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Thread: Please help me out with politics
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11-01-2025, 10:08 #1
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Please help me out with politics
Like many gunsiters I maintain some interest in politics. After all it governs our lives like it or not. But I'm by no means the best informed. Those who follow Peter Zeihan will know that falling birth rates everywhere except sub Saharan Africa will cause big economic problems in the foreseeable future. We, on the other hand, have a plentiful supply of young labour which we can't use for reasons we all know.
The British recently closed their two blast furnace steel plants on the alter of "green" ideology. You can't make virgin steel = defense industry with anything else but coke fired blast furnaces. The British will henceforth be dependent on India and China (heaven help us) for virgin steel. Surely that's a market for our steel plants at Newcastle and Vanderbilpark. Why are we so unable to exploit obvious opportunities? What am I missing?
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11-01-2025, 12:06 #2
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Re: Please help me out with politics
You may be conflating politics with economics (and the two are inter-connected at various points). The short answer to your question is economics, and more specifically, the lack thereof in our manufacturing sector.
While we have the two primary raw materials, iron ore and coal (energy) that's where it ends. Our plants are old, unmaintained, archaic (inefficient) tech, overstaffed by incompetents and located to serve an inland and not export market (read: just our transport costs to get the steel from plant onto a ship in Durban or R Bay harbours blows us out the water).
This all amounts to massively uncompetitive production costs versus world (commodity) price. Steel is a commodity and the world production base competes to supply whatever demand exists. There is thus a cost curve of all the producers, ranging from lowest cost to highest. Guess where we sit on that curve? Therein lies your answer.
So yes there's a market for virgin steel as you put it but we are not potential suppliers because the British are not quite stupid enough (yet) to pay more than the market/commodity price for steel. The old Iscor plants cannot come close to making ends meet at that same commodity price.
One can pontificate about the fairness of subsidies and trade tariffs and barriers and environmental responsibilities (i.e. the politics) but the bottom line is our steel sector's bottom line is terminally red.
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11-01-2025, 12:21 #3
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Re: Please help me out with politics
The mind boggles considering we have coal and iron ore in abundance but cannot produce locally at a cheaper cost than exporting said coal and iron ore and then importing steel. I realise there are other additives(chromium, manganese, carbon), but I am almost certain these are available locally.
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11-01-2025, 12:27 #4
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Re: Please help me out with politics
Be careful of zeihan, he talks a good game but he's really does deal in a superficial level of knowledge
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11-01-2025, 13:30 #5
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11-01-2025, 14:39 #6
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Re: Please help me out with politics
The staff used to be quite competent but the the unions took over. It is a permanent struggle even with the flat products in Vanderbijlpark. The Chinese governments used to subsidize their steel plants and that wwas the profit AMSA would have made.
When the one plant started up again after being mothballed for more than 2 years, I told 1 of the production staff, perfect now we can show management that this place can make money. His reply was, was a chuckle and then said we'll show them. Ja, true to tradition they only produced about 25 to 33% of the previous daily output. Most of the time this was on purpose. Then the plant got mothballed again.
May they all enjoy their sassa and grants.
Lets hope the new arc furnace, being built in Alrode, is going be a sucess for that company.
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11-01-2025, 14:42 #7
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Re: Please help me out with politics
As of this week the Newcastle plant is not worth mentioning. And Vereeniging.
A lot of what is happening with AMSA now is due to the government not being able to get their dirty little looting hands on it in they way they hoped to do after 94. Breaking everything. There is a bigger story and picture but basically they are slowly smothering it to death.
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11-01-2025, 14:50 #8
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So his talks on shipping are problematic, youtube "what going on with shipping" Sal did a good critique of his last video on shipping.
On Rogan and few other videos of his he keeps claiming Russia takes a million casualties and collapses or surrenders, except that's crap. From napoleon to WW2 "Russia" in whatever form it was in in those various conflicts took MILLIONS of fatalities and casualties and kept going until victory or internal political collapse.
Millennium7 did a good critique on his views on the PLAAN and why China is still a threat. In 2022 when I first came across him he claimed that because of fertilizer bottlenecks that could not be overcome in the short term African and south American agriculture would collapse by 2025, both claims he's now rolled back.
I think like a lot of public speakers and political journalists he weaves together some facts, factoids, convincing narratives and wild predictions in order to get attention.
Like a lot of futurists he's interesting to listen to, but if you've followed him for long enough he starts to fall short.
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11-01-2025, 15:24 #9
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Re: Please help me out with politics
Thanks for the reply. It doesn't look like its his knowledge that have an issue with quite so much as his interpretations and opinions. On the areas that I have some background knowledge and interest in he's always struck me as particularly well informed. Heavily and quite openly US backing but nonetheless well informed. Someone that I find really interesting for his view and analysis on the fustercluck in the middle east is a guy called Tom Nash. He made some startlingly accurate calls on what was going on behind the scenes and what was likely to emerge after the Oct 7 Hamas attack. He's worth a look if you are interested.
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12-01-2025, 23:43 #10
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Re: Please help me out with politics
I'm not competent to agree or otherwise but his point about birth rates seems accurate. That was my point - while most of the world may be facing a critical shortage of skilled labour in a few years time, here we are with lots of it that we can't use. I suppose my comments about that and steel are two different topics. I'm not sure why I mixed them together - probably because they are both resources that should make us a manufacturing powerhouse but we manage to screw it up. As are the British to be fair.
Yeah, I know, the persistent 66% marxist vote is to blame in the final analysis. But it's terribly frustrating that a Checkers employee with a matric couldn't divide R45 by three and get R15 (special offer of 3 for the price of 2) without the calculator on his cell phone. He was packing shelves near my friend Sue who was looking at the product. When she did the calc in her head but out loud he asked in surprise "how did you do that?" I recently encountered another matriculant who couldn't calculate the area of a circle and was utterly perplexed at the volume of the frustum of a cone. At matric age I remember doing differential and integral calculus. What the hell is happening? How can anyone pass matric without being able to do the simplest calcs mentally? Where are our future engineers and technicians coming from?
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