Medical-purity BaSO4 is likely to be a further cut above the lab-grade stuff you can buy from any number of common chemical suppliers - purifying it is trivial - they do it all the time to make the stuff in the first place.
Purifying it of hepatitis virus is NOT trivial (and I won't even go into what's necessary to denature prions).
Once it's been through the intestinal tract of one patient, making it pure enough to be inserted to another's is likely to be far more expensive than purifying something that came out of a mine.
Iodine is used in the illegal manufacture of Methamphetamine. As a resule, Iodine has recently been reclassified as a List I chemical under federal law. Those handling or selling iodine and its compounds must now go through a bunch of bureaucratic red tape with the DEA.
I found this out right after the Fukushima disaster (when I tried to find some potassium iodide supplement {or other potable iodine compound, such as water purification tablets or tincture of iodine} to take to bump my iodine level before the fallout arrived). Guess what: None to be found. Not just because it had been sold out by those who responded faster. But because most retailers (including large drug store chains and sporting goods stores) had stopped carrying it, rather than deal with the drug warriors.
I suspect that, even if some iodine compound is suitable for a gastrointestinal contrast medium, the drug industry has not been interested in developing it and seeking approval, at least until now. While barium was in cheap supply why should they spend money developing a replacement whose distribution would involve expensive federal red tape?
Hint: There is one time that people in the gun culture believe it is not merely moral, but sometimes morally required, to lie. That is when someone asks you about whether you have/what guns you have, in an inappropriate context and/or when they're not entitled to the information. An example of such a context is when you're in a doctor's office or emergency room being treated for something NOT related to an injury resulting from your own firearm.
The right answer to such questions is "no", unless it's obvious (like from an accidental self-inflicted wound) the answer must be "yes" - but with details withheld.
Such reporting bias invalidates studies dependent on questioning the subjects. (And how else can you obtain the information?) Authors of similar studies in the past (notably Kellerman, author of the debunked study behind the "43 times more likely" meme) have actually repudiated and withdrawn their own work once things like this were pointed out.
If they were talking IPv6, UDP packet overhead is 48 bytes, leaving only 22 for keeping the CODECs synchronized and specifying how much silence is being encoded.
I note that some carriers deliberately inject what is called "comfort noise" - a small amount of background noise - during silences. This is to keep the user from becoming concerned that the connection has failed.
While I don't know whether, or how, skype does this, it would be reasonable to either actually send the connection's real background noise at a reduced bit rate, or send some small amount of information to the receiving end in a mechanism for avoiding artifacts (like those I've heard on AT&T cell service) which make it obvious that a noise generator is being switched on and off, or repeating waveforms that sound like a "Max Headroom" style failing connection.
We have been cutting taxes for the past ten years. It has not worked.
First: The key is cutting SPENDING. As long as the government spends enormous amounts of money the value behind that money is sucked out of the public sector economy, depressing it, regardless of whether this is done by taxes, inflation, or borrowing. Spending has EXPLODED over the past ten years - especially with the "bailouts".
The different modes of ripping off the people hurt the economy in somewhat different ways, and some have greater "hurt multipliers" than others. But the value bled out of the economy to be squandered on non-producing (or under-producing) government projects sets a minimum level of damage.
Second: Most of the so-called "tax cuts" weren't. They were typically government giveaways administered through the IRS. To be a "tax cut" of the form that stimulates productivity it must be a cut in the RATE of tax on a FUTURE activity, and must be passed into law or regulation in time to influence the taxpayer to make a decision to perform the action that is now taxed less. Things like a lump sum given to each tax filer and passed into law after the taxpayer has already made all his economic decisions and done all his actions fails on both tests, no matter how many politicians call it a "tax cut".
an old idea from decades ago when all manner of weird and quirky ideas was bandied about from solar panels in orbit many miles square beaming microwave energy back to a receiver on earth (except any living thing in its path would be fried!),
Except that:
- Things wouldn't be fried, microwave-oven style, because microwave oven makers picked a frequency that is strongly absorbed by water (to heat food) while space-solar people picked on that passes through water very well (to not waste power heating clouds, birds, cows,...). Intensity of the microwave heating would be about a tenth solar input - and birds in outdoor tests of such systems at realistic power levels mostly ignored them (except on cold nights when they huddled near the transmitting antennas)
- This might have been practical even back in the '70s when it was first proposed - except NASA shot it down with high priced lift-to-orbit systems and an analysis with a fundamental error (turbine size) that made a specialized lift system look far too expensive.
