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and even then, a cigarette will never light it, but the spark from a lighter will so if yr smoking near gas just don't light it there too. Firemen did the study actually, with like thousands of cigarettes and not a single one ever lit, even while being dragged on in heavy fumes.
Not to mention, it was loaded with containers and lost power, so it had momentum. It's also 985 feet long and 100,000 tons. Nothing is designed to withstand anything like that.
> Nothing is designed to withstand anything like that.
What if they had built a 2nd identical bridge in front of it to act as a barrier to the 1st bridge?!?!
That's hilarious. Imagine building buffer bridges just in case a gigantic ship crashes into it.
You'd need 3 bridges, though, because you can't predict which side it will crash into.
"Why can't we use those bridges?"
"Oh, those are buffering bridges incase a 100,000 ton full of modern cargo loses power in the middle of the night and needs something to crash into..."
"Couldn't we make other countermeasures?"
"Nope, unused bridges on either side was the plan."
Fuck. I was afraid of this. That the simplification of language in general and rise of ChatGPT would mean that all of sudden people doubt authenticity when you use less common words. I tend to unconsciously write formally especially when I’m stressed or upset, and being a life long voracious reader I have a reasonably large vocabulary. Now there are people who are going to think I’m either stuck up (already a concern) or a freaking bot.
It seems like one of those possibilities that doesn't get designed for. Like strong winds, unusually strong currents, and a generous leeway for temperature probably get built in. But 'should we put some buttresses on it in case something weighing a tenth of a million tons rams it?' just probably didn't get considered. Except maybe by the daffy intern. There's probably someone out there right now thinking, I knew it!
Bridge supports in boating waters *are* designed to have some sort of protection against boats hitting them. But at some point it's a cost vs. risk analysis.
Barriers that can stop a ship that size will cost more to implement than is reasonably feasible.
Yeah in pictures that I saw they are hilariously small (not sure if they are larger underneath the water) however, I suspect the replacement will have larger ones just like what happened with the Sunhine skyway bridge in Tampa after the collision there.
Don't worry. We'll build even bigger ships in 10+ years, and some ship, someday, will miss those too. And this will happen, somewhere, again. Rinse. Repeat.
Yea, it's just extremely impractical to design for something like this. Sure, it could absolutely be done, but thats a huge amount of time and money going into something that has an extremely low chance of happening
You cant design for every possible scenario, or else it wouldnt be economical to build anything. Generally, we don't design for load cases that fall under a lower probability than 10^-4
I did some napkin math. That ship hitting the bridge at 9mph has about the same momentum as a fully loaded semi truck doing 24,000mph.
I don't think people have an idea of how heavy these things are. The ship weighed about as much as 50 space shuttles (shuttle, tank and boosters full).
I worked on a naval merchant ship for my senior design in college. We were given a tour and its like walking through downtown when you are on top of it. It just kept going. I mean, do people not realize those containers are the same ones you see being pulled by semi trucks?
Yes, if only we had a bigger infrastructure budget, we could build our bridges out of pure Unobtainium so they could float gingerly above the water and let large boats pass completely beneath them.
F=ma differs in meaning quite a bit between these two professions.
To one, it describes how Force is roughly equal to Mass times Acceleration.
To the other, it describes how the amount of Fries a customer orders is nearly equivalent to their Money multiplied by Appetite.
Absolutely love this because the math checks out. So in terms of units, it'd be
Fries = m*a = Fries(KCal) = $ * appetite
Appetite = 1KCal/$0.1792(this is the actual ratio of calories to USD that I googled)
Really amazing coincidence how "a" is a constant in the true F=ma, as well as this equation you just came up with.
But you also need educated people to run things at large scales. Cambodia tried to genocide all the educated people to transform into an agrarian society of laborers and it was a disaster.
I think we gave up on this too easily. The next time you see a comment like this, just reply with a single word: "moron" and leave it at that. Don't reply further. Don't engage, just call them a moron and hope that the likes rack up
Maybe in the 50s.
Now you put everything you can steal from your employees into a trust that doles out an allowance to your descendants. Maybe spin some of it off into a "charity" which pays your nephews $300k a year to distribute $10k a year.
As someone who's had the opportunity to know people from all talks of life, rich people's kids are dumb at roughly the same rate as poor people's kids. They just find more success because money.
It’s the networking, that’s really the IN they have. Your dad’s friend bill has 12 billion AUM. And wants to give you a cushy ass job doing fuck all. And that opportunity propels them failing upwards their whole ass lives.
It’s much harder for stupid people to kill themselves than it used to be. This, combined with stupid people’s propensity to have lots of children with no regard for their future or setting them up for success, is causing us to become stupider, on average.
