Whole blood is not sold for profit, but organizations do charge hospitals a handling fee to cover operational costs…

Domestically… Blood and blood products are America’s 9th largest export, and we export 70% of the world’s blood plasma supply. It’s nearly a 40 billion dollar business.

It’s low for a new jet, used jets lose a lot of their value over time and there are a lot of them. For 2.5m you’re probably looking at a used business class jet, like a Lear 31, or a Hawker 800. Some sort of private plane that was owned and used by a corporation.

Yeah, but Americans love to label themselves as moderates…which mostly just means conservative. Just because only 30% call themselves conservatives does not mean a significant amount of the other 70% consider themselves liberal.

It’s one of the misconceptions that get the DNC to play the fool every 4 years. They think if you lable yours a moderate then they have a chance to win you over. In reality most moderates are going to vote Republican no matter how far to the right the DNC panders.

The difference is that the Republicans care more about winning than any sort of ethos. With them once someone becomes a clear candidate everyone falls into line. The Democrats on the other hand would rather lose than have someone like sanders or aoc win.

The crime of being too poor to afford a lawyer.

There have been studies done that suggested money can buy happiness but only to a certain extent. I think the cap was somewhere north of the upper middle class. Enough money where you didn’t ever really have to worry about bills or ever going broke, while also being able to travel and vacation several times a year.

Past that point increasing the amount of money didn’t increase the overall happiness of the person.

It’s only a false dichotomy if we were to tax the rich appropriately… As of now and for the foreseeable future it’s just reality.

The leaders of pretty much every western government with a liberal democracy would rather watch children die than tax the wealthy.

Helicopter rescue costs are pretty common even in places with socialized healthcare, especially if they can be labeled as reckless extractions. Standard European Health Insurance Cards (EHIC) generally do not cover mountain or helicopter rescue transport. A lot of different Alpine or Mountaineering Clubs offer insurance directly for this purpose as part of their fees.

Which makes sense really. Socialized networks shouldn’t have to absorb the cost of people seeking a dangerous thrill. In the end it comes down to whether you want to treat the cancer of a couple children, or save a rich guy from a mountain and the consequences of his own poor decisions?

IIRC “3D Printed” houses are falling apart due to lamination issues. That said, I think it’s a solvable problem, though it will take awhile to sort out the issues.

You’d probably have to invent a new type of concrete first. You can add resin binders to concrete to make wet concrete somewhat stick to drying concrete but it doesn’t work very well. The drying concrete tends to pull the moisture from the wet concrete which ends up interfering with the curing of both sides.

The main issue with 3d printing concrete is more of an inherent issue with how homes settle over time. Unless you are building on bedrock or you’re driving a massive amounts of piles for the foundation, structures will move and settle over time. This is why brick and mortar have been around for such a long time, the mortar gives the bricks enough flexibility to accommodate movement.

Concrete lacks this flexibility and will crack and crumble apart unless you reinforce it with rebar. Rebar gives concrete tensile strength, distributes weight across the whole structure, and holds cracked pieces together. So really any 3d printed home that isn’t reinforced somehow wont last very long.

Who says the robots have to have batteries?

The market. How many cable powered mobile bipedal robots have you seen?

Human workers drag power cables all over construction sites.

No they don’t? Have you ever been on a construction site? They have power cables, but they aren’t attached to them as they constantly move across a construction site. They are used for a specific job then rolled up and taken to the next job. Dozens of people dragging their own powered chords across a building site would not only be dangerous, but a huge pain in the ass.

but fixed industrial robots have been operating for many decades. The wear issues are obviously solvable in the right context.

As I said in my original statement, laypeople such as yourself tend to underestimate the amount of force a moving object creates. Just engaging in something like jogging can have a ground force reaction of 3x your body weight, something like a small jump can exert up to 7x your body weight. That is with more pliable triplaner joints covered in soft tissues that help reduce that ground reaction by absorbing some of the force with higher degrees of range of motion. Something more rigid like a robotic foot/ankle or prosthetics actually experience much higher degrees of ground reaction force.

