Oroville Dam: Cost to repair spillways nearly doubles in price to $500M

Re:Oroville Dam: Cost to repair spillways nearly doubles in ... by JumpCrisscross on Saturday October 21, 2017 @11:17PM (#15524996)

I will make no attempt to defend the specific recommendations I mooted. There is better work, in any case, in the academic domain on fixing our flawed civil-engineering auction processes.

The problems anyone campaigning for auction reform runs into are three-fold. One, it's a boring problem with boring solutions. Two, there are vested interests. And three, Americans suffer from a just-world bias when it comes to infrastructure [1]. The latter is apparent even in this thread. It's difficult to find solutions when people vigorously defend a clearly-flawed system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

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Re:Oroville Dam: Cost to repair spillways nearly doubles in ... by yrb on Sunday October 22, 2017 @12:06AM (#15525109)

For sure. I don't know how you overcome the inertia of our societies structure to head towards something that would likely be better for the majority of citizens. Which is a problem in many more domains that just civil works auctions.

I can see how the recommendation you mooted would improve incentives in some procurement domains. Large civil works isn't one of them however.

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