March 24, 2023

🐕 Tutor Perini's in the doghouse and Spot's doing commercials now?

Move over Progressive's Flo and AT&T's Lily. We now have Wonderful Pistachio's Spot. (source: Wonderful Pistachios)

Before we get into construction, let's take a peek at our bracket contest.

When you're suddenly aware that colleges like "Fairleigh Dickinson" and "FAU" exist, you know it's been a wild March Madness so far.

 And Princeton? Maybe in a Mathlete competition where the answer in the final round is "The limit does not exist." But basketball? If you say so!

You got this, Wendy

You got this, Wendy

Wendy currently dons the crown, and she can practically smell that iPad (a metallic sort of nail polish waft). Meanwhile Buildr board member Paige, our contest leader for 99% of it so far finally succumbs to Gonzaga knocking her champion pick UCLA out last night. Very tough.

Paige's secrets to success? She claims to have only put in about 30 seconds worth of thought into her entire bracket and hasn't watched a single moment of the tourney. She picked Xavier going far because "he's that bald genius in the X-Men." Take notes for next year, everyone.

Good luck to all still remaining. Onto the Elite Eight.

SPECS

🦺 Tutor Perini in the OSHA doghouse...

According to an investigation by Construction Dive, Tutor Perini has had the most OSHA safety violations of any general contractor in the last decade. And it's not even close—they're emphatically the worst of the worst. Some notable stats include:

  • 1.5 violations found per OSHA inspection on a Tutor Perini job vs. 0.33 violation median for their competitors (GCs building over $3 billion annually).

  • Of their 244 violations in the last 10 years, 86 were deemed "serious," which is double the next closest GC.

  • Tutor Perini's $2.4 billion Purple Line project in Los Angeles was halted last year due to safety concerns (some of us are trying to convince ourselves being car-less in LA is possible, Tutor Perini).

Really tough look for Tutor Perini here. They claim that they're safer by other measurements they track, including TRIR (Total Recordable Incident Rate), which tallies total injuries multiplied by 200,000 divided by total hours worked. This measurement was deemed "unreliable," by Construction Dive, "due to its lack of precision and association with fatalities." 


🏗️ Manufacturing sector on the up-and-up...

From ENRmanufacturing work is up 58.2% since the start of the pandemic, according to the Marcum Commercial Construction Index, and is the top performer among nonresidential construction segments.

Plants that build goods such as semiconductor chips and electric car batteries have been on the rise and the large scale and length of these types of projects guarantees the manufacturing segment will be booming for quite some time.

The catch is that the labor shortage is causing wages to rise since individuals are more valuable, and wages in construction are raising higher than any other industry. As you'd expect, this contributes to a smaller profit margin for builders in spite of it being back to "the good times." 

⚡️ Punch List

CONSUMABLES

"Wanna cancel our weekend trip and and go see John Wick 4 instead?"

  • Byte the dust: Congress seems to really want to ban TikTok, and not because of risqué dance trends.

  • Madagascar: A zebra escaped from the zoo and a passerby had the perfect reaction. (video)

  • AI, Captain: ChatGPT can browse the internet now and Google releases Bard to keep up with OpenAI dominating the airwaves. 

  • Verti-whoa: Robert Downey Jr. may be the lead of the Hitchcock Vertigo remake. We would say "Please don't remake Rear Window" but it technically already happened with Disturbia and it was—hot take—good.

  • Going, going, gone: Top 10 moments from the World Baseball Classic. "The Ohtani of ____" needs to be inducted into our lexicon for unparalleled skill and achievement, ie., "Succession is the Ohtani of HBO shows."

  • Too Much Time Awards: Someone made a bunch of hyperrealistic sand animals. Poke fun at the fleeting nature of sand art if you must, but on a long enough timeline, the pyramids and possibly Shohei Ohtani will be the only things standing someday.

  • He's thinking he's back: Drop everything, John Wick 4 comes out this weekend and it's sporting a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 37-minute fight sequence.

  • Mushroom kingdom: A whole sub-genre of horror literature that's now popular because of The Last of Us' fungi creepiness: Sporror books. Trypophobia-heads need to tread carefully.

  • See Spot Act: We're borderline going to build a Spot the Robot Dog subsection within The SLAB. This week: Spot is a pistachio commercial star now. (video)

See you next week, The SLAB

P.S. Making fun of Princeton isn't mean, it's called "punching up." It's fair game when you're the Ohtani of educational establishments.

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