As someone who works in the industry, do you have a theory as to why virtually all of our peer democracies are so much better and more cost efficient at building big public infrastructure?
You are assuming that they are. From what I see for every airport that is so glorious it is an affront to the gods there is raw sewage being poured on the ground an hour drive away. Countries are good at peices of infrastructure, sometimes. Japan is famous for this but only because no one is mentioning their powerlines or snail mail system or their M2M over fax nonsense. The Israelis got water management down pat but best not to talk about East Jerusalem. Generally speaking the US has better sewage systems than say the UK but rail not so much.
And it wasn’t always this way. We used to be able to get shit done, but something happened in the last few decades.
Yes, as a whole humanity is getting worse at infrastructure. There is plenty of blame to go around. I imagine it is a variation on cost disease. We only have so many technical people and if they are all working on Faceboot and Twatter they aren’t optimizing the traffic lights.
In particular what would make my job easier and give the taxpayers a break:
Allow long term maintenance calculations to be used in bidding. If company A is bidding say 100k and company B is bidding 90K but company A can prove that their solution will cost less in the long run, factor that in by some equation. There are dozens of ways I know how to lower my upfront cost and increase taxpayer long term cost. I would rather not do any of them.
No more incentives to use local businesses. I know it sounds all cute and green on paper but in practice it creates monopolies and corruption. If the best water pumping system I can find for your town is in the another country please let me buy it.
Backcharges are now banned. If you are unhappy with what was delivered give the company a chance to make it right or blackball them for a decade. There are better things to do with our time than waste it with lawyers trying to remember what was said casually in a meeting three years ago.
No more requiring a PE unless someone can prove that a PE is required and at the same time do not let PE boards decide licensing. PEs are scarce, thus cost more. Because they are scare they can’t train new ones. Additionally since they cost so much and improvements can’t be made because no one is willing to pay for specs to be upgraded. That is why you have specs calling for components that haven’t been made in decades and why innovations don’t move around the sector.
Solve the problem, not the secondary effects. For example right now we have crap electricity at a site and I am struggling with all motors overheating. Upgrade the electrical feeding the site instead of demanding that I deal with impact. “Can’t you solve it in software?”. No Johnathan, I can’t software a solution to a motor melting for being demanded to give constant torque with 3rd world grade electricity.
The top down pyramid model has been proven to be the most wasteful and slow to innovate. It only exists because it is easy. Stop using it to build infrastructure. Just because a kid knows a bit about cement doesn’t mean they are experts on welding.
Stop farming work out. Deal with one company. That company buys it from a catalog or they build it themselves.
Almost all the problems you listed are just symptoms of going with the lowest bidder for everything. It’s similar to why so many start ups turn into ponzie schemes when VC money is involved. If you set achievable goals on a realistic timelime no one will invest in your company because there are 10 other people willing to lie to get the money. This is how most medical start ups went broke while Theranos was worth 9 billion.
Same with infatructure projects. Some town official who doesn’t even know which end of a screw driver goes in the electical outlet listens to (at best) a few proposals and chooses one. None of those proposals are going to give an honest cost by cost assesment compared to the other options. It comes down to the person making the decisions choosing who to trust. If one guy says it will need 10k a year in maintenance and the other says 100k who do you believe?
The only way to know for sure is to have your own people who you trust to verify information. But paying a knowlegeable staff like that is expensive; and people who don’t understand how complex this stuff can get will be angry at “double spended”. As in, why pay anyone in house when they aren’t actually “doing” anything like the private companies creating the proposals.
Why wouldn’t I give an honest answer? A dishonest answer is going to make me miserable. Most of the processes my company makes we make so much that we can give good estimates on total yearly cost. It would be easier for me to just hand over that data vs making up new fraudulent data that could survive a court challenge. As Mark Twain mentioned, if you tell the truth you don’t have to remember a damn thing. Besides they would easily be able to point to the numbers going over budget and demand free parts or free service.
Your idea about having your own people is why I yelled in my other comment. Those people are the worst. The more my customer understands the more problems their system will have. I know one horse towns in deliverance country using systems that smash the recommended operating lifespan and I know places that have all this local talent who are down monthly.
Doctors make the worse patients, lawyers make the worse plaintiffs, and inhouse engineers make the worse clients. The more the design is tampered with the less likely it will work right. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and open up your chest cavity and start poking around, maybe try to get your kidneys to work faster. That is what it is like dealing with the local engineering “talent”. They are overconfident, weight in on stuff that they don’t understand, follow ancient specs, and pretty much every other sin of engineering you can list.
Put another way. If me and my coworkers are working on process X all day every working day with hundreds of sites do you think we may know more than a person who deals with a single instance of the process? Phoenix Arizona is another great example. They have the most bottom of the barrel catty in-house engineering team of any city in the US. Kinda people who measure the paint thickness on a motor with calibers, demand a repainting if it is off by a milimeter, then leave it in direct sun, and are shocked when the motor overheats.
