I’ve planned international travel a week before and other trips far longer. A lot of what determines planning time is logistics of all going, if there are events during that time, holiday planning, and travel demand.

It sounds like the family friend is planning a big trip, so knowing before the one year hotel window is probably necessary.

The answer is slightly more complicated than that.

Part of the problem is that a lot of mass transit was built in the USA by private companies to make a profit. This went from trolley lines in small cities to large parts of the NYC Subway and almost all commuter and interciry rail.

Most mass transit systems ended up being built as loss leaders to develop suburban property. After the property was developed, the incentive to maintain mass transit dropped. Along with that, rail companies generally hated passenger service and preferred freight instead.

It eventually got to the point where the private company would collapse and there was little political will to maintain service. There was some lobbying done by auto companies, but a lot of it came from cities and states too cheap to make transit a public good with public funding.

Has Brazil offered to intervene?

Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.

“You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war”

And the city just humored him.

Harvard University is older than calculus.

I loved that Technology Connections video.

It is far worse than that.

Universities have a lot of metrics that they are judged against that don’t lead to a quality education. Research doesn’t lead to good undergraduate students. A good pass rate just means the curriculum is soft enough to keep don’t students from failing.

So you have university presidents who are incentivized to increase prestige and they aren’t going to focus on the quality of education because that doesn’t lead to better metrics. If presidents try to defend their universities’ way of teaching, they get replaced by those who follow the system.

This feels like spray painting “Trump 2024” on an evangelical church.

Liability insurance just becomes part of the cost.

A lot of consultants and contractors do the work for different governments. A reason why governments like this is that private companies find hiring and firing a lot easier. So, if a company performs poorly, it is really easy to fire them. In some cases, governments can also get individuals working for the consultant or contractor to stop working on that governments’ jobs, effectively firing them.

It can be a lot easier to get rid of a poorly performing consultant over a poorly performing government worker.

Calligraphy may be too fancy for day to day use. OP may want to look into how architects and drafters would write text. There are tons of guides online for it and that text is meant to be legible.

Governments don’t pay consultants to do work, but to leave when the work is done.

I wouldn’t say my parents were rich, but there was a safety net for them when I grew up. They meant my mom could go back to college when I was a kid and we didn’t have to worry about losing the house.

I would say that my family didn’t have to worry about the economic existential dread when bad things happened. I could also rely on my family having to invest in my education up to college because my parents would be shamed by extended family if I wasn’t getting my AP tests paid for.

I had to take on my college loans with a family cosigner on the understanding that I would bear that burden alone when I graduated. Since I went to school for engineering, it was considered a safe investment, which it is.

My income is such that I can live comfortably below my means, so I do. I still have to deal with the other hardships in life; I just don’t have to worry about it ruining me financially.

The two major benefits are that I can do important things without having to worry about financing them and I don’t feel guilt and dread over spending money. That said, it isn’t like all problems go away. A lot of problems are made easier, but they are still there.

Design:

The main constraints are geotechnical in nature. You need to conduct borings of the site and the material. It is expected that construction will be faster, so you can’t rely on slowly increasing the load to build up strength. Hopefully, it is found that the soil can take the load. If not, the soil would likely be injected with grout.

Rock removal and finishing:

This should be a lot easier since you can use modern masonry tools for this. Cutting and finishing should be rather quick; I expect a somewhat roughened surface to help with friction between stones.

Rock movement:

I expect a lot of use of cranes. Once the rock gets dislodged, it will likely have eye-bolts installed into it to help move it around with a crane. From there, cranes well likely move it on to and off of all trucks. There may be barges as well if the trucking costs are too high. On the site, there will be a lot of temporary roads for trucks to drive on, making it easy to bring the stones up to the final crane.

I expect the project to take at least two years from securing funding, probably more like three. The design is easy. The main issues are mobilization, funding, and logistics.

And they have not built their system with long term staging/replacement in mind. A lot of their shorter bridges don’t look like they are designed for staged maintenance. Also, the political will to build is different than the political will to maintain.

Just because it is illegal doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

No, but my job includes producing and verifying calculations.

We already deal with computer models, but there is a concept of “garbage in, garbage out” where the model is garbage because the inputter didn’t understand what to put in the model or even what model should be used.

So the modeling may be more efficient, but the budget gets blown in verification because the model is crap.

and it seems easier to focus on what other groups pay for those skills, which is not what I want.

The problem is that the skills have different worth and that said worth is different given the skill set. This isn’t what you want to hear, but cost to replace is a good metric for this. This includes the quality of the work.