Silent_Buddha
Legend
Well, perhaps death isn't considered an injury a worker can come back from. Thus a death is a death. And an injury would be a "lost time injury." 
Regards,
SB
Regards,
SB
billion dollar house
- Thread starter zed
- Start date
The real story behind this is that it cost the guy something silly like $50 million to build, so not that excessive. Note how it says "worth $1billion", not "cost $1billion". House prices have rocketed in that area recently, so he's seen a 20x increase in property valuation.
PS: if anyone finds the true story behind this, its been a while since I read it. It may have cost him more than $50m (it may have been less), but it certainly didn't cost him even a decent fraction of $1b.
PS: if anyone finds the true story behind this, its been a while since I read it. It may have cost him more than $50m (it may have been less), but it certainly didn't cost him even a decent fraction of $1b.
That guy must be happy, he now owns the world's most gigantic book shelf.
Well it does say "lost time". Maybe a bunch of people died or were injured but they didn't stop working.
Ya the guys that fall a few stories and managed to survive with just a broken spine can be put to work sorting screws with their tongue. Those that died were put to work as foundation enhancement.
aaronspink
Veteran
hey, it can't be as bad as Hoover Dam.
perhaps
but answer me this
is this worth $150million? 6,100m2 with land but in the countryside
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates'_house
vs
the billion dollar house 37,000m2
in downtown mumbai (ok not the greatest place but has a lot more growth potential value wise)
if u accept that billgartes house is ~150million then u must at least accept that the billion dollar house is >$500million
aaronspink
Veteran
perhaps
but answer me this
is this worth $150million? 6,100m2 with land but in the countryside
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates'_house
Hate to break it to you but Lake Washington isn't countryside. Its practically in the heart of seattle. And it is on a LOT of lakefront and a LOT of land. Also the construction for the Gates home was pretty extreme with a large portion of the house underground.
not really, two entirely different construction issues and a significant difference in land area.
So would I prefer gates house (Ild prefer living in seattle to mumbai), but the fact is land in downtown mumbai is far more expensive than downtown seattle.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/09/cities-top-expensive-lifestyle-real-estate_0209_cities.html
mumbai scraps in to the top10 worldwide
http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Asia/India/Rental-Yields
5million euro for 300m2 apartment in mumbai
sorry my mistake, but its not downtown
though bill gates paid $2million in 1988 for the land. How much today? donno
but 100:1 that its less than the landarea of the mumbai house
aaronspink
Veteran
Gates undoubtedly has a nice house - although I find his garden too busy with all the trees and overabundant bushes; perhaps it's a privacy measure to block photographers and other spying eyes, but in that case why not live out in the countryside instead?
I also question digging the house into the hillside. That makes the inner portion of the house dark and enclosed. Oh well. To each his own I guess.
And, I'd hack away that huge stair leading up to the building. It looks like something you'd expect to find in front of a high school, not a private residence. It occupies too much space and looks out of place. I can't really imagine Ol' Billy grinding down those steel rails on a skateboard; can you?
I also question digging the house into the hillside. That makes the inner portion of the house dark and enclosed. Oh well. To each his own I guess.
And, I'd hack away that huge stair leading up to the building. It looks like something you'd expect to find in front of a high school, not a private residence. It occupies too much space and looks out of place. I can't really imagine Ol' Billy grinding down those steel rails on a skateboard; can you?
It's actually a really common practice. They call it a walk out basement. It actually gives more light, not less than a traditional basement. Use the dark area for putting in your water, furnace, fuse box etc.
aaronspink
Veteran
Because living on a lake is much nicer. And more secure as it is easier to survey/control/patrol an open expanse of water than a forest/field. Trust me, don't take a speedboat to gates house going balls to the walls. You'll be met by people in other speed boats with guns very quickly.
Pretty common actually. Both from an aesthetics and energy standpoint. There are actually a decent number of rooms in a mansion that you don't want light in. And if you want light, you can light up any room with just a little bit of powered lighting.
And, I'd hack away that huge stair leading up to the building. It looks like something you'd expect to find in front of a high school, not a private residence. It occupies too much space and looks out of place. I can't really imagine Ol' Billy grinding down those steel rails on a skateboard; can you?
Most mansions of this scale serve both as a private residence and an entertainment venue. Most of the outdoor portion of the house was designed with entertaining in mind and has been use for that heavily throughout the years. When Gates was CEO/CA for MS, he would host many company parties at his house including the annual NCG party. As I said previous, the majority of the house isn't visible above ground. This isn't all that uncommon as many other modern mansions have a significant portion of their space underground for a variety of reasons.
yes OK then, less than the mumbai place (cymbal crash)
ouch
btw aaron do you still think "I'm pretty sure that Israel is more advanced militarily than the EU."
if You agree thats false I'll remove it from my sig.
