Here is the reality: societies with oppressive governments, be they dictators or pseudo-democrats, have oppressive governments because they have oppressive cultures.

Revolution is an opportunity for small, marginal political change. Yes, Russia is not quite an unfree as it used to be, and Iraq is slightly less free, but neither of these countries compare with freedom in the West (or even when compared with some countries in South America like Chile). Until their oppressive cultures change, government there will not change much.

This should be kept in mind when trying to evaluate the cost/benefit ratio of military intervention in foreign countries to achieve political change.

California does have the leading producer of steel in the western US...

Meanwhile California now has 5% of its power needs met by Wind Generation.

So I thought this was BS, but it is actually true! (source).

However it should be pointed out that California gets nearly the same amount of Total System Power from geothermal as it does from wind, and the power from solar is a measly 0.3% (less than biomass at 2.4%).

the difference in labour costs is a factor of 20 or so

This is too simple a measure, because US workers are far more productive than Chinese workers (because they have access to more capital).

World Bank numbers for 2008 say US GDP PPP per employed person is $65,480. China GDP PPP per employed person is $10,378. So a US employee is likely to be six times more productive than a Chinese employee, so you need to hire six Chinese workers to replace one American worker.

However because of the factor of ten difference in US vs. Chinese salaries, it still is around half as expensive for much manufacturing to be done in China.

I should add that Chinese wage rates are rising quickly (your factor of 20 was correct back in 2005), faster than Chinese productivity rises.

A study claims that in 2015, the productivity-adjusted wage difference between the US and China will only be 69%. So likely by 2020 there may not be much of a difference between manufacturing in the US or China.

You can already get a $40 ARM computer, the Duinomite-Mega

No Ethernet though...

Did they manage to wide-scale convert to IPv6 by the 23rd century?

India's latest GDP growth figure slipped to 6.9% and industrial production numbers showed a decline of 5.1% compared with the previous period.

The trade deficit with the US causes the Chinese central bank to "sterilize" the dollars it earns by purchasing US government debt to stabilize its currency.

Foxconn wage: $17 per day. Chinese average wage: $5 per day.

And that "Chinese average wage" hides the huge amount of poverty still in china. 486 million Chinese (more than the 300 million people who live in the US - 36% of the Chinese population) make less than $2/day (as of 2009).

And about 200 million Chinese still make under $1.25/day!

Only about 50 years ago, under Mao's Great Leap Forward, somewhere between 18 and 42 million Chinese starved to death in the name of communism.

It is a miracle they have been able to turn things around as well as they have. From 1981 to 2006, nearly 600 million Chinese have been brought above the poverty line ($1.25/day). 40-50 million are now working in (relatively) well-paying manufacturing jobs.

It would be much more honest to compare Foxconn to other Chinese factories, rather than to the practically-no-longer-existing factories in the Western world.

The robots in Western factories are being exploited! They are slaves forced to work 24 hours per day with no food or water, and are hooked up to electricity!

Yeah, I guess the comparison kind of falls short...