It has begun...

[donn]

Tuba purchase as an investment sounds like a recipe for heartbreak, but then you can write a country western song and recover your money that way.

[dugh]

I've had a conversation recently with a tuba seller. Can you imagine having placed an order and paying for it only to have to pay more than double to receive it? What do you do? Likely you're losing money on each sale!

Some of you don't like Chinese horns, but the truth is that most of us who are amateur players can only afford these types of tubas. It's laudable for these small businesses to take on the challenge and risk of being a seller.

The absolute truth is that the reason for these extra expenses are due to the decision of one man (not a political statement, but simply the truth) and is a form of highway robbery and the victims are these small businesses. Let's hope they can make it!

[Mary Ann]

Tuba purchase as an investment sounds like a recipe for heartbreak, but then you can write a country western song and recover your money that way.

The theft of my violin certainly paid off financially even though it was massively under-insured since the appraisal was more than ten years old. If it had been recently appraised I could have bought a nice new car with that money. It has been an interesting psychological trip, from rage and intense grieving to realizing that I haven't been able to even think about playing a violin for a year now, due to the physical problems I have developed. In the long run, it would have been very difficult to sell at the price it was worth, and would have had to be sent on consignment to the kind of seller who deals in that level of instrument. The recent joking post of the $380,000 Vuillaume wasn't so funny to me. Mine was not that, but neither was it a ten dollar box.

[bloke]

I can't "afford" to have my well repaired today, but I'm going to pay to have it done anyway.
There are no Chinese guys around here to do it, sadly.

[gocsick]

Most people don't realize the US has amazing manufacturing capacity... 15.9% of the total global manufacturing output .. or right $2.5 trillion dollars.

This is largely invisible to most people... because only about 7% of people are actually employed by the manufacturing sector. 8.7% if you include white collar manufacturing jobs. We are the world leader in efficient automated manufacturing processes.

I took a group of students to one of the largest US steel plants.. and the biggest comment I got was.. there are no workers. In the 1960s there were almost a million workers at US steel plants and we produces about 91 million metric tons of steel a year .. noe we have about 100,000 steel workers and produce 85 million metric tons a year (2021 numbers). This includes a lot of older plants where employment numbers are much larger . If we look at a modern faculty.. the Timken continuous casting facility in Canton Ohio is the second largest in the world.. it runs 24-7 with only a few dozen employees... in the 1960s they had several hundreds for 1/8 of the output.

US manufacturing will continue to grow and be strong... but it will do it with fewer and fewer people. We are likely to see nearly completely robotically made instruments before Conn Drummer brings production of student instruments back from China.

[donn]

Same in China actually. More factory robots than the rest of the world combined.