I don't know where on earth you got those numbers for Houston from... that would be a world record by an amazing margin. Very few places to date have recorded wet bulb temps above 35 degrees.
I can only assume you are putting incorrect readings into the calculators.
Are you making sure to put the temperature at the time of the humidity reading, since they reach their maximums at very different times of the day. If you just put max temp and humidity readings for a day in you are going to be wildly wrong.
This could well be it. It never really occurred to me how radically the humidity changes throughout the day. I suspect this is because as the humidity rises the temperature is in a low and vice versa. So it feels like a relative equilibrium, but it's not. It'll be interesting to check out the by-the-hour data the next time a particularly mean hot+wet window emerges.
The mismatch is expectations about what would be known from sequencing DNA doesn't speak to the validity of the analogy but to the poor mental models about the reality of code, computation and systems we have.
Though I agree that the analogy doesn't really buy you much useful leverage when seeking useful understanding.
Software engineering isn't special in this regard. It happens in a lot of other domains. Software often doesn't have a lot of the constraints of other disciplines so effects like these are more pronounced.
I would characterize all the statements you made as false. Though it does depend on what your standards are.
Most of the critical things are done well enough, but that is a pretty low bar.
What do you think bathtubs, showers, sinks, taps, doors and most fittings are?
There is a ton of prefabrication in construction already. There are also large libraries of shared details.
Most of the bits that are not already prefabricated are the bits that don't have simple interfaces. Either to each other or to their surrounding environment.
I would say the biggest factor is that it is a very repetitive rectangular box.
Overall design and how it is detailed is the dominant factor in time it takes to build things.
Do I have lots of joints that have to be perfect or can they be rough cut and covered with trim?
Do things assembly easily without having to fiddle due to having the correct tolerances?
Cuts and joins are what take the most time. The less cuts and joins you have the cheaper and faster things will be. Also cuts and joins that have to be done to high tolerances take a lot longer.
It can actually be very problematic and difficult, depending how how easy the new slab location is to access now that you have a building in the way and presumably landscaping you want to preserve. This can end up adding a considerable amount of expense to a job compared to a bare site.
Depending on how you measure a lot of prefab construction you don't save time overall (design to finished) or end up with better quality. You also tend to up with buildings that will fail earlier due to having a lot more of the most risky components of any built form, joints.
I have hope that as designers and tools get better at dealing with the connection detailing and with material/assembly tolerances it will lead to better outcomes in the future.
I would really recommend watching "The Building Science of Prefabricated Construction". It does a good job of going over the realities of this form of construction.
The problem as I see it is you don't have to actively run it over budget in bad faith.
Even as an ethical actor you can only price what is specified. However, you can then use your knowledge about likely the real variances that will be needed and risk profile to place a bid that takes this into account to remove margin or discount the bid price.
That just wouldn't work for large civil projects for so many reasons.
It also seems like you are only trying to address the problem of people introducing needless variances as a way increasing profit.
Which is not the case being discussed here and I don't think it is major reason for cost overruns. They haven't requested an increase, they have found out that to satisfy the engineering requirements of the project that more work has to be done.
> Which...I don't think it is major reason for cost overruns
It's commonly called out as one of the driving reasons behind the horrible economics of American civil engineering [1].
> They haven't requested an increase, they have found out that to satisfy the engineering requirements of the project that more work has to be done
It's both. The change may be merited. If so, it should win--again--in a temporary re-auction. But refusing to market test an 82% cost increase is game theoretically begging to get screwed on pricing. Given American taxpayers get screwed on pricing for public-sector civil engineering (after accounting for land, labour and materials cost differences), I think it's a fair discussion to have.
It is most definitely a fair discussion to have, and the bidding/financing/contractual system for these projects really does need to change to have better incentives.
I just don't think your incentives would produce better outcomes, from my perspective it would make things worse.
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.
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.
I can only assume you are putting incorrect readings into the calculators.
Are you making sure to put the temperature at the time of the humidity reading, since they reach their maximums at very different times of the day. If you just put max temp and humidity readings for a day in you are going to be wildly wrong.