Tag: economics

The Two Faces of Economics

Michael Hudson explains the difference between Western neoliberal economics based on prices and debt, and historical economics based on actual production of goods and services.

Economics is not really a science as it’s taught. It’s a lobbying effort by the finance, insurance, and the real estate sector: the FIRE sector. It’s a lobbying effort by the parts of the economy that don’t produce goods and services, that only collect income without playing any productive role at all. Empty prices – that is price without any underlying value. And that is being promoted as economic growth.

And basically, it’s as if economics is like a criminal case in court where you have two opposing attorneys.The 19th century attorneys were prosecutors for the landlord class. They said, “Why should we have to pay the heirs of the warlords who conquered England and France to collect ground rents without producing anything? What possible function do they play? Why should we have to pay banks money for creating interest for creating credit that actually the governments can simply create their own money, or at least create credit for a productive purpose? And why do we permit monopolies, most of which were created by the government to sell off to creditors because it couldn’t afford to pay them their debt, why do we have to do anything of that? We don’t need it. Let’s get rid of the rentier sector.”The rentier sector being landlords, and bankers and monopolists.

Well, by the end of the 19th century, the rentiers fought back. And they developed what a defense attorney would do in a trial. They said, “There’s a whole different reality. There is no such thing as unearned income. There is no such thing as economic rent. Everybody deserves what they have. The landlord produces a valuable service in renting out the land and the housing and deciding who to rent to. And the bankers make a wonderful service when they charge interest. And especially when they charge a penalty fee because that helps make people pay their debts on time and that’s essential for productivity. So of course, we charge penalty fees as part of the gross domestic product. And monopolies are also part of the GDP, because after all, the monopolist is simply creating an orderly market.”

So, the problem is that instead of economic students getting both sides of the prosecution and the defense of the rentier economy, they’re only getting one side of the picture. They’re getting the defense of the rentiers, not the classical economics. And that’s why in graduate economic courses they no longer teach the history of economic thought. They no longer teach economic history. Because if you had the history of economic thought, you’d know that contrary to what Margaret Thatcher said, there is an alternative, that things don’t have to be this way.

There is a reason why China is growing so rapidly, and the American economy is being squeezed tighter and tighter. And that’s because its basically using its revenue to create new means of production and create a broader environment.

It’s true that it provides education freely, instead of charging $50,000 a year, which is what people have to pay in New York. But if you would say what if we credit China with every person with a degree of having paid $50,000 a year, obviously, that would be much bigger.

It’s true that the Chinese people do not have to pay $4,500 a month rent, which is the average rent here in New York City. Does that really make them poor? Or does paying the $4,500 a month rent that increases America’s GDP, actually turn out to be an economic burden?

This is why the Great Bifurcation between The Empire That Never Ended and the growing BRICS movement was both inevitable and unavoidable. The masters of the shell game can only keep winning as long as the suckers keep playing. But Russia has been kicked out of the game, China refuses to play the game except on its own terms, and their resultant success is encouraging dozens of other nations to stop playing the game.

Call it what you will, but Samuelsonian or Neo-Keynesian economics have always been nonsensical; so too is Friedmanite monetarism, because it is impossible to meaningfully quantify anything in a metric that is so readily expanded at will. One can only base social policies on “economic growth” so long before the reliance upon a myth results in insane and deleterious consequences.

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The Media Extinction Event

Clay Travis explains why ESPN is sinking fast, why the free ride that sports fans enjoyed at the expense of everyone else with a cable subscription has come to an end, and the inevitable implications for everyone in the media business

ESPN knows that their cable and satellite business is collapsing but, and this is key, they’ve also done the math and realize that streaming is going to destroy their existing cable business. Because, and this is what no one seems willing to say, ESPN doesn’t just have one bad business now — the cable and satellite bundle — they have the streaming business too, which is an even worse business. And, and this is very key, each business is accelerating the demise of the other. Streaming isn’t making ESPN stronger, it’s making ESPN weaker because it’s hastening the destruction of a profitable business — cable and satellite — for a money-losing business — streaming.

And that’s what many are still missing — as the cable and satellite bundle boat takes on water and sinks, the streaming bundle is also taking on water and sinking too. ESPN has tried to sell people on the idea that at the exact moment that the cable and satellite bundle collapses they are going to step to a brand new business, the streaming business, and it’s going to be a sturdy and successful lifeboat that carries them to richer waters.

