The fact that you don’t know the answer to that question yourself is pretty much clinching evidence that it’s AI code.

The year is 1999. The tech scene, where I did most of my marketing work at the time, is collapsing in Ottawa. I’m getting tired of the disrespect I doubly get for a) not being a techie, and b) not being male. I decide to go for the money instead.

A company in Houston is hiring and I get headhunted. The salary hinted at is almost double what I’m making now, plus some very generous bonus and stock schemes. I get flown down to Houston, kept in a really nice hotel room for two days as I go through several interviews with different departments and managers. When I’m finished and on the flight back home, I have my pick of four jobs. Feels good, right? To be wanted that much?

Yeah, except that the final interview had already settled which I’d take: none.

Before that final interview I’d already had a few red flags:

1. Houston is a lovely city and far more cosmopolitan than I’d imagined I’d ever find in Texas, of all places. But … there’s still billboards left, right, and centre for churches, religious radio stations, etc. It may be surface cosmopolitan, but that general feel of fundamentalist Christianity is everywhere.
2. The salary is high but digging into the paperwork for the proffered health plan leads me to believe that if I have any kind of a major health problem or accident or the like I’m not going to be seeing the benefits of that for long.
3. As cosmopolitan as Houston itself looked, the company was whiter than white.

None of these was a showstopper. Hell, all three were just a mark in the “minus” column of my PMI¹ analysis and had not yet outweighed the “plus” column.

But that final job interview… Yeah.

I was talking to the final hiring manager (the pattern was in each department first a group interview with HR plus a few potential coworkers, and if I passed, directly with the hiring manager) and I noticed an intriguing sculpture on the shelf behind him. It was a smooth rock (a river-smoothed piece of granite, it looked like) and on it was mounted some pieces of shiny metal with weird dented-in spots that looked half-melted with the metal melting into weirdly-shaped blobs. So I asked about it. I couldn’t see how the metal was formed the way it was, melted so it sagged, broke through, and also pooled in the hole.

“Oh, that? That’s the platters of a hard drive that failed. I took it to the range and shot it with this.”

And he pulls out a revolver from his desk. Nothing special, just a silver .38 special revolver, like the kind cops used to carry. Loaded. He waved the handgun around in ways that would have my father (a retired CWO) leaping across to him and buttstroking him to unconsciousness for the sheer lack of trigger and barrel discipline. I can’t get across just how unsafe this guy was being. He was in an office full of people, he was waving around a loaded handgun that he’d taken from his office desk, paying no attention to if the barrel ever pointed at someone or not. I was too stunned to look, but it would not have surprised me to see that he’d placed his finger on the trigger too. This was just reckless.

And. Nobody. Else. Around. Me. Thought. This. Was. Unusual.

In the middle of a job interview, an interviewing manager thought it was OK to pull out a loaded handgun and wave it around. And nobody around him thought it was even slightly off.

That by itself would have been a hard “no” for accepting any kind of a job. I didn’t need the other red flags in the slightest. I had four offers in my pocket and my answer to all four was “sorry, I’ve decided I’m never setting foot on US soil ever again”. And I’ve stuck with it ever since.

¹ de Bono’s “Plus/Minus/Interesting” technique.

What stood out for me was this line:

— so it could be, whether the NYT understood it or not, that its “experts” were simply winking at the reality that it’s hard to build affordable gadgets in a country with robust labor rights.

Robust labour rights? An American is talking about “robust labor rights”!? If someone from the EU had written that I’d have gone “fair enough”. But against an American employer?

Let’s put it this way: I’ve worked in China for 25 years. I turned down a job in the USA shortly before moving here (about two years before). There’s a reason for this (and it wasn’t just the gun in the job interview).

It’s the pressure. It got to you. Just drained you.

In Hanyu Pinyin 张殿李 is transcribed as Zhāng Diànlǐ. An approximation of this in English sounds (ignoring tones) is Jahng Dee-en Lee (each word being a single syllable; the hyphen is there to show a diphthong change). This is not my real name, of course, because I’m not stupid. It is an approximation of my real name that those who know the real name would look at and nod saying “yes, I can see that”. Or you can call me by my English name if you like: Dianne. (No, again, I won’t be sharing the rest of the name because I’m not an idiot. 🤣)

You don’t pronounce the flags, though. They’re decoration. 😉

You’ve given me pause to reflect.

Removed by mod

And their counterparts “in a while”.

I hate you so much right now. Have your effin’ upvote!

Yeah, I had to go feeling around under the couch to find my eyes after rolling them so hard they popped out of my head.

I hated Donald Trump in the '80s already. I thought he was a dishonest blowhard and was amazed that anybody believed anything that came out of his mouth.

I hated Elon Musk from pretty much the moment he showed up as the “darling awkward little geek bro”. He always struck me as inauthentic and a little bit stupid. (I was wrong on that last point, mind. He’s a lot stupid.)

I’m with you here. No idea what the joke is even supposed to be, not to mention if it’s funny or not.

There is a whole lot more to a healthy democracy than “I voted”.

China doesn’t need to retaliate. Chinese cinema goers are overwhelmingly choosing domestic product over import in recent years. For 2024, for example, 80% of the Chinese box office went to Chinese productions.

The problem is he brought a deck of poker cards to a chess game.

The movies normalized The American Way™ as the default way of doing things. The billionaires then financed the people pitching The American Way™. Without the first, the second wouldn’t work.

The Chinese market is huge, yes, but increasingly turning away from Hollywood productions to homegrown ones. In 2025 for example 哪吒2 (Nézhā 2) broke scored over $2 billion at the box office, with a record-smashing $1.96 billion of that coming domestically. By way of comparison Captain America 4 only managed $14.4 million so far, a dramatic drop from 2016’s Captain America 3 returns of $180 million in 2016.

For reference, even CA3’s $180 million is an order of magnitude smaller than Nezha 2. CA4’s is two orders of magnitude smaller.

Now this is still true: China’s theatre-going audience, estimated at over half a billion people, is larger than the entire population of the USA. It’s still a hugely important market. But, for example, in 2024 the Chinese box office was estimated at ~6 billion dollars total: and 80% of that went to domestic films. The best-performing foreign film of 2024 (Dune 2) only made $48 million, ranking it about 8th. 7th was 维和防暴队 (Wéihé Fángbàoduì/Formed Police Unit) and it made over $120 million.

I’m pretty sure that the Chinese market for Hollywood films is vanishing.

I hate you so much right now. CHOKE ON THE UPVOTE, JERKFACE!

And here you come SO FUCKING CLOSE … and still fumble the ball. Tsk. Tsk.