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What happened to the US machine tool industry?

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Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#181

Post by wolverine876 »

mikeyouse wrote: post #176
bmitc wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#182

Post by shiroiuma »

lazide wrote: post #121
hasty_pudding wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sui…

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, a…

>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?

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#183

Post by happyjack »

lkramer wrote: post #58

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.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#184

Post by Godel_unicode »

jameshart wrote: post #173
rr808 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, th…

> 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 betwe…

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

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#185

Post by lmm »

dukeyukey wrote: post #61
MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inf…

> 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?

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.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#186

Post by [deleted] »

bane wrote: post #80

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…

[deleted]

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#187

Post by lmm »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #34
cantrevealname wrote: post #9

> 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 me…

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.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#188

Post by oneshtein »

mikeyouse wrote: post #176
bmitc wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#189

Post by georgeecollins »

fwlr wrote: post #180

“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 late…

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.
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