07-31-2023, 04:11 PM
(07-31-2023, 03:10 PM)dtkvictim Wrote: Used to do it no problem? We, as humans, built many great things fairly efficiently using slave labour. This continent's century old skyscrapers were built with a complete lack of health and safety regulations, where deaths were common and expected. Are you suggesting we roll back to these times, with your digs at union workers? These skyscrapers and other beautiful, quality buildings are fairly irrelevant anyways, since they were never built to house the masses, but were for the elite and upper classes. The housing for the masses were historically awful and haven't survived, and buildings for the wealthy are not emblematic of the way "things used to be".
I don't completely disagree with the points here, but it's not so black and white.
No, I'm not suggesting we should be relaxing safety standards or using slave labour. Though you'd have to be very naïve to think every worker on the job is practicing safety standards down to the book lol. I could take you to any job site in this region and point out a dozen issues just standing on the ground, then even more if we went up the building. Yeah it's bad to do but the guys working on job sites are cutting corners when it comes to safety because it is quite honestly excessive at times. I feel more at risk just crossing a busy stroad in this region than I do not having a harness on entirely or being fully anchored when working at heights.
My point was more that this is the developed world. We've got centuries of experience constructing things. We have the best engineering and construction methods in the world available. We have modern equipment at our disposal. We could easily build something very quickly if we want to, but we don't because there is no will power to do so anymore and less pride in what we're achieving as a nation. And of course the economic factors at play don't help, with so much stuff being contracted and sub-contracted out, developers wanting things done their way and stuff like provincial/federal rules and union influence on how things get done. Note, I'm not anti-union whatsoever, so I wasn't trying to make a dig at them. I'm actually a strong advocate for unionization in the architectural world because the workers in this field are used and abused. But I've also been in enough unions to know that they can get in the way in very nonsensical ways for both positive and negative reasons.
I just think as a country we need to be more proactive, progressive, determined and prideful about what we're doing for ourselves. One reason China is able to do what it does so fast is partially due to the number of workers they can throw at things, but there is also a strong current of idealism that drives what they've been achieving over the last few decades. When they build a couple high speed rail lines, subways, entire new cities and other infrastructure projects like dams or mines it is because they are guided by overarching theoretical narratives driving their society, such as common prosperity or Chinese modernization. In North America we don't really have such ideals to rally behind like we once used to. Irrelevant of the labour practices in our past, when we were developing fur trades, ports, national railroads, highway systems, the health and education system, our space program and so on people felt there was a greater purpose to accomplishing these things for the greater good of society. These days, everyone is just in it for the money and that's why there's a housing crisis and developers like Vive flip properties like this as a side gig. If we want to build things the way the Chinese do, we need to collectively agree to accomplish that.