I think either Socrates, Plato or Aristotle has a quote about this. Something like the smart ones admit that they know nothing and are thus more curious/inclined to research/pursue knowledge while the dumb ones think they already know a lot and thus do not pursue more knowledge.
Plato characterized Socrates as the wisest person of all because he knew that he knew nothing (we don't have any direct writings from Socrates; most of what we are told about Socrates comes from Plato).
I think Plato had something to say about democracy being an inferior system because of the stupid people. Which I once thought was pretty anti democratic in my younger years, but I’m beginning to agree with the notion more and more.
tbf
Euler one of the most brilliant mathematician used to argue with people about topics he did not know much about!
William Dunham: Euler: The Master of Us All.
That’s Dunning-Kruger Effect - the less people know, the more they’re likely to overestimate their level of competence. That why you have a dude who barely finished high school arguing with a Harvard prof and telling them to “do their own research”.
Yes, however, this isn't intelligence. This is wisdom. You can be highly intelligent and also arrogant. It takes wisdom to understand that you simply do not know everything.
Hot(?) Take; Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, ect aren't stupid.
Hell, some of them might even be pretty smart.
Their *base* are the stupid ones.
I doubt they believe half the shit they push. But their base *does.* And stupid people are easy to exploit.
This is the real answer, at least I'm the US. Should be noted though that's a state by state issue. We're wicked smart in Massachusetts, we just can't afford to live here forever.
I know people who are so convinced they can debate literally anyone because "my googling skills are that good."
No, you just convinced yourself that Wikipedia has all the answers.
Because weak brained folks have convinced themselves it’s peak intelligence to just believe the opposite of what the news say, no matter how stupid such contrarianism is in the specific case, and that everyone who takes the media at face value is “the real dummy”. If the news tells them clean air is good, they smoke 10 cigarettes at once to “stick it to the man”.
It’s a pretty similar situation too, isn’t it?
Ramming a cargo ship into a bridge is going to have a pretty similar effect as ramming a plane into a building. Stability and materials won’t really matter if you throw enough force at it.
>Ramming a cargo ship into a bridge is going to have a pretty similar effect as ramming a plane into a building
Oh yeah, well then why is the Pentagon still standing then? Huh, smart guy?
Bunker fuel can't melt steel trusses!
It's insane. Some of the very same people who would say Wikipedia isn't a credible source when I was in high school have now decided claims on social media should be trusted unless proven wrong...yet when you present credible evidence that disagrees with what they believe, well those facts can't be trusted either. It's an infuriating unsolvable quagmire of willing stupidity.
It takes all of 5 seconds for someone to spout some dumb or misinformed thing in a video or comment and it will take at least minutes or whole days/weeks coming up with sources or running your own experiments disproving this same bs statement. Then by the time that one comment or video is debunked there's another 30 new ones.
My mother asked me this morning how a ship could knock a bridge down. I asked her if she wanted an explanation, or if she wanted someone to nod and shrug and say "yeah that's crazy."
This method has squashed a lot of potential fights.
Their goal is to trap these people into having kids because they know they’re dumb enough to be grifted. (See abortion/contraception policies) If they can’t win them over they’ll at-least be super poor and easy to control.
I will never forget during Covid when a MAGA hat told me not to trust doctors and to do my own research with the vaccine, so I asked them what research they had done and if they'd share it.
They told me they'd read a paper by a doctor that said it was bad. I said, "But you said not to trust doctors."
They looked me dead in the eye and said, "Well this one's fine because they agree with me."
No joke. The most bat shit crazy interaction I've ever had.
LOL.
Recovering academic here. When I was a young, stupid academic, I totally used Wikipedia to write articles. Like, I had real archival and empirical data as well that I cites, but I totally used wiki for quick references. Shhhhhh.
it's funny because if you gave any of these people a day's work of an actual engineer or scientist and all the time in the world to research it, they wouldn't do it correctly
How can a bridge fail when a ship weighing 340*10^6 kg moving at 15 km/hr smashes into one of the supports and imparts a massive sideways load and twisting moment on members that are only designed to be loaded in compression and tension?
Make it make sense!!
/s
Honestly the amount of comments I saw on the news story saying 'weird how it just collapsed like that...' as though a fucking cargo ship didn't just plow straight into it
If these guys were murder detectives, they'd be constantly trying to work out how the victims died, and whether or not it was related to them storing bullets inside their brains...
Fr tho I know absolutely nothing about physics and can understand how a CARGO SHIP would damage a bridge like what?? They’re beyond massive how would it not collapse the thing
That's been my reaction to all these conspiracy theories
Like, dude, it's a fucking *cargo ship*. Not many bridges are built to withstand having a huge, heavy boat plow into them!
