The tragedy in Japan is horrific from a human standpoint, but as a parochial businessman in the machining realm I’m also interested in how it affects my operation. It appears that most Japanese machine tool builders suffered minimal damage because they are located far from the epicenter of the earthquake. Citizen, Mori and Tsugami say they did not incur significant damage. Mazak has a facility in Sendai that was damaged, but it is not a big production plant. One builder that did incur damage is Citizen-owned Miyano, which has a plant closer to the site of the quake. Though nobody…
Author: Lloyd Graff
The New York Mets ownership group is trying to sell 25 percent of the team because they are being sued by the attack-dog lawyer representing the victims of Bernie Madoff. The lawyer, Irving Picard, claims that the hedge fund operators who own the Mets realized huge “profits” from Madoff and should have known he was running a Ponzi scheme. This brings up an idea I have been thinking about for a long time, the “fiction of money.” In our Graff-Pinkert & Co. machinery business we are often asked to do appraisals of machinery, usually for financial institutions or consultants. We…
Ryan and Adam Goldston are 5’11” 23 year-old basketball lovers who dreamed of dunking, but their legs said, “Sorry.” Their longing to jam took them down the entrepreneur path, and they developed a dunking shoe for guys with no hops. Their company, Athletic Propulsion Labs, has designed and built shoes with tiny internal springs that they claim can add 3.5 inches to an average jumper’s elevation and as much as 8 inches to the leap of a top athlete. They sent their shoes to the NBA office to ask for permission to solicit the endorsement of players in the League…
Dan, Pels our publishing guru for Screw Machine World magazine, thought he was asking a simple question yesterday, “What title should we put on the masthead under your name, Lloyd?” He set off a day of heavy wrestling with the issue because, for me, it was crucial to the magazine and how I define myself. “Would you call yourself an editor, a publisher or a writer?” he asked innocently. I stared blankly at the whiteboard on the wall looking for a clue. None of those titles felt right. They were too generic. They were too white bread, too Chevrolet. I…
Dear Michael Bloomberg (Mayor of New York City), Just wanted to alert you that I am available, if the hours are right, to join the stable of writers of your new “Bloomberg View” enterprise. Our views on free trade (pro), taxes (don’t like ‘em) and tobacco (tax it like hell) are congruent. The $500 grand a year you are offering to prominent journalists is a nice round number I could live with. I could add knowledge about the manufacturing world, which your provincial New York Wall Street-focused crowd could certainly use. As a fellow magazine publisher I can relate to…
CalTech has had 32 Nobel Prize winners on its faculty, but in sports they are just a bunch of losers. The college basketball team had lost every conference game for 26 straight years; 310 games of futility against local colleges in southern California like Whittier and Cal Lutheran. In baseball they have lost 412 conference games in a row. Why do kids even go out for teams that never win? This is the The Bad News Bears to the tenth power. CalTech finally won a Conference game on January 29th against Occidental (Barack Obama’s alma mater). Should we applaud their…
Interesting juxtaposition of auction sales. Corporate Assets sold Die-Matic in Hamilton, Ontario. Gorgeous machinery including a 2004 L-20 Citizen and a 2003 M-20 Citizen . With buyers premium the L-20 brought $115,000 and the M-20 brought $127,000. Two weeks later TCL Auctions sold a 2004 Star ECAS 20 for $175,000 and a 2006 Star SR-20II , for $180,000. A 2007 Willeman CNC Swiss fetched $275,000. In late January, J.L. Spear sold off Alessandro Co., an old Acme shop in Los Angeles. Acme-Gridley 1 1/4” RA6 machines in fair condition of 1970 vintage brought $2-3,000. A little 2007 Okuma ECLII lathe,…
I am seeing a lot of anecdotal evidence of people playing the system when it comes to receiving unemployment benefits. We have been seeking to hire a part time worker. The person who we were pursuing turned us down because they do not want to jeopardize their unemployment benefits, and they already have a part time gig where they’re paid in cash. I know of another person looking for a full time sales job, while getting by on unemployment and bar tending. I think one of the reasons unemployment statistics seem so peculiar these days, during this broad based recovery…
Tom Friedman, a superb columnist for the New York Times, asked a rhetorical question while being interviewed a few days ago by Charlie Rose: “Why hasn’t Egypt developed in the last 20 years like Taiwan or Singapore or India?” He could have added Israel or even Islamic Malaysia. Egypt has mineral wealth, tourism, water and millions of educated English speakers. It has the ingredients for success as a nation, yet it has floundered abysmally with enormous unemployment, corruption and lack of political freedom. We should be surprised that the revolt by its citizens has not happened sooner. The sparks of anger…
I’ve survived the Great Blizzard of 2011 in Chicago. Fortunately, I have the money to hire a fellow with a pickup and a plow to clean my driveway. For me, the storm was an event to celebrate, not fear, but I will still have to work around the aftermath for a few days. Over the last weekend, my wife and I visited friends in Austin, Texas, who have a different approach to Chicago winters–they avoid them. Ricky and Debbie have a home and business in Chicago but also spend lot of their time in Austin. They bought a home there,…