Made in the USA

[MachineGhost]

American manufacturing has undergone a massive revolution over the past 20 years. Despite all the gloom and doom, America is actually the number one manufacturing nation on earth. Yul Kwon crosses the nation looking at traditional and not-so traditional types of manufacturing. 

Along the way, he meets the men and women who create the world’s best and most iconic products, engineers who are reinventing the American auto industry, steelworkers who brave intense heat to accommodate radical new ideas about recycling, and engineers who are re-imagining the microchip. He visits one of the most innovative manufacturers on earth: a small start-up company that is building personalized robots – machines that may one day reshape our homes and offices, driving our revolution further forward.

Yul further explores the emerging notion that manufacturing itself is changing from a system based on the movement and assembly of raw materials like steel and plastic to a system in which ideas and information are the raw materials of a new economy based around communications and social connections via companies like Facebook and Google.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2227791872/

[Mountaineer]

American manufacturing has undergone a massive revolution over the past 20 years. Despite all the gloom and doom, America is actually the number one manufacturing nation on earth. Yul Kwon crosses the nation looking at traditional and not-so traditional types of manufacturing. 

Along the way, he meets the men and women who create the world’s best and most iconic products, engineers who are reinventing the American auto industry, steelworkers who brave intense heat to accommodate radical new ideas about recycling, and engineers who are re-imagining the microchip. He visits one of the most innovative manufacturers on earth: a small start-up company that is building personalized robots – machines that may one day reshape our homes and offices, driving our revolution further forward.

Yul further explores the emerging notion that manufacturing itself is changing from a system based on the movement and assembly of raw materials like steel and plastic to a system in which ideas and information are the raw materials of a new economy based around communications and social connections via companies like Facebook and Google.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2227791872/

MG, Beware the NSA.  Your quoted article sounds like remarkably like American Exceptionalism which is mightly frowned upon by dear leader. 

... Mountaineer

[Mountaineer]

Merry Christmas, You Quiet, Hard-Working Americans - Keep Up The Good Work


America Continues to Thrive
Even in its current malaise, the U.S. still soars above the global competition.
By Victor Davis Hanson
 
Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, supposedly once said that there was “a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.”?
Apparently, late 19th-century observers could not quite explain how the U.S. thrived when by logic it should not. That paradox has never been more true than today.
The U.S. government now owes more than $18 trillion in long-term debt. Even after recent income-tax hikes for the very wealthy and huge cuts in the defense budget, the Obama administration will still run an annual budget deficit of nearly $500 billion.
No government official dares to trim Social Security or Medicare. Everyone knows that both programs are fiscally unsustainable.
More than 11 million undocumented immigrants are residing in the U.S. as federal immigration law is reduced to a bothersome irritant. A record 92 million American citizens 16 and older are not working.
Red-state and blue-state animosities reveal a nation more divided than at any time since the 1960s — or perhaps the pre–Civil War 1850s.
The permanent bureaucracy is awash in serial scandals. The IRS, VA, GSA, NSA, ICE, and Secret Service have all deservedly lost the public trust.
Congress suffers from overwhelming public disapproval. President Obama’s approval rating hovers just above 40 percent.
Our new foreign policy could be characterized as managed decline. Three defense secretaries have retired or resigned under Obama. Two of them, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, wrote memoirs in which they blasted the administration. From Russia to the Pacific to the Middle East, the world seems to be descending into the law of the jungle as the U.S. withdraws from its traditional role as a global overseer of the postwar order.
The Michael Brown shooting illustrates seemingly irreconcilable racial divides not seen in 50 years. Al Sharpton once was seen as a social arsonist and tax delinquent. Now he appears to be the White House’s most influential advisor on racial matters.
Student-loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion. Six years of college has become the new normal. Even then, more than a third of the students who enter college never graduate.
In such a depressing American landscape, why is the United States doing pretty well?
Put simply, millions of quiet, determined Americans get up every morning and tune out the incompetence and corruption of their government. They simply ignore destructive fads of popular culture. They have no time for the demagoguery of their politicians and the divisive rhetoric of social activists. Instead, these quiet Americans simply go to work, pursue their own talents, excel at what they do, and seek to take care of their families.
The result of their singular expertise is that even in America’s current illness, the nation still soars above the global competition.
Only in America can you find the sort of innovation, talent, legal framework, and can-do attitude needed to invent and refine hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling. Just a few hundred thousand scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, oil riggers, and skilled craftsman have revived the once-ossified oil industry for 320 million Americans.
The United States is not running out of fuels — as was predicted over the last 20 years. It instead has become the largest gas-and-oil producer in the world.
The epitaph for Silicon Valley is written each year. Its tech industry is copied the world over. Yet seemingly each year a new American technical innovation — the laptop, Google, Facebook, the iPad, the iPhone — sweeps the world. Apparently, American informality, meritocracy, and top-flight engineering still draw global talent into Northern California, which sends back out the latest gadgets to be gobbled up by billions.
Neither drought, nor needlessly cumbersome regulations, nor unfair trade practices have stalled American agriculture. The farms of the United States — where less than 2 percent of the population resides — have never turned out so much safe, nutritious, and cheap food that is feeding the world and earning America hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign exchange.
The U.S. military — in which fewer than 1 in 100 Americans serve — is facing record cuts. The Navy will have fewer ships than the American fleet of World War I. The Air Force and the Marine Corps are shrinking. Yet superb American forces continue to ensure that the United States and its allies remain safe. Neither Vladimir Putin’s Russia, nor the Communist Chinese hierarchy, nor the Iranian theocrats are quite ready to take the on the U.S. military. All are rightly worried that to do so would be suicidal.
America is not saved by our elected officials, bureaucrats, celebrities, and partisan activists. Instead, just a few million hardworking Americans in key areas — a natural meritocracy of all races, classes, and backgrounds — ignore the daily hype and chaos, remain innovative and productive, and dazzle the world.
The silent few of a forgotten America have given the entire country an astonishing standard of living that is quite inexplicable.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com . © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

