Why 20M Americans Need to File for Bankruptcy | I Want a Swiss Sheep

A whopping number of Americans would benefit from giving up and starting from scratch.

A few years ago, Chris Saltzburg found himself at the intersection of an expensive divorce, the loss of his job and the rapidly declining health of his mother. The debts started piling up. American Express seized his bank account. After making a six-figure salary for most of his career as a model, Saltzburg was broke.

He began researching his options and found that filing for bankruptcy made the most sense. But the process seemed incredibly daunting, and he couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer. Saltzburg’s situation is all too familiar — it happens to people all over the country every day. While many fear the unknown or make false presumptions about filing for Chapter 7, more than 20 million Americans would benefit from declaring bankruptcy.

Beijing’s private space market, just four years old, is growing faster than anywhere else. As are the country’s ambitions.

With a 90-pound satellite strapped on, the Zhuque-1 shot off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Inner Mongolia on Oct. 27 with a historic mission in its sights: becoming China’s first private sector rocket to deliver a payload into orbit. The Zhuque-1 didn’t make it, but Landspace, the firm that owns it, isn’t settling for failure. In fact, it already had devised plans for Zhuque-2, a successor rocket to carry payloads of up to 440 pounds.

That ambition isn’t restricted to Landspace, founded in 2015 at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Think of the private sector in space, and chances are that SpaceX comes to mind. But rocket by rocket, payload by payload, communist China is laying the foundations for the future domination of the private space industry.

America will finally see its own flocks of the Swiss Alps–bred Valais blacknose.

I’m in love with a sheep.

I live with two cats in the middle of Paris in an apartment that’s smaller than 500 square feet, and with a balcony too small to stand on — the closest thing to an outdoor space. But I want a sheep.

Not just any sheep, mind you. I want a Valais blacknose, a Swiss breed with a shaggy white coat, curled horns and, as its name suggests, a black nose. If you’ve ever seen one, it was probably in a tweet with the hashtag #CutestSheepEver. And now the Valais blacknose, which has been bred in the mountains of Switzerland for centuries and lives in Scotland, the Netherlands and Germany, will be an American sheep as well.