hvac

Food for thought. Iran Is Not Winning. It Is Unraveling. The prevailing narrative on Iran has it almost perfectly reversed. We are told that Tehran is winning a war of wills in the Gulf and that Donald Trump is gambling recklessly with the world’s most sensitive chokepoint. In reality, Iran is not consolidating strength; it is managing decline. And Trump’s play on the Strait of Hormuz has quietly forced energy markets to reprice security—tilting the balance decisively toward the Americas, and away from Europe, Asia and China. The Islamic Republic no longer resembles a confident revolutionary project. With the old clerical core leadership shattered, power has splintered between a camp that recognises a deal with the outside world as the only path to survival and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a class of military dictators with guns, patronage networks and a rational fear that any genuine settlement will ultimately throw them overboard. This is not a unified strategy at work; it’s infighting, paranoia, a fragmented system in late-stage decay, crumbling under pressure. Into this fragmentation, the White House has introduced a form of calibrated coercion too often caricatured as impulsive. Around the Strait of Hormuz, Washington has threatened disruption without fully triggering it, forcing shipowners, insurers and policymakers to absorb a hard truth: dependence on vulnerable, seaborne Middle Eastern barrels is not a passing inconvenience but a structural risk. Iran can harass tankers and jolt day-to-day sentiment; it cannot rebuild a broken economy on sporadic shocks to global shipping. And the world must deal with the end of Pax Americana! The underlying playbook is anything but novel. Sun Tzu’s insistence that “all warfare is based on deception”, Machiavelli’s counsel that a ruler must manipulate appearances and exploit factionalism, and Alfred Thayer Mahan’s argument that sea power and control of chokepoints shape the fate of nations are not museum pieces. They are, in this case, the operating code. Trump’s opaque signalling, deliberate use of disinformation and visible but limited naval posture in and around Hormuz amount to a modern, Mahanian use of sea power as economic statecraft. Energy markets are already adjusting. Tankers are head to the Gulf of America. In a world where a single strait can a risk to economies is Europe and Asia, without ever being fully closed, assets tied to secure basins and diversified export routes deserve a premium. The Americas sit in an enviable position: vast, politically stable hydrocarbon resources, multiple pipelines and ports, and no dependence on a distant maritime chokepoint controlled by adversaries. By contrast, Europe, much of Asia and China find themselves downstream of vulnerabilities they do not control and regimes they cannot stabilise, exposed to shipping routes that can be threatened faster than alternative supply can be mobilised. All of this plays out against a domestic backdrop in Iran that looks less like revolutionary vigour and more like fear. A state that cannot safely keep its internet on, that must rely on public brutality to deter dissent, is not projecting confidence. It is signalling weakness, to its own citizens as much as to its rivals. Winston Churchill once remarked that “in war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill.” Iran’s leadership offers only defiance, without realistic prospects of victory or peace. The uncomfortable conclusion for those still insisting that Tehran is “winning” is that what they are observing is not the rise of a regional hegemon, but the protracted, strategically exploited unwinding of a brittle regime at the centre of an overexposed energy system.

Got a quote to encapsulate my 4000 sq ft crawl space for $22k. Only vapor barrier over dirt, no insulation. Yikes

I honestly appreciate you engaging earnestly, so thank you for that. We have a lot of data on housing agencies and how they spend money and maintain buildings (or not). Look up NYCHA building violations. We also have data on how government spends money on building schools and libraries. Across the board, I’m not familiar with a single US jurisdiction that builds for less (including fees & *profit*) vs a private developer. Look up the Noe Valley bathroom story (I also wrote a post about it a couple of years ago). It’s the main reason why the vast majority of affordable housing is built by private entities. Budgets funded by taxpayers usually can’t afford it for two reasons. The first is, that kind of work is very capital intensive. Taxes would have to be considerably higher. The second is, that kind of work is complex and a public agency is less likely to have the experience and ability to attract the people who would be effective at the job. Bottom line is public entities are notoriously wasteful of taxpayer funds. This differs greatly from a developer who may have had to put up their personal home as collateral and likely invested a good chunk of their own savings to get a project built. For this second group, failure isn’t really an easy option, and in many cases they don’t actually make that much money at the end of the day.

If you expect oil to stay below $200/barrel for the next 5-8 years, you're ignoring 150 years of evidence 👇