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Manufacturing may be, but what about manufacturing EMPLOYMENT? When you use robots and automation, there aren't so many employees.

I believe manufacturing employment has also not shrunk, but it's harder to find statistics on that and it depends on what you mean by "manufacturing employment". If you mean jobs for people with high school education, those have shrunk, simply because more and more people are actually getting college degrees.

And it may look large because US manufacturing is focused on large-ticket items, like aircraft and rockets and tanks. It's still the case that 99% of the routine goods that you buy (whether clothes or household items or toys or electronics) are made in China.

It doesn't just "look large", that makes it objectively large. And, yes, the US focuses on high margin, high value items because those support the high salaries that US workers demand.

Mostly, these jobs move to China or Europe because Americans don't want to do them anymore.

See what Rowe has to say about this:

http://www.mikeroweworks.com/2...

Yes, wrap everything in red tape and "health and safety", wear a helmet and a high visibility jacket all the time ...

I'm just going to leave these here:

• This,
• That, and
• The other.

Mike Rowe would like to talk to you.

"Green" is the modern equivalent of "Safety First," which is a load of crap except for the safety alarmists (i.e. safety equipment vendors.) Mike Rowe is spot on with "Safety Third." I'd put Green at fourth. Every task has an attendant risk and cost. Environmental impact is a cost.

Holy crap, Mike Rowe has a website. This is a revelation.

Even more important - a hydrazine thruster is super-high-reliability. In space, pulling to the curb and calling AAA isn't an option (yet.) A liquid bi-propellant thruster is substantially more complicated than a hydrazine monopropellant one, and is more likely to have problems.

"Green" is the modern equivalent of "Safety First," which is a load of crap except for the safety alarmists (i.e. safety equipment vendors.) Mike Rowe is spot on with "Safety Third." I'd put Green at fourth. Every task has an attendant risk and cost. Environmental impact is a cost.

I'm all for developing less-toxic solutions, but a hydrazine monopropellant thruster is damned effective. It also shifts the system risk to the ground handling crews, where we can deal with it (as opposed to shifting it to on-orbit failures.)

There are plenty of people who don't start out with all the advantages, or all the smarts, or even any real support from the adults around them - but they work really damn hard and they make something of themselves. Granted, a little luck never hurts. I'm thinking of Edison and Einstein, Jordan and Woods. People who came from very humble means to do great things.

I'll never be a rocket scientist because I'm better at blowing things up than I am making them fly, but that doesn't mean I can't be damn good at what I do. I'm not even the best programmer, but I work hard and I try to make up for my lack of direct skill by being more customer-oriented and working harder at it.

However, your point about making technical and skilled trades more accessible and appealing is a good one. I saw an interview with Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame this morning where he was talking about wanting to make "dirty" jobs and trade schools, etc not seem like they're such an inferior choice to a 4-year degree. He has a website to this end: mikeroweworks.com which I haven't really explored.

Hey, what do you have against Mike Rowe? That guy's an American hero. Not only is he the host of Dirty Jobs, one of the few good shows on Discovery channel (the other being Mythbusters), but he's also a very outspoken supporter of the trades and American blue-collar workers. He's even got a website dedicated to the issue of the decline in trades jobs/workers in America, which has been a contributing factor to the collapse of our physical infrastructure.

But, seriously, I absolutely agree with you. The domain name registration system is all fucked up. The registrars (the most successful of which typically have had close ties to the InterNIC/ICANN board) are making a killing already selling virtual goods (it's like printing money). The least they can do is to mitigate domain-squatting and domain-hijacking rather than to cooperate with and try to profit off of helping those scummy companies.

I don't know why being sick of scummy business practices make you a socialist, but if trademarks were abused in the same fashion we'd quickly start running out of legible company or product names. Oh, you want to register a company name that doesn't substitute numbers for letters or incorporate creative misspellings? That will be $5000, please.

I can understand the argument that capitalism is desirable for promoting healthy competition, driving down costs and increases product/service quality. But how do domain squatters/prospectors contribute anything positive to society? By driving the cost of decent domain names up? That benefits only the domain squatters/prospectors. They're the definition of a parasitic establishment—one whose actions benefits only themselves while harming the rest of society and draining its resources.

The point is that this story is made up. It makes one leap after another, without any citations or evidence. Is there evidence NASA's engineers were limited by railroad specifications? Is there evidence that the English standards influenced the US railroad specs, when most US railroads were built when the country was independent, and no longer even a majority ethnically English nation? Is there evidence that English railroads are based on what the Romans built in Britannia? Is there evidence that the Roman roads were made to the specifications of a single chariot? Isn't it funny that these supposed "facts" all line up to one amazing coincidence? Isn't it a bit too neat and tidy that it all ends up with Ancient Rome, when there were other peoples who were influential in the history of England, and even in the history of Italy and the Roman empire? If you're gullible enough to believe all that, I've got an aqueduct to sell you.

Just googling around I saw this:

• Snopes - Claim: The United States standard railroad gauge derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
• ROMAN CHARIOTS, RAILROAD TRACKS, MILSPECS, AND URBAN LEGENDS