If you want a dose of machining today go directly to the ads, because I’m mad and I just can’t take it anymore.

In a couple of days we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving, watch the NFL, sop our dressing, and try to sleep with reflux. But 10,000 miles away thousands of American men and women will be trying to stay alive in Afghanistan.

Tell me, why?

We are propping up a corrupt Karzai government, playing ball with a Pakistan that harbors Al Qaeda, and inflating our monstrous budget deficit, to accomplish what?

I don’t care if you are a lefty or a righty, counting the caskets of young Americans dying in the hundred-year quagmire called Afghanistan is ridiculous. Thirty years ago the Russians lost a generation of kids while we supported the Mujahedin, which spawned a Bin Laden. Tell me why it makes sense for Americans to emulate the Russian experience.

Afghans do one thing brilliantly—kill each other. It’s their national sport or religion, or both.

If we have to indulge our own blood lust, buy 5000 more Predator drones and play remote control war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but take the soldiers out of the field and away from the hideous roadside bombs.

I am grateful to our brave soldiers for their sacrifice to country, but I am sick of politicians sending kids out to be killed in another meaningless war we cannot win. Hell, we don’t even know who’s on our team.

Question: This Thanksgiving, what are you thankful for?

Salvatore Giunta, the first soldier to win the Congressional Medal of Honor
while still living since the Vietnam War

With GM going public today and bringing back billions to the taxpayers, we are seeing a batch of revisionist opinion pieces about Rick Wagoner, former head of the auto giant.

Malcolm Gladwell, a favorite writer of mine, wrote a fascinating review of Steven Rattner’s new book, Overhaul, about the restructuring of GM for the Obama Administration. Rattner is a Wall Street mover and shaker who headed the restructuring in Detroit. Rattner saw Wagoner as a bureaucratic company guy and ultimately fired him, bringing in crusty Ed Whitacre to oversee the saving of a big part of the American auto industry.

Gladwell sees Wagoner as the guy who did most of the heavy lifting—chopping people, making a historic deal with the UAW, building a Chinese business, developing the Cadillac CTS and Chevy Malibu, and initiating the Chevy Volt.

Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal also wrote a laudatory ode to Big Rick, former Duke basketball bench warmer.

I see Wagoner as the Gorbachev of General Motors. He was an important transitional figure who understood the company’s problems and tried his best to save the company without blowing it up.

Like Gorby, he had to go when everything imploded. Rattner is no Yeltsin, but the oligarchs of Wall Street will make billions like their counterparts in Russia did after the fall.

Question: Do you think Wagoner was Obama’s fall guy?

Pilkington Metal Finishing employs 110 workers and does upwards of $5 million a year in aluminum anodizing work out of a 72,000 square foot building five minutes from the Salt Lake City airport.

From his desktop computer, with the help of specially designed software, company founder and president Van Pilkington can monitor and track in real time, the jobs in progress of each of his production workers.

But it wasn’t always so. The business, he recalls only too well, began a quarter century ago about as modestly as an enterprise possible can: in a cinder block garage that her ented for $145 a month. With nobody but himself on the payroll, Pilkington loaded jobs into the back of the family pickup after his afternoon classes at the University of Utah, did them himself on the little tank line that he and his father had set up in the garage, delivered them a day or two later, then scurried home to type up invoices.

His father, who’d retired from the Air Force and worked for a Fortune 500 company that supplied chemical and process equipment to the metal finishing industry, had helped with $4,500 in seed money – and more importantly, suggested an eager account – a medical devices company that needed many of its expensive parts refurbished. “This is something we don’t want to do in-house,” the company’s purchase agent told Pilkington. “It’s a good opportunity for an enterprising young man like yourself.”

Read full article here

We are seeing an acceleration of year end buying in machinery for both new and used equipment. One reason for this is the widespread business expectation that prices for new machine tool inventory ordered from Japan will reflect the 25 percent drop in the past year of the value of the U.S. dollar versus the Japanese yen.

The Japanese importers generally erred on the conservative side when 2010 orders were placed, which means the cupboards are now relatively bare. I’m hearing that 10 percent to 13 percent price increases are coming on Japanese built equipment, indicating that the builders hedged the yen or they just don’t think the American market will accept whopping increases in one gulp.

If we continue to see yen versus dollar in the current range of 80-85 it would not be surprising to see DMG/Mori Seiki USA bite the bullet and build a plant, probably in Davis, California. Other builders could follow suit if they see North America as a growth market.

Nevertheless, we Americans are so ethnocentric we still see ourselves as everybody else’s primary focus. As President Obama just learned at the G-20 meeting, China, India, Brazil, Korea and Southeast Asia are where the growth is if you are a world player.

With Japanese machine tool builders still recovering from an almost catastrophic 2009 they may be reluctant to invest big in a North American market with slow growth, a weakening currency, and an old workforce that is not being renewed by well organized worker training nor liberal immigration policies.

So in the foreseeable future, swallow hard, and pay the price if you want to expand.

Question: Will future sticker shock for new equipment push you to buy used machinery?