But the reality is, streaming is a way worse business than the cable and satellite bundle. Because the only people who pay for ESPN will be sports fans. The free ride is over, your Aunt Gladys is never signing up and subsidizing your sports viewing again.

Let’s say ESPN makes $8 billion a year now in subscription fees. ($10 a month x 70 million subscribers they has before Charter cut this by 15 million). Toss in another two billion in advertising and let’s say ESPN presently nets around $10 billion a year. Okay, how many people will sign up for ESPN as a direct to consumer streaming service? If they could get 70 million subscribers we’d all have to pay $120 a year for ESPN streaming by itself. (This assumes advertising will still be the same, which it won’t, but let’s just be generous and pretend it will.) But, as I noted above, many of these people paying for ESPN now as part of their cable and satellite package never watch ESPN.

So how many people will actually subscribe to a direct to consumer ESPN streaming service? Turns out there are some early test cases.

The NFL Sunday Ticket is the most desirable direct to consumer product on the planet. Do you know how many households subscribe for NFL Sunday Ticket? Around three million.

Uh oh.

Wait a minute, you’re telling me that the NFL can only get around three million households to sign up for actual NFL games, all of the out of market games, in the entire country?

We’ve got a major math problem here for ESPN.

In other words, even if we’re generous and we assume all the other sports combined generate as much television interest as the NFL, we’re looking at a decline from 100 million at peak to six million. That’s a decline of 94 percent in households. In monetary terms, if we use a single-season, single-team MLB subscription as a stand-in for all other sports, that’s an 88 percent decline in revenue from $10 billion to $1.23 billion… with $45 billion in rights fees owed through 2027.

No wonder the Saudis are licking their lips and looking to buy up more sports leagues instead of teams. It also explains why Bob Iger is desperately casting around for anyone who wants to buy pieces of the collapsing Devil Mouse empire. But it’s not just Disney that is facing the precipice.

TNT, Turner, AMC, Nickelodeon, you name the channel, all of them are basically being held together by the cable bundle. And ESPN is the most important channel in the cable and satellite bundle, it’s the linchpin, the anchor store. ESPN is your neighborhood shopping mall’s anchor tenant — the Macy’s, the Nordstrom, the Dillard’s the JC Penny. When a mall’s anchor tenant leaves the mall is often dead for, the rest of the shopping mall collapses around it. That’s why the best analogy for ESPN isn’t Blockbuster, it’s Sears, a big mall anchor tenant that collapsed and went bankrupt.

Okay, if you’ve read to this point, you might be thinking, “This feels like it’s going to be really bad, Clay.”

Uh, yeah, it is, that’s why I called it a media extinction level event.

And yet, the alternative media will survive this unscathed, because we’re already accustomed to being entirely dependent upon our direct supporters. No free riders, no advertisers. And so, as it happens, the great media extinction may be the best possible thing for the future growth of Arkhaven and UATV.

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Holding the Strong Hand

European leaders shouldn’t have been surprised that Putin wasn’t concerned about Western sanctions, because it’s not like he didn’t know they were coming in response to his actions. The problem with always relying upon the same tactics is that the other side anticipates and prepares for them:

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was surprised by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s complete lack of concern about Western sanctions shortly after the outbreak of conflict with Ukraine, Bild has reported.

In an article on Monday, the German tabloid cited a conversation between Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, which was revealed by journalist Stephan Lamby in his new book ‘Emergency: Governing in Times of War’.

The exchange, in which the two leaders discussed their phone calls with Putin, is said to have taken place on March 4, 2022 – just over a week after Moscow sent its forces into Ukraine.

It’s “not getting any better,” Scholz reportedly told Macron during that conversation. “Something bothers me more than the talks: [Putin] doesn’t complain about the sanctions at all. I don’t know if he did that in conversation with you, but he didn’t even mention the sanctions,” he remarked.

The French leader replied that Putin hadn’t addressed the issue of Western restrictions during phone calls with him either. After listening to Scholz, Macron replied: “Thank you, that was very similar to the conversation I had with [Putin] yesterday. I think he is now quite determined to go to the end.”

