The asphalt pavement of roads must be 4 inches thick to last forever. 3 inches lasts 5 years, 2 inches lasts one year, 1 inch is crumbling before you finish. You constantly see crumbling roads in the third world because of corruption, they don't put as much pavement down as they charge for.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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Now that’s a concrete fact
An asphalt fact, rather. Asphalt facts have lower modulus, so they are more adaptable to the point of the conversation.
Mitigating actions are celebrated, while preventative measures are ignored, or even mocked as unnecessary.
Adding an extra lane to a congested road will always cause that road to be more congested, and will also increase traffic on nearby roads.
When China removed a highway, it reduced car traffic thought the entire city while not reducing the number of people travelling to and around the city.
The only solution to car traffic is viable alternatives to driving.
Tangential but nobody seems to know how to drive in traffic. Pick a lane and stay in it, leave extra following distance, and try to change speed as smoothly as possible. If everyone did these three things, traffic congestion would be significantly less severe.
Don't forget zipper merging. I lived in an area where hundreds of hours spent commuting allowed me to observe the inability to merge was the primary driver of freeway congestion.
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Probably not always. You build a 12 lane road entirely within a random small town, and it will stay empty and stupid. But, in the range of what actually might be built, yes, there's pretty strong empirical evidence that cars fill any available space.
Which this actually isn't a straight example of, exactly. Jevon's paradox says more and better roads will mean more cars operating, not less. That happens, but in this case the increase is so great, that it leads to the same level of congestion on the roads all over again.
The wiki uses the example of coal. Better boilers and engines increased the use of coal, but it's fair to say industrial Europe had better coal powered equipment afterwards, not the same or worse. (Although, to be fair, congestion is only one metric of traffic performance)
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This is definitely not always true. They added a lane in my city a few years ago and my commute went from 45 minutes to 30 minutes.
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You need to test your restore procedure all the way through & periodically to have confidence in your backups
The borders between countries in the Middle East including India/Pakistan were deliberately drawn to cause conflict. Of course when that conflict started to come back home everyone was shocked pikachu faced about it. I really don't understand why people of those countries don't just throw away the map and sort it out amongst themselves like adults, but I guess expecting world leaders of a majority of countries to act like adults is a bit much to ask most of the time.
kashmere, and northern india/bordering china. one wants the whole terrority the other wants the same, a pretense to expand later on.
The people designing and building large machinery and cars dont ever have to maintain them
Among many other reasons, the biggest reason for me that the US stock market cannot be trusted is because market makers combine 3 techniques to create fraud and push risk to others to dilute unwitting companies and investors: borrow stocks, selling a borrowed stock to buy later, strategically failing to deliver stock.
Borrowing stocks doesn’t create a clean paper trail, can be done repeatedly, and steals shareholder votes.
Selling a borrowed stock to buy later can strategically intend to fail from the start where they don’t even have to locate (not even acquire as you might assume) a share to borrow, effectively creating new shares out of thin air. Market makers in the US can legally do this, even for the benefit of their hedge fund counterparts (sometimes under the same company).
Fails for stock delivery are allowed, so they’re a strategy. Cash in lieu is not the same as share ownership. Cash is fungible, stocks are not, and this gap can create technically infinite risk.
Your infinite risk is my infinite gain 🍌
Nah, the stock markets were fixed in 2008!
They created dark pools.
But in seriousness this unrealistic playground should be completely separated from real economics and fucks everything up.
Inheritance.
Lol what
He's obviously talking about the book series by Christopher Paolini.
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Mechanisms are technical. And the fact that some will claim this isn't a fact is actively obscuring it.
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money is credit ( debt )
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