What a fiasco. This story just keeps getting bigger and bigger. So many lessons to be learned about a flawed bidding and construction process.
And from what I see, it's immune to politics. No party can take the higher ground. Public sector graft and private sector lying, cheating and thieving, both need to be stopped and big, small government, or running government like a business doesn't seem to help.
Instead, working towards an ethical and just society with clear and equitable consequences for all does seem to help.
So in this case, follow the money, retrieve all that was gotten through ill gotten gains, and hand out jail sentences.
As for the rest of us, we still have a bridge to deal with.
This is exactly the right attitude in my opinion. Wherever there is money to be made, be it public or private sector, thieves will show up with big smiles and sharp suits on. Consequences are the only thing they understand, and prison sentences are the only true consequences for white collar crime (fines just become a cost of doing business, the only thing you can't get back is time).
The problem is that you have to know how often they get caught in order to decide the amount. For example, if they only get caught 1/4 of the time, the fine needs to be greater than four times the amount stolen to make a difference (force the expected value of the behavior below zero). In practice, it would probably need to be quite a bit higher than that since people who do this sort of thing are likely risk-takers/gamblers.
So there are then two things you have to guess at. First, how often they get caught (which is difficult, but not impossible to estimate) and second, how far below zero the expected financial payoff must be to change the behavior.
You also have to figure out what happens when they don't have the money (or the money is well-hidden). Do they just go into some kind of negotiated payment schedule like people who lose lawsuits? That might have no impact at all since their illegal earnings are likely to be hidden from authorities anyway (or can be if needed).
This is why I favor prison, because a prison sentence is much harder to "cheat" or nullify. No one lives forever, so prison is like taking a small chunk of a precious commodity away from someone. Additionally, if you are a big earner, prison is actually worse for you in some ways because you generally lose your income while incarcerated. This means that even very rich people or people who hide their wealth from the authorities can be punished effectively with prison time.
On principle, I'm opposed to prison being used for anything but violent offenders where there are no other choices to safely contain them - prison includes a very real possibility of rape, assault, and so on.
The administrative penalties could simply be scaled to be much scarier without needing to go that far.
Personal financial liability (piercing the corporate veil) with limited negotiation of terms (and since personal credit is usually factored into business credit, that bankruptcy will greatly impact your ability to do business), administrative dissolution of business, very very large fines, and so on.
I completely agree with you that rape and assault in prisons is a terrible problem. I still think prison is a better solution, but I definitely agree that throwing anyone in the prisons we have currently (at least in the US) is probably immoral.
You have a very small chance of being caught if you ride the subway without a ticket. If you are caught some countries will work out what to fine you by multiplying the chance of being caught by the price of the ticket you didn't buy. So if they check your ticket once every 100 times you catch a train the fine for not having a ticket will be more than 100 times the cost of the ticket. That way not buying a ticket works out more expensive than buying one.
If you actually want to deter this kind of crime you need to fine the people who are caught the amount of money they stole multiplied by the number of people who don't get caught. So you should probably be thinking 20 or 30 times the amount stolen.
Of course such large fines might take entire industries down with them so you're unlikely to ever see corporate crime punished as excessively as it should be.
The train example is very informative because if you don't price the fine high enough you encourage people not to buy tickets. There actually was a mob-run "insurance" plan for train riders in India. The fine was about 20x the ticket price, but you would only be asked to show your ticket about every 100-200 rides. So you could buy half priced tickets from the mob and then they would reimburse you for any fines you paid while riding with their ticket.
I am trying to understand how this fiasco is any different from Boston's big dig? Are we just posturing because it was a Chinese company? Neither was bid/priced right and both have/had safety problems.
Welcome to the world of government contracts, big projects tend to be vastly different than what is proposed or agreed too.
Hence I am confused as to why the controversy this time.
So your argument is, because government projects are usually problematic, we should not be calling attention to new problematic projects? Doesn't that seem a little... fatalistic?
I am not aware of many if any actually big government projects that are not problematic. However I do think the story was full of underhanded/indirect Chinese bashing, if not just plain foreigner bashing; like the quote "unaccustomed to the rigor of American construction rules". I guess they are just too stupid to do business in the real world, and this in the state that wants to waste billions on a train to nowhere.
Frankly I am amazed at how much oversight there isn't on billion dollar plus projects. You would think there should be more than one agency, in particular neutral non government agencies that should be required to sign off on projects that crest a certain dollar amount.
This is not to say that big government projects are all bad, they do lay ground work for many private companies to build on. Look as Space X, it would not be where it is today if not for NASA but it is a better choice for many things that NASA because of its big government mentality are not good at anymore. We only have to look at the recent boondoggle that was the ACA's main website to understand that oversight by non politically aligned, no government groups, is warranted.
TL;DR.
Yes, a lot of China bashing going on, to redirect the ire from its rightful spot, inept government with no real oversight. There needs to be "civilian" oversight on large government projects, appointed by industry experts.
I read the article as having a strongly anti Chinese bias. So I think Shivetya's point was a fair one which is "Should this be a story on government mishandling of big projects" as the lead and move away from the Chinese bashing? Or is there a legitimate angle for the overall story about the fact the cheapest bid also happened to be a Chinese company.
The communication problems detailed in the article, coupled with the pre-construction work that was completed in China and then shipped across the Pacific, makes a difference when it comes to the management of the project.
That's not to say that these are unique problems because the contracting firm was Chinese, rather than, say, French. However, in this case it is relevant to the overall narrative that the challenges exist, because they make it that much harder to proactively address quality deficiencies.
Sounds like exactly what I would have recommended when the sub-prime market caused Wall Street's collapse ... people should have gone to jail but instead received performance bonuses. Executives who directed the bridge construction seem to have landed cushy non-government jobs instead, but the level of corruption and blame-shifting amazes me in both cases.
It is really time that a new form of government is developed. It simply does not work this way and, in many ways, at the very least, the current form of democracy is insufficient and incapable of providing proper accountability.
There really needs to be some sort of tie to performance. It obviously cannot be the same kind of tie to civilian/private performance, especially since even that system in this country is grotesquely inadequate. Your motivations should be that your retirement and success is directly pinned to some metric and system of government competition and accountability.
I think the first step would be to separate and limit raising revenues, i.e., taxes, from spending revenues. The legislative function in the whole vertical structure of the government needs to be separated into a fourth branch. It is bone-headedly ridiculous that those who decide on what to spend money, also decide how much to spend, and where that money will come from.
There are so many humongous flaws in our governmental structure that violate so many basic auditing, risk, and accounting principles; it's absolutely ridiculous.
This is far deeper than just the acquisition or bidding process. This goes down deep into the core fundamental premises of our governmental and even social structure. It is a deep flaw that was revolutionary in the agricultural era it was devised in, but simply is far beyond inadequate for today's world.
I don't really see any evidence of corruption here. Just accepting a low bid from a contractor that scored poorly on the technical evaluation. Sometimes that pays off, in this case it clearly didn't.
The refusal and coverup/whitewashing of the quality problems is a criminal act. Corruption isn't just taking bags of money -- it's ignoring things that affect public safety to defend you career as well.
"Caltrans permitted an unknown number of cracked or suspect welds in the suspension span. After two senior engineers challenged quality assurance practices, Caltrans reassigned one and let the other’s contract lapse."
"Tony Anziano, chief executive for toll-bridge work, made at least 64 visits to Shanghai, stayed in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and spent more than $300,000 on travel during construction."
>"Caltrans permitted an unknown number of cracked or suspect welds in the suspension span.
That obviously is not good and is a sign of a badly run programme, but it is also true that structures are built with a certain level of defects all the time. It sounds like in this case they may have made judgements about that which were questionable but accepting work (including structural) which has some flaws is not abnormal, the question is whether the judgement as to the materiality of the flaws was made for sound engineering reasons or not.
>After two senior engineers challenged quality assurance practices, Caltrans reassigned one and let the other’s contract lapse."
Yes, that does sound quite bad. It's by far the most damning thing, I can't determine from here whether they used good engineering judgement, but dismissing whistleblowers is bad news. It's not corruption though.
>"Tony Anziano, chief executive for toll-bridge work, made at least 64 visits to Shanghai, stayed in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and spent more than $300,000 on travel during construction."
Totally normal. Anyone writing "one of the city's most luxurious hotels" doesn't understand business travel in Asia where there may not be much between the tiers of "luxury" and "doesn't meet basic standards".
Most of that money went on air travel, and I wouldn't want to travel back and forth to China 64 times in a short period. That's not a bribe, it's a punishment.
