Manufacturing Down, Blogging Up

Here are a couple of "leading economic indicators" for you: US car manufacturing is down 457 percent (caution: I invented this number to illustrate my point) while US blog creation is up 1532 percent (again, an invented number).

These trends came to me this morning as I was making my coffee and mulling over the insightful— yet humorous—comment I wanted to make on Joe Mazzanti's blog. I don't know what the exact numbers are, but you get the idea, and the idea is dead on.

After a few seconds of considering how and why these two "industries" are heading in opposite directions, a question occurred to me: What ever happened to the service industry sector of our economy?

We know that the traditional hard manufacturing industries have in large part left the United States for places like China, where cheap labor is found in abundance and pesky things like health and safety codes are found not at all. Okay, we get it.

But those manufacturing jobs were supposed to be replaced by the service industry sector. You know, those bastions of economic strength like the insurance industry (think AIG), investment banking (think Lehman Brothers), and transportation (think your favorite bankrupt airline here).

So we no longer make stuff and sell it to each other. Fine. It looks like we're about done "servicing" each other as well (excuse the word choice please). Now all we do is blog and blather back and forth to one another.

Is this our destiny?

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Contrary to Kristen's observation on her blog, The List, my blog entry about Miley Cyrus generated like zero page views. Is the pop world over Miley already, or is it just me? Rhetorical question. Don't answer.

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Some things are just words. There are people in the world who think it's wrong for Israel to try to defeat the people who keep lobbing rockets and mortars at them. These critics complain that Israel's response is disproportionate. In other words, Israel shouldn't try to win. "Disproportionate response" is just words. They sound good together. Nothing more, nothing less.

By the way, among those complaining that Israel's response to Hamas is "disproportionate" is France.

Enough said.