It’s precisely what everyone said would happen.
I don’t disagree with your general point, but I remember that there were many people (on reddit, but also on lemmy) who said there would be lots of power-hungry redditors just waiting to take over and that the admins would thus have no trouble at all finding replacements.
It seems you’re misunderstanding the map. It’s how much space each of those categories is taking up as a fraction of the total area of the contiguous US, not where that land use primarily occurs.
Streets aren’t really mentioned either, besides “Rural highways”. I assume other streets and parking spaces are mostly included in “Urban/Rural housing” and/or “Urban commercial” (smaller rural streets might not be counted seperately from the surrounding land).
The article gives another reason:
Authorities say the river will help expand agricultural land and reduce the need to import food and wheat.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year drove a global surge in wheat prices, leaving Egypt struggling as it is the world’s biggest wheat importer.
In addition, in recent years there have been droughts in East Africa as well, which can’t have been good for the amount of water the Nile carries, and the dam you mention just adds to the whole thing.
For those wondering like me where the water is supposed to come from:
Authorities have said that water for the artificial river will come from recycled agricultural drainage and groundwater.
This doesn’t really strike me as a long term solution though, unless Egypt has vast reserves of groundwater.
Depending on what exactly you mean, you might be onto something referred to as structural realism in the philosophy of science. Citing from the intro of the wikipedia article:
In the philosophy of science, structuralism (also known as scientific structuralism or as the structuralistic theory-concept) asserts that all aspects of reality are best understood in terms of empirical scientific constructs of entities and their relations, rather than in terms of concrete entities in themselves.
For those who want to read more, there is also an article on the SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), and books like “Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized” by James Ladyman and Don Ross (2007) or “How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?” by Sunny Auyang (1995).
In particular, your “nothing exists” reminds me of this in “Every Thing Must Go”:
a first approximation to our metaphysics is: ‘There are no things. Structure is all there is.’
There seems to be a bit of a difference, even though both involve asking questions. To quote wiktionary:
Apparently coined by this webcomic:
So the way I understand it, “JAQing off” is when you’re trying to guide your audience towards a certain conclusion without stating it outright (e.g. “Are the official numbers of holocaust victims really as solid as people claim? Are there alternative historical interpretations? I’m just asking questions here, not implying anything folks.” when you think just saying “The holocaust didn’t happen!” might make it too obvious you’re a Nazi), while sealioning is more about annoying the other party and trying to make them look bad/unreasonable and yourself polite and reasonable in comparison (e.g. “I’m just curious, is there any actual evidence that fascists are inherently bad people, as you claim? As a person with no opinion on the matter, I would just like to have an honest and open debate on this subject.” so when people reply with something like “Fuck off, fascist!” you can say “Wow, so much for the tolerant left.”). Both tactics are frequently applied by online trolls, especially of the far right, but they have somewhat different goals.