Admittedly, with this much travel they're going to eat into the savings from using a cheap contractor, not to mention the cost of accommodating their China team which was there full time.
This doesn't sound like corruption, it sounds like they foolishly picked a low bidder that couldn't hack it, tempers within the organisation started to flare when they realised how fucked they were and this guy flew back and forth way more times than was planned in a frantic attempt to fix the cluster-fuck before it all blew up in their faces.
I agree that the statements I highlighted aren't really "evidence" of corruption, just facts indicative of possible corruption.
Corruption doesn't necessarily have to be the acceptance of a bribe, though. The dismissal or re-assignment of whistle-blowers that are pointing out potential dangers in the project IS corruption; it's the dishonest use of authority for personal benefit, or to avoid personal responsibility for wrong-doing or negligence.
You're probably right, about the travel. 64 trips back and forth does sound like a punishment, and at ~5k per trip, it doesn't really sound that extravagant. Certainly not enough to think they were lavish bribe-trips.
Your last paragraph actually is a pretty good synopsis. This whole thing was probably a scramble to keep ahead of a badly managed project.
> If someone underbids the next contractor by $250 million on a job they've never done before, you're supposed to politely laugh them out of the room.
Most of the time, you can't, at least not for government projects. Because of procurement laws and rules (designed, among other things, to allegedly be transparent and to provide accountability), a government body is required to accept the lowest bid from the contractor that met all of the requirements. Seeking an "experienced contractor" is usually seen as code for "we want to use our friends" by a skeptical legislative body, so things like tenure and past projects can't be considered.
Odd. I've been involved in a few government bidding processes in Europe, and detailing past projects was always a major part of what we'd get graded on.
Indeed. Typically, being able to build the thing is a requirement, and that is typically made objectively measurable by stating that you must have successfully built similar projects.
That has its downsides, too. A common complaint in the EU is that there is no way for small building companies to become large companies. Reason is that, to become a large company, you have to do large projects, and to get large projects, you have to have done large projects.
In the EU, when comparing offers, one doesn't have to pick the absolutely cheapest that meets the requirements, either. A slightly more expensive offer that more than meets the requirements (for example by having much less environmental impact, by requiring less closure time of a road, or by producing something that has lower maintenance costs) can windhover one that just meets the requirements.
It's part of your grade, but it is rarely an overriding factor in my experience. Lots of experience plus slightly higher price will beat little experience and slightly lower price, but it won't beat little experience and very low price.
I was recently involved in a bid for a government contract where we got perfect scores on all factors, but still lost the bid to a small company with little to no relevant experience, but who claimed they could to the job for a third of the price.
To alleviate this somewhat, at least in Federal contracting, "best performer" can be chosen over "lowest bid" and often is if the project will be put at risk by an inexperienced contractor, or somebody trying to slip in on the cheap and provide substandard contract completion and/or try to squeeze the money out of the government later.
The obvious counter to this, and it's built-in to the process, is the "past qualifications" requirement. If your company has never built a bridge, they should have been disqualified from the bidding process via F.A.R.
The usual workaround for this is in IT is to sub-contract the necessary portions to those with said experience, so that the packaged team has the experience as a whole, but while that might seem like a loophole, it generally isn't bad because it means that the ones with the experience are the ones doing the work that requires the experience.
Admittedly, this isn't federal, and I don't know how what the bidding requirements are for state work, but if there's no disqualifier for "never done this before", heaven help the state of California.
I've worked for a company (electronics design/installation) that desperately underbid competitors to get as many jobs as possible, then the boss piles pressure on the workers to get the job done at an inhuman speed. Inevitably, up fucks occur and the boss has a shit fit, you get in trouble and have a black mark against your name. Not fun all around.
The lessons, not every job is worth doing and always allow margins for mistakes.
in this case the administrators are probably not malicious, they are thinking, "I'm doing society a solid... I should be entitled to a due". It's only malicious if they actually have a modicum of introspection.
Accepting a lower bid isn't an example of corruption.
This is the equivalent of buying a startup's product on the chance they figured out how to provide value more cheaply. That's not corruption; that's basic market forces.
usually the wording is "lowest bid from a qualified contractor"
If the the contractor is not qualified they should be removed from the bid. In NY there was a list of contractors no longer able to bid state jobs that had to be checked as well.
