One thing to note and I guess might be a bit of the puzzle is that the data clearly indicates that trans-gendered men have lower upper and lower body strength compared to cis-men, while the opposite scenario (transwomen compared to cisgender women) appears much less conclusive.

The trans-women vs cis-gender strength effects are heavily influenced by a single study. There are only 7 studies for upper body strength, 5 of which lean towards showing greater trans-women strength, 1 that leans towards reduced, and 1 (Alvares 2025) which clearly indicates reduced strength. Similarly for lower body strength there are only 4 studies with a similar pattern (once again, the Alvares 2025 producing the clearest TW weaker than CW effect).

The Alvares 2025 study compares amateur volleyball players. There are 7 trans women in that study versus 8 cis-gender women. Average hours per week of activity (or volleyball? Unclear, I'm working off the meta-review's summary table) is 4 for TW and 14 for CW. Average age is 30 (28-33) for TW and 26 (22-29) for CW.

I don't think that makes the Alvares study useless, but I do feel that it's deeply limited. 4 hours vs 14 hours a week is a pretty big difference in activity level.

The paper (https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/250) is about quantifying the environmental impact of material losses that happen in a typical scenario, including a single full recycle (as opposed to reuse).

The paper relies heavily on another paper (https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/250) for estimates of upstream material losses. That paper attempted to quantify production stage losses from raw fiber, into fabric, and then into apparel by surveying factories in Bangladesh for their mass input/outputs for different production stages.

The Army Corps of Engineers has its prominent civil engineering role because early America did not have a lot of federal resources and was born from war. So when the Federal government decided it wanted to take on large scale civil engineering works, the only ready to go resource at hand were the military engineers. And then afterwards, it's pretty much been inertia.

The Army Corps of Engineers civil works division is basically almost completely staffed by civilians. So there's a convoluted top level organization, but on the ground, it's not like they have soldiers and military engineers building levees.

Congressional Research Service report: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48322

It includes a section about discussions on transferring civil works responsibility out of DoD.

https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru...

https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ord...

Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:

* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."

* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."

In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.

I think the author's fear would be that we currently live in an informational vortex that threatens to destabilize and consume our democracies and societies, and remove even the possibility of a fair and predictable state.

And I would argue that that is hardly an outlandish fear. It's barely an extrapolation at all.

All other things equal, range varies proportionately with efficiency. Ie, if you have 500km range at 50% overall efficiency, then at 65% overall efficiency, you have 650km range.

Thermodynamic efficiency (which is what turbine blades enable) has increased from ~30 to 55% over the last 50-60 years. The book estimates that the practical limit of for thermodynamic efficiency is in the 65-70% range.

UNCLOS permits any country to intervene in case of piracy. Because piracy attacks the public good of assured, consistent, low cost maritime transit and commerce (which the entire developed world is addicted to), and successful piracy begets piracy, there are a lot of countries with a lot of resources deeply interested with intervening.

These types of actions are not perfect, they cannot stop everything, so you still see successful attacks happen.

And no one wants to try to intervene in Somalia itself. The world tried that in the 90s and got completely burned.

So the answer is that "other countries are not allowing it" in the same way that no country allows murder, and yet it still happens.

1. Because the Europeans wanted them there. NATO was a big security blanket, and certainly since the end of the cold war, up to say... 2014, America -wanted- a compliant Europe.

2. Because Europe is an amazing springboard into the middle east, and America just can't help but get itself involved in dropping bombs on the middle east.

1 ties into 2. A compliant Europe is less likely to raise objections to being used as a forward base for bombing Iraqis and Iranians. It's only in the last 10-15 years that the US realized that perhaps it was/had squandered it's lead to China, and dropped the ball (Europe at fault too) on properly containing (or addressing) Russia, and it would sure be nice if it could focus on the Pacific.

The US currently has 2 BCTs "fully" in Germany. The 2nd Cav Regiment (a Stryker unit.. so infantry mounted on 8x8 APCs) and an Armoured BCT on 9 month rotation (so tanks and IFVs).

There have been a bunch of studies indicating that the rotational ABCT costs more than even a truly forward deployed ABCT. My bet is that it's the ABCT that is going to get withdrawn. It's both the flashier unit, and likely has the highest impact on freeing up money. This also lines up with the withdrawal timelines... since the unit is rotational, they just need to wait for the end of rotation, and just... not send another. Much less disruption.

While the timing was obviously conjunction with current events, this draw down was likely to happen at some point in this term, even in absence of Iran things. Trump literally tried to do this at the end of his last term.

~50% gasoline, ~25-30% diesel.

Ukrainian drone capabilities in the near battlefield (up to ~20-30km deep) are also not contested. Russian milbloggers will openly talk about the difficulty of massing and movement in that area due to the saturation of drone coverage (and btw, this challenge is more or less symmetric).

So the article is not likely exaggerating any of their capabilities. However, it is exaggerating via omission.

In terms of deep strikes, the question is what the success rate of these missions are, what cadence can they sustain, what's the constellation of Russian lapses that have to line up for a successful strike, etc.

Another known area of weakness (that the Ukrianians are working hard on) is the middle range. How to strike quickly at targets of opportunity in the 50-500km range field. This was/is a capability that things like GMLRS and ATACMS provided, but I imagine the Ukraine is forced to ration those munitions carefully.

https://runrepeat.com/adidas-adizero-adios-pro-evo-3