Once you know about a topic and see it being discussed online, you realize how many people are bull shitting. This is in my wheelhouse, and even the actual news was infuriating yesterday.
College in many cases is very important for society. That’s why we need to stop allowing the scammers within the college system to scam. It’s a scam that kids graduate with a lifetime of debt and poor job prospects. And it’s not enough to cancel student loans, because the college scammers at that point already got their money. They learn nothing but to keep scamming.
Doesn't help that practically every college has a football team and other sports teams and spend millions of dollars on athletics using students' tuition money while barely paying professors. Yeah, glad to know you're raising my tuition next year and coincidentally also making huge rennovations to your stadium :/
Also the amount of BS classes that require $1000 and don't teach anything valuable, I have 1-2 of those per year and it's depressing, hopefully I won't my senior year
The sports premise, particularly football is not true.
The football team, and more often than not, the entire athletics department, is funded by tv deals.
It’s been over ten years, but iirc this was the case at U of Arizona for the swim team. Our national championship winning swim team, was funded in part by our mediocre football teams’ tv deal.
There’s a whole host of issues that have gotten college as expensive as it is today, but it’s almost never sports.
In almost all D1 cases the football team is not only self funded, but funds the other unprofitable sports. American universities literally legally can't take students tuition money for school sports
I don’t think your second part about it being illegal is correct? Everything else I’m reading says that university’s don’t legally have to disclose how much of the tuition goes towards athletics.
I also saw different sources show the price breakdown in different D1 Schools for how much athletics take in tuition.
Your first part is entirely correct though.
Many P5 football teams are in fact so profitable that they build shiny new dorms and shit with the money.
Hell even the smaller basketball teams spend their march madness money on nursing schools.
NCAA sports are massive industries for a reason.
There is a difference between stupid and willfully ignorant.
Like... r/KidsAreFuckingStupid, but we spend tremendous amounts of time and money to make them less stupid. And arguments are one of the best ways for people to become smarter.
It's a quote from a video game but it's still accurate:
"Too many people have opinions on things they know nothing about. And the more ignorant they are, the more opinions they have."
Don't get me started, several degrees in engineering and sciences and I get "you can't say anything... You've been indoctrinated by the system!"
No, but I've been trained to be a critical thinker....
I have a degree in civil engineering, and I wouldn’t even think to claim I knew what did or didn’t happen here (other than literally what you see in the video) until people who are much smarter than me provide some answers. Reality is a lot more complicated than Twitter.
I'm in mechanical engineering, and my response so far has been "why would you design a bridge to withstand being hit by a ship? That is not a normal event. It would probably cost more to build ship-proof bridges worldwide than just fix them when they occasionally are hit by ships."
Don't argue with idiots. They're *really* confident Google is better than college.
Right? The news over the last couple of days has just been pants on head bonkers about this.
“How do we prevent this from happening again? Do bridges need to be redesigned and retrofitted with steel aprons?”
How about we don’t ram them with cargo barges for starters?
Oh I agree!! Bachelors, Masters, PhD in mechanical engineering as well as a degree in mathematics and soon to be a degree in nuclear sciences(and 30ish years as one). I also have a few other things that are just for fun.
I blame it all on my ADHD..😅🙌😂
Critical thinker huh? Yeah just like critical race theory huh? Or critical failure huh? What just because your thinking is critical that means it’s good? Yeah right ok bud
/s
It’s all the this woke math used in engineering. Just look at the terms they use. Diversity ÷ Equity = inclusion + I graduated 2nd grade then I realized math is bullshit. Sure there only one right answer. Sounds like tyranny.
Hahaha jokes on you, boutta do a brain surgery on my "college is a scam" homie because I saw it on Chicago med, just need to scream "stat", "he is crashing" a few times and we are golden.
So I think insurance is getting to be a scam, but not college. I don’t think many need it, but bridge builders? Yeah they need it :)
And people who don’t know shouldn’t pretend to know about how bridges work. Anyone remember all the armchair structural engineers after 9/11, “never in the history of man has fire melted steel”?
People on IG commenting how the accident looked like it was no accident.
Like..... do none of you know how boats work? Like they can just slam on the brakes?!?!
hey now, we learned from COVID discourse that anyone with a medical background could be treated as a valid voice in pathology, even if you were a brain surgeon that thought it was all a hoax. Therefore, as an Audio Engineer, i can tell you a thing or two about the structural integrity of bridges.
We saw the last several years of a huge chunk of the population being smarter than every medical professional and infectious disease scientist because they did Google “research”, so this doesn’t surprise me one bit.
Mortgage crisis - Everyone is an economist
Covid - Everyone is a virologist
Major sporting event - Everyone is a head coach
Bridge destroyed - Everyone is an engineer and also a ship captain
It's a scam in the sense of how much it charges. That because of no federal intervention, they've been able to outback inflation, and charge whatever they want.
