I get all my bridge information from Andrew Tate and Alex Jones.
They’re both certainly people who know how to burn bridges when they see them.
There is a saying in engineering.
Anyone can build a bridge.
It takes an engineer who can build a bridge just strong enough to let cars cross it.
Oh man, as a (non structural) engineer I love the saying
“Any asshole can build a bridge, but only an engineer can barely build a bridge”
“I just don’t see how the whole bridge falls over that fast”
Bruh it is a ten million ton cargo ship bumping into it, do u think it’s just gonna bounce off?
it floats way better than i do, so it can’t be that much heavier than i am. and let me tell you, there’s no way i could topple a bridge by running into it
That ship was about 100,000t.
There’s a fairly crude equation in the American bridge engineering standard that relates impact load to the mass of a ship, which is:
P =√(DWT) ±50%
Where DWT is the deadweight tonnage, and P is the impact load in meganewtons.
So in this case P=315MN ±50% which is 315000kN or 31500 tonnes of force…
For comparison, I’m working on a project where we’re going to build a new concrete bridge on the ground next to where it needs to go (under a railway) then wait until we have a planned week with no trains running and push it into position using jacks. That bridge is a 60m long 20m wide 8m high concrete box with 1m thick walls and top and bottom slabs, and we think we will need about 30MN to install it (one tenth of the impact load from that ship).
So yeah… that’s quite a hit.
Yeah but long tons or short tons. If they used shorter tons maybe the boat would have slipped right between the leg things. The tons were too long. 🪿
Sure you can build a bridge they can withstand a crazy like that. It’ll cost more than the cities it connects and nobody has a budget for that.
Pfft, just put big magnets on either side of the bridge to make sure it goes in the middle!
Bro, it’s a trillion ton bridge. You’re comparing a bug flying into a windshield and telling me the windshield should break. R u serious 4 real?
Huyuck. Sorry for that. But this is the kind of shit you’re going to have to deal with. So you better have an answer for it.
I mean, all it takes is a look at the cost of shit like tuition and text books to conclude college is a scam, but that doesn’t equal a disrespect for the knowledge of people who’ve gone through it.
The difference lies in whether the speaker thinks the problem is the clearly evident financial exploitation or thinks that the education isn’t valuable.
(I almost walked away from commenting on this like three times. Hopefully I made sense) I don’t believe that modern college equals education, necessarily. How many corporate VPs have impressive college credentials but took nothing away more than future networking? Education is extremely valuable as is an educated society. And I get that we’re talking about people who do not value the societal benefit of a well-rounded education. Schools don’t seem to value it anymore either. We’ve commodified “knowledge”. It’s merely a stepping stone to better earnings. Engineering and medicine, though, are two positions I think anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together should value the quality of their educations.
I’d argue that commodification of knowledge doesn’t equate to the college experience not being educational. A lot of it boils down to the individual getting out of it what they put in: I’ve had my share of bullshit online classes that I only took to check the prereq box, didn’t give a single flying fuck about the material, gave it the absolute minimum, and finished it having gained only debt and a slightly shinier transcript. I don’t remember shit from those classes other than the feeling that they were a waste of time and money.
They were fascinating to some of my classmates. And vice versa: microbiology for example was one I didn’t think I’d take much out of when I was doing pre-nursing (there are way better study-of-tiny-bastard topics for pre-nursing, like clinical pathology; microbio is WAY more broad, and hit or miss in relevancy to the kind of work nurses do). Some of the topics microbio blew my fucking mind though… like did you know some bacteria have a literal fucking motor inside of them that spins their flagella around like a microscopic propeller?! Or a protein that walks along the lengths of nanotubuoles. We are stuffed with tiny, home-grown robots… and it makes my brain explode. Other pre-nursing peeps though? Couldn’t give the tiniest bit of a shit about it, cuz knowing about walking proteins n’ whatnot isn’t useful AT ALL for nursing.
And people like to bitch about English classes, but having been on the workforce for a good couple of decades now: writing is how you advance your career. SO useful, but SO underrated and undervalued by students.
I took a criminal justice course cuz I needed an elective and the classes I wanted were all full, so… fuck it. Wrong field, didn’t care, just there to check the box… walked away with a fresh appreciation for how fucked up our legal system is, and a kind of legal mindset for some non-criminal topics but turn out to be applicable.
Point is: the knowledge and education are there; whether the individual student engages with it in a meaningful way is up to the individual student. I’ve been on both sides of the coin, and have been surprised a few times.
There are mainly 2 types of “college is a scam” people. Type 1 is anti-education and places more value on what they typically refer to as “common sense” and think that you don’t need an education to know about something. They’re the type most likely to think they know more than experts and argue with engineers about bridges. Type 2 is more anti-capitalist and doesn’t view education as a scam itself but rather how costly that education is and the opportunities provided to educated people who paid the price is what they see as a scam. They’re usually capable of recognizing and acknowledging their lack of understanding about a topic and listen to experts because they do value education, they just think access to it should be easier and cheaper and provide more tangible results for the effort put into obtaining it. This post is probably talking about type 1.
Same thing with Big Pharma. People hear that pharmaceutical companies are greedy and untrustworthy and think it means that their medicine doesn’t work. It does, they just charge excessive amounts of money for it. We don’t hate big pharma because vaccines don’t work, we hate Big Pharma because they sell insulin at a 10,000% markup
I don’t know, finishing my engineering degree has opened up many a door to well paying careers.
My other two bachelor degrees (business and criminal justice) are completely useless.
All I know about bridges is how to sell them, and I have one right now I can guarantee was built by an entirely white construction team. I examined their skull shapes myself. I’ll just need about $80 million, and it’s all yours, Elon.
This reminds me of a line from K.I.Z.:
“Nazis erkenn’ ich an der Kopfform.”
(I recognise Nazis by the shape of their skulls.)