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What happened to the US machine tool industry? (construction-physics.com)
230 points by jseliger on Jan 18, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 211 comments



If you're into machining, the American Precision Museum[0] in Windsor, VT is highly worth a visit.

I had the good fortune to tour the Starrett factory some years back. They were still running pre-NC screw machines to make parts. It really is true that old machines, well cared for, will last just about forever. Apparently it's something of an axiom in the machining industry that tools that are no longer economically viable for large scale production end up in job shops where the capability is needed but there isn't a need to pump out volume.

The Springfield Armory[1] is also a neat visit. For hopefully obvious reasons, their machining exhibits are focused on the production of weapons. The American Precision Museum is actually housed in a historic privately-owned gun factory. It turns out a lot of the progress in machining is driving by the need to make weapons.

[0] https://americanprecision.org/

[1] https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm


I worked at my fathers machine shop (which was a subsidiary of New Britain Machine Company) a couple of summers when I was in high school in the mid 70's. It was quite an experience and the employees were some of the crustiest characters I've ever met. The second summer, I worked with this guy named Ray on a huge machine that made the heads to ratchet wrenches (the square part with the little ball). He was one of these guys that was continuously pissed off. A man's man probably only 35, but looked 45 and smoked Camel unfiltered cigarettes. But the thing I remember most about him was that he could swear for a minute straight and never use the same word twice. For example, he called the machine "The Afterbirth". I'll never forget that man.


> But the thing I remember most about him was that he could swear for a minute straight and never use the same word twice.

Legend! I’d have enjoyed working with him. The smell of cigarettes could be a turn-off. Only perfectionists (in their craft) can use that level of swearing.


Did you ever shop at my grandfather’s hardware store?


This was in southern Maine, not Connecticut.


If you go in late August and have a strong affinity for amateur astronomy, you can have one heck of a weekend by visiting Stellafane 10 miles south of there in Springfield VT. Probably an abuse of a comment but it's so rare to find two things to do so close together in that area.


Visited when I was a kid it was fun seeing all the belt driven machinery that wasn't so different than my father's machine shop (job shopped manual and CNC milling and turning.) The 90s was when we saw the manufacturing downslide then my father got sick and passed. We kept it going but by the 2000's China was eating everyone's lunch. Though the fall of the Berlin wall killed a lot of aerospace work which was big business on Long Island. We sold the business in 2006 and somehow the guy who bought it is still in business though downsized and runs it himself now.


I grew up in a family printing business. Printing is a manufacturing industry just like anything else, with equipment of various sorts at every step of the production chain. Even in the 80s, when the business was going strong, most of the equipment we used was from Germany or Japan.

Sure there were a few odds and ends made in America, things like X-Acto knives, or wax melting machines or something. Paper, ink, and a few other chemicals used for various parts of the production processed were usually sourced from the U.S. or Canada IIR.

But the presses, big cutting and binding machines? Every single one was from overseas: Heidelberg, Hamada, Ryobi, others. It was simply impossible to get machines of the quality and precision from the U.S. This often meant multi-week downtimes for aging machines that needed parts replaced or repaired, waiting for a single roller or a latch or something while it was shipped from the home country.

As things moved more and more digital, the front-end equipment likewise became more and more foreign made.

In my lifetime, the U.S. never owned the entire vertical supply and manufacturing chain in that industry. I'm not sure if it ever did.


I grew up with a father who is/was an owner and director of a company that produces manufacturing printing rollers (gravure printing), mostly for packaging industry. He always competed against others on quality and flexibility as he couldn't on size, so having the best kit was important. The technology, even though the product is a discardable piece of packaging, is on NASA/CPU manufacturing level.

Even though, I myself was never involved directly in it, nor am I today, I know from him there were several trends:

1) Printing companies in Europe and elsewhere got bigger. What use to be 10 printing companies, now it's 1.

2) Equipment manufacturers for that industry got bigger. What use to be 4,5 equipment manufacturers in EU/USA, now there is one.

3) Lasers. Lasers got to a level where they can compete and surpass mechanical removal on quality and speed. This is true also for industry I'm in.


“Historically, machine tool companies were small operations run by people (often descendants of the original founders) who had spent their whole life in the machine tool industry and knew it inside and out. Because of the cyclical nature of the industry, machine tool firms tended to be managed conservatively, and they operated with little debt. … [In] the 1960s, machine tool companies began to be acquired by the latest fashion in US business, the conglomerate: enormous, diversified companies that seemed to make anything and everything as long as there was profit in it. The machine tool industry was on a sales upswing … [and] machine tool firms' high profitability (and low debts) made them attractive acquisitions for the conglomerates. …

“Though the conglomerates enjoyed owning machine tool firms in the boom times when profits were high, they quickly became disillusioned during the lean periods when new orders slowed to a trickle. The new owners’ focus on profits meant that they were reluctant to make the long-term investments in R&D or new equipment needed… Conglomerates were often quick to divest their machine tool holdings when the companies began to struggle, resulting in frequent management changes and organizational whiplash…

“In his history of the American machine tool industry, Albert Albrecht states that “the actions of these larger corporations and conglomerates, under the leadership of financial MBA’s, perhaps more than any other factor, contributed to the restructuring and decline of the US machine tool industry at the end of the 20th century”.”

Bingo.

The article points to cycles of high variance in demand for machine tools. Other commenters have pointed the dominance of foreign companies (eg Japan due to their national standardisation on FANUC), globalization and “more cost-effective to import” more generally, and also suggested America is in a “post-machining” stage of manufacturing.

I think all of these claims have merit, but the real underlying cause is most certainly the humble MBA. To wit: they bought themselves into a cyclic industry, replaced the survivor-mindset management, and effectively took these resilient existing businesses and crystallized them into brittle conglomerates while the industry was on the rise of one such cycle, and when they where wholly unprepared for the inevitable down stage of the cycle, they divested, leaving a wasteland behind.


MBAs and financially driven management are why the US is such a poor country today. If the US was run like Japan or Germany we would be the wealthiest nation on Earth. First this short shortsightedness cost us the brick industry, then steel, and now machine tools. My children are doomed to be burger flippers due to MBAs.


> .. US is such a poor country today. If the US was run like Japan or Germany we would be the wealthiest nation on Earth.

US is, by a clear margin, the wealthiest nation isn't it? Certainly more so than Germany or Japan.

Edit: I may have missed some sarcasm there.


I think that it's possible for both of you to be right.

If you work in traditional manufacturing in the Midwest and mostly consume domestic goods, then it's easy to feel like the US is circling the drain.

If you work in IT or finance in a coastal city and mostly consume imported goods, then it's easy to feel like the US is in a golden age.


> If the US was run like Japan or Germany we would be the wealthiest nation on Earth.

The US is wealthier than Japan and Germany combined. With room to spare.


> A strong dollar made imports even cheaper by comparison

I think that summarizes the article. It has been cheaper to import, so we do. The strong dollar policy supports some industries at the expense of others.


There are three aspects to this - cost of manufacturing in the US, cost of manufacturing + shipping in China and exchange rates. I do think the relative dollar strength is a factor, but Chinese labour was effectively free vs US labour. If someone is willing to do work for free, then the economy will give them work.

The issue that the free marketeers have been railing about for approximately the last 50 years it seems like almost every major policy the US adopts increases the cost of manufacturing relative to a hypothetical entity that didn't do that. It has been a constant adjustment of labour law, environmental law, energy policy and financial regulation away from manufacturing. It is plain why US manufacturing isn't the global top dog. The real question is whether it is a bad outcome or not.

Over the last 50 years China has improved their energy use by 1 UK economy per capita. IMO we should also ask more seriously if those regulations were worth it. A UK per capita energy is a lot of QoL improvements and it was linked to doing a lot of manufacturing. The US on the other hand is behaving politically like people are worse off than they were.


> The real question is whether it is a bad outcome or not.

It's definitely bad. The U.S. won't even have the world's biggest navy pretty soon because of that. And there are tons of scenarios where the U.S. is economically hosed because of some international conflict. Not only does the U.S. not make things, it doesn't know how to.


We should absolutely increase our industrial capacity but who gives a shit about the biggest Navy? Outside of the problem countries like China and Russia, we have military alliances with nearly every country on earth..

US has somewhere around 450 Navy vessels.. China has closer to 350 but is rapidly adding new tonnage. Sounds ominous! Except Japan has another 150, Australia has 50 more, the UK has 70 more, Spain has 150, France 180, Korea has 160, if some war ever comes down to the sheer number of available ships -- it literally won't matter who has more since the nukes will have flown long before some Canadian frigate is exchanging fire with some Chinese gunboat.


Also, number of ships doesn't mean too much. I could buy 1,000 canoes. And tonnage only means a bit more - there is plenty of tonnage in old ships rusting at docks.

Naval power isn't easily measured with statistics. The capabilities of a single US 100,000 ton aircraft carrier overwhelms entire fleets, unless their capabilities include long-range anti-ship missiles or submarines. Then adding tonnage won't help the US; they need capabilities to counter those two threats.


You should look into it. I wasn't referring to canoes. Even then, you're wrong. Number of ships and ability to replace ships correlates to wins in times of conflict.


I actually know it pretty well.

> Number of ships and ability to replace ships correlates to wins in times of conflict.

Do you happen to remember a source for that? I'd be interested.


