Month: February 2021

Industrial Distribution One Year Into Covid

by

It was around a year ago now when we started to hear about this thing called Covid. My kneejerk at that time was “it’s just the f1cking flu”. Quite the year.

For those not acquainted, I own an HVAC distributor, and we are a subset of industrial distribution. I have written some updates along the way of this new Covidian world. Here are a few more thoughts of where we were, where we are, and where I think we are going.

1) I thought our AR was going to be ravaged. Boy was I wrong. AR is as healthy as it ever was. We probably have some PPP money being used improperly by some customers, but the fact of the matter really is that HVAC in general has been very, very strong. People had to stay at home and with extra money from not going on vacations decided to upgrade their HVAC systems. Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) was obviously a very good driver for us in both residential and commercial segments.

2) I originally thought that replacement parts would be an issue. Nope. It was all about finished goods, and still is. Our main domestic provider of HVAC equipment is digging out of the hole that seemed infinite in nature, caused by all of the distributors cancelling everything during the original shutdowns, and then re-ordering everything x 2 or more when the weather got hot in Summer. It was brutal, but we worked through it. All of the favors were called in, and I scoured the USA for new trading partners to come up with some solutions. That work paid off and will pay off in the future as now I have more partners to rely on. I have never worked so hard to get product – one week I worked 100 hours. I have had one day off since last February that wasn’t a holiday. Not looking for sympathy – these are things that you do when you are the boss but I’m glad we have a bit more normalcy now.

3) Right now, the ports on the West Coast are a mess, and there is a major container shipping issue to/from Asia. This is already causing hella problems with items such as ductless mini split systems, PTAC units, window airs, dehumidifiers, and the like. We are going to see major issues in these segments when it warms up.

4) Inventory controls are out the window. Product comes in surges rather than the patterns we were used to that had been developed over decades. We are still getting orders in on some items from last July. It is very tough to manage. We don’t dare send anything back to the manufacturers for fear of not getting the items again, but our turns are a farce right now. There really isn’t a solution, and we hope that our normal buying/supply patterns return later this year. I have rarely used my line of credit in the past, but until this thing normalizes, I have no choice.

5) Competition isn’t working as hard as I am. I really am happy about this as I am seeing new customers and coming up with innovative solutions or new products/vendors, and a lot of my competitors have either given up or just aren’t that interested in trying new things. It has really opened some doors. Hard work does create luck.

6) I protected, and continue to protect, our long time, loyal customers when the availability sh1t hit the fan and shielded them fiercely when other contractors came calling as their distributors ran out of product. We immediately halted new dealer acquisition and allocated product to “our guys”. My customers were very thankful for very few product outages. This created some angst as these potential new customers were offended when I politely told them to “pound it”, but that’s too bad. We did the right thing.

7) The future is bright. If we can get a handle on the inventory, we feel that there will be a burst of commercial work coming as companies get fully back up and running. I think that residential won’t slow down any time soon either. This polar vortex we are currently experiencing pushed a lot of units over the edge.

8) Some items are still hopeless. MERV 13 filters are a complete joke, along with UV product. MERV 13 filter lead times still sit at 16-20 weeks. Want a backup generator for your house? 20 weeks minimum. Our Bipolar Ionizer manufacturer that we represent has done a fantastic job re-supplying so that fight is over for now.

There is a lot of work left to do, but in general, we are finally, mercifully seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.

Back Stories and Suicides

by

Today, a friend complained of the death of a young man in Portland, of the heart rending interview of his father on Hannity. Some deaths are memorialized, mourned and others disappear from the headlines. Deaths in gang shootings in Chicago of toddlers are given less attention than those of victims of drug overdose in police custody. Not surprisingly, ceremonial ritual respect is given to a police officer killed in defense of the capitol, while the family of a young veteran, a woman whose business was destroyed by the covid lock down, is not. One an “insurrectionist”, the other a defender. Antigone might understand the distinction, if lamenting it. Creon certainly would. Another woman is trampled. Medical emergencies happen. Chaos.

Later, suicides. Of those we speak softly, negation of life hard for strangers and even harder for families. I knew a mother who spent years denying her son was dead – long after she had buried him.

For three suicides following the 6th, we ask, as we always do of these, why? We wonder about a back story? Would it help us understand the fences about the capitol, the vitriol of the impeachment?

One was a rioter, a middle aged man, an officer in a bank, who had been charged by the police. Given the “everyone is an insurrectionist” rhetoric, being charged would make life difficult and being convicted? The proportions of why and what he did – and why and what was said, was charged – were important to him and might well be to us.

