use a bidet or as in asia http://www.minishower.net/minish_commode.html

we need an energy/oil based currency, whereby all goods are priced in barrels of oil.

Lets say you owned a business that was returning 30% per year on the amount invested by you, why would you want a dividend? The best you can do with a risk free cash investment is 3-5% in the bank, if even.

In a vacuum if the continually resulted in a 30% return, it would be better to compound your money there.
The key thing is you need to buy stocks cheap ie as close to per share book value as you can.

Foxconn makes terrible margins on their product. (10-14 %)

Why on earth does it make sense to buy foxconn? Foxconn does not have anything proprietary that a dozen other assembly mfg companies in China can do.

One big thing is taxes:

share buy backs would not incur a double taxation that a dividend might.

This is already happening:
http://www.magna.com/en/capabilities/vehicle-engineering-contract-manufacturing
http://www.valmet-automotive.com/automotive/cms.nsf

If you have a problem with this, buy new balance:

http://www.newbalance.com/company/committed-to-american-workers/?action=recommendContent&pageID=%2Fcompany%2Fcommitted-to-american-workers%2F%23comment6761&pageTitle=Committed%20to%20American%20Workers

In addition, you can even select shoes by either made in america or assembled in america (less than 60% american content).

I think Edison and Westinghouse is a more appropriate comparison.

Hi As second degrees, I would suggest going into operations research and systems management. Learn industrial design and theories of manufacturing and manufacturability if you can. Most programs heavily gloss over those two subjects. The entire automobile industry is based on large scale manufacturing and eking out as much cost out of their parts. If your insight can reduce the cost and reduce waste while improve performance, then that will give you a leg up on the competition. Auto manufacturing hinges on suppliers and sub suppliers and knowing how to get as much productivity out of limited resources.

After reading the email-- project camden stood out.

I did a quick google search and came up with this

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=bd97a8f9b4c3bf8393ff69b58026ffb1&_cview=0
"The NexGenCI project seeks to significantly upgrade existing x-ray backscatter, whole-body-imaging, bulk detection portals already in use by the TSA"

/tinfoil hat...

I have tmobile, with an andorid. I pay 25 USD for unlimited data and thethering. The first 2 gigs per month are unrestricted and after that they throttle me. I quite happy with this arrangement. (never exceeded 2 gigs for tethering). Its fast too.

I for one support imperial units, especially the Fahrenheit system-- it covers daily temps without going into negative numbers-- world average temp is apx 50 degrees, 75 is comfortable and 0 is very cold.

Wow-- they completely missed out on the CD-i games.

Boy were those bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i_games_from_The_Legend_of_Zelda_series

Can some explain how this is different from CDMA?

Having great engineers that just recently graduated from college doesn't really mean squat with manufacturing. You need to have engineers with experience more than anything. A guy working for Ford of GM for 20+ years probably can help bring the tesla car to market much quicker and easily than someone fresh out of university Especially with manufacturing, a lot of the basics on machine tool handling and fixture design isn't taught anymore in Mechanical Engineering classes--- a much greater emphasis is put on theoretical stuff. The best universities that actually deal with the stuff you need to run CNCs and other machines is actually taught in the midwest -- Univ Michigan, Perdue, Iowa, etc.