Yes, but you forgot about informational war, which started long before direct armed conflict. Today, it's possible to influence a foreign election with an army of bots, to turn a country into a self-defense mode, so alliance will not work, because domestic problem, like border with Mexico, will overweight.


Beyond security, it was an example of the inability to build.


Why is 'making things' tied to income or wealth? In the mid-20th century it was, but those are the 'good old days'. We don't want a mid-20th century economy.

The US has the most productive, wealthiest economy in the history of the world, and a very strong one at the moment, without so much of the 'making things'. Why change?

(And why do American taxpayers have to subsidize someone else's uncompetitive, unproductive business? Perhaps they are better off letting the free market allocate the revenue.)


Outcomes of major wars were directly tied to domestic manufacturing ability. By not having manufacturing ability, the U.S. exposes itself to great risk.


The US has by far the most powerful military in the world, with its current domestic manufacturing capability. The idea that the US will be self-sufficient - a path followed only by North Korea - isn't realistic or desireable. They'd give up all the enormous advantages, including manufacturing capability, of all those allies, including S Korea, Japan, Germany, etc etc.


> It is plain why US manufacturing isn't the global top dog.

i do believe the US still does high-end (but low volume) manufacturing. It's just mass manufacturing that went away.


This is the answer to all American manufacturing woes. The dollar as a reserve currency gives the US a ton of global leverage but requires a trade deficit thus it comes at the expense of domestic industries.


I'd love to understand statements like this.

Lemme try:

Because trade deficits induce demand for dollars? Like how Japan and now China hold a bajillion US dollars? So if the US had (prolonged) trade surplus, no one would be holding dollars?

But wouldn't trade partners still need US dollars to buy US goods? Like the situation post-WWII?

So then we'd "loan" partners US dollars to buy our stuff?

Aiugh. My brain just broke.

How does a noob like me learn about these systems. I know it all probably makes sense to the learned. But with my folk (mis)understanding, these claims sound counterintuitive.

Thanks.


You're on the right track.

In a normal, non-reserve-currency situation, the demand for a country's currency is proportional to the demand for its products. After all, that's what you use a currency for: to buy the products that are sold in that currency. This has a well-behaved equilibrium, because if a country produces a lot of good products, that means the value of its currency will rise, which makes goods developed in that country relatively more expensive, which cuts demand, until everything equilibrates at a point which is roughly reflective of the actual quality and productivity of the country.

In a reserve-currency situation, the currency is used for many things other than buying the products of the country. For example, oil is priced in dollars; if India wants to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, it needs dollars to make the transaction, and then Saudi Arabia has an excess of dollars. Frequently it uses these to buy U.S. T-bills or invest in American tech startups like Uber or WeWork, both other sources of demand for dollars. The dollar is basically the currency of the global financial system: instead of directly converting rupee to riyal, you convert rupee to dollars, handle your transaction, and then convert dollars to riyal.

This creates a large source of demand for dollars outside of the traditional market for a national currency. Indeed, America's export here is basically financial services, which as a sector has been doing great since 1990, one of the few areas where you're likely to get paid handsomely. The other area is tech, which at its core is about enabling these cross-border commerce flows - Amazon, Google, Facebook, UpWork, Stripe, CoinBase, Ripple, Stellar, PayPal, E-bay, Shopify, AirBnB are all about creating global marketplaces where you can buy anything from anywhere.

Finance and tech crowd out everthing else that you would normally use dollars for. Basically America has specialized in being the global marketplace - it's only purpose is to be the common standard that every other country needs to transact in. Because there's so much demand for dollars simply to do international transactions, it pushes the price of the dollar up. This makes everybody who's trying to sell actual things in dollars (rather than take a commission when other people sell things in dollars) uncompetitive.

It works great, until the rest of the world decides that it wants to cut out the middleman. At that point, since we don't produce anything anymore, we're screwed. America's basically given itself Dutch Disease, where our only viable industry is financial services.


>It works great, until the rest of the world decides that it wants to cut out the middleman.

Isn't this why the US invests in having the world's biggest military by a long margin, plus the world's most powerful spy agencies? To make sure nobody dares cut them out of their privileged position otherwise they get a dose full of aircraft carriers, F-35 and B-2s after the NSA finds out what their plans is from the spyware they put in their iPhone.


Yes, exactly.

The challenge - alluded to in the article - is that having a functional military requires a domestic manufacturing base and machine tool industry. The U.S. generally tries to keep its arms manufacturing in-house, for obvious national security reasons. But even if you've kept the existing defense contractors alive, you lose out on the ability to repurpose the country's civilian manufacturing base if it doesn't exist. This was pretty critical in WW2: General Motors made more TBM Avengers than Grumman, Chrysler made more tanks than all German manufacturers combined, Kaiser made Liberty Ships by the hundreds. Without the ability to quickly tool up, you'll end up defeated in any war of attrition.

There's a pretty significant risk that we'll find out that the U.S. is a paper tiger if it comes to any sort of prolonged war with a near-peer power.


>Without the ability to quickly tool up, you'll end up defeated in any war of attrition.

Why is this a risk? The biggest tool makers in the world are Germany and Japan which are in the US sphere of influence whether they want to or not and are therefore incentivized to sell to the US as many machines it would need to fight a war.

The risk for Japan or Germany not wanting to sell tools to the US feels insignificant, as they aren't in a position of power to refuse to play ball.


Japan and Germany are entirely metric. Pretty much the entire US manufacturing industry, or rather the zombie the pentagon keeps on life support, is in US standard.

That means everything needs to be adjusted or replaced. That's not viable in peace times, it's even less so in times of war.

Obviously this applies primarily to tanks and ships, not planes nor guns.


Part of the beauty of eg. CNC mills is they don't necessarily care what the units are.


Especially when inch is now defined as being exactly 25.4 mm and you can manufacture to 0.01mm with commodity-level hardware.


Japan and Germany are vulnerable to Chinese aggression. The primary reason why a declining company like Micron was gifted a new fab in Syracuse NY is that their Boise fab is within range of a larger portion of the Chinese arsenal.


That's why (well, one reason why) the U.S. keeps Japan and Germany in its sphere of influence. Same for Saudi Arabia (major oil producer) and Taiwan (major chip producer). Notice that U.S. / Saudi relations soured a fair bit after the U.S. became the largest global oil producer again (thanks to fracking and shale oil). We're a bit less willing to overlook an authoritarian dictatorship when we don't need them.

The challenge with all international relationships is that they're not stable. Germany almost didn't back us on Ukraine, for example, because Russia threatened to cut off the supply of natural gas and make its citizens freeze in the winter of 2022/2023. Only because the NordStream pipeline blew up anyway (an act of sabotage that American journalists have attributed to the U.S.) and the U.S. secured alternate sources of heating for Germany did they back us on Ukraine. Had it been a different regime in power in either the U.S. or Germany, that could've turned out very differently.


But the lack of cheap gas fucked up a small but important part of the german industry: chemical commons. That cripples the economic competitiveness and together with other negative developments, e.g. the change to EVs, will result in very hard times for the Germans.

In consequence the right party is rising, in eastern Germany to an already serious level.

You will see where this way goes.


It appears the western public's understanding of geopolitical realities is always a decade behind. _Right now_, all of NATO combined can't even outproduce Russia alone. We don't need to be talking hypotheticals, it is literally happening in real time.

plus if a conflict like that occurs then clearly the US has lost significant power. so why would it be a given that American neo-colonies stay on its side?


>_Right now_, all of NATO combined can't even outproduce Russia alone.

What? Don't know where you're getting your sources but NATO combined definitely can outproduce Russia. Why it isn't, is that Russia is in war mobilization mode with all their industry running 3 shifts for the war effort, while NATO's industry is still in peace-time mode because they're not under attack.


NATO countries can overproduce Russia in a future, but right now they don't.


> with all their industry running 3 shifts for the war effort

Lol? Where are you getting your sources?


Perun



Military != 'all their industry'


That’s interesting . Sounds like it will end badly.

I do think the next major war will be nuclear and not one of attrition. America is not going to fight a traditional war it can’t win.


I'm not sure, honestly. I certainly think it's a risk that the next big war starts, it goes poorly for America, and then we resort to nuclear weapons to squeeze out "victory" (i.e. everybody dies) if we're all going to die anyway.

But I think there's another possibility that most people aren't considering: disintegration. It's very common for countries to cease to exist as countries when they start losing a war, particularly a war that happens because they're moribund and falling apart internally anyway. Witness the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires in WW1; the end of the Roman empire; England during the War of the Roses in the aftermath of the Hundred Years War; Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Cold War; etc. This also doesn't have to wait until the end of the conflict: most of the big disintegrations in WW1 happened in 1917, before the armistice, and sometimes even to "victorious" parties.

Modern nuclear weapons are very tightly controlled with PALs, so that you physically can't arm them without correct codes produced by the Pentagon/NSA bureaucracy. If that bureaucracy falls apart, it's likely they will just rot in their silos, while humanity dukes it out with relatively primitive technology because nobody wants to work together anymore.


I heard this was the real reason the US took out Saddam Hussein. Basically, Saddam had been saying for years that he wanted Iraq to abandon the dollar for trading its oil. If he was successful at this, other Arab Nations would most likely do the same. This wasn't acceptable to the powers in the US, so the US tax payers funded the war in Iraq to send a message to other nations: Don't even think of abandoning the dollar.

