My new favorite example of infrastructure cost disease: construction of the Eiffel Tower cost $40 million *in 2019 dollars*. (Also, it took 2 years and 2 months to build.)
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Some may be context: e.g. A 60 day design to built time is fast for a design done from scratch, but the Spirit of St. Louis was a customized Ryan M-2 design, so tooling and know-how for how to make it roughly existed.
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“Loosely based” on the M-2, says Wikipedia. More broadly, I agree and disagree. All projects build on preexisting know-how to some degree. Even those that do so to a considerable extent will often proceed far more slowly than those enumerated here.
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First sketches of the Eiffel Tower in May/June 1884. 3 years to conceive, convince gov, win contract, gather funds, and 2 years to assemble. Shouldn’t the nuance be detailed in your Fast post?
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If you’ve had an idea buzzing around in your head for 10 years, and you spend 10 days building a prototype and shipping it, how long did it take to build?
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Thanks 4 UR curiosity. Perhaps I'll have trouble pointing to factual errors. I'm more concerned with meaning. When you state, "On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the moon." Why ignore that the Apollo program began in 1961? Perhaps that's still fast?
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Many items on the list are explicitly items in a series, work performed during a economic downturn, as part of a war effort, or have some extraordinary motivating factor. In most cases people are putting their lives on the line. Maybe that is the point.
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