• CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    119
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    93
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    9 months ago

    “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?

      • affiliate@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        9 months ago

        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

        • Numhold@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          15
          ·
          9 months ago

          But that could mean the ship is actually a witch! And witches do have a history of bringing down bridges.

    • AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      28
      ·
      9 months ago

      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.

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      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.

    • thelasttoot@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        9 months ago

        “If I hit your kneecap with a hammer, I’m only taking out one support, but your hole ass is hitting the ground” seems like a good response

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    83
    arrow-down
    11
    ·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      55
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      The difference lies in whether the speaker thinks the problem is the clearly evident financial exploitation or thinks that the education isn’t valuable.

      • gdog05@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        arrow-down
        7
        ·
        9 months ago

        (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.

        • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          9 months ago

          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.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            9 months ago

            Yeah say what you will I may not have gotten much out of all my classes, but as an engineer I was changed by intro to Greek and Roman culture and by intro to stand up comedy. Blow off classes to some but I loved them. I paid more attention to them than to chem which really bit me in the ass come thermo.

    • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      25
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      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.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      9 months ago

      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

    • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        9 months ago

        You just need to start designing prison management systems. Problem solved.

  • N0body@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    61
    ·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • FleetingTit@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    47
    ·
    9 months ago

    What the hell are people debating here? A 150.000 tonne object crashed into a structure made of thin sticks (comparatively speaking). There is no doubt that the bridge would collapse. Especially since an arch is only stable if it is undamaged.

      • CompostMaterial@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        19
        ·
        9 months ago

        George Carlin never fails to be accurate: Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of them are even stupider than that.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          9 months ago

          He’s not accurate, though. That’d be the median person. With the average person I’d expect much more than half to be stupider than that.

          • candybrie@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            9 months ago

            Mean, median, and mode are measures of central tendency aka average. It’s usually context that indicates which measure we are using when we say average. A lot of the time, when speaking of the average person, we’re using the median or mode rather than the mean.

            How many fingers does your average person have?

    • Zink@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      9 months ago

      “Can a cargo ship really lose steering even if power is lost?”

      That’s the caption of a video I just went and found on Facebook shared by one of my distant hillbilly acquantances. I’m not even going to watch to see what it’s about.

      • Logi@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        Honestly it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to have backup power for the steering.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    32
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    9 months ago

    I mean, colleges are fucking expensive and their biggest appeal is a promise of a high paying job. Even public ones still eat up your soul and you may not necessarily be ready for “the job market” after graduation, or even academic life. Wholly different discussion.

    Still, no way in hell I’ll doubt that a bajillion ton (tonnes, whatever) of inertia can bring down a bridge. That’s effectively an asteroid boulder slowly rolling down hill

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      Same. I was thinking, “yes, college IS a scam, but I wouldn’t argue with most experts in their respective fields.”

      • λλλ@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        I don’t think college is a scam. I think they are way overvalued in America. I think trades should be pushed more for sure.

  • Pika@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    9 months ago

    I don’t think Knowledge is a scam, but I firmly believe that the current College system(at least in the US) is a scam or at the very least super predatory, it’s one of the only types of debt that you can’t bankrupt on, and if you try to go for anything more than a bachelor’s you’re likely not going to be able to pay off the loan due to interest accumulation.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      9 months ago

      I would say predatory is the right word, unless you have money.

      Although I would not put most community colleges in that boat.

      • VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        Shame that a lot of universities are starting to ban credits earned at community colleges. Can’t get any more predatory than that.

          • VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            9 months ago

            Don’t know how long it’s been but there’s a lot of articles popping up within the last couple years on it, saying that various universities rejected credits for what was essentially the same exactly class using the same book and the same curriculum.

            Meanwhile I was seeing posts on reddit and other socials talking about how crowded university classrooms were getting, with someone showing a picture that showed how the room was too full to meet standards for fire evacuations if necessary. It’s just absolutely nothing but greed at this point.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              9 months ago

              That’s fucking ridiculous.

              I don’t know what my daughter is going to do when she’s college age. She’s 13 now. It’s only going to get worse.

      • Pika@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        I agree, community colleges generally are going to be at least half the price of a private school, unfortunately in most States community colleges only offer associate’s degree, either by choice or state regulation.

        so anyone hoping to do a bachelor’s or a postgraduate degree are forced into larger University Systems where are the price is much higher per year.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          9 months ago

          True, although many of them also have attached vocational schools. For example, Ivy Tech, Indiana’s community college system (the one I’m most familiar with but it’s not alone in this) offers both vocational and degree programs, so you can get an HVAC certification or you can go through the nursing school and become a CNA. They even offer an associate’s degree in fine arts.

          Associate’s degrees aren’t always as good as higher educational degrees, but they will still likely get your into a better career than you would get with just a high school education.

          https://www.ivytech.edu/programs/

      • lennybird@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        Hear hear.

        I had a better education from more passionate teachers at community college than I did at university.

    • John_McMurray@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      9 months ago

      They didn’t use…ok our colleges now are trades schools you pay to go to. People used to apprentice for careers. Paying for education used to mean an actual education, not job training.

    • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      There were no construction workers killed in the collapse! It was all fake!