Not sure if there's any truth to that at all, but it's at least believable.


According to George W. Bush, God himself told him to start the war.


Conspirology at its best. Better swap Saddam for Qaddafi, that would be even more believable.

First Iran-Iraqi war that resulted in a standstill, then invasion of Kuwait, and only then the second Iraqi war when he went totally nuts.

Other Arab nations are Saudis and Persian Gulf emirates, who had zero use for the deranged person. And were and still are quite happy with dollars.


https://www.wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/6528

> Qaddafi's government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli. This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French.franc (CFA).

> French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.


> For example, oil is priced in dollars; if India wants to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, it needs dollars to make the transaction, and then Saudi Arabia has an excess of dollars. Frequently it uses these to buy U.S. T-bills or invest in American

If it priced the oil in Euros or Yen or Riyals or Rupees or US Dollars it has to pay its costs. Sure it may end up with a profit its then free to invest those where it likes, there is no reason it has to buy USD assets. Many wealthy and/or exporting nations choose to buy US assets because its a large, safe and well established market, but it has nothing to do with being the most popular trading currency.

> America's basically given itself Dutch Disease, where our only viable industry is financial services.

Clearly this is not true. The largest companies in the USA are not financial.


> Clearly this is not true. The largest companies in the USA are not financial

According to this list[1] of the top 100 largest (public) companies in the US, 14 of the largest companies are in the financial industry, and five more are in insurance. Six if you count Berkshire Hathaway; eight if you also count health insurers (although they're not exactly a financial service exporter, so probably don't count).

So between 19-22 of the largest 100 US companies are in the finance industry. In comparison, there are only eight or nine tech companies, and 11 petroleum businesses. So sure, the.. six largest companies aren't financial companies, but finance is very well represented among the largest companies in the US below that level.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...


It’s an uncommon take that a diverse market with no single sector even close to a majority is a problem.


> Clearly this is not true. The largest companies in the USA are not financial.

i believe the parent post meant tech and financials (but is lumping them together into one).


I found this blog post to be quite interesting https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/


I think of it as another type of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse


Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

I think this video addresses the topic in question at a layman level.



Honestly I learned the basics in Econ classes during college and have an interest in international relations/geopolitics so I’m not sure a good single source for learning about it all. But yeah there is some macroeconomic wizardry involved here. I’ll add it is a political thing and not a right v wrong policy. Choosing manufacturing power or global influence is a trade off with pros and cons.


> So then we'd "loan" partners US dollars to buy our stuff?

Other way around, they buy T-bonds -- i.e., "loan" dollars to the US Government. But the country is still owed that money back - it's like a trillion dollar bank account. One could say China "lends" dollars to the Treasury, but it's also just as accurate to say they "deposit" dollars into the Treasury. It's all just words to describe the action of giving money to another party to hold onto temporarily.

"Strong" currency means there's more demand for it. Demand is usually a function of what you can buy with the currency.

When countries reinvest their dollars into T-Bonds, they are double dipping on establishing demand for dollars. On one hand, they are owed back the dollars handed over to the Treasury (thus, creating future demand for USD), and on the other, accepting USD for the sales of their goods/services induces demand for USD, since it is yet another good that can be purchased with USD.

"Weak" currency means that there's less demand for it. Weak currencies tend to be those from countries that produce little in the way of goods and services, or they only produce commodities (like oil) that are generally traded in other currencies.

A weak currency can be a benefit. Hence why so many countries seek to artificially weaken their currency (aka currency manipulation). They often do this by strengthening the the USD. Sell to the USA, accept USD from foreign trade partners, buy T-Bonds with excess currency. The market for USD is so damn big that this is often trivial to do unnoticed, like using ocean to fill a swimming pool. But economies like Japan and China eventually grew to the point where their currency manipulation had a meaningful impact on the USD and American economy, rising the ire of American politicians. You can read about the Japanese "lost decade" which was suspected to be the result of American politicians intentionally targeting the Japanese economy due to currency manipulation and a general fear that the Japanese would "take over the world." (you can see these fears highlighted in 80s movies)

> How does a noob like me learn about these systems.

Take an economics class. Eco 101 is kind of trash for understanding anything truly useful. But at higher levels, you get into mathematical models for the underlying systems that govern trade. Granted, it's a little more hand-wavy, since economists can't conduct experiments at the scale that physicists can. But there is generally some experimental data supporting the models (it just might be data collected on college students trading candy bars).

You can read about what happened to the Swiss economy during the pandemic. They are a smaller economy that's been plagued by an absurdly strong currency. There's been a lot of reporting and research into the many factors contributing to the currency's strength as well as the impacts it has had on such a small country.


I'm vaguely aware that partners with a trade surplus end up buying t-bonds. eg China, Japan.

I poorly explained the post-WWII scenarios I was thinking of: to stimulate demand for US goods, the US govt would give aid, grant loans, etc to other countries, for those countries to spend on US goods. Ditto World Bank, IMF, etc.

I've read criticisms of this strategy over the years. Many have suggested it would be better for the developing economies if US/West simply bought their goods. Or maybe a hybrid, like stable investments and purchase agreements.


"Aiugh. My brain just broke.

How does a noob like me learn about these systems. I know it all probably makes sense to the learned. But with my folk (mis)understanding, these claims sound counterintuitive.

Thanks. "

don't worry, your intuition is right. you are on the right track when you say that your brain broke. you are more learned, or rather, more wise than those guys.

because a lot of economics is BS, a hotchpotch of some art, craft, heuristics, observations and formulae, pretending to be a science.

this is exactly why economics is known as "the dismal science", and why there is a saying that if you get 20 economists in a room and ask them the same question, you will get 20 different answers.

(italics mine)

I studied economics in high school for a whole year (11th grade). the course covered both microeconomics and macroeconomics. the Samuelson (MIT prof., IIRC) book was one of our text books.

I did well in class, was among the top few students.

I made some penetrating comments to which my teacher had no satisfactory answer. it was on a situation / question regarding OPEC (the oil cartel).

from that time on, and also from subsequently reading economics articles and news now and then, I could intuit and piece together the opinions that I stated above. :)

so, not to worry :)


Not sure how you can pretend I’m wrong when what I stated is an observation of the world and not an opinion. The US moved its industry overseas and switched to exporting dollars in an effort to buy sway inside of other countries. It did this to isolate Russia and win the Cold War.


edgy, you are quant(ifiably) edgy. ;)

i never replied to you.

so how could I have pretended you were wrong?

you seem to be mistaken.

trace your way upthread and tell me where I replied to you. i, at least don't see it. but whether it is your error or mine, it may be due to the shitty message threading style used here on hn. I have commented about it in the past. if the better Usenet / NNTP style was used, such confusions would not occur.

The D language forum uses it, for example.

maybe you need some edgyqation ...


So you declare an entire field as BS and your basis of expertise is a high school class you took and a (probably underpaid and overworked) teacher who couldn’t satisfactorily answer your questions?

Dunning-Kruger effect in action.


Further economics classes only pull the curtain farther back on what economics is: applied mathematics and applied sociology combined!

I'm personally undecided on dismissing economics and trying to learn more of it!


diss it, you won't miss it! ;)


[flagged]


You should probably seek out a therapist or psychiatrist, you seem to be having a crisis of some sort.


you too should start thinking for yourself, like I said to cycrutchfield above.

it will improve your way below average brain.


To quote economist Brad Delong: "... tax cuts created a half decade of deficit, boosting need for government debt which attracted foreign capital and helping to send a false signal to Midwest manufacturers to shrink starting the hollowing out of what became Rust Belt."

I think in the long term (and maybe short term) we will live to regret this error.


I don't understand this quote without more context. Five years of tax cut cycles does not seem abnormal, nor does it explain why only Midwest manufacturers received a (false) signal.


cheaper when not including externalities(losing critical manufacturing capabilities), which is why a proper government would take action. But the problem is our government is heavily lobbied to not protect critical industries in the name of short term corporate profits. And in many cases our government is outright hostile to manufacturing by holding domestic producers to pollution/labor regulations but allowing imports from countries with no regulations


Trade agreements have allowed importing from countries where human rights are (more of) an economic externality. Domestic manufacturers can really only compete on the ability to do small batches, higher tolerances, and quick turnaround; like for R&D projects or medical devices.


The article specifically mentions that Japanese manufacturers could deliver tools much faster than US ones.


I'd say MBAs driving for quarterly numbers were unable to manage the business cycle is a better summary.


That’s just corporate political shade throwing. Fiscal policy has, for a few generations now, incentivized trade deficits for foreign policy reasons. Overtime this results in offshoring of all industry.


Article says machinist industry failed to lobby the same way as US steel. Not that US steel is doing healthy. But at some point it's the govs foresight / job to reign in MBAs via protectionism and industrial policy for strategic sectors. As other's have mentioned, JP has MBAs too. Maybe lesson is JP Gov listened to Zaibatsu/conglomerate lobbying power.


This is as empty as saying trade unions caused it. Does Japan not have MBAs? It's all about comparative advantage.


From what I've heard, Japan has very different corporate culture, more focused on loyalty and social stability, than on maximizing profit. They can even keep unprofitable divisions of the company, because they don't want to fire people who work in them.

Would be nice if someone with first-hand knowledge of Japanese corporate world could confirm/deny it.


