The aftermath of Super-storm Sandy makes me ask the question whether a generator should become standard equipment in homes and businesses. My wife has a big family in New Jersey and New York. Many of them have sought refuge this week at a close by lake home they own jointly that has a built-in generator. At Graff-Pinkert we lose power several times a year. It has become more than an inconvenience. Our phone and Internet service are tied to the electric grid. I’m starting to think we should buy a generator for the office, and possibly at least a portion…
Author: Lloyd Graff
I am one of the dwindling number of Americans who have never owned a gun – or a rifle, semi-automatic, shotgun, or RPG. I did practice using a rifle (M-16) with targets shaped like people in Basic Training, but the idea of firing at a real living person terrifies me. Tramping into the woods to hunt and kill deer or ducks doesn’t excite me either, though I can imagine that the camaraderie of friends dressed up in orange and camo, packing rifles on a camping trip in the woods could be exhilarating. I just have no fascination with guns. I…
Do we now have two National Anthems? The “Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America”? At Yankee Stadium they play the Banner before the games and the Irving Berlin masterpiece in the seventh inning (and not just during playoff games). Frankly, I think “God Bless America” is definitely more inspiring, more melodic, and much easier to sing and remember. I do love the creativity that various artists have shown on national television, starting with the remarkable Jose Feliciano rendition of the awkward Star Spangled Banner. The song is just plain old and lacking meaning today – “Rockets red glare?” Please……
A little more than two weeks to go before the 2012 American election. It seems like business is stuck in the mud–slinging. I’m going to make the contrarian case that this is precisely the time for people to take action, because almost everybody is so scared about the outcome of the election. If the President is re-elected, many people I talk to think it will be a bad thing for small business and manufacturing. But if you listened to his arguments, Obama is gung ho for small business and manufacturing, and the remarkable thing is that this segment of the…
One of the more interesting areas developing in manufacturing today is the three-dimensional printing of parts. The process is in vogue for the rapid prototyping gang. It merited a front cover story in The Economist’s April 2012 issue and was a hot area at IMTS. Recently, somebody printed a guitar of playable quality. Another party copied most of a gun, which made some law enforcement folks shiver. With the availability of guns legally and illegally, plastic guns are probably the least of our worries. Publicly held firms like Stratasys have been bid up to stratospheric levels, partly because sales have…
I am suffering from a case of auction advertising fatigue on the Web. Every morning I see 15 or 20 ads for auctions on various sites. I used to open most of them looking for a nugget of useful information. Now I just feel overwhelmed, and maybe open a couple. Machine tools are my business and even I won’t open the undifferentiated commoditized email barrage, so I doubt most people care anymore. The Internet auctioneers have diminished the quality of their offerings by both showing the reserves and hiding the reserves. I think eBay has actually become more transparent because…
It’s October and I can’t resist writing about one of my true loves – not politics – baseball. It’s been another remarkable regular season. Baltimore and Washington make the playoffs. The Orioles and Yankees stay within a game of each other for the last two months of the season. Washington benches their stud pitcher Steven Strasburg for the last month and the playoffs because they believe a pitcher coming off Tommy John surgery should not pitch more than 160 innings. Amazing stuff. ***** Here’s another shocking story, courtesy of Hanan Fishman of Partmaker. Tsuyoshi Nishioka signed a $9.5 million dollar…
Richard Gonzalez, Chief Operating Officer of Abbott Laboratories (market cap $108 billion) has a Bachelors Degree from the University of Houston and a Graduate Degree in Biochemistry from the University of Miami. Except he really doesn’t. Niaspan, Abbott’s potential blockbuster drug, was going to be the next big thing in cardiovascular care – except a study published after it hit the market showed it didn’t do anything to prevent heart attacks. Is there a link between a COO who fudged his credentials and a drug his company over-hyped? Do we care if Harvard jocks cheated on tests or if Derrick…
By all accounts I have heard IMTS was a major success for the exhibitors. I am always skeptical about supposed pre-registration numbers at shows, but this year it appears that IMTS actually exceeded the 87,000 number that was floated before the show started. The 100,000 mark was probably reached. If you can generalize, buyers were even more schizophrenic than usual. With excellent cash flows the last couple of years, manufacturing migrating back to North America from China, and with favorable depreciation rules for the moment, this should have been a selling free-for-all. But I gather many buyers were drooling yet…
For 10 years, once a month, I would leave my comfortable bed at 4:45 a.m., drive through the winter slush to a local Jewish temple, and schlep mattress pads off the floor where 50 homeless guys had snored the night away in warmth and awkward camaraderie. I did it not out of a soaring sense of compassion for the hapless poor of American society, though those feelings did warm me on those frigid mornings, but because my friend Jerry Levine, oil industry lobbyist and book reviewer extraordinaire for Today’s Machining World, suggested I do it. The volunteers used to go…