- Recent developments (privatization of space launches, improvements in the technology of photovoltaic collectors,power radio, and high-efficiency lasers for ground-based lift systems) have made the cost and price/performance equations better - by orders of magnitude. (See Keith Henson's recent papers on this.)
Which doesn't say squat about whether something similar may apply to the atmospheric vortex hack.
Dollars to doughnuts finansinspektionen will conclude that no one in sweden has done anything wrong...
Since Wikileaks has its headquarters in Sweden (specifically BECAUSE if its strong journalistic shield laws), and no doubt tried to collect the money there, one end of the transaction is under Sweedish banking law. No doubt some of their contributors are also making donations in Sweden, putting the entirety of those transactions under Swedish law.
Well, the legal grounds amount to some nice men in dark suits told Visa that since wikileaks were terrorists, they could possibly run into some unspecified trouble if they paid that money.
Unspecified?
I thought it was "... be in violation of, and prosecuted under, the U.S. banking laws prohibiting transferring funds to recognized (i.e. on the government's public list) terrorist organizations."
According to the referenced Wikipedia article, the new model A (one USB, no Ethernet) has the System-on-a-Chip (SoC)'s USB port go directly to the connector, while in the older model B (two USBs, one Ethernet) it went to a 1:3 hub and the hub drove two USB connectors and an onboard, dongle-style, USB-to-Ethernet chip and connector.
So plug in an external hub and an Ethernet dongle and you get the same functionality as the previous board. (You can also use a higher port-count and/or powered hub, more Ethernet dongles...)
and enough RAM
THAT's problematic.
but without graphics (that should save a lot of power, too).
So don't enable the graphics. B-)
(I don't know if you can switch off the clock and/or power feed to the graphics selectively. On the other hand, you should be able to leave out the frame display stuff and graphic software, recover most of the RAM allocated to it, and still use the GPU for crunch.)
That... Is the stupidest name for a company/product i've heard in a long long time.
If you object to stupid-but-cute names, why are you on "Slashdot?" B-)
(I'd have a four-digit, or maybe even a three-digit, i.d. if I'd been able to figure out the URL when first told about the site over the phone.)
As for "solidoodle" I think the name is great. Mnemonic, descriptive, easy to pronounce, and not TOO hard to get the spelling right. Google search for "solid doodle" (without quotes) spelling-corrects it to solidoodle and finds the company site and discussions about it, too.
Saw a makerbot being demonstrated with black ABS plastic at a conference last month. The parts made with it were STRONG. (Replacement components of the print head had been manufactured this way.) Also a sample was being made with internal, hollow, completely enclosed and sealed, honeycomb cells, which made it very light without substantially reducing its strength or dimensional tolerances. Should be ideal for things you need to float. (Try building THAT without a 3-D printer: You'd need to bond two or more pieces together.)
I understand one of the problems with the makerbot that metal-frame follow-ons like this are trying to address is that the wooden frame flexes and changes size with relative humidity, making tolerances lower than they could be with a metal frame.
Does anyone know how well ABS works for lost-"wax"-casting originals? Or same question regarding other "hot-glue plastic wires" that could be fed through these machines?
The only question is: how do we contain the amount of guns in circulation, and how do we contain the violence when a gun gets abused?
That's the wrong question(s).
The right question is "How do we reduce violence and murder, especially among those innocent victims who did not start the violence?"
By phrasing the questions as you did, you've made several false assumptions. Among them:
- Reducing the guns "in circulation" will reduce violence.
- Violence with-gun is all that matters. Violence with-axe, with-baseball-bat, with-car, with-fist, etc. is somehow just a creampuff-toss.
What if reducing the number of guns in private hands INCREASES violent victimization and increasing the number of guns out there REDUCES it?
If that is the case would you be willing to work to get more guns into the hands of people?
... it'd be nice to see an agency, like the FCC did with antennas, step in and say "This is our jurisdiction, not yours."
Unfortunately, that can work both ways. On one hand it might make some technology accessible over local bureaucratic objections, everywhere in the country. On the other, it might make it INACCESSIBLE anywhere in the country. You can't fix it in your local area or move to another to escape the prohibition or draconian red tape.
A person with the special kind of lazyness that makes him prefer spending three hours setting a problem up right, once, than spending ten minutes doing it twice.
The program may not break even in time until the job has been done 36 times. But even when the job has been done twice the programming approach has already replaced five minutes of boredom with 175 minutes of satisfying fun.
Not to mention that, if done properly, it keeps doing things correctly rather than slipping up after a while.
One issue with Navy funding is that they embargo the results until after the review of the final report of each stage of the work. That means the workers can't talk about how things are doing and you get a short burst of news every year or two. B-b
Last I heard of the plan the next step after WB-8 (and maybe another small model with a different symmetry), if the scaling rules worked out in practice, was to be a beyond-breakeven proof-of-concept machine with 100 MW output, for about $200M - which, if it could run continuously for little ongoing cost, would be cheaper than a solar panel farm (which only gets about 5 hour-equivalents of the panel rating per day). I was hoping that the end-of-2012 news would be that WB-8 had worked as expected and they were going ahead with the real thing. So I was both elated and disappointed at the news that things seemed to be working as expected but that they were going to spend a couple more years doing engineering and science with WB-8.
Did a little checking: Actually a presidential candidate is not REQUIRED to put their money in a blind trust.
In principle Romney could have kept control and ordered his accountants to not use a tax haven.
The downside is that he'd be nuts to do so. In addition to the loss of money from such deliberate mismanagement, he'd be leaving himself open to legitimate attacks on any OTHER decision he made about the money, along withaccusations of conflict-of-interest when he makes political decisions. (Avoiding both conflicts of interest and the appearance of them is the whole point of blind trusts.)
I'm NO friend of Mitt Romney - to put it mildly. But let's not blame him for something that's not his doing.
1) Because Romney was running for president, US law REQUIRES he put his money in a blind trust.
2) Also under US law the trustee has a "fiduciary duty" to do his reasonable best to protect and grow Romney's money for him. That includes seeing to it that is not taxed substantially more than the law requires. If he can save, say, 40% of the trust's earnings from being taxed away by using a LEGAL tax haven in Bermuda, and trustees of such trusts are expected to know that, he is REQUIRED BY LAW to do so.
So let's not have cheap shots against politicians and financial managers who are only doing what the law REQUIRES them to do.
There are plenty of things politicians have done that we can LEGITIMATELY go after them about - which have zapped us to the tune of trillions of dollars - at $3,175.40 from EACH citizen for EACH trillion. Let's not the dilute the discussion, and give them something to use to discredit their critics, by flaming them over drops in the bucket that AREN'T THEIR FAULT.
Countries that are broke are not broke because they have public healthcare. They're broke because they didn't balance their books.
One of the ways to "not balance the books" is to commit to paying more for for health care than they can recover from government income.
This is complicated because all forms of government income suck money out of the private sector one way or another and that retards the private sectors production of wealth.
Someone always end up paying for the health care somehow. Rule of thumb: When the government is involved it ends up costing FAR more than when it's not.
(And before you point fingers at the pre-Obamacare health care costs, realize that the government HAS been involved - drastically - in so-called "private" healthcare for more than a half century.)
It doesn't even mean that... shatter proof means it wont end up in a zillion razor sharp shards for you to step on. It could still be easy to break. Jello is shatter proof...
Depends on how hard you hit it. I hear Jello shatters just FINE if you hit it fast and hard enough.
Of course the sharp fragments don't STAY sharp in the timescales involved in stepping on one of them - or even getting to the floor from the "shattering" event.
TFA notes the language "Assembled in the USA" so that's pretty clear.
Back in the 1950s Japan was plowsharing the remainder of it's WW II manufacturing plants into manufacturing cheap stamped-metal toys and gadgets, largely for export. "Made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap and shoddy. (This was when they were bootstrapping themselves out of the rubble, before they adopted Demming principles and became noted for high-quality, instead, starting with optics and cameras.)
I hear that, during that time, a small manufacturing city in Japan renamed itself Usa (UH-suh). Then some of their manufacturers stamped "MADE IN USA" on their products, to try to fool the consumers. (Of course that got stopped pretty quickly. But it was a cute hack. B-) )
"Assembled in" doesn't say squat about the components in the assembly. But at least it does tell you where the final assembly process is employing workers.
It will be interesting to see whether the high unemployment rates and the collapsing dollar will be adequate to make bringing manufacturing back to the US economically desirable, or if the regulatory costs and barriers will keep the "exported jobs" exported.
This has been going on for a while. Here's one of several online images of the "Keep Your Lawyers Off My Computer" button commissioned by John Gilmore and Richard Stallman, 'way back when Apple sued Microsoft over Windows looking too much like the Lisa/Macintosh interface they licensed from Xerox - and thus threatening other programmers writing windowing systems and components of them (X, NeWs, Gnome, Display Postscript,...).
(I got my copy of that button from John Gilmore. B-) )
Slashdot Mirror
Medical-purity BaSO4 is likely to be a further cut above the lab-grade stuff you can buy from any number of common chemical suppliers - purifying it is trivial - they do it all the time to make the stuff in the first place.
Purifying it of hepatitis virus is NOT trivial (and I won't even go into what's necessary to denature prions).
Once it's been through the intestinal tract of one patient, making it pure enough to be inserted to another's is likely to be far more expensive than purifying something that came out of a mine.
Iodine is used in the illegal manufacture of Methamphetamine. As a resule, Iodine has recently been reclassified as a List I chemical under federal law. Those handling or selling iodine and its compounds must now go through a bunch of bureaucratic red tape with the DEA.
I found this out right after the Fukushima disaster (when I tried to find some potassium iodide supplement {or other potable iodine compound, such as water purification tablets or tincture of iodine} to take to bump my iodine level before the fallout arrived). Guess what: None to be found. Not just because it had been sold out by those who responded faster. But because most retailers (including large drug store chains and sporting goods stores) had stopped carrying it, rather than deal with the drug warriors.
I suspect that, even if some iodine compound is suitable for a gastrointestinal contrast medium, the drug industry has not been interested in developing it and seeking approval, at least until now. While barium was in cheap supply why should they spend money developing a replacement whose distribution would involve expensive federal red tape?
A five-hole donut (assuming your anatomy is normal - including intact eardrums).
Mouth-to-anus gastrointestinal tract, two nostrils (into throat), two ducts from corners of eyes (into nasal passages).
Not owning a gun makes you safer .
Ah, the Lippmann study rears it's head.
Hint: There is one time that people in the gun culture believe it is not merely moral, but sometimes morally required, to lie. That is when someone asks you about whether you have/what guns you have, in an inappropriate context and/or when they're not entitled to the information. An example of such a context is when you're in a doctor's office or emergency room being treated for something NOT related to an injury resulting from your own firearm.
The right answer to such questions is "no", unless it's obvious (like from an accidental self-inflicted wound) the answer must be "yes" - but with details withheld.
Such reporting bias invalidates studies dependent on questioning the subjects. (And how else can you obtain the information?) Authors of similar studies in the past (notably Kellerman, author of the debunked study behind the "43 times more likely" meme) have actually repudiated and withdrawn their own work once things like this were pointed out.