Who would have thought that enforced autarky could benefit an economy? Perhaps Putin has some economists who have explained that free trade is deleterious, rather than beneficial, to most national economies in most historical situations. This should be obvious, considering that the financial vampires literally depend upon capital movements in order to parasitize the real economies and divert coporate profits into their own coffers, but 200 years of unrestrained economic propaganda has been so effective that national leaders are actually basing their geopolitical strategy on inverted and incorrect assumptions.

I do find it mildly amusing that neither Scholz nor Macron grasped the obvious consequence of Putin’s lack of interest in discussing the sanctions that were supposed to be their devastating economic weapon. While Scholz appears to have had an inkling of why the Russian President was so unconcerned, apparently it wasn’t strong enough to look seriously into the matter or to revisit his assumptions.

We know the leaders of the Western puppet governments are retarded and totally incapable of successfully anticipating events or the obvious consequences of their actions. Putin knows they’re retarded. Xi, who is the smartest of all the world leaders according to Lew Kwan Yew, obviously knows they’re retarded.

But no one ever suspected they were this retarded.

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They are the World

In attempting to isolate Russia through the use of economic sanctions, the NATO countries have only managed to divorce themselves from the greater part of the world economy. BRICS now massively outweighs the G7 on a global scale.

The addition of six new member states will propel the BRICS group of countries far ahead of its major rival, the G7, in economic terms, several Russian media outlets reported this week, citing calculations based on global data. BRICS currently consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, but next January it will admit Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

According to reports from the news outlets RBK and TASS, the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the expanded BRICS in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) will be roughly $65 trillion. This would see the bloc’s share of global GDP rise from the current 31.5% to 37%. In comparison, the share of the G7 group of advanced economies is currently around 29.9%.

Furthermore, with the addition of the new members, BRICS nations will account for almost half of the world’s food production. In 2021, the group’s wheat harvest amounted to 49% of the globe’s total. The share of the G7 was 19.1%. BRICS will also have an advantage in terms of the production of metals used in the high-tech industry. The 11 nations will account for 79% of global aluminum output, against just 1.3% controlled by the G7. For palladium, the disparity is 77% for BRICS versus 6.9% for the G7.

The expanded BRICS will account for roughly 38.3% of the globe’s industrial production, versus 30.5% for the G7. Overall, the 11 BRICS countries will account for 48.5 million square kilometers, representing 36% of the world’s land area. This is more than double that of the G7. The combined population will amount to 3.6 billion, 45% of the globe’s total and more than four times above the G7.

On the other hand, the USA and Europe have diversity. Which, we are repeatedly assured, is a strength. And let’s not forget the advantage of being ruled over by a small and nepotistic tribe that has never been able to succeed in maintaining a self-sustaining society, not even on a small scale, for more than 2,700 years.

According to Reuters, over 40 countries have expressed interest in joining BRICS.

This should end well for the people of the West.

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Don’t Make it Harder

At least, not any harder than it’s going to be. Karl Denninger, a genuine American hero who saved more lives than anyone else I’ve ever known, warns those under 40 that they’ve never seen the sort of economic challenges that are heading their way:

You’ve never seen tough.

I mean it.

No, 2000 wasn’t tough.

No, 2008 wasn’t tough.

If you’re 33 now you were ten in 2000. If you’re 40 now you were barely an adult in 2000 and not even born or beyond infancy in the last “actual tough” — the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I thought that what we face now was likely coming in 2008. I was wrong. People managed to “kick the can” another time, but in doing so we made it a lot worse. What we had to absorb then was about a late 1970s / early 1980s problem. What we did was greatly increase the seriousness of the damage by deferring it for another 10 or so years, and then we wildly added to that when the virus showed up. Maybe the pandemic response was in some part an intentional attempt to evade taking the economic medicine then and maybe not, but whatever the case may be you can’t go backwards and thus here we are.

What’s coming is going to be worse than the late 1970s or early 80s. It is inescapable. Continuing to try to put it off will simply compound it more and increase the risk that we lose our society entirely. Jerome Powell, chair of The Fed, knows this which is why those who believe he will cut rates “soon” are wrong; he’s not stupid and he is fully aware of what has happened in other nations that kept playing this game one too many times, with no way to know in advance when the next time is “one too many.”

