Comment by mlyle

Comment by mlyle 2 days ago

> > There was no capital investment, because why pay to have a huge line that isn't being used.

I was specifically talking about war materiel. The US is not doing great at making things like low-tech artillery shells, because we've not had a large line running for them for quite some time. In retrospect, it would have been better to have a bigger stockpile and to be paying for more line capacity.

Things are steadily ramping, but it's taken a good year and a half to get to the quantities we now want.

> > Military are terrible customers ... You spend a lot of effort and business just evaporates.

> This only applies to companies that lack vision, that seem to only be able to keep stamping out the same widget as 20 years ago.

Nah, vision or not: political winds change and projects get killed. Being involved in an early program is exceptionally high risk: you need to start ramping to do the whole thing and you may get a good return on capital or a pittance.

> Seems like a lack of leadership, instead of an existential proof that Tek can't compete.

The overwhelming majority of the test equipment marketplace has commoditized out. This is a problem if you're still mostly a test equipment vendor. It would be even worse if Tek had higher costs.

> This actually sounds like the kind of visionary leadership that Tek or the larger Portland metro needs.

In those sentences, I'm not talking about Tek: I'm saying the United States has, as elementary economics predicted, specialized in areas where it has a comparative advantage over other countries. It is not possible to have a comparative advantage in "everything."

ddingus 2 days ago

>Nah, vision or not: political winds change and projects get killed. Being involved in an early program is exceptionally high risk: you need to start ramping to do the whole thing and you may get a good return on capital or a pittance.

Often, people wonder about the higher cost associated with government cobtract work. One does need to cost out those risks and include them in project costs.

"Elementary Economics"

Economics is not a science. We cannot execute the scientific method on Economics because we have no way to repeat and or establish controls needed to understand results.

Policy drove "elementary economics", and made it predictive. And the policy was driven by strong advocacy dressed up as real science too. That advocacy was produced by people of significant means wanting more and more control.

Change the policy, and we will see the Economics change too.

Fact is we gutted a lot of small to mid sized manufacturing, and with it went many strong opportunities for people to take advantage of. Those people require help to make it because the opportunities they did find, if they found them at all, do not pay enough to make it, or should they, the labor burden and often painful scheduling makes for tired people lacking often the means and energy required to build skill on their own.

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hollerith 2 days ago

>Economics is not a science. We cannot execute the scientific method on Economics because we have no way to repeat and or establish controls needed to understand results.
You could say the same thing about mathematics, but it remains the case that it is useful to know some math.

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- ddingus 2 days ago
  
  Of course math is not a science either. Ultimately, math is a reasoning tool and in the economic context, it is not a complete tool.
  There is policy, and that has a major league effect on what will make good economic sense.
  The current policy could change, and that would impact what is worth what and why and the math can tell us what it always has.
  Here is one:
  For a long time we have ignored anti monopoly laws.
  When competition is present, margins are less, people tend to get higher value for the dollar. When it is not present, margins are higher and people get much less value for the dollar.
  Right now, big grocery is wanting to do one more merger to basically put Krogers in charge of grocery stores, with its competition being Walmart and maybe Amazon.
  So far, each merger has reduced the number of products available to people and higher prices. But someone somewhere is banking more and paying less.
  I like competition. I like higher value for the dollar and choice in business. I bring this up because I personally dislike Kroger and it is all about the much lower value per dollar.
  How this all goes is political. Policy may be to preserve competition to prevent price gouging and all that comes with a monopoly.
  The math may say more dollars are made by having one company, but that same math says it comes at the expense of the people too.
  Does not, and I would argue, should not go that way.
  
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