Apparently Japan's MBAs can manage for longer term. At least in this one industry.


Also that right after a drop in domestic machine tools demand due to recession American industry collapsed overall.

It should be no surprise few machine tools are made when there's less domestic industry overall.


Right, it seems the U.S. economy is trying to say, "making elementary machine tools is beneath us." The important bit is at the end: the U.S. is still a top buyer of machine tools (made elsewhere).

Is the same thing to happen with software?

When it becomes worth the time of the U.S. economy to produce basic machine tools again, they'll get to create new machine tools factories using all the latest technology: so it is probably good thing the "old way" is not still around hanging on by a thread.

The market naturally is culling technical debt.


> Is the same thing to happen with software?

Offshoring in software development has been around for a very long time. Most large US companies have a mix of onshore and offshore devs. The more mundane the software, and the tighter the financial macro-environment, the more the ratio shifts toward offshoring. This is the way the offshoring cycle has worked for a long time.

However, unlike hardware, software is about information and communication, and cultural context is very important. I have seen firsthand that non-US teams building software for US consumers often don't quite understand the reasoning behind the requirements and may lack polish around basic things like English. (The same is true, of course, in reverse, if US teams build for non-US audiences.) So I think it should be a little bit stickier.

You also cannot copy software design in the same way that you can copy, say, the design of a lathe. A lathe is a lathe, and as long as you've got the tools and materials, a lathe made in the US should not in theory be any different than one built in China. The same is not true of software.


> I have seen firsthand that non-US teams building software for US consumers often don't quite understand the reasoning behind the requirements and may lack polish around basic things like English

Something I'm curious about, have you seen this happen with countries culturally close to the US? Like teams based in Canada, Ireland, or the UK?


One of the biggest lies in cultural thinking is that countries like Ireland and the UK are "culturally close" to the USA. Sure they are close-er than say Italy or Japan, but anyone who thinks "close" means "similar enough that it doesn't matter" is in for a rude awakening.

In reality there are incredibly large gaps around even the most basic things like the meaning of words. As a very basic example: the meaning of the word "interesting" differs radically between cultures. Most US employees would think the boss is indeed interested when they describe an idea as "interesting" and may even bring it up again at some later date after more research. Meanwhile, someone from the UK means that it's the dumbest thing they've ever heard and they will be incredibly miffed if it is ever brought up again.


I've certainly experienced US-made software that was close to useless in the UK, demanding dates in some absurd middle-out format and expecting everyone to know what a "401k" was with no explanation, along with more minor bits of polish like saying "pound" but meaning a completely different symbol.


Hah, good point. If anything, software handling that kind of data might be better is smaller countries that need at international audience from the get-go!


Right. The US economy was well poised to tackle the massive task of computerizing humanity and, being a nascent technology stack with green field opportunities abounding, it was more profitable than continuing to produce machine tools. Meanwhile the Pax Americana has eliminated the risk premium to manufacturing overseas, so our entire economy has reconfigured itself around this task and opportunity of computerizing humanity. To our massive benefit, I think. IMO this is the main driver between diverging American incomes compared to the rest of the developed world.


As long as those manufacturing centers are part of US allies (Japan, Korea, Europe, Australia, Taiwan), or at least trustworthy neutrals (Vietnam, India), I'm happy.

But some manufacturing, in fact a large amount, is Chinese. And I'm not convinced they've got our best interests at heart. Either China needs to calm down over their "Wolf Warrior" style, or we need to cut back on providing benefits to an obviously and increasingly antagonistic power.

---------

The other part, with respect to Taiwan + China, is that we must defend Taiwan as they are a critical source of advanced-materials (ie: computer chips) to us. Yes, its more efficient to have Taiwan centralize production, but it does come at a cost. We need to be ready to defend Taiwan and keep it safe if we are to continue to build computers and phones out of Taiwan-only parts.


The entire economy is configured around making quarterly profits for shareholders. Any good that happens to come out for humanity is purely incidental. The US economy is not some fairytale hero.


> Is the same thing to happen with software?

I have a theory that one of the major challenges facing manufacturing in the US is actually the opposite.

A manufacturing company in the US is competing for smart, numerate STEM graduates with the likes of Google who offer graduates $180,000 with zero experience (or so I'm told)

But they're also competing with manufacturers in the far east, where $40,000 is a great salary, for someone with several years of experience.

Difficult to win both competitions.


I think that’s right, and I think there’s a third aspect at play, which is that culturally the US doesn’t value jobs in manufacturing, machining, engineering, etc. as highly as it once did (after WW2, say) or as highly as it values finance and tech jobs today. I’m not sure how easily that could change.


Will “all the latest technology” be available? The expertise the US once had in this area is largely gone, and won’t come back immediately. I think there’s real reasons to be concerned that the US will fall behind countries like China in areas like innovation because of this self-inflicted brain drain.


Right now there are mandates to build out the manufacturing base needed for military efforts.

They know the tech sent off shore will, for the most part, remain off shore.

Additive manufacturing, an example of "latest tech", is a primary build up target here. It is new and expertise is being created as the tech itself is.


Additive manufacturing doesn't help much if you want to build Liberty ship volumes, or roller-bearing tolerances, unfortunately.


Indeed.

HYBRID DED is going to be the answer to many of those scenarios.

Basically, we couple subtractive with additive and maximize the benefits of both. Done right the risks are greatly reduced as are costs compared to just doing it the legacy way.


"Right, it seems the U.S. economy is trying to say, "making elementary machine tools is beneath us.""

Hopefully policy makers and the citizenry will resist following what, as you say, the US economy is trying to say.

You see ...

You can stop making elementary machine tools.

You will never stop making (people who can only make elementary machine tools).


People who understand this industry can answer in a single word.

Fanuc.

And when Fanuc realized that only GE was capable of competing with it in the computer controls needed to run machine tools (and wasn’t doing shit, another Welchism), it cleverly bought off GE by giving it the U.S. franchise for Fanuc, at least until the GE stink began to be undesirable.


Yes, no surprise that a standard won the battle, over several competing choices. That seems to happen a lot.


Sort of a tautology, right? The winner of the competition becomes the standard.


First thought, being in the aerospace advanced composites field and using machine tools: "MBAs"

Aaaand, the money quote:

" In his history of the American machine tool industry, Albert Albrecht states that “the actions of these larger corporations and conglomerates, under the leadership of financial MBA’s, perhaps more than any other factor, contributed to the restructuring and decline of the US machine tool industry at the end of the 20th century.” "

MBAs & financial "leadership" have basically optimized American excellence, leadership, and its middle class out of existence, and putting the world's democracies in jeopardy.

They benefitted greatly by privatizing and optimizing profits into their pockets, but at the cost of nearly breaking the society onto whom they externalized the costs.


So from what I can tell, a lot of boils down to the same reasons most of America/US manufacturing declined. Globilzation, greed and other factors.

This article really hits home for me. I grew up in Cincinnati and it was a tool making powerhouse back in the day. Cincinnati Tool, now Milacron and many others were made here in town. We still have a few nice tool makers in Ohio - Kett and Wright but its sad to read about how much this industry powered the nation and a lot of its innovation.

Going to our museum center, hell even our Airport has a bunch of exhibits that take about all of the tool making and industry we used to have. Makes me sad really.


What was considered high-end precision machining a few decades ago is now standard and easily reproducible in cheap labor markets. For example, guitars made in SKorea used to be a bad joke. Their machining tolerances were too big and too inconsistent. Much like storage and bandwidth what used to be exotic cost-prohibitive is now cheap.


> guitars made in SKorea used to be a bad joke

Are they now considered good guitars??


Yes. But really Indonesia has taken over from South Korea (and China and Mexico for some parts of the market). E.g. PRS used to make their SE line in South Korea and the quality was excellent. "Good guitar" is somewhat subjective. US brands like PRS, Gibson and Fender are still able to charge a premium for a US made instrument. This isn't necessarily because the US has some abilities that the foreign makers don't, it's more of a marketing strategy.


I thought it was because US had better quality controls and finer manufacturing specs.


1. lack of stable production lines due to real-estate securitization and zoning. i.e. it is a huge liability to install something expensive likely to break if moved, and burning capital in a sucker lease.

2. lack of cheap 3-phase power in said zoning, and aging power infrastructure. EVs will likely make the problem worse.

3. lack of skilled labor due to career churn from outsourcing. i.e. it became a demand-deficient labor-force now reassigned to other careers.

4. Manufacturing domestically is strictly a niche industry, as consumers are cost sensitive, and value blind

If you go to foundry districts in India, one will see many US machines that were sold for scrap still powering emerging economies. The mechanical equity of 60 year old machines are still supporting entire communities.


Value blindness is the bane of my existence. Thin walled plastic everywhere. Things are difficult to clean because they are filled with grooves, because you need grooves and bends to make thin walled plastic stiffer. A very good criteria for quality and value is: how easy is it to clean? If it is hard then you probably are dealing with a low value disposable product. Consider porcelain, lasts forever, cleans beautifully and does not stain. Or spoons made with solid stainless steel. Spoons made with thin sheet steel often have bends and corners as to make the thin sheet stiffer. But then dirt accumulates on these corners.


The cost of porcelain is similarly constrained by labor, energy cost, and space.

