Yes, China has no enormous military buildup right now, and they aren't fortifying the South China Sea or being aggressive with their neighbors at all.

Until the next earthquake, and then you fix it. A hell of a lot more straightforward than making something last in the violent and frozen marine environment. I hope there is no metal in it. Or concrete. This thing has to compete with giant ships lumbering across the ocean - it will be a challenge.

Why would you need to heavily fortify the bridge? If something objectionable starts to cross it, a WW2 dive bomber could do the job.

I think you need to look at the first Mac keyboard. There was no "control" key. Just the Command and Option keys. The Command key was for keyboard shortcuts and the Option key was to enter special characters (accents, extra symbols, etc). They later added the "Control" key where the caps lock key is typically located now and moved "caps lock" to a tiny button next to the space bar. This was done to be compatible with terminal applications.

To be fair, nothing ever good came from buying a PC with ME or Vista... you picked the lesser of two evils. I had 98SE on a machine well into the XP era. I had an XP machine well into the 7 era. Strategic skipping of versions is just as important to a Windows user as not touching the installed system.

The auto market is one of the most competitive and low-margin. You need another example for your theorem. I can get a Versa for under $12,000 that is a better car in almost every way than anything that could have been purchased in 1980. We've had 200% inflation since then... What sort of crap did you get for $6000 in 1980? Did it last 150,000 miles and have airbags, crumple zones, a CD player, and AC?

I agree. Substitute man's intervention for some other one-off event. It doesn't really change my point. Polar bears are separated from brown bears by less than half a million years - they may be more analogous to humans, which have less than a 100,000 to have differentiated. My point is that the differentiation - mild as it was - has now largely been undone. Especially here in the US where you have people with significant African heritage living as "white" people and the average "black" person having 30% European heritage. A classification system is completely useless from a scientific standpoint.

But they don't interbreed unless a person intervenes.

Ignoring for the moment that a wolf is basically a wild dog, again they only breed when man intervenes. Dogs wouldn't exist at all without man's intervention.

Weird logic jump, but yes, character traits are heritable. Humans haven't been selectively bred by a weird outside force who wants a docile animal with a smooshed up face and breathing trouble. Humans quite obviously inherit their character traits from their parents. But if you take your typical brown American, they probably have European, native American, and African ancestry. Maybe some Asian. How the hell are you going to classify that person, let alone try to correlate their inherited skin color to their inherited personality? A classification system that cannot classify the President (or nearly 1/3 of the US) is pretty useless.

And oddly, not an island.

"State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations"

Haha, that sounds awful! Probably uses something like the SPEEX codec in a 44kbps stream :)

Strings are bad - and cymbals. MP3 at low bitrates is indeed horrible. But those are all high-end that would be completely absent on AM. If you wished you could encode the MP3 with the high end filtered/compressed out and it would sound just like AM. People seem to prefer bad high end to no high end.

In any event, I wouldn't listen to either low-bitrate MP3 or AM except maybe in the car where it doesn't much matter :)

I'm not sure how old you are, but maybe your ears have lost high frequency response? AM has a very low dynamic range - something like 30dB. You can usually tell immediately that the radio is tuned to AM rather than FM. You could also be lucky enough to be listening to AM with a receiver that can handle HD or stereo broadcasts... those should sound better.

I would like the name of that streaming service, to avoid if possible :)

I'm skeptical, but perhaps in an ideal state you could coax AM radio to sound as good as Pandora's free stream at 128kbps. Certainly not in the typical configuration of an AM radio in 1980. It was not stereo, had horrid dynamic range (lower than the telephone!), and it picked up motor noise from your car engine or refrigerator. And again, you were listening through those horrid 1970s factory speakers or possibly a really crappy set of foam headphones.

Heh, yeah, now I have this image of Neil Young listening to a 48kbps MP3 and declaring digital dead.