“I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape kind of stupid. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on the warm side of Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me.”
I once worked in a pet store. We had a sign on a cage full of ferrets reading “do not stick your fingers through the bars, WE BITE.” Stupid people would routinely still do so, sometimes even moving the sign out of the way, and complaining that they had been bitten. All the booms and flashing lights will not stop stupid people, since they tend to believe that the signs, booms and flashing lights are for other people, not them.
But I am IN the galaxy. Wouldn’t, I dunno, math or something, make this impossible?
Not in the stupid galaxy, which obviously you would be in. Here’s your sign.
Just call it a derp ceiling and the Republicans will fight it.
Not certain if you realize but http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-PiKZ3Ikig is far worse in most instances than http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIVvlG6DycE. Most bridge tenders would prefer to see a single vehicle accident than sink a large vessel or completely destroy a major waterway crossing.
Opening a bridge at the correct time takes a lot of skill and ships don’t have brakes which can slow them. Once they are committed it hundreds of yards or even miles to stop them. Cars, on the other hand can stop in tens or hundreds of feet.
Most people are risk takers and they correctly presume that they won’t be called to task for the risks that they take. When they are, the odds are that they won’t be injured or killed for taking those risks so they lose concern about this ever occurring.
Like I said, in this case, I’m somewhat inclined to believe the driver was flustered and not flagrantly trying to be an asshole. Supreme brain fart. Lord knows, I’ve had occasions like that happen to me before. Not specifically in a car with a train crossing, but similar “how the fuck did you miss that?” occasions because I got frustrated or flustered and so tunnel-visioned that I missed the obvious.
The first time I saw the video, I just thought this guy was a self-centered dick and cheered the train on. Upon review and seeing that he was the guy who originally made the U-turn, I’ll allow for the possibility that he crossed the street, got pissed off/distracted by the dead end (or was already lost and intentionally pulled into the driveway to make a U-turn), pulled the U, and forgot/completely lost track (cough) of the traffic situation. That squares with the behavior towards the end of the video much better than someone intentionally trying to “beat the train.”
But I can go either way on this. In the original thread, I was quite a bit less forgiving. Either way, it’s stupidity.
This post actually proves the hypothesis. Isn’t that “something”?
Both bridges in my examples have PA systems where the bridge tender can warn vehicles, tell them to move forward, back, or get-the-hell-out-of-there. In neither case did they because they weren’t watching.
In the case of the car on the bridge as it was going up, once the bridge tender decided to look out the window to see what everyone was honking about, he stopped the bridge and lowered it, and was able to do so in spite of the ship passing underneath. Not all ships require a complete opening of this drawbridge to pass.
And your first link doesn’t work.
I must respectfully disagree - I don’t think the thought processes get much further than, “I got hurt doing that, therefore there must be some process put in place by other people to protect me from myself.” It never gets as far as, “I got hurt doing that, so maybe I shouldn’t do that any more.”
No it races right along to, "I git hurt, so I better try that again. And why don’t you try it too?
Several things:
[ol]
[li]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-PiKZ3Ikig[/li][li]**Again, a ship hitting the bridge is a far greater emergency than a car being stuck on the bridge.** - If you are unable to see why that is the case, then I’m not certain how much clearer I could make that.[/li][li]What exactly are loudspeakers going to do with a person in a car with their windows rolled up or who is panicking?[/li][li]How are loudspeakers going stop a person who has already decided to drive around a lowered crossing arm?[/li][/ol]
Fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because a ship is passing through a bridge doesn’t mean the bridge has to be opened all the way. In the Sturgeon Bay case with the car on the bridge, the ship passing was probably not a laker, but a small sailing ship that needed just a little more clearance than the closed bridge allowed. The bridge tender not only stopped the bridge from raising, but stopped it using a gradual-stop mode because he said if he had stopped it instantly, the car would have been thrown off and the driver could have been killed. So he had some leeway in this case. It might have been a different story if a large ore carrier had been going through.
And you are indeed right about the bad things that can happen if a ship hits a bridge. It happened here in 1960 and no one could cross the waterway for 6 weeks until they repaired the bridge.
You might want to ask the Wisconsin Dept. of Transportation, who has decided to allow remote control of 3 bridges from a central location, only 2 of which can be seen by a single operator without video assistance. Wis DOT says that the abundance of video cameras will make it safe (bridge operators aren’t so sure).
Experienced operators claim that they have had to use the PA/loudspeakers to tell pedestrians, some of which are tourists who do not speak English, to GET THE FUCK OFF THE BRIDGE BECAUSE IT’S GOING UP!
There’s only so much you can do when panic sets in.
In the case of the RV, the driver saw the lights, heard the bells, but had already passed the arms. Panic sets in…“Do I drive forward and run off the end of the drawbridge? I can’t back up because of traffic and the arms are blocking me, anyway…I’ll just stop here where it looks safe.”
Unfortunately the driver didn’t know about the bigass counterweight poised just above his head, and the bridge tender wasn’t watching, either. Crunch!! Not many RVs can survive a multi-ton block of concrete being slowly lowered on the cab.