Having studied in China, and worked in construction, all I can say is that this smells, far and wide, like there was some kickback somewhere in this process. I'm guessing on the Chinese soil end of things. From first hand experience, I know it happens on American soil all the time as well, but, from what little I saw in 1999 the Chinese culture of kickback in China takes it to a whole new level.
Also, can somebody explain to me those flight prices? Spending over 10K on flights to Shanghai within a single month seems outrageous.
It's a single roundtrip in business class. And if you're flying to Shanghai and back once a month for several years on end, like he clearly did in 2010-2011, doing it all in economy is pretty brutal.
Also, the $10k is an outlier, and might well be two trips in a single month. The vast majority of his fares were under $5k, and there are some visits under $2k.
The plane tickets and accommodations are just populist fodder. It sounds like an asskicker of a project and some luxury isn't that bad. The screwed up welds and cracks scare the hell out of me though, that's the real story.
I just searched on Delta.com. If you book a week ahead, the price for a round trip ticket in First/business class ranges from $6,000 to $11,000, so spending 10k in a month is "normal".
Call Delta and tell them you need to send 3-5 people a month from SFO to PVG in business class for the next 3-5 years. You won't pay $6-$11k per ticket.
The answer to this question: "And why would you go first/business class?"
Is this statement: "It's a huge project"
Apart from getting far enough along in your career to be handling huge projects and therefore probably entitled to some cream, it also just doesn't make sense from a business point of view - save a few thousand on a flight, but the extra fatigue makes good decision-making harder.
Put another way: who should be using business class, if the decision-makers of a huge project shouldn't be?
If you're making me fly roundtrip to China in economy once a month, I quit.
I make that trip once every year or two and I hate hate hate the travel part of it. Being there is good, getting there and back is absolutely awful.
So I would say, either pay for business class, give me a raise large enough to cover paying for it myself, or find somebody else.
If you choose the last option, then you'll either have to get astonishingly lucky to find someone who doesn't mind being crammed into an Economy seat so much (does any such person exist?) or you'll eventually find someone desperate enough to put up with it, and what are the odds that such a person is also good at what they do?
I have done just 90K miles this year to Asia. 57 times just to Tokyo in the last 4 years! There is no way I would even think about doing this in economy. I am not effective at my job for a day after a flight like this in economy. And lets not forget the time away from the family. If you have to be in Asia for a Monday meeting you have to leave Saturday as you lose a day.
Agree on this one. I imagine they factored the prices of business class flights into their bid on the project. People that are higher up in any industry want a few perks. I can't imagine telling someone that's at the top in the industry you'll need to send them on 64 flights to Shanghai, in economy class. That's basically a form of torture, so you need to put them up in business class and a decent hotel, otherwise they'll be walking out the door.
I would completely agree with all of this if the guy running the project was competent. If he was a licensed PE and he got the bridge built correctly, shit give him double for the travel expenses. But he was a lawyer bossing engineers around and making decisions far outside his realm of expertise. As such the criticism stands.
>>it also just doesn't make sense from a business point of view - save a few thousand on a flight, but the extra fatigue makes good decision-making harder.
I can vouch for this. It makes good decision making almost impossible. I've made a ton of trans-Pacific trips and jetlag has a much bigger effect on you when you've not been able to sleep or slept poorly on the plane. Business class really does help to reduce the jetlag.
Sure, they're scheduled months in advanced, but they're moved, re-scheduled and canceled, days in advance. Also the agenda, and thus who has to be there, changes all the time. The meeting may have been scheduled 6 month in advance, but that doesn't mean that you get to find out that you have to be at that meeting more than a couple of days in advance, if you're lucky,
If your time is valuable, avoiding the 1 or 2 days of downtime in economy can be worth it. Economy is just horrible on the 12 hour trip between that crosses the IDT. It's manageable, but if I had to do it very often even my company would start flipping for biz class (call it a humanitarian benefit to those that have to travel often).
I'm 6'2" and broad. Spending an hour and a half in an economy seat is pretty unpleasant. 12 hours would be positively inhumane, and I'd need at least a day or two to recover. 12 hours, each way, once a month? Fuck that. I'll quit and work at McDonald's first.
For example, first class round trip from Washington to Beijing is typically about $25,000. Business class is more reasonable, but still high. Economy is already $1,200 or more.
It seems like the author is trying to make the assertion that all sorts of poor decisions were made - it'd be helpful to have a comparison to other similar projects, in order to make that determination. Otherwise, these could be completely routine issues for all I know (as a layperson). If you took any software engineering project, and described it by detailing all the mistakes in isolation, it would look like a complete disaster.