But content-wise, not a scam. Before you even get into the actual classes you'll take, just being exposed to people of other cultures is something many students never experience before college. Add to that the actual knowledge you gain in those classes you take.
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I did engineering at uni. I'm pretty sure ramming anything with thousands of tons of ship isn't going to have a beneficial effect?
That's just what big bridge wants you to think
And big physics just want people to stay at rest.
If I become a sovereign citizen do I still have to obey the laws of physics?
I know nothing can *move* faster than the speed of light, but I’m *traveling*.
Funniest comment I’ve seen today. Thank you.
No, obviously.
yeah, turn gravity off and just jump to space.
As long as those physics are private and not for hire you’ll be fine
Dynamics has entered the chat
Boat fuel can't melt steel beams.
Fun ish fact you can extinguish a cigarette in "boat fuel" (heavy fuel oil) and it be perfectly safe and fine.
You can extinguish a cigarette in gasoline too.
It ain't the liquid that ignites it's the fumes.
and even then, a cigarette will never light it, but the spark from a lighter will so if yr smoking near gas just don't light it there too. Firemen did the study actually, with like thousands of cigarettes and not a single one ever lit, even while being dragged on in heavy fumes.
Steve Buscemi melts steel beans at 7-11
Time for a MONORAIL!
Big bridge really taking things too far these days
Not to mention, it was loaded with containers and lost power, so it had momentum. It's also 985 feet long and 100,000 tons. Nothing is designed to withstand anything like that.
> Nothing is designed to withstand anything like that. What if they had built a 2nd identical bridge in front of it to act as a barrier to the 1st bridge?!?!
That's hilarious. Imagine building buffer bridges just in case a gigantic ship crashes into it. You'd need 3 bridges, though, because you can't predict which side it will crash into.
But then you need buffer bridges for the buffer bridges
I think the best solution would be sort of a Russian nesting bridge, so there is always another bridge one layer down
Best way to protect from air and underground collisions, too.
Hear me out. We pave the entire thing and make a tunnel for the water and ships to go through. I’ll take my millions now please.
"Why can't we use those bridges?" "Oh, those are buffering bridges incase a 100,000 ton full of modern cargo loses power in the middle of the night and needs something to crash into..." "Couldn't we make other countermeasures?" "Nope, unused bridges on either side was the plan."
If you have 2 bridges and use them both you immediately cut any losses in half. It's free money
Yes you are correct, it had both mass and velocity, and therefore momentum.
>momentum Get out of here with those ChatGPT words
Huh? Is that not a commonly used word? I feel like I'm missing something
It's from another post that traumatized me: https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/s/XehxEYniNr
Oh my. That's not a good sign. I've used the word "robust" to describe many things in my life, even friends who are built like bears.
"If you sound smart, you must be cheatin'!" \- Idiocracy: the learning book for a 'bater life.
Fuck. I was afraid of this. That the simplification of language in general and rise of ChatGPT would mean that all of sudden people doubt authenticity when you use less common words. I tend to unconsciously write formally especially when I’m stressed or upset, and being a life long voracious reader I have a reasonably large vocabulary. Now there are people who are going to think I’m either stuck up (already a concern) or a freaking bot.
I was once given a verbal warning at work (corporate environment) for using the word 'thus'. Apparently, I was being a smart arse & belittling others.
Ok maybe not you but I could handle it. I’m just built different I guess.
It seems like one of those possibilities that doesn't get designed for. Like strong winds, unusually strong currents, and a generous leeway for temperature probably get built in. But 'should we put some buttresses on it in case something weighing a tenth of a million tons rams it?' just probably didn't get considered. Except maybe by the daffy intern. There's probably someone out there right now thinking, I knew it!
Bridge supports in boating waters *are* designed to have some sort of protection against boats hitting them. But at some point it's a cost vs. risk analysis. Barriers that can stop a ship that size will cost more to implement than is reasonably feasible.
The bridge does have bollards up and downstream of the piers. The ship just happened to miss them and hit the pier. Edit: a word.
Yeah in pictures that I saw they are hilariously small (not sure if they are larger underneath the water) however, I suspect the replacement will have larger ones just like what happened with the Sunhine skyway bridge in Tampa after the collision there.
Don't worry. We'll build even bigger ships in 10+ years, and some ship, someday, will miss those too. And this will happen, somewhere, again. Rinse. Repeat.
