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Comment by masonic | Hacker News Reader

  the U.S. has become incapable of building large projects in a reasonable amount of time and budget?

Private projects come in on time and on budget, or nearly so, all the time. It's the public sector projects that are layered in graft.

The last major public project that came in near the original budget that I can recall is the San Jose Area (now SAP).

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Private projects come in on time and on budget all the time? Do you have any evidence to support this? I’ve seen plenty of private projects gonoff the rails. The difference is that private projects can keep their budget information, well, private.

Which private enterprise has the power to run a hundred billion project that isn’t funded by the government. Not one.

Uber, Google Search Engine, Facebook, etc.

None of them have done anything on this scale, have they? They’re valuable because they don’t make investments like this. Their work is on a long lever so they have great margins over massive volume.

I’m pretty sure Uber has terrible margins :)

Haha, or potential for great margins, right. It's not one big project that costs $100 bil, right. There's very little incrementality to HSR, etc.

Google has spent over $200 million on land alone... in the valley alone... just in the past month.

I heard that it seriously depleted HQ's petty cash fund. (But seriously, these were, in fact, all-cash deals.)

Yeah, but they don't do that every month. And $200 million is 1/500 of 100 billion. This is like the difference between going to a nice restaurant and buying a McLaren P1. Or spending all your money as an L7 at Google vs. going to space yourself.

Think of all the high-rise apartments (which so many on HN claim to want) and large commercial complexes that are constructed purely by private enterprise.

AT&T Park, Levi's Stadium (over $1 billion), and the new Warriors arena (over $1 billion) were privately funded.

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