This Beer Minute is brought to you by Th’ Gaussling and the code ffolk at WordPress.
Two half-decent Utility Beers I’ve run into lately are Samuel Adams Winter Lager and Stella Artois. Both are commendable lagers, best taken with a hearty meal and convivial friends.
Might I recommend a visit to the Stella Artois website? It is rather entertaining and interactive.
This has been a Beer Minute brought to you by WordPress and Th’ Gaussling.
Lordy. Another angry, gun totin’ male out capping random Colorado citizens, this time in church. Sounds like testosterone poisoning. We really need to re-examine how we raise males in our society because something continues to be dreadfully wrong.
Evidently, kids learn about nature from the Natural Geographic Channel, but curiously, they don’t learn violence from the rest of television culture. Hmmm. I guess ideation of violence just glances off kids like scrambled eggs off a teflon pan.
Sarcasm aside, who really knows what the causality behind this event was? But surely immersion in a culture that idealizes the drama of violence can’t help. This was a final showdown. Isn’t that how many if not most action/adventure movies end? Desired outcome through superior firepower. What is imitating what?
Collectively, we seem unwilling to address the matter of how young men might be influenced to choose away from violent resolution of conflict.
It was interesting to note in the recent C&EN report on the Top 50 chemical companies that among the most profitable was Sigma-Aldrich (SIAL), or colloquially, Aldrich. Sigma-Aldrich controls an expanding complex of companies all targeted for more specialized domains of chemical technology. Anyone who has received an invoice from Aldrich would not find their profitability surprising. But what most customers may not realize is the extent of relatively transparent infrastructure that has been put into place to enable this profitability.
Aldrich is not profitable merely because their prices are, well, high. Aldrich is profitable for some subtle reasons as well. Easiest to recognize is their shrewd choice of market. Aldrich’s customer list includes nearly every research and academic chemistry and biology department in much of the world, or at least anywhere FedEx delivers. What is important about the R&D market is certainly not the volume of chemicals each research group orders- 5 g here, 100 g there, a liter of this, or 50 mL of that. Rather, it is the constant buzz of orders coming in for premium grade (and premium priced) chemicals virtually all of the time. While each order may be modest relative to bulk chemical transactions, a constant stream of orders begins to add up.
What is shrewd about focusing on the R&D supply market is this: Over time R&D money is relatively constant. The big academic and institute money is federal in origin and as such tends to be reliable in supply. Out in the world, projects start and projects end continuously. It may not be reliable to an individual researcher, but overall, the monies are dispersed every year and someone out there gets them. So from a marketing view, the players in the game may change, but the spring of money flows every year.
Other people develop the Next Big Thing and SAFC supplies the raw materials. Just like the gold rush. A few miners hit a big strike. But the more reliable money came from selling supplies to the miners.
As I alluded above, Aldrich charges a premium price for its products and, to my knowledge, has never discounted its wares. It offers a valuable service and is unapologetic about how it does business. Any given product in the catalog has a substantial markup on it. I think that many people find this galling when they compare 25 g unit prices to bulk prices. But I would caution that there is a substantial and unrelenting cost associated with having certified quality material prepackaged and waiting on a shelf in some warehouse.
It’s easy to get bulk pricing- buy in bulk!
A bottle of maleic anhydride sitting on the shelf is functionally equivalent to cash sitting in a bottle. You have to pay up front to have material in inventory and the cash or credit used to buy the inventory could have been used to do other things. It could have been given to Warren Buffett for investment or to the stockholders. Management has a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders. It is to provide the best possible return on stockholders investment.
Another hidden talent of Aldrich is logistics and distribution. Getting things to where they should be on time does not happen easily. Much of Aldrich’s success depends on its ability to move product into and out of inventory rapidly and accurately. On the input side, purchasing, receiving, quality control, manufacturing, and warehousing are highly organized to assure that orders can be fulfilled when the time comes.
When the order does arrive, the business data system has to issue the right part number from inventory and be assured that there is no shelf life problem that would disqualify the product for sale. Any chemical product must have a certificate of analysis, an MSDS, and be available in the right unit configuration, or SKU- stock keeping unit.
Order fulfillment involves entry of the purchase order into the data system, issuance of a work order to obtain the material, pulling the SKU from the inventory data base, and sending the order to shipping for final containerizing for land, sea, or air shipment. Here, the product must be packed in a way to conform with DOT and IATA regulations. Shipping documents must be packed, boxes placarded, and the parcels must get onto a truck for delivery. Foreign deliveries are complicated by customs issues, which often include inspection and import duties. Customs clearance is a subspecialty in the shipping world.
In many ways, making the chemical is the easiest part. Getting clean product is just the beginning of the adventure in product distribution.