An utterly huge percentage of people I grew up with, who were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, are dead. They’re not dead because of a virus, or just natural “stuff” — they’re dead because they slowly killed themselves, usually with drugs or alcohol. This includes someone in my immediate family and a several more within my growing-up social circle — including people I was extremely unhappy to have to cut loose.

That’s significant because typically other than through accidents or violence (e.g. car wrecks and homicide) statistically nobody dies once you get out of childhood until you get into your late 50s or 60s and the diseases of older age start to catch up with your poor lifestyle or just bad luck and genetics. Yeah, there are exceptions — but not many.

You don’t want that to happen to you as it often comes with years of disability first and there’s still time — if you act now.

Hard times are coming folks.

Now, before the younger generation’s dismiss Denninger’s warning as the customary Boomer dramatics about walking uphill to school both ways in the snow, what he is talking about here is not the way in which the new normal is more difficult than the old normal. Yes, it’s much harder to get ahead now, it’s much harder get a college degree, to get a good job, or to afford a middle-class lifestyle, and the economic mean has observably declined steadily since real wages peaked in 1973.

He’s not talking about the current normal. What he’s talking about is genuine economic crisis, when people who own homes can’t keep them, when there are no jobs of any kind to be found, and when interest rates are not only in the double-digits, but the teens, so any kind of financing for anything is completely unaffordable.

Remember, we didn’t see actual credit deflation after 2008, but mere credit disinflation.

The point that he’s making is that since times are going to be difficult, don’t make them more difficult for yourself and your family by making stupid and short-sighted decisions, because the consequences are likely to be considerably more serious and long-lasting than the average young individual can reasonably imagine.

I’ve seen the casualties among my friends and family too. So be smarter than we were. Be better than we were. Because the one thing, perhaps the only thing, that you have going for you is that the GenXers are providing you with the sort of advice that we should have gotten, but for the most part didn’t get, from our predecessors.

So if you can avoid wasting the decade or so that most of us did, you might actually wind up ahead of the game in the end.

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The US Housing Crash Cometh

Karl Denninger explains why, and in the process, also explains why people had so much money to spend over the last 3-4 years.

All Real Estate is local.

But — it got a lot less specifically-local in the last three years, and bifurcated basically two ways: Blue and not-Blue.

The problem is that the dynamic of virus restrictions along with wildly ridiculous fiscal and monetary policy drove a dynamic that was utterly unsustainable and, fundamentally, stupid as a whole although for the people doing it the act looked smart at the time. There were several elements of this:

  • Work-from-home on a near-universal basis was forced by many employers. This, in high-cost areas, drove employees to think they could arbitrage their higher salary (a result of the high cost of living where they were, such as in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and similar) and keep it while moving somewhere much cheaper, such as Tennessee or Florida. For those who pulled this it was a massive windfall, provided they could sell their home in the high-cost place.
  • Forced-low interest rates meant mortgages were extraordinarily cheap. The brokers of same — banks, independent shops and similar — feasted on the fees, both for purchase money (see above for the flow on that!) and refinances. Many of those refinances were strategically wise, being committed just a few years after origination and not materially-lengthening the amortization clock. All of them wildly increased available consumer funds for spending, however, by reducing the monthly payment amount.

These two dynamics skyrocketed home prices. The All-US index went from ~450 to 625, a roughly 40% increase in two years. That is much greater than the explosion higher during the last couple of years of the housing bubble; that was a mere 14%. There were plenty of areas, including where I live, that prices of “real” (not AirBNB friendly) single-family homes roughly doubled and some of those “short-term rental opportunities” were even more-obscene with some of them tripling in three years time.

All of this was ridiculously stupid. The premise that employees operated on — that they’d never have to set foot in an office again — was crap. As the pandemic ended so did the curtailment of occupying office space and the cities could not survive with all that office space empty; the tax revenue plus all the retail business activity associated with those people being in the buildings during the day is utterly essential to their fiscal survivability.

Those who thought they could arbitrage their cost of living while keeping their “bonused up” salary are now getting a rude shock: Come back to the office, which we have leased and have to pay for, or be fired. Except….. those employees now live hundreds or even a couple thousand miles away! Worse, they bought houses on <3% mortgages and spent the rest and, while their “price paid” is what it is nothing is moving.

