Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

What’s The Connection between Skyscrapers and Economic Turmoil?

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February 10th, 2012

“Once I built a tower up to the sun, brick and rivet and lime. Once I built a tower, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?”

The Empire State Building was completed in 1931, the same year “Yip” Harburg wrote this lyric. The song grew to become an anthem to unemployed American builders during the Great Depression. But these words could easily apply to those put out of work after building Burj Khalifa or one of hundreds of other skyscrapers that now cast long shadows across the Middle East.

The skyscraper index

If you’re beginning to wonder whether skyscrapers are an economic jinx, you are not alone. What began as Andrew Lawrence’s tongue-in-cheek “Skyscraper Index” to correlate skyscraper construction with business cycles has grown into serious research. As recently reported by BBC news, Barclays capital wrote: “Often the world’s tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction…” Misallocation of resources is one of the unfortunate side effects of economic bubbles. Mega skyscrapers may be an indication of a distorted relationship between land values and construction costs.

Why build these skyscrapers?

The construction cost of a one story commercial building is typically $100-$200 per square foot, varying widely because up to 70% of this is the cost of the land. The construction cost per square foot of a skyscraper is approximately $500 per square foot and the cost of WTC 1 in New York City is $1,150/square foot.

Construction costs

Working through the details is one exercise, but economic reasons for building a skyscraper seem to vanish by the tenth floor. So if a pencil building seems to be the best fit for the economics of a site, you might want to consider funding horizontal public transportation to another location. The chances are good that the land values are floating on an economic bubble. And when the bubble pops, the skyscraper will have to support itself long after it makes economic sense.

The skyscraper symbol

The Great Pyramid of Giza stood as the highest man-made structure on earth for almost 4000 years before the Lincoln Cathedral exceeded its height in the 14th century. This record held for another six centuries before the Washington monument topped it at 555 feet.

Symbolic structures

These were all symbolic structures. They didn’t pretend to be green or economically practical. They were works of art which symbolized something. Skyscrapers rarely make economic sense, but they can be powerful symbols. So many people think of modern skyscrapers as symbols of economic prosperity it has become a cliché since they often indicate quite the opposite.

Are they Green?

While there can be an advantage in avoiding horizontal sprawl, vertical sprawl can be just as bad for the environment, possibly worse. Even so-called “green” skyscrapers consume a massive amount of resources and energy. They cast long shadows, kill millions of birds and expose far more surface area for collecting solar heat than the land beneath them.

Tags: Construction costs, Economic downturn, Skyscraper index, Skyscrapers
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Hey, I’m Working an Extra Day for the Same Salary This Month! Not Fair!

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February 8th, 2012

Everything you wanted to know about February 29th

February has 29 days since 2012 is a leap year. Leap Years are needed to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth’s revolutions around the sun. It takes the Earth approximately 365.242199 days to circle once around the Sun. If we didn’t add the day on February 29 nearly every 4 years, we would lose almost six hours every year. After only 100 years, our calendar would be off by approximately 24 days! In the 16th century the two were out of step by about 10 days and in 1582, Pope Gregory implemented a new Gregorian calendar. This corrected the errors of Julian calendar which added one day every four years. This was too much, however, and the Gregorian corrected this by making all century years, that is those such as 1500 and 1900, not leap years, but if the year was divisible by 400 it would be a leap year. So 2000 was a leap year.

The formula

Simply put, years divisible by 4 are leap years, those divisible by 100 are not but those divisible by 400 are and finally those divisible by 4,000 are not. This should keep everything working nicely for at least another 20,000 years, by which time it will be someone else’s problem!

February

The extra day was allotted to the month of February which is the shortest month in the calendar. So in a Leap Year, February has 29 days. If you were born on “Leap Day” like my daughter-in-law, your birthday is a day of complete confusion: it was yesterday. No it’s today. Are you sure it’s not tomorrow? Daughter-in-law, of course says she only has a birthday every 4 years, and that I should treat her in accordance with her solar age.

Workdays

Here’s an interesting point. I, together with millions of others around the world, will be working an extra day this month, for no extra pay. My boss will profit, no doubt. He will be invoicing out the job or task by the hours worked but he will not be paying me for any extra hours I work. If I normally work 52 weeks of 5 days at 8 hours a day that is 2,080 hours. This year I will work an extra 8 hours with no pay. Not fair.

Women’s day?

According to myth or tradition, Leap Day is the day when women are allowed to propose to men. According to tradition, this practice started in the fifth century. Want to know what day of the week Leap Day will be? It occurs on the same day every 28 years. That means it will be 2040 before Leap Day is on a Wednesday again.

The Guinness Book of Records

Like everything else that is related to the sun or moon there are many related superstitions and myths. And there are also challenges: According to the Guinness Book of Records, one family in the UK has three generations born on February 29th.

Tags: February 29th, Gregorian calendar, Leap year, Solar year
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You Are A Facebook User, Right?

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February 5th, 2012

So where were you on Day 1?

To my everlasting disappointment I regret a missed opportunity. I was junior clerk in an engineering office downtown. Next door was a small insurance company. One of the clerks working there was a neighbor of mine in the street where I lived out in the suburbs. He was a few years older than I and we were only on nodding terms, both at home on the street and in the office corridors. From experience gained while working at the insurance company he started up his own insurance company. He collected money from friends by way of $1,000 “investment lots” and gave them shares in exchange. For some reason he never offered me any shares. His new company took off and became, and still is, a major international insurance company and his friends who invested became rich.

The Facebook story

Now it’s Facebook time. At the very start of the Facebook story, a guy called David Choe was asked to paint murals on the walls of the offices. Choe, who says his “dirty-style figure paintings combine themes of desire, degradation, and exaltation”, took shares in Facebook instead of a cash payment. He chose to gamble his fee and now the shares look like being the hottest property on the US stock market.

Street artist

Choe calls his painting style “dirty.” In his documentary, he says his smeared and smudged painting method comes from being left-handed when he was little. He told an art magazine, “dirty styles is painting on found object besides a blank piece of paper or blank white wall … so even before you start there’s some history, there’s some spills, chills and marks, then you keep creating more history on top of that, spilling, spraying, dripping, creaming, collaging, making a mess. I create hope from dark beginnings.”

The Facebook IPO

With Facebook being pitched in the $75-$100 billion range, those murals could turn out to be more expensive than the $140 million paid in 2006 for Pollock’s No 5, 1948, or even the $200.7 million paid at auction for a collection of Damien Hirst pieces in 2008. Jackson Pollock may lose his record for creating the most expensive painting ever, not to another enfant terrible of the art world, but to a minor Los Angeles mural painter who happened upon the Facebook offices in 2005.

New-found wealth

Although Choe declined to speak about his new-found wealth, his Facebook fanpage tells his story: “In 2005, internet entrepreneur Sean Parker, a longtime fan, asked him to paint graphic sexual murals in the interior of Facebook’s first Silicon Valley office, and in 2007, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg commissioned him to paint somewhat tamer murals for their next office.”

Millionaires and billionaires

David Choe could be the unlikeliest of all the millionaires and billionaires who will be minted by the social network’s flotation this year. If the company hits the top valuations being talked about, then Choe will have been paid about $200 million for the “graphic sexual murals” that adorned Facebook’s walls in its early years. Is he a good artist? Who cares?

Tags: facebook, IPOs, Shares
Posted in Business, Economy, Employment, Finance, Money, Personal / Internet, Technology | No Comments »

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