Now i’m just recognising this might be a language issue: watercolour paints are a type of paint to paint with on paper using a brush dipped in water. If you ever seen kids paint with brushes and paper most likely they were using watercolour paint.

Even to this day many of our paint pigments are mined this way. Red/yellow ochre, umber, sienna.

If what you are asking is the dirt in question geologically speaking a soil? Sometimes, sometimes not. It can be a sediment or a regolith too. But in the more general laymen sense callig any dirt from the ground a soil is not too mistaken.

Technically this is not incompatible with the title. Just uses “can” in a different sense. The title would be using “can” in the “has the skill already”, while you use “can” in the “able to acquire the skill” sense.

It is not hard to imagine that most people when asked the question “can you juggle?” would answer in the negative. That’s what the article’s title describes. And then if those people, given sufficient motivation can learn to juggle that leads to your sentence. And they both can be true at the same time.

I agree that it would be nice to provide source for the claim though.

> The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.

That sounds very complicated. Actuators are expensive. Actuators which are strong enough to drill through stone are even more so. Having many of them per arm and many arms per machine sounds very expensive and also a maintenance nightmare. Look at a real world tunnel boring machine: they have a cutting head rotated around by a single electric motor and hydraulic jacks to keep the cutting head pressed against the formation. It is conceptually simple, even though of course real world constraints make it complicated in practice. You are proposing to replace that conceptual simplicity with something much much more complicated. It is not clear what benefit you are hoping to achieve with the complexity you are thinking of.

> tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate

How would that work in practice? Would people live in tunnels under a pristine forests? I’m not sure i understand your concept.

If the USA government had credible evidence that it is not so, they could have picked up the phone and presented their case to the other signatories. Or at least to their allies. Then once those countries were convinced that something is off they could have withdrawn together from the agreement. Would have less of a terrible optics than how it went down.

You think so? Then why did the US make it the condition of cease fire? Why did the US even agree to a cease fire? It is not like Iran is hurting the US mainland kinetically.

> The oil was already flowing. So I think we can reasonably rule that out as an objective.

Sometimes you have a thing and you don’t appreciate how important it is for you until you don’t have it anymore.

Use your mind and develop an opinion. I read the article too, i’m just disagreeing with it.

> visibility

There are two kinds of visibility to be had. Not knowing where the tunnel is, and not knowing who and when passes in it.

Cut and cover doesn’t help with the first kind of visibility. Disturbed vegetation and soil will reveal your tunnel’s path to even a senile adversary. One who somehow missed your whole construction. If you just want to hide your movements and somehow you have the budget for hundreds of miles of prefab concrete tunnel you can hide inside it without it being burried.

> susceptibility to attack

Undoubtedly burrying the precast concrete segments under dirt makes it harder to attack, but it won’t make it impenetrable. And once the enemy cracked it the whole tunnel becomes useless for transportation. On the surface you can just buldozer a way around the damage and keep on trucking. Underground you need to excavate, re-line with precast concrete and cover again, under enemy fire.

> TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce

I think they could have just left the mention of cut and cover out and the article would have been stronger for it.

I bet. Do they recommend cut and cover highways in contested environments? Or do they recommend shooting back until the area is no longer contested? (Which you practically have to do anyway to build the cut and cover tunnel in the first place.)

I don’t doubt that it is a good idea to cover with earth C&C bunkers and launchers and such. But those are point installations. Miles and miles of tunnels used for logistics are lines. They scale very differently.

If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?

Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?

Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?

And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?

I’m sure that is true. And yet, the oil is not flowing. We keep “winning” like this for a few more weeks/months and we lose. Not because we sudenly stop “blowing targets the fuck up”, but because we cripple our economies.

There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.

Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.

Depends on what you mean by “orbital weapons”. I assume you are not thinking of the sidearms of astronauts, or anti-satelite satelites.

If you are thinking about nukes pre-positioned in space then the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space. And this is not just paper prohibition. The reality of space based nukes is that the time between deorbiting and touch-down is so short that nuclear armed states would treat their launch (the time when they are placed into orbit) as an attack and launch in retaliation against the launching country.

Basically if you try to sneak them into orbit and the enemy finds out about them you will be anihilated. This is just simple MAD doctrine. So the strategic balance which is preventing you from launching your ground based warheads is the same which is preventing you from launching your future space based warheads into orbit.

> Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.

I wouldn’t assume that you or me would learn about it. But it is almost given that the peer nations would figure it out. They spend considerable resources trying to figure out if you are doing this. And then they get MAD and your country is no more.

It could be free if we imagine some crazy advances in autonomous self-replicating spacecrafts. But by then we live in the post-scarcity diamond age probably.

Ships had their AIS on before the war, and will turn it on again once they left the area. So we can just filter for ships which previously reported a location in the Persian Gulf, and now are reporting outside of it. Similarly we can count ships which were outside of the Gulf and now are inside. We don’t need the AIS to be on while they are transiting.

Okay. Tell me, what did the US got? You say they got what they wanted. What is that they wanted and now got?

Here is where we disagree. And i think this is the only point which matters.

I agree with you that the US always had the ability to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure. I agree with you that doing so would cause catastrophic economic damage, civilian unrest, regime overthrow etc. It would seriously disrupt their nuclear program for sure.

What it wouldn’t do is reopen the strait. As long as some ships pay the toll those monies can be used to pay the “warfighters” and their weapons. It is relatively cheap to do so. Ukraine demonstrated this with their unmanned surface vessels. This they can do even if the whole hinterland of Iran is in flames and turmoil.

In fact the more their economy collapses the more lucrative this coastal piracy “business” relatively to other opportunities becomes. People who “before the bombing” had better things to do will find that shaking down foreign ships is still doable “after the bombing”. Some of it will be out of ideology and hate for sure, destroying all the civilian infra of a country tends to whip up emotions in people. But fundamentally they can keep doing it because it is a business which pays.

And regime overthrow won’t help with this either. In the absence of a strong central coordinating force you might get multiple separate pirate outfits camping at different parts of the coast trying to take tolls. That obviously wouldn’t improve their economic success, but would increase chaos and hinder transportation even more.

In short while the USA could destroy Iran as a nation, doing so would not eliminate the threat to shipping in the region.

And we are arguing that private contracts like this should not be enforceable.

> we have decided

I have not been consulted on this matter.

Yes. In fact i remember hearing about a gym which offered a flat-rate pricing model but explicitly excluded certain professions from partaking in it. I remember the deal was excluding police, bouncers, models, actors and air stewardesses. They had a separate more costly tier for these people. (And I think i heard about it from the indignation the deal has caused online.)