Change My Mind
(media.communities.win)
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Ad an engineer, dont blame us. We design things to work properly. Blame the cheap ass contractors the govt pays to half ass the work and ingredients themselves. It's like blaming Dyson engineers because you bought a shitty knockoff Dyson vacuum from china on wish.com Oh, and the shady contractors do subpar work so that they can get the contract to redo the road in 3 years because the company owner got a no bid contract from their brother who works for the state. Shit like that is why roads suck. But roman roads simply used rock, and they did wear down pretty bad, you can see old roman roads under restaurants and the hump in the center is like 2 feet tall
I work in infrastructure and we are a low bid state. The quality of work is shit.
Also notably Roman roads were built by the roman government itsself, using the Roman Army. There were no contractors, bids, or private anything involved. It was 100% a government project. Private involvement was supplying the materials.
The US actually used to do a lot of this. Like until the modern Era the military manufactured all its own arms. Curiously enough until the Korean War the US also didn't do pointless proxy wars without clear military objectives. The way it worked is the government would commission private companies to design the equipment, but would run its own factories to build it itself. Thus the equipment was made to spec, and it was designed to a performance target instead of at lowest cost to a profit margin. WW2 was the first time they actually started to hire private companies to do manufacturing of arms and armor because of the extreme demand. And it would seem those companies really realized getting $billions from government was...kind of of nice.
IMO the government should be doing its own projects itsself. The whole contractor system is too ripe for abuse and corruption.