What country is the world’s largest manufacturer by a huge margin? If you have a kid, you would think it must be China — I don’t know the last time I saw I toy (or anything else, really) that wasn’t made there.

Wrong.

Accounting for more than 20% of the world’s total manufacturing output is the United States.

Japan is a distant second at just over 13%. Then China (12%), and Germany (8.2%). Then, well, everyone else. (Data come from the Dept. of Labor and the United Nations.)

(Click to enlarge, as usual.)

So what do we make? Aircraft (Lockheed Martin, Boeing), missiles, space-related equipment, autos and auto parts, farming equipment (can you say “John Deere”?), gas turbines for power plants (GE), computer chips (Intel), and a heck of a lot more. We don’t make as much consumer goods, but we sure as heck make the things that make those goods possible.

So when you hear someone whining about us not making things anymore, keep reality in mind.

Here’s the problem I had to solve with Excel. (I’m sharing this in case anyone Googles a similar problem.)

I am entering a long list of data in three columns– to keep it simple, let’s call them “Client,” “Salesperson,” and a 10-digit “Salesperson ID.”

Every time I enter a salesperson’s name, I then have to also enter his ID. This gets tedious.

So I wanted Excel to think like this: “If the Salesperson name entered matches one that’s already been entered, automatically fill in the Salesperson ID based on that previous entry. If it doesn’t match, just put ‘No match’ in the box.”

Check it out, yo. Here’s the formula from 10 rows down in the table:

=VLOOKUP(B11,$B$1:$C10,2,FALSE))

This says, “Look at what’s in cell B11 (the 11th entry in the Salesperson column). If it matches a name anywhere in the existing columns B or C (from B1 to C10), then fill the cell with whatever’s in the 2nd column of that selection — that is, whatever’s in column C.”

So if I enter “Smith” in B11, it looks at the existing B and C columns for the word “Smith” (only up to row 10). If it finds it — say, in B6 — it then gives us the number that’s in C6. (It’s an Excel quirk that you have to search both columns B and C, even though only column B might have the data.)

When I put the formula in row 12, it updates so it’s searching rows 1-11. And so on, always searching above the existing entry.

But if it doesn’t find the text, it returns an error or a messy “N/A.” So I added some code to make it pretty.

=IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(B11,$B$1:$C10,2,FALSE)) = TRUE,”No match”, VLOOKUP(B11,$B$1:$C10,2,FALSE))

This says, “If the VLOOKUP returns nothing (i.e., FALSE), then display ‘No match.’ But if it does come up with something, then display whatever value it calculates — i.e., whatever’s in column C.”

Make sense? I know. But if you’re trying to solve this problem, it does. Honest.

Quoth:

msnbc.com BREAKING NEWS: 13-year-old Kavya Shivashankar of Kansas
wins Scripps National Spelling Bee

Kavya Shivashankar of Kansas. I just love that. Too many people forget too quickly that what makes this country great is our incredible, unprecedented mix of people — people, cultures, ideas.

Homogeny breeds mediocrity. Evolution happens when something changes — when something different is added to the mix. If it’s good, it prospers. And we have prospered.

It’s easy to get all rah-rah and wrap yourself in a flag because we’ve got a ton of money and a lot of guns, but the  reason this place is so damn rich and prosperous is because we embraced changed.

300 million people who all think alike don’t get much done. But 300 million people with last names like Smith, O’Hearlihy, Mogatu, Fellini, Andreesen, Ivanovich, Rodriguez, Zaradic, Chan, Konishi, Shivashankar and a million others — we do wonderful things. We do magic.

Don’t forget it.

Argue about gun control and abortion and school prayer and taxes and health care and the wars we fight. But don’t forget that we can argue about those things because we have the money for weapons and medicine and schools and roads and clean water, and all those things because we’re all different – not because we’re all the same.

Kavya Shivashankar of Kansas. W00t!

Yeah, as usual I haven’t been writing much. But I gave up World of Warcraft so that’s gonna leave a lot more time in the evenings. And I’ve been taking notes on lots of things I want to write about.

Translation: If you’re a loyal reader (thank you thank you thank you) there will be more a-coming.

This was pretty funny. I have a small home-equity loan through Provident Bank. I wanted to get the exact payoff amount so I can close it.

Nowhere on the Provident Bank site is there a way to do this, so I called. The customer service rep told me — seriously — that the only way to get this information is to fax a request in.

To say I was surprised would be an understatement. I repeated it back to her. “There’s no way to do this online?”