If they were talking IPv6, UDP packet overhead is 48 bytes, leaving only 22 for keeping the CODECs synchronized and specifying how much silence is being encoded.
I note that some carriers deliberately inject what is called "comfort noise" - a small amount of background noise - during silences. This is to keep the user from becoming concerned that the connection has failed.
While I don't know whether, or how, skype does this, it would be reasonable to either actually send the connection's real background noise at a reduced bit rate, or send some small amount of information to the receiving end in a mechanism for avoiding artifacts (like those I've heard on AT&T cell service) which make it obvious that a noise generator is being switched on and off, or repeating waveforms that sound like a "Max Headroom" style failing connection.
What can possibly go wrong...?! :p
For starters you only get to watch a demo once.
We have been cutting taxes for the past ten years. It has not worked.
First: The key is cutting SPENDING. As long as the government spends enormous amounts of money the value behind that money is sucked out of the public sector economy, depressing it, regardless of whether this is done by taxes, inflation, or borrowing. Spending has EXPLODED over the past ten years - especially with the "bailouts".
The different modes of ripping off the people hurt the economy in somewhat different ways, and some have greater "hurt multipliers" than others. But the value bled out of the economy to be squandered on non-producing (or under-producing) government projects sets a minimum level of damage.
Second: Most of the so-called "tax cuts" weren't. They were typically government giveaways administered through the IRS. To be a "tax cut" of the form that stimulates productivity it must be a cut in the RATE of tax on a FUTURE activity, and must be passed into law or regulation in time to influence the taxpayer to make a decision to perform the action that is now taxed less. Things like a lump sum given to each tax filer and passed into law after the taxpayer has already made all his economic decisions and done all his actions fails on both tests, no matter how many politicians call it a "tax cut".
an old idea from decades ago when all manner of weird and quirky ideas was bandied about from solar panels in orbit many miles square beaming microwave energy back to a receiver on earth (except any living thing in its path would be fried!),
Except that: ...). Intensity of the microwave heating would be about a tenth solar input - and birds in outdoor tests of such systems at realistic power levels mostly ignored them (except on cold nights when they huddled near the transmitting antennas)
- Things wouldn't be fried, microwave-oven style, because microwave oven makers picked a frequency that is strongly absorbed by water (to heat food) while space-solar people picked on that passes through water very well (to not waste power heating clouds, birds, cows,
- This might have been practical even back in the '70s when it was first proposed - except NASA shot it down with high priced lift-to-orbit systems and an analysis with a fundamental error (turbine size) that made a specialized lift system look far too expensive.
- Recent developments (privatization of space launches, improvements in the technology of photovoltaic collectors,power radio, and high-efficiency lasers for ground-based lift systems) have made the cost and price/performance equations better - by orders of magnitude. (See Keith Henson's recent papers on this.)
Which doesn't say squat about whether something similar may apply to the atmospheric vortex hack.
Dollars to doughnuts finansinspektionen will conclude that no one in sweden has done anything wrong...
Since Wikileaks has its headquarters in Sweden (specifically BECAUSE if its strong journalistic shield laws), and no doubt tried to collect the money there, one end of the transaction is under Sweedish banking law. No doubt some of their contributors are also making donations in Sweden, putting the entirety of those transactions under Swedish law.
Well, the legal grounds amount to some nice men in dark suits told Visa that since wikileaks were terrorists, they could possibly run into some unspecified trouble if they paid that money.
Unspecified?
I thought it was "... be in violation of, and prosecuted under, the U.S. banking laws prohibiting transferring funds to recognized (i.e. on the government's public list) terrorist organizations."
The people here asking for 512MB are the the rich kids whose parents bought them ...
Nah.
They're the people who want to plug in an off-the-shelf distro and get the project done in a couple weeks.
Actually I'd like a model with Ethernet port ...
According to the referenced Wikipedia article, the new model A (one USB, no Ethernet) has the System-on-a-Chip (SoC)'s USB port go directly to the connector, while in the older model B (two USBs, one Ethernet) it went to a 1:3 hub and the hub drove two USB connectors and an onboard, dongle-style, USB-to-Ethernet chip and connector.
