Automobiles were once high-maintenance luxuries that only the wealthy could afford. Renewable energy, such as that from photovoltaic sources, also is a luxury among whose sole redeeming qualities are its uninterruptable nature—at least during the daytime.

Henry Ford would have fired for incompetence any manager who tried to move jobs offshore for cheap labor. He believed—and more important, proved—that intelligent management can make most jobs sufficiently value-adding to justify high wages for American workers. If he was alive today, however, California’s enactment of a cap-and-trade law would disqualify the state from consideration as a Ford manufacturing venue under the following criteria.

The traditional control charts for nonconformances (np and p) and defects (c and u) date back to the 1920s, and they rely on the normal approximation to the binomial and Poisson distributions, respectively. This approximation works best when the expected number of events is 4 to 6, or even greater. The control charts therefore perform better as quality becomes worse, which suggests there is something wrong with the whole picture.

Two thousand years ago, somebody (like the future Alexander the Great) who wanted to learn from a famous philosopher (like Aristotle) had to visit him in person, or vice versa. Written correspondence was of course possible, but every letter had to be written by hand, and it could take months to reach its destination. It was hardly possible to have an ongoing, two-way exchange of ideas under these conditions.