Ok, let's stick to this notion of expected value because it plays both for the land owner and for the transit system builder.
To get back to your post, the plan was to buy an area, build a transit system in the middle of it, then sell the rest at a higher price. If you fail to buy all the land you need (or at least enough of it), you may give up on the project, in which case the value of the land does not increase. So indeed, as the transit system builder, the viability of your project (and the profit attached to it) is linked to the probability that you indeed acquire the land you need (both the land to physically build the transit system and the land around to sell later at a higher price), as well as the price at which you will be able to buy the land first, and re-sell it after completion.
Now, if the land owner are correctly calibrated, and they correctly anticipate the odds of your project being a success, your expected profit on the sale of the land must be zero.
If, on the flip side, you expect to make a profit because the land owners will underestimate your ability to succeed, will not see you coming, not understand what you are trying to do, or something along those lines, then your strategy relies on the market not being efficient. If this is the case, I think this is a crux.
I don't see your point. If you are saying that there are many nearby sites for transit expansion, then the owner of the land should not sell at a low price, because if any of those sites is chosen, the land value will go up.
If you are saying that there are many alternative sites across the country, then this is not relevant. Those projects aren't mutually exclusive.
We have to keep in mind that the land owner will not profit from the project being completed once the land is sold, they will only profit from the sale itself. The rational move is either to keep the land in case a project goes through, or sell it at the future price because selling means giving up on potential future profit of the project going through.
The idea is, the public transit company buys property, makes it much more valuable by building service to it, and then sells it.
This plan is unrealistic because it assumes that the owner won't price the future value in.
Assume you try to do exactly that. Why would the current owner sell the land and the historic price when, in fact, it is very clear that the price will go up once you are done with your project? No, the owner won't sell below the anticipated value of the land, or at least a substantial fraction of it.
I think one confusing aspect is the fact that the person being critical about the structure of the post is also the target of the post, therefore it is difficult to assume good intent.
If another well respected user had written a similar comment about why the post should have been written differently, then it would be a much cleaner discussion about writing standards and similar considerations. Actually, a lot of people did, not really about the structure (at least I don't think so), but mostly about the tone of the post.
As for EY, it is difficult not to assume that this criticism isn't completely genuine, and is some way to attack the author. That being said, maybe we should evaluate arguments for what they are, regardless of why they were stated in the first place (or is it being too naive?)
In that regard, your post is very interesting because it addresses both questions: showing that EY hasn't always followed this stated basic standard (i.e. claiming that the criticism is not genuine), and discussing the merit of this rule/good practice (i.e. is it a good basis for criticism)
Anyway, interesting post, thanks for writing it!
I think you are missing the point.
Getting back to the example about an old man collapsing in a bank lobby, let's compare three alternative types of actions:
Claiming that there is no meaningful difference between action and inaction would imply that doing nothing to help the old man is equivalent to harming an old man. This is indeed a fairly extreme position, and I agree with you that it is rejected by nearly everyone. In this very real case, the bystanders were fined by the German justice system for not helping, but they were not put in jail, as would have been the case for harming an old man (at least on purpose). So the German justice system agrees with you on this point.
But that's not really the question of duty to rescue. The question is not about the equivalence of doing nothing and harming an old man, it's about the equivalence between helping and doing nothing. In this case, one would be fined for doing nothing, but wouldn't be fined for calling an ambulance.
Without the duty to rescue, one wont be fined, or otherwise punished, for doing nothing. This makes doing nothing a safe choice (at least in term of legal consequences).
'Petard' is French for 'fuck you'
Is it though? Where have you heard that?
If we search for Pétard in google translate, the results are petard, firecracker, squib, cracker, banger, maroon, backfire, whizz bang, which doesn't seem to match your definition. If we try Petard, google translate auto-corrects into Pétard so I'm assuming this is what you meant.
Maybe google translate doesn't know swear words though? To check that, I try to translate Putain, which is a foul word for prostitute. I will not write the results here, but you can check for yourself that the results match this definition.
If we go the other way around, and try to translate fuck you, we get a french sentence which I won't write here either, but perfectly matches the english sentence.
What evidence supporting this can you provide?
[EDIT] You may also want to check Pétard(homonymie) on wikipedia
Shouldn't this imply that a country with a huge colonial empire (and the UK comes to mind) would have the best food?
I'm not really sure how useful this poll is to answer the title question of this post. Indeed, what is evaluated in each cell is the food labeled as "country A" in "country B", which may or may not be similar to what one would find in country A.
For example, let's consider the first row. It describes how much each country's version of italian cuisine is liked within said country, but may not reflect how much anyone would enjoy the food, were they to travel to italy. In particular, I wouldn't be surprised to see an italian traveling around the world, appalled or amused by what each country labels as italian food.
I'm not sure I follow you on the skyscrapers example.
The Burj Khalifa is about 2 times higher, and took about 3 times as much to be built ; it doesn't look like things are getting much slower. Even better, it is 2 times higher, thus it is between 2 times and 8 times bigger (depending on how scaling laws work for civil engineering), so one could argue that it was built faster.
The slowest example, the Abraj Al-Balt, also seems to be much bigger than the other ones, so it's not too surprising either (?)
You get back to the point of projects being mutually exclusive. Can you elaborate in your example on why the projects would be exclusive?