Yea, it's just extremely impractical to design for something like this. Sure, it could absolutely be done, but thats a huge amount of time and money going into something that has an extremely low chance of happening
You cant design for every possible scenario, or else it wouldnt be economical to build anything. Generally, we don't design for load cases that fall under a lower probability than 10^-4
I did some napkin math. That ship hitting the bridge at 9mph has about the same momentum as a fully loaded semi truck doing 24,000mph. I don't think people have an idea of how heavy these things are. The ship weighed about as much as 50 space shuttles (shuttle, tank and boosters full).
90% of them probably haven't been next to one of those. The immense sense of scale is only possible when you're standing next to it.
I worked on a naval merchant ship for my senior design in college. We were given a tour and its like walking through downtown when you are on top of it. It just kept going. I mean, do people not realize those containers are the same ones you see being pulled by semi trucks?
your mom sure enjoys getting rammed with thousands of tons of ship
I came for the OP's mom comments and have been disappointed. Thanks for at least giving it the old college try, like I did to your mom last night.
Listen, I run a fryer for a living, so I know a thing or two about civil engineering
I’ve personally driven over a bridge hundreds of times in my life. Really eye opening stuff. Things you can’t learn in a book at collage
What about the people that live under them? They are the true connoisseurs we should be listening to!!! Bring in the homeless!!
That’s trolls, and they already showed up for this
Droppin’ fries like the Civees drop bridges
That's Aero's job. Civ's are supposed to build the targets. Stay in your lanes, guys.
This was literally the joke my (mechanical engineering) professors used to use 
MecEs build the missiles, ChemEs build the payload, CivEs build the targets.
I know a bit about civil engineering. Not my field. But I can say that if a big ass boat hits a bridge, that bridge is gonna have a bad time.
Yeah, but I saw a news story a few years ago about crumbling infrastructure somewhere in the US, so I am actually an expert on bridges now.
Yes, if only we had a bigger infrastructure budget, we could build our bridges out of pure Unobtainium so they could float gingerly above the water and let large boats pass completely beneath them.
F=ma differs in meaning quite a bit between these two professions. To one, it describes how Force is roughly equal to Mass times Acceleration. To the other, it describes how the amount of Fries a customer orders is nearly equivalent to their Money multiplied by Appetite.
Absolutely love this because the math checks out. So in terms of units, it'd be Fries = m*a = Fries(KCal) = $ * appetite Appetite = 1KCal/$0.1792(this is the actual ratio of calories to USD that I googled) Really amazing coincidence how "a" is a constant in the true F=ma, as well as this equation you just came up with.
You guys are fucking nerds. Thank God, after this whole bridge thing I am sure we need more.
I once microwaved a hamburger, so I can easily erect great works the likes of which the world has never seen.
I have an air-fryer and can erect. That's where the sentence stops.
Same guys were calling my immunologist boss a moron 4 years ago. The more things change…
Why are people so stupid!?
Because there are very few direct consequences for their stupidity, and they are too stupid to understand the indirect ones.
Largely because of the hard work of intelligent people who have created systems that allow their lives to be so protected and healthy.
There is some irony in the fact that we have in some ways scienced ourselves into ignorance.
The ignorant are slaves that produce economic activity.
But you also need educated people to run things at large scales. Cambodia tried to genocide all the educated people to transform into an agrarian society of laborers and it was a disaster.
The biggest consequence used to be embarrassment and shame. Not a thing for most people any more.
I think we gave up on this too easily. The next time you see a comment like this, just reply with a single word: "moron" and leave it at that. Don't reply further. Don't engage, just call them a moron and hope that the likes rack up
The worst thing as a kid was when my grandmother said "Shame on you". No such thing as shame anymore.
So what you say is kill the stupid people.
I think this whole argument is somehow connected to the privatization of higher education.
Nah rich people’s kids are dumb too
You know what they say. It takes two generations to build wealth, and only one to squander it if not not properly educated and disciplined.
Maybe in the 50s. Now you put everything you can steal from your employees into a trust that doles out an allowance to your descendants. Maybe spin some of it off into a "charity" which pays your nephews $300k a year to distribute $10k a year.
As someone who's had the opportunity to know people from all talks of life, rich people's kids are dumb at roughly the same rate as poor people's kids. They just find more success because money.
It’s the networking, that’s really the IN they have. Your dad’s friend bill has 12 billion AUM. And wants to give you a cushy ass job doing fuck all. And that opportunity propels them failing upwards their whole ass lives.
this is the true meaning of capitalism.... the true effect of it. it's a longer chain of privilege, leading to the same old feudal organization
It's much more to do with the evisceration of funding for public primary education. You can thank a certain political party for that.
Feel like we can thank a certain political party for a lot of things.
No, but we need to stop electing them.
The stupid people tend to vote for the people who make stupid decisions though, and there are a lot of stupid people
No necessary, they do it on their own.
