Quote:(The Borowitz Report)—As America’s bridges, roads, and other infrastructure dangerously deteriorate from decades of neglect, there is a mounting sense of urgency that it is time to build a giant wall.
Across the U.S., whose rail system is a rickety antique plagued by deadly accidents, Americans are increasingly recognizing that building a wall with Mexico, and possibly another one with Canada, should be the country’s top priority. Harland Dorrinson, the executive director of a Washington-based think tank called the Center for Responsible Immigration, believes that most Americans favor the building of border walls over extravagant pet projects like structurally sound freeway overpasses.
“The estimated cost of a border wall with Mexico is five billion dollars,” he said. “We could easily blow the same amount of money on infrastructure repairs and have nothing to show for it but functioning highways.”
Congress has dragged its feet on infrastructure spending in recent years, but Dorrinson senses growing support in Washington for building a giant border wall. “Even if for some reason we don’t get the Mexicans to pay for it, five billion is a steal,” he said.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
Wasn't that giant stimulus supposed to do a lot of that? I think I heard a lot of talk about shovel ready jobs.
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.”-Thurgood Marshall
(08-30-2016, 10:15 AM)bfine32 Wrote: No doubt chain link and barbed wire is expensive.
Oh shit. You're serious. This is going to be awkward. A chain link fence is not...hmm...how can I put this in terms they'll get a raging southern hardon for and possibly understand..."the best"
(08-30-2016, 10:16 AM)GMDino Wrote: I guess that plan would be to not pay the unemployed too which seems kind of counter-productive.
Or just renege on the contractually guaranteed cost of the labor once the job is done. Doubt that's going to affect the cost of the materials much.
(08-30-2016, 11:02 AM)Vas Deferens Wrote: Oh shit. You're serious. This is going to be awkward. A chain link fence is not...hmm...how can I put this in terms they'll get a raging southern hardon for and possibly understand..."the best"
Or just renege on the contractually guaranteed cost of the labor once the job is done. Doubt that's going to affect the cost of the materials much.
Of course I'm serious. IF it is determined that we are to build a wall then why would we not explore every means possible to reduce the cost?
No one is suggesting not paying anyone, simply allow those that are currently drawing unemployment a change to earn their money and perhaps learn a trade.
No sure what material you think would be required (I did see that you chose to run with the materials suggested), but I cannot see raw building materials being more expensive that the labor to erect it.
(08-30-2016, 11:08 AM)bfine32 Wrote: No one is suggesting not paying anyone, simply allow those that are currently drawing unemployment a change to earn their money and perhaps learn a trade.
How many unemployed people live withing driving distance of the Mexican border, and how many of them have the skills to design and construct "the best wall ever"?
Then there is the fact that many people drawing unemployment receive much less than minimum wage in benefits.
(08-30-2016, 11:23 AM)fredtoast Wrote: How many unemployed people live withing driving distance of the Mexican border, and how many of them have the skills to design and construct "the best wall ever"?
Then there is the fact that many people drawing unemployment receive much less than minimum wage in benefits.
I have no idea how many live within "driving distance" (however far that is) to the border or the skills they posses. Do you really think everyone that will be employed building such a wall already live within your prescribed distance or already posses the skills necessary. I should have mentioned something about a chance to learn a trade.
The most current data I can find has the National average unemployment pay at $294 a week that works to $7.34 and hour. That's $.10 higher than the Federal minimum wage. I say we let them keep the extra dime.
(08-30-2016, 11:50 AM)bfine32 Wrote: I have no idea how many live within "driving distance" (however far that is) to the border or the skills they posses. Do you really think everyone that will be employed building such a wall already live within your prescribed distance or already posses the skills necessary. I should have mentioned something about a chance to learn a trade.
The most current data I can find has the National average unemployment pay at $294 a week that works to $7.34 and hour. That's $.10 higher than the Federal minimum wage. I say we let them keep the extra dime.
Of course, if they are employed full time then we need to take into account benefits. The cost of training will have to be figured into it as well. Relocation costs if we are bring people in from all over the country. Would there be available housing for those relocated?
