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/Me imagining Japanese companies fighting tooth and nail to secure national dental chains simply to secure that distributed arc furnace capacity
Hadlock fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Mar 13, 2024 |
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Mar 13, 2024 23:48
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Probably higher these buyers know exactly what they are getting into. There’s not any way to hide the vessel transits that deliver input materials to the facility. So separate from any investigation to financials when they bid, they can know the real material / logistical truth about what they are buying and how productive USS has actually been. what's the japanese case for buying US Steel? it seems like they were willing to pay a pretty large premium over the other offers. Is US Steel complementary to their production methods? Is there some benefit to having a plant on US soil?
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Mar 14, 2024 16:30
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hypnophant posted:what's the japanese case for buying US Steel? it seems like they were willing to pay a pretty large premium over the other offers. Is US Steel complementary to their production methods? Is there some benefit to having a plant on US soil? There is still a lot of car production in the US (y en México cerca de frontera norte). Having steel production closer to the consumers who are using that steel, instead of having to ship it across the Pacific, is an attractive offer.
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Mar 14, 2024 16:56
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hypnophant posted:what's the japanese case for buying US Steel? it seems like they were willing to pay a pretty large premium over the other offers. Is US Steel complementary to their production methods? Is there some benefit to having a plant on US soil? Unless they say outright it’s hard to say. There could be a huge number of reasons. That side of it is more complicated than inferring process input amounts from vessel transits. There are all sorts of esoteric issues involved in the international steel trade they could be looking to not have to deal with if they have a US subsidiary and direct access to US markets.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:40
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LanceHunter posted:There is still a lot of car production in the US (y en México cerca de frontera norte). Having steel production closer to the consumers who are using that steel, instead of having to ship it across the Pacific, is an attractive offer. Thinking about that, Gary used to barge finished coils over to the big Ford plant on Torrance. All the automakers are building those huge battery plants for the EV transition. It could be a bet on that. There’s going to be more auto production in the US if Trump loses. Coils are a pain in the rear end in containers, they generally don’t get secured properly. When they’re shipped as general cargo in a hold there’s always a certain level of handling damage that’s unavoidable, that customers have been getting less tolerant of.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:45
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Remember, Nippon Steel doesn't represent Japan as a entity, it's just a public corporation beholden to shareholders. The why is probably "They want to expand their steel production capabilities and US Steel is an attractive add due to its assets and access to a very friendly market". There's most likely little thought of strategic resource acquisition of a nation-state and far more thought that this will be a profitable move.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:47
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I wonder if one factor is simply that there are senators aware that steel smelting has coal as a necessary and more or less permanent input, that domestic electricity production is inevitably moving off of coal, and they simply do not want to accept even a slightly higher risk of losing control of the location and existence of that guaranteed coal buyer. Yes, there's no reason to think that Nippon Steel would shut down their blast furnaces, today, but in the minds of a congressman, that risk may exist even if it's not really there in the real world. That's speculation, but coal is just a big a political issue, it's one of the things that is a red line in the sand for a certain political faction.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:52
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Leperflesh posted:I wonder if one factor is simply that there are senators aware that steel smelting has coal as a necessary and more or less permanent input, that domestic electricity production is inevitably moving off of coal, and they simply do not want to accept even a slightly higher risk of losing control of the location and existence of that guaranteed coal buyer. Yes, there's no reason to think that Nippon Steel would shut down their blast furnaces, today, but in the minds of a congressman, that risk may exist even if it's not really there in the real world. I'd be shocked if it's cheaper for Nippon Steel to import coal from the US than from someplace in Asia, likely China.
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Mar 14, 2024 18:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'd be shocked if it's cheaper for Nippon Steel to import coal from the US than from someplace in Asia, likely China. I think the idea was "the blast furnace must be kept running because it creates domestic demand for coal", not "Nippon Steel wants to buy this blast furnace as a way for them to get access to US coal supplies". In other words, it's answering "why is this smelter a national priority", not "why would NS want to buy it".
