At 6:39am on Friday morning, the heavily trafficked Fern Hollow Bridge located in Pittsburgh’s East End collapsed with five cars and a bus on it, injuring 10 people. And because irony is real, President Biden was scheduled to arrive in Pittsburgh only hours after the splinter to promote, what else, the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that he recently signed into law.

The details: The Fern Hollow Bridge was built in 1970 and had received a “poor” rating in regular inspections from 2011–17, according to the National Bridge Inventory.

• 29 bridges in Pittsburgh are considered to be in poor condition and at least 53 have a poorly rated component.
• Kent Harries, a University of Pittsburgh engineering professor, told Public Source that just because a bridge gets a poor rating doesn’t mean it’s necessarily on the verge of collapse.

The Fern Hollow Bridge, for its part, was most recently inspected last September. The details of that inspection haven’t been released and the cause of the collapse is still being investigated (the bridge’s 2019 report mentioned problems with the deck and superstructure).

Pittsburgh’s 2022 budget contains only $7.25 million for bridge updates, and repairs are made on a “worst come, first served” basis. Two researchers estimated it would cost roughly $458 million to address every single bridge issue in the city famous for its bridges.

Biden told Air Force One, “Yinz gotta make a pit stop”

The president reshuffled his Pittsburgh itinerary to visit the site of the bridge collapse and speak with first responders and officials. He also used the occasion to tout the funds the infrastructure package would bring to cities like Pittsburgh for bridge upkeep and repairs.

• Under the law, more than $27 billion will be spent over the next five years fixing the 45,000+ bridges around the country that are currently rated in poor condition.
• “The idea that we’ve been so far behind on infrastructure for so many years, it’s mind boggling,” Biden said.

Administration officials said this program isn’t just for bridges about to bust—it will also hopefully encourage local governments to take on more lower-priority projects sooner.—MM

Warren Buffett once wrote, “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

That quote has become eerily autobiographical. Yesterday Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, made nearly $10 billion on its investment in Apple alone, whose stock it began buying in 2016. Apple shares jumped nearly 7% after it managed to sidestep the supply chain bottlenecks that have dogged competitors and report record quarterly revenue.

• Not known for his bets on the tech industry, Buffett has remained bullish on the iPhone maker, amassing a 5.4% stake and calling Apple “probably the best business I know in the world.”
• As Apple’s share price has skyrocketed over the years, Berkshire has returned nearly 5x its investment on Apple, as of earlier this month.

Buffett also showed this week that his commitment to companies in unsexy sectors can be prudent when markets get turbulent. Since the start of 2020, Berkshire Hathaway has outperformed Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF, a fund comprised of disruptive tech companies that’s collapsed over the past few months.

Looking ahead…after two years of going virtual due to the pandemic, Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, aka “Woodstock for Capitalists,” will be held in person on April 30. Book your flights to Omaha now.—NF

Autonomous car company Waymo is suing the California Department of Motor Vehicles over a request to share its fleet’s crash info with the public.

The Alphabet subsidiary is also demanding that the DMV keep under wraps how it responds when its vehicles—which have just-in-case drivers—experience emergencies, veer off course, and navigate steep hills and tight curves (aka all of San Francisco, where Waymos are almost as common as soup dumplings).

Waymo’s reasoning? These are “trade secrets” that would give its competitors, like GM’s Cruise, a leg up and releasing the intel would have a “chilling effect” on the entire industry because no one wants their proprietary tech put on blast.

Others, including the DMV, argue that the public should know more about their autonomous neighbors, especially since Waymo’s developed a bit of a track record: With 24 crashes, it accounted for the most autonomous-mode crashes in CA last year out of its peers (though no serious injuries or fatalities), Insider reports.

Looking ahead…expect more regulatory tussles as autonomous vehicles slowly but surely make their way onto city streets. Waymo tripled the size of its CA fleet last year and started testing vehicles in New York and New Jersey.—JW

Stat: Americans are not OK during the pandemic. According to the General Social Survey, the share of people who said they were “very happy” plunged from 31% in 2018 to 19% in 2021, while the share of people who were “not too happy” surged from 13% to 24%. Over the past few decades, the very happy people had outnumbered the not-too-happies by about three to-one.

Quote: “Over the past two years, we prioritized certain strategic projects that distracted us from the laser-focus we needed to have on our core business: scaling our beauty brand.”

Emily Weiss, founder and CEO of Glossier, told employees in a Wednesday email that the online beauty startup would be laying off over one-third of its corporate staff (about 80 employees). The brand that brought us “looking wet” as a makeup trend has grown to a valuation of more than $1 billion, but, “We also got ahead of ourselves on hiring,” Weiss wrote. “These missteps are on me.”

Read: Seven technologies to watch in 2022. (Nature)

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