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What happened to the US machine tool industry?

construction-physics.com

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Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#151

Post by fuzztester »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #124
fuzztester wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 hotchpot…

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.

[flagged]

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#152

Post by fuzztester »

ducttapecrown wrote: post #132
cycrutchfield wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! ;)

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#153

Post by jwagenet »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #127
sct202 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#154

Post by nick222226 »

fuzztester wrote: post #151
cycrutchfield wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#155

Post by ddingus »

poncho_romero wrote: post #108
grow2grow wrote: post #2

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 i…

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.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#157

Post by Joel_Mckay »

jwagenet wrote: post #153
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. =)

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#158

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #128
nostrademons wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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, a…

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.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#159

Post by rr808 »

nostrademons wrote: post #118
specialist wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bro…

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 develope…

> 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.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#160

Post by mastax »

supernova87a wrote: post #144

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 spu…

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.

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