The weld is really the key difference here. For welds to be structurally sound, and for them to work in the calculations that have been performed for the structural integrity of the structure, they have to meet a certain standard. These welds didn't. The company said that they themselves would state whether those standards were met. So this would be more akin to a computer chip manufacturer, where every Nth chip is faulty, and then still inserting them into a computer. This isn't about detailing mistakes in isolation. Nor is this about a software program where good enough is sufficient. This is more like the NASA launch controls where it has to be perfect (or however close NASA claims it needs to get to clear a launch program.)
Though I'm not sure that answers your question. Since I'm not showing similar projects.
Yep. The big reason that the convenient approximations (lies) we use in mechanical and civil engineering work is that it is expected that the implementer of our designs (elaborate lies) doesn't use the wrong parts--there are exhaustive specifications on things as boring as bolts and threads and welds specifically to ensure that the behavior they exhibit is within the realm of what the designer expects.
It's nice to see software engineering practices being backported to more conservative and stagnant forms of engineering. 8)
The entire design was done assuming proper welds. When they accepted substandard welds, nobody went back and did the calculations that probably would have shown they needed twice as many supports.
I've never been involved in bridge contracts, but all the highway construction contracts I've seen have specified performance bonds sufficient to finish the project in case of problems. I thought this was a requirement for any project that gets federal money (which is effectively any highway project at all). It's surprising that an article this long wouldn't even mention whether the bonds proved sufficient, how much the insurer tried to weasel out of the bonds, whether the insurer insisted on hiring a new contractor, etc.
That this topic hasn't even come up, leads me to believe that the state inspectors have completely failed in their duties. With all due respect to Hanlon, the simplest explanation for such total failure is not "gosh they must be stupid!"
I was involved in a lot of state landfill construction (my Civil Engineering days). That Bond was a big deal for a lot of companies.
The owners (county and village) were good and wouldn't release payment for work that didn't meet the spec. The prospect of payment or lack thereof is a great motivator. Contractors knew the rules up front and it made our lives as inspectors for the owners much easier. Not that they didn't test you continually to see what they could get away with. These things start at the top.
Oragne County landfill Expansion (a landfill they built and then had to stop and restore wetlands) was before my time but companies lost a lot of money on it and it was a good cautionary tale. Google seems to have very little knowledge about it.
"California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the "Buy America" provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers."
It's still part of I-80, though. Are there not requirements for the bid process and construction standards independent of funding?
That's exactly the question I asked some minutes before you. This doesn't have an answer still? I find it perfectly ok for something to start to corrode but the maintenance work should be there to fix it...
The article is focused on faulty management/supervision. It should've focused on HOW the contract went to the Chinese firm in the first place. I'm sure they build find cranes for ports but they never built a bridge.
Obviously I have no link to point to or solid proof but here's what someone told me. Hearsay it may be but I will just throw it out there.
Initially it looked like a Japanese company was going to get the contract. However after a Californian trade mission to China (headed by ex-Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger) returned, the bid went to the Chinese firm. I was told it was quite unexpected.
Not saying Arnold Schwarzenegger was somehow convinced otherwise but I think it's possible one of his advisors were convinced otherwise and than convinced Arnold Schwarzenegger to give the contract to a chinese firm.
Hopefully the truth will come out in a formal inquiry. Hopefully.
Love the pictures of the bridge. The scale is amazing. Wouldn't it be nice if these were projects we could be proud of?
It is a little hard to understand how serious it all really is. It sounds like inspections were quite rigorous. Past half way down the article, there's two pictures, one of the internals of a box girder, and right below it, a 10mm crack in a tack weld. I mean, the scale differential of the two images is amazing. I can't imagine cracks in the tack welds make a bit of difference in a bridge like that. The bridge looks incredible.
I find there aren't enough incriminating pictures/infography in the article. This kind of technical detail only speaks to people with a mechanics background.
For example, a pole will be much weaker if there is an abrupt section change in the middle, even if it's a bigger section. This is counter-intuitive until you learn what the forces look like in metal.
Same goes for welding and cracks. Do you know what happens when a 19-ton propeller has a crack? It breaks while spinning and launches the weighted wing at a few dozen m/s. The French aircraft carrier is lucky the wing was sent to the bottom of the ocean [1].
