You must log in or register to comment.
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.
They’re also both people I’d like to see jump off one.
So all in all, they should have a lot of experience.
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’ve heard it as “Anyone can build a bridge that stands, it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
Wait till you see what the airplane and rocket guys have to do.
“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?
Yeah but it literally floats so how heavy can it be?
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
But that could mean the ship is actually a witch! And witches do have a history of bringing down bridges.
Physics does not work that way goodnight!
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.
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!
Magnets stop working if they get wet, like under a bridge
You see, gravity is just a theory see.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
You just need to start designing prison management systems. Problem solved.
deleted by creator
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.)
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.
Yes, but you forget: lots of people are stupid.
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.
How dare you insult our nation’s precious little conservatives!
“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.
Honestly it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to have backup power for the steering.
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.
I would say predatory is the right word, unless you have money.
Although I would not put most community colleges in that boat.
Shame that a lot of universities are starting to ban credits earned at community colleges. Can’t get any more predatory than that.
They are? Yeah, that’s utter bullshit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hear hear.
I had a better education from more passionate teachers at community college than I did at university.
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.
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
Same. I was thinking, “yes, college IS a scam, but I wouldn’t argue with most experts in their respective fields.”
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.
True. I could also probably generalize it to most industries in the USA are scams.
But you know… Capitalism…
Same dunce heads who argued against vaccines
What is there to argue? Like there’s video evidence of it happening
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.
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.
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.
BOAT FUEL CANT MELT STEEL BEAMS
Same with 9/11. That doesn’t stop people.
Engineering is one of the few non-scam college degrees
And what are the apparently majority scam degrees?
You’ll get a lot of people arguing arts degrees where there aren’t jobs are scams.
Frankly, I think there’s a divide between what we expect of education and what education should be.
There’s kind of a spectrum from required credentials like medical, law, or engineering degrees, to things like stem programs which are not required but open job doors, to arts degrees where there’s not really many direct careers being opened.
Charging an arm and a leg for arts programs is a scam because it’s not opening the same economic opportunities as career based degrees. Having or providing arts degrees is totally fine, they just need to be cheaper.
I think the main benefit of an art degree (for the average person) is learning to research, communicate ideas, and think critically. I have a degree in political science and work in an IT/business role but I absolutely don’t regret my choice of degree.
My Bach degree was in history, and I often wrote off the importance of the “critical thinking” skills we learned in that program.
Boy was I wrong, I know too many people who need nothing more than an unsourced headline to fully convince them of something ludacris.
So the correct spelling is ludicrous, but I prefer to believe that you really did mean to refer to American rapper and actor Ludacris. So carry on.
LUDAAA
Arts education (which I mean to encompass not just visual art but also literature, plays, music, etc) is important because without it you get idiots with no media literacy. An arts degree, specifically, may not be important or beneficial for the average person, but classes in which one must think critically about the creator, the creator’s intent, the context in which the art was created, and the reception of the art are how you teach people to be well-rounded individuals who don’t just vomit out the first half-baked thought their curdled brain cobbled together from propaganda.
It’s only a scam if they’re being misleading. I’ve never heard anyone say “get an art degree, you’ll get rich!” It’s not a scam to study art simply because you want to develop your knowledge and talents in a structured way. Should art degrees cost as much as they do? Probably not, but “expensive” and “scam” are two different things.
People should study the arts, schools shouldn’t pretend they yield jobs just because you get a degree and charge the same as a career specific degree
The E in STEM stands for Engineering
I like to think it stands for enlightenment
Stars, Tarot, Enlightenment, Mythology
Studying engineering is nothing like science technology or math, so I basically just forget it’s there at all.
I certainly remember a lot of math and technology.
College should be about the pursuit of education, plain and simple. For a specific education to be required for licensure makes sense, not for it to be a resume filter for admin assistants.
I mean I’d love if my auto mechanic had a degree in ethics and philosophy. The world would be a much nicer place if everyone had a well rounded education imo.
Anything from Trump University?
Did anyone ever actually get a Trump University degree? It only operated for like 5 years. Imagine being the poor schmuck with a framed Trump University degree on his pawn shop office wall.
That would absolutely go on my wall of shame along with several industry certifications I have where the software I’m certified for stopped existing (sometimes within a few months of my certification).
Find any certification that isn’t a scam
I’ve got plenty of those too, mostly Microsoft and Cisco plus PMP, all of which I let expire because I have no use for them anymore.
When I was younger the company I worked for got into installing and maintaining EMR/EHR software at a time when the government was giving out cash to switch over from paper records. So a million little EMR/EHR software companies spun up all with their own certifications and most of which only barely adhered to HL7 to be able to send info to other health systems.
