Graham Rankin's Page

If you've ever wondered whether a consumer electronics industry is still worth having, you might be interested in the news that the US Dept of Defense has just bought 336 old-shape Playstation 3 consoles to develop into a cut-price military supercomputer (ten times cheaper per GFlop than traditional supercomputer architecture). The old-shape one can run Linux, but the new slimmer one can't, so they're being bought up now while stocks last.

This idea is not new, with the University of Illinois b… Continue

Contributors to Manufacturing Crunch believe in manufacturing, but we all have our different ways to promote it. My view is that unless we get more young people interested very soon in innovating and inventing, and actually making stuff, the tidal wave of retirement of skilled workers that's coming ever closer is going to leave us high and dry with half-empty factories, which will be doubly tragic given that we're now winning the arguments against outsourcing all over the place.

There are great… Continue

It's not often billionaire capitalists do some hard thinking about the effect of the influence of the super-rich and the political elites on society. But one who did was multi-billionaire James Goldsmith. In 1994, he gave an interview with Charlie Rose on Bloomberg, in which he warned, with astonishing prescience, about the likely repercussions from GATT, and its consequences for Western manufacturing and globalisation.

He called GATT the most important economic change in our lifetime, which wo… Continue

While the debate over outsourced production and the loss of manufacturing capacity continues, home-based manufacturers aren't always aware of one of the best arguments against outsourcing in the arsenal: the pollution caused by global shipping. Makers of SUV's are on the ropes and even Hummer is now a Chinese brand. Yet what if just 16 of the largest container ships caused more sulfur pollution than all of the world's vehicles put together? That's not just all the world's SUV's, that's all the v… Continue

If the recent report in The Nation, reprinted in the UK Guardian today is true, US forces are handing over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the Taliban (yes, you did read that correctly) to allow lorry convoys of essential military supplies to get to their destination. This is of course encouraging the McTaliban franchise to open up branches anywhere in Afghanistan the protection racket can work. The payments already total some 10% of US logistics contracts, a huge sum of money.

If the… Continue