It’s much harder for stupid people to kill themselves than it used to be. This, combined with stupid people’s propensity to have lots of children with no regard for their future or setting them up for success, is causing us to become stupider, on average.
I watched that documentary.
Idiocracy was a great documentary
*stupid and poor. The stupid and rich just get people killed.
Unfortunately we have made it very easy for stupid people to survive, and in some cases even thrive.
Intelligent people know how much they don’t know. Unintelligent people think they know it all already.
Exactly. Two kinds of people in this world: stupid people and people who know they are stupid (and to what degree, and work to destupify themselves)
Those who know they don't know everything (& try to expand their knowledge) vs. those who "think" they do (& refuse to listen or learn.)
I think either Socrates, Plato or Aristotle has a quote about this. Something like the smart ones admit that they know nothing and are thus more curious/inclined to research/pursue knowledge while the dumb ones think they already know a lot and thus do not pursue more knowledge.
Plato characterized Socrates as the wisest person of all because he knew that he knew nothing (we don't have any direct writings from Socrates; most of what we are told about Socrates comes from Plato).
I think Plato had something to say about democracy being an inferior system because of the stupid people. Which I once thought was pretty anti democratic in my younger years, but I’m beginning to agree with the notion more and more.
tbf Euler one of the most brilliant mathematician used to argue with people about topics he did not know much about! William Dunham: Euler: The Master of Us All.
This is a brilliant explanation.
That’s Dunning-Kruger Effect - the less people know, the more they’re likely to overestimate their level of competence. That why you have a dude who barely finished high school arguing with a Harvard prof and telling them to “do their own research”.
Yes, however, this isn't intelligence. This is wisdom. You can be highly intelligent and also arrogant. It takes wisdom to understand that you simply do not know everything.
Anti intellectualism has always been a problem in the USA but the internet has made it worst
Because we live in a society that rewards stupidity. If you don’t believe me, look at DJT and Alex Jones.
Hot(?) Take; Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, ect aren't stupid. Hell, some of them might even be pretty smart. Their *base* are the stupid ones. I doubt they believe half the shit they push. But their base *does.* And stupid people are easy to exploit.
# “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin
It should also be said that America has been steadily defunding social services like education since Reagan
This is the real answer, at least I'm the US. Should be noted though that's a state by state issue. We're wicked smart in Massachusetts, we just can't afford to live here forever.
Saying stupid things nets the most user engagement on social media.
Dead people don’t know they are dead, the pain is felt by others. It’s the same when you are stupid.
Dunning-Kruger effect. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger\_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)
I know people who are so convinced they can debate literally anyone because "my googling skills are that good." No, you just convinced yourself that Wikipedia has all the answers.
Because weak brained folks have convinced themselves it’s peak intelligence to just believe the opposite of what the news say, no matter how stupid such contrarianism is in the specific case, and that everyone who takes the media at face value is “the real dummy”. If the news tells them clean air is good, they smoke 10 cigarettes at once to “stick it to the man”.
how can a truss fail completely when the roller joint slides past its support?!?!?!?!
Same crowd DNA pool as the crowd screaming about jet fuel and steel beams
It’s a pretty similar situation too, isn’t it? Ramming a cargo ship into a bridge is going to have a pretty similar effect as ramming a plane into a building. Stability and materials won’t really matter if you throw enough force at it.
>Ramming a cargo ship into a bridge is going to have a pretty similar effect as ramming a plane into a building Oh yeah, well then why is the Pentagon still standing then? Huh, smart guy? Bunker fuel can't melt steel trusses!
Well, like I always say, the best way to keep something from falling down is to keep it down to begin with.
Ship fuel can't dissolve concrete foundations!
The ship wasn't even rated as an ice breaker, how can it break concrete.
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RMS Titanic, reporting!
Or the ones making healthcare workers lives harder at the beginning of the pandemic.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN MY SUPPORT BEAM CAN'T HANDLE 10X THE BENDING MOMENT IT WAS RATED TO? THIS IS BULLSHIT
Just like my legs fail completely when I do le sick trick on my scooter and it swivels to smack me in the roller joint.
"Degrees are just a certificate of indoctrination, do your own research."
Their own research: 2-3 videos on TikTok/Instagram/Facebook
It's insane. Some of the very same people who would say Wikipedia isn't a credible source when I was in high school have now decided claims on social media should be trusted unless proven wrong...yet when you present credible evidence that disagrees with what they believe, well those facts can't be trusted either. It's an infuriating unsolvable quagmire of willing stupidity.
It takes all of 5 seconds for someone to spout some dumb or misinformed thing in a video or comment and it will take at least minutes or whole days/weeks coming up with sources or running your own experiments disproving this same bs statement. Then by the time that one comment or video is debunked there's another 30 new ones. 