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Mar 14, 2024 20:56
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I think the idea was "the blast furnace must be kept running because it creates domestic demand for coal", not "Nippon Steel wants to buy this blast furnace as a way for them to get access to US coal supplies". In other words, it's answering "why is this smelter a national priority", not "why would NS want to buy it". It's this. A blast furnace is going to have a dedicated rail line with trans full of coke coming from a coker that is taking trains full of coal coming from a network of dedicated coal mines, constantly, forever.
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Mar 14, 2024 23:12
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Leperflesh posted:That's speculation, but coal is just a big a political issue, it's one of the things that is a red line in the sand for a certain political faction. It's a perceived political issue; west Virginia coal employs about 30,000 people, I forget exactly but near half of those people are in management not actual "coal miners"
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Mar 14, 2024 23:54
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I’ve got some knowledge about the coke supply chain into Chicago and Gary, it’s not coming from West Virginia it’s going to be the bituminous out of the west. And it’s on the lakes with easy barge access to the calumet. The ore, sand, blast furnace slag, etc is mostly vessel. I think the coke to the blast furnace was mostly barge with some rail as backup.
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Mar 15, 2024 00:06
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This bloomberg interview with the cleveland cliffs CEO is wild (he's known for how blunt he is). https://archive.is/CKBL4 Says he is talking directly to the white house, that US Steel isn't worth more than somewhere in the 30s now (I think the actual quote was low 30s, saw that somewhere else), and conferenced in the union president to browbeat him on the spot to tell the reporters that the union supports their bid. I bought X at 40 this morning, doh. But I think this is going to backfire on him. Bragging about having sleepy joe on speed dial to blow up the competitor's deal, and then saying his prior bid isn't even on the table anymore.... Just greasy.
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Mar 15, 2024 00:23
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Hadlock posted:It's a perceived political issue; west Virginia coal employs about 30,000 people, I forget exactly but near half of those people are in management not actual "coal miners" I know. They very demonstratively do not give a flying gently caress about coal miners. What they care a lot about is opposing anything that implies that environmentalism and/or climate change is a real problem or that anything should be done about it. Bar Ran Dun posted:I’ve got some knowledge about the coke supply chain into Chicago and Gary, it’s not coming from West Virginia it’s going to be the bituminous out of the west. And it’s on the lakes with easy barge access to the calumet. The ore, sand, blast furnace slag, etc is mostly vessel. I think the coke to the blast furnace was mostly barge with some rail as backup. Makes sense that it's not really trains, for stuff on the great lakes. The fact joe manchin and west virginia get all this attention as "the coal places" is another of life's absurdities https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38172 
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Mar 15, 2024 00:32
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Leperflesh posted:Makes sense that it's not really trains, for stuff on the great lakes. The big coke facility in Chicago is Koch. They do coke and coal and blending to most of the lakes locations in both US and Canada. From their facility is ship or barge. To their facility from the lines is rail. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 02:24
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Baddog posted:This bloomberg interview with the cleveland cliffs CEO is wild (he's known for how blunt he is). lol, putting it mildly. reading their earnings transcripts is something i recommend just for entertainment
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Mar 15, 2024 02:35
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hypnophant posted:what's the japanese case for buying US Steel? it seems like they were willing to pay a pretty large premium over the other offers. Is US Steel complementary to their production methods? Is there some benefit to having a plant on US soil? US Steel's proxy for the shareholder vote tips us as to what Nippon Steel was most interested in early on: US Steel DEF14a posted:On October 5, 2023, following discussions between representatives of Barclays and Goldman Sachs and NSC’s financial advisor, based on feedback from the Board of Directors, NSC submitted a written, non-binding indication of interest to acquire USS’s Mini Mill segment and its Keetac mining operations for an enterprise value of $9.2 billion or, in the alternative, to acquire all of the outstanding shares of USS common stock for consideration of $41.40 per share in cash. That'd be the Big River (mini mill) facility I mentioned earlier and the iron ore mines (Keetac). Come to think of it, that also points to a possible compromise, if the politics gets too heated; NSC buys Big River (which is non-union, and not in a swing state) and Keetac, and a rump US Steel keeps those union-contracted basic oxygen furnaces. I don't know if that rump US Steel would do well though. Big River was the future.
