No worries, you are in good company - we can’t build anything big in Germany, too. Between NIMBY lawsuits and over regulation everything takes literally decades and cost billions. Somewhere is 60s-70s people have build whole metro networks in a decade. Now a single stub metro line takes 10 years (Cologne, Berlin) and is often followed by all kind of problems due to incompetence.
Funny you should lead with that as your main concern, because it has the same problem as the fabrications about Russian collusion (which I note has fallen way out of fashion now that election security has happily returned to being a iron-clad given [0]) - at some point the narrative collapses due to a lack of any and all evidence. It has been 12 months, the transfer of power turned out to be mostly peaceful - as usual. And then people quite rightly ask "why was the focus on fabrications rather than real, tangible problems - like supply chain instability and lack of disaster preparedness?".
[0] Possibly the Trump administration did good work securing them?
I'm still worried about Russia interfering in our elections. I can't speak for others.
> And then people quite rightly ask "why was the focus on fabrications rather than real, tangible problems."
Because it almost worked. If one police officer had run a different way, the insurrectionists probably would have found where the congresspeople were. Say a bunch of them are killed—what do you do now? If they came from states that had opposite party governors, and the balance of power in congress changes... what does that mean for democratic legitimacy?
That day came very, very close to being very bad, and there's no reason to think it won't repeat itself in a few years if we don't take the problem seriously.
For stuff like cream cheese, I really think the news stories are overblown. It's around, there was plenty in the grocery store yesterday.
I hope you are right that this is not a serious issue. I can only say that I ran into this, as well as being unable to reliably get on a flight, as well as being unable to easily aquire a PCR test required for international travel all within the same 3 week period.
And none of these problems seem to exist in Germany.
Here's what the Senate Intel. Committee concluded:
[B]ased on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modem era.
What happened in 2020 is not that the election was more secure per se (although there was some foreign interference reported at the time, it was not as bad as in 2016), it was that Paul Manafort was not Trump's campaign manager. He was the main vector between the Trump campaign and Russia. And honestly at that point, Russia didn't have to do any work to get their propaganda on American airwaves, because Fox New was literally doing their job for them -- e.g. broadcasting the position that Ukraine was responsible for the 2016 DNC hacking, not Russia.
> the transfer of power turned out to be mostly peaceful - as usual.
Mostly peaceful? A violent insurrection at the Capitol during a joint session of Congress, sent there by the defeated President, with the explicit intention of preventing the transfer of power through force is not "mostly peaceful", I'm sorry. It actually marked the ignominious end of a 200+ year streak of peaceful transfers of power. Even during the Civil war something like 1/6 didn't happen.
This is what worries you? That we're having some supply chain problems with cream cheese, largely as a result of a once-in-a-century pandemic?
The price of gas is far too cheap anyway given it's environmental cost, Americans should consider buying smaller freaking cars. While it is hard to find COVID tests, it's very easy to find vaccines (and has been for eight months), and between the two I'd say we prioritized the right thing. Flights are clearly a result of employees catching Omicron.
I'm much more worried about the insurrection, and voter suppression, and the large percentage of Americans who think Biden won illegitimately. Or, if you want to focus on material issues, I'm worried that we're the only advanced country without universal healthcare, income inequality has been skyrocketing for decades, and we can't seem to build major new infrastructure projects. (The recent infrastructure bill is encouraging, but e.g. Amtrak says it will mostly be used for maintenance on existing lines, WTF?!)
Oh, and I'm worried about climate change, but at least most of those problems are in the future. You know, after it's too late to do anything about it.