Myself I have a 3 bedroom house at the moment, me + the partner (no kids) but even with 20 kids such places (the skyscraper + bills place) are too big, u only utilise a part of it, thus if half is in the hillside, just dont use that part of the house, simple!
OK a 3 bedroom house + 20kids is perhaps not good , but 3bedrooms + 2 adults that sleep in the same bed is too much (2 bedrooms are just storage), esp since in my living room its so big, u could have 2 kinects side by side + have room over (groan)
bills place looks nicer, yes a lot of trees from that angle but if youre there (+ obviously thats in the spring, Im guessing the months aprill/may from the photo, 10 points for the correct answer, why this is my guess, comeone b3der's its simple, any takers? are you good intelligent detectives? ) theres still a lot of light most times of day.
hell I'ld take living there over mumbai no question
aaronspink
Veteran
yes OK then, less than the mumbai place (cymbal crash)
ouch
It would be pretty close in land cost depending on where exactly in mumbai that tower is. But I'd probably give at least the property cost advantage to Bill's place.
For weapon systems, Israel is ahead of pretty much anybody atm. They've got better AA missles than anyone else out there (which basically just means they have better seekers, pretty much all the top end AA missiles are the same propulsion wise). Plus they have better land systems as well (so far they are the only ones to demonstrate and deploy guardian/kill anti-penetrator technology). They don't spend as much money on platforms because those are so much cheaper to get on the open market and are pretty much all the same (not much real difference in any modern tank chassis/APC and for planes it really all depends on the electronics packages (no one gets into real dog fights anymore)). So they've concentrated all their research into the value add areas such as electronic and auxiliary weapons/protection systems.
For personal space both in the tower and in Bill's house, they only use a fraction of it. The majority of most real mansions/estates are designed for entertaining and this is reflected in the design of both of the residences under discussion. Another large portion of the space tends to go towards bringing auxiliary functions local (movie theaters, gyms, spas, etc). Some portion in both is also dedicated to effectively hotel/guest residence duty. For Bill's house, probably about 1/10th of the area is "personal" living space. It's probably less in the tower.
OK a 3 bedroom house + 20kids is perhaps not good , but 3bedrooms + 2 adults that sleep in the same bed is too much (2 bedrooms are just storage), esp since in my living room its so big, u could have 2 kinects side by side + have room over (groan)
Well, just living on the water beats living in the middle of mumbai any day of the week.
Hmm so you want me to replace EU in my sig with EU+the US. hell I admit israel has possibily the most capable weapons in the middle east but in the whole world? [lol]
heres the top14 countries WRT money spent
now youre saying that even though the US spends >40x more than israel their weapons capabilty is actually weaker, mate why arent the US taxpayers up in arms about this outrage!
aaronspink
Veteran
because as has been proven for centuries, money does not beget progress. Look at what the US is spending that money on and ask how much of a difference it really makes? As an example, a new build F15 with an electronics upgrade and new paint does pretty much everything that an F22 does but at a fraction of the cost.
What you spend money on has a bigger impact than how much you spend in total. Instead of researching and building yet another baseline chassis, Israel has spent money on the parts that matter most in modern warfare. Sensors, Seekers, etc. Several of the Israeli companies are getting paid substantial sums by other governments to license technology because they are ahead. Because they focused on things that actually make a real difference.
Contrast this to the US that dumped billions on designing new infantry weapons as part of the future warrior project and then dumped them when they realized that they weren't really any better than what they already had. Or all the money the US dumped into researching new artillery systems just to realize that none of it made any sense. It would of cost multiples of the age old 155 Howitzer and provide basically no new advantaged. Take a look at what are considered the successful us programs: JDAMs, etc. Those are simple mods to fairly archaic weapons. And they perform better and cost less than all the exotic weapons they spent money on to replace them.
The one area the US has a significant advantage in is the Navy but that is only because no one else cares as much about naval power. On a cost basis the Navy is many times more efficient than the airforce and army because they don't try to reinvent the wheel. They just to reasonable feedback from operations into new builds.
For airplanes, the advantage areas are in sensors (radar - active and passive), seekers (aka targeting systems for missiles and bombs), and paint (no lie, the majority of stealth comes from coating, not basic airframe design). Instead the airforce has spent billions designing and developing replacements that aren't even as effective in many cases as the airframes they are replacing because they are driven in large part by aesthetics rather than mission performance (a perfect example is trying to replace an A10 with an F35, the A10 has longer range, longer loiter, better payload, higher survivability, etc, it just looks ugly).
