Enjoy your remaining years with people telling you: "I told you so!"

You can store a lot of low bitrate MP3s on a 5 GB hard drive (lowest spec of 1st Gen iPod)

USB to FireWire adapters are around $10-20. They tend to only support a subset of FireWire and don't support chaining multiple devices, but it's kind of what you need in this scenario.

I'm thinking I can save a lot of money if I only get a one way ticket.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Santayana, George (1905) Reason in Common Sense

That seems fair. It also seems fair that we can united and do some collective bargainig for a better deal.

Over the past century we mostly just let Capital Hill use our service men and women as fodder for imperialistic ambitions.

Your average "snowflake" needs a civics lesson more than they need rifle training.

Oh absolutely, it's mostly analog and mixed signal in the US. Very high yield and very few human hands that need to touch the product. Reels of components only getting touched when the receiver moves it off a palette. These kind of foundries don't create very many jobs though, almost no entry level jobs. And those components get priced according to what is competitive in the domestic market rather than the global market. With tariffs and shipping delays on imported components, the domestic stuff tends to creep up a bit to fill the gap (profit).

Chinese manufactures can make both cheap and expensive goods.

In a sense American manufactures can really only do one. They struggle to keep the costs below what can be imported, and that's even when the American company doesn't have the same shipping overhead.

Our labor costs are too high for that ever to happen, we'll make goods with high prices and low quality that nobody wants. And employers will try to weasel out of paying for health insurance for the staff by cutting hours to be below the threshold of full time employee. Anyone that doesn't like it, is a communist. If they make too much noise their family will get a visit from ICE, regardless of actual citizenship status.

Next we need to build up a market where the American consumer can afford American prices. Maybe if people didn't have to spend 60-70% of their income on housing they wouldn't buy cheap Chinese goods from Walmart.

I have no doubt that your experience lead to a lot of personal growth, I mean how couldn't it have.

But it wasn't necessary to put you into great personal danger and risk of life long disability. You took the hardest way possible, not that you had much choice. But if you get to choose what way the next generation goes, you're going to put them into the same peril? Leave them down a path that also has PTSD, depression, or at least cynicism?

Can't we just have the youths of today work as aids in a nursing home, or really any other job where what they do is difficult, messy, but there are living breathing people that depend on the job that you do? (unlike my job as a programmer, where it is easy, pays a lot, and doesn't actually matter)

We warned them for decades. They kept treating film making as a factory where you take a successful film's parameters, turn the crank and make another. The assumption is you already have an audience when you make a sequel.

But the running joke for 50 years is that the sequel is (almost) always worse than the original. And it's not just an old wives' tale. Everyone has experienced this and witnessed it multiple times and we all "get" the joke because of it.

Except film producers don't get the joke, and they don't understand how or why the public consumes art and entertainment. They see film production as a closed system where the right parameters produces a hit and an untried idea is too risky to attempt.

It's not hard to predict the trend, multiple research groups have been able to confidently point up for about 35 years.

Congress has essentially been the same for decades. And between racist anti-woke GOP and identity-politics abundance Democrats there's been really no opposition party. Two groups appearing diametrically opposed, but quick to sell your labor for cheap to the biggest donors.

Cutting your workforce across the board is always done in order to cut production.
This scaling back can be for a variety of reasons, and rarely is a good sign for the economy.
I believe what we are seeing right now to be an move by the respective board of directors of each company to extract the wealth from their business and move it into the hands of shareholders. It is a contraction of business rather than the usual pattern of investment and growth.
For casual investors, do not give any of these companies your money.
If a recession hits they will be fine but you will be screwed. The wealthiest people are protecting their assets right now, and it is no longer safe to ride the wave with them.