They might not even have legs. A welding robot could just be a welding tool on the end of a long boom arm.

The entirety of my argument was around humanoid robots… That’s why I said it would make more sense for a robot on a flat factory floor to have wheels or tracks. I’m not arguing against the idea of robots in general, just bipedal humanoid ones.

UGL](https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/AMEX-UGL/?timeframe=60M) still up over 100% since June 2024.

The 3-year annualized trailing return for the ProShares Ultra Gold (UGL) is approximately 42.67% to 44.73%. That was the metric I was using for the other etf. Just picking an arbitrary date to figure growth isn’t very helpful, for example I could pick 6 months ago and they would be down by 44%.

I’m not betting on gold as a currency alternative. It’s a pure speculative play. Central banks are buying gold to underpin their own currencies, and speculators will pile in when things come unglued. The dollar “crash” will effectively be runaway inflation.

Eh… Central banks on emerging economies are the primary buyers, advanced economies have been selling or holding what they have. This is because gold acts as a hedge against global inflation, not necessarily that they are trying to stabilize their own currency.

The dollar “crash” will effectively be runaway inflation. It will not instantly go to zero. There will be a point in time where I will liquidate and briefly go to cash, and then immediately roll over into another asset.

That’s a pretty big gamble… It’s not like people know when the rug pull is going to happen.

My thinking at this point is potentially oil, as it is in high demand when there is war, and from my perspective we’re teeing up WWIII right now.

See… This is where it feels like you don’t understand what you are talking about. If we have run off inflation it just doesn’t stick to currency, it’s going to affect the market as well. Meaning unless your plan is to physically buy barrels of oil your share in whatever oil company will devalue or collapse. You will see the share price skyrocket in nominal terms, but the actual value when adjusted to buying power will nosedive.

Also, oil may not be the best route if you really think there’s going to be ww3. Production increased greatly during ww2 but the share price of oil companies like standard oil did not skyrocket like munnition manufacturing companies because the US government enacted price controls. In this day and age there could also be efforts to nationalize oil production all together.

My expectation is that the shit will hit the fan within a year though. We’ll see.

Based on what? The only country that could potentially go to war against NATO would be China, and they aren’t exactly the most aggressive warlike country in the world. Not to mention that China going to war with the US would be economic suicide, especially since things are still shaky after COVID. I guess the US could have been the agressor in this scenario if they hadn’t just blew through all their munnitions on Iran. It’s going to take at least a couple years of rapid production until they feel confident to go on the offensive with a peer adversary.

I mean it’s not my money, but I think you would actually be significantly better off just buying gold from the pawnshop if you really believe in your theory. That wouldn’t be my suggestion, but it’s better than holding onto a leveraged etf.

Btw leveraged etf are meant to be utilize by day traders, not people holding onto stock for more than a day or two. They multiply their daily returns by rebalancing their exposure targets at the end of every day, using futures and swap agreements to meet their quota. Meaning even if the overall value of gold rises, choppy or sideways movements in the market can still tank your stock. Basically for them to meet their x2 daily multiplier both the value of gold and the overall stock market have to increase, because a lot of the growth is made on future contracts for other stocks.

They have a bunch of issues, and the only thing that is really automated about them is the walls. Since it’s basically unreinforced concrete they have a horrible time with insulation, cracking, delamination, and shrinkage. Not to mention that they aren’t very good at producing sharp or square angles, so a lot of your door and window work is custom or done manually.

If you know anything about residential construction, building the interior and exterior walls is not exactly an especially time consuming or expensive part of the build process. A decent sized team of good manual workers can put up the exterior and interior walls of a decent sized home in a week or two. The 3d house people say they can do it in 72 hours of machine time…which can run anywhere from 2 weeks to 5 months in real time.

you cpuld have a factory that cranks out walls and some sort of automated system that assembles them on site.

