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Bridge maintenance is sorely needed across the whole country. Anyway, the reason this stuff doesn't get enough funding is because the process of sorting out pu

Bridge maintenance is sorely needed across the whole country. Anyway, the reason this stuff doesn't get enough funding is because the process of sorting out public spending priorities is called politics. Everybody has their own idea about what needs money and how much money should be thrown around. There's no objectively correct way to sort it all out, no means by which we can weigh the relative merits of increased library funding against retrofitting single family homes against earthquakes except by asking people which they prefer. And different people have different tolerance for risk, somebody who decided to tolerate the risk of a major earthquake sometime in the next X years because they'd rather fund some other project isn't necessarily wrong. It's not a matter of simply educating people about the risk (and FWIW, the average person in Seattle is definitely aware that the region is geologically risky.)

cloudwalk9 2y ago
> Bridge maintenance is sorely needed across the whole country. Not just that, but also to rethink how we reinforce them in major waterways or even minor but navigable waterways, if any heavy enough boat can just crash into a support column and take the whole thing down... albeit accidentally in that case.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  That is almost as unrealistic as wanting to nuclear bomb proof them
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  Shipping incidents taking out major spans is a once in a quarter century kind of event in the US (at the very most). Smaller spans get taken out every decade or so. So it is a known problem. Most modern bridges do take into account the possibility that there will be collisions. But it is also very hard to protect against a collision with an object that weighs 100k tons or more. By the time the boat is crashing into the bridge it’s too late. The solution is to design better systems around preventing things from getting to that point. A good analogy is airport security. We are very bad at keeping weapons off planes. The TSA routinely fails to find knives and guns. The reason we haven’t had any more 9/11s isn’t because we made buildings airplane proof or because TSA doesn’t let box cutters through (they absolutely do). It’s because we learned to pre-empt coordinated well organized attacks using intelligence, and we hardened physical security at the cockpit door (I’m guessing mostly the latter).
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    >It’s because we learned to pre-empt coordinated well organized attacks using intelligence, and we hardened physical security at the cockpit door (I’m guessing mostly the latter). You're forgetting the REAL reason airplanes are basically not hijacked anymore: Flight 93. It used to be, if you threatened to blow up an airplane, the passengers would largely choose not to confront them, because the SOP of hijacking was to land somewhere and negotiate. Indeed this desire to not rock the boat actually turned one hijacking by drunk teens into a catastrophe when the hijackers were too stupid to understand that a plane couldn't just fly to Australia without picking up more fuel, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961. 9/11 changed that risk calculus for passengers. Now everybody knows what hijackers COULD do, and are willing to endure some danger to prevent that, to the point we've kind of overcorrected and people are yelling at and harassing fellow passengers for non-issues.

cloudwalk9 2y ago

> Bridge maintenance is sorely needed across the whole country. Not just that, but also to rethink how we reinforce them in major waterways or even minor but navigable waterways, if any heavy enough boat can just crash into a support column and take the whole thing down... albeit accidentally in that case.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
That is almost as unrealistic as wanting to nuclear bomb proof them
dghlsakjg 2y ago
Shipping incidents taking out major spans is a once in a quarter century kind of event in the US (at the very most). Smaller spans get taken out every decade or so. So it is a known problem. Most modern bridges do take into account the possibility that there will be collisions. But it is also very hard to protect against a collision with an object that weighs 100k tons or more. By the time the boat is crashing into the bridge it’s too late. The solution is to design better systems around preventing things from getting to that point. A good analogy is airport security. We are very bad at keeping weapons off planes. The TSA routinely fails to find knives and guns. The reason we haven’t had any more 9/11s isn’t because we made buildings airplane proof or because TSA doesn’t let box cutters through (they absolutely do). It’s because we learned to pre-empt coordinated well organized attacks using intelligence, and we hardened physical security at the cockpit door (I’m guessing mostly the latter).
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  >It’s because we learned to pre-empt coordinated well organized attacks using intelligence, and we hardened physical security at the cockpit door (I’m guessing mostly the latter). You're forgetting the REAL reason airplanes are basically not hijacked anymore: Flight 93. It used to be, if you threatened to blow up an airplane, the passengers would largely choose not to confront them, because the SOP of hijacking was to land somewhere and negotiate. Indeed this desire to not rock the boat actually turned one hijacking by drunk teens into a catastrophe when the hijackers were too stupid to understand that a plane couldn't just fly to Australia without picking up more fuel, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961. 9/11 changed that risk calculus for passengers. Now everybody knows what hijackers COULD do, and are willing to endure some danger to prevent that, to the point we've kind of overcorrected and people are yelling at and harassing fellow passengers for non-issues.