“No, sir.”

“I just need the payoff figure. Is there a number I can call to get it?”

“No, sir, They’re telling us to have you fax the request in.”

Wowzers. I thought Cincinnati’s Fifth Third bank was the most backward in the world, but this wins.

OK, so it makes sense that one of the two major condiments on everyone’s table is salt — simple mineral, long history, used for preserving, one of the five basic tastes, and so on.

But why black pepper as the other one? Why not cinnamon or curry or mace or saffron or ginger or… you get the idea. Who decided on ground black pepper?

One of life’s many mysteries that I’m too lazy to research.

One year, 12 bucks. Great deal.

And yes, I’ll be blogging again very soon.

If I were to tell you that Sid and Marty Krofft were creating a feature-film version of Land of the Lost starring Will Ferrell, what would you say?

Perhaps “Arrrrrrrgggggghhhhh”?

From Inman News:

Meanwhile, Anthony J. Longo Jr., founder and CEO and broker of record for CondoDomain.com, has characterized the lawsuit as an “unreasonable action” with “zero basis” by a “traditional brokerage” with “deep pockets” against a “discount broker” with “limited funds.”

We were told in Reporter School (i.e., the newspaper) to avoid using partial sentences as quotes if it could be helped. This would be a no-no:

Smith agreed that the contract gave him “an easy way to find customers.”

Someone at Inman “may have been” out sick that day.

The wife and I made a short trip today to take part in a Good Deed that was only possible because of the Internet. It’s one of those things that cheap and easy global communications doesn’t make easier, but makes possible.

We drove one leg of a dog “transport” — Richmond to Fredericksburg. The point of these transports is to move dogs that are being held in “kill” shelters (and likely to be euthanized) to either other shelters that have room, to foster homes, or to permanent homes.

But we’re not talking about moving them across town. We’re talking from — in our case — from Tennessee to New Hampshire. Every weekend, dozens of dogs are moved, usually from the South to the North, via a well-crafted plan involving dozens of people who each volunteer to run a leg of the trip. They meet in rest areas or just off highways to pass their dogs onto the next driver.

Sometimes it’s just one driver meeting another, other times it’ll be a dozen of them in a Wendy’s parking lot, where a clipboard-toting coordinator makes sure the right dogs go with the right people for the next leg.

Interstate 81 is the main corridor, so dogs will converge there — Nashville, Tenn., to Knoxville, to Bristol, Va., to Roanoke and up I-81 to Pennsylvania, New York, or further. Ours was coming from Nashville up I-95. We picked him up from the house he stayed in overnight (another volunteer), and dropped him off at a Wawa parking lot in Fredericksburg.

Think of the coordination this requires. Every week you’ve got drivers and overnights in five, six, maybe even 10 states. Each driver has to be screened, as do the dogs. (Can’t have biters with kids in the car, and some dogs just don’t get along with others.) Every week the coordinators work with shelters in different states to see which dogs are in the most danger and who can take them. Then they have to figure out the most efficient route — if three dogs are all going up I-81, it makes sense for them to ride together until they need to go their separate ways.

Once each dog’s trip is marked, all those trips are broken into segments, and then the coordinator has to to get drivers for every one. They tap into their network via e-mail or through message boards to see who’s available: “We need someone to take two small dogs from Roanoke to Charlottesville. Meeting at such-and-such a place in Roanoke at 9:00 a.m., then in Charlottesville at 10:45.”

Without the Internet, this wouldn’t be possible — certainly not on this scale. Phone trees couldn’t handle it, and changes to a schedule would take too long to propagate down the line.

But we have the Net, so today we did our part to bring Opie (a 52-pound, three-year-old Catahoula Mix) one small step closer to a better home. He had been living in a shelter — in a cage — since March. Today he was stuck in a bunch of cars. But in a day or to, he’ll be home.

November 13, 2008, 8:28 AM, BoingBoing headline: “Sixth severed foot found in British Columbia.”

November 13, 2008, 9:06 AM, BoingBoing headline: “Seventh human foot found in Pacific Northwest.”

…doesn’t even stay to cuddle.

(Yeah, I just wanted an excuse to use that headline.)

A 15-year-old girl sends nude pics of herself to friends. She’s charged with distributing child porn (“possessing criminal tools and the illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material”) and may have to register as a sex offender.

That’s dumb enough on its face, but check out the brain-dead prosecutor, Ken Oswalt of Licking County, Ohio.