I learned a lot from a domestic slip-casting company as a kid. It taught me big heavy things are not economical to ship, and thus remain locally competitive in a global market even when competitors are 100% subsidized. Amazon shifted this calculus a bit, but is still constrained by energy/fuel costs.

The power of plastic is automated cycle times under 45 seconds, minimum infrastructure needs, and shipping weight. In a way, Tesla Giga Press technology leverages similar strategies for Aluminum parts.


That press you mentioned in an interesting example of the globalization of machine tools. Commissioned by an American company and made in Italy by a Hong Kong Chinese owned company, which now makes them in China.


There is no longer enough domestic infrastructure to fabricate complex equipment within a competitive budget.


It seems like domestic manufacturers weren’t able to compete on price or quality in the decades preceding the collapse of the industry either.


Hard to say really... if foreign labor is subsidized under communist strategic policy, than it is more of a loss-leader rather than rational competition.

Value blindness is often accepted in consumer markets, but can prove fatal in industrial or aerospace products. Hence the rules silly people try to work around to make more money. =)


>Consider porcelain, lasts forever,

This isn't true. Porcelain is brittle and delicate, and usually shatters when dropped. It's easily broken through normal handling. Just guessing, I imagine most new inexpensive porcelain dishware is purchased to replace broken stuff.

Sure, if you put it in a cabinet and never use it except for once-a-year special occasions, it might last a lifetime, but the stuff you use every day won't.


When my parents moved abroad, I inherited the bone porcelain set they got as a wedding gift (a Swedish Rörstrand set). It was used every day when I was a kid and it's used everyday now 40 years later by my kids. It's been dropped hundreds of times and there are maybe only one or two chips among all the plates and bowls.

Meanwhile all the cheap IKEA dishes I bought as a student always broke within a year of purchase.


Would EVs make the problem worse, or better? I'd expect EVs to make better power infrastructure more common and thus cheaper to find.


Energy Commodity prices are an unavoidable variable cost in most factories.

EVs push their true cost onto the entire grid, and thus every resident/business subsidizes the fleet operation with added service costs due to resource scarcity driven prices.

I do like the idea of EVs in many ways, but only when combined with distributed power generation infrastructure like standalone home solar arrays. EVs suck power in large cities and or locations the require battery temperature management... outside in cold <4'C climates a Tesla Lithium battery heater is like having a fuel tank that will leak out in a few days... thus, it is always leaking energy unless in a heated garage. Not an immediate problem, till you have millions of units commuting in -18'C weather.

Have a wonderful day, and lets admire the sycophantic idealism of EVs together. =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX4PJDA4MQg


Read a great book on this in college in formative years. Made me pretty depressed about how management/markets can target false equilibrium points.

Markets do not drive efficiency. At least not if chasing quarterly profits drives bad decisions.

"When the machine stopped: A cautionary tale from industrial America"

https://www.amazon.com/When-machine-stopped-cautionary-indus...

Note: referenced in the OPs original article


This is a great book - I still own my copy and occasionally reread it.


At some point, the technical advancement rate of markets tops out and other nations then can catch up. Ford ultimately gave way to Toyota. Westinghouse to Panasonic.

The counter example is the semiconductor tool industry where the advancement of technical capability remains ahead of the rate other countries can catch up with them. Internal to the industry, the 'low-tech' machines are made by Japanese manufacturers: Track (TEL), Wet (Screen).

US/Europe (AMAT, LRCX, KLAC, ASML, ASMI) remain dominant in that capital equipment market.


For folks who are curious about Haas, this blog-post on buying one may be of interest:

https://carbide3d.com/blog/how-to-buy-a-haas/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU6nsfoNWDI for a trip down memory lane (and coincidentally, an apt example of how far we've fallen).

Can you think of a single modern US-based industry/association which produces educational, instructional, and/or historical videos like this one anymore?


Yes.[1]

And, after 10,000 hours of apprenticeship, you can make as much as $50,000 to $100,000 a year as a tool and die maker!

I have some entry-level skills at that sort of thing, from my TechShop days. There's a lot of stuff to learn and you have to do a lot of it to get good.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-7ivFEAzw8


> Consider a company that manufactures its product on lathes. Assume that it has ten lathes that can just meet production requirements. Assume also that each lathe wears out in ten years and that the company has its investment plans so well organized that one lathe is replaced every year. Now consider what will happen if there is a 10 percent increase in demand for the product. The plant will need eleven lathes to meet production requirements. It will have to buy two lathes: one as a replacement for the worn-out lathe and a second to increase capacity. Thus a 10 percent increase in the demand for the product has produced a 100 percent increase in the demand for lathes.

The 100% increase doesn't seem to make sense in this example.


It's a 100% increase (i.e. double) relative to what the ordinary demand for lathes would have been.


The universe isn’t quite that binary.

Suppose those lathes ware out 0.1% faster than expected lasting ~3 days less than 10 years, now eventually you replace 2 of them in the same year thus doubling demand in that year… Except the manufacture wouldn’t notice a spike from occasionally sending out a few days earlier even if it’s crossing a calendar year.


a lathe doesn't wear out that way. It just slowly gets harder and harder to maintain tolerance. Eventually a new machine will be enough better as to make an experienced machinist take less time - they always have to stop and measure as no lathe can give you absolute accuracy, but when the lathe is new it is more predictable how much turning a handle will change things and so you measure before the last operation and adjust it to the right setting vs you measure get closer and measure again.


I run a small machine shop, and while I agree that you're opinion is closer to reality it's absolutely not out of the ordinary for a precision metalworking lathe to fail entirely and be dead weight until repair; it's not all gracefully easing into imprecision.

Older lathes, for example, love to put the AC motor under something that either accumulates or produces chips; you can see why this might be a problem over time. It's not out of the ordinary to require motor re-winds.


Do lathes actually wear out? Machine tools are built like tanks and could probably last until the end of time, you just need to replace the bearings and motors occasionally.


There's an entire refurbishment industry keeping them going.

I know that this article said that you could order machine tools from Japan in the 1980s and get them in a few weeks. But that's not the case anymore.

People buy some press or lathe or whatever out of a liquidation warehouse in Michigan for ~$50k and then pay a refurbisher $1,000,000 to get it to whatever specs they need. That's more expensive than buying a brand-new machine from Germany/Italy/Japan, but you get it installed in your facility so much faster that the extra cash is worth it.

And because they last forever with proper care and maintenance, nobody cares if the "new" tool is 70 years old.

Note that this behavior can easily distort the stats on demand for new machine tools ;)


My understanding is that a lot of lower end in manufacturing might at time seriously consider turning old manual equipment into CNCs, not just hackers.

And dunno about USA, but there's a cottage industry of people running hacked up ex-volkswagen robots despite them requiring a human holding dead man switches. They are not going to buy a new industrial robot, but they can afford to turn bunch of ex-volkswagen gear into semi-automatic machines.


I don't have much knowledge about robot conversion, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. When you've got a country that has been industrialized for a really long time, old equipment is going to be available and may be a viable option for what you want to do. Since this stuff costs a lot of money new, it can be worth fixing/modifying old stuff.

If a new television cost $10000 and was delivered a few months after you ordered it, you would be shocked if television repair shops weren't in every city, and people paid $2500 for used televisions that they could get next week.


At Warsaw Hackerspace we have a Bridgeport series I MDI machine that was retrofitted locally with LinuxCNC. Various vendors sold Bridgeport clones or retrofitted originals with CNC machinery.

We also have an Ex-Volkswagen KUKA robot - Volkswagen units are specific to Volkswagen and don't really work properly without "the gorilla and rest of the jungle" - in this case a Volkswagen factory line. But it can be driven in "human present" mode if you accept Volkswagen software limitations, and apparently quite a lot of places do just that.


If they did not; we would not have the entire art of scraping [0]

Yes, if meticulously maintained and lightly used some can last a good while. In a less pristine environment, say where deadlines need to get met, they wear out unevenly, for lathes, the ways near the headstock usually see more work than the tailstock end. So, the machine now cuts a taper when it is suppose to cut parallel.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=scraping+machine+tools&ia=web


Yes, it's a machine with many moving parts. There's bearings, gears, ball screws, lead screw, belts, etc. There's also multiple precision ground surfaces that wear unevenly because some parts of the surface get far more use than others.

The bed tends to accumulate damage over time, as try as you might, you'll eventually drop something heavy on it.

A lot of it is very much fixable, but I suppose that eventually one decides it's too much to bother, especially if something is damaged is badly enough, or the lathe is old enough and it doesn't make much business sense to fix it.

If you abuse a machine badly enough you can get something bent to the point it's not really worth fixing.


The lathe ways (the guides/support for each axis) do wear out, but you can re-grind them to be flat again.

Usually you sell the machine at this point to someone who doesn’t need the precision and get a new machine.


Well, it's a 100% increase from that company, for one year. The next year, though, they only need to buy one lathe again. And the next year, and the year after that. Every tenth year, they'll buy two lathes.

Calling that a 100% increase doesn't seem to make sense because it actually doesn't make sense.


The point is that it's an extreme bullwhip effect. Yes, it's not a sustained 100% increase, but it's a 100% increase that year.


Yes, and there even is such a thing as equipment lease for companies that are liquidity constrained to be able to move to match the market even if their short term reserves would stop them from doing so otherwise. At a price, of course.

The most asked question about the CNC gear we sold was whether or not it could be leased and whether we could offer financing. Almost none of it was bought outright.


