Meanwhile over here in the US the clowns we have in the supreme court ruled that anything the president does while in office is de facto not a crime.

Yeah, the article is right, but for all the wrong reasons. China is taking the lead globally less because of anything it’s doing but more because of what everyone else is. In many ways the US was doomed from the moment one of our two political parties decided its future was best served by appealing to the ignorant and uneducated.

The GOP has spent decades attacking our education system and painting experts and the educated as the enemy all because they had the temerity to say the emperor had no clothes and point out the many ways in which conservative dogma fails. China got incredibly lucky to have just the right economy and connections in the 80s to become everybody’s outsourced manufacturing hub and has further benefited by the US attacking its own educational and research institutions.

China hasn’t so much sprinted past the US as they have maintained their steady pace while the US shot itself in the head because the right hand wanted to be the one in charge of everything.

Trump and the MAGA idiots are just the natural progression of the policies the GOP embraced starting all the way back with Nixon and his southern strategy and accelerated by Reagan and his economic policies.

It turns out it’s hard to be a leader in a technological society when you put the dumbest people you can find in charge of things.

You’re right, essentially all so called Christian holidays and traditions are just rebranded older traditions from other religions. People were far more amenable to converting to or at least tolerating Christianity if they could continue their existing holidays and traditions largely unchanged, so Christian churches came up with various explanations for why those holidays were now Christian. It’s why for instance Christmas is in December suspiciously close to the winter solstice despite all evidence pointing to Jesus being born at a different time of the year. Sometimes they don’t even bother with trying to pretend like with Christmas trees and the Easter bunny (also the name Easter).

Boomers are the core, but they’ve gotten some reinforcements from Gen X and Millenials. The good news if there is any is that not enough of Gen X and Millenials are MAGAts to carry an election without the Boomers, so in another couple decades if a bunch of Gen Alpha doesn’t turn real stupid we might have a chance.

The dongles are not proprietary. I’ve literally used my USB A module as a USB C to USB A adapter on a different laptop. The dimensions of the module are publicly available, nothing is stopping anyone from making their own. Before Framework offered their own Ethernet port module someone in the community actually manufactured their own using the 3D printing files that Framework provided.