget.
This isn't meant to return it's investment, it's meant as an operational testbed for musk's vision.
It will not.
>What costs more, the transaction fees or the ice cream cone?
There have been times where the average transaction cost was about $20. It's hovering around $0.80 cents now, to the best of my knowledge. So it depends on the market.
I belief that the current strategy is to convince others that bitcoin is a great transaction medium for everything under the sun (i.e. ice cream) and then cash out in dirty fiat once the price reaches a target so you can buy Lambos full of ice cream. It's really not a sincere attempt to create a currency as it is to masssively enrich early adopters by encouraging use by normal people.
In any case, nobody uses Bitcoin as a currency because it's logistically harder for 99.9% of people, and nobody uses it as a store of value because its insanely volitale. Bitcoin is really just a speculative asset.
But on the other hand, if you don't build and replace infrastructure now, you're going to have tons of problems that have real, tangible costs. Imagine you're a patient with a disease, but you don't have health insurance and you know the cost is for treatment is high. You wait several years to get treated but the cost for treatment hasn't changed or is higher and you've suffered all that time.
That's our conundrum. We can choose to not treat the disease and that's been the choice of a fair number of public officials but it's only cost us.
If you're an advocate for transportation options, this is a good thing.
Streetcars, in the sense that they're being implemented in North America are no faster than buses in mixed traffic. What they mostly lend is the idea of permanently high frequency transit, which is a positive sign for developers although not as useful for residents as light rail.