Around here I looked at recent sales. Among single-family homes there are an effective zero from roughly April forward. The top of the Realtor.com page for this county comes up with sales from March, February, May, a couple the first two weeks of June and a couple of (wildly-overpriced cabins) recently. This is the second week of August and Memorial Day to Labor Day, which is a couple of weeks away, is prime closing season here because the kids are out of school and similar.

The market is basically locked up and the reason is quite-clear: Those who bought at the top can’t move; they have 3% mortgages and that $500,000 place has a $2,100 payment. The same $500,000 house at 7% carries a payment of $3,326!

The net present value of that payment on their house today is $316,000, a $184,000 loss!

Translation: things aren’t looking so great for your new neighbors from California who arbitraged the location delta into an overpriced home in your community. Or for the banks that hold their mortages. It should be worse than 2008.

The higher interest rates were inevitable and unavoidable. However, it remains to be seen if the minor premise was false and employers are going to be able to force their employees back into the office. I remain skeptical about the “back to the office” scenario, because I think it’s more likely that the corporations will break their leases, pull out of the cities, and decentralize. They certainly have no dearth of other reasons to do so.

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The Price of Partiality

Switzerland is beginning to learn that no one will utilize a middleman who takes sides, as the Alpine country runs the risk of missing out on a truly historic opportunity:

The latest 32% monthly fall in commodities trading followed a 27.5% decline in April, 22% in March and double-digit negative figures going back to the start of the year. The latest figures from the Federal Statistical Office show the volume of Swiss commodities trading in freefall as the Ukraine war rages on, destabilising the shipment of grains around the world and redirecting the flow of Russian oil.

Switzerland has established itself a one of the most important global hubs for trading oil, metals and foodstuffs. Swiss-based companies handle 40% of all oil trades and have taken a 60% slice of the metals trading business, 65% in cotton, 55% in coffee and 35% in cocoa, according to the industry association Suissenégoce. The sector employs 35,000 people and contributes some 4% to the Swiss economy.

The real loss to the Swiss economy will be the opportunity cost going forward. With the inevitable bifurcation of the global economy into two unequal halves, the larger BRICS economy and the smaller WEF/SWIFT economy, the neutral Swiss were in the perfect position to serve as the central intersection where the two international economies could meet to trade. What will eventually be seen as a single-digit hit to the economy is actually a much larger loss to what the economy could have, and should have, become.

But the unbelievable myopia of the current set of Swiss politicians combined with external pressure from a Clown World caused them to throw away all of Switzerland’s natural and historic advantages in order to take the losing side in a war that neither Ukraine nor NATO could ever even hoped to have won militarily. Now that Clown World’s desperate bid to win the war with banks in lieu of tanks has failed, Switzerland finds itself categorized as an “unfriendly” state by both Russia and China and is increasingly likely to find itself excluded from consideration as a future central trading hub by all of the countries that are aligning themselves with BRICS.

Even FIFA and the Olympics could find themselves in jeopardy soon if all of the BRICS nations pull out of the global sports associations in solidarity with the banned Russian athletes and teams. Given that the Saudi Sports Agency has already proven that it can leverage its money to swiftly take over an entire sport with its LIV Golf maneuver, both the opportunities to a Sino-Russian-Saudi alliance and the vulnerabilities of the existing organizations are obvious to even a casual and indifferent observer.

The only hope the Swiss have of taking a central place in the future bipolar world economy is a rapid and sincere commitment to an official neutrality that is firmly established in the national constitution. The choice should be obvious given the near failure of UBS, the failure of Credit Suisse, the PGA Tour partnership, the Nigerois war for economic independence from France, the economic contraction of Germany, the coming surrender of NATO and Ukraine, the pivot of the US military toward China, and the ongoing collapse of the European Union.

The existing Atlanticist economic order is simply not going to survive in its current form, so seeking to curry its favor is not only unproductive, but self-destructive. And no redefinitions of what “neutrality” actually is will fool anyone, especially not those nations whose corporations and citizens are subject to material sanctions. Only those whose positions are inherently untenable need to redefine words in order to justify their positions.

The problem is that a generation of politicians who have been accustomed to regard the USA and the EU as the Sun and Moon for three decades are probably incapable of grasping the geostrategic realities of a world in which those two entities combined amount to nothing more than the junior side of the Great Bifurcation.

