By Lloyd Graff In this time period between Memorial Day and the 4th of July, I struggle with the idea of patriotism. What does it mean to be an American patriot in 2010? We honor our soldiers during this period, and they are worthy of praise for their sacrifice and service. But we can legitimately ask if ousting Saddam Hussein has made us safer as a country. Has it been worth over 4000 soldiers killed, thousands severely wounded and untold lives disrupted? I am grateful my children have not ended up in the theatre of war, even while I realize…
Author: Vincent
By Lloyd Graff The day after Memorial Day weekend I pose the question, “Should we be economic patriots”? When I wrote the car buying stories for the April and May TMW issues, I took heat from readers who felt I was derelict in not coercing my sons to buy American cars rather than Hyundai Sonatas. It turns out that the Sonatas are made in Montgomery, Alabama, and have more than 50 percent American content. Hyundai spent $1 billion to build a factory, and the workforce is almost entirely Alabaman, but ultimately, my sons’ buying decisions were based entirely on the…
By Lloyd Graff Here’s the good news and bad news everyone. Bad news—75 percent of Americans are overweight. We’re French frying ourselves to death. Good news—it’s going to be great for the precision machining business. Dr. Uli Sutor, key account manager at DMG, gave an illuminating talk at the first day of DMG/Mori Seiki’s Innovation Days, May 24, at its national headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. The event was a combination sales and networking event for the collaboration between two of the biggest players in the world machine business. Sutor’s presentation discussed the opportunities in the medical machining business. As…
By Noah Graff When is it best to take responsibility for a screw-up, even when you think it’s not entirely your fault? Recently NPR’s “Morning Edition” interviewed Patrick Kinney of Gaffney Bennet Public Relations to get his thoughts on BP’s current public response to the Gulf oil spill. Kinney had worked for Ogilvy Public Relations, which helped BP rebrand itself as “Beyond Petroleum” 10 years ago. At the beginning of the oil spill crisis BP’s PR team elected to deny responsibility for the disaster. However, later the company flip-flopped and admitted it was at fault. Kinney attributes BP’s first response…
By Lloyd Graff Today’s Machining World Archive: May 2010 Vol. 6, Issue 04 I received impassioned letters (one is printed on page 13) about my “Swarf” piece in April recounting the purchase of new Hyundai cars by my two sons Noah and Ari. The letters were clearly heartfelt and probably representative of the feelings of many readers. They deserve an honest reply. I did not buy the cars. My sons bought them, and they were focused on the monthly payments. Like me, neither are car buffs, but they valued my opinion on the car buying process more than on which…
By Lloyd Graff Barry Zito of the San Francisco Giants is 6-1 this season, his fourth since signing a $126 million free-agent contract. Zito won the American League Cy Young award in 2002 when he pitched for the Oakland A’s. I’ve always been intrigued by guys who have it, lose it, and then find it again, years later. When confidence evaporates it is so hard to recover the belief. For professional athletes who get the monster money like Zito we often see a dropoff in the performance the year after the contract is signed. I remember an interesting piece in…
By Lloyd Graff The $64 billion dollar question for the economy is, what happens to employment? What happens to unemployment is related, but the two numbers do not always shift in tandem. We are seeing a strengthening in manufacturing now and the overtime strategy seems to be waning. Productivity stats are still impressively bullish but they are starting to level off. You can only squeeze so much juice out of the lemon. The Labor Department acknowledges that people are being hired in manufacturing and my anecdotal evidence confirms this. New construction is still pathetically soft in most markets, but we…
By Lloyd Graff The hot movie at the Cannes Film festival is Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987). Michael Douglas plays Gordon Gekko again, who returns to the Street after spending eight years in prison. Art imitates reality. Reality imitates art. I just finished Michael Lewis’ brilliant new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, about the appalling fraud among the big shooters on the Street during the subprime fiasco. He could have used the same title he used for his last best seller, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, because…
By Lloyd Graff I understand that some Japanese machine tool builders are running painfully short of inventory in the United States. Sales in Japan are up 260 percent year to year. The American distributors under ordered last year and the Japanese factories slowed production, while huge Chinese orders flooded in several months ago. Six hundred CNC Swiss lathes went to one builder and 285 machining centers went to another for cell phone dies, swamping the companies. Now American demand is perking up, and the cupboards are bare. It will be interesting to see if ¥92 to the dollar will justify…
By Lloyd Graff Elena Kagan has impressive credentials to become a Supreme Court justice, but her nomination brings up some interesting questions about the composition of the court. If she is confirmed there’ll be three Jews and six Catholics on the High Court—no Protestants, Buddhists, Muslims or evangelical Christians. Four of nine Justices will be from New York city if Kagan gets in, one from each borough except Staten Island. With Kagan’s appointment all nine Justices will have gone to either Harvard or Yale Law School. There will then be three women on the High Court which would be a…