I have been hired to rewrite the Technical Report required by the Municipality's Environmental Department. The original report, written by another engineer, was angrily rejected by the Municipality. I am familiar with the City's engineers and they are of high caliber, yet the "Guide to Technical Reports" contains a four page list of titles to be filled. The document has to submitted in six copies with color prints of complete 1:100 drawings of the factory. One of the titles demands to explain the scientific basis of the wastewater treatment methods, such as the FOG (grease) interceptor. Every restaurant has one and having to explain it is like having to explain the science of the soup spoon. What can I write? The Stokes Law of differential velocity of sedimentation? Newton's Law of Gravity? I had a college who wrote exactly that, Newton's Law of Gravity, with an illustration of Newton under the apple tree.
The regulators were not amused.
8 comments:
Hoe long do you think it will be before all cities require engineering drawings of buildings to be submitted electronically in a commonly agreed upon format?
Not in the near future in Israel. What is the purpose of those drawings? I can see only one: to torment and torture the people, to ensure the control and absolute rule of the bureaucrats. Paper is more efficient for that.
I think that a requirement that all building plans be submitted in CAD format would improve the building trade in Israel. Having a single digital file to represent the structure being built would prevent having separate blueprints for each mechanical system, many of which often interfere in practice. Boeing uses a single CAD file to design its jetliners without using any paper blueprints at all.
If the entire object of the process is to torture the designing engineers then Israeli bureaucrats can devise new methods. Considering that Israel has a near-surplus of Ashkenazi brainpower I have faith in their ability to succeed.
The last thing you want to do is increase the efficiency of the bureaucracy. I am currently working on an addition to my home. One of the local zoning requirements is that no more than 21% of my lot be covered by "impervious" surface - the other 79% must be unpaved grass, dirt, etc. (the idea is to provide a place for storm water to sink in to the ground). My architect submitted a "creative" calculation to show that we are in compliance. With CAD, it might have been quite easy to show that the numbers were dodgy - the government computers could have been programmed to flag such problems automatically. It is a trivial exercise when the plans are in CAD form.
Instead the plan reviewer, who I can tell is perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer, has a set of little red rubber stamps on his desk - he looked at the plans for a few minutes after lunch (on the last day legally permitted to respond) and where something caught his eye, he stamped a notation = " 18x24 inch access hatch required for crawl space", "fire blocking required", etc. and issued my permit. The real issues such as the impervious coverage passed completely over his head and for that I am very glad. I don't want him to be replaced by an all seeing computer.
This is like GPS in your car - do you really want the government to have direct access to your GPS and automatically send you a traffic ticket each time you exceed the speed limit? I WANT inefficient government.
K
BTW, buildings that are designed on a computer LOOK like they were designed on a computer. My architect draws all her plans by hand in the old way and it shows - the building looks like something designed by a human and not a machine. It's fine for a airplane to look like a machine, but a building shouldn't.
K
K, if you cheat the government you should expect the government to cheat you in return at some point.
Do you ever drive above the speed limit, even 1 MPH above? People will follow regulations if they feel the regulations are there for a good reason to protect them or the common good. If the regulations are excessive then they won't. Adjoining townships (and many others across the country) allows 30% to 45% impervious coverage or more, so a 21% maximum is like a 15MPH speed limit - something that is excessive and not warranted by any element of public welfare. Maybe the local contractors and engineers lobbied for this so that they would make money drawing up and implementing plans for storm water management. Maybe some eco-nazis got this passed so that the nearby streams would be ultra-pure for their frog inhabitants. I could have told my architect to account for every last square foot of impervious and pushed my calculation above the limit. I could have then hired an engineer who would have designed a dry well and a lawyer to pursue a variance and the result would have added months of delay, maybe $10,000 or more to my costs and zero benefit to the public good. In order to be respected, the law has to be first worthy of respect.
K
If you were trying to design a totalitarian state, one of the things that you would do would be to criminalize behaviors that a large % of people engage in - you make tobacco and alcohol and driving above a low speed limit and cannabis and various consensual sexual activities , etc. illegal or subject to taxes that are so high that people try to evade them. You require licenses for all sorts of activities and then don't issue them or make the requirements ridiculously high (1200 hours of training to cut hair). If you do this "right" then the vast majority of your citizens can be classified as criminals and have their property/freedom confiscated at the whim of the rulers, even if constitutional protects still exist on paper for "law abiding citizens". Does any of this sound familiar?
K
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