      The CIA caused the ship to lose power!

      The ship was remote controlled! There wasn’t actually anybody on board until after the collision!

      The “construction workers” were actually deep state black ops agents that were there to loosen bolts on the bridge to ensure it collapsed when the ship hit it.

      And so on… Never underestimate the fantasies that conspiracy theorists can come up with.

      • algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        9 months ago

        Why is it that hard to believe that accidents happen? Just because something was interesting enough to reach headlines that means there had to have been an ulterior motive???

        I know you can’t make sense of these people, but how the hell do you even make those leaps in the first place…

        I’m going back to my cave.

        • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          9 months ago

          My thought is they don’t have much positive going on in their lives so they get validation from these conspiracies. It makes them feel smart because they see the real truth.

  • casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    26
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    9 months ago

    I have had more PhDs recommend against college than for it. I’m not joking. It’s scary.

    They’ll tell you that if you can get by without a degree, by all means do or at least heavily consider it.

    Education is undoubtedly important, as often evidenced by people’s lack of it. But even those who ran the gauntlet decades ago have lost faith in the system.

    And now we have a whole new litany of problems on their way because of the rising prominence of GenAI and I can confidently say that academia is wholly unprepared for the shit storm coming it’s way.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      9 months ago

      I’m guessing that’s more because they’ve spent a good decade or so working on their degree, which is probably too specialized to get the job they want in their field.

      There is such a thing as too much college too. PhDs are very handy if you want to be a professor or go into a very specialized field and hope there are available jobs. Not so much for everyone else.

      • bluewing@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        There is also the cost to benefit ratio. Even IF you can get a job in your chosen field, the cost of the education to get there and the increasing pace of industrial change as required knowledge grows and changes can make your degree not really worth the effort. While I certainly don’t know for sure, it could be conceivable that the world might not even miss half of collage graduates produced today. And most people could make a living with a “simpler and more focused” technical education.

        The world will always need carpenters, plumbers, electricians, accountants, and garbage collectors. And perhaps not so many people with a Master’s degree in library sciences or maybe with the advent of AI, even human programmers.

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        I think there’s an inflationary effect where so many people go to university that a regular degree is devalued. It leads to people who wouldn’t otherwise do postgraduate study to do some to be as competitive as an undergrad degree was years ago. I see people sleep walking into postgrad study because they don’t know what to do after graduation because an undergrad degree is so limited nowadays

    • piecat@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      We always seem to equate common sense and education.

      I’ve met some dense people with PhDs. And some smart people that never got formal education.

      Obviously best case is smart and educated. But you can’t teach someone common sense.

      • hdsrob@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        ^ This … my father has his doctorate, yet is talking about chem trails, stockpiling guns and food for the coming apocalypse, and is a full on Trump supporting MAGAT right wing Christian.

      • casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        US. So perhaps not representative of international trends. Altogether worrying with implications for US education standards though. The whole college/trade/career decision logic among the US public is seriously out of whack because parents kept preaching it was either college or burger flipping, unless you had a talent or parents with money of course.

        The US education system, academia, and workforce are all incredibly and seemingly unappealably fucked. The bigger picture is just some madman’s abstract expressionism. I’m convinced the Russians are behind it all, somehow because just wtf it is actually looney levels of destabilizing and I fear it all comes crashing soon enough. But whatever, stop worrying and love the bomb I guess.

        • beebarfbadger@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          9 months ago

          Basically, America’s poorer majority have the free choice which rich conglomerates they want to be exploited and/or drained dry by? Legalised wage theft, student loan debt, ludicrous cost of privatised healthcare - spoiled for choice which monopoly to hand their entire fortune over to, really…

          • casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            8 months ago

            Pretty much. I had to explain to my mother on the phone last night why I absolutely refuse to order anything from Amazon if I can get it brick&mortar without any issue and she couldn’t understand it. “You’d rather pay more? Why not just wait the couple days for shipping?” That’s not it mom, yes I like being able to immediately receive what I paid for in a transaction, as well as the opportunity to inspect it’s package before I pay for it, but that’s only the tip of the shitberg. I will gladly go pay more elsewhere because that money is often times going back into my community in at least some fashion and I can trust that my experience as a consumer will be better when I shop with the little guy who says my patronage matters and that they appreciate it rather than the unaccountable tech conglomerate that got its start by exploiting a flaw in a book vendor’s billing system for their own profit.

            “I’m voting with my wallet” “…by paying more elsewhere” “sigh yes mother that’s how this often works, welcome to late stage capitalism”

  • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    9 months ago

    I have no formal training in building bridges. I actually only learned what a bridge was yesterday. Anyway, here’s what I think happened and I will fight anyone who tells me different.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      and I will fight anyone who tells me different.

      That’ more proactive than most sudden bridge experts who just call anyone who tells them different a liberal cuck.

  • bbuez@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    9 months ago

    Hell, 3 hours in polybridge would probably give the common sense to realize that supports do in fact, hold the bridge up

  • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    9 months ago

    I went to college for a stem degree… IDK if it’s a scam, but I’m extremely far from happy with the value proposition. And my school was relatively affordable.

    Of course, that’s not a problem with colleges but with policy, imo