scoobdog

Holy shit, that's what I had for brunch too. Wait, I was talking about the strawberries and pancakes and bacon.....

That sounds like it might have been part of the settlement that was reached in '22 and cleared of challenges by the SCOTUS last April, but, it's a little weird that Treasury would be holding on to money that's already been paid toward a loan. Sounds like it was a really complicated settlement.

In 1984, tsar4 saw things…

The only thing I beat to a pulp is my dick, because these hands are for loving.

Motoring. It's motoring a boat.

And that's all before the time he threw a kettle ball at his son's strength and conditoning coach's head.....

Is it a bandwidth issue?

I guess it makes sense the VP would have to be crazier than the President, but damn.

I’m 8 miles away from one of those.

Was your uncle boning French chicks in 1984?

You know... in hindsight, the Puffy's "Jr. Mafia" might have had an entirely different meaning.

Pursuing and dismantling Hamas is not achieved through razing Gaza. In fact, bombing indiscriminately does precisely the opposite.

They do. Any pier strike is going to lead to the bridge becoming unfixable, but engineers can build bridges that can resist total collapse... for the right price. First off the best bridge for the application is a suspension bridge: it can handle the distance (the Golden Gate Bridge is longer), and it ha supports that are massive and easier to defend against should there be a ship strike. In my neck of the woods, we have a suspension bridge that's fifteen years older than the Key Bridge that spans the entrance to the Port of Los Angeles and is tall enough to not only handle cargo ships but cruise liners. Because it's a suspension bridge, both towers are on land and away from the channel. It was also $211 million in 2024 value for a 1,500 foot bridge (while the Key Bridge was $580 million in 2024 value for an 8,500 foot bridge). Building a steel truss bridge with safety features that will prevent total collapse will add to that cost and and also make the bridge less navigable since it would involve more support piers and limit the bridge clearance. Those two factors would weigh on any decision and lead city and state leaders who control the purse to choose to take the risk of mass casualties against making a critical roadway connection unaffordable.

Well, that's kind of my point. I'm not an engineer, but I spend my day looking at structural drawings and explaining to my clients why it costs the equivalent of a Lamborghini to install a panelized roof system. Steel truss support systems were antiquated by decades by the time the Key Bridge was first installed because failures similar to this one were becoming more frequent in turn-of-the-twentieth century truss bridges (from age, not from ship strikes). Unlike (for example) a suspension bridge, a steel truss structure disperses the roadbed load down through the support pedestals instead of up to an overhead structural member attached to towers. When one of those pedestal supports is damaged, all of the potential energy from the structure travels down into the missing support, pulling the structure apart. In this particular case, the design flaw is specifically in how the sections of bridge was connected to each other: there are no breakaway components that allow one portion of the bridge to fully collapse while allowing those supported by the unaffected support remain standing. You can see it's a design flaw because, in looking at bridge before the collapse, there are no obvious break points anywhere across that entire span and the two support pedestals are not sufficient to hold all the weight of the section above each by themselves. You'll likely never see a new steel truss bridge of this size ever built again, but you can still see smaller truss structures being built for railroad crossings and pedestrian bridges. All of those structures have smaller spans / more midspans and the pedestals are in-line with the horizontal spans as opposed to be suspended above by steel wings. As such, if one pedestal is damaged, the sections it supports will pull away from adajacent pedestals leaving portions of the bridge standing. This isn't to suggest that the bridge was built shoddily or that the design was glaringly negligent given the knowledge at the time (i.e. not up to code). Like you said, the bridge acted exactly like any model would have predicted given the displacement of one of its supports. It was just a cheap design for the era and a catastrophic failure was part of the calculated risk of building a bypass artery (it's 3 digit interstate).

I’m convinced.

The key points (I think) is that kickoff ball is in the same place but the actual line of scrimmage is 25 yards in front of that. Receiving and kicking and lineups are 5 yards apart and no one moves until one of two returners touches the ball. There are no fair catches but the ball can still roll into the end zone for a touchback. Essentially, everything is centered around nobody moving until the ball is caught, shortening the time and distance for the kicking team’s players to run up on the returner.

Cool

They're going to great lengths to reduce the high speed impacts of special teams plays.

I'm no engineer, but the way that bridge collapsed suggests there was at least one underlying design flaw. Also, someone is going to need to question the road crew's foreman, if he survived, on why he didn't evacuate his crew when the road was shut down.

There are a lot of fucking Cybertrucks all of the sudden. I saw my first one in the wild like a month ago. Now I can’t go a day without seeing at least one. They’re even more hideous than I expected.

You should do the Camino de Santiago.

I don’t think I ever used Mapquest, but I jumped straight to a GPS in the ‘90s from a Thomas Guide.

In 1984, I went to the Olympics in Los Angeles.