Think of the traffic on the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri rivers, then extend that throughout 2/3 of the country and make that transit 2-way rather than mostly from upstream to downstream. I'm pretty sure they're ahead.

China recognizes over 200 languages and something like 180 ethnicities, they're one of the most diverse countries on the planet (either second or third, depending on how India counts their ethnicities). IIRC Russia is fourth, with around 100 languages spoken and almost that many ethnicities.

The pipeline is for natural gas, which is extremely important not only for electrical generation but for making fertilizer.

They do have a massive canal network (portions of it dating back over 1000 years) and a lot of coastal shipping. Whether it would add 8% I would have no idea but it would undoubtedly be larger than in the US.

No, this is a real thing. One of the first sectors to move heavy equipment to electric was mining, now they have entire mines which are all-electric and mostly-automated. Driving a mining truck or running an excavator is pretty much no-brain work, jobs fit for robots. This guy lives and works in China and writes mostly about the business environment (with occasional digressions). All of his articles are accompanied by lots of links to other reading.

https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

The mining company deployed a fleet of one hundred fully autonomous electric trucks.

Huawei built a 5.5G network and designed algorithms specifically for open-pit coal mines, with localized maps. As a result, the smart trucks operate at 120% efficiency compared to human operators.

As more intelligent mines come online and electrify, enormous savings in fuel costs will be realized. Diesel fuel typically accounts for up to half of all operating costs for mining operations; mining trucks consume up to 100 liters (30 gallons) of fuel per hours, and overland fuel transport and storage in remote areas drive capital investment needs higher.

Seriously, WTF are you babbling about? First off Uighur is a single ethnic group, they're not multiracial. Transgenderism is barely a thing in China at all, and since Uighurs were mostly Muslim for the last 700 years there would be even fewer among them. You appear to be absurdly poorly informed.

I suppose the alternative is you were trying to do some wokeism/racial slur. It that's the case your troll-fu is weak and laughable.

Cripes, anyone who had been paying attention for the last quarter of a century could have predicted the "invasion of Ukraine". How many "red lines" did NATO think it could cross before Russia finally felt forced to act?

Troll? Really mods? OK, whatever.

I do consider taxation theft, there is no purpose to it except for controlling the population. The fact that people accept different *levels* of theft depending on how much money they make just proves how much of theft it is, because they more money someone makes, the fewer people there are in that category of people, given that, it is easier to structure theft in such a way as to convince the majority that they don't suffer as much as the other people, who are hit with a much bigger crime.

AI and modeling is making robotics useful across a wide range of disciplines, very suddenly. Where before you might need years and scores of prototyping attempts to get a functional restaurant dish washing robot today videos of humans doing the job can be fed to the AI, a prototype designed in the computer, and then thousands of actions and exceptions modeled in a few days before ever cutting a piece of metal.

When people who aren't smart enough to do anything more complex than wash dishes are laid off, where are they going to go?

They may as well just said, "Chinese technical universities have outpaced American universities in everything."

This guy lives and works in China and writes about the business environment there (with occasional digressions). All his articles are lavishly supplied with links.

https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

This has happened suddenly, but decisively, that Chinese universities now dominate the world rankings for the hard sciences.

The Nature Index is a comprehensive ranking of over 18,000 universities and colleges from around the world, and the scores are based on quality research output. These tables are sortable, as well, by scientific discipline. For example, in Physics, the United States didn’t show up in the top 10 ranking at all.

Sichuan University in Chengdu, across all scientific and engineering disciplines, is now ahead of Stanford, MIT, Oxford, and University of Tokyo.

Here are some other takeaways. 8 out of the top 10 research institutions are Chinese. Zhejiang University is in that bunch, and where Liang went. Of the top 50 universities, 26 are from China. US has 14. Have you ever been to Xiamen? Me either. But they have a university in Xiamen that’s ahead of Cal, Columbia, Cornell, and Chicago. I know about all of those. Half the top 100 are Chinese. . .

If you are a programmer and you are given clear instructions on what is expected, then yes. If you are a programmer and you are not given clear instructions, then no. However if you are technical lead/architect then you really should be responsible for it.

OTOH if you are a programmer and you raise these concerns then you are on your way to become a technical lead/architect.

In my systems I insist we keep a database table of various common passwords (tens of thousands of these) and we do not allow people using them as well.

They gave up their privacy when they stepped out of their front door.

I remember a story on Slashdot from around the turn of the century, an audit of servers at the Pentagon found that the most common Admin password was Password, the second-most common was P@ssw0rd.

At my first real IT job in 1996 if you knew the birthdate of of the children of 4/5 of the users you knew their password. I wasn't allowed to insist on a change in the user training.

It is like saying: someone will do some work for free, because they like it, lets then make sure that we take away the product of their work, they don't need it anyway. How is that a moral stance, how is it good economically? People feel a certain way if someone tries to steal from them. One thing is to work, even if you don't have to, but to understand that the result of your work is yours. It is a completely different proposition to enslave someone just because they can survive without keeping the results of their work. Practically speaking, if someone sees this type of attitude, they choose a different jurisdiction to do their work, where there won't be such blatant abuse.