So plug in an external hub and an Ethernet dongle and you get the same functionality as the previous board. (You can also use a higher port-count and/or powered hub, more Ethernet dongles...)
and enough RAM
THAT's problematic.
but without graphics (that should save a lot of power, too).
So don't enable the graphics. B-)
(I don't know if you can switch off the clock and/or power feed to the graphics selectively. On the other hand, you should be able to leave out the frame display stuff and graphic software, recover most of the RAM allocated to it, and still use the GPU for crunch.)
That... Is the stupidest name for a company/product i've heard in a long long time.
If you object to stupid-but-cute names, why are you on "Slashdot?" B-)
(I'd have a four-digit, or maybe even a three-digit, i.d. if I'd been able to figure out the URL when first told about the site over the phone.)
As for "solidoodle" I think the name is great. Mnemonic, descriptive, easy to pronounce, and not TOO hard to get the spelling right. Google search for "solid doodle" (without quotes) spelling-corrects it to solidoodle and finds the company site and discussions about it, too.
Saw a makerbot being demonstrated with black ABS plastic at a conference last month. The parts made with it were STRONG. (Replacement components of the print head had been manufactured this way.) Also a sample was being made with internal, hollow, completely enclosed and sealed, honeycomb cells, which made it very light without substantially reducing its strength or dimensional tolerances. Should be ideal for things you need to float. (Try building THAT without a 3-D printer: You'd need to bond two or more pieces together.)
I understand one of the problems with the makerbot that metal-frame follow-ons like this are trying to address is that the wooden frame flexes and changes size with relative humidity, making tolerances lower than they could be with a metal frame.
Does anyone know how well ABS works for lost-"wax"-casting originals? Or same question regarding other "hot-glue plastic wires" that could be fed through these machines?
How many would have been killed with chains for the doors' crowd bars, a gallon of unleaded, and a Bic?
The only question is: how do we contain the amount of guns in circulation, and how do we contain the violence when a gun gets abused?
That's the wrong question(s).
The right question is "How do we reduce violence and murder, especially among those innocent victims who did not start the violence?"
By phrasing the questions as you did, you've made several false assumptions. Among them:
- Reducing the guns "in circulation" will reduce violence.
- Violence with-gun is all that matters. Violence with-axe, with-baseball-bat, with-car, with-fist, etc. is somehow just a creampuff-toss.
What if reducing the number of guns in private hands INCREASES violent victimization and increasing the number of guns out there REDUCES it?
If that is the case would you be willing to work to get more guns into the hands of people?
... it'd be nice to see an agency, like the FCC did with antennas, step in and say "This is our jurisdiction, not yours."
Unfortunately, that can work both ways. On one hand it might make some technology accessible over local bureaucratic objections, everywhere in the country. On the other, it might make it INACCESSIBLE anywhere in the country. You can't fix it in your local area or move to another to escape the prohibition or draconian red tape.
Sounds like my definition of a programmer:
A person with the special kind of lazyness that makes him prefer spending three hours setting a problem up right, once, than spending ten minutes doing it twice.
The program may not break even in time until the job has been done 36 times. But even when the job has been done twice the programming approach has already replaced five minutes of boredom with 175 minutes of satisfying fun.
Not to mention that, if done properly, it keeps doing things correctly rather than slipping up after a while.
One issue with Navy funding is that they embargo the results until after the review of the final report of each stage of the work. That means the workers can't talk about how things are doing and you get a short burst of news every year or two. B-b
Last I heard of the plan the next step after WB-8 (and maybe another small model with a different symmetry), if the scaling rules worked out in practice, was to be a beyond-breakeven proof-of-concept machine with 100 MW output, for about $200M - which, if it could run continuously for little ongoing cost, would be cheaper than a solar panel farm (which only gets about 5 hour-equivalents of the panel rating per day). I was hoping that the end-of-2012 news would be that WB-8 had worked as expected and they were going ahead with the real thing. So I was both elated and disappointed at the news that things seemed to be working as expected but that they were going to spend a couple more years doing engineering and science with WB-8.