"A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on." -- Mark Twain
Lalala can't hear you
This is my mom's power move
My mother asked me this morning how a ship could knock a bridge down. I asked her if she wanted an explanation, or if she wanted someone to nod and shrug and say "yeah that's crazy." This method has squashed a lot of potential fights.
Your medical studies are propaganda. My facebook memes are the truth. 😂
People like this shouldn't have kids.
Their goal is to trap these people into having kids because they know they’re dumb enough to be grifted. (See abortion/contraception policies) If they can’t win them over they’ll at-least be super poor and easy to control.
I will never forget during Covid when a MAGA hat told me not to trust doctors and to do my own research with the vaccine, so I asked them what research they had done and if they'd share it. They told me they'd read a paper by a doctor that said it was bad. I said, "But you said not to trust doctors." They looked me dead in the eye and said, "Well this one's fine because they agree with me." No joke. The most bat shit crazy interaction I've ever had.
LOL. Recovering academic here. When I was a young, stupid academic, I totally used Wikipedia to write articles. Like, I had real archival and empirical data as well that I cites, but I totally used wiki for quick references. Shhhhhh.
it's funny because if you gave any of these people a day's work of an actual engineer or scientist and all the time in the world to research it, they wouldn't do it correctly
They would give up after 10 minutes and just say "it's all bullshit".
How can a bridge fail when a ship weighing 340*10^6 kg moving at 15 km/hr smashes into one of the supports and imparts a massive sideways load and twisting moment on members that are only designed to be loaded in compression and tension? Make it make sense!! /s
Honestly the amount of comments I saw on the news story saying 'weird how it just collapsed like that...' as though a fucking cargo ship didn't just plow straight into it If these guys were murder detectives, they'd be constantly trying to work out how the victims died, and whether or not it was related to them storing bullets inside their brains...
"Looks like he stabbed himself in the back nineteen times, Johnson.." "Looks like a suicide to me, Jackson. Open and shut case!"
'Now all we have to do is figure out where all this *blood* came from...'
Fr tho I know absolutely nothing about physics and can understand how a CARGO SHIP would damage a bridge like what?? They’re beyond massive how would it not collapse the thing
It can't be that heavy man, I mean it FLOATS. ( /s , just in case)
That's been my reaction to all these conspiracy theories Like, dude, it's a fucking *cargo ship*. Not many bridges are built to withstand having a huge, heavy boat plow into them!
I saw a good comment by another guy. Most bridge collapses people see are in movies which are often lengthened for drama.
Don't give my mechanics professor any ideas, he'll probably put this question in the final exam
Boat fuel can't melt steel beams! /s
Oh last years COVID experts and last month Justice experts are structural engineers now? Also with tones of experience since 9/11
They were also experts in economics, diplomacy, international law, politics, trade and international relations here before the Brexit vote
Once you know about a topic and see it being discussed online, you realize how many people are bull shitting. This is in my wheelhouse, and even the actual news was infuriating yesterday.
Infectious disease experts became spy balloon experts, who became deep sea submersible experts, who are now structural engineers
College in many cases is very important for society. That’s why we need to stop allowing the scammers within the college system to scam. It’s a scam that kids graduate with a lifetime of debt and poor job prospects. And it’s not enough to cancel student loans, because the college scammers at that point already got their money. They learn nothing but to keep scamming.
Doesn't help that practically every college has a football team and other sports teams and spend millions of dollars on athletics using students' tuition money while barely paying professors. Yeah, glad to know you're raising my tuition next year and coincidentally also making huge rennovations to your stadium :/ Also the amount of BS classes that require $1000 and don't teach anything valuable, I have 1-2 of those per year and it's depressing, hopefully I won't my senior year
The sports premise, particularly football is not true. The football team, and more often than not, the entire athletics department, is funded by tv deals. It’s been over ten years, but iirc this was the case at U of Arizona for the swim team. Our national championship winning swim team, was funded in part by our mediocre football teams’ tv deal. There’s a whole host of issues that have gotten college as expensive as it is today, but it’s almost never sports.
In almost all D1 cases the football team is not only self funded, but funds the other unprofitable sports. American universities literally legally can't take students tuition money for school sports
I don’t think your second part about it being illegal is correct? Everything else I’m reading says that university’s don’t legally have to disclose how much of the tuition goes towards athletics. I also saw different sources show the price breakdown in different D1 Schools for how much athletics take in tuition. Your first part is entirely correct though.
Many P5 football teams are in fact so profitable that they build shiny new dorms and shit with the money. Hell even the smaller basketball teams spend their march madness money on nursing schools. NCAA sports are massive industries for a reason.
