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Yes but the engineers can build bridges that don't crash, whereas the finance people who want to impress us with hard math brought us the derivative crash and h
by threepipeproblm 12y ago
Yes but the engineers can build bridges that don't crash, whereas the finance people who want to impress us with hard math brought us the derivative crash and high-speed trading with the "flash crash" etc.
- freehunter 12y agoBridges certainly can and do fail.
- hga 12y agoAs the example I'm most familiar with, this bridge should not have failed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge The state of the art in the first half of the '60s was good enough to design such a bridge correctly, but the gusset plates that connect girders together were undersized. Then there's the famous example of Boston's Hancock Tower, which was designed and built per the current state of the art and code, but it turned out that did not consider some important things that could have caused it to collapse along its long, narrow side: http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/5826 http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/5826
- threepipeproblm 12y agoI didn't claim that bridges can't fail, but that engineers can make bridges that are reliable. Yes with roughly 20% of the economy locked up in "finance" we appear to get INCREASED economic instability. So... did I get downvoted because that wasn't clear, or because it hit too close to home for the financial experts on here?