161–170 of 216 posts
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I get that it is neat but it's hardly the Hoover dam is it?
No, it's significantly more complex.
The water systems for LA and San Francisco are really quite audacious even if they have less technical complexity than floating rail.
I've built ML systems way more complex than any of these but it's still way less ambitious and audacious.
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> No, it's not an insane engineering achievement. It's just a normal one, because nobody else has floating bridges, nobody else needed it. It's also years late and costs 10x more than it should. Your other points aside - Doing something no one else has ever done is the definition of an engineering achievement. There isn't a set of best practices. There aren't a bunch of off the shelf parts, there aren't any contracto…
I said it was, just not an "insane" one. It's not the Hoover Dam. Trains get on to boats all the time. It's innovation. Oh yeah, and we hamstring ourselves because every extra property can only be used for "affordable" housing and we paid top dollar for it, then limit how much it can be used and tie up prime property which could have been used for more purposes. Gee, why is everything so expensive!?
Yeah everything surrounding what sound transit was forced to do with their finances sucks, which is why I have a lot of sympathy for the people trying to run ST and maintain its budget.
Everyone complains ST is bleeding money but the voters passed the laws forcing the finances to be terrible.
But every time I post that Seattle needs to dramatic loosen up building restrictions, it pisses everyone off.
Everytime I say things like "we should just do what cities running a good budget and that have affordable housing are doing" people get upset.
The curse of being an engineer. "Do the thing that makes the numbers work out" is rarely a popular opinion.
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> I'm wondering why california isn't investing in more desalination for SoCal, especially for LA. Because California has plenty of water for residents. What California doesn't have is plenty of water for agribusiness. And the agribusinesses do NOT want people paying close attention as all the valid solutions to water problems are basically "shut down agribusinesses in arid areas".
people are always trying to conserve water, and droughts have been a plague for the past few decades. Even if the agriculture is taking up all the water, it doesn't change how water scarcity is a a very real part of socal life. You don't have to shutdown agriculture elsewhere, and it is a vital part of california's economy, that's just a lazy solution. I can get behind getting the agriculture industry to finance part…
Agribusiness is under 2% of the California economy and an even smaller employer. You could wipe it completely out and the state would barely notice.
And nobody is saying to wipe out actual food production. Mostly people want to stomp on things like growing and exporting alfalfa (which is effectively exporting water for all intents and purposes).
> droughts have been a plague for the past few decades
Droughts have been a plague forever. Quoting Steinbeck from East of Eden:
“During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
Sometimes it feels like the US has lost its appetite for grand structural projects like that. Maybe it’s just that I’m unaware of them and that impression is the result of survival bias, but given how impossibly hard it is to just build anything where I live (Seattle), I’m not so sure.
Sometimes it feels like the US has lost its appetite for grand structural projects like that. Maybe it’s just that I’m unaware of them and that impression is the result of survival bias, but given how impossibly hard it is to just build anything where I live (Seattle), I’m not so sure.
Seattle just got done building light rail tracks over a floating bridge. It is an insane engineering achievement. A train literally running on tracks on a road that is floating on water!
Of course those were first built in the 19th century.
Is it really considered the Cascades all the way down near LA? I thought the mountains down there were the Sierra Nevada? Did Grady just get that detail wrong, or am I wrong in thinking that the Cascades stops in Northern California?
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There are environmental and financial concerns https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/05/california-desali... I don't understand the financial concern at all. How could increasing the water supply increase the price? It only makes sense to me if the price is artificially low right now. Environmental damage by a desalinization plant couldn't possibly be worse than overdrawing the acquifer -- the defacto solution.
As part of the contract for construction, the county or city must buy a certain amount of water every year. Because desalination is not economically feasible, the water is more expensive and this extra subsidy raises the cost of the water bill. This is how it works for the facility in San Diego County. Building a desalination facility is economically hard to justify because the break-even point seems far away. It als…
Being from LA, I am used to a water system that works without needing power. I think most of CA is like that. It was a surprise to lose the water back east when the power went out during a storm.
The LA water system is dependent on power as a whole. There’s many pumping stations along the various aqueducts.
Another nitpick is that California's various aqueducts are net producers of electricity (i.e., after accounting for pumping), so, while some of them do rely on electricity, they do not require an external source of power to operate.