scythe

Our road-building has slowed dramatically since the 1980s. The Interstate Highway network would be much more expensive and slow to build today.

>If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots.

Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. Access to the island/town is through two two-lane roads that get backed up to a standstill every night. There's a running "joke" about how everyone is going to die if there's a major hurricane.

Well, this is part of it. The other issue is that the superconducting phase diagram has two limits: the transition temperature Tc and the upper critical magnetic field Hc. The magnetic field limit is generally highest at absolute zero and drops steeply with temperature. Even for the superconductors with Tc as high as 120 K the Hc at 20 K will be much less than the Hc at 4 K. So in order to make powerful superconducting magnets you need helium regardless of what superconductor you use, since nothing has broken this pattern.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/what-us-iran-isra...

>Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced the ceasefire between Iran and the United States on X, saying the two sides agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon, where Israel launched strikes.

This suggests that either the Americans are lying or they did not read the agreement carefully before signing. Either way I don't think it's a good look for the United States.

The US has plenty of ability to force Israel to stop its invasion of Lebanon and it has done similar things twice before by economic means. All parties to the agreement are aware of this.

What I said was that anyone who wants their country to meet the fate of other countries the US has attempted to regime change is morally compromised. Simply hoping that the Islamic regime will go away is completely rational. Knowing that it will definitely fail and wanting to try it anyway is insanity.

And the diaspora fools cheering for more bombs and destruction are also in armchairs. They have no sympathy from me.

>Hoping foreign power can help overthrow the domestic lord is nothing new. That’s literally how the U.S. gained its independence with French military assistance.

Not regime change, a rebellion.

>And to your point, US interventions saved South Korea, Kuwait, Grenada, Bosnia, in addition to Panama.

South Korea was a response to invasion, Kuwait was a response to invasion, Grenada was a coup (response to a coup — edge case because the end state was much easier to define and also the country is minuscule), Bosnia was a rebellion. None of these are regime change.

>Kurds in Iraq can attest to this.

Also a rebellion. You might want to recheck the criteria.

>We don’t know how Iraq and Venezuela will turn out in the current timeline either.

23 years of civil war is too many. You can't just say "well eventually it worked out", that could justify anything. Other dictatorships have ended faster without violence. Venezuela was not a real regime change war because a deal was made with the VP before the invasion and also the Bolivarians are still in power.

Most of them realized their mistake:

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/04/01/...

Iranians hoping that war and death will save them are chasing a gruesome mirage. The US has successfully liberated exactly one country by regime change since 1945: Panama in 1989. Every other intervention has either supported a rebellion (secession) instead of a revolution, or it has ended in failure (Afghanistan, Vietnam, Somalia) or a prolonged civil war (Iraq, Libya, Yemen). Anyone hoping for such a fate to befall their own country is morally compromised.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa...

It isn't central to the discussion. The appearance of corruption is clear; nailing down the culprit is difficult. It isn't reasonable to expect people to have a theory of corruption in order to complain about it.

>Otherwise this is just generic conspiratorial thinking

The perception of corruption is not a conspiracy theory. Corruption is an ordinary financially motivated crime, while conspiracy theories usually involve some kind of grandiose or mystical objective ("new world order").

Anyway, the question is moot because the only possible answer is "the regulatory authorities". We know who makes the rules! I just didn't want to tolerate this kind of fallacious nitpicking.

There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this pattern is used to imply the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct themselves. She doesn't need to know who built the bridge.

The number of shoplifting incidents is also a weak metric. Most shoplifting is not of serious economic concern. The problem is with repeat offenders and those doing it for profit. The value of merchandise lost is a much better metric but stores may be reluctant to share this due to concerns about insurance rates and public perception.

Crime statistics are very hard. And state capacity is declining, sadly. We can't expect bloggers to pick up the slack.

There is plenty of room for improvement in cement production. I'm not sure exactly how to apply AI to it but I guess I was hoping for more than this. If we are going to have the infrastructure renaissance that keeps being talked up by reformists of various stripes, we need more cement.

South America is also a surprising laggard in cement production, which is odd considering they have the materials and they need the roads. I think that environmental concerns and a continental aversion to coal might contribute.

I don't think that the urbanist movement can succeed if it is driven by policy wonks who want to throw out the rulebook and impose reforms from the ivory tower without a real small-d democratic political strategy. Many of us are used to fighting the political battle against climate change by being Absolutely Correct and expecting that Science with her indefatigable armies of Reality will guard the flanks. A fully economic fight like this one just doesn't have the same kind of inevitability. Every step forward on the ground weakens the sense of urgency in the legislature, leading to an equilibrium trap without a vigorous political movement that can hold momentum.

Nerds do not usually want to do politics, but in housing you have to do politics.

Israel I think is similar to Costa Rica in that whatever problems Israelis have, they look around at their neighbors and realize how much worse it could be.

– Georgi Arbatov, Soviet political scientist, 1988

>The attacks, seen in videos circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times, appeared to be the first on Iran’s energy infrastructure since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran last weekend.

The first interaction of radiation with tissue is usually this:

H2O + ħv >> H2O+ + e- (fugitive)

The radical ion H2O+ is extremely reactive and usually protonates another water molecule immediately:

H2O+ + H2O >> H3O+ + OH*

The hydroxyl radical has a half life of about a nanosecond and will usually be the main "reagent", diffusing until it runs into an organic molecule which will be oxidized and thus degraded. At high enough dose rates, the peak concentration of hydroxyl radicals and more stable radicals like superoxide could be much higher, leading to "nonlinear" effects, i.e. byproducts of multiple radicals interacting with each other or a protein.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00697-z

The advantage, I think, of age verification by private companies over cellphone bans in public schools is that cellphone bans appear as a line-item on the government balance sheet, whereas the costs of age verification are diffuse and difficult to calculate. It's actually quite common for governments to prefer imposing costs in ways that make it easier for the legislators to throw up their hands and whistle innocently about why everything just got more expensive and difficult.

And the argument over age verification for merely viewing websites, which is technically difficult and invasive, muddles the waters over the question of age verification for social media profiles, where underage users are more likely to get caught and banned by simple observation. The latter system has already existed for decades -- I remember kids getting banned for admitting they were under 13 on videogame forums in the '00s all the time. It seems like technology has caused people to believe that the law has to be perfectly enforceable in order to be any good, but that isn't historically how the law has worked -- it is possible for most crimes to go unsolved and yet most criminals get caught. If we are going to preserve individual privacy and due process, we need to be willing to design imperfect systems.