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Mar 15, 2024 02:41
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Those pellets they make at that mine are the good stuff. But and this is a huge rear end butt, export cargo from the lakes is a gigantic pain in the rear end. Foreign flag ships only get to move during the day. They have to have a pilot on all the time. The locks are closed for a couple of months every year. Loading rates at Duluth make Australian and Brazilian ore ports look slow which is a big problem for ships that aren’t lakes fleet self unloaders.
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Mar 15, 2024 04:04
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Are the locks closed due to ice, or mostly just due to lovely shipping conditions and nobody wants to get Edmond Fitzgerald'd
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Mar 16, 2024 19:18
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Generally ice, some vessels keep going on little local runs that don’t involve lock transits. It’s also a seasonal annual maintenance period. There are ( well we’re in 08 when I worked the lakes) still folks that sailed on the Fitzgerald actively sailing.
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Mar 16, 2024 19:29
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nicely written blog post at factset walking through construction and analysis of a gradient boosting model for 2-month forward recession prediction based on a variety of fed/fred data: https://insight.factset.com/using-machine-learning-models-to-uncover-historical-us-recession-risk tl;dr -- low recession risk currently according to that particular model
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Mar 17, 2024 15:13
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Methodology seems good and the results are explained well, but I am curious about ~three things:
The “recession definition” isn’t damning, but it’d be clearer of bias if they switched the verbiage from “political agency’s definition of recession” to a technical definition like “two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth”. Hell, create another model with “three consecutive quarters”. Then they predict whether the technical definition will occur and skip the semantics battle entirely. The feature selection bit is potentially damning. What you choose to pay attention to when forecasting is fundamental. Measuring your current gas tank level will not meaningfully help predict car crashes. They did a good job in the paper to describe the strength / predictive power of the feature (SHAP analysis), but they never talked about why they chose those features to begin with. To be fair, they seem fine, but I want a little more serious consideration.
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Mar 17, 2024 16:50
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Japan to drop negative interest rate policy after 17 years, journalists speculatequote:Ukraine drones hit Russia's Syzran oil refinery, governor says https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Bank-of-Japan/BOJ-to-end-negative-rates-marking-1st-hike-in-17-years Ukraine drones causing sustained havoc on Russian refineries, per definitely not Western aligned journalists https://archive.is/2024.03.16-07084...ays-2024-03-16/ quote:Europe’s refineries in demand as Ukraine war boosts oil margins https://www.ft.com/content/68510c6f-cb6a-4c59-874c-f9770c162bcb Hadlock fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 04:39
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Hadlock posted:Japan to drop negative interest rate policy after 17 years, journalists speculate And this is the big reason why: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/03/15/companies/rengo-wages-hikes/ quote:This year’s spring wage negotiations involving major Japanese firms have delivered robust pay increases, with the preliminary figure for the average hike standing at a 33-year high of 5.28%, according to Japan’s largest labor organization. Major Japanese companies have just ended the spring negotiations with labor unions (the annual dance about annual bonus levels and floor-increasing wage talks), and it’s a big hike for almost everyone. Japan, Inc. collectively got the memo. It’s beyond overdue - hopefully the yen also gains some value, it’s still sitting around 150:$1, which is insanely low.
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Mar 18, 2024 06:01
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quote:(Bloomberg) -- China Evergrande Group, the defaulted developer at the heart of China’s real estate crisis, falsely inflated revenue by more than $78 billion in the two years leading up to its failure, according to the nation’s top securities regulator. Nothing terribly surprising. They are mostly putting this on Hui as the figurehead. I still haven't seen if they are looking at a bail out or what.
