To be fair, a lot of the reason the US is the one top country is because they're the one top country. From the historical structure of NATO to la privilège exorbitant, the US enjoyed and enjoys a lot of, well, privilège exorbitant due to their position.

Of course, they currently seem determined to scuttle all that all by themselves.

Reliably being the only major power that didn't get destroyed in WWII then holding everyone else over a barrel while they rebuilt.

Because Hillary Clinton said so.

Not being a dick was even better. The US has tried that "kneecapping" trick on a bunch of countries, including their good friends in NATO. The French quit NATO because they saw it happening. Then the US secretary of state writes an essay in 2011 called "America's Pacific Century" stating in the very first paragraph that as the US winds down it's wars in Iraq and Afganistan it's time to move on to the Asia-Pacific region.

WTF was China supposed to do?

No, NASA will look like the child who did that, then did it again.

If the Chinese manage to set up enough bases to claim and defend all the water on the moon before anybody else can get there either a) there's not enough to be bothered about or b) they deserve it.

You said taxes. Here, let me quote it for you:

The top 10 percent of earners pay 72% of taxes.

The link you included as "evidence" clearly says "income taxes."

If you believed your argument you wouldn't have a problem with stating it accurately. Instead you're weaseling. I can't even figure out why since it's pretty clear the people with the most money pay the most taxes.

The US can't let China have a moment.

What's important is what you do when you get there. The US raced to the moon the first time then just quit. China, at least as far as they've announced, seems to be planning to go and actually do some stuff like set up a long term research base. The US was also planning to do some interesting long term stuff but has cancelled most of that in the interest of beating China.

I assume because they're charging by the minute they have to start up a VM or something to monitor it. They probably use the same process as any other "runner" except this one sshs to your machine and executes commands instead of doing it locally.

I don't see why someone who objects to this couldn't just replace it with their own system where their local machine does whatever it needs. Make a runner that pings your machine and then exits if you absolutely need to.

The Soviets used metric.

Do you mean the Johnny-come-lately Americans? I guess they were operating on Imperial time. They did bring a bunch of very useful 105 and 155 mm Howitzers though.

Not a special legal category that is less than, usually a lot less than, the "minimum" legally allowed.

The US: if we have to pay people enough that they can afford to live and have health care then the industry will die!

The rest of the world: ???

We build a fair number of metal things that spend their lives in sea water. Most of them have heat exchangers too.

Microsoft did that. It apparently worked okay. They've ended the experiments and haven't decided to deploy it in production.

Individually directly paid taxes

Piling on some more qualifiers? You are probably correct that the rich pay most of those as well, but if so then why the misleading generalization?

Probably because the number isn't as big. Income taxes are (usually) designed to be progressive. That's the point. Most sales and property taxes, including the hidden ones, are only weakly so. Billionaries don't eat thousands of times more bananas than poor people.