The owner of the company decided to send someone to get certified in a bunch of them that he was betting would pay off. I got paid to sit in a room and get free certifications for a year on and off because I volunteered. He was grooming me to take over a whole healthcare support division he was spinning up. Those companies folded and I ended up supporting Allscripts and NextGen without a team.
The next big idea he had was for supporting Seismic and Geological software. So while my certs for Kingdom IHS are still good, I never used them because all the oil companies had in house people supporting that plus support from S&P.
Plus my certificate from bartending school (for fun, not for money).
Computer Science and Business. I say that with 15 years of experience in both those industries.
Business school is for people who couldn’t hack it in any other degree program.
The limit as a STEM major’s GPA approaches 0.0 is a business degree.
CompSci is a legit subject, mostly as an area of mathematics, but doesn’t have a whole lot to do with building software systems.
The difference between computer science, computer engineering and software engineering is pretty nuanced in a lot of ways. Same core knowledge base. Sprinkle a little extra math and logic abstraction and you get a CS degree. More principles of development and team based work, and get a SE degree. More hardware and systems, and get a CE degree. And all three of them touch a bit on the other two.
More than a few of my team of software engineers and data engineers have degrees in things like chemistry or business. They just took a boot camp to learn to develop.
Yep. Strip it back to the basic physics of it all and you get an electrical engineering degree.
I work with code both from people who have a degree in CS and people who learned on the job and there’s a huge difference
CS used to be the only degree that concentrated on software development.
That may be more true today with more math heavy focuses like computer vision or neural networks. But most everything else is better learned on the job or via YouTube. Unless you plan to specialize like that, it’s almost certainly better to just teach yourself.
I’ve hired dozens of engineers from both university and self-taught backgrounds, and the self-taught ones are by far superior. In fact, it’s not uncommon that I have to break the bad habits taught in university - those courses are painfully outdated and the professors often have self-serving motives that hurt their students.
I agree with Computer Science.
Any degree that will put you in debt without actually helping you to get out of that debt.
I’d personally say marketing/publicity is a scam degree, though that’s because of a heavy bias I have against advertising and marketing in general
Economics
Art, philosophy, and English degrees :P
Edit: I was kinda kidding guys, I took philosophy classes, my father is a sculptor, and I dabbled in the fine arts.
That said, I encourage all of you in the traditional disciplines to have a plan for employment after school- teaching or related fields are fine! But have a plan!
Doesn’t sound like a scam to me.
Those kinds of degrees can lead to careers in things like politics, business, and education.
I don’t believe anyone managed to learn anything useful about history or economics or literature in high school. Or about anything else. I wish more people were able to seriously study these subjects as adults with the guidance and correspondence of a global community of fellow students and access to centuries of past discussion and debate.
People telling you there’s nothing more to learn (or that the “soft sciences” offer nothing better than your personal intuition) are the scammers.
It’s worse than that, most things you learn in high school end up being either false or so simplified it ends up misleading (think common misconceptions). Biggest offenders tend to be history and hard sciences, although that might be mostly since we don’t even offer things like psychology or sociology outside of a few elective APs (and imagine how prone to misinformation those classes could be if taught by someone following their personal intuition!)
Dunno how it is in other countries with a recent slave past, but Brazil did an excellent job in erasing both native and African ethnicities in my school years. You never learned about specific native tribes like the Aymore, Tupinamba or Goitacaz, it was always “the natives” and all African slaves were just that, “African slaves”, no difference between the ones from current day Mali, Angola or Somalia.
Whenever the books talked about the expeditions into the heartlands, the bandeiras, they rarely or never mentioned local tribes that might’ve helped them, whether in goodwill, in exchange of something like getting rid of old enemies, or by force.
Another thing that school glossed over was one of the many slave revolts, the Malês Revolt. I vaguely recall that the book said that slaves organized by leaving written notes, but it never mentioned that said notes were written in arabic, because those slaves were from Mali and most of them were muslim, thus they could read and write in arabic. It also never taught us that, after the revolt was quashed, nearly every slave from Mali was sent back to Africa and the city of Salvador, the focus point of the revolt, expelled every muslim and removed every mosque it had.
Man, I could go on for a while, just comparing what I remember being taught in school and all the stuff left out that’d make me really damn interested in paying attention to classes.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
^ 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.
Wish Lemmy had some sort of awards, because also this exactly.
Just out of curiosity - which country was your sample from, if I may ask?
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.
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…
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”
It can be a scam, especially if your not gonna use your degree.
deleted by creator
Just use HostNetwork, why would you use a bridge
Hell, 3 hours in polybridge would probably give the common sense to realize that supports do in fact, hold the bridge up
If seeing the very clear video of what happened doesn’t convince them, nothing will.