I realize that I'm late to this party, but I learned about the phenomenon of CapEx vs OpEx when the small company I worked for came under new ownership in the early 90's. We made relatively inexpensive light-industrial electronic controls and the new owner, a former CFO from a public utility, came up with the "brilliant" idea to allow customers to lease hardware from us vs buying it outright since they might have more money in their Operations budget as opposed to Capital.

In theory, not a bad idea. In practice, the only business likely to want to lease a $200 item is probably close to bankruptcy.


Also US more or less export controlled CNC to China, boosting German, Japanese and even Taiwanese machine tool industry massively since China bought many from them.


The world is flat. India has ~1.5 billion people and is growing. We need enough precision machine tooling and production capacity for self defense. But world competition is inevitable, and arguably better for the US economy. Our value proposition needs to be something greater than that of other countries. And that's where the economy and employment will thrive and thus support other service sectors.


How will the US economy thrive by outsourcing all the jobs to the billions of people in India?

Sounds like the rich are the only ones who will thrive in this scenario. It will absolutely devastate American workers.


Why do I feel there is a parallel here to Boeing? (Maybe that was the motivation for the submission)


When the Clinton administration forced the downsizing of the military industrial complex (https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2015/12/2/f...), the USA lost all competition in the larger than regional aircraft. To compete with Airbus (subsidized by the EU), Boeing turned from manufacturing their own airplanes (and using suppliers in America) to assembling planes in Washington and forcing procurement of their products internationally through contracted parts. (https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/its-complic...). Nippon airways would buy x number of 737s, etc. as long as they were making the brakes. Hell, even Airbus assembles in the USA now to force procurement in America.


> To compete with Airbus (subsidized by the EU), Boeing turned from manufacturing their own airplanes (and using suppliers in America) to assembling planes in Washington and forcing procurement of their products internationally through contracted parts.

Yes, this is one of the more common alternative fact on what happened to Boeing. Going beyond the nonsensical take of the evil subsidized foreign company unfairly competing against the hardworking non-subsidized domestic aircraft builder, as various independent pundits have reported in the light of recent events, Boeing's woes are mostly self-inflicted, starting even before the infamous MD takeover.

But it's true that it is more flattering to paint yourself as the victim of unfair globalization as opposed to acknowledging that the ruthless search of short-term gains came at the cost of product quality and passengers lives.


It's not an alternative fact, and I'm not defending Boeing. I could give a shit about Boeing.

The fact is there's no competition in the American commercial part 121 airline world. No competition makes you lazy and incompetent.


And there will never be competition. It cost Cirrus (small, single engine GA aircraft) $100 million to get a type certificate. The Boeing 737 max is still on its original type certificate.

Boeing and airbus is what the (western) world has for big jets. It's a duopoly and has no signs of not being one. Boeing probably shouldn't be a public company either.

The rest of world's aircraft manufacturers are quasi majority state owned enterprises.


> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. […] “the actions of these larger corporations and conglomerates, under the leadership of financial MBA’s, perhaps more than any other factor, contributed to the restructuring and decline of the US machine tool industry at the end of the 20th century.”

Probably the sentiment expressed by this excerpt. You can probably point to any example of former US expertise and make a similar statement.


Maybe I missed a point in the article, but I feel a broader shift that produced this situation is simply that the US is no longer building huge numbers of new factories and industrial processes that need lots of new machine tools.

We have left that phase of our country's development behind. We have relatively piecemeal demand for such tools, aside from the random new Tesla factory. And that kind of growth is what spurs development and maintenance of these kinds of supporting industries.

As a country, you fall out of the practice of building stuff, and the talent or ecosystem of it migrates away.

Look at railroad building. In China, they have entire industries of people building the tools for building railroads. They can call up 100 experts on design just for EV battery building machine tools and factory processes. Here you're lucky if you can find that many experts on any machine tool topic across all the contractor companies that have had to consolidate to make keeping this kind of talent sustainable. We just don't have this deep practiced industry knowledge in general across many businesses any more. And aside from some specialized centers (NASA, NIST, national labs) that doesn't exist much in the government either. We've outsourced it.

Maybe it's a natural evolution of a country. Maybe the tide can be turned with strategic investment, I don't know.


The last line in the article argues against this:

> The US is still a major purchaser of machine tools (2nd in the world behind China), but unlike for most of the 20th century, today its factories are full of machines made elsewhere.


I was binge watching TechFreeze[1] on youtube just yesterday!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOnxOTdx_ps


Industrial JP is very good also

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QjVeH2Z57E


This Old Tony is out there doing the very best he can


I wonder how much of the loss of the American competiveness was caused by the SI-incompatible Imperial system (buying, selling, using)?



So it is the story of losing because of market competition? Doesn’t feel that surprising of an outcome


Not really. The story is management wasn't able to handle a downturn and so failed to come out of a recession.


> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. In some cases, machines would be shipped out the door unfinished so the delivery could be booked, and assembly would be completed by service technicians at the customer’s location. In his history of the American machine tool industry, Albert Albrecht states that “the actions of these larger corporations and conglomerates, under the leadership of financial MBA’s, perhaps more than any other factor, contributed to the restructuring and decline of the US machine tool industry at the end of the 20th century.”

In short, the MBAs happened. Clueless management was brought in who then decimated anything they did not understand. I.e. everything. Aided by Reagan policy to aggressively outsource manufacturing from the nineteen eighties US manufacturing just imploded.

Just speculating here, but by the time the Japanese and the Germans caught up and got really good at machine tools, the metric system would have become an obstacle as well. Because the US insisting to do everything in inches, foot pounds, and what not doesn't translate very well internationally when you start outsourcing all your manufacturing. Outsourcing meant manufacturing standardized on the metric system using equipment and parts not made in the US.

Just speculating here, but I imagine that all that combined lead to a natural preference for non US based manufacturing companies that took over from US companies to not use any US made equipment or parts. So, manufacturing became predominantly metric based and that would have affected standard components, screws, bolts, parts, etc. All made by non US companies standardizing on all of that.


MBA thinking ruins everything it touches. Boeing is another example. It's all about short-term profits over long term sustainability.


Fire all the MBAs.


also HP...


> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered.

It’s not necessarily the case that greedy, ignorant MBAs came in and ruined everything. Like, if their practices were so inferior, then any domestic firm that didn’t get taken over by them should’ve had a leg up and could’ve dominated the domestic market.

Don’t you think the more likely source of “pressure” was the international suppliers who had lower costs?

> Aided by Reagan policy to aggressively outsource manufacturing from the nineteen eighties US manufacturing just imploded.

Was the policy to outsource everything, or liberalize markets and let firms and consumers more freely choose where to buy things from? Globalization has done quite a lot to lift people out of poverty and keep prices low.


Brand names carry weight for several years before the damage becomes apparent.

Often their cost cutting measures seem positive at first as it creates a profit uptick, but it's usually at the cost of the brand, so 3-5 years later things take a turn (once the consumer has figured out the brand can't be trusted anymore). By that point it's hard to put the blame on the appropriate person or identify the appropriate reason for a less profitable year.


I said it thousand times in different but related at root topics, quality and reliability are possible but why would somebody build something that would last forever? It’s more profitable to churn cheap garbage over and over specially when customers wouldn’t pay for quality products or when a new, more flashy and feature-rich one is launched everyday. It’s the same for electronics, fashion, cars, machines and anything. Manufacturers just push consumers to “desire” the brand new product but the grinder is spinning faster and faster and the landfills getting higher and higher.


In cases where it matters, it's still a competitive advantage. Consumers don't care, maybe, but companies absolutely do, for their business-critical tools.


> Like, if their practices were so inferior, then any domestic firm that didn’t get taken over by them should’ve had a leg up and could’ve dominated the domestic market.

There aren't infinite firms. Plus in the article, the previous paragraph goes into how the tooling industry was being bought up by conglomerates so the finite firms became even easier to count.

A company fitting your argument is Telsa. The existing firms weren't willing to canabalize their existing product lines so they didn't invest into EVs and now a domestic firm is eating at their market share. However, "Who killed the electric car?" is from 2006, there has been a lot of pent up demand for EVs that no domestic firm was selling to.

However, something also fitting your argument is Moneyball [1][2]. It's not until the 2002 season that teams start to use statistics to determine who to staff their roasters? The League is from 1876; it took 126 years of baseball before a team figured out how to use math!

> Don’t you think the more likely source of “pressure” was the international suppliers who had lower costs?

Well, the article agrees in that it says "By now, tools from Japan and other countries were as good as or better than US tools, not to mention cheaper and more reliable.".

However, R&D was also being cut prior to this so if you don't do any R&D and your products become uncompetitive it's probably because R&D was cut.

> Was the policy to outsource everything, or liberalize markets and let firms and consumers more freely choose where to buy things from?

Well, don't forget there are winners and losers when trading.

In this case the losers are the American Tooling Industry; the winners were everybody that bought from them lol.

--

I do think this growth every quarter is a big problem though. The early observers of business cycle all noticed that it has its ups and downs. Pretending that there won't be a down and fudging the numbers so that you don't have any downs is going to cause future problems. Delivering not-finished lathes counts to me as fudging the numbers.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball_(film) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics


The main way for countries with higher wages to compete is through automation. You can't supply 1000 laborers at $2/hour, but you can supply five skilled mechanics at $50/hour.