Which leads me to the next topic: Will politicians state that welds are too complicated for them just like computer things?
> Do you know what happens when a 19-ton propeller has a crack?
The story of these propellers is interesting. They were to be cast from a single piece of metal, and were precisely of the largest dimension fit for the largest metallurgy facility in France (because it's a top secret design, they had to be made in a domestic factory). However, the project was so delayed that the factory closed its doors several years before it to be able to build the propellers...
So another company got to build them, but they were so large that they had to cast them in several parts and weld them together instead of a single cast, which is apparently NOT best practice and hadn't been ever done before.
Cracks act as focal points for stress. A 10mm crack in the wrong place can cause surprisingly large metal structures to tear in half, with the stress staying focused on the tip of the crack as it grows. In fact, the larger the structure, the worse the problem can be as the forces tend to be correspondingly bigger.
Boy, it'd be great to know more about each commentator before reading their expert opinion on the subjects of project management, procurements, bridge-building, government agency function and anything else relevant to the topic.
>The California Department of Transportation agreed to contract the company known as ZPMC in 2006 because it had established a reputation as fast and cost-effective, offering savings of about $250 million compared to the competing bidder.
This is absolutely crazy. What kind of person hires a company to build a bridge that usually builds cranes? (A politician)
When I was still in college I met a Project Manager who was building a new building for my University. The project was going very wrong because they hired a residential building company to build a commercial building.
Dont force a square peg in a round hole. (No amount of money will help it fit)
>"Tony Anziano, chief executive for toll-bridge work, made at least 64 visits to Shanghai, stayed in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and spent more than $300,000 on travel during construction."
if tales of Chinese corruption and kickbacks is even a bit true (and knowing Russian corruption i tend to believe in Chinese too :) these $300K are juts unrecognizable under microscope peanuts compare to what was most probably transferred to some accounts on Cayman Islands and in some other peculiar jurisdictions.
Ok I have a very serious question that none seems to dress, so I must be missing something. Please I really want to be enlightened because I am puzzled by this.
I don't even buy a toaster without some kind of guarantee for the coming years and some kind of maintenance available.
In many cases, I'd agree with you. But in context of what happened here, the fact that the company was Chinese (or simply just foreign, for that matter) is absolutely relevant. A few outstanding points:
1. The company was "unaccustomed to the rigor of American construction rules" and "lacked basic quality control", leading Caltran to "relax U.S. standards when the firm couldn’t finish fast enough."
2. "ZPMC violated the job contract by delivering key documents in Chinese instead of English. ABF lacked sufficient quality-assurance staff to speak directly to its own subcontractor – also a contract violation."
3. "Counting the money spent on travel and living costs for Caltrans and its contractors, the suspension span consumed much more than the $250 million in ZPMC’s assumed efficiencies that made the Chinese steel so cost-effective." On living costs alone, Caltran "paid about $50,000 annually per person to rent more than a dozen well-appointed rooms."
Asked for justification, "Caltrans described the accommodations as "reasonable and appropriate" in a written statement. 'The hotel provided a government rate that was comparable to rates at other western hotels,' and followed bargaining agreements, based in part on providing adequate 'safety and support for employees far from home.'"
Parts of the story will feel terribly familiar to anyone who has had much manufacturing done in China. Sometimes, things go smoothly, but in the worst cases, like this one, there's a huge mismatch between 'Western' quality demands and the output of their Chinese partners.
The typical pattern will be for the manufacturer to start sending back work which is totally unacceptable. When their partner protests, the manufacturer will grudgingly raise the standard to 'barely tolerable'. Time runs out, exhaustion sets in, decision makers don't want to draw attention to the fact that they chose the wrong manufacturer - so the client has to lower their standards.
Caltrans officials were amazingly naive and blinkered if they weren't aware of the long history of stories just like this one. Perhaps they did know the history, and they thought they would be protected by quality checks embedded in the contract, but that's just more naivety. Contracts don't have much power in that environment, particularly when your project is already falling way behind schedule.
Blaming 'The Chinese' though, is stupid. Caltrans was in charge of this deal. If they chose the wrong partner and didn't stay in control of things, they are responsible.
Not at all. You apparently didn't read the article.
"Caltrans employees and U.S. contractors who supervised the job lived fulltime in Shanghai, and top officials flew there often. Tony Anziano, toll bridge program manager, alone spent more than $300,000 on travel.
