to ensure supplies of medical equipment, etc., cost is also a factor. If I can buy one of your instruments, a chemical analyzer, computer analytic systems, etc., for roughly the same price as one instrument made here, more people get helped.

Concentration in one place is a huge risk.

We’ve likely gone too far in global trade, but it’s gonna take decades to change things. And, we’ll be in perpetual war if we don’t spread the wealth around to other countries.

...exactly what happened.

As it happens, the bourgeois world has simply exported the risks of manufacture to poor people. That is not spreading wealth; rather it's exploitation.

I follow things in the literature like the concentration of brominated flame retardants in the bloodstreams of Chinese children "recycling" our stuff so we can declare ourselves "green."

Now that China is wealthy, having loaded some of its citizens with heavy metals and haloaromatics, they've closed China to the import of electronic waste.

Watch out Africa!

There is a lot of tragedy behind the things about which we are glib.

The semiconductor industry was not pretty when it was in California; even though in the 1970's and 1980's it was heralded as "green" there. Nevertheless at that time, even the worst government in the US was not certifiably insane; we had environmental regulations. Some of them were a little weird, to be honest. I have direct experience with a law that required me to not neutralize a dangerous material in a manner easily performed, but rather to ship it around at great expense and at risk to lots of people. This was obviously a stupid rule. This said, regulation can be wise; often it is. I think regulation is necessary to protect our common space.

Sending manufacturing off to places where poverty precludes attention to regulation is not ethical in my view.

It is definitely true that living standards in China have risen, as well they should have done, but I disagree that everything should have been sent there.

we don’t give a damn about them.

We have to find a balance that is fair to workers here. But, wait until all those folks have to pay 3 times what they were paying for “flat panels” a year ago.

We live in a big world, America First is over, gonna be hard telling the rest of the world to f%*k off, and worse.

Hope you get your parts and carry on your research. I may well need it.

I think I argued that I do care. I just don't want the people you call "peasants" to have babies loaded with lead. This happens.

I'm acutely aware of it, because I do read the fucking environmental literature, to which I have excellent access, regularly.

Here's an exercise for you if you're concerned about "peasants:" Go to Google Scholar and type in the following list of words: brominated flame retardants chinese children plasma.

In a few seconds, one can get 3,780 hits.

I do these kind of exercises all the time. Why? Because I give a shit about people digging through mud in the Congo region for no pay so we can have cobalt for our electric cars.

We should pay more for our stuff. The fact that we are unwilling to pay more for our stuff is one reason we are so willing to throw it away and get new stuff. Every generation in every country after us will have to pay for our profligacy.

The idea that Americans should not to be required to pay three times more for a flat screen TV set smacks to me a little more of "America First" fascism than you seem to think it does.

I came from a time when people repaired their television sets when they broke. Now they just hall them off on "recycling day" and buy new ones. That is a function of cost.

In my opinion you're being more than a little smug and might relieve yourself of it by being a little better informed and a little less judgmental.

trade with others outside our border to enrich ourselves.

Apparently attempts to buy this RF generator from other sources has evolved into something of a scam.

That's what we're being told anyway.

One of the responsibilities of my position is to screen instrument purchases, in particular mass specs. I'm not happy, and will weigh this in future purchases. Mass specs are expensive instruments and having even one down over a long period is itself expensive, the risk to projects not even included.