by Chris Bodenner
A reader makes a good point I neglected to note:
The $6,000-per-ten minutes overtime penalty comes to about $1 million per day or $7 million for a one week overrun. Hardly a major hit to a $1 billion contract. And I'm pretty sure the contractor built the potential cost of that exposure into the bid, either by purchasing insurance (recent events have proven you can insure against ANYTHING these days) or increasing the bid to self-insure.
Over to the China-US part of the thread, a reader fisks another:
I could NOT let the reader who describes the difference between “communist dictatorship China” and the US regarding infrastructure. In a few short graphs he/she managed to mangle, mislead and just plain get wrong about 10 facts on China, its development and its government. I have been living and working in/with China for more than ten years and I make my living guiding corporations on how to enter and operate in China. To wit, your reader said:
One reason China may be a bit more efficient than the United States is that they don’t have any debates, about anything, because it’s a Communist country.
Wrong.
Chinese politicians, businessmen and every day people rarely make any major decision before rigorous debate and with a consideration of keeping harmony for the group as a whole. The concept of consensus building is paramount. While it may seem like decisions are made in a snap, they are not.
Secondly, China is about as Communist today as the British Virgin Islands. For sure it is a one-party, top-down authoritarian political system, but it is also a thriving market economy in some ways more capitalist than we are here in the US.
Let’s see, we need to build a really long hazardous bridge project, and we have billions of unskilled laborers whom we can force to work on the project with little pay because we don’t respect human rights. Let’s get cracking. That’s a lot easier discussion than dealing with Unions, regulations regarding worker safety, project design, etc.
The arrogant assumption that 1.3 billion Chinese and their millions of politicians have no respect for human rights is both quasi-racist and plain wrong. One thing you learn as a world traveler (28 countries so far) and international business person is that often when Americans or Europeans are pointing their fingers at the likes of China they do not realize three fingers are pointing back. Do things like 70 million Europeans dying in WWII speak to our respect for human rights? How about the US being founded with slavery being protected in our Constitution? What about the more than 2 million people in US prisons (the largest population in the world) and our death penalty. I could go on but you get the point.
I grow really weary of the comparisons between a Communist dictatorship and the U.S.
China has not been a dictatorship since 1976, when Mao died.
Ever since we gave them most-favored nation status so that our corporations could take advantage of their oppressed workforce,
I think the 400 million people taken out of abject poverty over the last 30 years would argue about how “repressed they feel”. Same goes for the 300 million new middle-class earners and the millions of new millionaires.
our citizenry has become more than willing to forget just what a shitty place China is for the majority of its people, who have no say in their governance.
China is not a shitty place for most of its citizens. That said, there is a lot of work to do in terms of giving the people a say in their governance. There I agree with him.
Does China still have a long way to go in all these areas? Of course, I am no China apologist, I see the warts and the beauty of the place. Your readers should too.
The Dish 