So yes, the US spends a lot of money, but the vast majority of it is either pure waste or purely redundant. In a lot of the critical areas the US has actually fallen behind because they've been too busy reinventing the wheel.
And a lot of US tax payers are up in arms about it. The F35 program is a perfect example. Boeing actually had the better design, delivered on time, and on budget and with better supporting collateral. Even before the prototype for Lockheed was complete, they were over budget (significantly), behind schedule, had horrible project management and couldn't account for hundreds of millions in funding and already had a bad reputation due to all the F22 issues. Yet they won the contract and what do you know, the F35 is under-performing, over budget, and late!
And there is at least building consensus that the US spends way too much on the military budget with the air force and army being the two biggest examples of inefficiency and waste.
itsmydamnation
Veteran
until you want to actually arm the thing or carry fuel, there is also a lot to worry about with stealth then paint and it massively depends on what angles your trying to reduce your radar signature on. Also the performace figures of the F-22 are classified so you can make any real judgement. the F-22 is an air superiority fighter with no equal, could the F15-SE do its job today most likely, will it be able to do it in 15 years time?
just messaged my best friend this who is a physicist working on
http://www.cea.com.au/!Global/Directory.php?Location=ProductsServices:PhasedArrayTechnologies:CEAFAR , basiclly the smallest, lowest power yet most powerful phased array radar in the world. he just sent back "/facepalm" .
can't complain about the rest, the american war machine maybe very money/development inefficent but when they decide to mobilise they are very effective.
edit: http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2009/03/f-15-silent-eagle-media-briefi.html
only compairable to 5th gen from front on, this is likely looking to steal JSF export sales because the USA will limit the stealth abilities of JSF for export even to countries like the UK, Australia etc. i wonder who will win in time to market, we had to to buy F-18 super hornets to fill a capability gap caused by the constant delay of the JSF, not expecting our first JSF's to something like 2017 now. But we are getting out super hornets built to the spec so they can be converted to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_EA-18G_Growler later on.
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aaronspink
Veteran
Lets be honest, in 1 years time, the number of manned military A-A and strike fighter will like be a small small percentage of the used aircraft. For air superiority, its really an issue of how many missiles you can carry, the missile ranges, the capability of the seekers, the detection capabilities of the craft, and the detectability of the craft. The human cockpit does nothing but present design problems and take resources.
The primary advantage of the F22 is super-cruse, beyond that, the development cycle for the F22 has been so long that it is already in need of an electronics upgrade. Whereas at one point ~20 years ago, its tiled phase array radar was revolutionary, its functionality is now replicated by many other countries. It has a small advantage in radar x-section but that's about it now. That combined with the prohibitive cost leading to minuscule numbers is certainly an issue. To give you an idea of how out of date its electronics are, the microprocessors used haven't been made for over 10 years and were designed 20 years ago! The latest block of F/A-18s have better overall electronics.
And FYI, the performance characteristics of the F22 are largely known. This isn't the cold war era, a lot of this stuff can be modeled fairly easy these days to a fairly accurate precision.
just messaged my best friend this who is a physicist working on
http://www.cea.com.au/!Global/Directory.php?Location=ProductsServices:PhasedArrayTechnologies:CEAFAR , basiclly the smallest, lowest power yet most powerful phased array radar in the world. he just sent back "/facepalm" .
That looks a bit big to fit into the nose of a fighter jet. But most of the modern fighter jet radars are tiled phased array systems.
That's more an issue of the US owning the vast majority of the heavy lift capability in the world between the C5, C17, and the fleet of C130s plus the largest sealift fleet in the world. Plus strategic stockpile of heavy vehicles (tanks, etc) around the world (middle east, asia).
Now if you meant combat effective, that's true too, but that's really mainly because of the backend capabilities (comms, etc). The vast majority of the US weapons aren't any different than any other 1st/2nd would countries. For instance, the M1 tank isn't really any better than say the british or german designs. In fact the weapon systems are largely the same among the western nations for tanks. About the only thing that the US has that no one else does is the AC130s.
All reports are that the F15SE testing is going better than expected and would likely be available in late 2011/early 2012. Pricing is reported to be in the $100 mil range vs ~$200 mil range for the F35 (which is completely disturbing and borked). So far Boeing has ran into issues with export licenses, only receiving one for South Korea though it is reported that they applied for both Saudi Arabia and Israel as well.
Apparently there are a lot of countries interested in it, not the least for the fact that software for the plane is available whereas so far the US has been very reluctant to provide software access for the F35. Which means its possible to integrate non-us approved systems into the F15SE and not into the F35.