You are assuming that they are. From what I see for every airport that is so glorious it is an affront to the gods there is raw sewage being poured on the ground an hour drive away. Countries are good at peices of infrastructure, sometimes. Japan is famous for this but only because no one is mentioning their powerlines or snail mail system or their M2M over fax nonsense. The Israelis got water management down pat but best not to talk about East Jerusalem. Generally speaking the US has better sewage systems than say the UK but rail not so much.
Yes, as a whole humanity is getting worse at infrastructure. There is plenty of blame to go around. I imagine it is a variation on cost disease. We only have so many technical people and if they are all working on Faceboot and Twatter they aren’t optimizing the traffic lights.
In particular what would make my job easier and give the taxpayers a break:
Allow long term maintenance calculations to be used in bidding. If company A is bidding say 100k and company B is bidding 90K but company A can prove that their solution will cost less in the long run, factor that in by some equation. There are dozens of ways I know how to lower my upfront cost and increase taxpayer long term cost. I would rather not do any of them.
No more incentives to use local businesses. I know it sounds all cute and green on paper but in practice it creates monopolies and corruption. If the best water pumping system I can find for your town is in the another country please let me buy it.
Backcharges are now banned. If you are unhappy with what was delivered give the company a chance to make it right or blackball them for a decade. There are better things to do with our time than waste it with lawyers trying to remember what was said casually in a meeting three years ago.
No more requiring a PE unless someone can prove that a PE is required and at the same time do not let PE boards decide licensing. PEs are scarce, thus cost more. Because they are scare they can’t train new ones. Additionally since they cost so much and improvements can’t be made because no one is willing to pay for specs to be upgraded. That is why you have specs calling for components that haven’t been made in decades and why innovations don’t move around the sector.
Solve the problem, not the secondary effects. For example right now we have crap electricity at a site and I am struggling with all motors overheating. Upgrade the electrical feeding the site instead of demanding that I deal with impact. “Can’t you solve it in software?”. No Johnathan, I can’t software a solution to a motor melting for being demanded to give constant torque with 3rd world grade electricity.
The top down pyramid model has been proven to be the most wasteful and slow to innovate. It only exists because it is easy. Stop using it to build infrastructure. Just because a kid knows a bit about cement doesn’t mean they are experts on welding.
Stop farming work out. Deal with one company. That company buys it from a catalog or they build it themselves.
Almost all the problems you listed are just symptoms of going with the lowest bidder for everything. It’s similar to why so many start ups turn into ponzie schemes when VC money is involved. If you set achievable goals on a realistic timelime no one will invest in your company because there are 10 other people willing to lie to get the money. This is how most medical start ups went broke while Theranos was worth 9 billion.
Same with infatructure projects. Some town official who doesn’t even know which end of a screw driver goes in the electical outlet listens to (at best) a few proposals and chooses one. None of those proposals are going to give an honest cost by cost assesment compared to the other options. It comes down to the person making the decisions choosing who to trust. If one guy says it will need 10k a year in maintenance and the other says 100k who do you believe?
The only way to know for sure is to have your own people who you trust to verify information. But paying a knowlegeable staff like that is expensive; and people who don’t understand how complex this stuff can get will be angry at “double spended”. As in, why pay anyone in house when they aren’t actually “doing” anything like the private companies creating the proposals.
Why wouldn’t I give an honest answer? A dishonest answer is going to make me miserable. Most of the processes my company makes we make so much that we can give good estimates on total yearly cost. It would be easier for me to just hand over that data vs making up new fraudulent data that could survive a court challenge. As Mark Twain mentioned, if you tell the truth you don’t have to remember a damn thing. Besides they would easily be able to point to the numbers going over budget and demand free parts or free service.
Your idea about having your own people is why I yelled in my other comment. Those people are the worst. The more my customer understands the more problems their system will have. I know one horse towns in deliverance country using systems that smash the recommended operating lifespan and I know places that have all this local talent who are down monthly.
Doctors make the worse patients, lawyers make the worse plaintiffs, and inhouse engineers make the worse clients. The more the design is tampered with the less likely it will work right. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and open up your chest cavity and start poking around, maybe try to get your kidneys to work faster. That is what it is like dealing with the local engineering “talent”. They are overconfident, weight in on stuff that they don’t understand, follow ancient specs, and pretty much every other sin of engineering you can list.
Put another way. If me and my coworkers are working on process X all day every working day with hundreds of sites do you think we may know more than a person who deals with a single instance of the process? Phoenix Arizona is another great example. They have the most bottom of the barrel catty in-house engineering team of any city in the US. Kinda people who measure the paint thickness on a motor with calibers, demand a repainting if it is off by a milimeter, then leave it in direct sun, and are shocked when the motor overheats.