Japan has some grade crossings on local lines, such as Shinsen on the Tokyo Inokashira line. All Shinkansen lines are grade separated.

Meanwhile, we're still struggling to bring our rail system into the twentieth century. We might go from diesel to electric in the 2040s.

And also because when the signage on the long uphill grade clearly requires that trucks must keep to the right lane, the robot ruck that can climb at eleven miles an hour won't tie up miles of traffic vainly trying to pass a truck doing 10.99 mph.

My state's response: What are those 'unions' you speak of?

The US answer to cheap Asian labor has to be robotic factories. These will take time to build, and will probably be financed by China as their way of avoiding the tariff.

This isn't Apple's fault, so it has to be Trump's fault somehow.

Young whippersnapper. Get off my LAN!

This, folks, is why China is winning.

We're not stopping until we can slice and dice a 737.

How much power-that-California-doesn't-have will this AI require?

It's also subject to hurricanes and Biblical flooding. Furthermore, the specially modified 747 used to transport Shutltes from place to place is already a museum piece at the same place that Texas wants to place the Shuttle. It would have to be de-mothballed and made operational again just for thiis one job.

The Shuttle in Los Angeles, not all that far from Houston, is accessible to even more people.

What will a society of 150-year-old hippie mystics lookalike?

We hear so much these days about young urban hipsters deciding not to have children because the world as they see it appears to be coming to an end. But when I visited Iowa this month, I was impressed by by seeing babies everywhere. So if children represent optimism about the future, look at these differences among states:

https://worldpopulationreview....

Now consider the effects, long-term, of these differentials on our culture and politics.

"Dark matter" is about to go the way of phlogiston and luminiferous aether.