America has 30 aircraft carriers. It has 11 super-carriers and 19 other ships the USN would label as carriers if they were in literally any navy in the world other than the USN.

That's a stupid idea that won't work. Highways and trucks are terrible for large-scale logistics across set routes. That highway needs to be a railway. Preferably, an electrified railway.

The military itself is quite successful at doing the war thing. The problem comes when the political class tries to use the military to do non-war things. Ironically, the reason first Gulf War was such a success was everyone in charge of the US military, and many of the politicians in power, had gone through the loss in Vietnam and learned some valuable, if painful, lessons from that experience. That's why the Gulf War had very clear aims that could be accomplished directly with military force and clear criteria for exit. Ironically, the success of the first Gulf War taught the next generation all the wrong lessons about American military power, so we got another Vietnam.

TL;DR If you need something shot or blown up, use the military. If you need anything other than people shot and shit blown up, you need something other than the military.

America won the war and lost the peace.

You're misunderstanding the purpose and disposition of the People's Liberation Army. The PLA is primarily a political organ with a small military attached to it. The PLA mostly exists to indoctrinate recruits for the CCP. This is rather explicit, but you have to read the documents written in Chinese to see that. About 90% of the current formations aren't capable of fielding either a fighting force or providing logistical support to combat forces. That actually includes much of the PLAAF and the PLAN. About half of the combat forces of the PLAAF are supposedly flying MiG-15s and MiG-17s. There's little chance more than a dozen of those 75y/o planes are even airworthy, let alone combat-rated. Most of the PLAN ships are either repurposed/impressed fishing and merchant vessels, un-seaworthy, or rusting hulks. Less than a quarter of the infantry forces even receive firearm training (by that I just mean firing live rounds at some point).

That said, China has been making significant efforts in modernizing its navy and air force. That will impact the calculation a lot ten years from now. As it now stands, divide any claim of the size of China's military by 10 and you will have a more accurate picture of reality.

They don't have money to spend. They have collateralized debt. The collateral for those loans is usually company stock. The value of that collateral is mostly set by high-speed trading algorithms. Those algorithms value the stock based not just on current earnings but also on projected future earnings. Those projected future earnings are based on past growth rate of the company. If their growth rate slows (slows, not stops or contracts), it results in a significant downgrade of future earnings. This will drop the share price of the company by huge amounts in fractions of a second. This has already happened before in '22. Facebook reporting lower than expected growth resulted in an instant loss of about a quarter of their stock value.

That's a bad loss on its own. What worse is if your shares are collateral on a loan. When your collateral drops in value by 26%, you either need to add more collateral, something relatively difficult for a company to do, or you need to pay a higher interest rate. Servicing the higher interest rate lowers the company's profits. That lowers profit projections. Those lowered projections result in a devaluation by trading algorithms, sparking a selloff. That lowers stock price, which then triggers higher interest rates, which then lowers profits, which then lowers market cap... This is a negative spiral that ends with bankruptcy as the company tries to deal with the suddenly crushing debt.

This is the situation that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, and several other tech giants find themselves in. Any one of these going into the death-spiral described above will affect the entire tech sector when it goes. That collapsing giant can trigger other giants to collapse. Before you know it, everything is in freefall and trillions, with a 'T' of dollars of wealth just evaporates.

That's several times worse than what happened in the 2008 crash.

Whoever at Alphabet signed off on this is a fool. It's an entire culture of spendthrift on longshots caused by the founders of all those companies having hit the jackpot once and them and all their investors blowing their money chasing another one. The whole industry is going to collapse in like 5 years. It's going to make the dot-com bust look like a minor market correction.

An elephant trunk is a type of tentacle. But you need rigid lever arms for lifting weight efficiently. So, I'd suggest one of each.

It's not American football. It's Canadian gridiron football.

You're still stuck in the chauvinistic mindset of your experience. It wouldn't look like a centaur. It would look like a crab with slug-like eyestalks and antennae for sensing and one or two manipulators sprouting from center of mass like either a multi-articulated arm, or an elephant trunk. Maybe both.

No, there won't. First, because all those companies are going to go bust. Second, because all those companies going bust are going to take out the entire industry and destroy trillions (with a "T") of dollars of notional wealth. (Anyone who wants to argue with me that we're not currently Y2K levels of over-valuation in the tech markets needs to first explain how Chewy's business model is sufficiently different from Pets.com's that the former makes economic sense while the latter's famously did not.) Third, the aftermath of all this will just be a new level of acceptance for fundamentally broken and worthless code being sold to the public.

That's what I was wondering. Because there absolutely have been 4-door hatchbacks. And people hated them. That's why they stopped making them and settled on 3-door and 5-door hatchbacks.

Because, unlike a trunk, it allows access into the main cabin of the vehicle.

I think you'll find that opposes the well understood definition of a "door". It has hinges, it has a latch, it is used to reversibly occlude a space. It's a door.