“There’s a totally false perception among juveniles that there is no risk to this,” he told ABCNews.com. “That picture, once taken and sent, gives anyone who receives it the ability to do anything with it, forever. If a picture of you found its way onto the Internet, that’s going to haunt you, potentially forever.”

So, to punish her for doing something that might hurt herself, he’s going to destroy her life — which is, in effect, what a felony conviction for child porn would do.

Who elected this idiot?

Further, Oswalt says he might charge the people who received the images with possession of child porn. They did nothing wrong, and had no way to prevent this from happening, yet Oswalt wants to ruin their lives?

Here’s a guy who ought to be run out of town.

My brother asked if I was going to post about the whole $700 billion bailout thing. Truth was, I didn’t completely understand. So I started reading more carefully. I think I’ve got the picture now. Tell me what I’m missing.

* * *

Investors around the world were looking for a safe, profitable place to put their money, because those were becoming harder to find. (The US flooding the world money supply with its half-trillion-dollar war didn’t help.)

They turned to real estate, because everyone thought home prices would go up and up. Made sense.

To meet the demand for those investments, lenders needed to create more mortgages. So they started loaning money to people who had no business borrowing it. (The “sub-prime” borrowers.) They then sold those loans to all sorts of investors on Wall Street.

But the people who took out those loans couldn’t pay them. They began to default, and banks had to foreclose. Normally this isn’t a big deal, because the bank ends up with an object (the house) worth as much as the loan. But housing prices were dropping.

Suddenly investors didn’t own nearly as much “stuff” (mortgages or the homes themselves) as they thought. They needed to get rid of those low-value paper (mortgages and deeds).

So they took those bad loans, mixed them with good ones, got the rating agencies to rate them AAA or whatever, and sold them to, well, suckers. Suckers in other financial firms.

It wasn’t long before those suckers realized what they had, as housing prices continued to fall. Financial institutions suddenly realized that they didn’t have as much money as they thought.

Now, if you wake up to find that the value of your stock portfolio is a lot less than it was, it’s bad news, but you still go to work and get a salary. But for banks and other investment firms, they need to have a nice, fat balance sheet in order to make money. (After all, that’s how they earn a living — by borrowing and loaning money.)

But other banks didn’t want to lend them money anymore — after all, they didn’t have collateral. So the credit market “tightened” as institutions decided to play it extra, extra safe with their investments. For consumers, that means it became harder to get a loan without kick-ass credit. For banks, it became a nightmare.

Big bank to smaller bank: What kind of collateral do you have?

Small bank to big bank: Well, I have these mortgages….

Big bank to smaller bank: Buzz off.

As people realized this, they came to a conclusion: My bank may not have enough assets to back up my deposits. I’d better get my money out.

Can you say “IndyMac”?

And then it hit on a larger scale. Wall Street firms were saddled with billions in losses — in other words, they were finding out they were poor and being shunned by other firms. No one was lending money, and depositors wanted to cash out.

Firms began to fail because, without the ability to borrow money, they couldn’t meet their obligations.

And that’s where we are. The $700 billion bailout is the government saying, “We’ll buy a lot of those bad loans that you’re holding (mortgages, deeds, etc.), so your balance sheets will look better and your friends will lend you money again.”

Hopefully, the government thinks, those loans will turn out not to be so bad. When the economy recovers, it might be left holding deeds to homes that are actually worth plenty. If not, well, it’s just another bill for the taxpayers.

So most of what you’ll see going on, legislatively, are efforts to get financial institutions to start lending again. Today the Fed lowered the prime rate, for example. That’s the goal: Get lenders to start lending so the economy can start moving again.

A whole lotta stuff going on in the past few days has meant light blogging. That’s over now. Back later today.

Seen in South Africa.

Sometimes the gods make it pretty clear that a particular place is in their crosshairs….

The Giants’ second-stringers beat the Patriots last night, 19-14.

I think I mentioned these folks before, but it’s worth another shout out. I needed toner for my laser printer and (for reasons I can’t recall) I found TonerRefillKits out of the huge list of places. The first time I used ‘em, I loved ‘em — good price, and honestly clear instructions. (Whomever wrote them is clearly a writer, not “the guy who knows English as a second language instead of a third or fourth.)

Plus, you get a bag of M&Ms. (Some kits require a three-minute wait, so TRK provides a timer and the M&Ms to munch while you wait.) And this time I got a flashlight keyring, too. Plus the owner’s name is John Galt, which adds at least a couple of cool points.

And no, I’m not paid or even asked to say these things. I just really like this company.