{"id":199403,"date":"2007-08-02T05:05:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-02T10:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/08\/02\/eating-our-seed-corn-the-minnesota-bridge-collapse\/"},"modified":"2007-08-02T05:05:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-02T10:05:00","slug":"eating-our-seed-corn-the-minnesota-bridge-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/08\/02\/eating-our-seed-corn-the-minnesota-bridge-collapse\/","title":{"rendered":"Eating Our Seed Corn: The Minnesota Bridge Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In staring at the rubble that was a bridge on CNN today, the question is &#8220;why?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Speaking strictly as an engineer, I can say that there was either a point load, or a tensile load (the strength of ceramics over time in tension is zero) leading to a failure.<\/p>\n<p>That misses the big picture.<\/p>\n<p>The big picture is that at least since the 1970s, the United States has created prosperity, or the illusion of prosperity, through eating its seed corn.<\/p>\n<p>Eating one&#8217;s seed corn is a metaphor.  It refers to a farmer eating seed that is reserved for planting the next year.  It feeds his belly now, but creates a disaster the next season.<\/p>\n<p>Through the systematic dismantling of protections on things workers rights and speculative investments, along with literally running infrastructure constructed over 40 years ago into the ground, we have created a little pop.<\/p>\n<p>Things seem fine, but at some point, the poper must be paid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In staring at the rubble that was a bridge on CNN today, the question is &#8220;why?&#8221; Speaking strictly as an engineer, I can say that there was either a point load, or a tensile load (the strength of ceramics over time in tension is zero) leading to a failure. That misses the big picture. The &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,973,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-economy","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199403"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}