"is sponsored by Studebaker trucks and your local Kaiser-Frasier dealer."

We show our age by even knowing what you are speaking of here. Remember in the '50s Sears Roebuck experimented with cars in their lineup by putting their "Allstate" brand name on Kaiser's little "Henry J" model?
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Im old enough to remember Paul Winchell, Jerry Mahoney, knucklehead smif, soupy sales, Studebaker trucks, radio free europe, the cbs evening news with douglas edwards( and it was 15 minutes long) and cigarette commercials on tv, and it was all broadcast in black and white and it didnt start until 4:00 in the afternoon and it went off at 12:30 after johnny carson.

studebaker trucks and kaiser-frazier popped into my mind because of a hullaballo over the car bailout. one of the things people toss about is how GM helped in WWII and therefore...

to which I reply 'so did studebaker and kaiser-frazier' but no one bothered to save them for the effort. studebaker when belly up, kaiser-frazier got bought by rambler, which got bought by AMC and they went belly up in the 70's. we seem to have gone on living a pretty good life.

I'm not sure, but I think AMC became merged into Chrysler. When I owned a '94 Dodge Intrepid (beaultiful, seductive, but the most "snake-bit" vehichle I've ever owned, their lineup also included the Eagle, built on the same frame and labeled AMC.

Of course, as a pilot, you know the same thing happened with the several dozen airplane manufacturers that used to exist in the U.S.

Most of them are still here, in a way, but their atoms are now part of Lock-Mart, Boeing, and General Dynamics. (

Is General Dynamics still separate from those two, or has it also been absorbed by one of them. I envision something like the "protoplasm" of the '50s comic books, of "The Blob" devouring the whole world.)
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> I'm not sure, but I think AMC became merged into Chrysler.

Yeah, it was.

> Is General Dynamics still separate from those two?

Yeah, GD still exists.
;-)

> I envision something like the "protoplasm" of the '50s comic books, of "The Blob" devouring the whole world.)

Look towards the Japanese Keiretsu for the future of manufacturing. Just as the "small farm" has gone by the wayside except for niche markets ("fully" organic foods, gensing, etc), so, too, will small manufacturing firms get reduced to a small percentage of really big firms.

Robotics is going to do to manufacturing what Mechanization did to agriculture -- cut the margins so tight that only a large firm can weather variances in the market caused by external events. This is why idiots concerned with "shipping jobs overseas" are stupid. Roboticization would eliminate most, if not all, of those jobs anyway if there wasn't cheaper labor out there in the world market. And by locating those jobs there, you give those nations a chance to build their own economies up to join the *20th* century.

All substantial future wealth from the US and Euro perspective is in IP and Services (pay attention to WIPO, not the WTO!). The end result of the whole mess is going to be to have 2-5% of the population of any nation making industrial goods, just as 2-5% now make agricultural products.