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For what it's worth, I have been told that the boxes of Taco Bell meat are marked "Suitable for human consumption."

          C                                      F                    C
There's a small town in the mountains, where the streets are wide and still;

          F                             C           F C  
There are children making angels in the snow.

    F                 Gsus4            C       Em/B     Am     C/G
The sunset paints the sky at night; An old man works by candle light;

  Dm     /E F6                   G
A tiny baby smiles and waves hello.

       F         C/E      Dm7      Dm7/G C      Cmaj7/B
In the cold gray light of dawn, an eagle flies;

        Bb            F                G
And the men are happy wearing matching ties.

          Bb       F           Fm6/Ab          C
A pair of poodles;    A broken finger will not bend.

          Bb       F           C
Soup with noodles;    A female Klingon's drunk boyfriend.

        Bb   F               Fm6/Ab         C
A sexy lady;    This party's better than it seems.

       Bb           F              G               C
Warren Beatty; Dear sleeping giant panda: pleasant dreams.

F#m              D      /E
     Are you the plane?

F#m       E          D      /E  
     that shapes the board?

F#m       E/G#  A  D        /E
     part of    a  history,

F#m       E            D
          smoothed and worn. And

Bm   C    C#m      D              F#m/D#   D 
ohhh...        the windy weather,

F#m/D#       D      F#m/D#     E5
         dry spell,         brush fire.

"...U.S. manufacturing output is up over recent decades. As Thomas Duesterberg of Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a research firm, has pointed out, the U.S.'s share of global manufacturing output has actually increased slightly since 1980."

"...manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades..."

"The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change... Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers."

So US manufacturing market share is up slightly in about a generation, but productivity (i.e. output per worker) has more than doubled. You can't quite compare those two concepts (since share is a percentage of a number not given), but if global manufacturing output doubled in that time (a guess), then there would have been no job manufacturing job growth (and even a big perceived loss, as the population went up by about 75 million people during that time).

But I believe there's a more subtle problem that Brooks misses, or at least ran out of space to address: flexibility. In an automated factory, output can be increased only to a certain level -- then more capital equipment needs to be purchased, installed, configured, etc. and that is very expensive. In a completely manual factory, adding capacity means hiring and training new workers. In the US at least, when times get tough, it is pretty easy to shed workers. But the resources spent on capital equipment generally cannot be recovered.

To me this means that US manufacturing flexibility is a bit like French job creation: employers are reluctant to take on new expenses that cannot be easily undone if times get tough.

Interestingly, I've noticed these sort of annoyances since the beginning with Bluetooth based products. There are very, very few Bluetooth connections that "just work" and continue to do so. On top of that, the model is fairly complex: many people probably don't understand all of the subtleties of "discover," "pair," "passcode," and "authorize." I don't think any of these concepts are super difficult, but it seems that almost no implementation gets everything right, and I think that is a clue to an underlying problem.

Bluetooth as a specification seems to be very complex for real humans to implement well. It has been around for about a decade, so by this point the basics should be very mature, and I'm sure they are. But all of these annoyances indicate to me that maybe important parts of the specification are too complex or poorly defined. It's easy to point fingers are the implementations and just say that the chip vendors or driver writers or operating system engineers made mistakes. It's also easy to say the the user interface designers did a poor job of integrating the technology into the user experience.

All of those engineers are undoubtedly guilty of making mistakes -- they (we) always do. Unfortunately with some technologies it just seems easier than otherwise to stumble.