Did a little checking: Actually a presidential candidate is not REQUIRED to put their money in a blind trust.
In principle Romney could have kept control and ordered his accountants to not use a tax haven.
The downside is that he'd be nuts to do so. In addition to the loss of money from such deliberate mismanagement, he'd be leaving himself open to legitimate attacks on any OTHER decision he made about the money, along withaccusations of conflict-of-interest when he makes political decisions. (Avoiding both conflicts of interest and the appearance of them is the whole point of blind trusts.)
Because where else would US politicians offshore their income? http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts
I'm NO friend of Mitt Romney - to put it mildly. But let's not blame him for something that's not his doing.
1) Because Romney was running for president, US law REQUIRES he put his money in a blind trust.
2) Also under US law the trustee has a "fiduciary duty" to do his reasonable best to protect and grow Romney's money for him. That includes seeing to it that is not taxed substantially more than the law requires. If he can save, say, 40% of the trust's earnings from being taxed away by using a LEGAL tax haven in Bermuda, and trustees of such trusts are expected to know that, he is REQUIRED BY LAW to do so.
So let's not have cheap shots against politicians and financial managers who are only doing what the law REQUIRES them to do.
There are plenty of things politicians have done that we can LEGITIMATELY go after them about - which have zapped us to the tune of trillions of dollars - at $3,175.40 from EACH citizen for EACH trillion. Let's not the dilute the discussion, and give them something to use to discredit their critics, by flaming them over drops in the bucket that AREN'T THEIR FAULT.
Countries that are broke are not broke because they have public healthcare. They're broke because they didn't balance their books.
One of the ways to "not balance the books" is to commit to paying more for for health care than they can recover from government income.
This is complicated because all forms of government income suck money out of the private sector one way or another and that retards the private sectors production of wealth.
Someone always end up paying for the health care somehow. Rule of thumb: When the government is involved it ends up costing FAR more than when it's not.
(And before you point fingers at the pre-Obamacare health care costs, realize that the government HAS been involved - drastically - in so-called "private" healthcare for more than a half century.)
It doesn't even mean that... shatter proof means it wont end up in a zillion razor sharp shards for you to step on. It could still be easy to break. Jello is shatter proof...
Depends on how hard you hit it. I hear Jello shatters just FINE if you hit it fast and hard enough.
Of course the sharp fragments don't STAY sharp in the timescales involved in stepping on one of them - or even getting to the floor from the "shattering" event.
TFA notes the language "Assembled in the USA" so that's pretty clear.
Back in the 1950s Japan was plowsharing the remainder of it's WW II manufacturing plants into manufacturing cheap stamped-metal toys and gadgets, largely for export. "Made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap and shoddy. (This was when they were bootstrapping themselves out of the rubble, before they adopted Demming principles and became noted for high-quality, instead, starting with optics and cameras.)
I hear that, during that time, a small manufacturing city in Japan renamed itself Usa (UH-suh). Then some of their manufacturers stamped "MADE IN USA" on their products, to try to fool the consumers. (Of course that got stopped pretty quickly. But it was a cute hack. B-) )
"Assembled in" doesn't say squat about the components in the assembly. But at least it does tell you where the final assembly process is employing workers.
It will be interesting to see whether the high unemployment rates and the collapsing dollar will be adequate to make bringing manufacturing back to the US economically desirable, or if the regulatory costs and barriers will keep the "exported jobs" exported.
This has been going on for a while. Here's one of several online images of the "Keep Your Lawyers Off My Computer" button commissioned by John Gilmore and Richard Stallman, 'way back when Apple sued Microsoft over Windows looking too much like the Lisa/Macintosh interface they licensed from Xerox - and thus threatening other programmers writing windowing systems and components of them (X, NeWs, Gnome, Display Postscript, ...).
(I got my copy of that button from John Gilmore. B-) )