The stats tell us a lot about the economy, which is erratically bouncing along. Housing starts are up 6% over last year in the latest figures, but multi-family is jumping up 17%. In Palo Alto, California, this week, visiting my daughter, I’m getting a birds-eye view sipping my coffee while listening to the buzz and hum of construction tools in Silicon Valley. There is an occasional single-family house going up, but there are hundreds of apartments, hotel rooms and condos being built down El Camino Real, which bisects towns like Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino where Stanford, Google and…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Lockheed Martin thinks it can make fusion power a reality within a decade ONE of the clichés of nuclear-power research is that a commercial fusion reactor is only 30 years away, and always will be. Hence a flurry of interest—and not just a little incredulity—when, on October 15th, news emerged that Lockheed Martin, a big American engineering company, has a new design for a fusion reactor that it reckons could be in use in a decade. A team at Lockheed’s renowned Skunk Works, where its wilder (and often secret) ideas are developed, reckons fusion is ripe for a rethink. Attempts to harness…
My impression is that business is slowing a bit in our machining world, though IMTS exhibitors moved a lot of iron. Auction prices have trended softer for the last several months. The recent Belden sale brought prices considerably lower than I had expected during the summer when the company was taking bids from auctioneers. The recent mini collapse of oil prices has sent gasoline prices under $3.00 per gallon in low tax states like New Jersey. While this is something to be thankful for ahead of Thanksgiving, the oil patch is suffering from heartburn, adjusting to $80 crude. Break even…
I am watching an intriguing phenomenon in American education that has long-term implications for our economy and China’s political life. There is a large and increasing influx of high-paying Chinese students from China coming to the United States for high school and college. The University of Illinois has 600 students from mainland China in the Freshman class, 10% of the enrollment. Other colleges have taken a similar course. On average, the international students are paying twice as much as in-state students. There is also a significant flow of high school students attending private schools around the country. Some have sprouted…
Slight shameless self-promotion. I need to tell all of you about my new opus that debuted on YouTube this week. I made a documentary entitled “Saving Ferris” about the Chicagoland locations of my favorite movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” In the documentary I go to almost all of the filming sites of the movie, from the Sears (Willis) Tower, to Wrigley Field, to Cameron Frye’s famous garage that housed the Ferrari California Spider. In the documentary I talk about where and what each location is and how they have changed over the last 25 years, but I also strive to…
These last several months have been a struggle for me to find workers for the cleaning and painting department of our used machinery business, Graff-Pinkert. You might think, with so many millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed, it should be quite easy to find manual laborers who want to make $11 per hour with the chance to get on the company health insurance plan worth $5 per hour more, plus virtually guaranteed overtime pay and a year-end bonus. But it isn’t. I’d like to share my recent experience. First of all, few women apply for the cleaning and painting jobs. Seemingly,…
The sign’s message was clear enough: Please Do Not Touch. For some visitors, however, the temptation was too great. Here at the recent Maker Faire, a traveling festival for technology enthusiasts, people ran their fingers over the car’s ribbed exterior. The bolder ones took a more brazen approach, knocking their fists against the surfaces to see how the material would respond. One eager young boy, all of about three feet tall, went further, licking a front fender to learn how it tasted. A mortified parent quickly admonished him. This irresistible attraction was a 3-D printed vehicle made by Local Motors,…
Wednesday was the first night of the Jewish New Year holiday, Rosh Hashanah. I took the day off from work, went to the Synagogue and thought about my life. We celebrated by having friends and family over for a big meal. I am grateful to live in a place that has allowed Jews to flourish and prosper. America is such a crazy wonderful exception in a world of intolerance and outright hatred. Anybody who has lived long enough to know people who fled the Nazis or has seen photos of Auschwitz, or like me, had the privilege to visit a…
One of the definitive currents I see in the economy of the 2010s is the democratization of technology. Computers and devices cost a tiny fraction of what they did just a few years ago, and the learning curve to operate them has eased dramatically. For a few hundred bucks a person can buy an HD video camera, edit video on a consumer computer and then broadcast what they’ve shot to the world online for free. People can create Web sites with free open source software like WordPress that they can learn to operate in a few days. A person can…
Two months ago, Metal Seal Precision of Mentor, Ohio, had a fire. The incident is a warning to people who run screw machines that the workplace is a dangerous environment. Nobody was injured, but it caused a huge mess from the smoke, heat and water. John Habe IV runs the family owned company and he is one of the smartest, shrewdest guys in the turned parts business. He is doing a massive juggling act, getting his insurance money, reviving the Metal Seal shop in their nearby Arrow Manufacturing plant. He currently is deciding which machines to save and which to…