This was a couple of years ago but I think the numbers are still the same: sending a shipping container from Hong Kong to Newark cost about $3000 while sending the same container in the opposite direction cost about $500. This is because we badly want the shit China makes while they don’t want anything we make (the same situation that led Great Britain to force China to accept opium at gunpoint almost two hundred years ago). Sending a container to China is so cheap that for a stretch we were actually filling them with our garbage because it was less expensive to dispose of it there.

Anyone who think this represents economic weakness on China’s part is batshit crazy.

Why has no one organized cyber warfare against your regime?

I mean … the US government (the NSA specifically) can basically read anybody’s electronic communications and let themselves into any networked device younger than 25 years old. If there were to be any kind of successful resistance to this administration, it couldn’t be “cyber” in any way.

When the 2nd Amendment was written, a bunch of (trained) dudes with muskets represented the pinnacle of military power (at least if there wasn’t any artillery around, even back then). So the 2nd Amendment gave the people the right to possess sufficient military power to counter the federal government. Today, having a closet full of peashooters means absolutely fucking nothing to a government with armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, cruise missiles, intercontinental missiles and nukes at their disposal. The idea that the 2nd Amendment represents an antidote to a tyrannical federal government is just as much of a fantasy for the Left as it always has been for the Right.

I added a few closed businesses like you recommended.

Lol. It’s funny, the college I went to went belly up a few years back, and it occurred to me that I could basically say I had whatever degree I wanted to have on my resume and there’d be no easy way for an employer to check it out. I don’t have a Computer Science degree, but I never found that to be the slightest hindrance to my career so I was never tempted to lie about my degree. With the way the CS field has gone tits up lately I would probably have to do something like that to even be considered for a job, but I’m a school bus driver now so I don’t give a shit.

I used to do a lot of interviewing of prospective hires at my last job (I’m a programmer). It was not at all uncommon to ask a candidate a question and then hear multiple voices whispering in the background along with frantic keyboard tapping sounds, and the candidate would take 5-10 seconds before answering. I just don’t understand what their thought process was for even attempting this - it earned them an immediate “no further action”.

I won’t say what country all of these candidates were from. It would be obvious to anyone in this field.

I only knew about Cortez because my MAGA cousins would rant about her and the Green New Deal and I decided to look her up.

Fun fact: during WWII, the British figured out a way to jam German radar by dropping bales of metal-coated plastic strips (called “chaff” or “Window”), but they held off on using it for more than a year because they didn’t want the Germans to figure out the secret and start using the same trick on their radar. Meanwhile, the Germans had also figured out this technique, but they also held out on using it because they didn’t want the British to get it.