The Middle Ages may have been more colorful than usually thought, based on an inventory of garments belonging to people in medieval Valencia.
Memnon of Rhodes says “There is a subset of the US precariat class that is quickly becoming the new face of genteel poverty — characterized by a combination of high academic achievement and poor financial prospects (think post docs, academics, journalists, nonprofit staff).”. Noah Smith opines “This is the Bernie base. They are people who *could* get high paying jobs thanks to their general intelligence and education level, but are downwardly mobile due to some combination of emotional problems, chasing “cool” professions, disdain for the business world, and laziness.”
I note that to the extent these people earn over $150K and lives in dense urban areas, they will be categorized as ‘elites’ according to a categorization used in a widely-circulated Rasmussen survey of political attitudes.
(I never heard the term ‘precariat’ before, but it seems useful)
Bad election narratives, by Musa al-Gharbi, summarized and discussed at the Assistant Village Idiot’s blog.
Glenn Reynolds: Is AI Coming for Your Kids? The example of the kid asking ChatGPT about how cars are made, and then talking with it about counting, is impressive, and there is obviously a lot of value in this kind of thing. But, the possibilities for the ‘nudging’ of political, social, and philosophical attitudes, in the direction desired by the creators of the system, is immense. See my post Stories and Society for some related thoughts.
Canada: the ongoing disaster and the possibilities for change, at Stuart Schneiderman’s blog, along with several other interesting items.
Several discussions going on about the the prospects for manufacturing in America:
Andrew McCalip says “We have an existential manufacturing problem in America.”
Zane Hensperger writes about reindustrialization and especially about machine shops.
Bill Waddell has several essays at LinkedIn, including Manufacturing in the Age of Tariffs, The Ethics of Free Trade, and 12 Million Middle Class Jobs Sacrificed on the Altar of Globalization.
Marc Andreessen says “From near total dominance in manufacturing to near total dominance in technology. What happens if we dominate in both? Let’s find out!”
For contrast, a WSJ article: Factories Aren’t the Future. I do wonder whether, when thinking about factories, the economist who wrote the article visualizes processes like this.
And finally, watch this mountain lion experimenting with a swing.
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Stolen from Peter Zeihan…
If we want stuff, we’re going to have to make it ourselves.
Again.
(He may not like the idea but he recognizes what’s coming)
“If we want stuff, we’re going to have to make it ourselves” A recent report on reshoring from a major brokerage noted that the US is an outlier in that it is the only country/region that does not produce the goods it consumers (16% production share vs 30% consumption share)
The same brokerage notes that US share of global GDP grew from the 1980s into the 1990s, but following the admission of China into the WTO in 2000, things changed…US GDP growth fell from nearly 4% CAGR to approximately 2% for the 20 years succeeding China’s WTO admission.
A report on China’s response to Trump’s forthcoming tariffs:
CHINA IS ESCALATING ITS RESPONSE TO U.S. TRADE RESTRICTIONS BY EMPLOYING A CALCULATED STRATEGY DUBBED “SUPPLY CHAIN WARFARE,” TARGETING CRITICAL AMERICAN INDUSTRIES DEPENDENT ON CHINESE RESOURCES.
Reply by John Konrad V, who runs the maritime website gCaptain:
“This is going to be a difficult battle for the United States to win under current frameworks. BUT what nearly everyone in DC forgets is 90% of trade is done via the ocean, and when we created the system of international maritime trade, we installed powerful leverage into the system.
Levers of power that haven’t been exercised in decades but very much do exist. My hope is
@michaelgwaltz
builds a maritime team capable of helping him understand these levers,
@EliseStefanik
appoints a full ambassador to IMO,
@howardlutnick
doubles down on
@FMC_gov
, and
@marcorubio
appoints an oceans ambassador with a full embassy team.
With all that in place— plus once again placing it in the same cabinet as USCG with
@DOTMARAD
(hopefully commerce but potentially DoD)— we could start running circles around China’s maritime trade dominance and block tariff warfare.”
https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/1861896849788928266
There are some equations left out of these manufacturing threads and generally in discussions on the subject.
The first it that you can have a building full of state of the art machine tools without having a successful machine shop. Second: You can have a very successful machine shop but you still don’t have a manufacturer.
The normal chain of events is to start with a product and develop the means of producing it. That development includes both finding suppliers and, often, acquiring the means of making other components. Of course that’s only party of the story, you have to figure out how to sell it, to whom and for how much. Recruit dealers, make provisions for service etc. A non trivial number of manufacturers fail because they can’t manage the process of bringing components that have been made outside, in house.
Every level still has all the challenges of getting good personnel, managing money, technology; in short, running a business.