That idea is over a hundred years old. I currently live in a house that someone bought from a sears catalog in the 1930s. They would flat pack an entire house and ship it to you on a train for you to put together yourself, or you could hire a local sears approved contractor that had a team put it together for you.

Yep, in engineering design should be solution oriented. You don’t ever really want to first design the form and then try and see what solutions it may be able to solve.

A robot arm is a great start, you can then customize it further to your needs with different terminal end devices.

The main benefit of human hands is that they have an amazing amount of sensory input. If someone gets peripheral neuropathy and loses even a modest amount of that ability they can barely tie their shoes.

Bipedal robots are kinda stuck in between a design flaw of what we want robots to look like, what we want robots to do, and what our technology is currently able to do.

Bipedal locomotion is just not the most efficient or simple mode of mobility for things like a flat factory floor, it’s really only efficient when you are factoring unleveled ground. We just currently don’t have the technology that allows bipedal efficiency across all terrain. That would require a synergistic system of optics and something that mimic propeoception. That’s a ton of information being sent from a vast network of sensory input being sorted out by your spine and brain in real time.

Imo robots for a factory floor should be on tracks or wheels. Attempting to design a robot that’s good for everything is just going to lead to a robot that is good for nothing. In engineering design should be made to fit a solution, designing for form and then trying to find a solution that form can solve is backwards and typically leads to terrible outcomes.

Unfortunately there are a lot of different types of nurses with varying degrees of education and ability to discharge care. Some of the stuff that nursing assistants and even some LPN have to do is pretty grueling. I think a lot of nursing schools that act almost as certification mills kinda mislead a lot of students on what they’re going to be doing.

But overall nursing is a great job if you have the right education, a lot of RN and especially APRN can basically find a job anywhere in the country virtually overnight and make pretty good pay.

If she is still interested in nursing, I would suggest a more traditional education route instead of an LPN school. As an RN or APRN you can pick and choose where you work and with what patient population.

Yep. I work in prosthetics, people tend to overestimate current battery technology and underestimate how much energy it takes to move around a couple hundred pounds.

Even with batteries that cost a small fortune, we haven’t been able to create a lower limb powered prosthetic that can keep up with the human body for more than a couple hours.

There’s a lot of hype about the humanoid robotics coming out of China, but most everything is just marketing science fiction. Once you factor in the initial cost, power consumption for processing data, multiple batteries per unit, and the massive amount of general maintenance… It becomes pretty apparent that things aren’t going to pan out anytime soon.

I build limbs out of reinforced carbon fiber and titanium and even those acquire a ton of wear in a relatively small amount of time. Any bipedal robot with plastic parts, made to do intensive labour is going to start falling apart almost immediately. The human body takes a ton of damage throughout the day as well, but it’s self repairing.

Yeah… The early 00s seems to be the last time when just getting any practical degree seemed to be a decent investment. After the 08 recession things seemed to only really bounce back for people with specified graduate degrees.

At this point I would say that it’s better to wait to go to school until you know what you want to do, and only if that job requires a specific degree. Anything else just seems to be gambling with loans.

Yep… Certain trades are worse for your bones and joints, but not much is going to be worse for your systemic health than sitting for half the day.

As someone who’s worked in construction and now works in orthopedics and rehabilitation, I think the biggest issue with a lot of people in trades like residential construction is that they don’t really learn how to prioritize their physical health until a lot of the damage is already done. Once you’re a bit older you kinda learn that even if carrying that 80lb bag of cement by yourself is faster, it’s still better to take the time to grab a dolly or another person. Most of the issues would be solved if we had better regulations.

A small and noble sacrifice that Californians are more than willing to make so a few billionaires can turn a profit from growing almonds and pomegranates…

I mean… He did popularize third way politics in America, which has paved the way for fascism in America. That being said, it’s hilarious that a publication like foreign policy would attempt to blame it on changes to how welfare works without actually alluding to why.