Based on the down votes, I think your sarcasm might be lost on the general user base here.

If you haven’t watched it yet you’d probably enjoy Westworld - it plays a lot with that space and approaches some very interesting philosophy when it comes to human consciousness and what it means to even be a person.

the major difference is China hasn’t bombed anyone or established overseas military bases… yet. Anything can happen in the future.

It’s worth noting that is changing. They have two overseas military installations now and a lot of their commercial ports are set up for dual use so they could use them for wartime navy if needed.

But I do still think China is much more interested in economic soft power vs the USA who’s power projection is oftentimes “help us or we’re just gonna take what we want with force.”

Obviously that’s a huge oversimplification of a very complex topic just thought it was worth mentioning China has some overseas military force projection capabilities but they’re very limited.

I mean, the USA can basically move the equivalent of most nations military to anywhere on the planet in less than a week. It’s pretty crazy. But I think we are going to see some serious shake ups in the navy with new tech, carriers are great but it takes a lot to support them and some hypersonic missile batteries could probably make it through current defense systems. I’m not sure we’ll ever see a large scale naval battle on the open seas ever again but if that day does come it’s going to be real interesting except for, you know, all the deaths.

Short Answer: Markets are complicated and full of hundreds of thousands of moving parts. For a very simple example related to beef - we could consider the import of Waygu beef since that’s a commodity you can’t make in the USA.

Obviously, there’s plenty of other beef products we import. Anyways yeah usually a country is exporting and importing the same stuff in some quantities when it comes to things like beef or pork or simple mechanical widgets or whatever. Just stuff that because of the quirks of supply and demand and logistics makes it so widgets are exported for sale and also sold domestically.

I’ll go one further for you.

Now there is THCa on the market that when you heat it - you know by smoking it or whatever your method of choice - literally turns into Delta-9 THC. Some light reading on it.

So there is this really odd legal gray area now. I think it should be abundantly clear by now that marijuana should just be fucking legal, it’s readily available all over the place and it being illegal on the federal level is just dumb. It’s safer than alcohol and we have ads for that shit shoved in our faces everywhere we go.