Over the last ten years I’ve had a dozen surgeries and dealt with heart disease, prostate cancer and detached or damaged retinas in both eyes. I am a relatively wealthy guy in America, top one or per cent in savings and earnings, but without health insurance I would have been wiped out financially, and possibly dead or blind. I understand the disappointment and anger everybody feels toward the early phases of the Affordable Healthcare Act. it’s totally mismanaged, people on the left and right of the political spectrum agree. But so was Medicare at the beginning and George W. Bush’s…
Author: Lloyd Graff
The Tea Party and its junior partner, the Republican Party, is determined to drive itself to irrelevance in National Elections. By dooming the Immigration Reform Bill, Republicans will be seen as immigrant haters. With 2000 Latinos turning 18 every day and an expanding Asian population, a shrewd Democratic candidate can again get almost 80% of the vote of those two groups. The Republican Party is also doing a good job of alienating potential donors in Silicon Valley, where businesses desperately need H-1B reform to fill their job openings. Not only is it wrong on its merits, this is the dumbest…
DETROIT — THE moving assembly line was the simplest of inventions, born of necessity to meet the exploding demand for automobiles in America in the early 20th century. Angie Tostea on the assembly line at Ford’s plant in Wayne, Mich. The line, a legacy to the entire industry, celebrated its centennial this month. And while it turned 100 years old this month, “the line” remains as integral to the progress of the auto industry as it was in the days of Henry Ford. The assembly line is a constantly evolving industrial ballet of workers and robots building cars. And automakers like…
What do you do if the perfect building for expanding your company has just one flaw – it borders “the ghetto”? My client posed this problem to my daughter and I over fish tacos, as we overlooked the water near Oakland, California. His machining business is thriving these days with clients from aerospace to apple picking. He has outgrown his land-locked 20,000 square-foot brick building, still owned by his dad, who is in his 80s. Stanley, our client, is no novice at real estate. He has a side business flipping homes in the Bay Area and owns a valuable piece…
One of the prevailing myths in manufacturing today is that “there are no good people.” The reality is that there are good people, but you have to invest in them to make them top notch. Hydromat, the Swiss-American rotary transfer machine company in St. Louis, is making that investment today in young people coming out of nearby community colleges with a four-year in-house training program. The apprenticeship approach still works well in Europe, but it is rare to find companies in the U.S. with the long-term view to commit to a $50,000 training program in exchange for a two-year work…
General Motors is cautiously experimenting with selling cars online using a hybrid strategy of making the sale online, while running the transaction through a participating dealer. GM is gently tiptoeing into the Web strategy because its dealers are still a vital sales force. Dealers also have huge political clout and pay for a lot of brand advertising. But the specter of Google, Amazon and Tesla has to be spooking them. Google is developing a self-driving car which could be available by 2020. Amazon is a sales colossus that could go into the car business with a Chinese or Korean import.…
By Lloyd Graff. Nicholas Kohart’s company makes components for the natural gas industry in his manufacturing plant near Philly. Business is brisk, though the shale boom has changed his product mix. He is now in the market for a 2” capacity CNC lathe (might go a little bigger) with live tooling and sub-spindle. He runs mostly aluminum but has some projects coming up using stainless. Nick is not wedded to a particular builder. He knows he will buy a new lathe and he wants a capable local distributor. He contacted me to find a Web site that had candid user…
By Lloyd Graff. Conventional wisdom says that if you pour money into the American economy it causes inflation. I am really wondering if this “wisdom” is economists replaying a scenario in their minds that is now obsolete in the silicon age. The theory of scarcity of raw materials, scarcity of housing, scarcity of talent, scarcity of bananas or Berettas is proving to be flawed. The general trend for most prices in the economy is steady to down. In the world I live in, price increases are always challenged. CNC machines have improved and decreased in price. Hourly rates have stagnated,…
By Lloyd Graff. I listened to President Obama’s speech on Syria Wednesday. It shook me up, particularly the line about the children who were gassed and “never woke up.” I woke up at 4:30 am in a cold sweat and I could not go back to sleep. I saw the images of the poor gassed children in their burial white sheaths. And then I remembered my moment under the showers that spewed the Zyklon B gas at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. I was a concentration camp “tourist” at Majdanek, which is inside the Polish city of Lublin. The…
By Lloyd Graff. I was out in Palo Alto visiting my daughter and made a call on my new favorite coffee shop, Philz Coffee. The Philz approach to coffee makes Starbucks seem like a crude imposter, and I don’t think Starbucks is all that bad at what they do. But Philz is what Starbucks started out as, before it lost its way and corporatized, and before Howard Schultz wanted to own a pro-basketball team in Seattle and have books written about him. Philz was started by Phil Jabar 10 years ago, and the original location was in a corner grocery…