And it’s absolutely surreal that they had these machines running for four months straight, and nobody was paying attention to the traffic from them. Just insane levels of incompetence.

Lol yeah. In a way, it’s almost beyond belief, but then, this is the same capitalism that can’t even build weapons properly anymore because it’s so deep in grifting.

But yeah, you laid it out well. What is normally a useful capitalist behavior (for the capitalists) is turning into a repeating “hurts itself in confusion” moment, due to them not being able to lock down China. For all the credit I do give China, I think I still underestimate sometimes how well they thought through the trajectory of their approach to participation in the world economy and dealing with attempts to kneecap them along the way. Cause they seem to have maneuvered into a place now where the empire’s default tendencies are to its own detriment in confronting China. This feels like an insufficient explanation of where my head’s at on it, but I’m too tired right now to work out better words for it than that, so this will have to suffice for now.