It is a real pity that the Swiss journalists who daily peruse this blog looking for ammunition to discredit and deplatform me will not quote me on this particular subject, because it is vastly more significant to them, and to those they seek to influence, than anything I have said that violates their precious Narrative.

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The Capital That Was Lost

A commenter on Gab observes how the societal changes throughout the United States have significantly reduced its human capital:

I like to relate to my experience growing up in a small town, once a modest but prosperous mining community. By the 80s and through the 90s, the mine was long closed and economic opportunities were scant. By the 2000s, generational welfare recipients were common, except now the last vestiges of culture disappear as crime and drugs increase.

The town now serves mostly as a retirement/ bedroom community with a base of unfortunates.

I always thought that if a big employer showed up nearby, there would be a huge line for the much needed jobs. What I didn’t understand until recent years is what had really been lost: Human capital.

Now employers are hungry for people and you can’t get anyone to show up. New generations seem incapable of managing getting to work on time or at all. That’s what was lost, the culture that reinforced family, work ethic, social values. That’s human capital. Once it’s gone, it’s very hard to get back.

This is where Generation X can, despite its tendency toward nihilism and apathy, make a real difference and give its successors an advantage. Because we don’t care about the mainstream narrative, we can reinforce the traditional family, work ethic, and social values that enhance human capital. We have the ability to teach them how to be in the society, but not of it.

Just yesterday, I explained the way business communications hierarchy worked to several members of the younger generation, and assigned them to watch this scene from The Godfather in order to help them understand how it works. Notice in particular the way the two senior subordinates, the hit man and the lawyer, as well as the rival family capo, understand immediately the major faux pas that has been committed by the undisciplined son.

“I have a sentimental weakness for my children, and I spoil them, as you can see. They talk when they should listen.” This is the key phrase from this scene, and not the more famous “Never tell anybody outside the Family what you’re thinking again.” But they are both significant concepts that are part of what was the human capital of the time.

Our children and grandchildren will not pick up these things via osmosis from the mainstream culture the way we did, which is why it falls for us to preserve it by teaching them wisely and well.

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Mailvox: Borrowed Time

A reader with knowledge of the US shipbuilding industry concurs with my assessment of the USN having lost its naval superiority:

Your analysis about US shipbuilding capacity was spot on. I have an uncle who is an engineer at Newport News shipbuilding (Ingalls). I remember, many years ago, we were having a discussion similar to this topic and it centered on submarines construction.

I didn’t know this but New London, Conn (Electric Boat) can only build sections of the subs. The bow section is built at Newport News. The reason being, Electic Boat lacks the machine necessary to bend the steel in the bulbus shape of the bow section. They sold it off years ago. Newport News is the only shipyard that has that machine. I was surprised because this is an obvious single point of failure.

But then he went to tell me that Newport News is the only shipyard that can install a nuclear reactor. I shook my head in disgust. Right then and there, I knew that we, as a country, were pretenders living on borrowed time.

No amount of glorious history and past success can prevent an outdated power from being surpassed by its successor. Sooner or later, the illusion of invincibility inevitably fades.

UPDATE: Apparently the reader’s take is the optimistic scenario, as someone with direct experience of naval repairs weighs in.

As someone who worked in ship repair on aircraft carriers and submarines at a naval shipyard for [more than 20] years, and on non-nuclear vessels for [additional] years as well, the description given to you of the industry is a vast understatement. The ability for the handful of nuclear capable yards to fix ships has been crippled by a combo of inability to train new workers well, and inability to maintain the skilled workers they do have. “Diversity” pushes women and racial minorities to the top in engineering positions. Some of those may have actually been able to do the jobs they were pushed into if they’d been given the time to build their skills in the way any man would have 10-20 years ago.

In the trades, even a modicum of skill is enough to find yourself fast tracked to a supervisor position before you even finish the apprenticeship program. Admirals appear to think that the lack of capacity to perform can be solved by creating more shipyards. This requires ignoring that the private shipyards can’t hire and maintain skilled labor either, both in nuclear and non-nuclear work. It’s not uncommon to leave a shipyard with many systems in worse shape after “maintenance” than they were in before arriving there. The ridiculous lead times for materials suggests other related industries are in just as bad of shape. As I write this, i’m staring at photos that just came out to my group of [important ship’s equipment destroyed by carelessness].

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