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Post by Cosmic Wonder on Mar 2, 2018 23:20:55 GMT -5
But Aqua, if you insist that only people with expertise can weigh in on this, then you will have to completely muzzle Trump. Which is not a bad idea.
Mike
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Post by aquaduct on Mar 2, 2018 23:33:41 GMT -5
But Aqua, if you insist that only people with expertise can weigh in on this, then you will have to completely muzzle Trump. Which is not a bad idea. Mike Not really, Mike. Trump is a very bright business man with direct access to plenty of the brightest minds in economics and the actual industries involved. Not like most here who have access to journalists with no skin in the game or expertise whatsoever but no useful understanding.
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Post by aquaduct on Mar 2, 2018 23:35:33 GMT -5
But Aqua, if you insist that only people with expertise can weigh in on this, then you will have to completely muzzle Trump. Which is not a bad idea. Mike Not really, Mike. Trump is a very bright business man with direct access to plenty of the brightest minds in economics and the actual industries involved. Not like most here who have access to journalists with no skin in the game or expertise whatsoever but yet, no useful understanding of the issues at all.
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Post by Cosmic Wonder on Mar 2, 2018 23:47:37 GMT -5
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Post by jdd2 on Mar 3, 2018 2:35:04 GMT -5
I read that T's economic advisor, Cohn (goldman sachs), was so against this that he's threatened to resign. We'll see...
My Dad spent almost his entire working life at Keystone Steel & Wire--started in sales driving around the midwest and worked his way up. They started with scrap, not ore, and made a lot of fence & barbed wire, posts, nails, rebar, steel reinforcing for concrete, and so on. Both my brother and I worked summers there--I did two, he did four. It was really good money for a summer job.
Most of it was tearing down the open hearths for rebuilding--out with the old fire brick (us), so the brick guys could put new back in. 45 or 90 pound jack hammers. Sometimes the hoses would come off and blow even more brick dust all over before you could catch them. The furnaces were always still hot, since the brick held heat, and in a row of 7-8 furnaces shutdown was rotated, and the ones next door would still be on. Because of the heat it was something like 30 minutes in to work, and then 30 minutes out to rest and cool down, and you had to wear wooden clogs. Double shifts for time and a half or no weekends off when things were busy.
Below the furnaces were checker chambers. These also got torn down and rebuilt. Think several stories high of brick under the furnaces placed to form a lattice/honeycomb structure, this got warm from the furnace above it, and air coming in thru it would get preheated before going into the furnace. One part of the work was on top, pulling brick & putting into mini dumpsters. But doing this, lots fragments and crap would fall on down thru the lattice to the bottom. Down there were tunnels, a good yard wide and same high, and when they filled up, top work would become tunnel work--one guy per tunnel digging and putting stuff in big squarish bucket that would get slid out for emptying and back to the guy inside by rope. Dark and cool down there, not for the claustrophobic.
I watched the furnaces being tapped (a bit of dynamite) dozens of times, liquid steel flowing out into a giant bucket, and then that being used to fill ingot molds. (Sometimes someone would be tossing scoops of manganese of other things into the bucket.) After the ingots cooled enough, the molds came off and this glowing red hot chunk of steel, about two feet square and six high, would get picked up and moved to the soaking pits. After they've soaked enough--proper, uniform temp throughout--it's out and to the rolling mill, where an ingot is rolled into a billet about 3" square, and loooong. Back and forth, lengthwise, thru pairs of rollers, and these get cut a few times along the way to manageable lengths.
Billets could be stored or used right away, next step was the drawing mill, where a billet would be stretched and pulled enough that it might eventually become wire--thicker for nails, thinner for other things. Some optional galvanizing and maybe glavannealing along the way, depending on.
No stainless there, and they didn't make springs, but did make higher carbon steels. I've no idea of the metallurgy, but in talking about this with our daughter (chem major), she said in one of her classes they were given an alloy and had to figure out what it was composed of.
Sometimes on the way home after 3rd shift, we'd stop for beers. We were underage, but places serving beer at 7:30 in the morning didn't seem to care.
When I eventually saw Deer Hunter, it made those scenes in the steel mill hit home. (those were blast furnaces)
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Post by jdd2 on Mar 3, 2018 6:11:48 GMT -5
Keystone had a couple of arc furnaces, the cat's meow in those days, and also their own power plant. I worked in these, too, jackhammering out fire brick. They were also trying to perfect something called continuous casting, where they want to pour steel into a forming thing up high, and have those billets come sliding out the bottom. It was supposed to be pretty high tech for steelmaking.
One time my dad described how some japanese had come to visit and wanted to tour the mill, including these facilities. They let them in, cameras and all, and showed off the plant...
Just one little brick in the wall, nobody realized that later in the 70s and 80s japanese steel would have the impact that it did. But then the koreans took over from the japanese, and then china took over from korea.
*
I read earlier that 56% of the aluminium imported to the US comes from canada. I wonder whether (and how) this might be affected.
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Post by jdd2 on Mar 3, 2018 6:31:50 GMT -5
((I also know a little about the steel(s)/alloys used in bicycle tubing, from 531 up thru 853, if those numbers ring any bells. How they're designed and formed on the insides, and why, and the pros and cons for how those are joined. We'll leave all that for another day.))
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Post by timfarney on Mar 3, 2018 7:01:53 GMT -5
No. This is something he campaigned on. He's been consistent. Probably the only politician that actually follows through on what he says. Yeah except for that stuff about being a populist friend of the little guy, not cutting taxes for the rich, not benefitting personally from the tax cuts, draining the swamp, leaving Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security alone, replacing Obamacare with something that’s going to cover everybody, Mexico paying for the wall...so far, he’s been great at living up to all his worst ideas.