"A great democracy has got to be progressive, or it will soon cease to be either great or a democracy..." - TR
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." - FDR
Quote:As with so many thingsin this election, the question beggars belief. Trump is pledging the largest infrastructure project since the U.S. highway system—perhaps the most significant infrastructure project since the Erie Canal—and yet he has shared few details about the wall itself. What little Trump has said, namely that he intends for Mexico to pay for it, is unrealistic, to put it mildly.
Details are beside the point, of course. That’s because Trump can’t build a wall across the entire border. It’s a moon-shot without a rocket. The proposal crumbles at even the slightest scrutiny. No one who can build it would, and no one who would build it can. “With the highly contested nature of this project, and the fact that many, many people object to it really strongly—do you want to be on the wrong side of that in a way that’s going to stick with you for years?” asks Raphael Sperry, president of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility.
Sperry says that his organization will condemn the border wall, should Trump be elected president. His organization may not stand alone: Other professional design associations are bound by ethics that Trump’s proposal appears to plainly violate. As with other controversial border projects, firms that built this wall could be subject to boycotts, blacklists, and lawsuits.
...
Eugene Pawlik, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, declined to speculate about the border wall specifically. But he did explain that the Corps maintains few projects that could be described as “national.” Even theMississippi River and Tributaries Project, the largest flood-control system in the world, is maintained by the Corps as a series of individual elements: levees, floodways, and so on. Each project is conceptualized, built, and operated as a local concern.
So Corps projects typically start from the bottom up, especially in today’s post-earmark era. Infrastructure projects rarely begin with the executive branch, even if they do receive federal support. Seen through one lens, Trump’s answer to immigration is the supreme evocation of executive authority: The White House will build a wall. The audacity of Trump’s proposal brings to mind the earliest debates about the division of powers, when the Hamiltonian Federalist Party (later the Whigs) sponsored “internal improvements”—best represented by the Erie Canal—in the face of fierce objections from the Jeffersonian Republican Party (later the Democrats). (Today’s debate is not quite of the same calibre.)
In the here and now, a proposal for a wall crossing state lines might be broken up into smaller constituent projects, to be evaluated independently. This process could open up multiple potential points of failure—objections that an 80-foot-tall wall running through or along the Rio Grande violates the National Environmental Policy Act, for example. Or objections that the wall divides divides certain animal populations, violating the Endangered Species Act. Residents of El Paso may object to an 80-foot wall in their back yard.
...
The Corps would not physically build the wall themselves. For most projects, the Corps engages a “prime” contractor, who then hires on other subcontractors. A wall running thousands of miles through hills, deserts, and rivers would take a major campaign, possibly involving multiple primes. Not to just to build the wall, but to support the builders: to build the roads that would enable the builders to reach the border. No small feat.
...
There are just a handful of architectural and engineering firms with the organizational capacity to buildTrump’s wall. Not the technical know-how—any engineer can design a wall—but rather the experience in management. Marshaling the array of contractors and subcontractors it would take to build a wall across so many different jurisdictions and climate regions would require a fairly elite engineering firm.
None of more than a dozen global architecture and engineering firms I contacted were willing to speak on the record about Trump’s wall. Neither did faculty at the schools of civil engineering for Texas A&M University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. But several sources pointed to codes of ethics that seek to prevent architects, engineers, and planning professionals from doing harm.
...
Building Trump’s wall across the Mexican border might require one-tenth of the cement the U.S. produces in an entire year. Maybe more. Maybe all of it.
Since the height of the Great Wall of Making America Great Again keeps rising, it’s hard to give anything better than a stab in the dark at what it would cost to build, for whoever ends up stuck with the tab. One Daily Kos contributor outlined a plausible-sounding guesstimate regarding the sheer amount of cement it would take to wall off 2,000 miles of mostly natural border.