[madbean]

Your quoted article sounds like remarkably like American Exceptionalism which is mightly frowned upon by dear leader. 

How do you distinguish between the concept of "American Exceptionalism" and what the Bible calls "pride". The Romans obviously thought they were exceptional, and indeed, in many ways they were, so how does the concept of "Roman Exceptionalism" work for you?

[Mountaineer]

Your quoted article sounds like remarkably like American Exceptionalism which is mightly frowned upon by dear leader. 

How do you distinguish between the concept of "American Exceptionalism" and what the Bible calls "pride". The Romans obviously thought they were exceptional, and indeed, in many ways they were, so how does the concept of "Roman Exceptionalism" work for you?

For much of the time I think Rome was exceptional, as was Greece, Egypt, etc. All measured by the kingdom of the left standards. Pride is heavily a kingdom of the right issue.

... Mountaineer

call it a pet peeve.... but i hate when i see words that had an important meaning corrupted and twisted to mean something else for the purpose of political manipulation. American Exceptionalism originally did (and still should) refer to our understanding and protection of god given rights, the idea they are not something granted to you by government... as they are most everywhere else in the world. it has nothing to do with empire building, the success of industry, american inventive ingenuity, the size of our army, etc. It also has nothing to do with "how great our sport teams are" which is the level it seems those who would wish to do away with it, want to lower it to and then destroy it..

(i also get irritated that liberal didn't always mean communist, statist or socialist and being liberal was actually a good thing...)

i didn't look up origins prior to posting my comment, it is interesting to see where the term came from... I am going by my recollection of what American Exceptionalism's common usage/referred to prior to the last ten years or so, it is possible that the memory is wrong or that i have narrowed the definition somewhat, it would seem logical that the thing that is truly different from other nations is what Exceptional refers to, and not things which other nations poses, or things which while we may lead in at one moment we could easily be following at in another.

i also stumbled on this when your post got me looking for sources

“The Federalist”? No. 1, Hamilton wrote, “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”?

and some commentary on the above

The insistence on “reflection and choice”? rather than “accident and force”? is reflected in a national commitment to equality of opportunity, originally signaled by the Constitution’s rejection of monarchy, its prohibition on “titles of nobility,”? and its insistence that sovereignty lies in We the People*. It is also reflected in a cultural commitment to freedom, individual rights and self-help.

(*emphasis mine)