Isn't that the point with things like this? Since I don't have any Facebook/X/etc. accounts, that, and all the other similar online forum sites, is *exactly* what they would get were I ever to visit the US (which is not likely given they seem to be competing with social media to see who can rape the most of my personal data). I also have a wildcarded email domain with different addresses for different companies and a whole bunch of mailing lists that have been around for decades, so they can have a copy of my aliases table too. If whichever poor bastards get to look at it don't need therapy after trawling through all the AC-posted crap and inane flamewars in all that, then I'll be amazed. And as for finding anything I've overlooked and proving it was deliberate concealment... Yeah. Good luck with that!

I would need to see if if you can submit a GDPR request to a federal agency but, if so, then following up with one of those asking for a copy of everything they have on file after getting back home (assuming they approved my visit in the first place after yanking their chain with the above) could be entertaining too. Probably ensure an instant blackball on any future visits, but still - ROFLMFAO! In fact, come to think of it, I might just plan a short trip somewhere in the US just for the Lulz if this ever comes to pass.

Yeah, that too. :) However, in practical terms, I'd assume that given enough time, willpower, and a LOT of $$$ we would both solve the environmental challenges and develop a "spacebus" to enable more efficient colonization, so the gene pool would become sufficiently diverse before it becomes a major problem. If not, we already know how that might work out from all of the historic in-breeding of the European royal families, in particular the Hapsburgs, although YMMV on what physical attributes, or personality traits for that matter, will be more likely to be "enhanced" in the Mars colony scenario.

Good luck with that. Birth rate might be declining in many countries, but we're still spawning around 100m new humans every year. That's an awful lot of human freight just to break even, and while prioritising shipping those of breeding age to transfer the newborns off-world (with all the physical development complications that likely entails) might help a bit, the reality is there are only two ways we get to point where more humans live offworld:

1. We take a long, long, long, time doing it.
2. A massive die off of those left on Earth.

Either way, the Earth-bound serfs are screwed.

Yes, but in this case the US Government is the bank... China owns $700b of their debt, and can effectively either ask them to pay it back (cash out) when the bonds mature or dump some - or all - of them on the bond market at any point they choose.

Dumping them reduces their value, including any of China's remaining holdings, but would almost certainly cause the US' credit rating to be downgraded - and therefore the interest required to service its debt - all $38 trillion and counting of it! - to go up. It doesn't take many fractions of a percentage point increase to cause the US economy real problems in that scenario. If they decide to cash out mature bonds, then the US either has to pay up - which basically means balancing cutting budgets and raising taxes to raise the cash, or printing more money and devaluing the Dollar to pay for it instead; meaning prices of US imports and the cost of servicing the remaining debt both go up again. Neither are going to be popular with the US electorate.

The final option would be the nuclear one; default. That would crash the US economy completely, and bring most of the rest of the world's down with it, but especially those that have a significant slice of the global financial markets and a heavy reliance on imports (US, UK, EU...), but less so for those that, for various reasons, don't import much and are less dependant on the financial markets (BRICS). A default would also mean that the US' credit rating and value of the USD would go way down, so interest rates go through the roof and the cost of imports would skyrocket. On the plus side (if you can call it that), with the USD being worth less compared to other currencies, and perhaps significantly so, it could become *really* easy for the US to export anything it can still produce once the dust settles.

So, I take it you didn't read and understand my comment? At no point did I say China's imports are considerably smaller than their imports - I actually stated the opposite (see the last sentence of the first paragraph) - just that it's not quite the almost absolute "all or nothing" OP implied.

To re-iterate: Plenty of countries make stuff China wants, and they do indeed import in significant quantities from many different countries, contrary to what OP implied, it's just that despite all those imports their exports *still* massively outstrip their imports (as your linked data clearly indicates). Also, OP implied they were just sitting on the resulting surplus as cash (virtual or not), which was the real point of my post - that they are not doing that at all. They are, in fact, weaponising it and turning it into the economic equivalent of an aircraft carrier by buying government bonds (e.g. the national debt) of countries that they may have a problem with in the future. Many of the rest they are shackling using Belt & Road loans. If it comes to it, being able to crash an adversaries economy by dumping those bonds, then hitting it with a barrage of cyber attacks, there's a pretty good chance they'll be on their knees and have a panicing population to deal with before anyone even needs to fire off any kind of conventional weaponry.

That's a very western-centric view. China imports a large range of products extensively, including western produce and finished goods. Examples include: specialist electrical and mechnical goods, especially for manufacturing their exports and for medical/scientific/power generation use; oil and gas; grain and soy beans; prestige western cars, mostly European; plus significant quantities of various ores, minerals, and other raw materials... They do have a significant trade surplus, but it's nothing like as vast your comment implies.

Regardless, it might just be a database entry of some numbers, but don't just sit on it but rather convert it into things like government gilts and bonds - "Treasury Securities", in US parlance. Still a database entry, but one that turns that fiat piece of coloured paper into a way to help out an ally, or into a notional lever they could pull to disrupt the economy of the bonds they hold; dump a large number of the bonds, and watch the economy in question take a dive as inflation spirals upwards. Yes, the book value of the rest of their holding goes down too, but that's still a better use of the money than just torching the virtual equivalent of a pile of coloured paper sat in a warehouse, Joker style.

