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[anewaname]

If only there were some other metric aside from pure efficiency...

I mean in many systems we sacrifice efficiency for reliability and robustness.  In fact, we even require it for things like aviation, some medicine, civil engineering, etc.  You'd think we'd require it for infrastructure (gas pipelines, water, power), including de facto infrastructure (major financial services).

Risk is the other metric (maybe the only other metric after the profit/loss metric).

I mean, your profit/loss for a business goes into the toilet if your risk measurements were poorly measured and your business just caused devastation (my tanker got stuck in the Suez! my drone fell on someone's baby! my driverless ground-car drove into a manned hover-car!). If the supply system *can* halt for 24 hours without causing a man-made disaster (like many planes falling out of the skies or massive oil spills), then there will be no new regulations forcing the creation of redundant control systems or greater reserves within the system, but there will be renegotiation of contracts, reassessment of insurance costs, and lawyer brawls.

[Maximum Spin]

What are we saving for? Is it really cheaper to build again and again, than to put up something that will stand the test of time?

Well, the main thing is, nothing stands the test of time. The test of time happens in a dream where you didn't study, the questions make no sense, and you realise you haven't been in class for twenty years.

What I mean is, everything comes with maintenance costs and an EOL, and generally we've found that, with "monumental building projects", those tend to build up to be a lot more than the thing was worth to begin with.

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[Maximum Spin]

It's not like we can still observe thousand of year old ruins that maintained their structural integrity in the modern age.

Well... we really can't. The Colosseum, to pick an example, is slowly crumbling away all the time and needs regular restoration work. It wouldn't last long at all if you tried to use it as an office space or even as an arena like it was intended. We see thousand-year-old ruins that appear to maintain their structural integrity due to constant protection and work that is deemed valuable only because we value those ruins for their cultural heritage.

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[Starver]

* A 99.9% uptime does still mean they can be down for 8h 45m 56s a year before crossing that threshold.

...while "24/7/365" generously (skipping over the basic problem[1] with its progression) means one whole day of downtime every four years.


[1] "24/7/52-point-<something>" would be more accurate to the spirit, but apparently isn't a popular rendition.

[Maximum Spin]

But I can see how this is hard to grasp for somebody coming from a nation where they live in wooden houses and who doesn't believe in insulation.

I don't live in Japan, what?

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[Maximum Spin]

Look mate, we don't have drywalls over here. The japanese do have ridiculous paper walls though I'll grant you that, or at least so I'm told  . TBF the americans aren't the ones building skycrapers with bamboo, but if this this gender reveal hype keeps building on you might want to reconsider.

People do put insulation behind drywall, you know.
And besides, most Americans live in apartment buildings which are generally brick or steel or both, some of which have been around over 100 years. Brooklyn, for example, is famous for its brownstones. It's not like we build everything to embody mono-no-aware, we just also have a lot of demand for cheap housing. I'm not even necessarily saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that you're the one who seems to be making it out to be all one thing or the other.

[Starver]

You mean 24/7/365,33?

If I meant anything, it was "24/365.2425"[1]. I'm not sure where you got the ~⅓ from.
And "24 hours a day / 7 days a week / 365 weeks a year" is the (factually incorrect but) most consistent reading of the phrase I'm arguing against[2].

(NeverExplainTheJoke)

[1] Going with ¼, reduced by a 100th, increased by a 400th.

[2] I'd also accept 24/168/8765.82, for reasons you can easily establish...

[Maximum Spin]

You mean 24/7/365,33?

If I meant anything, it was "24/365.2425"[1]. I'm not sure where you got the ~⅓ from.
And "24 hours a day / 7 days a week / 365 weeks a year" is the (factually incorrect but) most consistent reading of the phrase I'm arguing against.

(NeverExplainTheJoke)

[1] Going with ¼, reduced by a 100th, increased by a 400th.

Maybe they were all supposed to be numbers of days, and the inventor of the phrase got the length of a month wrong.
:fireworks brain meme:

[MorleyDev]

Also those monuments weren't built to last the test of time, they were built from the best material they had available for what they wanted to build.

There's literally no point in building something to last 1000 years if it's probably gonna be useless within 25 years because the worlds moved on. It's just a waste of resources and effort for no tangible benefit.

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[MorleyDev]

You don't think the best -or - let's just say reasonably affordable second best, material and construction methods, all of our collected knowledge could come up with... would easily pass 150 years with minimal maintenance?

That's...really not how things work. Concrete can last a long time, but you trade off in weight (cheap material but can be expensive to build with and just plain ugly, and weight adds a limit on height).  And longer lasting concrete buildings take more time and resources to build, which increases costs. Again, why spend the money to build something to last longer than it's shelf-life will be? And even then, nothing lasts without maintainence.

Or do you think the colleseum look livable-in by modern standards of comfort, even with the maintainence (costing millions to do, btw) done to it to preserve it?

Wood is light but organic so will decay without treatment. Bricks are fairly strong but they are made of particulates will suffer from erosion.

Meanwhile, Technological devices grow more complex over time, and complexity means more interacting parts which means it's more likely to break when one of those parts goes wrong. But also means they can do more stuff faster. So that's the trade-off there.

There's some experimentation with self-healing organic concrete but it's not ready for batch production yet.