sh00g

Seltzer water 99% of the time. Ski otherwise!

1. For the first few years of my career after college which has a pretty generous 401k company matching scheme I put the maximum amount possible into my retirement accounts and lived well within my means to build up a nest egg. Now that I am married I have dialed back my investments so we can afford to live a little bit nicer with the knowledge that we have a really great start in our retirement accounts.

2. My wife and I moved in together two years before getting married. This made living substantially cheaper for both of us and made us positive that we wanted to live together and could tolerate each other prior to tying the knot :).

3. I got a vasectomy mid-last year. My wife and I both agreed long before marriage that we only want to adopt. Adoption is obviously very expensive, but now we have the peace of mind of knowing we have full control over when we start to invest in that process to expand our family. No “accidents” can happen which is very liberating.

The entire purpose of engineering as a field is to use outside of the box methodology to solve problems. Creativity is a crucial skill for good engineers. The idea that those two skill sets are mutually exclusive is wrong.

No thanks. One party already does everything it can to disenfranchise voters across the country. I think I’ll stick with the pro-Democracy side of the equation.

This is one of the most commonly touted engineering myths that simply doesn’t hold up to even a brief analysis. The first glaring problem is the inherent survivorship bias behind claiming Roman concrete was objectively better than modern concrete. As other users have already mentioned, modern concrete is actually very strong and exceeds the strength of Roman concrete when such strength is required, but where it really has an advantage is in its consistency.

If every concrete structure built in Rome was still standing and in good shape to this day, engineers would be salivating over the special blend and would be doing whatever they could to get their hands on it or replicate it. But we don’t see that. We see the Roman concrete structures that have survived the test of time (so far), not the myriad structures that have not. Today’s concrete on the contrary is deliberately consistent in chemistry, meaning even if it typically isn’t designed to last hundreds of years, you can say with a great deal of confidence that it will last at least X years, and all of it will likely exhibit similar wear and strength degradation behaviors over that same duration.

There are other factors at play too:

1. Romans didn’t use steel reinforcing re-bar, instead opting for massive lump sins of concrete to build structures. These massive piles are better against wear and porosity-related degradation, especially due to the self-healing properties of the Roman concrete blend due to volcanic ash helping to stop crack propagation.
2. Our modern concrete structures are much, much larger in many cases and/or are under significantly higher loads. Take roads for example—no Roman road was ever under the continued duress of having hundreds of 18 wheelers a day rumble over them.
3. Our modern concrete structures do things that would have been considered witchcraft to a Roman civil engineer. Consider the width of unsupported spans on modern concrete bridges compared to the tightly packed archways of Roman aqueducts.

None of this is to detract from Roman ingenuity, but to make the claim that Roman concrete was objectively better than what we have today is farcical.