Originally posted by CaptainObvious
Typically the fairest price AND reputation both make up the minds of owners, contractors, etc.
In the case of the WTC Towers specifically, it's agreed historically that David Rockefeller rejected two expensive bids from major US suppliers of
steel to turn to an obscure company and get the same amount of steel for only a fraction of the cost. There were rumors that the mafia was
involved.
I would have to see a specific case as to
why the structures would have been sub-standard in their construction, though, because aside from
the cheap steel (which was the same steel all over Ground Zero, and most of it was still in pristine condition, cleanly separated from its
neighbors) the actual construction of the buildings (at least partially) is available in video format and photos and you can see these guys putting
the buildings together, and you can see where the bolts went and you can see welds in photos from Ground Zero, and there's really nothing
specifically to suggest to me any corners were cut, so to speak.
But even if corners were cut for the sake of money, and it wouldn't surprise me (I just fail at this point in time to see
where any corners
were cut), then that argument would only go so far.
For example, the so-called "collapse wave" of the generalized building failures across each floor continued at a steady rate down the floors of the
buildings, evidence suggests the failures did not speed up or slow down. In other words there was no acceleration at all, one way or the other.
This suggests a regular, linear sequence of events in terms of time, which is something consistent with a sequence of explosives going off to bring
a structure down.
If it collapsed on its own, then physics would have to dictate that it would slow down significantly. This is because (
1) mass was constantly
being lost of the sides of the building in the "mushrooming" debris cloud as the buildings peeled apart like bananas, and therefore less and less
mass is going to crush the floor below it over time, and most of the mass eventually ends up outside of the footprints (see footprints below),
(
2) kinetic energy was constantly being spent on an enormous level to account for all of the destruction seen, ie all energy "expenditures"
from the PE/KE on failing the intense grids of steel columns, pulverizing all of the concrete, ejecting large steel debris with considerable lateral
force, all of the heat generated that lingered in the footprints, etc.
When kinetic energy is spent,
velocity is lost. We've generalized a complex system here but it should work out regardless, because another
law of physics (of thermodynamics) states basically that you can never get more out than you put in, and it cannot be argued that all of the energy
above came from anywhere else but the building collapsing, if one is arguing no planted explosives. So then logically this mass that is falling, no
matter HOW it is falling, cannot do what we have seen
and refuse to slow down, when everything else between the upper block of floors and
lower block of floors was virtually identical, except the lower floors were much stronger.
That applies no matter how the buildings were constructed, unless you believe the construction amounted to suspending a sledge hammer over a stack of
toothpicks.