insert a witty blog title here

So update for all of you lucky enough to not be on Twitter: It looks like Elon’s plan to try and make back all the money he lost buying twitter is to run the website rampant with bots that are willing to pay him money

Why would you hide this in the tags?

surely this is a good idea that doesn’t have the capacity to end real fuckin badly

Bridges aren’t supposed to have weight restrictions on them. That is, they don’t come with weight restrictions on them when they’re new. So a bridge with a weight restriction on it is a sign that something has gone wrong and the bridge does not meet current standards.

The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)

Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits…but in practice they don’t.

One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.

Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)

So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.

Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.

Biden isn’t advocating eliminating weight limits and letting it be a laissez-faire free-for-all where trucks can just go wherever they want. He’s advocating for replacing bridges that carry weight limits with new ones that don’t have them.

wow i got absolutely schooled thank you for all this this is really informative. i have learned so much

This is a great explanation of what the fuck Biden was talking about in his tweet. because I will freely admit that I also went “…….wtf?????” when I read it. So thank you.

Today I learned about civil engineering.

are we sure that Biden understands civil engineering, tho?

*sigh*

Are we sure that the guy who has been in public service for longer than I’ve been alive - and I’m 46 - & is kind of famously obsessed with transportation infrastructure knows a basic thing about weight limits and bridges?

I can’t guarantee it, but I know where I’m placing my bets.

Whether or not Biden himself is a civil engineering expert is irrelevant. A President doesn’t need to be an expert in all things.

They need to listen to the experts they do have.

If Biden has a team of civil engineers on hand and he’s trusting the data they’re giving him and their expertise, then we’re good.

I want Biden to be good at Being President, which he’s doing by listening to people who know more than him on certain subjects.

something that biden is indeed VERY good at is listening to people. i like that in a president.

That was one of the many many problems with Trump imho. He won’t admit that he doesn’t know stuff, and surrounds himself with people who make him look/feel smart and/or are wealthy and not people who are qualified, like nominating Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education when she has no education training or experience.

Biden is far from perfect, and all the complaining about how he’s confused or mentally not there is irrelevant to me for two reasons - most importantly, he knows what he doesn’t know, and surrounds himself with people who do know it and then listens to him. The second, less important reason, is that Reagan had most likely was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s during the latter years of his presidency, and the rest of the government held it together just fine.

yes i posted this on my other blog but you know what it goes here too

“if you’re working a full time job you should be able to afford to live on your own and have access to food and transportation” gonna be real with you brother. everyone deserves this. Not just people working 40 hrs a week

people inherently deserve to have a roof over their heads and to eat and live comfortably. not tied to whatever work they do or do not do. Shocking, i know

First time posting my knitting to tumblr. Look at my Bug Son

knitting tutorial made by a twenty-something knitting influencer: 18 min long, 12 of those minutes being the intro and a sponsor plug, they show the first few steps of the tutorial at the slowest speed known to man, they show the most important steps at a neck-break speed, they stop every five seconds to talk about what they just did, 40,000 comments filled with questions ranging from insightful to “how do i knit”, filmed with a camera that costs more than a car, the tutorial is incorrect.

knitting tutorial made by a seventy-something grandmother: two min long, filmed 17 years ago, shows you what you want with the skilled patient hands of a beloved deity, made with the world’s shittiest camera, the best video on the fucking internet, four comments and 30 views, you lose the video and never find it again.

Solar Eclipse Shadows

Absolutely beautiful! I hope everyone took this in! Makes you think just how small we are. A moment the world comes together as one! That’s true humanity . We will be uploading more amazing photos to this same post. So come back later on and check out our 2024 once in a lifetime eclipse photos.

People don’t owe you their downtime! And I don’t mean this in a harsh way, but in a “quit breaking your own heart” way.

It’s so easy to see a friend “active” and reblogging on tumblr, or maybe making a status update on Facebook and feel hurt they haven’t replied to our messages.

Different things take different energy. And someone being “online” but not actively talking to you does not mean they no longer love or care about you.

Today in niche genres of joke that I can never get enough of and will probably still be secretly thinking about four years later

Hi I have a question about Pacific Rim. Given that the sparring is just A way to test for drift compatibility and any activity that requires people to collaborate and anticipate each others moves works, including stuff like multi player video games

They are piloting a Jaeger together in my imagination

Its name is "Yes, And?"

@leggywillow

#please don't take him just because you can :(

kind of hate my stupid caustic pussy for dissolving my underwear over time but it's kind of cool, like, scientifically

once again thinking about this banger

the whole “i used to be a teen who hated authority only to grow up to become the authority that hates teens” is a bad bad thing that practically every other generation has fallen into and we all need to make an extremely conscious effort not to repeat the fucking pattern

Studies have shown that the shift starts to happen around age 30. If you’re close to that, make a conscious effort to be open to and accepting of younger people. I’m 31 and paying close attention to how I react to young people and new trends and shit and trying to keep myself from developing those thought patterns.

noted

It is imperative you befriend people other than those of your own generation. It’s harder to lump people together if you know some of them. This is why you should also pursue friendships beyond your race, ability, religion (or lack thereof), and class. Humanity relies on relating to each other.