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McDonald's, Cadmium, and Thermo Electron Niton Guns
An anonymous reader writes, snipping from a story at NPR: "'How did the Consumer Products Safety Commission find out that cadmium, a toxic metal, was present on millions of Shrek drinking glasses now being recalled by McDonald's? Well, an anonymous person with access to some pretty slick testing equipment tipped off Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) about the problem. Her office confirmed that somebody using a Thermo Electron Niton XRF testing gun found a lot of cadmium, sometimes used in yellow pigments, on the surface of the glasses. The source overnighted glasses to Speier's office last week, which then turned over the test results and specimens to the CPSC. ... By law, no more than 75 parts per million of cadmium is supposed to be present in paint on kids toys. Speier's office said the amount found on the glasses was quite a bit higher than that.' Seems like the answer to a previous question about at-home science — this blogger seems to have been one of the anonymous sources."
The glasses were made in China.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
A two trillion dollar budget, and still they miss this.
It used to be that public safety was the number one purpose and concern of the government. I guess poisoning children is less important now than making sure those with political power get bailed out. Children don't vote, after all. Well, except maybe in Chicago.
They probably missed it because it isn't above any established standard. The glasses were voluntarily recalled because a tougher standard may be pending. CNN has a poorly edited story about it.
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I sometimes use it to analyze soil samples in the field. Since you aren't necessarily shooting a homogeneous substance, you sometimes get results that don't reflect the overall concentration. To get meaningful data you have to send it to a fixed lab where they will extract it and get an analytical result that is more likely to reflect the real concentration.
Well, the "Smart Mama" (Jennifer Taggert) is someone that actually makes money through her XRF gun. According to the site below, she charges $5 per test or $100 per hour.
http://www.thesmartmama.com/xrf-testing/
Here's a media article where two families paid her to test their toys:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/25/AR2009122501674.html
A government cannot get "unlimited funding through inflation." Our government can run budget deficits because people will keep loaning us money - i.e., buying Treasury securities. Post-WWII Germany, Zimbabwe, Argentina, and a bunch of other countries serve as good examples of why a government's budget is not helped by running the presses.
If fiat currencies suck because of inflation, representative currencies suck because of deflation. With representative currency there is by definition a fixed amount in circulation, but that does nothing to stop the never-ending rise in demand for currency. Higher demand with a fixed supply of currency causes deflation.
Deflation sucks almost as much as inflation because it hurts those who borrow money. If you owe someone $1000 and the currency appreciates, you now have to pay back $2000 in constant dollars.
You don't get rid of inflation by using a representative currency; instead, you get negative inflation. Except that you now have no mechanism for controlling inflation.
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