Major League Baseball is facing a major league problem. Its audience is bored and fading away. For a fan like me, this is a minor problem. I love my team, the Chicago Cubs, but if they are awful and boring, I can switch to Netflix, reading, or a podcast for entertainment. But for the baseball industry and the gambling community, which make their very profitable livelihoods from fans like me, baseball and boring cannot afford to go together for long before it really starts to hurt. From an entertainment standpoint, it is not too hard to figure out why the…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Kyle Schwarber, playing for the Washington Nationals, is on a roll. He has hit 15 homers in a 17-day span, the first major leaguer in history to accomplish that feat. His remark after his last two-homer game was striking: “To be honest with you, I want to play stupid, just keep going up there and take your at-bat. Don’t remember the one before, just live in the present. Just go out there and have a short memory.” Watching the NBA playoffs a couple days ago, I watched Trae Young, the 22-year-old superstar of the Atlanta Hawks on his way to…
Is it really possible that the “thing,” the loud, relay operated, cam directed monstrosity called by the name of a sofa, is on the comeback trail? Is it possible that the “thing” named for a little burg in Connecticut that chews up brass like it’s a kosher hot dog, still has a following? Could it be possible that the stodgiest of plodding metal dinosaurs that uses so many cams for one job that it requires voluminous shelves to categorize them, still has a fan club? Folks, it may just be possible in this weird, finally unmasked, industrial moment, that the…
A good client of mine is trying to buy a company to get the employees. The firm is not making money, but he is so desperate to hire workers near his main operation in Ohio that he is willing to overlook the financials because he believes acquiring the firm will enable him to bring in his own lucrative work to make the transaction pay. How did the machining world get into this pickle? It is not new, but rarely has it been this acute. I have studied it as a participant in the industry with skilled and semi-skilled employees, and…
Last Friday we sold a Swiss machine. It was an OK deal, but in order to complete the sale we had to take some live tooling from a different machine we own and transfer it to the one we sold. We don’t know how much the live tooling is going to cost to replace it, but we made a calculated judgement that robbing one of our other machines was worth it. The important part was to make a sale. Close the deal! Because even in a good market, as we seem to be in right now, it’s hard to close…
The Ford F-150 pickup trucks, with an average selling price $40,000, are sitting unfinished in assembly plant parking lots. For lack of computer chips, they cannot be driven or sold. Ford will lose at least $2.5 billion in sales this year. Most of it will never be recaptured. Ford and most of the car companies are victims of being slaves to the philosophy of “lean.” Their unwavering belief that their computers and data analysts can predict usage and dictate the ordering of components to wring out the last nickel of profit in order to raise the price of the stock…
May of 2021, after over 50 years of treasure hunting in the machinery business, I am still making a living by searching for overlooked items to find diamonds covered in cutting oil. Some of these machines we might have actually sold their current owners. It makes me think back to a blog I wrote in 2018 about six de Kooning paintings found by a man named David Killen in a New Jersey storage locker. I decided to check up on what happened to the paintings and see if they sold for much money. Here is the original blog, followed by…
It is finally a moment to look back on the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 and think about the changes in America it has hastened. Many of them would have happened over time but were dramatically sped up by sickness and recovery. **** First, healthcare. The astonishing development of the mRNA vaccines to quickly spur immunity with minimal side effects will go down as one of the greatest advances in medicine in a hundred years. The Turkish husband and wife team in Germany and the Moderna scientists in America had both been working on their ideas for more than a decade…
FYI: If you have ended up on this blog post after clicking the link for the “My Quest for Serendipity” blog on the email blast, click here to the go the proper post. Growing up, I never really “got” Mother’s Day. My mother never did either. The holiday was a big deal, but not for her. It was always about my grandmother, my father’s mother, Ethel Graff, who I think my mother hated. She cast a pall over our family because my dad, a strong, powerful and loving man, was manipulated by her for as long as…
President Joe Biden speaks to Congress after his first 100 days in office tonight. Washington and the media will listen as he intones a profoundly left-wing agenda. The Congress is closely divided, a 6 vote margin in the House, 50-50 in the Senate. The Democrats are hoping for court packing of the Supreme Court to 13 and getting Senators from the District of Columbia. Currently 6 House seats are vacant, awaiting interim elections. The left-wing media is cheering and the Republican strategists are delighting as Biden tilts strongly to the left in his rhetoric and policies, almost ensuring (in my…