I like much of your analysis, Mr. ffb.
I do a lot of work with firms that import entire things and sub-assemblies for re-sale here and even abroad. It's a lot of shuffling stuff around and relabeling things and then moving said things along again. It all SCREAMS to be streamlined and drop-shipped whole straight out of all of Asia and India directly to the customer. I mean, that is the essential model of Amazon. That company actually hunts and kills American (and world-wide) entrepreneurs with this tactic.
The factories we have out here are in the fields where humans plant and grow food, so that's kind of a static situation. There were weird pressures in that area. Field-use expands and shrinks, but no one opened a new strawberry factory. In fact, an old strawberry consortium closed.
Garlic got 'healthier' over the hill in Gilroy, but that means we paid more for garlic at the counter. It's kind of the inverse resolution to what I proposed in that same thread so long ago - "We will build TVs again when we work for five dollars a day." Our wages aren't decreasing, but prices rise over time to cause the same effect. Huh.
I haven't heard of any factories re-opening in the States. Perhaps in The Middle, you have seen this. Automation is King here. Everywhere I turn, human work keeps losing to machine work. It's like Quint slowly being eaten on the busted deck of the Orca.
I get this feeling. Like the economy of the world is precarious giant pile of dry sticks. A mountainous shape, heaped to the sky, seemingly formidable and resolute. Yet upon walking up to it, the entire mound is riddled with gaps and cavities, compromises and air-spaces set-up and built upon over centuries, a structure of casual convenience in the moment. One can crawl inside and see opportunity for shortcuts - wormholes to wealth for the clever and nimble. And stepping back from the mountain one can see the entire pile of sticks can be easily crushed to the ground, or set afire from the bottom, like a Burning Man effigy to the entire flow of our lives.
I don't think your scenario of HD functioning as a worker able to move from one job to another is exact.
HD, as it is, the preeminent American manufacturer of heavyweight motorcycles, can only exist as such if it does as such. If it fails, it dies. It may be reborn as a manufacturer of something else (Cyclone went on to bend tubing to make hospital beds), but collapse is game over.
That board of directors wants to live their lives as "Harley Davidson - Kings of America," and they're in a shirts-off knife fight. If they try some fancy trick-move they read about in a book, they may loose an arm and bleed out.
With their stock share price looming over their shoulders, their fighting box is so small - An old-school product, driven by old-school customer desires, who have old-school income levels, while their competitors are free to meet any demand and any style with any tech from any location to satisfy any price.
The Board will do anything to stay alive. That's who they are fighting for. Themselves.
What they should have done is used MV Agusta, from day one of ownership 12 years-ago, to branch out into the new world of everything. It would've been the name-plate to hang on any product. Now the money-stream is low, and precarious in the near-term.
My 2009 Buell rims have a big blobby Made In China glimmering out of the translucent blue paint. I believe that Austrian factory that you mentioned cast the frame/tank.
I respect that I could well be completely off track here and in the gravel. Just thinking and typing.
Supports splitting everywhere.
Locked