Then, the two suicides of defenders, one of a Capitol policeman and the other in the Washington force. They had their reasons – but are they ones we need to understand as citizens or only as sympathizers? Policemen are often of an honor culture who feel keenly their responsibility to protect. A friend posited another reason: resignations and firings are likely (though responsibility for inadequate preparation does not appeared to be the fault of the police but rather of politicians – seldom members of an honor culture). My friend observed that when the airline for whom her husband had piloted for decades went into bankruptcy (along with their pension fund), several pilots committed suicide. Middle aged, they were unlikely to find work of the same kind and pay; they had (according to the financial planner who served the group) chosen to leave their families in a stronger financial place than the coming bankruptcy would. The planner’s responsibility was to ensure those wishes were fulfilled. (She clearly was glad her husband had not chosen that path although 15 years later they have not yet received the appropriate pension.) Protecting family, protecting reputation – those are motives. Most suicides are prompted (if partially) by clinical depression. Back stories can be sad, but need not be, really, our business. But, given the political machinations before and after that day, the back stories might be telling.

This isn’t much of a post – I hope the comments are more substantive than it is.

Some newsy discussions:
For one, such responsibility was inherited – see CNN for what it is worth.
And Politico gives both officer’s names.
NBC gives details.

2/8 – Adding links
Banker
Another on him
The Financial Planner gives more information about Georgia’s employment; apparently he’d spent decades in finance and the order was because he had not “dispersed” when asked to by police. The difference between these arrests and those 4 years ago that protested Trump’s inauguration are telling and are not so much apples and oranges as some contend.

“You Play with My World Like it’s Your Little Toy”

by

Watching a series of European bureaucrats…pompous, arrogant, and extremely unattractive European bureaucrats…asserting the need for a global ‘great reset’, I was reminded of the above line from Bob Dylan’s song.

In America, too, of course, we have politicians and bureaucrats demanding a Great Reset.  And Dylan’s song, of course, was directed at armaments manufacturers, not at world-resetting politicians and their operatives. Nevertheless, I think the phrase captures well the arrogance of those who believe they have the knowledge, insight, and authority to reorganize the lives of everyone on the planet.  And in their view of things, there isn’t any ‘my world’ for the individual; there is no sphere of individual autonomy and agency which is not to be made available for their interference.  It’s all their world.

In 1931, a book titled The Conscription of a People was published by Katherine, Duchess of Atholl.  It was “a blistering, well-documented indictment of the savage collectivization of life in the Soviet Union.”

The title of the book provides a perfect description of the worldview of the Resetters.  The entire population is to be drafted into an army, assigned to whatever battles and tasks their rulers..far beyond their ability to influence..think most fitting.

 

Degrees of Toxicity

by

The Daughter Unit clued me in this week to a humongous ruckus which brewed among Air Force contributors to military-oriented discussion boards on Reddit – a ruckus which involves the current Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force – which for the laymen audience, means the very tippy-top enlisted, that singular and exemplary senior NCO who supposedly sits at the right hand of the highest military commanders in the land, to keep them appraised of the interests of the enlisted men and women. The Daughter Unit keeps track of this military ‘gen on a more regular basis than I do, as my two-decades long service was a good while ago, and I walked away from it all and constructed another life and long-term interests in writing, book-blogging and publishing. I will confess to some sentimental feelings for my service, as it provided me with a lot of fun, foreign travel, a decent paycheck and benefits (to include the pension and retirement benefits), a chance to hang out with some amazing people (as well as a soupcon of psychos, amiable freaks and the severely mal-adjusted), and a kind of mental grounding, even a rough sympathy when it comes to people who work for a living and get their hands dirty and their fingernails broken. But enough about me, and my not-particularly-rewarding career as an enlisted minion, toiling away in the bowels of the mighty military public affairs machine some two- or three-decades past.

The office of the Chief Master Sergeant of any service is a huge thing, in all the military forces: the name of the current Chief-Master-Whatever is one of the things military recruits to whatever branch are expected to know and recite on demand when in Basic Training. General officers there are, in legions, and the multi-stars roost en masse like grackles in the highest levels of command – but there is only one Chief Enlisted, for all four (five counting the Coast Guard) military services. This one – CMSAF JoAnne Bass – is the first female to take up that exalted office for any of the services. I wish her the best luck in the world. When I began serving, there weren’t but a bare half-dozen of female senior enlisteds in the Air Force, and a fair number of the junior enlisted that I served with were the first or second females in certain traditionally male specialties which had just been opened to females. Unfortunately, as things are shaping up in the first months of her tour of duty, Chief Bass had better buckle in, as it looks like it’s going to be a bumpy flight. She put her foot wrong, straight off the bat, when a young NCO (innocently, or perhaps not so innocently) inquired on the CMSAF’s FB page as to how her last name was pronounced – like the fish or the musical instrument?   

Read more

An astonishing article in Time on the 2020 election;

by

Time magazine, nearly invisible for years, published an amazing story about how the 2020 election was stolen.

We figured some of this would eventually get out but to see it this soon is just astonishing. The author frames the story as one of “saving the election” from Donald Trump but, of course, that is not what it reveals.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

It is possible to see this from the author’s point of view. That seems to be that it was critical to not have riots and looting like those which occurred over most of the summer. In order to keep the peace, it was necessary to see that Trump did not win. The validity of the election was secondary, if that.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.

That is a fairly good example of “newspeak. “Voter Suppression lawsuits” can be translated to voter ID requirements of any type. The “vote by mail” included the absence of voting day requirements or even signature checking. It was wide open for fraud.

Read more