I heartily recommend the current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek for a brilliant article on the Takata airbag saga, recounting the dubious decisions the company made in the 1990s, leading to the enormous legal entanglements of today. The title of the piece is “60 Million Car Bombs.” I am fascinated by Takata’s story, not only because I own a 2003 Toyota Avalon that had an airbag replacement recall recently, but because it relates to the machining business that many of my customers are in. The Bloomberg story indicates that Takata employees understood the danger of using ammonium nitrate as the explosive…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Within the first week of June 2016, 13 Chicagoans have been shot and killed, primarily in the war zone called the South Side of Chicago. In Cincinnati a 17-year-old well-behaved gorilla was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a 4-year-old child wiggled into his living space. Anxious zookeepers followed protocol and shot the gorilla to save the child. A week earlier at a zoo in Chile a seemingly deranged man snuck into the big cat area, stripped naked and offered his flesh to the lions. The zookeepers obeyed their preset ground rules and shot two lions dead…
The biggest basketball games of the year are starting. I’m pumped for Steph Curry vs. LeBron James, but the game I’m looking forward to even more will be at a family wedding in Virginia this Saturday. For the last 40 years, at almost every wedding or Bar Mitvah weekend on my wife Risa’s side of the family, the cornerstone of the event is the family “North vs. South” basketball game between members of the Levine clan. The natural rivalry is between my wife’s family from Charlotte and the other Levines from the New York area. The games started when Risa’s…
Monday I went to the Cubs game with my boy Roberto. I’ve known Roberto for about nine years. I met him when I started salsa dancing. My first memory of him is when he was hitting on a girl who I ended up dating for a short time. He’s 50 years old, from Columbia (he grew up in Chicago), and I think that neither of us are exactly sure what the other one does for a living, but we have things in common and we connect. I consider him one of my best friends in Chicago, probably my best guy…
Observations of the machining business at mid-year. There seems to be a real case of the blahs in the market. Auctions from the wreckage of the domestic frackers are swamping the Southwest. Waves of 10-year-old CNC lathes and mills are hitting the market and depressing prices. Haas VF-2 and VF-3 machines, market staples, have softened 20% in the last year. Even the CNC Swiss market which has been strong for so long is softer, partly because the Japanese Yen’s weakness versus the dollar has enabled new machine sellers to discount. The total market has also eroded with ferocious worldwide competition…
“Make America Great Again.” The vision that phrase invokes has half of America backing Donald Trump for President, who last year wasn’t a serious candidate, even in his own mind. News of Trump’s numerous character flaws pours out in the press, but many Americans couldn’t care less and will vote for him anyway — if not out of anger for the system, then in agreement with his shrewdly chosen catch phrase. That’s the power of a well thought out vision or campaign. In 1996, during my Sophomore year of high school in Hinckley, Illinois, our class of 60 kids, made…
A funny thing happened on the way to my colonoscopy. I followed the directions the hospital sent me perfectly. Tuesday, the day before the test, I drank a lot of water and then imbibed 64 fluid ounces of Gatorade mixed with a large bottle of colon cleaner called Miralax, something I had used before. Then I continued to drink more water before going to sleep, just to be sure my system was clean as a whistle. I nodded off quite easily at 10:30pm but the rest of the night is a blur. My wife, Risa, says that I woke her…
Lloyd and Noah Graff are away this week. We are featuring Jerry Levine’s excellent review of Born on a Blue Day, which is highly relevant today. America and much of the rest of the western world is suffering through an epidemic of autism. The disease is called a spectrum disorder because it does not manifest itself with a single set of symptoms, but covers a range of behaviors. At the worst, its victims are non-communicative and may do violence to themselves and others. At the best are those diagnosed as Asperger’s Syndrome, where they have above average intelligence, but very…
I am on vacation for a week. I thought rerunning this column by Jerry Levine from four years ago would give us an insight into the rise of Donald Trump and the impending dissolution of the Republican Party. I invite your comments. -Lloyd Graff David Brooks of The New York Times writes, “I’ll be shocked if there is another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” Murray writes, “For most of our nation’s history, whatever inequality in wealth between our richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere…
Are you skeptical of people who claim to be INCREDIBLE at something? According to extensive scientific studies, the people who claim to be incredibly talented and intelligent are either genuinely incredible or they are incredibly bad and ignorant about how bad they are. National Public Radio’s “This American Life” recently did a piece about the research of scientists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The scientists conducted tests on undergrads at Cornell University in which they gave the students three quizzes. One was on grammar, another on logical reasoning and another on humor—such as asking them which of several jokes was…