McCalip imagines an Amazon of manufacturing. Does he know that the warehouse portion of Amazon probably loses money? Has he noticed that about half of the stuff they sell is just plain crap? How does he imagine he will get them interested in building the small quantities of very intricate parts out of exotic metals he needs? Machine shops that run 24/7 don’t even consider orders less than thousands. It takes just as much time and effort nearly to program and set up for ten pieces as for ten million. Tesla with their gigfactories only builds about five products and still hasn’t mastered the intricacies of after sale service and repair part availability.
A viable manufacturing sector needs operations at all scales and would probably look a lot like the one we have now only somehow better or cheaper or? For a while,China seemed very good at putting all the pieces together, very low labor costs made up for a lot of deficiencies but if you listened closely, there were always stories about orders accepted and never delivered, containers filled with bricks instead of merchandise and worker and customers showing up at factory entrances to find the doors locked and the proprietors absconded.
I tend to believe there are enough wheeler-dealers running around here that opportunities will be exploited. I’m much less confident that the government will do anything useful. More likely the equivalent of taxing Ford to subsidize buggy whip makers.
I do agree that the problem of training skilled workers is hard. It’s not like we started the 20th century with an army of skilled machinists, tool and die makers and machine builders. We started with a multitude of farm hands, eager to scrape the dung from their boots and turned them into what we needed to make the 20th century. What’s changed in the mean time?
Zane says: ” I’ve seen a crazy amount of other manufacturers (down/up stream) that rely on the SMB manufacturers (shops) for critical parts and supply chain inputs like components, metals, systems, and much much more. Losing a trusted supplier could be detrimental to a larger manufacturer’s supply chain, ability to move fast, and be profitable. Also, shops are critical to local economies, communities, and national defense….With shops losing their edge due to retirement, workforce, and dated machinery, I have seen first-hand domestic firms choosing overseas suppliers.”
Because of these dependencies, the overall economic impact of a small shop may be much greater than the suggested by its revenue and net income.
On stories – this is something I wrote about before:
https://natewinchester.wordpress.com/2024/01/18/the-practical-need-of-stories/
Basically, stories are a piece of communication. So the stories people have available to them helps them express ideas. Limit the stories is like limiting the vocabulary – which was the goal of newspeak in 1984.
David, you linked to Zane’s X profile rather than a tweet? so if you don’t have an account you are SOL as as far as seeing anything.
From your paraphrase which might be unfair. Even if you are going to build another River Rouge plant where they unloaded iron ore from Ford mines on Ford ships at one end and drove Fords out the other, you’re still beholden to countless suppliers. Ford itself has been backing away from such extreme verticality from almost the moment the plant opened. As with all things, it’s the balance between bought and built that’s key.
Zane has a whole lot of recent posts, here’s a new one today:
https://x.com/zanehengsperger/status/1862487929689624690
….We Are Losing SMB Manufacturing Shops (25% decrease 2001-2023)
re Andrew McClaip’s post, “Why aren’t there Amazon/Tesla-scale gigafactory warehouses filled with CNC machines?”, there are indeed some companies that offer manufacturing services with an array of machines of different types…you send in the CAD model, agree to the price, and get the parts back….but I don’t think they’re on the Amazon/Tesla scale. Nor is it obvious to me that giantism is the way to go. And indeed there are reasons why people moved away from verticality. Although supply-chain failures surely are leading many to think about more verticalization again.
The longer bloc
After working in manufacturing shops for over 5 years, I’ve seen a crazy amount of other manufacturers (down/up stream) that rely on the SMB manufacturers (shops) for critical parts and supply chain inputs like components, metals, systems, and much much more. Losing a trusted supplier could be detrimental to a larger manufacturer’s supply chain, ability to move fast, and be profitable. Also, shops are critical to local economies, communities, and national defense.
In this article, I am taking a problem/data first approach to how we are losing manufacturing capability due to retirement, labor shortages, lack of investment (and ability to invest), lack of new technologies (and technology implementation), and a bit more.
With shops losing their edge due to
David,
I’ve used Xeometry once for a part. Their model is basically what Uber was supposed to be. They put parts out to shops to bid on. You can limit the pool to domestic only or international if you’re willing to accept longer lead time, maybe in return for lower cost. I expect the draw for the shops is picking up fill in work to keep busy. When you look at it from their perspective, the upside is pretty limited since they aren’t the one building a relationship with the customer.
I think most of these work this way. The idea of building a fleet of machines and the personnel to run them expecting online parts orders to come flooding in sounds like something that would only appeal to a VC, eventually to feature in a cautionary tale in the WSJ.