Growth occurs by acquiring new brand loyalty and by expansion of the collection of products. One stop shopping for lab supplies. The “80/20 rule” applies to such collections of products. This rule of thumb states that 20 % of your products do 80 % of the business. Chances are good that this ratio is even more skewed than 80/20.
So, one way to grow is to expand the collection size. This ensures that as much demand is covered with product as possible.
Another way to grow is to dial in annual price increases- say 5-7%. This renders the prices in the catalog obsolete soon after they are distributed, but that is unlikely to be fatal to any given buying decision.
Here is an interesting link. It is a simulation of the famous Enigma Machine from WWII. You can alter the settings and input a string of text to be encoded. The flash simulation will show how the thing works. If you copy & paste the encrypted string back into the input, it will decrypt it. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t accept number or space characters.
Ever seen pictures of an uncontained jet engine failure? It would be interesting useful to know if the frags had enough energy left over to penetrate the cabin.
To: Mr. Bill Gates, Microsoft
Re: Vista
Dear Mr. Gates,
Please set aside an afternoon next week to visit with Th’ Gaussling regarding the new Vista operating system. Also, please bring along a cheque for $150.00 as compensation for brain damage associated with Word document compatibility problems with XP. Oh, we’ll need 2 forms of ID.
Golly, Mr. Wizard. As planned obsolescence schemes go, this one is a whopper. It’s an upgrade storm that will eventually rain on everyone. You Microsoft guys are really clever.
Kindest regards,
Th’ Gaussling
Every day there seems to be another example of how our disfunctional society is tightening the spiral to chaos. The recent footage of a citizen getting tased by a patrolman in Utah is just the latest log on the fire. In the footage, the trooper stops a driver who then stridently disputes the signage and proclaims his innocence.
He refuses to sign the ticket and is then told to get out of the car by the patrolman. As directed, he walks to the spot where the patrolman asks him to stand. Foolishly, he persists on debating with the patrolman. The patrolman pulls his taser gun and warns the driver to stop and turn around (presumably for a target on the belly). As the driver walks away, the patrolman fires the taser and drops the driver to the ground.
What is troublesome to me is that the patrolman was not being physically threatened by the driver, only ignored. The only apparent risk to the patrolman up to that point was the possibility that the driver would take some time to answer to the patrolmans request.
I think the driver did not know what kind of peril he was edging towards while attempting to use his “rhetorical skills” to persuade the trooper.
Could it be that the trooper used the taser as a matter of convenience rather than self defense?
Some will advance the argument that troopers are asked to risk their lives daily by pulling over potentially dangerous citizens. They should have this kind of latitude in their judgement calls. But I would say that electrocuting citizens because they are annoying is not a valid response.
What has happened in law enforcement the last decade is the institution of a more militaristic police presence in the USA. SWAT teams, tasers, armored vehicles, and aggressive tactics all aimed at putting down troublesome citizens.
The whole criminal justice system is out of control. Our failed drug policies and overcrowded prisons are completely ignored by legislators. US drug law only seems to create scarcity and high prices for illicit drugs. It would seem that our puritanical War on Drugs only benefits special interest manufacturers of police equipment, security companies, and private prisons.
Our prisons have had scant success with rehabilitation and only serve as a brutish, anti-civilizing crime practicum for prisoners. Prisoners are stigmatized with a felony record and consequently barred from most gainful occupations in the US. Why are we dismayed with high recidivism?
Many of my fellow citizens have a mean and brutish side that is not much changed from the days of westward expansion, the Klan, and the Indian wars. Unfortunately, we have a federal administration that is sympathetic to American exceptionalism and manifest destiny through superior firepower.
We Americans are pretty damned good at demolition. But when it comes to the careful assembly of civilization, we’re bloody cavemen. We confuse the advance of civilization with tax law or better law enforcement. Building a more comprehensive police state is not progress. It is consolidation of power by paranoid groups who are intolerent of the inherent disorder of pluralist populations.
Minty fresh silane
Your smell so sweet, but please don’t
Silanize my brain
—
Down, angry reflux
There is time for all vapour
to cool, clear and calm
—
Toluene methyl
Singlet of grief, go away
Without you, I’m done
Perhaps the best decision Th’ Gaussling ever made was to stay clear of the pharma business. In grad school (1980’s), the Standard Model for an ambitious organikker was to work hard in a good group and maybe, hopefully, with any luck, get an interview or two with the big pharma houses. The goal was to land a plum slot in drug discovery with Merck, Glaxo, Pfizer, or several of the other stars in the fabulous constellation of Big Time Drug Discovery. [Cue Ethel Merman– “There’s no business like pharma business like no business I know !!”]
Most grad school friends have had great success in this field, some are already in director and VP positions. I’m very happy for them. But I find that I have zero regrets about not going into the drug industry. It’s not a slam, just a fact.
