The key word here is "unauthorized."

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"Unauthorized markings not designating price, class, address, handling, content, or extra service are not permitted."

Seems pretty clear to me. Yes, they ALSO require that any old labels or markings on reused boxes be obliterated or removed, but explicitly so that any legible markings accurately reflect the contents and service required. Basically ANY marking on the box which is not approved is subject to fuckwittery by postal workers. Since these guys want to use custom decorative boxes for their wares, maybe they should talk to someone at the USPS about it or just put the decorative box inside a plain box for shipment.
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Anyone who's ever actually sent a package through USPS should know that they explicitly recommend you destroy or cover any non-USPS related markings or labels, explaining that it may lead to delays or failure to deliver.

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I don't know where you live, but that's certainly not true around here. I suppose it's true if you live in a particularly shitty area that nobody would want to live in you might have problems selling in general, but then again you're only talking about *maybe* +$10k to +$15k of added value which is %10 or less of the average home price in this country.
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Consider leasing the system, then. Let a company (who DOES have tax liability) pay for the installation, and your utility bill is replaced with a somewhat smaller lease payment. You end up saving money with little or no out of pocket cost, and most agreements include annual maintenance.

Also, most (all?) lease agreements will transfer to the new owner if you sell your home, so it's still added value.
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1) Half of home owners stay in their home at least 10 years. Buying a new home is a good time to do remodeling and renovations, so it's also a good time to install PV solar.

2) Roughly a third of home owners stay in their home at least 20 years.

3) A PV system adds value to the home which can be used as a potential selling point and increase the asking price if you decide to move, so it's not like the entire unrecovered cost of the installation is lost.
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China has a lower Gini coefficient than the US? They're actually about the same. Not that this point matters because you said some adjustments would need to be made, yet you did not make any. Instead all you did was recite numbers from two tables and acted like that proves a point somehow. You're simply rehashed the same argument but thrown in GDP/Capita instead.

The question of how the CO2 emissions of the "middle class" in China vs the US compare still remains unanswered. To answer this we will need information such as how much the "middle class" consumes in each case. A good definition of "middle class" would also be very helpful here...
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Factor in that the US's population is about a 1/4 of China's population - that implies lower energy usage and lower CO2 emissions... right?

Wishful thinking and bad logic is not a substitute for data.
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All the per-capita data I've ever seen does not break out the data by "class" / income bracket. Where are you getting this information from?
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Where have all the gadgets gone?
Long time charging
Where have all the gadgets gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the gadgets gone?
Gone to smartphones, every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

I Learned two things about you from reading this post.

1) You have no idea how the tiered tax rate structure in the US works.

2) You are a shortsighted idiot.

The evidence of (1) is that you appear to believe that if you are making, say, $32K/yr (15% marginal income tax rate), that working a bit harder and getting that raise to $33K/yr (25% marginal tax rate) would mean your tax bill would go from $4,800/yr to $8250/yr. This is nonsense since you still pay 15% on the first $32K and the 25% rate only applies to anything in excess of that, i.e. $1K. So you get $1000/yr increase in salary and pay an extra $250/yr in taxes for a net increase in-your-pocket of $750/yr.

(2) Is evidenced by the notion that, despite the amount of money you put in your pocket ALWAYS increasing with increasing salary, you honestly think it's not worth the extra effort. Of course, your whole argument seems to be predicated on the notion that someone making $300M/yr is working ten thousand times harder than someone making $30K/yr, and that's clearly bullshit.
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Do you suppose the money just up and vanishes when the government spends it?

That money goes to individuals or companies, and if to companies then ultimately to individuals via salaries. The point of discussion should not be if government spending is good or bad since, economically, government spending is indistinguishable from any other entity spending the same amount of money on the same things... being "government" does not do anything magical to the money. Rather, the discussion should focus on if the money is spent wisely, for the maximal benefit of the country and its citizens. Obstinately the government is a product of the people collectively organizing their resources for the purpose of serving the public.

Defense spending, as an example, does not appear to have maximal benefit at the amount we are spending. Building battle tanks certainly employs many thousands of people, but we don't need or want battle tanks. Therefore building tanks the army explicitly said they do not want is the military-industrial complex equivalent of paying people to dig holes and fill them in again; money and resources are spent but nothing of real value is created.

On the other hand, spending public money on basic research has extremely high value. Just about everything we enjoy in a technological society has the fundamental principles rooted in government funded research. The DoE should get more funding, not less.

Incidentally, Sandia National Laboratories, like ALL national labs, are part of the Department of Energy. DARPA, on the other hand, is part of the Department of Defense. Just thought you might want that clarified...

So I, for one, have no problem using public money to help a new business developing a new technology with a loan. In the long run, if successful, such a business will pay massive returns in economic activity long after the loan itself is repaid. And even if the loan is never repaid, most of that money ends up right back in the economy anyway since it would have been used to buy materials and pay workers. Unless there was some kind of scam going on, even the worst case is still not that bad economically... and if someone did try to walk off with the cash in their pocket, I'd fully support stringing them up by their entrails in a public square as a cautionary example :)
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In addition to having an idea of what you'd use it for, I'd like to offer the following advice regarding how much to spend / what to buy:

How much work are you willing and able to do yourself?

The more effort you're willing to put into making the machine, the less expensive it's likely to be. Right now, the cheapest machine I'm aware of that's not total junk is the Prusa i3 ("Box frame" version) which you can stick together for under US$500 if you're savvy about where you buy parts from and you're handy with basic tools.

Be forewarned that 3D printing is a proper hobby - the kind of thing you can throw embarrassing amounts of money and time at, and the only people who will understand are those who are also part of the hobby. I do not know what kind of quality you can get with a Solidoodle. In my experience the machine itself is a relatively minor part of the equation: Endless tinkering and calibration, along with quality filament, are far more important to print quality. It's only when you get into machines that have been stripped down so much to reduce costs that quality gets impacted... see: Printrbot and it's unsupported vertical axis.
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It seems to me that genetic diversity and cultural diversity would be related. In other words, cultural isolation and genetic isolation tend to go hand-in-hand.

Therefore, if the argument is that economic development is correlated to genetic diversity, then it is also necessarily correlated to cultural diversity. This now frames the issue in a more intuitive way; The more ideas and ways of looking at the world you bring to the table, the more diverse your solutions and creativity, and the more developed your economy becomes. This seems to be broadly supported by history as well, since the most prosperous trade often occurred when and where cultures mingled freely.

And now that the genetic element has been effectively abated, the controversy evaporates. You're welcome.
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I dunno, I'd rather nobody ever heard of my product than think my product was shit... people who don't know about my product don't talk about it, but people who think it's shit will spread their opinion to others. "Q Score" includes metrics like favorability, not knowledge of existence.
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