The lack of a person watching you check out does not mean no one is watching. They absolutely are and you are being recorded the entire time you are in the store.

I feel like I should point out that pure lead is really soft. So soft in fact that you should be able to easily scratch and deform it with a dull knife. Lead will also tarnish really quickly when heated and turn a flat grey color. Because of its low melting point, lead would also be a really bad filler metal for cast iron cookware. It would soften and fall out if you ever overheated the pan.

Try scratching a line through both the pan and the brighter area with the tip of a fork or a dull knife. If it’s lead, the shiny area will scratch much deeper and feel different compared to the cast iron.

Also, filling a hole or a void with lead might be easy, but welding with steel is also easy and probably cheaper from a manufacturing perspective.

I am far from being an expert, but I would think the shiny spot is indeed a repair but with arc welded steel or an iron/nickel alloy. Both of which will be durable, stand up to heat beautifully, and also appear noticably shinier than cast iron even after being heated on the stove.

I am of the opinion that closed-minded thinking is only part of the issue. The other part is there are well financed interst groups who work hard to create and encourage division in order to prevent regular folks from working together for a common cause.

The reason is simple: convince people to fight amongst themselves and they will be too busy to notice how much they are being ripped off by the tiny handful of rich people at the top.

The bar in the picture is one kilogram or about $65,000 US dollars. Ten bars would buy a very nice house in my area.

Depends on local laws of their state, but yes in most states you lose the right to vote while in prison and some places, like Florida, make it difficult to get your right to vote back. Not sure if the prison sentence being for a state or federal crime makes a difference or not.