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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

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voidfunc·

400m now... after cost overruns 2billion.

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$2 billion? I wish I were as optimistic as you.

The environmental consultants will drag this out for a decade if they can.

I wouldn't have believed you but it will take close to a decade to build under like half a mile of sidewalk near me with like actual construction time planned in weeks in contrast to the overall plan.

I don't think I would blame the environmental consultants though. This is just how we do things now.

The USD 2B path train stop at WTC became USD 4B+ and nobody went to prison for it. I don't think it should have even been USD 2B. All we needed was a path train stop.

*This is how we don’t do things. The whole process is optimized to ensure the least possible amount of things actually get done

You see in service economy most of the things done are services. Those are extremely profitable and low cost in materials. Actual real tangible things are entirely secondary. Preferably whole thing would be outsourced to some third-world country where it would be entirely build and maintained.

Services in a service economy aren’t expensive because they’re extremely profitable. They’re expensive because they have to pay for all the service-providers’ rent, which is a fractal source of ever-increasing costs.

We used to build subways by removing the entire road, building a steel structure, then covering the hole with a street surface (“cut and cover”)

Now that those neighborhoods are occupied by people who go on Hackernews and Bloomberg, they tend not to like having their streets converted into open pit mines, and so constructing subways is ungodly expensive.

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