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President Obama Wants America to Be Like Germany—What Does That Really Mean?
By STEVEN HILL. Want a smarter workforce? A stronger manufacturing sector? Germany seems to offer a blueprint for Obama’s middle-out economic agenda — if we take away the right lessons. Americans [...]
India, Long the Home of Outsourcing, Now Wants to Make Its Own Chips
By SEAN McLAIN. NEW DELHI — The government of India, home to many of the world’s leading software outsourcing companies, wants to replicate that success by creating a homegrown industry for [...]
Observations from PMTS 2013
A few observations from the 2013 Precision Machining Technology Show (PMTS) in Columbus. 1) Attendance at shows is dwindling, which does not mean PMTS was a weak event for those [...]
Tiny Chiplets: A New Level of Micro Manufacturing
By JOHN MARKOFF. PALO ALTO, Calif. — Under a microscope, four slivers of silicon — electronic circuits called chiplets — perform an elaborate, jerky dance as if controlled by a hidden [...]
Inflation? Not In My Neighborhood.
I have an unusual vantage point to observe the housing market as the pundits fret about the housing “bubble” they imagine is bulging. I live in a housing refrigerator, Olympia [...]
Hard Hiring Decisions
One of the good things about buying out my brother at Graff-Pinkert was being asked by lenders to study my costs. What I found out, among other things, was that [...]
Is Business “Just Business”?
I wrote a blog recently about my reaction to a letter from my landscaper Guillermo’s daughter, which put a face on her father to his clients. I received two comments [...]
The Tar Sands Disaster
Courtesy of The New York Times. By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON. WATERLOO, Ontario. IF President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor. Canada’s tar sands formations, landlocked [...]
Going Once, Going Twice … Human Interaction
I attended the Auction of Tecomet Wednesday this week in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. It was just the fourth auction I’ve gone to since I started working at Graff-Pinkert almost two [...]
How Robots Are Revolutionizing Our World
By Rhett K. Hunter of The Atlantic. From healthcare and homecare, to military use and emergency response, robots are fast becoming a fixture in our lives. A number of T. Rowe [...]