COBOL programmer?

That's an interesting planet you live on, very different from Earth, but I'm not putting it on my Trip list.

That's incredibly cool. There's a pedestrian walkway across it and an observation deck on top of one of the towers, I definitely want to go. Looking at the zigzag road that it replaced I can see why it used to take 2 1/2 hours to cross. The terrain resembles the Apurimac River valley near Pacarictambo in Peru, there are (IIRC) 21 hairpins going down one side of the valley, a small steel bridge, and 17 going up the other side.

Yeah, but one of our floating bridges sank, can Greece beat that? (Contractors were doing in an inspection inside the concrete pontoons when a storm came up, and were in such a hurry to get out that they forgot to close the manhole covers.)

Bureaucratic barriers? There was specifically one single thing listed which would fall under that heading, the permit. The rest is just crony capitalism, which runs this country to a far greater extent than the government has for years.

No, these were (possibly the first) drive-by shootings, into the homes of union organizers who had small children inside. That's the kind of stuff that doesn't make the 'official' histories, in part because the bought-and-paid-for Detroit and Saginaw police didn't even respond much less file a report.

His safety standards had more to do with the safety and integrity of the assembly line than the workers. An injured worker stops the assembly line until he's been dealt with and replaced, and Ford could not stomach the thought of paying all those guys to stand around until it got moving again. Growing up in Michigan you used to hear the dirt about people like Ford and Iaccoca, of course it was biased against the owners but so is the sycophantic press that wrote the 'official' histories.

OT: My grandfather used to fish in Bowers Harbor on Lake Michigan. You could always tell when the Fords were there, since if he got close to the island thugs with Tommy guns would wave him away.

Ah, you've been reading Ford's propaganda. Henry Ford didn't offer his workers higher pay and shorter hours out of the goodness of his coal cinder heart, or because of efficiency studies that didn't exist yet. He did it out of desperation. Factory workers, only a generation or two from the tradition of apprenticeships, only changed jobs once or twice, or often never, during their entire career. The Dodge brothers and (IIRC) Cadillac had all the skilled car factory workers in the area and the migration from farm to city hadn't really started yet. He had an expensive factory built with bank loans and no one to work there, and the lenders were getting nervous. He had to offer workers "a deal too good to turn down" to lure them away from their current employers. The other justifications were after the fact whitewashing of a decision made out of desperation.

Henry Ford was a true bastard to his employees, once he had them on board. There were positions that would leave a worker permanently disabled with repetitive movement injuries within a year, but rather than change his assembly line he preferred to fire them (this was before workers compensation laws, remember) and hire new. People were poisoned painting autobodies, safety equipment was an afterthought frequently installed by the workers themselves and sometimes the cost was taken out of their pay. My dad heard stories from the old guys who unionized his factories, guys who had been beaten with lead pipes by Ford's thugs, whose windows of their homes had been shot out with Tommy guns. Ford loved Hitler's anti-union activities and funded Nazi publications and meetings in the US until the opening of hostilities, and never did shut down his truck factories in occupied Europe. There were definite reasons why Ford took his family to their private island in Lake Michigan during contract negotiations.

I was just referring to the the ongoing abandonment of the Petrodollar as the world reserve currency. I'm quite aware of what you're referring to, the Bushes have been neck deep in the Middle East for generations as well. Bandar bin Sultan, former head of their intel agencies and then the Security Council to the House of Saud, was nicknamed 'Bandar Bush' because he largely grew up with Shrub and Jeb on the Bush family compound.

Actually it was the Obama/Rump/Biden/Rump cavalcade. By locking three of the world's largest petroleum producers (Russia, Iran and Venezuela) out of the SWIFT exchange, and to add injury to insult stealing the funds they had in the exchange, it alerted other countries to the danger of linking their trade to the USD. China and Iran signed a deal to buy petroleum for renmimbi, Russia and India followed suit using whatever currency was convenient, and the flood gates were opened. Now India, the Saudis (neither ever sanctioned) and Brasil (even prior to sanctions) will trade with anyone in any currency. Among the BRICS+ countries non-dollar denominated transactions make up over half of their trade. Even Australia refinanced part of their debt recently with China because the terms were so much better. If it weren't for the EU, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan it would be well under 70% already.

China is already doing it, prohibiting sales of Rare Earth Elements, REE magnets, antimony and tungsten (they control the markets for all of those) that will be used to make weapons. Boeing can still buy magnets to build airliners, but as soon as they're caught diverting them to build F-18s or Arrow air defense missiles they'll be completely cut off. There's no other source for these materials, thanks to the greed of our business executives.

(Before someone says, "Just mine REE here!" keep in mind that the time between breaking ground on a mine/refinery and actual production being under way is around a decade.)

China and India both have Linux versions that they're using throughout their governments and their educational systems, and China is apparently exporting computers with their flavor preinstalled to the Third World.

Decade? You optimist. While we're not yet a pariah state like Israel but supporting their genocide so enthusiastically is tarring us with the same brush. Only 5 years ago 97% of international trade used the US Dollar, so far this year it's 70%. Belt & Road has eaten the IMF/World Bank programs throughout the Third World. Multiple countries in the last few years have requested the Pentagram to remove military bases in their countries (although they normally refuse). The five founding members of BRICS have a larger share of world production than the G7. Several SCO members have signed mutual defense pacts. The US Empire is on the way down.

China controls the world market for Rare Earth Elements and for magnets, and both product lines have been banned for sale to weapons producers in the US and EU, and several strategic metals like antimony and tungsten are prohibited now as well. IIRC there are over 300 pounds of REE in each F-18 for example, and production lines for Patriot missiles and reloads for Israel's 'Iron Dome' are having trouble getting materials as stockpiles decrease. As someone in another forum said, "China doesn't want to help build the missiles that will be used to attack it."

That could be a goal for the Chinese, we don't have any say in it.

Says the guy who spends all day trolling SlashDot when he's not flipping burgers.

I was a theater techie in my late-teens/early-20s, 100-hour weeks back to back to back were the norm and I went three months without a day off. Then I met a few techies in the 40s and thought, "Holy crap, I don't want to be these guys."