Bill Palmer Jr., the editor of Concrete Construction, offers that a concrete wall running 80 feet high (including 30 feet below grade), 1 foot thick, and 2,000 miles long would require 31 million cubic yards of cement. “If we made it higher-strength concrete, go to 700 pounds per yard, that’s 21.7 billion pounds of Portland cement, or about 10 percent of U.S. annual consumption,” he writes in an email. Cement is just one ingredient in concrete, and concrete is just one component of a wall-building project.
In a project like this, they would be making their own concrete, so the price would go down,” Palmer writes, “but getting materials, equipment, and people to the job site and building this as a government project ([at] prevailing wages) would be very expensive.” (Emphasis his.)
Those costs would not go away if the U.S., under Trump, [url=http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/how-much-trumps-immigration-plan-would-cost-the-us/445830/]opts to build a mere fence, not a true wall. Neither would the lawsuits, presumably all of which would need to be settled—along withright-of-way acquisition—before engineers could break ground. There is no way that the cost of building a border half the length of the Great Wall of China doesn’t reach astronomical heights.
Quote:Cost is no issue, of course, because our Maximum Leader has told us many times 'I'm really rich', but let's take a look anyway.
Average concrete cost is about $150 per yard, plus about $100 per yard for delivery. We're not building an average wall, but let's use $250 per yard anyway: 306,074,560 yards * $250 per yard = $76,518,640,000 cost of concrete
Now keep in mind that this is concrete suitable for a driveway, not a Great Great Wall. We're going to need better cement and a lot more rebar. Why more rebar, you asked? Good question.... concrete by itself isn't very strong, especially against impact, like a bunch of people banging on it with sledge-hammers.
It's the rebar (steel reinforcing bars) that makes it strong. I'm not going to go into a long calculation on how much rebar we need.... I think you'll believe me when I guess it will be a sizeable percentage of the steel production in the US for the year.
Let's leave the cement and move on to another issue: how are we going to get all of this cement, sand (you can't use just any sand), aggregate and water, to say nothing of the concrete mixing plants, wood for forms, workers, etc., etc., etc. to the border? I just looked at the entire US/Mexico border (the wonders of Google Maps!) and found there are almost no roads within a few miles of the border. Uh-Oh!
Looks like we're going to have to build a 1,954 mile road along the border, along with another 1,000 miles of access roads to get there. Let's see.... asphalt costs.... no, wait, I'm not going through that again. Let's use $10 million per mile to get us $30 billion cost for our access roads.
There's also 2 rather large lakes right on the border in Texas... I guess that will be a management decision how to deal with them.
Oh, and as my wife (also an engineer, BTW) pointed out: we're building roads to these desolate areas where no-one in their right mind would ever cross the border because it's an un-tracked wilderness, so anyone who manages to get over or under our wall won't have any difficulty moving north.
Returning to our Great Great Wall, let's consider that an average of 3,500 men poured 160,000 yards of concrete per month for 2 years to build a structure with about 1/100th the size of our wall. We'll get lots of savings using modern tools and techniques, but it's still going to take just about every concrete installer in the country.... which doesn't matter much when you consider we're going to need all the concrete produced in the country in order to get this done in a year.
Let's say we're 10 times as efficient: we need to pour 159 times as much concrete per month with 1/10th the manpower, so that means we need about 55,650 workers. Most of the border is really desolate, so we have to feed and house them.... let's figure fully-burdened labor costs at $100 per hour (ridiculously low, IMNHO) so that's about $1.1 billion per month.
I'm not sure what the total estimated cost for our Great Great Wall would be - too many variables - but suffice to say it would be at least a couple hundred billion dollars, provided, of course, you can get all the materials and labor you need.
Oh, one more thing: a good bit of the land on the border doesn't belong to the US government, so we'll have to work out how to buy it. I'd say 'just take it', but that might get the Cliven Bundy crowd frothing at the mouth again, and we don't want that, do we?
And, of course, all of our calculations will have to be re-done if Home Depot decides to sell a 60 foot ladder in Mexico, but let's not go there, OK? At least our Illustrious Poobah has told us that Mexico will pay for it!