The problem with this is that the 1000 people who had been doing the labor in the US for $25/hour don't want that to happen any more than they want it to move offshore, and they're the people with the skills to ensure the automation goes smoothly. So they resist and then lose to offshore manufacturing rather than domestic automation.

Which in turn causes the US to lose even more manufacturing jobs, because now that factory is in Asia and it's more economical for its inputs and outputs to be other factories in Asia.

The way out of this is to make sure domestic barriers to entry are low, so that you get more new domestic companies like Tesla that aren't stuck in this trap. Right now that isn't the case and Tesla is an exception that got there on hype and eccentric leadership, whereas what you really want is for domestic small businesses to be able to eat the lazy incumbent's lunch long before China does, and indeed to be able to eat the Chinese company's lunch by replacing a thousand low-wage workers with a handful of high-paid specialists.


> It’s not necessarily the case that greedy, ignorant MBAs came in and ruined everything. Like, if their practices were so inferior, then any domestic firm that didn’t get taken over by them should’ve had a leg up and could’ve dominated the domestic market.

In this instance, it was people like Icahn.

Machine tools were a very cyclical market. Consequently, they did well as part of a vertically integrated conglomerate where the profits could be booked over time and the R&D could be shared with the manufacturing parent. When forced to spin out and stand alone by corporate raiders, those companies were effectively doomed as you just ripped out their ability to do R&D.

In addition, people forget that the Japanese companies were very much not playing fair. MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) and the keiretsu/zaibatsu companies were actively attacking the US companies--this was effectively governmental and monopoly collusion. This attack was to the point that they almost wiped out the semiconductor industry (which prompted the DARPA VHSIC project and later Sematech in response) for example. They did similar actions in the manufacturing industries but the government never responded with the same vigor.

> Was the policy to outsource everything, or liberalize markets and let firms and consumers more freely choose where to buy things from?

The policy was to fund the hell out of West Coast (high tech and mostly no unions) and to leave the Rust Belt (manufacturing and lots of unions) to rot.

I will be one of the first to line up to piss on Reagan's grave for the complete shit that he was. However, to be fair, NOBODY had any answer to the fact that manufacturing automated and could get by on two orders of magnitude fewer employees. Every country dependent upon manufacturing went through a horrible time (see: England and Thatcher for similar vitriol). In fact, nobody still has any answer 4 decades+ later. It's one of the reasons there are so many old, very angry MAGAs.

> Globalization has done quite a lot to lift people out of poverty and keep prices low.

At what local cost? Nobody in Cleveland gives a shit about whether someone in Africa is doing better when they can't make their house payment.


There's no such thing as playing fair it's just national industrial policy.

Every country has one.

The change was that ours went from "try to have industry in this country" to "my friends make money offshoring stuff" instead.


> When forced to spin out and stand alone by corporate raiders, those companies were effectively doomed as you just ripped out their ability to do R&D.

It would be just as fair to blame the original culture of having vertically integrated conglomerates to begin with.

If there is anyone who should be able to figure out how to automate manufacturing with a small number of workers, it should be a bunch of machinists. But you put them in a lumbering conglomerate and teach them that automation is the enemy because it will take their jobs. Then they take that same attitude into a smaller company that has to be leaner in order to survive and you've set them up for failure.

Whereas if you embrace it, instead of domestic buyers getting their goods from cheap labor in China, domestic and international buyers get their goods from automated domestic factories that employ fewer people per unit but make more units than ever before because they have globally competitive prices and the global demand when you can supply at a low price is enormous.

> Nobody in Cleveland gives a shit about whether someone in Africa is doing better when they can't make their house payment.

But the reason they can't make their house payment is the same kind of regulatory capture that they supported and caused them to lose their job, which in turn makes housing unaffordable because you can't outsource plumbers and electricians.


> you can't outsource plumbers and electricians

You can outsource trades (that's literally what almost every general contractor builder does->outsource specialist trades to subcontractors).

You can't off-shore them (or at least not nearly so easily and completely).


AR enables offshoring the smarts at least, you treat the person at the location of the work as if they were a robot ... until the robots get good enough, I guess ...


Mexico is a large country with a very liquid labor supply


> you can't outsource plumbers and electricians

Not yet. Wonder where west would be if politics threw trades to the wolves and kept machinists. Maintain manufacturing prowess and build cheap factories.


who needs to outsource when you can just open the borders.


Great points.

Riffing on your last remark, the federal labor statistics list of Ohio occupations with the highest location quotients (prevalence in that area divided by prevalence of the same occupation nationwide) still shows machine tools related professions near the top. Surely that cluster of expertise would be in even greater demand if the national economy were to grow in that direction.

May 2022

Engine and Other Machine Assemblers 4.21

Multiple Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic 3.79

Patternmakers, Metal and Plastic 3.23

Forging Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic 2.99

Heat Treating Equipment Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic 2.91

Tool and Die Makers 2.81

Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic 2.75

Sewers, Hand 2.71

Cutting, Punching, and Press Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic 2.70

Model Makers, Metal and Plastic 2.64


> However, to be fair, NOBODY had any answer to the fact that manufacturing automated and could get by on two orders of magnitude fewer employees.

Hasn't the answer been tons more products being made? More product designers, more tool manufacturers, more people in charge of designing factories, more automation engineers, more robotics engineers?

More people supporting those products, more people in sales, more people doing packaging design, logo design, and so on and so forth.

(None of this is environmentally sustainable, separate discussion!)


Agreed and to clarify:

> everything in inches, foot pounds, and what not doesn't translate very well internationally when you start outsourcing

It translates pretty well for the last 90 years:

In 1930, the British Standards Institution adopted an inch of exactly 25.4 mm. The American Standards Association followed suit in 1933. By 1935, industry in 16 countries had adopted the "industrial inch" as it came to be known, effectively endorsing Johansson's pragmatic choice of conversion ratio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch

See also the paragraph above referencing the precision tools enabled by Swede Carl Johansson's "Jo Blocks." For a nice video/contextual storytelling, see Machine Learning channel's Origins of Precision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58


I've long been sounding the alarm on MBA'ification destroying everything. To me its the most under discussed problem with society in better quality of life areas.

In the beginning they cleaned up messy, inefficient, wasteful processes. However for the most part MBA's ran out of real stuff to do 10-20 years ago. Ever since then it has just been about how much more can they shave off of 0.1% of 0.1% of just one more thing that doesnt need it but hey they have a quartly bonus attached.

Or like a comedian I recently saw said, every new business these days are basically something like:

Hey you know how a taxi driver can afford to feed his family?

What if he couldn't anymore?


The metric system wasn’t a factor, it was all economics as laid out in the article. Tooling both foreign and domestic was/is a mixture of imperial and metric to meet certain markets. The major force behind machining, automotive, did their conversions to metric back in the 1970s. The U.S. was seriously lacking in computerized machining and had plenty of time to shift to metric based machines, but the MBAs had already determined long before that they preferred overseas manufacturing at a fraction of the cost.

Machining today is heavy metric, even in the U.S. and there is still no economic way to make it all work, much like with steel production and other manufacturing concerns.


> Machining today is heavy metric, even in the U.S.

Likely due to the dominance of metric tooling from abroad.

Old ass machine equipment is imperial and is still in use. Imperial measuring devices are still widely available as well.

I think the OP is probably onto something.


The MBAs probably did not want to invest into anything. I see it all the time, it feels like they never thing more than one year ahead.


> In short, the MBAs happened

This describes many many things in the USA.


MBAs are fine, honestly. I have a manager who came up in the industry he works in. He worked at the 'coal-face', understands the issues and has real perspective. He got an MBA later in his career and uses what he learned from that to more effectively communicate up the chain and has some new ideas that he filters through his industry experience to make his team more effective.

Children who get an MBA before getting a job and think they have some magic sauce that solves problems for an industry without respecting the work that's been done and knowing why those problems exist to begin with (maybe they're trade-offs? For a real reason?) are a problem, as are the clueless twats who listen to their breathless assertions as though they carry any weight.


The MBA philosophy vs the craftsman philosophy differ vastly.


MBAs are taught techniques for optimizing for quality and cost. It's not always an either/or decision.

Even when it is an either/or situation, sometimes it's better to build a product that is half the price for a quarter of the lifespan. A buyer who will use a tool for 30 hours doesn't really care if the service life of a tool has been reduced from 1000 hours to 250 if the price is halved.


I know what you mean, but I think we can say for sure that it's definitely not globally optimal to produce durable goods (of any kind) that are half the cost but a quarter the lifespan. Half price for half utility is fine, but half price for a quarter utility is just pure waste -- even if you don't need the tool for 1000 hours, you can resell it to somebody who will use it for the next 970 hours (or the next 30, after which they sell it again). There are transaction costs here which make it a little more complex, but in a society where this was common, they would be driven down by scale -- more pawn and consignment shops would pop up, culture would teach people how the process works, etc. (By the way, there are also extra transaction costs for the people who need 1000 hours of tool time but have to buy it 30 hours at a time.)

Any system that encourages this behavior (i.e the one we have) is obviously not a winning system.


