There are two considerations.

For the American government and corporations, Chinese espionage is an obvious and real threat. NVidia doesn’t want China to steal their chip designs and the Pentagon doesn’t want China to steal military info.

For American private citizens, it isn’t really a threat. It’s actually preferable in a way, because you know they won’t disclose whatever they learn to the American government. You might even consider buying a fully “designed and made in China” device, which the NSA might not have a backdoor to.

This only makes it more concerning to the American government, because they lose control over their citizens.

Also, having been on the other side of such a situation: it’s not cool to pressure or guilt trip your guests. Either be hospitable and let them do whatever they want, or don’t invite them.

If people aren’t hungry, then they aren’t hungry. Maybe they are on a diet, maybe they misunderstood OP’s intention and ate beforehand. Maybe they are recovering from something and don’t want to eat too much.

And as for the two that did not showed up. It’s a good practice to reconfirm the night before. Sometimes people forget. Sometimes life gets in the way.

If they did reconfirm and still didn’t show up and did not have a good excuse, then I would start looking for better friends.

Hope OP has better success next time. I do understand that the situation sucks.

But it’s also a situation that, in my opinion, is preventable.

Yep, all the electrical engineers who have chimed in say it looks more like explosives.

A battery would get hot and start a fire. It wouldn’t instantly explode like this.

Look, I wouldn’t trust the GOP with my shit stained underwear.

Of course they don’t have a better plan.

But voters who vote for them are still voters.

And falling for a false narrative doesn’t make them hypocrites.

In their mind, they are voting for the party that will fix it.

You may disagree, as do I, but that’s what they think.

To be fair, it’s a flawed argument.

You can be against Google and Apple and still use a smartphone.

You can be against a genocide being sponsored with your tax dollars and still work and pay tax.

And yes, you can use the healthcare system that exists today and still want a different one tomorrow.

Or do you think that advocates of universal healthcare are also hypocrites for using Obamacare?

It’s also by design.

The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.

For one, you can’t transfer a 401K to your kids.

You have to first cash it out, pay income tax and then you can transfer what remains.

Then you’ll need to educate yourself beyond what the government tells you.

Look up the ProPublica leaks. Someone is serving a very long jail time for leaking that out. It clearly shows how billionaires have very low taxable income, probably lower than yours.

To then say that you are upper class and Jeff Bezos is middle class is… Absurd.

The top 10% of income is not upper class. The error that people make, including you, is to focus on income.

People like Elon Musk have incomes smaller than $100K.

Upper class are the people who do not need to work and who live off of capital.

We need to shift our focus on wealth equality.

Look, the economy needs capital. If we want to be less dependent on the capital of rich people, then middle class people need to take over that role.

The people making $100-300K per year are key, because they can provide an alternative source of capital if their tax burden is lowered.

The people making $50K will not be able to provide large amounts of capital.

Yes, I fully agree.

So we need to find the right messaging.

I don’t know about Germany, but here in the Netherlands most people identify as middle class.

So “stop taxing the middle class” and “let the billionaires pay more” is a message that should resonate.

I’m optimistic and I believe we will get there. The level of equality we have today would be unfathomable for somebody living before 1945.

Which is why the tax system needs to be reformed.

The political right actually has one good point that we on the left don’t always appreciate: taxes on middle class people should be lower.

Specifically, very liberal tax exemptions on things like 401Ks, including the ability to transfer wealth across generations.

Combine that with higher taxes on the wealthy, and it will be possible to shift power to the middle class.

Consider the total market cap of the S&P 500, rounded up it’s about 50 trillion. Divide that among 130 million households and each household should own about $400K in stock on average.

Full equality is neither achievable nor desired by most people, so a good scheme would be to let every household hold up to $1M in wealth, tax exempt.

And then progressively tax everything above that.

While I do agree with you, I also see twitch, TikTok and Patreon presenting models that are quite competitive with YouTube.

From a privacy perspective, free junk content like TikTok, YouTube and twitch will always be hard coupled with targeted advertising.

But Patreon (and onlyfans for that matter) do offer a model that can work without ads.

In fact, if Patreon also introduced an ad-supported tier and allowed you to more broadly see other content aside from the direct person you sponsor, it could probably grow quite a lot.

Unfortunate reality, but headline placement is quite OK.

As your links explain, C series is used for envelopes, while B and elongated A are special case that aren’t commonly used.

In any case, none of those series has an equivalent to American Letter.

The only paper that you will commonly find in European offices are A4 and (to a lesser extent) A3.

A big office printer might have 4 trays stocked with A4 and one tray with A3, for example.

As a European, I do appreciate Legal as a format.

It just happens slightly too often that an A4 is not long enough and the last bit, including the signature, goes to the next page.

I wish Legal was common here. Or perhaps we could get a Long A4 with a third extra height or so.

The Letter format should just be replaced by A4 though.

Indeed, also it’s much nicer to use a shared high quality tool than to buy an el-cheapo disposable tool.

Even something simple like a crowbar. I once borrowed a (shorter) professional crowbar after struggling with a (larger) cheap one. The thing I was trying to pry came out like butter.

Even though physics dictates that a shorter lever should be inferior, it just had a much better design and grip.

Better for our wallet, sanity and environment.

From a lecture by Roger Penrose

Wikipedia has an article and he has some videos on YouTube

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction

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Looks like they at least made it sturdy enough to withstand a car wash.

Progress!