China’s ten-year presidential terms worked well for their people for a long time. That Xi has gone the dictator for life route is IMO a significant threat to their future direction.

Many countries also seem to be on a fine interim path to building up a combination capitalist/socialist economy and bringing up their median and minimum living standards. China is big and influential, but doesn’t have a lock on that.

Yup, small percent of people. But those 4% (or whatever it is) are the only possible audience capable of breaking free of living from paycheck to paycheck by following “tips”. And 4% of 300 million people is a reasonably large number of people.

Or AI

It didn’t last. Surely there’s something in the middle that can both lift up the potential floor for standard of living through social safety net and also be sustained long term.

I don’t think the target audience here is people struggling with groceries.

There are a surprising number of households where both people pull in six figures in low or moderate cost of living areas, and they live paycheck to paycheck because they way overspend. It’s not groceries or the heating bill, it’s the extravagant vacations, the horseback riding lessons, the huge wardrobes for growing kids that need everything replaced in six months. These are all nice things, but if you can’t afford them, it’s OK to do without.

Do you have other instances of calls or texts not going through? I ask because I had that problem, and it turned out the TMobile towers often take longer to find my phone number (the number itself - this issue persisted through multiple physical phones) than the default 15 second timeout to voicemail. I found instructions on the TMobile forums of how to increase the timeout period, bumped it up to 25 seconds, and haven’t had an issue since.