Pipelines are incredibly vulnerable to being taken offline by an inexpensive long-range strike. You can't just put them in the middle of a war zone, especially when we (the US) have targeted that same type of infrastructure first.
Pipelines are usually buried under the ground. Pumping statins could be protected by short range SAM systems. An undegraund pipeline can be destroyed by a heavy glide bomd (not an option for Iran) but should be relatively safe from shahed drones. Iran's ballistic rockets are not precise enough to hit a pipeline wihtout spending multiple rockets (in which case it would be cheaper to repair the pipeline than to produce all these rockets).
sure, as the oil wells and the pumping stations and everything not underground, but right now there's not even an option to try. (also loss of a pipe section compared to the loss of a tanker is much better economically, easy to replace, not to mention that there's no loss of life, so ultimately it can bear more risk even if there's an active conflict.)
None of those have near the capacity to replace what was flowing through the Straight and will not replace the Straight for a long time. That's the whole problem.
If there were viable alternatives to the Straight, the US would have attacked Iran decades ago. Every US administration has had people in the wings desperate to "Fix" the Iran situation, but only Trump was stupid enough to try it.
Meanwhile, the actual production is meaningfully damaged, and for at least a couple years.
> The court ordered Levison to be fined $5,000 a day beginning 6 August until he handed over electronic copies of the keys. Two days later Levison handed over the keys hours after he shuttered Lavabit.
I remember that. That was around the time they were using the National Security Letter to make things happen that were clearly illegal. Now look at where we are at. They are using Nation Security reasoning for anything.
Ukraine also seems to have solved this pretty well. NFC in the plastic card, selfie video confirmation, etc.
Hungary is also rolling out a "digital citizenship" app. (Also can be bootstrapped via newer plastic cards, so no need to visit the government office.)
Brits also voted to leave the EU where they had the absurdly privileged position of picking (almost freely) which rules applies to them, while benefiting from others applying them fully.
...
Democracy is only as good as the people doing the voting, who are about as good (as the rules they don't protest againsts) and the content they consume, which is about as good as certain groups make it to be.
What's particularly amazing about Brexit is that many of its chief architects have not been shamed or exiled from society for spinning a yarn that fell apart when confronted with the smallest slither of reality. No, instead, the primary advocate may very well be our next prime minister.
A slither of reality sounds snaky... and I ended up googling it and Google AI convincingly says both that it exists and also that it is confused with "sliver of reality", and its examples of "slither of reality" point to pages that use "sliver" instead.
yes, so situational awareness is even more fundamental than communication
especially because people hired by people hired by people (....) hired by founders (or delegated by some board that's voted by successful business people) did not get there by being engineering minded.
and this is inconceivable for most engineering minded people!
they don't care because their world, their life, their problems and their solutions are completely devoid of that mindset.
some very convincing founder types try to imitate it, some dropouts who spent a few years around people who have this mindset can also imitate it for a while, but their for them it's just a thing like the government, history, or geography, it's just there, if there's a hill they just go around, they don't want to understand why it's there, what's there, what's under it, what geological processes formed it, why, how, how long it will be there ...
had the US had any real plan to empower the Gulf states against Iran there would already be backup routes
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