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Post by timfarney on Mar 3, 2018 7:09:47 GMT -5
I think that the EU bloke may have just rattled off three famously American things, Harley Davidson, Levis jeans and Bourbon whiskey without a great deal of thought. Who knows how this could escalate. I just hope we don't put a tariff on Scotch. Oh no, not random at all. He was thinking about the constituencies of specific, powerful GOP Congresscritters.
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Post by timfarney on Mar 3, 2018 7:24:48 GMT -5
The biggest problem here is a very simple one: There are a lot more American businesses, jobs and money in the industries that use steel and aluminum than there are in the American steel and aluminum industries. A lot. Driving up the price of steel and aluminum will hurt us, even if there’s no retaliation, no trade war at all. Why would we do it? Because steel and aluminum executives were in the room? Because a willfully ignorant president wants to look like he wants to fulfill a willfully ignorant campaign promise? This will probably pass like most Trump drama. Let’s hope so.
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Post by brucemacneill on Mar 3, 2018 7:30:36 GMT -5
As long as he doesn't negatively impact my life, I'll support him. A tariff on Scotch and I'm out.
He's just keeping his promises and doing it out in the open.
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Post by jdd2 on Mar 3, 2018 7:52:15 GMT -5
...As long as he doesn't negatively impact my life, I'll support him. A tariff on Scotch and I'm out. He's just keeping his promises and doing it out in the open. So we're over a year in, and he's just gotten around to this? When is he going to do that other stuff he promised? (see Tim's post)
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Post by timfarney on Mar 3, 2018 8:14:26 GMT -5
...As long as he doesn't negatively impact my life, I'll support him. A tariff on Scotch and I'm out. He's just keeping his promises and doing it out in the open. So we're over a year in, and he's just gotten around to this? When is he going to do that other stuff he promised? (see Tim's post) He’s not, of course. He has broken more campaign promises than he has kept, he has done that out in the open as well, and all he’s had to do is continue the xenophobic theater to keep his base from noticing.
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Post by timfarney on Mar 3, 2018 8:21:13 GMT -5
As long as he doesn't negatively impact my life, I'll support him. A tariff on Scotch and I'm out. He's just keeping his promises and doing it out in the open. Do you buy aluminum foil? Knives? Pots and pans? A johnboat? Guns? If this actually happens, it will negatively impact your life, unless the steel and aluminum industries get enough growth from it that they hire you to program the robots they’ll buy to replace the steel workers.
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Post by brucemacneill on Mar 3, 2018 8:31:08 GMT -5
As long as he doesn't negatively impact my life, I'll support him. A tariff on Scotch and I'm out. He's just keeping his promises and doing it out in the open. Do you buy aluminum foil? Knives? Pots and pans? A johnboat? Guns? If this actually happens, it will negatively impact your life, unless the steel and aluminum industries get enough growth from it that they hire you to program the robots they’ll buy to replace the steel workers. We'll just have to agree to disagree, as usual.
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Post by aquaduct on Mar 3, 2018 9:01:16 GMT -5
((I also know a little about the steel(s)/alloys used in bicycle tubing, from 531 up thru 853, if those numbers ring any bells. How they're designed and formed on the insides, and why, and the pros and cons for how those are joined. We'll leave all that for another day.)) That's seriously impressive and exactly what I was wondering. Thank you, sir. So now I've got you, probably Jeff, maybe amanajoe, and maybe epaul (for a farmer he just seems to know shit- I'm guessing his wife is the smart one). Our plant devours steel and it's mostly because the price overrides the quality concerns that most of it is foriegn. I think I understand much of the core reasons (things like environmental regulation) but I'm open to learning. Again, thank you.
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Post by timfarney on Mar 3, 2018 10:01:12 GMT -5
((I also know a little about the steel(s)/alloys used in bicycle tubing, from 531 up thru 853, if those numbers ring any bells. How they're designed and formed on the insides, and why, and the pros and cons for how those are joined. We'll leave all that for another day.)) That's seriously impressive and exactly what I was wondering. Thank you, sir. So now I've got you, probably Jeff, maybe amanajoe, and maybe epaul (for a farmer he just seems to know shit- I'm guessing his wife is the smart one). Our plant devours steel and it's mostly because the price overrides the quality concerns that most of it is foriegn. I think I understand much of the core reasons (things like environmental regulation) but I'm open to learning. Again, thank you. There’s nothing here to disagree with. The steel-using industries in America are many times larger than the steel-producing industries. Drive up the cost of steel (the objective of tariffs) and you drive up the cost of the goods they produce. Whether or not there is trade retaliation, American business and American consumers lose. The only question is does Trump not get this simple equation, or does he just not care?
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Post by timfarney on Mar 3, 2018 10:10:48 GMT -5
Sorry. Responded to the wrong post again. Buttons not where I’m used to it. The post above is, of course, a response to agreeing to disagree, a noble thought, but sometimes there are just realities...
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Post by Cosmic Wonder on Mar 3, 2018 10:15:31 GMT -5
Bruce, the saying that those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it applies here. We have been down this road before, in the 20's. Protectionist tariffs and policies that were popular with the common man were passed. And a global trade war ensued. It's credited with deepening and prolonging the Great Depression.
So we got that going for us.
Mike
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Post by fauxmaha on Mar 3, 2018 10:20:37 GMT -5
I'm going to spend the day using this: To weld up this: Using this: Going to be a long day. I have 41 joints, each of which is about 5.5" long (actually longer, since they are all on an angle) which works out to 225 linear inches of welding. And it sucks, because of the curves and tight spots and the fact that the stainless wants to shrink when it get's hot, you can only do little segments at a time. Anyway, carry on.
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