From my quiet perch behind the curtains, I get to watch a hundred stories play out. Many products that are mind numbingly boring to others are things I know to be the result of difficult and fascinating technology. Elementary things, like the ability to peel off a sticker from its backing is the result of highly engineered materials and processes.
One of the really curious things I see from time to time is what I call a chemical market echo. Now and then someone will report some work at a conference wherein our product is featured as a key reagent or substrate. Shortly after the attendees get home, there is a flurry of requests for quotation from others in the field. These queries come in from around the world like echoes bouncing off distant objects.
I have seen this numerous times and I am presently in the middle of such a cycle. It is quite gratifying to know that your product has garnered a bit of interest. Unfortunately, penurious professors only order a few tens of grams at a time.
Echoes happen in other ways. If you are in the business of making odd things, a single query will come in from the end user followed by query echoes from others hoping to buy and sell to that single end user. Sometimes the echoes come from competitors hoping to do some sly competitive intelligence work, pretending to be a broker or end user. There are many ways to be lied to in business. All’s fair in love and war. And business is war.
There was an outbreak of sensibility in Venezuela this weekend as that swaggering gasbag, Hugo Chavez, was set back in his bid to rewrite the constitution. Chavez, who was recently and openly told to “shut up” by King Juan Carlos of Spain, has been on a nationalization binge in the last few years. To validate his further consolidation of power, his party attempted to alter the constitution to favor his continued tenure and further his grasp on the resources of the state. The people of Venezuela told him to go powder his nose.
Things weren’t so democratic in Russia last weekend as a highly managed political campaign delivered the goods. That is, victory for the Party of Vlad Putin, the new Czar of Russia. With key opposition leaders temporarily in jail (Kasparov), and a state controlled media, a comfortable margin of victory was delivered as expected to Putin by his aparachiki.
Russia’s long, sad history of Big Boss rule continues.
Much has changed in the consumer computer world in the 3 years since I last bought a computer. We recently purchased an HP Pavillion laptop computer. It comes with MS Vista and a bunch of other applications already installed. No program discs or manuals at all. And, like an infant, it pops out gasping for life sustaining air. Only in this case, it gasps for connection to the internet.
What moves me to write this post is my naive refresher on the extent to which we are becoming enveloped and intertwined by the internet. Increasingly, the internet is becoming the central nervous system of our civilization.
While standing in front of a display at Circuit City I called the HP customer service number to inquire about the warranty on their Pavillion. I eventually spoke with a fast talking character who flat out said that I should not buy from Circuit City, one of their own distributors (!), and that I should have a custom laptop assembled by HP. After 10 minutes of irritating hard sell, we eventually hung up on him.
This isn’t just about commerce. This is about anthropology. A commercial tool is absolutely altering how we do nearly everything and how we expend scarce resources. It is a tool that uses features you cannot own- you can only agree to the terms of a license. This tool is held together by the sinew of invisible electronic code. This tool is both pleasurable and fearsome. It can be swung by governments, accountants, and 9 year old Hindu children.
To even inquire about these computer tools, we are forced to use computerized telecommunications and speak to computerized devices that filter and channel us into packing house chutes like pigs to slaughter. This sorting process can identify willing consumers, plump with credit, and prepare them for flensing.
We have become giddy and willing participants in a change that is almost biological in its transformation of our social structure. The very first thing that a MS program wants to do is to connect with the Mother Ship at Microsoft. Increasingly, our DSL connected computers are becoming assimilated into the control of the collective being. It would be an exaggeration to say that it resembles the Borg of Star Trek. But the idea of assimilation of information flow into a master network is beginning to take shape. A master network suggests master control.
Consumers have control of the situation, you might say. At some level, yes. But there are disturbing trends that need to be recognized. The playing field of global commerce is neither egalitarian, democratic, or laissez faire. While there may be harmonized regulations that cut across national borders to slow down the more obvious scams, the nature of the players is changing. Increasingly, nationalized organizations are participating in the market place in a big way. In the petroleum market for instance, NOC’s control approximately 75 % of the worlds petroleum reserves. That means that soverign nations can modulate scarcity directly.
Autocratic and paranoid governments do what they have always have done. They restrict access and reduce transparency. When such governments have control of commodity production (i.e., Gazprom), their resilience in the market is magnified by the fact that overhead can be subsidized and scarcity can be driven by politics. Nationalized commodity suppliers do not suffer the full forces of the market place because they can be floated by the government. The cleansing effect of the market place on inefficient operation is ineffective.
The openness of the internet can only go one direction. It will increasingly be subject to contrivance and control by organizations that seek facile extraction of dollars from you. Today, buying a computer means giving increasing consent to automated integration into the net. We willingly comply because we are first and foremost primates who are dazzled by flashing lights, pretty colors, and a new axe to swing around.
Lamentations on Chemistry 