It's a generic problem with flat demand in heavy industry. Shipbuilding, bridges, nuclear reactors - when the production backlog runs down and the factory goes idle, the factory dies. So do the companies that feed specialized parts into the process.
Governments keep making contracts with megacorp prime contractors, who stiff their suppliers at the first opportunity, instead of the SMEs that are essential to reliable long term capability. It's the bean counter obsession with counting delivered parts as the only basis for payment.
This would be a great opportunity for the government to get involved.. Tell them to just make two of every order they have now and the government will buy the second one at whatever price the customer is paying. Put the spares in a strategic repository and sell them at “cost” to whoever wants them. Would be a much better use of a few billion dollars than some asinine Star Wars II or another half a trillion into the war maw.
The head of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock, which builds the US aircraft carriers, once ran a full page ad announcing that if Congress would order two carriers at once, instead of one at a time, they'd throw in a third carrier for free. The total shutdown between jobs was that expensive for them.
Liquidity is expensive. Selling a carrier one at a time is like a retail business where you're expected to hold onto stock. If you don't build up an inventory to sell from and just sell one unit, you have to markup the price to cover the cost of the factory when it is idle.
It’s a major cause of why the U.S. shipbuilding industry can produce such a tiny number of surface combatants per year, despite having the industrial capacity to do far more if it was steady work.
The US Government selling off the helium reserve at cost over two decades effectively capped the global price, even while exploration costs got higher. So exploration was killed, no investments made in better extraction, processing or recycling.
Now that it's gone we're ultra dependent on a by-product of methane extraction and liquification for LNG transport. But most of the helium we extract as natural gas is not separated, as it just gets piped as gas. Helium is getting very very expensive.
You can have the government buy the equipment with the economy goes down, or you can have the government manufacturing it and letting the factory go idle when demand dries down.
But amplifying the orders just makes the problem worse.
Have the government only sell these in times of crisis. They're not competitors, but vendors of last resort. For general maintenance replacement, the gov should tell prospective buyers to take a hike.
The Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act and used $250m of IRA funds to increase production of grid transformers. Guess what happened when Trump took office.
This reads like you just desperately wanted to criticize, but couldn't really be troubled to research the background for a minute or two.
The IRA was a law passed by Congress. It set aside funds for grid upgrades, but did give some latitude to the President to deal with crises, because it was understood that Congress couldn't move quickly enough to deal with sudden supply issues. One thing that happened was the investments into grid upgrades created a demand shock, and transformer pricing and timelines surged upwards. So at that point the President invoked the DPA and used a chunk of IRA funding to try to unsnarl the transformer pipeline so the rest of the project could proceed. Then Trump (for basically arbitrary reasons) decided to screw it up. (He's also screwed it up in ways that probably just plain violate the law, but he doesn't care about that either -- which is why "run policy purely from the Legislative branch" doesn't fix any of this.)
Given the context -- a broad law duly passed by the slower legislative branch, a crisis dealt with (according to the law) by the more nimble Executive branch -- I am struggling to make your criticism sound reasonable, even with the absolute maximal dose of charity. This is basically the kind of governance that we want a functioning Legislative and Executive branch to engage in; it was screwed up on purpose; and your proposed solution/excuse does not produce better outcomes.
The problem expressed, I think, that it is not useful to scale up production quickly (or perhaps at all), because a factory catching up on all of their orders means that the factory goes idle. Idle factories can't afford to pay wages, so they lay off some or all of the workers -- and those folks go and find different jobs.
And when they leave, they take their institutional knowledge with them.
So the sustainable goal is to never be idle, and the way to accomplish this is to never catch up.
For an example of how idle factories can go sideways, look at the Polaroid film story: Polaroid closed. Everyone left. Some investors with a big dream eventually bought many of the physical assets that remained.
But owning some manufacturing equipment didn't help them much because the institutional knowledge of producing Polaroid film had already evaporated. They had to largely re-invent the process. (And they've done a great job of that, but it's still not the same film as the OG Polaroid was.)
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So anyway, suppose the government steps in and simply artificially multiplies transformer orders x2, and pays them fairly for this doubled production. Since transformers are tangible things and we can't just spin up more AWS instances to cover demand, the immediate result is that the "short" lead time on new orders has increased from 2 years, to 4.
That's not seeming to be very ideal. It seems to amplify the problem instead of resolve it.
I suppose that the government could also offer safeguards that would help protect the businesses (including suppliers for parts) once they eventually catch up on orders, and that this might motivate them to scale production sooner instead of later (or never).
Which -- you know -- that isn't unprecedented. As an example: The Lima Army Tank Plant, in Lima, Ohio, is place where I've spent a fair bit of quality time. It still exists and continuously has employees largely because the institutional knowledge of how to build tanks (and a few other war machines) is considered to be too important to lose. During lulls, it mostly just sits there on its expansive site, loafing along repairing stuff that comes in, and waiting for the day when things to turn bad enough that we need to start increasing our number of tanks again.
It needs to keep operating (at any expense), and so with the magic of the government money-printing machine: It does. But it's one of the most actively depressing industrial sites I've ever been to; like the life just gets sucked right out of you before even getting past the entrance gate.
