halffaday

Having lived in both areas, cities make people crazy. Everyone spends so much time trying to stand out. Look at my fashionable clothing. Look at my exotic sexual identity. Nobody is comfortable in their own skin. There are no consequences to bad behavior because people are disposable and reputation is unimportant when there are 10million other suckers that don’t know you’re a dirtbag.

I don’t think we’ve evolved to live among millions of people.

Writing an insult and punctuating it with “cheers” is so insincere and sanctimonious that your argument is it’s own counter-argument.

If you think civilian gun violence is unique to the US, you should really r check in on any country south of our border. All of which have much more restricted gun ownership.

This article could have been written about any industry at all, like healthcare, aerospace, or fast food, and have made essentially the same points, on the same timeline, and with the same conclusions.

Maybe something happened in the 1960s…

The Australian government also put its citizens in concentration camps with total impunity last year. That sort of outrageous mistreatment of lower and middle class people is not feasible outside of a few cities in the United States. Cheran in Mexico is also a good example of how resisting state-mandated civilian disarmament can discourage the abuse of citizens by powerful organizations.

Seemed like an OK article, but punctuating your essay with a cheerful reference to a violent counter-intelligence operation by the Chinese Communist Party that crushed free-thought for generations is so tone deaf it makes me doubt the author’s judgment on everything else.

Precious metals. Of course financial institutions often falsify their reserves. The real problem isn’t that no solution exists. The problem is that market makers only want to deal with exchange media that they can use for their own fraud.

It's...I don't know what to call it except intriguing, the way you conclude anything I wrote means the US is a totalitarian monolith.

The tone of the article is a little hard to take seriously given that the legacy media are mostly now admitting that a Ukrainian surrender is necessary and that all Russian territorial objectives are likely to be met.

The more interesting question is if having the US as a credible security partner has a future.

I wasn’t under the impression that solar panels actually generate more revenue in their service life than their production and installation costs. Has this changed in the last few years?

It is limited by state and federal law, and ambiguous language means that the law is whatever the bureaucrat reviewing your site plan thinks it means at that moment.

An empty bus weighs 20,000lb or more. That’s around 80X the wear the trucks this bill targets causes, and you probably can’t put 80x more people on the bus. Why not axe the public transportation nobody with a choice actually uses?

There are trade organizations, metropolitan planning organizations, and quasi-government entities that write model development codes that several communities may adopt as-is, but cities and counties are all able to adopt, modify, and repeal codes as their political representation sees fit as allowed by probable interpretation of state law.

There really isn’t a way to make everyone have the same laws everywhere while having local representative government.

Chuck Marohn is an ideas-guy that pivoted his career from engineer to paid speaker. It’s a lot of TED-talks kind of stuff that resonates with certain donors, and it includes a lot of “guys, you’re doing it wrong!” statements and trashing trade organizations. Those trade organizations have pushed the licensure board to strip Marohn’s license for years, and I think he’s finally had enough of the legal trouble.

My feelings are mixed. The licensing processing is pretty lenient, and NCEES testing just weeds out the bottom 1/3 of applicants. Keeping a license is basically a matter of paying your dues. Sure, people get disciplined by the board, but it’s almost always for forgetting their PDH credits, which are “listen to this vendor-sponsored webinar during lunch and you’ll get an hour”. Practicing outside one’s competence is very common, and almost nobody gets in trouble for that, unless there is legal trouble.

That said, licensing does create an artificial scarcity and a completely superfluous cottage industry of land-development hacks, typically one-man-show practices, that specialize in being a land owner or speculator’s pseudo-attorney for a permit application process. The construction plans for permit are basically conceptual, rife with flagrant errors, and may have little relevance to actual construction, since a contractor probably won’t use the plans anyway. In my region, maybe 30-60% of the market is like this, with the exceptions being larger commercial projects, like apartments or medical offices. A parking-lot extension for a quadplex, though? That’s going to be a PE who will perjure himself all day to a Planning Commission for $500. They’re just a licensed as the engineer scrutinizing seismic forces on bridge piles.

So is the free market the answer? I don’t know. The land owners are the ones choosing the hucksters. They’re also usually fast-dealers that aren’t concerned with product quality once it’s sold. I don’t think “develop as thou wilt” is a good policy because that used to be how it was done, and it killed enough people to create a demand for government intervention.

The problem is, like software, nobody has any idea how to measure “goodness” of civil engineering, and laymen have no idea of the quality of product they’re getting unless it fails catastrophically.

I just accept that it’s not perfect, the hacks aren’t going anywhere, and I try not to do shitty work.

If you’re designing a pavement structure based on the AASHTO Guide For the Design of Pavement Structures (1993), then you wouldn’t include anything other than trucks (semi-trailers, single-units, and buses) because passenger vehicles produce negligible wear. Even the devil’s own ride, the Ford F-250, produces 1/1350th the wear of one loaded semi-trailer.

Given this is D.C., I would assume this is just a manifestation of petty malice toward symbols their council associates with people on the “wrong” side of righteous causes.

Paint = safety is a horribly misguided heuristic. Playing traffic engineer is just as bad an idea as playing dentist or attorney. Just don’t.

Typical compressive strengths in concrete mixes for construction applications is often around 3000psi, which is actually about the same as HDPE. “Flowable fill” might be closer to 800-1000psi, which is close to end-grain compressive strength of some common lumber products. Special concrete mixes can be used to get almost 20,000psi, which is a bit less than steel (which has much higher tensile strength).

The real value proposition of concrete is that it’s made out of very common materials and can be produced in enormous quantities in most places in the world at low cost.

Use sharrows. Changing the meaning of stripes for one special type of road is a terrible idea.

There also really needs to be more aggressive standards for participation in transportation planning. I see way too many “ideas guys” playing engineer. I’m looking at you, landscape architects!

Not that long ago, California paid $2B in fraudulent benefits. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-07/bank-of-...

That’s a single program. Forget it, Jack. It’s China Town.

>2024: autonomous machinery takes over

Mass-grading is the only part of construction anywhere close to this that I’m aware of. Manufacturing processes for building materials are really impressive, but it’s a different story on the job site where you constantly have to make judgments about the work environment. I think most of the low-hanging fruit for automation is in the design process.