LATE BREAKING: Scott Walker, in a desperate attempt to prove that he's still relevant, has floated the idea of a wall on the border with Canada!!!
Let's see..... the US/Canada border is 5,525 miles long...... the tallest ladder for sale at Home Depot in Canada is 60 feet, so we better go for 80 feet high....... we'll have to cross the Rocky Mountains with this wall, as well as 4 of the Great Lakes and a lot of the border in Alaska is virtually inaccessible, but none of that matters!
I'm just really, really glad that nobody in Central America has ever gotten the idea to build a boat and sail to Florida.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
(08-30-2016, 12:09 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Of course, if they are employed full time then we need to take into account benefits. The cost of training will have to be figured into it as well. Relocation costs if we are bring people in from all over the country. Would there be available housing for those relocated?
I feel that some would think that these people should either be forced to work because they are collecting unemployment or happy to work because...reasons?
I mean why care about benefits when you can work for minimum wage in the middle of the desert?
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
(08-30-2016, 12:09 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Of course, if they are employed full time then we need to take into account benefits. The cost of training will have to be figured into it as well. Relocation costs if we are bring people in from all over the country. Would there be available housing for those relocated?
Did the Hoover Dam build itself?
Of course there will be costs, but we have an idle workforce available that is already getting compensation.
(08-30-2016, 12:18 PM)GMDino Wrote: I feel that some would think that these people should either be forced to work because they are collecting unemployment or happy to work because...reasons?
I mean why care about benefits when you can work for minimum wage in the middle of the desert?
(08-30-2016, 12:20 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Did the Hoover Dam build itself?
Of course there will be costs, but we have an idle workforce available that is already getting compensation.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
Quote:The Hoover Dam's completion 75 years ago marked one of the biggest public works projects in the U.S. and a win for jobs and electricity. But experts say the Dam would not pass today's environmental guidelines.
The Hoover Dam harnessed the power of the Colorado River to generate reliable electricity for southern California, Las Vegas, and many of the factories that helped win World War II. It also created much-needed jobs during the Great Depression. But Joseph Stevens, author of "Hoover Dam: An American Adventure," says he doesn't think a project like the Hoover Dam would get off the ground if it were attempted today. "Worker safety rules and environmental impact assessments would make the Hoover Dam too expensive."
There were also significant downsides to the project: Over 100 construction workers were killed, and the Dam had a large impact on the Colorado River, flooding wildlife habitats and changing its natural flow of the Colorado. Stevens notes this would not pass today's environmental impact assessments.
But University of California energy professor Daniel Kammen says the Hoover Dam was a visionary public/private partnership. "That was essentially a government-designed vision, and it found partners in the private sector, and partners in the developers of many big cities in the southwest. So that tied together an energy plan and a development plan."
The Hoover Dam was finished in five years -- two years ahead of schedule -- and cost a $49 million, which is worth under $750 million today.
Many of us today don't think that we make enough money. Check out what the workers who built Hoover Dam made in the early 1930's. The amounts shown are per hour of work, and the men worked eight-hour days. If you see an entry like .825 it means that person earned eighty two and a half cents per hour.
The lowest wage was 50 cents an hour, and the highest was $1.25. The average for all of the workers at the dam was about 62.5 cents an hour. How does that compare to the rest of the country at that time? It was pretty good, actually. Fifty cents an hour, eight hours per day for a year works out to $1460.00. The average 62.5 cents an hour works out to an annual income of $1825.00, and the highest wage, $1.25, works out to $3650.00 per year.
It still does not seem like much until you compare it to what other people were making at that time. Below is a table showing some comparisons on an annual basis.
[url=https://postimg.org/image/eby28owlp/][/url]
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
(08-30-2016, 11:50 AM)bfine32 Wrote: The most current data I can find has the National average unemployment pay at $294 a week that works to $7.34 and hour. That's $.10 higher than the Federal minimum wage. I say we let them keep the extra dime.
If that is the average then that means almost half of them probably draw less than the federal minimum wage
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