Elroy, the beam fell down. The soil was fine - you can see from the photos that the end of the beams fell
down: <<Or even funnier, the Chinese engineering could be at fault, or they didn't take soil samples. >>
The problem was more likely "starter rods" which are bits of reinforcing steel put in concrete to make it look as though the steel continues all through the concrete. With not much understanding of such structures, the steel stealers are likely to leave out crucial steel instead of taking just the steel that won't be noticed unless there's an earthquake or some such.
Mainland China is a melamine in milk culture so it should be expected that the producers are just interested in the dog eat dog and human eat dog principles of getting money away from other people by hook or by crook, instead of doing an honest day's work and being proud of what they have done.
The local yokels know that's true which is why New Zealand milk was so popular = sure to be made of milk instead of melamine. Ironically, the dopey people at New Zealand's milk producer Fonterra, which had about 40% shareholding in the melamine milk marketing did not demand that Fonterra be in charge of all aspects of quality to ensure milk rather than melamine was used. I had better control of gasoline quality for cars than they seem to have had of milk for babies. What were they thinking?
A friend had a similar engineering disaster to the failed bridge. He was supervising construction of the Ruahihi canal in the late 1970s [in NZ]. I was living in the area [but not knowing that my friend had come to live in Tauranga to do that job]. I had gone to have a look at the construction process being a curious civil engineer, and thought that for a few hundred metres the very steep and high bank holding the canal up looked dodgy.
Water leaks through earth canals. The design and construction have to be good or pore water pressures build up and leakage and collapse can destroy an earth embankment.
Since my job was selling bitumen [in part], I wrote to the company suggesting spraying the lining of the canal with bitumen to stop water leaking out. It was such a small amount of bitumen that I was just doing them a favour, rather than making a sale. But I like to do good things and it wasn't much effort.
I didn't hear back and had profitable work to do, so left it.
The canal was finished and the fat little prime minister Robert Muldoon attended to announce it open. It was brimming with water and looking great.
Next day, I was going back from Hamilton to Tauranga and as I got to the bottom of the Kaimais there were warning signs of road problem. I immediately thought "Oh, oh, I hope it's not the canal". It was. What I feared would happen happened and half a klometre of canal and megatons of water went flooding down the valley, across the road and into the adjacent river. Game over!
I don't know whether it was a design failure, or a construction failure, or combination. But it was a very big failure, for lack of a few tons of bitumen sprayed on the inside. It didn't even need an earthquake to make it fail so it was VERY bad. Only 1 day old!! Very very bad.
It was only a few years later that I learned it was my friend who was involved. That was the end of his civil engineering in NZ. He went to Africa, then I think PNG and ended up running a squash court in MacKay, Australia.
Meanwhile, my short of TSLA is now on track after a Himalayan Heights short squeeze soaring to $385 [from my short at $339]. It's always fun in the markets. Tesla was last seen at about $312.
For the record, I'm all in favour of Tesla just as I was for Qualcomm. Elon Musk has done many great jobs. I disagree with some of his ideas but for the most part, he gets things right.
I'm sure that even Elon wouldn't have been telling his grandmother to put her life savings and grocery money into Tesla shares at $385. QCOM share price went stupid Xmas/New Year 1999 then went all the way down to $13 a share from about $100.
But the share price is not the company so Qualcomm just carried on and the rest is history. Everyone now uses Qualcomm for mobile Cyberspace.
Of course many people such as Apple would rather just steal things than be appreciative and pay the price. So Qualcomm is having to ask the USA government to ban iPhone imports due to Apple being thieves. Apple are thieving scum. They say Qualcomm is charging too much money. But for some reason, Apple's market price is close to $1 trillion and Qualcomm's below $100 billion. If it was a Qualcomm overcharging monopoly, the share prices would be reversed. Apple is the overcharging greedy monster. Except that I disagree that anyone is overcharging. People should just charge what the market will bear.
Tesla will probably be successful but that doesn't mean the market capitalisation should already be more than Ford, and General Motors, and many other car companies which sell umpty millions of cars including electric cars such as Prius, Leaf, Bolt, Volt and what have you.
Mqurice |