"Part of that cost was for Anziano’s room at the five-star JW Marriott Shanghai Tomorrow Square for up to $470 per night, according to his expense reports."
The travel costs are an obscene waste of American tax dollars. Moreover, the fact that so many tax dollars were paid to a foreign company is offensive. Even if that company was at all competent, it shows a disregard for the American economy. For a project that puts American lives at risk, a demonstrated concern for the wellbeing of Americans is rather important.
>Moreover, the fact that so many tax dollars were paid to a foreign company is offensive. Even if that company was at all competent, it shows a disregard for the American economy.
The reason that the US doesn't restrict foreign engineering companies from getting government contracts is that it wants US companies to be able to bid on government projects in other countries.
I don't actually find the hotel price to be necessarily offensive in the absence of any other information... in foreign countries, you often have to pay a premium to get American-standard lodging (if it's even available).
I don't think people outsource to developing countries because they think they'll get cheaper hotels there... it's more about the cost of the services / goods being delivered.
Shanghai is more or less a first-world city these days. American-style hotels will not be hard to find. Your "if it's even available" parenthetical may be true in general but is rather absurd in this particular context.
Do you think the citizens of countries such as Japan, Canada, and Turkey should be offended that their governments are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to 'foreign' companies in the U.S. for (e.g.) the F-35 fighter?
Responding to this from the parent comment (highlight is mine):
> Moreover, the fact that so many tax dollars were paid to a foreign company is offensive. Even if that company was at all competent, it shows a disregard for the American economy.
> Caltrans diaries also indicated that ZPMC violated the job contract by delivering key documents in Chinese instead of English. ABF lacked sufficient quality-assurance staff to speak directly to its own subcontractor – also a contract violation. “Although I can jump in when misunderstanding between ABF and ZPMC developed,” Caltrans engineer Stanley Ku wrote in a report, “I do think ABF should have a (quality expert) who can speak Mandarin to reduce the ‘misunderstanding’ situation.”
I'm not concerned because the firm was Chinese. I'm concerned because they tried to override the engineers and hired a company with zero experience who massively underbid the project. That screams "bad management" to me, personally.
In troubled projects, where extra money comes from really depends on the structure of the contract and the parties' goals. In this case it sounds like the client is asking for specific things to be done that weren't in the original contract, and is offering to pay for them, because the client wants things done ASAP and thinks this will help get the project un-stuck.
The client could instead stick to the original contract and attempt to enforce any provisions in it about nonperformance/delays/etc. But that gives the client less ability to directly specify what measures to take now.
(This kind of thing happens in private-sector contracting also, e.g. in relationships between oil firms and platform maintenance companies.)
Any major IT consultancy company. Especially those working for the government.
But the modus operandus is standard even for small agencies.
You get to bid for a project. If your bid is anywhere near realistic, there's no way you'll ever get it, because the competition will bid way, way lower.
So you put in a bid that you know will never get the project completed and/or will reduce quality well below what will ever be acceptable. However, the contract will be full of loopholes that will allow you to get away with it. You know that once your in, and once the project is far enough along, the client will have no choice but to pay you extra to do what actually needed to be done in the first place.
No, the client is not getting screwed. Especially when it comes to governments and major corporations, everyone knows this is going to happen. It's just impossible to get the project started for anywhere near the real price tag.
But even on a smaller scale, for instance a web agency with a 20K project, if you put in an honest bid you'll either never get the job or be forced to build crap.
From web shopping carts to bridges, people don't value good engineering and planning. Or at least not until they are confronted with the results of bad engineering and planning.
So there's the original budget and there's reality, and an entire cult of rituals surrounding bridging the huge gap between the two. And it is this ritual in which people on both ends take a considerable percentage of the top, so all the decision makers are vested in keeping this ritual going despite all of the well publicized failures.
If you are a contractor and you're not getting at least 50% more out of a gig than the original contract, you're not playing the game very well.
I wonder if these kind of contract arrangments are just a consequence of lack of communication. You have to agree on a single cost because it is impossible to audit and check everything the contractor does. But the client will inevatably have to check everything anyway but in a delayed fashion. So why not assume from the outset that the client is just another part of the team and must sign-of on everything every single day. Give the client complete access to all data about the project. With sufficient communication the contractor could prove they are working correctly and the client justs pay them for the time and materials they use.
