In reply to this comment by Pprt:
So Jewish people are the ones blowing themselves up in foreign countries and intentionally killing civilians, while the Muslims are prosperous inventors and artisans? That's news to me.

That's a keen and concise use of sarcasm, and one wasted on most of the sheeple here. The Jews excel the world around at arts, entertainment, science, medicine, business and finance, literature, the list goes on.
Muslims the world around have devoted their genius to killing, destroying societies, oppressing women and, oh ya, Allah.

The Mohammaden blight has nothing to do with race. It is the culture and religeon. Pakistan, Phillipines, Thialand, India, Iraq, Darfur, Beslan, Sweden, France, Britian. All these places and more they are assaulting the rules of law and advancing barbarism.

So Jewish people are the ones blowing themselves up in foreign countries and intentionally killing civilians, while the Muslims are prosperous inventors and artisans? That's news to me.

Actually, there is a lot of evidence that a majority of the physical labor/supporting labor for the artisans in the construction of large structures came from farmers during the dry season, a place to sleep and food in exchange for their labor. Skeletal remains that have been found at these sites suggest basic medical care, such as evidence of setting and splinting broken bones, as opposed to the sort of "driven until death" that would be expected from slaves. That isn't to say that slave labor wasn't used, but probably not predominately.

It works damn well..here's my blog entry about it.

your's right FC, and I often muse idyllically about some other paradigm, like it would be better than the one we have, good with the bad, etc. We make great strides wit respect to science with the current one-My biggest beef is being accustomed to a higher standard of quality, and it becomes increasingly less available to me as the world's economy is faster becoming standardized. China has no history of quality with regards to manufacturing-America has pimped hers to the point of absurdity-Now when you want to use your coin to buy quality, you must return to the artisans and specialists in a trade or discipline.....used to be it was everyone holding themselves to a higher standard. Gone are the days.......

It is weird to me how much this guy resembles a guy I work with in his mannerisms. The guy I work with also happens to love bacon.

Bacon is teh awesome. I think most cooks love bacon. How much do cooks love bacon? Check out this thread on eGullet in praise of bacon:
Bacon Aphorisms

Anyway, bacon didn't USED to shrivel up the way it all seems to now. The reason that bacon shrivels up like that now is because industrial grade bacon is made by injecting it with nitrate salts in a water solution. By doing this, bacon can be made in a matter of hours, instead of the painstaking, days long process by which real bacon is supposed to be made. The other "advantage" of wet-cured bacon is that the bacon increases in mass, so it is more profitable. The result for the consumer is less than optimal.

If you go and get artisanal dry cured bacon, you'll be in for a treat. Bacon that keeps its shape when rendered, and much more satisfying, full bacon flavour. Do yourself a favour, eat some BACON!

A walmart, for the uninitiated, is a concrete structure with at least 15000 sqaure feet minimun floorspace, containing items consisting mainly of petroleum by-products, sugar, and working-class poor, the most highly decorated of which can be called manager/supervisor-While their job duties are only slightly different, the supervisors,checkers,and stockers all for the most part, have these things in common:

Poor health bennies
Paycheck-to-paycheck job security
Little or no company pride,enthusiasm,or loyalty

The kind of beast that Walmart is, dictates the overall vibe of the institution.
Little or no concern for the human factor, or their quality of life, and profit-driven above all else.

Quality is a thing of the distant past.
In the not to distant pass, it was the poorest with regard to monetary wealth, who were the artisans and producers of quality in this country.
Go to Turkey...they still make the finest tile and marble...
to Belgium for chocolate, to Trinidad for steel drums....

Come to America for worthless shit, imported from Taiwan...a city known for its endless miles of sweatshops and manufacturing compounds....toxic waste, ansd human wreckage....Exploitation is the walmart difference!!!!

It's amazing how easily an artisan can form the image of a cat out of a shapeless blob of material, especially that quickly and effortlessly! It wouldn't surprise me if the man was at least a Journeyman in his craft.

I'm a believer in CNC stuff. The guy is right these guitars are still handmade even if a high speed numerically controlled machine is shaving away at the heel instead of some artisan with a rasp. I'd never heard of Taylors before this video. Martins? of course!

Automata are really interesting, and the French took the art to new heights. From wikipedia:
A new attitude towards automata is to be found in Descartes when he suggested that the bodies of animals are nothing more than complex machines - the bones, muscles and organs could be replaced with cogs, pistons and cams. Thus mechanism became the standard to which Nature and the organism was compared. Seventeenth-century France was the birthplace of those ingenious mechanical toys that were to become prototypes for the engines of the industrial revolution. Thus, in 1649, when Louis XIV was still a child, an artisan named Camus designed for him a miniature coach, and horses complete with footmen, page and a lady within the coach; all these figures exhibited a perfect movement. According to P. Labat, General de Gennes constructed, in 1688, in addition to machines for gunnery and navigation, a peacock that walked and ate. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher produced many automatons to create jesuit shows, including a statue which spoke and listened via a speaking tube, a perpetual motion machine, or a cat piano which would drive spikes into the tails of cats which yowled to specified pitches, although he is not known to have actually constructed the instrument. He also wrote an early description of the magic lantern, in Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671).
The world's first successfully-built biomechanical automaton is considered to be The Flute Player, invented by the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson in 1737. He also constructed a mechanical duck that could eat and defecate, seeming to endorse Cartesian ideas that animals are no more than machines of flesh.
In 1769, a chess-playing automaton called the Turk, created by Wolfgang von Kempelen, made the rounds of the courts of Europe, but in fact was a famous hoax, operated from inside by a hidden human operator.
Other Eighteenth Century automaton makers include the prolific Frenchman Pierre Jaquet-Droz (see Jaquet-Droz automata) and his contemporary Henri Maillardet. Maillardet, a Swiss mechanician, created an automaton capable of drawing four pictures and writing three poems. Maillardet's Automaton is now part of the collections at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia.