I feel like Worldcom got a modest amount of press coverage at the time but probably would have gotten a lot more if it hadn’t been front-run by the Enron scandal.
I work with people who are well smart enough to know that.
It’s also still a reasonable question to ask “well, last year we budgeted $15M and you got acceptable results while spending only $14M; perhaps you only need $14M/yr…” And despite its reasonableness, many people would prefer to oversee a $15M/yr budget.
I think a reason for this is suppose the next year you run into some difficulties so it requires 14.2M. Now you have to fight to request an extra 0.2M added to your budget that you wouldn't have to worry about if you had 15M.
Totally! And it drives me crazy to get very few questions and mostly positive ones if I underspend by 5-10% but going over by 1-2% is a massive problem.
It’s little surprise what happens under such a system: logical people over-reserve.
What’s the alternative? Governments pass regulations and all buildings must be adapted within 12 months? 36 months?
What of the buildings that don’t
comply in time? Or can’t find trades to do it in time? Or we notice to our eternal shock that projects to ensure code tracking are priced at a serious premium?
Or, how many improvements to code would we decide weren’t desirable because of the costs of retrofitting, so now we lose even the low slope of improvement versus today.
This is a fairly well-trod path in economic policy circles, especially in Europe. You can either grandfather in buildings, perhaps with rules that line up with maintenance schedules anyway so that when something breaks anyway you replace it with the new standard (the HVAC world understands this well with refrigerants), or you sign yourself up for stunning, astronomical expense.
Not to mention, a lot of places around the world care about the look and character of historical locations. If a structure wasn't designed for central HVAC, for example, then there's often nowhere to hide the condenser units, air handle units or the ductwork. Same with insulation -- if that exterior wall wasn't intended to have it you've got a couple options and they both hurt.
Last of all, I'll mention labor. The type of skilled labor that can do any specific trade at all is relatively rare in the aftermath of the "college-or-bust" era, but the kind of labor you'd want for renovation work (fast, efficient, can tackle multiple different aspects at once without calling in different trades, and gets it right the first time to minimize disruption/call backs) is even more rare. To carry out some kind of massive renovation project at a national level even with infinite money you're talking about a generational timeframe just due to labor constraints.
The extortionate renewal rates I saw as a gift from Broadcom. It made it very easy to price the risk of doing nothing and be sure that the cost of outages during and immediately post-migration would be lower. (Yes, we had a few, due to obscure drivers issues or an app that really wanted a specific CPU or chipset or virtual NIC, and they cost us less than 10%, probably closer to 5%, of what the proposed renewal would have cost.)
25 years from now, if half the cars are then capable of autonomous nav-and-park, we could convert some of the excess parking lots to buildings. (Any lot large enough to have “aisles” will also be large enough to build on.)
It's extraordinarily difficult, and expensive, to convert parking garage space to housing - the heights are different, it's not designed with the same egresses, the floor material is concrete.
It also affects what the ground floor of buildings looks like - you can't have ten ground floor pedestrian exits or bike parking in the courtyard if the courtyard is on the third floor.
Just as you wouldn’t use the asphalt parking surface of an open parking lot as the floor of the house, there’s no obligation to use the actual garage structure.
25+ years from now, if it’s more economical to use for housing, knock it down and build high-density housing.
Because there’s a heavy bias for people who have use for 4+ bedrooms to also not want to live in an apartment building.
The reasons vary, but I have lived in Boston/Cambridge area for 40 years and can’t think of literally any of my friends who raised a kid past the age of 3 in an apartment, despite many of them (including me) enjoying the apartment life while young and single. But, literally as soon as we could [barely] afford to, we bought a house and only then added to the family.
You've got this backwards - big elevators with union labor mean that they're an expensive undertaking that only large multifamily buildings can afford.
Smaller, more affordable elevators mean that they're less of a luxury item. You could put an elevator in your house, or retrofit an older apartment with an elevator, much more easily. This is incredibly common in other countries
I tend to think the benefits of unbacked currency exceed the downsides, but it’s not exclusively upside.
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