We can certainly extend that kind of thing to transformer production. But should we?
I mean: I've got some MREs in the pantry along with some other shelf-stable food, and I've got some water stored (primarily to fill empty space in the chest freezer for various practical reasons, but it exists). I keep some basic first aid and survival stuff in the car (bandages, space blankets, stuff to catch fish with, stuff to cook with). I've got my camping gear, including a small off-grid solar power system, stored in organized totes that can be loaded up very quickly. And I try to keep a minimum of a couple hundred miles worth of fuel in the gas tank at all times.
I do these things just in case. The bulkiest items see frequent use. None of this cost me very much to buy, or to maintain. And none of these things can replace the lifestyle I've come to expect, but they might be able to buy me some time.
Can we afford to have a spare copy of the hard-to-produce parts of the electrical grid sitting in a warehouse?
Would we even want to rebuild the grid in the same shape if the shit really hit the fan and we had to start it over from scratch?
We're not talking about starting over from scratch, we're talking about replacing a bunch of parts after a major geomagnetic event or something similar. Yes -- we would very much want to do this. And hundreds of millions of lives would be at stake if we delayed longer.
Covid demonstrated that can't even successfully rejigger the distribution of toilet paper to adjust for a change in where people poop during the day. During the Great Bog Roll Shortage of 2020, the mills that make toilet paper didn't shut down, people didn't use the toilet any more than usual, and the hoarders and scalpers (while both present and despised) were a mostly-insignificant factor.
But yet: The store shelves were empty while the janitorial and institutional supply chains had a surplus. We were incompetent at moving things from Pile A and putting them into Hole B.
So, sure: In the event of an unprecedented geomagnetic event destroying big chunks of the grid, we're hosed. I agree. And people will die. It will be awful. If I'm sure of one thing, I'm sure that we'll somehow manage to completely fuck this up.
So maybe we should focus less on stockpiling a bunch of ludicrously-expensive parts that we hope to never have a use for. Instead, maybe we should focus more on making the grid less reliant on centralization, and instead comprise it of smaller parts that that can be operated more-independently.
Both things are very expensive.
One of them is a reactive solution to a problem we've never had -- and that we hope to never have. The other is a proactive solution we can start using immediately, and also into the future.
(An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say.)
It is important. We must not forget how to make transformers.
But the knowledge is already being preserved. Unlike the singular army tank plant (which smells like a combination of despair and naphthalene), there are a plurality of transformer factories in the US...and they are always operating at 100%.
As long as that continues to be the case (there's no sign that it will change), then the expertise is actively being employed, refined, remembered, and transferred.
So even if we do nothing, we're good on that front.
We just aren't keeping up with present-day demand. (Hence, the article.)
Lead times increasing to four years doesn't necessarily mean that every order will take that long. Since the additional orders are just there to cover idle periods, the government could omit an expected delivery time so regular orders don't get delayed.
I think that would mean that the factory would switch from operating at 100% capacity (and never catching up), to 100% capacity (and never catching up).
For that kind of sameness, it seems like it'd be easier to do nothing at all.
> You'd think if it's causing this much of a problem, there would be money available.
There’s plenty of economic solutions if companies are really that desperate. They can pay a premium to encourage more investment. They can invest themselves, or enter into partnerships, acquire their suppliers or even open their own facilities.
Companies often complain about shortages, but it usually comes with the caveat ‘at the price we’re willing to pay’
Even doodling on the margin can be distracting. Or doing little tricks with the pencil. But these don't distract the verbal part of the brain as much perhaps.
LLM is fundamentally not prone to the Socratic method. Socratic method requires both parts to learn something while the discourse. LLM will forget some shit often.
Source: I'm "on the spectrum." This often resulted in me being the skunk at the rationalization picnic, because I didn't realize the boss wanted me to rubberstamp a bad design.
Correct. But especially if you're using long cables a cable with more "headroom" in the eye diagram will perform more reliable than one that is just at the edge of breakup.
For home use that doesn't matter usually, but I for example run events where I need the cable to work also after 10 people stepped on it and then this can become a significant thing.
These two statements aren't mutually exclusive. The link is looking at the analog signal through an oscilloscope. The person you replied to is pointing out that after decoding and applying error correction, you can still end up with the same digital signal output. So the eye diagram charts are useful for detecting the quality of the cable, but as long as the quality is past a certain threshold, it does not matter.
And that threshold is "baked in" to the eye mask pattern you load into the tester. If the eye stays out of the masked areas, it passes, if it goes into the masked areas it fails. Oscilloscopes capable of eye diagram testing can trigger on failure, so if it passes an eye test it'll reconstruct correctly with proper timing.
It's a bit like software pricing, the marginal cost of production is low. You often see massively different prices charged to different types of customer.
I used to support an application used by about half a dozen businesses. They all knew each other, that's how I got their business.
Two of them were paying significantly more for their support than the others. That's because those two had their phone numbers set to ring even when my phone is in quiet mode. Just for the privilege of being able to wake me whenever you want, and get my attention even when I'm in the middle of a hike, you're paying substantially more.
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