Word: clay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cobbling shoes is an honorable occupation, but it's not rocket science. It requires only limited skill and technology, and the country with the lowest wage tends to get the business. That's why China sells so many sneakers to Americans, including David Clay, 42, a toolmaker who helps build humpbacked Boeing 747 aircraft in a giant hangar just north of Seattle...
...What Clay and his co-workers do by contrast is rocket science. And even though seasoned machinists like Clay earn more in an hour (about $50, including fringe benefits) than a comparable Chinese worker is paid in a month, the American worker still is more productive...
...more than 500,000 U.S. industrial workers last year had their jobs exported to China. A study by the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington predicts that over the next four years, 250,000 more jobs in the aerospace industry alone will be lost to China. That's why Clay and others wonder if their futures will be sacrificed so that Boeing and companies like it, lured by the potential of 1.2 billion people, can boost their share of the China market. Laments Clay: "Companies in this country are sending manufacturing of just about everything to China." Clay's friend...
...local U.S. commanders didn't really feel they were doing their job if they weren't chewing up the countryside more or less nonstop. Consequently, as the sun dipped below the horizon, artillery shells would whistle down through the jungle canopy and throw up enormous red sprays of laterite-clay clods...
There is still hope that archaeologists can solve this mystery, as well as dozens of other unanswered questions about the Olmec. Most of the sites have barely been studied, and with good reason. Annual floods smother the land with thick layers of silt that dry into impenetrable clay. What's more, says Diehl, "about 80% of the entire Olmec territory in southern Mexico has been converted in the past 20 years from jungle to cow pastures and sugar-cane fields. There's so much vegetation on the surface that you can't just pick up pottery. Generally...