Word: metallization
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...ping and rattle of the rides and games reached all the way to the parking lot as Greg Lynch pushed Jessi's wheelchair toward the glow of the midway, over ruts that jostled her legs (which had been repaired with a metal rod and screws), her pieced-together arm and her back, which had been realigned with metal plates...
...grind their boots onto the gas pedals, could not get above 40 miles per hour. One of them bogged down in the roadside sand, another broke down, and running soldiers leapt into the thin cover of other trucks as large-caliber bullets shattered windshields and bored through sheet metal, as dead and dying trucks began to block the road...
Thanks to spiking metal prices caused by demand from China and India and a couple of smelting-factory shutdowns in Mexico you may not have heard about, the zinc inside a penny now costs .83 of a cent. (The U.S. got rid of almost all the expensive copper in 1982.) Add distribution and production costs, and you're up to 1.3 cents to make a penny, which freaks people out. That's because the U.S. Mint claims to make a profit, called seigniorage, on the difference between the cost of producing currency and its value. That, however, is stupid. Printing...
...most powerful penny opponent is Republican Arizona Congressman Jim Kolbe, who keeps pushing his Legal Tender Modernization Act. He's very concerned about the coming penny Armageddon. "At some point you'll find a burgeoning business of people melting them down to metal," says Kolbe, "and selling them back to the Mint for more pennies." Kolbe, who advocates rounding to the nearest nickel, argues that parking meters, Laundromats, transit systems and vending machines don't accept pennies. Merchants hate them and won't let you pay for things with a stack of them. They pile up or get thrown away...
...remember subway tokens? The two-color chunky metal coins cost about a dollar back in 1988,the same year I read Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, a truthful book about the hard social and political realities of New York. I read most of it "on site" in my call room at Harlem Hospital. One night, the phone in that room rang and I was told to come down to the Emergency Room fast. They had a 16-year-old boy there who was bleeding to death; his leg had been run over by a subway train...