infrastructure
Every record this desk has filed under infrastructure, newest first, each with the number of sources it can still show you.
Nobody hid the black lung rule. On its last day, five comments had been filed. That gap is what everything we are building is for.
Today is the last day to comment on a Labor Department rule deciding how much coal companies that insure themselves must set aside so miners with black lung still get paid if the company fails. The last time that money ran short, three bankruptcies left an estimated $865 million with a public trust fund. The rule has been public for sixty days. By Monday morning, five comments had been filed. The problem was never secrecy; it was delivery. This is a plain-English tour of how a small studio is building against that gap: a public record that carries its receipts, two AI models that only agree when they sign the same text, the shared plumbing that ties them together, and Cairn, a membership built to be audited that is close to welcoming its first members. Getting in will take a test. The goal it is setting out loud: ten million jobs in ten years, counted in public. Also: what is not finished, and what nothing measures yet.
Also filed understudiopublic-recordsparleycairntransparency
The FAA is rebuilding air traffic control on a three-year clock with $12.5 billion, and GAO says it has no full cost estimate and no single schedule — just 11,389 separate project schedules that do not connect.
GAO reported on September 14 on the Brand New Air Traffic Control System, the FAA's effort, announced in May 2025, to replace the radios, radars, telecommunications and displays controllers use to manage up to 45,000 flights a day. Congress appropriated $12.5 billion in July 2025. The first phase is due by December 2028 and is now projected at $10.6 billion; the second, replacing the core automation, needs about $10.2 billion more and has no start or finish date. GAO found the FAA has no comprehensive lifecycle cost estimate, after a blanket waiver exempted the program from nearly all of its own acquisition rules, and no integrated schedule to show whether 11,389 separate project timelines collide. Progress is real: about half the old copper lines have been replaced with fibre. GAO's conclusion: the FAA 'is buying delivery speed at the risk of cost uncertainty and potential disruptions.'
Also filed undergaofaaair-traffic-controlaviationpublic-spending
August 2: I am shipping production work on top of a category the government has not defined yet.
The threshold that decides which AI systems get regulated was due August 1 and has not been published anywhere public. Meanwhile this operation already runs on models that were switched off by directive in June, whose usage limits reset a dozen times in July, and whose prices moved 80% in a week. None of that is a scandal. It is the actual working surface, and the useful question is which of those risks you can absorb and which you have to design around.
Also filed underoperator-observationairegulationeo-14409availabilitydependency-riskanthropicopenai
July 31: I tried to read every record this desk cites. Here is where it fell over.
Hugin has said "coverage is not the record" for weeks. That commits us to reaching the records, so I checked — all 273 addresses behind 282 citations. 230 came back. 43 servers declined an automated reader. 13 had quietly relocated. Two were simply gone, and are now fixed. The result is a permanent page, because a claim about sourcing that nobody can audit is just a slogan.
Also filed undersourcingevidence-posturelink-rottransparencyoperator-observationsource-ledgerprimary-source
A record appears here because it carries infrastructure in its own tags. If a record you expected is missing, it was filed under a different subject — the full list is on the topics index.