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?

The info out of the Ukrainian MOD is even less reliable than that from the Kremlin, which isn't reliable at all. Both sides lie with abandon.

And Baba Yaga drones are mostly used on resupply missions for trapped troops.

And don't forget to include "board memberships for the family members of generals and admirals" among those incentives.

Middle-range drones are in use because anti-aircraft measures have gotten so good. Once they've been depleted you'll see single-use drones replaced by reusable aircraft dropping dumb bombs again, which Iran did during the height of the Usrael attacks and Russia occasionally does in lapses of NATO weapons shipments.

Pretty sure he means "made in" like a new VW can say "Made in the USA", but all the components were made in Germany, Mexico and China and it's just assembled here.

Of course, they're dedicated devices. Drones are cheap and easy to customize.

Researchers in England found that they could track the US stealth aircraft outside one of the big bases by its affect on the cellphone network (IIRC it was covered on SlashDot). You can stealth them from the front and to a lesser extent from the sides and rear, but there's not much you can do about the bottom or the top.

There are now anti-net drones.

Once the drone defense gets figured out a way to mostly work around it will be encountered. Every countermeasure so far in the drone exchanges has been combatted, with various levels of success.

Even if they do spend the next several years building up (an extremely expensive) drone production infrastructure they still have to go to China to buy the materials to build those components. While Western corporations were unloading low-profit mining and refining operations in favor of investments which would provide higher short term profits China saw an opportunity to take control of the very base of industrial production and now control most of the truly important material streams.