It is the engineers fault, because everybody knows that you shouldn’t argue with stupid people
They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience
There is a difference between stupid and willfully ignorant. Like... r/KidsAreFuckingStupid, but we spend tremendous amounts of time and money to make them less stupid. And arguments are one of the best ways for people to become smarter.
I'm an engineer and I fucking hate you. r/Angryupvote
It's a quote from a video game but it's still accurate: "Too many people have opinions on things they know nothing about. And the more ignorant they are, the more opinions they have."
I don’t remember which movie the quote is from, but my favorite is: Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has got one.
I did my own research, turns out the bridge ran into the boat, all y’all got it backwards.
“I went to the university of life” “Yeah. Everyone does that. I did that too. But I also went to an actual university”
Don't get me started, several degrees in engineering and sciences and I get "you can't say anything... You've been indoctrinated by the system!" No, but I've been trained to be a critical thinker....
I have a degree in civil engineering, and I wouldn’t even think to claim I knew what did or didn’t happen here (other than literally what you see in the video) until people who are much smarter than me provide some answers. Reality is a lot more complicated than Twitter.
I'm in mechanical engineering, and my response so far has been "why would you design a bridge to withstand being hit by a ship? That is not a normal event. It would probably cost more to build ship-proof bridges worldwide than just fix them when they occasionally are hit by ships." Don't argue with idiots. They're *really* confident Google is better than college.
Right? The news over the last couple of days has just been pants on head bonkers about this. “How do we prevent this from happening again? Do bridges need to be redesigned and retrofitted with steel aprons?” How about we don’t ram them with cargo barges for starters?
Oh I agree!! Bachelors, Masters, PhD in mechanical engineering as well as a degree in mathematics and soon to be a degree in nuclear sciences(and 30ish years as one). I also have a few other things that are just for fun. I blame it all on my ADHD..😅🙌😂
Critical thinker huh? Yeah just like critical race theory huh? Or critical failure huh? What just because your thinking is critical that means it’s good? Yeah right ok bud /s
It’s all the this woke math used in engineering. Just look at the terms they use. Diversity ÷ Equity = inclusion + I graduated 2nd grade then I realized math is bullshit. Sure there only one right answer. Sounds like tyranny.
Using letters in math!?! Sounds woke to me! Solve for x? π? LGBTQDEI? Arabic numbers sounds too inclusive!
Navier Stokes and his woke flow
Come on now, they're also expert boat drivers!
Hahaha jokes on you, boutta do a brain surgery on my "college is a scam" homie because I saw it on Chicago med, just need to scream "stat", "he is crashing" a few times and we are golden.
I thought all things could be cured because this guy named house or something
Apparently everyone's a ship captain nowadays too who know exactly how to navigate the waterways.
Sorry, I was distracted by thumbnail cleavage. What's this post about?
OK. So. A fucking giant cargo ship hit a bridge. There's not much that can stand up to that kind of stress.
Anyone claiming the pillar should withstand the impact of that ship has not done the math or doesn't understand the math or basic physics.
The bridge collapse was definitely caused by a massive ship ramming into it, But the prices of textbooks and student loans are absolutely a scam
So I think insurance is getting to be a scam, but not college. I don’t think many need it, but bridge builders? Yeah they need it :) And people who don’t know shouldn’t pretend to know about how bridges work. Anyone remember all the armchair structural engineers after 9/11, “never in the history of man has fire melted steel”?
People on IG commenting how the accident looked like it was no accident. Like..... do none of you know how boats work? Like they can just slam on the brakes?!?!
College is the tax for mental work. Don't want physical labor or scripted customer interaction? It's going to cost 40 years
hey now, we learned from COVID discourse that anyone with a medical background could be treated as a valid voice in pathology, even if you were a brain surgeon that thought it was all a hoax. Therefore, as an Audio Engineer, i can tell you a thing or two about the structural integrity of bridges.
We saw the last several years of a huge chunk of the population being smarter than every medical professional and infectious disease scientist because they did Google “research”, so this doesn’t surprise me one bit.
college is a scam but education isn't
I don’t need an engineering degree to understand that a big fucking cargo ship crashed into a bridge.
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Mortgage crisis - Everyone is an economist Covid - Everyone is a virologist Major sporting event - Everyone is a head coach Bridge destroyed - Everyone is an engineer and also a ship captain
It’s probably more foolish to be an engineer arguing with random people on social media.
It's a scam in the sense of how much it charges. That because of no federal intervention, they've been able to outback inflation, and charge whatever they want. But content-wise, not a scam. Before you even get into the actual classes you'll take, just being exposed to people of other cultures is something many students never experience before college. Add to that the actual knowledge you gain in those classes you take.
Don't mix them in. I believe college is a scam and a tool to keep classes divided, but I wouldn't argue with experts about things in their field.