My #1 frustration with road construction: You effing barreled/cordoned off 8 miles of road but you're working on about .1 mile of it for a day? I would LOVE to hear the justification for that.

While I'm loathe to credit accounting and economics for things considering how they've basically underpinned our societal direction towards environmental destruction, the issue is fundamentally misaligned incentives.

Flat bid basically optimizes for monetary extraction of the "ownership class" from the government, and labor and the actual project are just annoying costs.

Features + schedule + cost optimization would come from incenting labor and management. If workers got paid salary + a huge bonus for schedule then things would get a lot more efficient.

Just look at your typical big enterprise, it's basically an authoritarian boondoggle, with only very long-range economic realities ever intruding, and the organizations themselves use monopolies to avoid those. It's these big hierarchies, with people carving out sub-domains and knife fighting over budgets.

What probably should happen is internal competition: if you have several datacenters, let them compete against cloud offerings and other internal datacenters for customers. Don't organize them to a central org.

Road construction may not be vanilla cookie cutter, but it should be a well known problem at this time, and frankly it should be an embarrassing parallel one. YOu have the route set down, you have the plan in place, you have the 8 miles of barrels done, you have phases (tear up, clear out, re-grade, pave) that can be pipelined. You can have teams do it in parallel in separate parts of the road to compete for incentives.

But... that's not the point. The elephant in the room is that this is government revenue extraction, corruption in the guise of stimulus, and really, if we were totally efficient in road construction, we'd just have overbuilt the roads and sprawled even worse in the US.

People hate on Musk, but look at the infrastructure his companies produced:

Tesla has a national charging network, what, a half-decade and counting before anyone else?

SpaceX has a nutso cheaper space launch capability (if starship even approaches its targets)?

If Boring Company does the same for tunneling per their stated goals, it would be a trifecta.

The first two really aren't magic by some modern day wizard. Tesla is about changing the world for the better with EVs, Musk probably gets crazy overwork from his staff with just that core missions.

SpaceX is about getting humanity to the stars. Again, Musk doesn't have to whip people to get productivity, the mission and goal are the drivers: awesome cool space projects.

I also recall a story from decades ago about an all-in-one road builder that would dig up, break down asphault, regrade, and then lay down the asphalt all in one package, and it would crawl along. It never got adopted because it would make things too cheap. Or maybe some labor/unions killed it. This was pre-internet, so it was probably an old wives tale, or maybe it required a nuclear reactor. I can't find it in google, which heavily favors recent stories.

The lack of low-level robotics, specialized equipment, and other similar things after 20 years of gigahertz processors and robotics in manufacturing seems to point to industry resistance to productivity enhancement, which one would expect from a business that is fundamentally corrupt.

At CES I've seen multiple strength-enhancement exoframes, and this was 8-10 years ago. It is insane to me that these aren't in extensive use and undergoing active economies of scale and year-on-year improvement. It's simply too easy and satisfying for the elite class to have manual laborers do pure manual labor, enhancing their relative perceived position in the great pecking order or America's class system.