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RE: Unfortunately

I remember watching the degradation in the quality of American manufacturing when I was doing engineering in audio and video facilities in the late 70's/early 80's. Take Ampex, for example, the remarkable company that introduced audio tape to America and then invented the practical videotape recorder in the late 50's. You had a panoply of their products, and the earlier they were, the better they were made. With every generation of audio and video recorder, the parts grew skimpier, the quality control shoddier, the reliability lower. And it wasn't just Ampex, it happened in every American industry.

Does it have something to do with the spoiled me-me-me self-indulgence of we boomers, and the generations that followed? I tend to suspect that it does, that we moved from having high expectations of ourselves to having high expectations of what others would do for us. Thanks to post-war prosperity, we grew up to be, in effect, spoiled rich kids. And so we started making crap, while the Japanese made a fetish of quality, and now we try to make an "easy money" living -- lots of government services but lower taxes, an emphasis on short-term profits, takeovers, leveraged buyouts, monopolies, get-rich-quick derivatives that create imaginary paper profits while the factories that actually create wealth move offshore, borrowing money from the Chinese so we can buy goods that others have made and then wondering why we're growing poorer. And the frustrating thing is that both liberals and conservatives are guilty in this. We blame everything on the other side, but the sad fact is we're *both* to blame.

But, whatever the cause, I had the sad experience of watching storied companies that had pioneered their fields, companies like Ampex and RCA, go the way of the dodo thanks to products that while they were far in advance of anything else technologically became increasingly unreliable and shoddy as time went on.

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