If I paid attention 40 hours a week, I'd be braindead within a month.

I actually tried working 6.5 days a week when I first started my "real" software development career job - going into the 3rd week it became painfully obvious to me that I was making less real progress (mistakes, rewrites) though the overtime pay was nice...

Most displacement hull ships have a "hull speed" that does get higher with longer waterline - so the big cargo ships have that going for them, but, you're right, it's either linear or quadratic, up to a point, and then you hit the hull speed where turbulence makes it just about impossible to go much faster. Try it in a rowboat (small, low hull speed, easily attained with oars...)

How fast do you want it? Do you want to displace water, or air while you travel at that speed? If you're willing to cruise at lower speed, the oceangoing ships get more efficient, but I don't believe they run that way - they more or less go as fast as their engines are practically capable of, because that's what the customers are paying for - speed of delivery.

Malpractice insurance mentality....

All depends on the cost of oil... with cheap oil, the ships win. Trains move cargo for less energy expended per ton-mile, but cost in the infrastructure construction.

I've seen the project discussed for decades too, this is the first time the headline overtly states that China would consider paying for it...

No, no, NO! You power it with a $5 piece of crap power supply that you got at an outlet sale - then watch as the power supply fries everything in sight the first time you look at it crosseyed....

I did this in college with my "free" evaluation DSP (that cost $200 in reality...) took me a month to get another sample out of the sales rep.

That would be absolutely awesome - microchip traces are probably ~200nm, and your 3D printer nozzle might be capable of 1mm thick traces... imagine the barn you'd need to protect the finished product from the weather!

You make me think: baby seal catapults probably are viable competition for Amazon drone delivery - more likely to be cleared for legal deployment by the FA whatever that regulates baby seals, and more gentle on the cargo than UPS delivery.

Why would they inspect when they've got you doing their work for them?

Tropicana used to pipeline orange juice about 1/2 mile to the Middle School my father taught at - they shut the pipeline down after a few years due to intractable contamination issues.

There was a pipeline from Miami International Airport to Homestead Air Force base carrying jet fuel.

A small leak under Cutler Ridge shopping mall went undetected for years, until somebody noticed the storm drains were all flammable.

All in all, pipelines are safer than trains are safer than supertankers, but each has its place and none are perfect.

Not just pipelines made in the 1930s - leaky pipelines are a feature of the system, it costs too much to keep them 100% intact, so a little leak here and there goes unrepaired for long periods of time.

We looked at buying acreage in East Texas, pipeline easements are pretty common there, as are contamination spots from pipeline leaks.

So, we should be converting fossil fuel directly to foodstuffs, then?

Oil is incredibly inefficient in all its forms of use - what's the efficiency of an internal combustion engine? How about heating a home with a furnace, how much heat is lost out the flue? When you make electricity with an oil fired generator, what's the efficiency there? Take any of these figures and square, or maybe cube them to account for multiple steps involved in producing and delivering food - 10% seems optimistic to me.