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Mar 19, 2024 14:24
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I don't want to dive into talking about the Russia/ukraine stuff too deeply, but SCMP had a pretty good summary of the recent and sustained attacks on Russian oil refineries https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3256051/ukraines-drone-strikes-russias-oil-refineries-mark-new-phase-war We've had the capability to shut down russian refineries pretty much instantly using ICBMs, at the risk of looking like we launched nukes and likely getting nuked ourselves For a while now I think people have been casually wondering when advanced RC plane stuff would get good enough that it would be used in wars, seems like we've probably reached the tipping point. SCMP is reporting Ukraine has taken 11% of refinery capacity offline ($$$ thus why I'm posting here), and are actively testing Russian anti aircraft defenses on the regular now. Ukraine indicates they're assembling and developing these drones locally quote:Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion has entered a new phase, pitting home-grown drone technology against a 2,000km (1,200 mile) swathe of largely Soviet-era oil facilities. At least nine major refineries have been successfully attacked this year, currently taking offline 11 per cent of the country’s total capacity by some estimates. Seems like with a drone you get that potential ICBM "strike anywhere" capability, but without the risk of triggering thermonuclear war, and finally there's a real risk of remote attack on critical infrastructure nowhere near the front line. A handful of well placed bombs can do more damage than troops on the ground, potentially. And this is only the beginning Will advanced industrial countries avoid invasions in the future due to drones? I think oil refineries are uniquely suited for drone strikes because everything there is flammable. Drone strikes on a salt or copper mine would be annoying but not crippling Wrapping back around to the Nippon steel purchase conversation, if the US only has two blast furnaces for steel, would a strike there be crippling to a war effort? Detroit is a long ways from any nearby enemies but if steel production (or, pick your favorite defense industry feed stock) was at risk would that temper the desire to meddle in affairs elsewhere Edit: more content to balance wild speculation; this article has a pretty decent map of the remaining blast furnaces; it appears there are 6; two in the rust belt, two in Georgia, one in NY and one in far NE Oklahoma https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/inside-cleveland-cliffs-bid-keep-us-blast-furnaces-smelting-2023-09-05/ Hadlock fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 17:26
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Hadlock posted:I don't want to dive into talking about the Russia/ukraine stuff too deeply, but SCMP had a pretty good summary of the recent and sustained attacks on Russian oil refineries Just FYI I'm stealing this post for the Cold War thread if you DO want to get more into the weeds on Ukraine.
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Mar 20, 2024 17:31
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drones were really decisive in the second nagorno-karabakh thing, thats where the ukrainians got the doctrine from basically, and the ukrainians had bayraktars lying around because of the advertisement that the second nagorno-karabakh war gave baykar corp. the usa pioneered usage but it wasn't decisive in any american conflict because america's military slaps anyways, but second nagorno-karabakh was far closer run than, say, the conventional bit of the second iraq-american war
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 17:46
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Hadlock posted:Wrapping back around to the Nippon steel purchase conversation, if the US only has two blast furnaces for steel, would a strike there be crippling to a war effort? Detroit is a long ways from any nearby enemies but if steel production (or, pick your favorite defense industry feed stock) was at risk would that temper the desire to meddle in affairs elsewhere Well just for clarity’s sake: there are two blast furnace operators, but there are more than two blast furnaces (though, at this point, probably less than two dozen). The majority of American steelmaking is via EAF, and most of those are non-union, smaller, and better distributed throughout the country. No opinion on potential wartime strikes. I don’t even know if they’d be legal. (edit: lol just realized you meant drone strikes, not labor strikes) Agronox fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 17:47
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Do we even have a dedicated cold war thread anymore? We have like six Ukraine or Ukraine-adjacent threads half of which are in cspam Agronox posted:Well just for clarity’s sake: there are two blast furnace operators, but there are more than two blast furnaces (though, at this point, probably less than two dozen). Thanks that makes more sense as to where I got the 2 number from. I've updated the post with a link at the end to an article with a map of furnaces colored by type
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Mar 20, 2024 17:52
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The US government stepped in to stop strikes and the Army seized and ran several munitions plants in WWII for brief periods, but at any rate I thin your premise is flawed. The workers at the plants are still mostly Americans. Why would they strike to deprive the US of materiel in a wartime situation, and how does that relate to plant ownership being foreign nationals? edit: I ran with Agronox' labor strikes premise oops
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Mar 20, 2024 18:04
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We're definitely entering a new era of warfare here where the technology to do massive damage is going to get very accessible. Even home grown dumbasses are prolly gonna figure out how to overwrite the firmware on commercial drones pretty soon to override "no fly areas". I don't know what we can really do to insulate ourselves from economic impacts though. Build a bunker like all the super rich seem to be doing?