As of September, China is currently the third largest foreign holder of US T-Bills ($700.5b), after Japan ($1189.3b) and the UK ($865.0b), then you're rapidly into the long tail with Canada in 4th place at a "mere" $475.8b. That's quite a lot of influence, should they choose to use (read "burn") it.

But that would have ended with Russia not being owned by Russians.

The only thing "Russian" about the people that own Russia now is the country on their passports, which they probably don't use anyway because of the sanctions etc. from Ukraine and that many have citizenship in whichever country they have moved to. They sure as hell don't give a damn about the country, it's people, or anything else "Russia", besides their ability to keep extracting money and influence from it.

Of course, you could say that about a lot of the people that essentially own the rest of the world too.

Doubly so in this case, albeit of a slightly different nature. I keep coming across IP addresses that are managed by Cloud Innovations all the time, and almost always leased out to some sketchy ISP that is either heavily compromised by botnets, or an out and out "bullet proof" hosting provider. The latter are particularly interesting as they are presumably raking in the cash because they both covering Lu's rental fees and maintaining a business relationship because they keep cycling to new subnets as the previous ones get blocked. That implies they are not defaulting on the rental fees, and Lu is either oblivious to what that continual changing of ranges for the same customer implies or is fully aware of, and therefore supporting, this kind of activity.

10m IPs, huh. /checks blocklist. Yeah, I've got just over a third of that blocked & flagged as "Cloud Innovations" at the moment, most of which are in /16 and larger IPv4 allocations. About 7m to go, I guess... Thank $deity for IPSets...

National budgets simply do not, and cannot, work that way. Taxes go into a central pot, and then get assigned out according to the priorities of the state as interpreted by the government that currently controls the national purse strings, ideally without having to borrow any additional money although that seldom happens and is deeply unpopular when it does (see "Austerity" - governments typicallydo not live within their means, yet usually expect their publics to do just that). For the whole system to work, they have to both tax things that are easy to collect the tax on, and over tax those things to make up for the costs of things where it is not easy to tax. If you want any taxes spent to be proportionate to what they are raised from, then the outcome will be a LOT of essential services that are currently supported by the public purse seeing drastic cuts, forcing more people to go private or join a *long* waiting list, and requiring suplemental per-use fees.

For most people, sure the odometer will be fine, but some of us live in rural communities and have vehicles that are used a significant amount of time off public roads, but still need to be taxed for their on-road usage - think tractors or road-legal quad bikes, for a couple of very obvious examples. A simple "per mile driven" based on the odometer is not the perfectly fair "one size fits all" solution that it might at first seem to be if those kinds of vehicles go electric at some point, so I think a little more nuance may be required before this scheme sees the light of day. Privacy concerns aside, many of those issues could easily be addressed via GPS-based tracking of just public road usage, and could also enable more nuanced billing to try deter drivers from using busy roads at peak times, effectively turning any road that is applied to into a toll road.

It should also be noted that this is on top of existing vehicle tax, which is paid as an annual fee in the UK. People with large SUVs and commercial vehicles will still be paying more to drive those vehicles per year, but whether the plan is to shift more of that tax to the per-mile rax rates based on criteria such as the likely amount of road surface wear they will create, e.g. different per mile rates for larger vehicles, isn't yet clear, either. Overall, it's probably the fairest system for users of different types of vehicle classes and power trains to pay their share of the public highway costs, but the devil is always in the details and at this point there are scant few of those available to see where the issues people ought to be concerned about might lie.

They clearly do NOT think it is safe. From TFS, emphasis mine:

"It is important to differentiate between the highly toxic PFAS such as PFOA and PFOS for which the EPA has set drinking water standards, versus less toxic PFAS in pesticides that help maintain food security," notes Doug Van Hoewyk, a toxicologist at Maine's Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

Less toxic is still toxic. So, they *know* it's bad for you (and probably the environment/local ecology too), just not as bad, and yet they still expect you to be grateful for their efforts and quite literally lap it up. Good luck getting that shit on the shelves of places like the EU that have reasonable food standards, regardless of any tariffs or TACOs.

Given most people think "dams, reservoirs, and turbines" when they hear the word "hydro", it's also worth pointing out that the UK has a lot of untapped tidal potential as well; the Severn estruary in particular is one of the largest tidal bores in the world, twice a day, and its energy potential will only increase as sealevels rise. Combine that with some suitable storage system, and you'll have another clean (once set up) and predictable supply capacity to offset some more of the current carbon-based baseload.

My kids are not in the public school system because here, a 6yo kid here gets an ipad or chromebook, and does a huge chunk of their school work through apps. I just dont believe that is a good way to learn. Has nothing to do with race, gender or left/right politics.

At least in our areas, while there is no money for teachers (no raises, big classes etc), the schools spend enormous amounts of money on new stadiums. As long as the tax money goes to funding sports, I will do whatever I can to underfund them.
Example: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.co...

Always the oddball trying to blame different budgets and crap, but it comes from the same pocket in the end.

So... Did you work on Microsoft Excel, the Intel Pentium, or both?