"Pre-Mao Chinese government" = warlords who let millions (literally) starve because they could make more money exporting rice than letting the people who grew it eat it.

China 600 years ago was more than three times its current size and the highest civilization on the planet. Things change.

The CPC (Communist Party of China, CCP is wrong) has never shown any interest in ruling the rest of the world, or for that matter even any of their neighbors. The Chinese have learned over the course of 5,000 years of history that invasion and occupation of unwilling populations is a waste of energy and resources, trade and shared economic interests are more stable and less wasteful in the long run. The Chinese model works for China, and its leadership is smart enough to realize that it's not appropriate for other societies.

Unfortunately none of that is true for the Western countries, especially the Untied States. We have yet to learn that there is no "one size fits all" model for societies, and continue to insist on forcing the rest of the world into our model whether it's appropriate for them or not.

The utterly useless US Space Farce (spelling deliberate) has only been around for less than 5 years and it already has a $30 billion budget. NASA's budget last year is under $25 billion and it actually manages to accomplish useful tasks.

All NASA budgets since foundation combined (including Apollo) - $690 billion
Pentagon budget just last year not counting Black Budget, intel agencies, or nukes - $860 billion

This is why we can't have nice things.

Thanks, just came here to say this same thing. While I was at Amazon I saw the same thing happen with several other technologies (none of them worth half a billion, though). The company has hundreds if not thousands of teams of teams worldwide working to create new products, it would be amazing if other people somewhere weren't working on creating some of the same ideas. Somehow lawyers manage to convince prospective clients that the only way Amazon could possibly have the same idea is by stealing their idea, unfortunately they somehow manage to occasionally convince a judge of the same thing.

I once worked with a guy who held some of the top Project Management certifications, but who had never worked a day in our industry (physical security). We all felt sorry for him, since he had no idea how long any aspect of a project would take nor how much it would cost. If we had been a different crew the techs could have lied to his face and he wouldn't have known the difference.

I'm very good at security engineering, and I can't count how many times I was told, "You should be a manager!" I've never understood that belief, since they're two completely different realms. My answer was always, "Why would I leave a job that I enjoy and which I'm extremely good at to go and do a different one that I hate and which I suck at?" That generally ended the conversation.

I suspect that this effect is becoming more common as building automation installs more ultrasonic and infrasonic devices which are not normally audible, things like the light switches which detect room occupancy and turn off automatically, alarm system motion detectors, and the like. Your UID is low enough that you probably remember when most florescent lights had an audible hum from the ballast, a lot of the cheaper fixtures still make noise but the frequency has just been raised (or lowered, can't remember) to where we don't hear it any more. Multi-function printers in fast standby mode, water coolers, ventilation fans, all that stuff can send off normally inaudible sounds that interact. Once worked in an office where there was a series of receptionists who came and went because there was something about their work space that they could not stand but each pointed the finger at a different cause. The phone switch was moved to the server closet from under the desk and the next receptionist was happy as a clam.

That might be considered cruelty to animals, that much pork and fat can make them sick . . .

Yep, I had a LaserJet II that was surplused from my work, I used it for ten years and put it on the curb. It's probably still pumping out kids' homework. Compaq used to make the sort of computer you couldn't kill, they'd last so long users would start sabotaging them to get a new one, until they were managed into the ground and sold to HP. American industry is littered with the corpses of good companies managed to death, and I don't see the situation changing soon because too many powerful people have too much vested in it.

Chrysler certainly wasn't, Mercedes sued the board of Chrysler for fraud when the found out what they really had purchased didn't reflect the financial reports they had been presented in the least.

There are tens of thousands of mercenaries around the world who rely on you being wrong.

The issue with the FAA is what Newt Gingrich did to it (and the FDA, EPA, etc.) decades ago. He realized that he didn't have to eliminate the agencies that his corporate benefactors didn't like, all he had to do was make their enforcement budget a separate line item and squeeze. And squeeze they have. Once upon a time the FAA had people on staff who could look at the plans for the 737 MAX and say, "This is too big a change, it needs to be recertified," but now those people are long gone. Instead they have to rely on the corporations themselves, under the absurd Libertardian dogma that no corporation would build a faulty product because they would get sued in their phantasmagorical perfect court system.

United Airlines is showing the results of skimping on maintenance, they had an engine catch fire, a wheel fall off in flight, an inspection panel fall off in flight, and steering fail bad enough that the plane ended up in the grass along the runway. That was all in the first half of March.

And Boeing is the world leader in stock buybacks (really).

Boeing did the opposite, they outsourced writing the MCAS package for the 737 MAX to a company which normally wrote software for the financial industry. They laid off the team of (highly paid) programmers up the hill from my house who had decades of experience working with real-time inputs and life-safety critical software because all programmers are the same, right?