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Mar 20, 2024 18:07
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You can flash a $120 pixhawk 4 gps autopilot with whatever firmware you like. Amazon will ship it to your door same day. The unit itself is only $90 but for $30 more you get an SD card, GPS dongle and an arming buzzer. I used mine to build an autonomous sailboat but there's nothing stopping you from plugging in the GPS coordinates of a Soviet era refinery or museum and adding fuelKYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I think your premise is flawed. The workers at the plants are still mostly Americans. Why would they strike to deprive the US of materiel in a wartime situation, and how does that relate to plant ownership being foreign nationals? Finding out who actually reads the posts ITT Hadlock fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 18:12
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Hadlock posted:You can flash a $120 pixhawk 4 gps autopilot with whatever firmware you like. Amazon will ship it to your door same day. The unit itself is only $90 but for $30 more you get an SD card, GPS dongle and an arming buzzer. I used mine to build an autonomous sailboat but there's nothing stopping you from plugging in the GPS coordinates of a Soviet era refinery or museum and adding fuel tbf this is the econ thread not the Cold War / Airpower thread so it's more likely to be talking about labor strikes than drone strikes
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Mar 20, 2024 18:17
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Hadlock posted:Will advanced industrial countries avoid invasions in the future due to drones? Speaking specifically to this point, I think the main thing that drones change about invasions is that asymmetric matchups become more symmetrical. That is, if you're a strong nation invading a weaker one, you can still expect to take a significant amount of damage from drones, because even a weak economy can afford to slap a grenade on a quadcopter or RC airplane. Defending against this kind of offense is hugely more expensive than the offense itself. That said, the disincentives to invade other countries were already strong enough to dissuade most countries. Russia will be feeling the economic effects of this war for decades to come at least, and most of that impact comes from being economically isolated, from their leadership burning through their local and international credibility, and from the death toll among their young able-bodied population. Relatively little has to do with drones.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:19
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Baddog posted:We're definitely entering a new era of warfare here where the technology to do massive damage is going to get very accessible. Even home grown dumbasses are prolly gonna figure out how to overwrite the firmware on commercial drones pretty soon to override "no fly areas". The drones themselves are the easy part, you can absolutely already get access to drone capable of flying into restricted areas. The hard part is lightweight, stable, relibale, explosives that are big enough to do real damage that will still fit as payload. You also have to be remote enough to not get caught, despite what armchair terrorists creeds may say the vast vast majority don't want to do suicide missions. For the time being, military tech is really the only way to surpass these hurdles. For defensive measures especially against a near neighbor? Ho boy seems like a good way to get a great ROI on economic disruption.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:21
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Quds Force and the Houthis already hosed about with this and it worked OK in that they got a result https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_attack But destroying industrial targets with small drones is difficult and those facilities were back up and running pretty fast.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:39
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Hadlock posted:Will advanced industrial countries avoid invasions in the future due to drones? I think oil refineries are uniquely suited for drone strikes because everything there is flammable. Drone strikes on a salt or copper mine would be annoying but not crippling Someone already addressed two operators not two locations. But as to this… there is a tremendous amount of industry and infrastructure that could be affected. I’m extremely hesitant to completely unwilling write down what I really think is possible about the subject. So I’m only going to write about a thing that has previously been in the news. Think about years ago when big electrical transformers were being shot with rifles. There are many very sensitive hard to replace critical targets with replacement lead times that can be in years. The real danger isn’t one or two, but a lot of them happening at once. There are important infrastructure components that are only produced in a couple of places and the rate they are produced at is what it is and they often have to be shipped internationally. Sometimes situations like this end up driving industrial changes. An example is reduction gears. They’re slow to make, complicated and expensive. The sub warfare particularly in the Second World War drove the start of a transition from steam power to slow speed diesel for commercial vessel power plants because only so many reduction gears could be made and ships had to be replaced faster than that. That transition normally gets blamed on fuel prices, but fuel prices only finish it off with oil crisis.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:43
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Hadlock posted:Do we even have a dedicated cold war thread anymore? We have like six Ukraine or Ukraine-adjacent threads half of which are in cspam Hadlock, we must not allow a thread gap!
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Mar 20, 2024 20:34
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Neat: https://www.reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/turkey-hikes-key-rate-500-points-50-surprise-move-2024-03-21/ Reuters posted:Turkey central bank stuns market with 500-point rate hike to 50% 
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Mar 22, 2024 00:07
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