Wasn't clear, apparently. I meant that Russia would still have persevered even if the US hadn't sold them weapons on credit.

It wasn't Russia yet when either thing happened.

So you think that repeating Hitler's and Napoleon's mistake was a better idea? Damn. Sure, the Soviets got a shit-ton of weapons from the Allies, but all that did was move the defeat of Germany ahead a few years. Invading the largest country on Earth is never a good idea, especially when it consists of a population who has refused to submit to invaders EVER.

That horse left the barn years ago, our last presidential election pitted two candidates against each other who both swore to continue using US tax dollars to arm and fund a genocide.

There was a guy who did hard prison time and was put on the child predator list for life because he wrote a fictional story about it. Never underestimate the viciousness of puritans.

They're desperately trying to keep the Chinese models out, but I doubt they'll be successful. Chinese AI is mostly outcome-based, they train a bot to wash dishes, a drone to recognize an insect infestation, or mining machinery to find and follow a vein, and equipment purchased from China is going to come with their AI baked in. Sure, they'll play with chatbots and AGI, but most of their work is devoted to actually accomplishing something besides stock manipulation. Once Chinese AI is seeded throughout the economy in machinery and devices more advanced systems are going to follow.

A lot of Asimov's subsequent stories were about end runs around the Three Laws, enabling robots to do things they shouldn't.

That's the normal outcome of a legal system run by and for lawyers. I was once added (without my permission) to a class action suit against Seagate. We "won" a coupon for $15 off our next Seagate drive of 500 mb or less (a month after Seagate had stopped producing 500mb drives). The lawyers made $5,000,000.

Ticket scalpers are overcharging for tickets? Say it isn't so! Inconceivable! /s

At that point decent emergency healthcare in remote locations like the upper Andes, remote mining camps, container ships, and antarctic research stations becomes possible. Parachute the robot surgeon in to the site, set up the mobile operating theater, and carve away. For that matter, it would make sense to send one along on lunar and deep space missions, both as surgeons and general fetch-and-steps.

I had a friend who knew both Spanish and French. She decided to take up Portuguese because it was similar to both. At one point she got so confused she couldn't use any of the three!

A lot, if not most, gold trades never involve metals physically changing hands, any more than stock trades involve you handing over paper certificates. Generally if you're a large buyer you purchase the gold from an exchange and it sits in their vault where the neighborhood meth head can't get to it.

They also claim:

They're not going to be the first, China already will sell any friendly country advanced modern nuclear reactors which go into production only six years after ground breaking. The US, not being a friendly country (to anyone but billionaires, anyway), still relies on 70 year old technology for ours.

Oh? Didn't know that. They still make spring steel in Switzerland?