Not because we weren't doing our job, but for example I've been involved in cases where we've had to say "I'm sorry, but there is no way we can hit the deadline without more hours and external resources", and client says "fine, here's some more money, just make sure you hit the deadline"
I wish I could read it, but it's completely broken on my browser (Safari on iPad). It only shows the title, the aforementioned top bar, and the footer; the rest is blank.
I had my hopes up this time since, after all, the URI contains the word "/static/"; but then I just realized it also appends the word "/sinclair.jquery/" later on...
Lucky for you, it's baked in to every modern web browser in existence - just look to the right for a built in progress bar that even lets you click to a particular section of the article based on it's progress.
The other reason the traditional scrollbar is useless for gauging progress is one never knows how many pages of comments are at the bottom of the article you're reading. The article could be one page long but have 30 pages of comments and you just don't know until you get to the end.
In this case, sacbee doesn't seem to have any comments at all (good for them!) but I don't read them often enough to have that fact memorized.
Unluckily for most mobile viewers (definitely on iOS), scrollbars aren't persistent (makes sense when you have limited real-estate). A sign of the times - mobile and desktop client parity in web readership?
I know it's hard to resist making snarky comments, but you jumped on it a bit too early, and I'm afraid you missed the point.
My comment was specifically about It's about the fact that the bar is at the top of the page. It's a completely different user experience than the standard scroll bar.
First thing I did was inspect element to get rid of it.
I have little enough vertical screen real estate. I don't need random websites throwing up redundant (and poor) approximations to ubiquitous UI elements.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but your comment seems laden with anti-Chinese sentiment ("Chinese-ridden") that doesn't seem justifiable by facts nor by modern standards of treating other people.
First, the demographics of California are not what you state. People of Asian descent comprise ~15% of the population of California, not 40%.
Second, is there evidence that the rationale for the selection of the inexperienced company from China was influenced by anything except for nominal cost? Specifically, is there evidence that race was a factor in the company's selection? Perhaps I'm wrong but it seems highly unlikely prima facie.
Third, if we accept as fact that third-world nations don't grasp the essentials for running sustainable society (which I don't in general, but will for this comment), then what is the relevance of that to Chinese Americans? I would argue that there is none.
Fourth, Chinese taxpayers lost money just as much as non-Chinese taxpayers, proportional to their tax payments.
Fifth, phrases like "Chinese-ridden" have no utility except as derogatory terms. Deriding an entire race of people makes absolutely no sense, as your race does not determine your person nor even your culture. Basically, it comes off as racist.
The People's Republic of China is a country of many races. The one race that most people in the US think of when they hear "Chinese" is more specifically known as Han Chinese ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese ).
This piece is more nationalistic/jingoistic in spirit than racist.
Furthermore, countries (and their people) do typically exhibit identifiable differences relative to other countries (and their people). A piece about American-made cars relative to Japanese-made cars probably describes perfectly valid generalizations as the cultures of the countries, companies and people involved are probably markedly different.
Had this piece talked about work for hire done by a firm located in the US (or any country besides the PRC) where the owners and most or all of the employee were of ethnic Han Chinese, then you could fairly call it racist, since the focus would then be on their race and not all the attributes (culture, regulatory environment, business practices/norms, etc.) that go along with identifying them by their nationality.
I would have found the piece far more balanced had their repeatedly identified the management as "American management", since all the failings of this project exhibit traits somewhat typical of American management styles. It would have been as fair (i.e. statistically valid generalizations based on facts) as repeatedly identifying the source of the goods as Chinese since historically there have been noticeable quality issues with products produced in the PRC relative to countries like the US, Germany, Japan, etc.
The misunderstanding was because of a rare collision: we banned that commenter a few seconds before carbocation posted his reply.
We almost never kill comments when they have replies. (And strictly speaking we didn't do that here either.) But that comment was so egregious that I'm not inclined to unkill it. Anyone who wants to can read it by turning 'showdead' on in their profile.
On a positive note, the recent changes that we and, more importantly, the community have made to HN threads have had the interesting side effect of making banning less common. It's mostly restricted now to throwaway trolls, spammers, and users with a clearly negative track record on the site.
racism against asians and whites is almost completely ignored, even tacitly encouraged in most places. fairly sure the author deleted his post only because he was down voted and called out, not because of any kind of change of heart.