Everything worked out OK the cost and delivery were good, less than a local shop I had used before for fairly simple parts machined out of 6061 aluminum. There was some back and forth about one dimension that needed to be within 0.001″. They are much happier +- 0.005 which is really sort of wide. I also quoted some pieces plasma cut from steel plate. that should have been producible nested from a single setup but the quotes seemed to price each and every piece separately with a sizeable minimum that blew them clear out of the water. I found a local shop to do it for about 20%.
They have an impressive list of materials and processes that they will support and have an online instant quote system. If I were procuring for production, I’d want a lot more back and forth with the shop, you’re talking a long term relationship after all and it’s not all just dimensions and tolerances. And I have a lot more leverage talking 10,000 parts than 2.
I can perfectly imagine a situation where the wrong person leaving a supplier makes parts become unacceptable. That’s one of the things you want to talk about at the beginning and the sort of thing that puts shops just starting up or one man shops at a disadvantage. In the end, you’re always depending on the management of your suppliers and I don’t see any way that’s ever going to change.
Ah I thought Xometry actually did the work, sounds from what you say that they are more of a clearinghouse.
There’s also something called eMachineShop…sounds like they actually do perform the work themselves?
I looked at their website, the list of services and operations is pretty unlikely for a single facility or company.
https://www.emachineshop.com/
One example is making injection molding dies and injection molding. Many molders will offer to have molds made, but not by them. Not impossible but not very common. A mold will last for maybe a half million cycles and will produce from one to dozens of parts per cycle so an injection molding facility will mostly be producing parts from existing molds belonging to the owners of the parts and would have trouble keeping a tightly bound mold shop busy. Molds very commonly move from molder to molder as well.
Caterpillar might have production facilities with many of those capabilities all integrated but it’s hard to imagine so many very specialized facilities all together running as a sort of job shop. At the same time, I would have dozens of choices for each category in DFW so it seems this is more likely the case. And that’s where American communications, infrastructure and legal climate give us an advantage over someplace in Vietnam. I can very easily transport parts from my machine shop to my heat treater to my finisher with little more than a single fully enforceable sheet of paper. the sort of consolidator/middleman that Xeometry or eMachineshop is, is much closer to a manufacturing “Amazon” than what Zane seems to envisage. Purchasing departments have been doing the same thing since Ely Whitney was a boy.
Yeah, Amazon doesn’t actually make the products that it is selling, which it would be doing in a truly verticalized model. They have, though, started operating a lot of their own transportation rather than shipping via common carrier.
I think the Amazon-as-giant-integrated-facility thing was from Andrew rather than from Zane.
And if you’ve had experience recently of Amazon delivery, you know that they have significant challenges to put it charitably. Their business model with Prime, free delivery of even small packages coupled with their inability or unwillingness to consolidate deliveries to a single address leaves them making multiple drop offs, maddeningly stretching far beyond business hours. Also, while the vans say Amazon, neither the vans nor the drivers belong to, or are operated by Amazon, the same goes for the warehouses. It’s all “contractors” all the way down.
Captive contractors are nothing new but they all seem to have to learn the hard way that they are going to be in a vise, squeezed from both sides. Also, push comes to shove, that Amazon can hire, probably, better and certainly more lawyers then they can and that Amazon wrote the contract to begin with. Dito, Uber and Lyft drivers.
If I was in charge of “Restoring American Competitiveness”, hereinafter, RAC!, (trade mark applied for) I’d do everything I could to make starting a business easier and a little less risky. Compared to most of the rest of the world, aside from certain states, it’s much easier here already but things could be easier.
The first would be simplifying regulations, especially “environmental”. In every SDS I’ve ever read, there’s a statement that this substance should be disposed of according to local regulations. Have you ever tried to find out just what those are? If you find someone, at some agency willing to say anything, there is no particular reason to believe he knows what he’s talking about and certainly no protection if you follow such a statement. You can hire a consultant, just be sure there’s a very good indemnification clause in the contract and his insurance premiums are up to date.
Another is health insurance. As with everything Obama, what was supposed to fix the system, made it even worse and more convoluted. I would make hospitals post prices and charge everyone exactly the same. The system we have now is the equivalent of pumping gas at a desert gas station and finding out when you’re done that you used the “wrong” credit card to pay, so your gas cost $15 a gallon. Where are all the bleeding hearts maundering on about “price gouging”?
Empty nest syndrome is the paradox of parenthood (you can’t live with them, and definitely cannot live without). But it is a journey defined by immense love, joy, and the bittersweet challenges of letting go. They reflect the unique bond between parent and child, where moments of closeness and nurturing create lifelong memories. Parenting is portrayed as a delicate balance—teaching children independence while cherishing their fleeting youth. This profound connection is celebrated in themes of unconditional love and the selflessness required to prepare children for a life beyond the family nest. Kindly check https://soinspiring.com/quotes-on-empty-nest-syndrome/ for the curated quotes.