This will probably come across as a kneejerk response, but the submission makes it sound like Liu's themes are almost entirely derived from PRC propaganda.
I read that bit about the plot for "The Wages of Humanity" and almost laughed out loud. Straight out of Mao's little red pulp mag. What would aliens care about the form of government used on another planet?
Although it doesn't sound that different from some of the line's Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. "The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity"
I guess it's possible, of course you would first have to commit genocide against everyone with normal human instincts. That pretty much sums up communism.
Your other narrative of fear and scare-mongering of the great Chinese space migration is as nutty as the fear of Japan taking over the world was in the 1980s.
Sadly it is an open question whether China's present will become seen to more closely resembles Japan of the 1980s or Japan/Germany of the 1930s. Even if China does manage to maintain a somewhat peaceful course (which will be surprising given how they're threatening to annex territory from nearly all their neighbors and even threatening to completely annex Taiwan), a China that achieves the same level of prosperity as Japan won't be as weak as Japan. Japan peaked with a per capita GDP slightly larger than America's giving it an economy about half the size of America's (because Japan has roughly half as many people). China on the other hand has 4 times as many people as America. If China reaches per capita GDP parity, it will have an economy 4 times as large as America's, and larger than America Europe and Japan combined. They'll get their way. While America too often live up to its ideals, China doesn't even have similar ideals.
SETI found nothing
That is a very real possibility. Or maybe the aliens aren't civilized or even intelligent. Or maybe they're in one of the trillions upon trillions of places SETI hasn't had a chance to look yet. Or maybe they're using transmission frequencies SETI isn't checking, or the transmissions have been wave shifted out of SETI's range. Or perhaps SETI just didn't recognize the signals received.
The fact that SETI has found nothing tells us practically nothing about whether there is life out there. God may have created life (directly or indirectly) all over the universe. We don't have enough knowledge to say for certain yet.
But I've certainly had cases where I needed to copy and paste a few lines of code maybe even 100 times and then tweak each instance to put in the data values or validations I want.
This leads to bugs where a tweak gets missed in one of the copies (copy, paste, do tweak 1, interruption!, forget tweak 2). It also causes maintenance problems when the person coding a bug fix doesn't know there are a bunch of other places that need to be fixed.
You're right that forgetting to do the tweak can be a problem. But as for not knowing there are a bunch of other places that need fixing, I guess I wasn't clear enough. The repetition gets centralized in a single file so that you can look over all the locations at once.
I don't think refactoring implies simplification. I think ideally it would simplify something about the code (e.g. semantics, interoperability, etc), but it will likely make some parts of the code more complex (e.g. more levels of abstraction, or a more complex design patterns, etc)
Refactoring definitely doesn't imply optimization.
from wikipedia
Code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code – changing the factoring – without changing its external behavior. Refactoring improves nonfunctional attributes of the software. Advantages include improved code readability and reduced complexity to improve source code maintainability, and create a more expressive internal architecture or object model to improve extensibility.
Occasionally you may be refactoring the code to give it more capabilities so you'll move to a higher level of abstraction. But I think in most cases the goal is to make the code simpler even if doing so makes some portions of the code more complex. A design pattern that reduces coupling between two classes can make the overall code simpler even if the code that implements the design pattern is complex. If you have a program that, for example, prints a custom driver's license for each of the fifty states, you may put complexity into certain parts of the code so that the parts of the code that focus on the differences between each state can be simple.(instead of 50 mildly complex pieces of code have one more complex piece of code and a list of 50 calls to that code with each call having unique parameters).
"The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." -- Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards