You can't really tell if something has been adequately packed unless you either open it or it already shows damage (lack of packing material allows the box to crush). UPS and Fedex would be more than happy to slap you with a reboxing fee* if they could.

*plus fuel surcharge on the fee, because everything gets a fuel surcharge. This notice about the fuel surcharge gets a fuel surcharge.

Please explain this to the squirrels and chipmunks in my backyard that dart and twitch around like meth heads on a sugar high.

Americans aren't willing to go back to 19th century factory life, which is essentially what they have in China now. It's not enough to raise the pay a little, the working conditions will have to be improved if they want a workforce that isn't completely desperate to take those jobs.

States provide tax incentives for businesses to locate there all the time. By their very nature state governments do things that benefit companies within their borders. Lowering a tax for investing within the state is not the same thing as raising a tax for investing outside the state, even if they have a similar effect. It doesn't cause an investment outside of the state to earn any less money.

Why would someone who doesn't live in CA be paying CA income tax?

What is unconstitutional about a state providing state tax incentives for its residents to invest in companies within that state? There is no interstate commerce going on there. I know the federal government thinks absolutely everything is interstate commerce, but it doesn't make it true. It's allowing the federal government to regulate the tax policy of a state.

If the previous 12+ years of school didn't teach you how to learn and think then 4 more isn't going to do the job either.

The important question TFA didn't answer for me is what happened in between the letter and a reasonable time period afterwards when the contract would have been finalized?

Definition of BEAR
transitive verb
1
a : to move while holding up and supporting (something)
b : to be equipped or furnished with (something)

You can keep the nickel though.

The US National Guard is today's implementation of the militia, and they most certainly have armor and air force. If they wanted to restrict the right to bear arms to hand held arms then they would have left out canons, which they did not. And so you can own a working canon, if it's old enough, today. If you want to be taken seriously by the US government then you'd better have a nuke.

The right way to do gun control is through Constitutional amendment, but we don't do things the right way anymore.

Tanks are arms. A10 gunships are arms. Chemical and biological weapons are arms. Nuclear weapons are arms. No one seriously disputes the fact that we get to infringe on bearing arms, the question is only where to draw the line. Why do you insist that semi-automatic weapons must not be infringed but not tanks and nukes?

Not very many of our military planes get blown up. Instead we just stick thousands of them in the desert boneyards to make room for the new shinies.

We can still cut military spending without stopping making new shinies though by closing bases and getting out of Afghanistan. Or we could put some of them to work making new bridges to replace the ones that are fucking falling apart all over the country. Or nuclear power plants. Or we could build a colony on the moon, I bet that would keep a few people busy. If we have to make work then let's make something besides bombs with that work.

2. Well we could get into a whole discussion about precision in woodworking, but the short version is no it isn't enough but it doesn't really matter. What really matters is that like parts are exactly the same length, but what that length actually is isn't always important. When it is important you need to sneak up on the cut anyway. That's why the decimal/fraction conversions aren't that big of a deal, because if it needs to be that accurate then it's not getting cut exactly to a measurement on the first cut anyway.

4. I use table saws much more than circular saws and those blades are either 1/8" or 3/32", at least to start with. Once you resharpen the blade the kerf becomes slightly smaller. I can't easily get a metric size kerf blade for a 5/8" arbor anyway. I don't do much cutting of things out of sheet goods for the stuff I do so it's a moot point for me.

You have to account for the fact that I have to make things for customers who are going to expect measurements in imperial. So there would have to be a conversion between the two either at the beginning or end (or both) of the project. If they want a box that is 10" deep I'm going to be dealing with an oddball 254mm measurement that I can't really round off to 250 and then that has a ripple effect of every other dimension based on it being oddball.

My squares that have measurements are imperial. My calipers and dial indicator are imperial. My drill bits are imperial. My spindle sander has imperial size drums. And on and on. I do have some metric chisels. I'm also going to get hardware that comes with screw/bolt patterns that are imperial.

It's not as simple as using a different ruler and suddenly I live in a metric world.

I do woodworking for a living and get along just fine with imperial. It can be a bit of a pain any time you need a calculator to divide something, say 7-3/8" divided by 5, and then have to convert the answer back to the nearest fraction to actually do anything with it. But when you do it often enough you memorize all the decimal equivalents of 1/16 pretty quickly. Even though I've got rulers with metric on one side and could easily use that instead in those situations I don't.

The biggest thing I find is an imperial tape or ruler is graduated such that the 1/2 inch marks and longer than the 1/4 inch marks which are longer than the 1/8 inch marks and so on. A metric ruler/tape has longer marks at 1/2 cm but everything between is the same length. So not being used to that, it takes me longer to register what the measurement is with metric. That annoys me. So any experiment with using the metric side of the ruler usually ends in about 30 seconds because I'm instantly annoyed at being slowed down.

Let me put it this way, if all we needed was the yard and the inch, why'd we come up with the foot in the first place? If it wasn't useful we wouldn't bother with it.

It's interesting that you bring up construction, because this is the area where I hear a lot of anecdotal evidence of imperial still being used. As long as plywood keeps coming in 4x8 foot sheets here we're going to keep measuring in imperial. Would you like us to knock down every house and rebuild everything with metric spacing on the studs? Houses need remodeling and no one wants to cut down 250x125 cm plywood to 4x8 sheets. Our table saws are just getting safety features that you've had for decades so you'd maim a few thousand of us just doing that. Think about the size warehouse you would need to stock all the different thicknesses and types in two different sizes. Though actually melamine does come in 250x125 sheets here, but it's not something that's used for anything that requires stud spacing.

My tapes that have imperial and metric on them only go down to mm, and that isn't precise enough for the finish work that I do. Do you have tapes with half mm on them over there? I have seen some rulers with sections in half mms but not the whole thing. Our rulers are typically all 1/16th inches (1.5 mm) with sections in 1/32 and 1/64, so I don't know how you'd manage with just mm. I admit the math can be a PITA when you need a calculator to divide something and then have to get back to the nearest 1/32 to actually do anything with the answer. Part of the problem may just be that we have crappy metric rulers and tape measures here, just like when you try to make imperial tapes. It would actually be nice to have a tape measure or ruler with the feet divided in inches on one side and in 10ths on the other.