FYI the posted load limit on a bridge is not the weight that, if exceeded once, would cause the bridge to immediately collapse. Rather, it’s the weight that, if exceeded regularly, would cause the bridge to require repairs and maintenance much sooner than otherwise. This is why school buses (and emergency vehicles like fire trucks) are legally allowed to ignore the posted weight limits on bridges. I’m a school bus driver and this is actually one of the questions that comes up on the school bus certification exam (there’s also a bridge in my district with a 5 ton weight limit that a number of our buses regularly cross despite weighing about 10 tons empty).

Even if the authorities wanted to post an absolute, it’s-going-to-collapse weight limit for a bridge, it wouldn’t really be possible, as this would have more to do with per-axle weight, ground pressure and vehicle speed, not to mention length of the vehicle compared to the length of the bridge. Nor would authorities want to post any such number without a large safety factor.

Jesus is anti-authoritarian first and foremost

I mean, he did exhort his followers to sell their shirts and buy swords!

I like to think my comment qualifies as clarification. I’m not trying to be snarky either.

OK, maybe a little snarky.

Any nation on Earth, if they had nuclear weapons, could put them in shipping containers and mail them to any target they wanted.

Stephen King is Scots-Irish and he used the pen name Richard Bachman despite not being German.

“Stolen valor” can be used in a humorous way beyond its original meaning as someone pretending to be a veteran. For example, there’s a funny Youtube video about a tradesperson encountering a hipster wearing Carhartt workwear and using the phrase “stolen valor” to describe him.

The flavor, called Screamin’ Freedom, tasted like hard candies dissolved in water

This is ridiculous. Room-temperature energy drinks are supposed to taste like cough syrup.

He knew the secrets: blame your tools and be the same religion as your bosses. He was also, to his credit, a fantastic softball player, which helped the company team win the championship every year.

I will never get over those NK officers’ hats. They’re like codpieces for the head.

One word: mortars.

And this wasn’t even his biggest disaster as long as you don’t count the potential for death. The baseball-throwing gig was just him and his manager; for his next project he led a team of five developers that turned three months into three years and never produced working software. The only revenue it ever produced was an initial $50K from the client that was later refunded to preempt a lawsuit. For the project he chose Ruby-on-Rails despite the fact that neither he nor anybody else on the team - nor anybody else in the entire state for that matter - had any experience with RoR. I have to give him credit, though: he was a true Renaissance Man in the sense that he could fuck up a project in any language or platform.

We got hired by a company that was developing a remote-controlled baseball launching machine. The machine itself was just the standard two spinning wheels (although the max rotational speed of 125 mph was a lot for this sort of thing), but it could also pivot 360 degrees and also angle itself between straight up and 45 degrees down towards the ground, so it was capable of simulating any hit ball in baseball. The idea was that you would put this machine at home plate and then the coach could walk out among the players and use the remote (which was a Windows Mobile PDA) to generate any kind of hit, like a grounder to short or a pop fly to right field etc. Because the wheels could be independently controlled, you could put any kind of spin you wanted on a ball by having one wheel spinning faster than the other.

Really a cool device and a cool project, but my coworker who got the gig was a remarkably terrible programmer who spent more than a year fucking things up in various ways. At one point, for example, he spent three months trying to develop a Physics engine to control where the ball went, despite the fact that a) he knew nothing about Physics, and b) the Physics of a spinning baseball is actually incredibly complicated and well beyond the processing power of a PDA circa 2005. Not to mention that the balls used varied tremendously in how old and scuffed up they were, which would have defeated any attempt to calculate where they were going with any kind of real precision.

Despite being well over budget and past the original schedule, he had things sort of working (sometimes) and the client asked him to produce a variant of the software that would let the machine be used by Little League coaches. My coworker in addition to writing the version to scale back the speeds appropriately, also decided to completely change the API that was used to communicate with the machine. Previously, the speeds had been specified by short integer values between 0 and 32768, but he decided it would be better to use floating-point values between 0 and 1. All well and good, except his way of dealing with the huge amount of compiler errors this generated was to cast all the hard-coded short int values as floats and clamp the result between 0.0 and 1.0.

As bad as this was, he also decided to test this version - for the first time - on a field with actual Little Leaguers (in his defense - but only slightly - we rarely had access to the actual machine itself, so proper testing was always difficult). The coach sent the command for a slow grounder to the shortstop. This should have produced a horizontal ball with about a 30 mph speed on the bottom wheel and 35 mph on the top wheel to give it some topspin. Instead, his hard-code int values were about 10000 and 12000, which got cast and clamped to 1.0 by the API call - in other words, maximum speed (125 mph) on both wheels. This ejected a ball with no spin going 125 mph, the most deadly knuckleball in human history (human pitchers throw knucklers at maybe 50 mph and they’re nearly impossible to hit or even catch). At least he had the angle and azimuth “right” so this was fired straight at the shortstop! Had it hit him, the kid for sure would have badly concussed and very possibly killed, but fortunately it sailed just over his head.

This was my entire 25-year career. No way in hell would I want to watch a show like that.

Although if there were a show based on my career, I’m sure the highest ratings would be the show where my coworker fires a 125 mph knuckle ball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. It was the only time in my career when I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between my boss and the client.

just let him keep breaking the law until it reaches the Supreme Court?

Also after it reaches the Supreme Court.

Biden and Garland should’ve put throttle down on a five-alarm-fire investigation into election.

For that matter, Obama should have conducted an investigation into the 2016 election when he still had the power to do so.

Accuse your enemy of what you intend to do

It’s ironic that Hitler’s “Night of the Long Knives” (when the Nazis arrested and eventually murdered numerous brownshirts and their leader, Ernst Roehm) acquired that name because Hitler himself used the expression in a speech that he gave immediately after the event. In the speech, he accused Roehm of having been planning a “NIght of the Long Knives” himself, directed at Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. Quite unintentionally, the phrase came to describe Hitler’s actions.

In the 2000 election cycle, electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold used Microsoft Access as the underlying database for storing vote counts. Only techie oldheads will remember this, but in the world of electronic data storage Access was basically a toy. Access databases did have an audit table (which tracks every change made to the data), but the audit table was hand-editable.

I have formally requested the Trump Administration

“With a strongly-worded letter, no less!”

A person in my neighborhood still has a TRUMP LOW PRICES KAMALA HIGH PRICES sign in their front yard, albeit partially hidden behind a bush. Unremarkable except they’re black and living in a subsidized housing development. You just can’t make shit like this up.

I’m saving up my fucks-to-give for the strongly worded letter to the editor.