- This is long, but most frightening...
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- CHANGES ARE COMING
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- Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part
on how we adapt to them. But, ready or not, here they come.
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- 1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a
world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble
that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and
UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post
office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.
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- 2. The Check. Britain is already
laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial
system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and
online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This
plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills
by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely
go out of business.
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- 3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply
doesn't read the newspaper. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered
print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man.
As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile
Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine
publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the
major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.
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- 4. The Book. You say you will never give up
the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages.
I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my
hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could
get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest
music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore
online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is
less than half that of a real book. And think of the convenience! Once
you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you
find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to see what happens next,
and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead of a book.
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- 5. The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large
family and make a lot of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people
keep it simply because they've always had it. But you are paying double
charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you
call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your
minutes.
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- 6. Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the
change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because
of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given
a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption
is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply
self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is "catalog
items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with.
Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit.
To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the
book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper, and the
video documentary, "Before the Music Dies."
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- 7. Television. Revenues to the networks are down
dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and
movies streamed from their computers. And they're playing games and doing
lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching
TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common
denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every
4 minutes and 30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it. It's time
for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose
what they want to watch online and through Netflix.
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- 8. The "Things" That You Own. Many of
the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we
may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the
cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures,
music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you
can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple,
Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest "cloud services."
That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built
into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be
tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something
in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud.
And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider.
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- In this virtual world, you can access your music or your
books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the
good news. But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or
will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big "Poof?"
Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes
you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book
from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.
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- 9. Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we
can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's
been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most
of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But
you can be sure that 24/7, "They" know who you are and where
you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View.
If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your
ads will change to reflect those habits. And "They" will try
to get you to buy something else. Again and again. All we will have that
can't be changed are memories.
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- 19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That
Will Blow Your Mind
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- The United States is rapidly becoming
the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe. All great
economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great
wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is
accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that
was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that
showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions
to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in
World War II.
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- But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America .
Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in
the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have
been lost in the same time period. The United States has
become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly
little. Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste paper. Yes,
trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world
as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants
to sell to us.
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- The United States has become bloated
and spoiled and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was.
Once upon a time America could literally out produce the
rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans
sure do consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization
of America continues at this current pace, what possible
kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?
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- Any great nation throughout history has been great at
making things. So if the United States continues to allow
its manufacturing base to erode at a staggering pace how in the world can
the U.S. continue to consider itself to be a great nation?
We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world in
an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the current state
of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable. Every single month America
goes into more debt and every single month America gets
poorer.
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- So, what happens when the debt bubble pops?
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- The deindustrialization of the United States should
be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country. But sadly,
most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.
- For people like that, take this article and print it
out and hand it to them. Perhaps what they will read below will shock
them badly enough to awaken them from their slumber.
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- Here are 19 stunning facts about the deindustrialization
of America :
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- #1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories
since 2001. About 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 people
when they were still in operation.
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- #2 Dell Inc., one of America 's largest
manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand
its operations in China with an investment of over $100
billion over the next decade.
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- #3 Dell has announced that it will be closing its last
large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem , North
Carolina in November. Approximately 900 jobs will be lost.
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- #4 In 2008, 1.2 billion cell phones were sold worldwide.
So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States ?
Zero.
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- #5 According to a new study conducted by the Economic
Policy Institute, if the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase
at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs
this year alone.
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- #6 As of the end of July, the U.S. trade
deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time
period a year ago.
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- #7 The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million
manufacturing jobs since October 2000.
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- #8 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment
at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased
an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment
at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.
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- #9 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic
output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.
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- #10 Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure
of a factory that produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul , Minnesota .
Approximately 750 good paying middle class jobs are going to be lost because
making Ford Rangers in Minnesota does not fit in with Ford's
new "global" manufacturing strategy.
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- #11 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans
worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans
were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.
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- #12 In the United States today, consumption accounts
for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services.
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- #13 The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent
of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
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- #14 In 2001, the United States ranked
fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use. Today it ranks
15th.
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- #15 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer
industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
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- #16 Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands
of different products. Asia now produces 84
percent of them worldwide.
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- #17 The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese
goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United
States .
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- #18 One prominent economist is projecting that the Chinese
economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy
by the year 2040.
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- #19 The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans
are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number
of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.
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- So, how many tens of thousands more factories do we need
to lose before we do something about it?
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- How many millions more Americans are going to become
unemployed before we all admit that we have a very, very serious problem
on our hands?
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- How many more trillions of dollars are going to leave
the country before we realize that we are losing wealth at a pace that
is killing our economy?
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- How many once great manufacturing cities are going to
become rotting war zones like Detroit before we understand
that we are committing national economic suicide?
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- The deindustrialization of America is
a national crisis. It needs to be treated like one.
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- And to underscore the above: 11/9/10: The largest
private employer in Saginaw, Michigan will soon be the city government
of Beijing, as a 104-year-old unit of General Motors will be sold to new
owners from China. The $450M purchase received little attention this summer,
but it is a landmark deal - the first time Chinese investors have bought
a U.S. industrial operation of such scale and history.
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