Straightfowardly, no, it couldn’t be. Bridge construction on this scale isn’t just a matter of throwing money or people at the problem. Like the old saw that says you can’t get nine women to make a baby in one month, a 1200’ span takes time. Foundations have to be built below water, piers have to be formed and given time to achieve design concrete strength, and each bridge segment has to be completed in sequence, including formwork, rebar, concrete pouring and setting, etc., in a careful sequence that keeps the cantilevered sections of the bridge in balance.

The US is no paragon of speedy infrastructure projects, but even in China cable-stayed concrete bridges are years-long projects. The Changtai Yangtze River Bridge, for instance, has spans similar to the Francis Scott Key bridge and it took fully 6 years from start of construction to completion, never mind design time.

Not to mention the choice of Toyota here makes this especially silly. The used market for body-on-frame Toyotas has been so far out of whack for so long that back when you could still get 0% dealer financing it was often cheaper to buy new than used after you factored in interest rates.

That’s the trillion-Euro question, and the answer so far is “between 15 years and never,” but some researchers have said they are seeing early signs of the current weakening. It’s a controversial topic in climate research, but it’s one of lose “low probability, high impact” events that can’t be safely ignored.

Well, I maybe have good news for this person… AMOC collapse is an anticipated effect of global warming and it would paradoxically make it much, much colder in Ireland. As in “Ice Age” colder.

I heard the cop they sent to go undercover and bust him had too much fun at Race Wars.

Disagree. The GOP was radicalized from the inside via the Tea Party wave of 2010, and while there’s little of value to have come out of that there’s a lesson on how to execute a sort of internal coup within the party system, instead of looking to third parties that are doomed in a FPtP system like America’s or hoping the Democratic establishment “learns their lesson” from a hopefully-brief, violent interlude of fascism. Progressives tried like one-and-a-half times to do things top-down with Bernie and then decided to wash their hands of the whole party, rather than doing to work to elect grassroots progressive candidates like AOC and Mamdani from the ground up, build a bench, and change the fundamentals of the conversation within the Democratic caucus and national apparatus.

The silver lining of what’s happened is that there are finally exciting, charismatic progressive candidates making inroads as the current party establishment twists and fumbles and (probably just importantly) primary voters stop selecting for the status quo and lowest-common-denominator “bipartisan” appeal, but my fear is that it may be too little and too late to stop the disaster.

The problem comes when you’re weighing a protest vote/no-vote against milquetoast corporate centrism, and the outcome should that protest vote sway the election is that the Slavering Fascist Apocalypse-Makers sweep into power, turn any future elections into tightly-controlled farces, and then begin a sweeping range of internal and external pogroms. Voting for the corporate centrists sucks, but from a standpoint of harm reduction it’s the only viable choice. A bunch of people stayed home in 2024 on the logic that by doing so they’d send a message to the Democrats, and as a result America might lose its democracy entirely.

The protest vote logic 100% works when the opposing side isn’t ready to kill you given half a chance, but the American right clearly is, and has been for the last decade, and now the most vulnerable are in the literal and metaphorical crosshairs. You could make an accelerationist argument, that what we can build back up from the wreckage of what’s to come will be better for all (and it might well be!) but history tell us that’s no guarantee – and even then, you have to answer for those who won’t live to see the better days to come, or who will suffer greatly against their will in the process.

There’s a series of photos from a wildlife photographer that are essentially selfies of him with a litter of cheetah cubs that the mother cheetah literally dropped in his lap while she went to go hunt. It’s been theorized that the only reason cheetahs have never been domesticated is that that they’re very difficult to breed in captivity.

I think Gen X went from “invisible” to “the enemy” in a lot of folks’ minds when exit polling showed that they broke for Trump in 2024 by a greater margin than any other age group. Before that point most millennials just knew them as their cool older cousins, whose childhood was shrouded in a warm haze of half-remembered, half-imagined 80s nostalgia.

Madison’s thread detailing the whole thing is available here if you want to refresh your memory, but the TLDR is that, at least as of 2-3 years ago, LTT maintained a sweatshop production pace, was a hostile workplace in several dimensions, and executed a rugpull on Madison in terms of permitting and supporting her independent efforts in a way that created a practically textbook claim of promissory estoppel.

In the wake of the blowup, Linus and LTT more generally did make a lot of appropriately sorrowful noises and promised to do better, and I suppose it’s possible that they have done so, but I don’t really consume their content and TBH haven’t bothered to check.

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.