I'm not American, and I'm aware of many of the authoritarian leanings of the current US administration. We're currently living through a test of democratic institutions across the west. Those institutions are holding to various degrees, but barely. But to compare western democracies to Chinese autocracy as if they're equivalent is bonkers. You have to recognize it's a matter of degree.

From the government and military's point of view, this is exactly the reason they want a flourishing free market economy, so that there's lots of infrastructure to call on when they need it. The demand for ships was real, and the market adapted and supplied them. When the demand went away, the market adapted and turned to building other things.

That take is just so far from reality it's bonkers. People with high credit scores tend to a) not take on as much debt, and b) get significantly better interest rates when they do. The last time we switched mortgage providers, our mortgage broker said our credit scores were probably the highest he'd seen in over a decade of doing this, and he went back to the lender and negotiated an extra half percent lower interest rate than what they offered, which was already below prime. Credit score is a measure of risk, that's all. If you're high risk of default, they charge a premium. People with high credit scores tend to borrow money for things that improve their financial situation in the long run: student loans, mortgages, and a car loan for a modest car to get them to work. Maybe a loan to start a low risk business, like an electrician. People with low credit scores borrow money to buy smartphones, TVs, decked out pickup trucks, and even doordash orders. i.e. stuff that has no payback.

It's only this outdated industrial revolution notion that we need to do everything at the same time every day that leads to ridiculous solutions like changing the clocks. Just have different hours for activities at different times of the year. That's all you're doing anyway with shifting the clocks. School doesn't have to start at the same time every day throughout the year.

As an engineer who spends most of my time designing systems that involve both automation and humans working in tandem, you're absolutely right. Any design constraint like, "the operators will just have to do this when such-and-such happens" are doomed to fail if you really need them to do it every time. A good design takes incentives into account. A human will do something if they get something for it. You can't rely on a person to push a button when a bin is full, but you can if they need to push that button to get a label to put on the bin so they can send it down the conveyor. Likewise, it's a good idea to put the "bad part" reject bin at least 3 steps away from where they stand, so they get annoyed if the machine is making bad parts, and that'll get them to call maintenance to fix it. If it's too convenient they'll happily make bad parts all day. Society has the same problem: even though most people want to be good, there are enough people who will just throw trash out their window or dump toxic waste in the river, or just refuse to work and demand a handout, that you need to build a system with incentives and deterrents that reward the people who are contributing, and catch/punish the people who are abusing the commons. While capitalism does a good job of the first, regulations are needed for the second. That's why communism doesn't work. It achieves the second but doesn't achieve the first.

Chinese people aren't stupid. But whenever you try to run your country from a top-down authoritarian style, and especially a one-man show, then you can never be as efficient as the free market. Over in the west we do interfere in the market in order to protect a national security interest or to punish a country that isn't playing by the rules-based world order, but the level of market interference in China is at least an order of magnitude more. They have solar farms built in places with nowhere near enough local industry to use it, and no grid capacity to get it to a market that needs it. Private industry doesn't build stuff like that without some guarantees that they can sell the product. But if you give them government incentives, they're happy to build it and let it sit idle. When my boss was in China visiting a tool & die place, the government literally dropped off half a dozen brand new milling machines for them to use at no charge. That's wild. If you're just trying to grow to catch up, this stuff works, but once you reach market saturation you can't tolerate inefficiencies like that anymore. You need the market to do its thing and find the optimum allocation of resources to meet market demand.

Standard time is based on the sun being overhead at noon (or close to it, depending on where you are in the time zone). It's symmetric. There's about as much light before noon as after noon. Nobody says we all have to get up at the same time every day. We increasingly work remotely and have to meet with people around the world. We can figure it out. We've created these stupid anomalies where a user says "show me the events from midnight to 2 am local time" and once a year there's an extra hour of events sprinkled in. Or an extra hour of production on that day, if you work in a factory that runs 24 hours. It's absolutely bonkers.

As a Canadian, I absolutely hate DST. Keep it on standard time. If you want your workers to get up an hour earlier in the summer, change the hours you're officially open! That's all you're really doing anyway.

I'm willing to suffer through the transition, but so help me God, if they come out with a USB-D port right after we finish transitioning to USB-C, then that's it! I'm never doing this again!

"diesel engines are known for being especially difficult to start in cold."

When I was in the Army in Korea in 1985/86 one of the duties on the duty roster was to start every vehicle in the motor pool every 4 hours and run it for half an hour to keep it warm. Nothing like getting up at 0200 on a Sunday morning to spend an hour in the motor pool.

If you're really stuck needing to buy a drink, I've never seen a cooler at a store that didn't sell water bottles right next to the soda pop. I'm not sure what the psychological reason is, but people think they're getting a better deal spending $2 on a coke instead of $2 on water because they're getting sugar and flavor. Nobody needs that extra one or two hundred calories, and if you're thirsty, water is always going to quench the thirst. You're not paying for the contents. You're paying for the bottle, the branding, and the fact that it's refrigerated.

While not quite as energy dense, LiFePO4 (aka LFP) batteries are increasingly common, and they don't pose the same thermal runaway risk that lithium ion batteries have. It's worth looking for this type of battery in devices you're buying from now on.

It's easier to just assume you're right about everything and avoid trying to understand facts and evidence.

"Alpha is a measure of an investment's performance that indicates its ability to generate returns in excess of its benchmark." - from here. So it means your ability to beat the market by picking good stocks.

Companies that pay dividends tend to be bigger well established mature companies that have a large market share and aren't investing much in growth, which means they tend to hold value pretty well in a crash. They also tend to fare a little better in periods of high inflation, and we're going to see higher inflation for the foreseeable future. But you aren't going to average better than a 5% market return, and that requires a million dollars in assets to get that rather small $50,000 per year income.