peebee67

It's like breakfast cereal all over again.

> 8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.

Checks out. The residential suburban streets I've lived on have been resurfaced on about that timeframe, maybe a little less, with patch-ups in between. Say, how do the houses on those streets get built without trucking? What about the food in the nearby (much closer than the nearest train line) shops get supplied?

I'm one of those people whose brain works such that that rail and nuclear power plants are how we should be solving problems because I know how good they look to a physicist and engineer, so I am right there with you. But be practical: The guys running the machinery that literally makes society possible deserve to be compensated fairly and I don't see many trucking magnates living large at the rest of our expense.

There are some externalities we can afford to subsidise, and unless you've the stomach for putting in 100x as much public money into rail for a ROI measured in half-centuries, paying for high quality roads that you also get the direct benefit of should grind your gears less than most of the other economic imbalances you could name.

Hilarious! Thanks for the research and write-up. I enjoyed the read.

Weren't all the ATMs running a custom Windows 98 into the late 2000's?

If you're still looking at this through the lens of party politics, you're missing the big picture. Most of US power comes not from its military, but its economic system. And that depends on trust and reliability. Both "sides" have been engaged in a project to scuttle that as hard and fast as they can since the end of the Cold War.

Both sides demonstrate that the United States can be consistently relied upon to break every deal they make, be it relating to international relations and borders, economics and debt, trade, military protection, and supply of arms.

Bush Sr and Clinton both broke the assurances made to Gorbachev that made the relatively peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union possible by marching NATO eastward and carving up fresh borders in the Balkans.

Clinton, Bush Jr, and even Biden were still talking about free trade agreements, less than a decade before we see an international tariff regime spring up, and the United States reserves subsidy carve-outs in every deal they make with other countries who they expect to open their markets.

US spending has been out of control for decades no matter who controls the White House or Congress, and is only getting worse. They're relying on the inertia of its massive economy to bear the inflationary burden by printing money. The biggest export of the US economy, Treasury Bonds - that is, debt - is now seen as unreliable, and other countries are dumping them like burning garbage. Indeed, the United States has already started defaulting on such loans to a growing number of nations, only they get to call it "sanctions" when they don't repay their loans. The rest of the world looks on in horror as they realise how much of their wealth is tied up in this make-believe that the United States can renege on or bully creditors into not divesting on a whim. This explains the skyrocketing price of gold.

Speaking of those creditors, a lot of them are gulf states. As in, Persian Gulf. They used to sell oil and buy Treasuries as investments. But since nearly every US base in the Persian Gulf has been effectively destroyed, every gulf state that participated in the war crimes against Iran has been punished into submission for that involvement. Resumption of hostilities like we saw in the opening month would see the infrastructure that those nations rely on to continue to function as countries destroyed within hours. Absent desalination and oil export facilities, those countries would just cease to exist as significant polities. The de facto government in Yemen (referred to perversely as the "rebels", while the legitimate government sits in Riyadh, capital of the country that has been bombing Yemen for 15 years or so) just delivered Saudi Arabia a major military defeat, while the President refused to help. Saudi Arabia, land of black gold, unable to export from either the Strait or the Red Sea, with one of the biggest oil pipelines in the world now burning, is being forced to borrow money! The United States, so called most powerful military the world has known, dares not send a large naval vessel within about 1000 km of the Strait of Hormuz, and two aircraft carriers have been forced to limp away. Meanwhile, trade through the Red Sea has also been strangled off. All of the US allies under the protection of Pax Americana have been humbled by a country that has been getting "strangled" in some form or another for the past 70 years by a superpower.

And after all that the US military is out of interceptor missiles. They can't spare any for West Asia or Ukraine, right when everyone wants them. They wasted thousands of million dollar missiles on thousand dollar drones, and cannot make more at a rate that matters.

If you think it's just tariffs and some hurt feelings, you haven't been paying attention.

The absence of a central bank.

This is a sinking ship trying to lash unwitting tenders to it to try to keep it afloat while it rams an iceberg. Canada does not need that kind of trouble.

You're idealising one government rule to stop other government stupidity. The fact is that enforcing that kind of thing is meant to be the electorate's job. Instead of howling these people out of office as the spent, bought-and-paid for geriatrics that they are, they keep electing them instead.

That's a really solid set of counterpoints to which I'd respond that the foreign policy has not merely been to maintain supply of oil, but to do so at discount prices and prevent other powers from developing it. This has demonstrably not improved stable access to oil and necessarily requires bringing an increasing fraction of the world to ruin and relative turmoil. In short, it's bad long-term strategy because it's not sustainable. Meanwhile, they've notably resisted efforts to diversify access to alternative sources of energy that'd reduce that reliance on oil.

They'd be better off trying to align themselves neutrally and dropping NATO.

"Remember that pirate fleet that tried to tie weights around our neck when we were taking on water 20 years ago?"

"Yes, why?"

"Well they're about to sink and I think we should tether our ship to theirs."

> Bonus: put some typos in the quiz that don't matter. Red flag for the people that get hung up on that.

I feel like after presenting a great solution to the stupid, cryptic, arbitrary interviewer games where you have to guess the rules on your only attempt at playing the game, you've added one at the last minute. What if one of the values is attention to detail?

I loved everything about this.

I'd take the attribution with a wheelbarrow of salt. If Iran was as dangerous as Unnamed US Official has been claiming for the past 50 years, they'd be running the world by now. Iran hitting US mainland targets would be a big departure from the doctrine they've been following so far.

Microsoft 364, am I right?