> techniques for optimizing for quality and cost

Some of those techniques:

1. hiring each other and bloating bureaucracy in healthcare and education and other industries jacking up prices that werent expensive before

2. come up with ideas like 'shrinkflation' and 'planned obsolescence

3. reducing quality and making products unrepairable so we have massive waste in landfills and things like a giant pacific garbage patch

4. purchasing quality brands , parasiting the brand name, and making the actual product shitty

5. hollowing out every industry in quality and jobs...making private equity monopolies so theres no competition and then hiring more MBAs.

What you call 'optimizing quality and cost' I call 'trying the fuck the consumer to the maximum amount without them noticing'. But, to be fair, those are the same thing.

Just my observations. Capitalism is becoming a zombie and MBAs are the cordyceps.


The issue isn’t MBAs. They are just a symptom.

What the issue is, is that we’re essentially in the third ‘wave’ of US economic change post WW2 manufacturing boom.

Post WW2, the United States was the only manufacturing economy that hadn’t been bombed to smithereens, has not only little to no real debt, but a lot of debtors that would repay them, and had massive amounts of undeveloped land ripe for development, and a major new manufacturing base looking for things to do.

This allowed the US to become the world’s reserve currency (along with gold) in the Bretton Woods agreement in ‘44. That lasted until ‘71.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system] when the dollar stopped being backed by gold, allowing periods of increased inflation.

At around the same time, the economies of Western Europe and Asia had mostly recovered, and they were starting to catch up on manufacturing to compete with the US.

This led to increasing competitive pressures with US manufacturing, and increasing incentives to go towards Globalization and outsourcing to chase the cheap labor and more willing to compete manufacturers in these locations. Switching the US to a ‘knowledge economy’ was the natural progression.

That easy money is mostly gone now, and the US is also no longer far ahead in many areas on knowledge.

China in particular is starting to come close on almost all metrics. If Europe has a recession, their primary disadvantage (cost) may turn into an advantage.

So then the US is much more on par with everyone else - for the first time in several generations.

And that causes quite a rude awakening economically, as now the US potentially has real and actual competitors it isn’t 5 steps ahead of already.

MBA’ism is because long ago the economy switched from ‘actually leaps and bounds ahead of competitors’ to optimization. As most of the actual structural differences have now equalized, and we’re down to who can make it cheaper/simpler. No one wants a 5 lb drill that costs $100 if they can have a 2lb drill that costs $50 and does the jobs they want well.


> MBA’ism is because long ago the economy switched from ‘actually leaps and bounds ahead of competitors’ to optimization

False. Many companies make more money now than ever. American GDP and technology is leaps and bounds ahead of other countries as well.

MBA's exist to create shareholder value while fucking the consumer and the laborers as much as possible without getting into trouble.

melanine in baby food, and suicide nets outside of factories, for example, are cost optimization strategies that didnt work out.

I can just picture an MBA running the cost/benefit numbers in an excel spreadsheet comparing treating the workers better versus putting suicide nets outside the windows.


Bwahah.

How easy was it for a normal American to buy a house, get an education, and get health care (in hours of labor) in 1950 vs now?

How about fixing a broken bone? Or getting a basic checkup?

Taiwan makes all the fancy chips.

Apple designs things, but China makes them.

The best cars are generally made in Japan.

The vast majority of daily household items come from China.

Food comes from the US for the most part, and some random heavy manufacturing and other parts.

The US may have the largest GDP, but that is a measure of turnover - and is supported by the Dollar being the reserve currency.

We’ve been inflating it a lot. And we’ll see what happens.


>The best cars are generally made in Japan.

And this isn't even a new thing: it was absolutely true (in fact, more true) way back in the 1980s and 90s, and really started in the mid-to-late 1970s. American cars were utter garbage: poorly engineered, poorly performing, and poorly manufactured, with terrible quality.

So why do people seem to assume that other American-made stuff in that era was so well-made? Sure, there's a few shining examples such as HP test equipment and printers, but the American auto industry was churning out truly bad products, so why isn't it also assumed that other domestic industries were plagued by the same poor standards and management?


It’s all relative. There was competition to compare against, so one can say ‘terrible’ vs ‘good’. Otherwise, it just ‘is’.

Notably, compact transistor radios were quite a marvel - and came out of Japan around that time too. Same with the Walkman, shortly afterwards.

Tools were more commonly American made, and were very heavy - but often durable. German equivalents were notably more expensive but ‘better’. Chinese made tools were originally terrible quality, but by around the early to mid 2000’s that changed.

I forget exactly when, but Mitutoyo (Japanese) started being notably ‘better’ in what - the 90s? Hitachi made power tools are pretty good, but I think that’s been about the last 10 years.

TVs were at first terrible from Asia, then started to get much better. By the 90s, they were pretty much all Asian manufactured no?


chips, household products....what you're saying is manufacturing has left the US.

fungible shitty unnecessary goods have rock bottom prices. costs of things human beings need to live like education/training, health care, food housing have skyrocketed.

I completely agree with you that getting off the gold standard and letting a leprechaun like Yellen skyrocket inflation to cover for bad political mistakes, is a terrible idea and 1971 is a huge inflection point in United States on numerous economic graphs and indicators, as we've both seen the website.

Keep in mind the late 60s were also when immigration started it's upward trajectory as well with the 1965 immigration act, and now we're letting in the equivalent of an entire new U.S. state every year.


The Bretton woods change was to allow stimulation of the economy - because things at home were losing momentum (relatively speaking) as other countries manufacturing bases and economies recovered from the damage from WW2. It was a way of keeping the US a few steps ahead.

Printing gold backed dollars quickly doesn’t work very well when you can’t increase the rate of mining gold quickly. Non gold backed dollars are a lot easier.

As long as goods and services can be made cheaper every year, it works well since inflation isn’t felt badly - there aren’t any supply restrictions where something is going to get noticeably too expensive.

All the things I talked about though all have that issue - they can’t be made cheaper somewhere else. someone can only build so many houses in LA before there is literally no more room, and someone building a house in Shanghai doesn’t help anyone in SF live closer to work. Building a new college/university in Vietnam isn’t going to help a kid in Oregon get their degree.

We’ve been exporting inflation because it’s worked. But when other countries stop being so much cheaper, or costs of critical things for the population finally exceed affordability, it doesn’t.

Yellen, Powell, and others are just following the rules and mandate they are given.


Wait till you see what the MBAs have cooked up for health care. You'll die in the Emergency Room waiting room. Even concierge medicine wont save you.


[flagged]


Book recommendation: "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Michael Pettis.

If you don't buy the apologetics that permeate the popular economics sphere but still want an expert to walk you through the details, this is your book.


+1 for anything written by Pettis. Very clear communicator, and his Chinese Financial Markets blog[1] (now hosted at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace) is required reading on the Chinese economy.

[1] https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/


Sounds like commie gobbledygook.

(RIP Norm MacDonald, the thinking mans comedian!)


It's basic macro. Assets, exports, capital accounts, current accounts, savings, investment. Essentially, windfall surplus in one area causes savings bubbles causes investment bubbles causes asset pumps and export dumps, usually in a different area. He cites a bunch of historical examples and then goes step by step through techniques for identifying sources/sinks and directionality.

Oh, and did you know that Ricardo based his analysis on the assumption of a closed capital account? It's interesting how the theory of comparative advantage usually gets invoked without mentioning that ;)

If you dogmatically reject the idea that political economy could possibly involve the concept of class, I'd love to hear how your analysis clusters the interests involved. In any case, he's not a CCP shill. He throws some mean punches in that direction with facts and figures to back them up. Everyone hustles in the world economy.


> If you dogmatically reject the idea that political economy could possibly involve the concept of class,

Class is a suitcase word that may refer to different ways of classifying people but often does not clarify which dimensions and clusters are being used in a particular context. Maybe Pettis does a better job than other authors. Perhaps you or the sibling comment author can provide an example?


You do yourself a tremendous disservice by blowing off good scholarship with uninformed jokes, especially in the case of book publishing, where titles are often set by the publisher and not the author.

This book gives detailed, and very accurate, descriptions of how trade wars which appear to be foreign conflicts-- i.e. one country united against another-- are almost always actually domestic conflicts between competing interest groups inside the same country; often during these conflicts, those interest groups can make alliances with equivalent groups in other countries. This is a commonly-observed phenomenon which, for brevity's sake, we reify as class, and does not require any Marxist axioms or analysis to understand.


> The new owners’ focus on profits meant...

Pretty much the answer in one sentence.


short/mid term profits


[flagged]


>The company is morally corrupt.

haas has been morally corrupt for some time.

they're essentially the 'john deere' of machining, they sell under-performing over-priced crap that only they can sell parts for or maintain, which is convenient for them because they produce machines that have some of the highest downtime in the entire industry due to lack of repair facilities/parts/availability as well as overwhelming small quality control problems.


[flagged]


The equivalency would be if there were weapons of e.g. some Iranian company sold to Israel and used against Gaza.

As a US company, Haas has a duty to obey US-ordered sanctions and ensure that their products are not being used against the interests of USA, but it has no duty to ensure that their products are not used against interests of Gaza.


This I totally agree with (US companies should abide by US law). It's the moralizing that gets under my skin.


We gave up the low intelligence blue collar manufacturing jobs so city dwellers can obtain highly specialized and skilled expensive college degrees to do important work on global problems in matter like, making and editing excel spreadsheets, writing emails, and sitting in on web meetings.

I am writing this while drinking an 8$ caramel latte from Starbucks with a slice of avocado toast for 17.99$.




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