Mm. Reminds me of something I saw a while back, can't remember enough to search for it though. During the Cold War, there was an easy "US good, USSR bad" patte

Mm. Reminds me of something I saw a while back, can't remember enough to search for it though. During the Cold War, there was an easy "US good, USSR bad" pattern for the world to be inspired by, but with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rest of the world no longer needs to (or even can if it wanted to) rally around a call of "hey, at least we're not the USSR". Now we don't have the USSR in the picture, what does the USA offer? Much of the rhetoric I see from it these days is "We're not China", and true, you're not, but when we're looking in from the outside there's a loss of scale and rightly or wrongly the ICE detention camps and exporting of people to CECOT, looks much the same as Uighurs being put in Xinjiang internment camps. Meanwhile, increasing fractions of my hardware, from injection moulded widgets to laser welding kits, from 3D printers and PV to computers and smartphones, is made by Chinese firms, so China looks increasingly like the place where stuff actually happens, and conversely the USA looks increasingly like the place where grand visions are pronounced only to fail from lack of awareness of how to engineer anything or what customers really benefit from (e.g. Juicero, Metaverse, Cybertruck).