Unable to read Mendeleev’s great 1869 work, the Periodic Table of the Elements, especially the principles of carbon bonding that any high school student can divine from it, Dumb Don just pulled us out of the Paris climate accord.
Dumb Don’s illiteracy puts Mendeleev’s subtle syntax and grammar as far beyond him today as they were when he was introduced to the Periodic Table as a teenager. Who pays for Don’s massive intellectual deficiency? We do.
If Don could read Mendeleev’s language of the elements, he would know some of the simpler principles behind global warming. If he had even a vanishingly small drop of experience in business, he would know that green drives profits; dirty drives losses. Not complicated. Instead, he pulled out of Paris because people are “laughing at us.”
It gets better.
In a spectacular combination of his illiteracy in English and Mendeleev on the one hand and his total ignorance of business on the other, Don said that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” In fact, if he had a shred of business experience, Don would have said that China is on the losing end, not us.
For forty years, Publius has analyzed the operations of hundreds of factories around the world, including many in China. The first thing Publius does is to check capacity utilization and yield rates. The second is to check waste.
It is axiomatic that high capacity utilization and high yields throw off less waste. Top factory managers regularly look at waste to flag production problems that are often not visible any other way. They attack the waste and get better yields. Better yields drive up productivity and profits and drive down costs. Whence Publius' 1995 maxim that lower waste = lower costs; green = profits.
As recently as a quarter century ago, however, information costs were so high that the systems for divining the low-waste, low-cost, green = profits relationship were available to only the highest tech of high tech producers. It was commonly thought then that heavy polluters had lower costs, and therefore, competitive advantages. China pollutes so China wins.
But, the Moore Curve has advanced relentlessly since Publius published his path-breaking 1995 green = profits analysis and ever-cheaper information is increasingly substitutable for the other factor inputs, land, labor and capital. This process has unleashed the “Pollute less, profit more” rule of operations.
In one case a few years ago, Publius saw large amounts of waste in a factory with poor yields and capacity utilization. Demand was going up quickly management was about to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to double capacity using existing production inefficiencies.
Publius showed management that if it started with its waste problem and worked backwards, it could double production without spending a single dollar on capital expenditure. And get far improved yield and lower costs.
Fifteen minutes into Publius explanation, the top executive at the meeting rushed out the door and cancelled the entire project. Hundreds of millions saved and millions more served!! That’s the power of the Paris Accord. Power that Dumb Don just threw away. And for which, as always with Don, he got nothing for us in return.
A Smart Don, if such a thing could exist, would have pushed harder for an even more stringent Paris accord and ever-greater American market advantage, profits and jobs.
Alas, Dumb Don’s complete lack of business knowledge and common sense, combined with his inability to read and write English and the Periodic Table, drive him to push us into the 19th century as fast as possible. His multiple illiteracies tell him that he must deprive us of as much competitive advantage as he can as quickly as he can.
This, you can be certain, will make America great again.
October 11, 2017
Dumb Don, who is so intellectually insufficient that he can't pass Publius' TruMP exam, has challenged his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson to an IQ Test, saying that he is sure he knows who will win. Talk about putting your foot in it! Yes, Don, we all know who will win.
April 28, 2020
It took nearly three years for the mainstream media to catch up with Publius on Dumb Don's inability to study science, but today, in The New York Times, Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer finally did. The proximate motivator for the NYT's story is Don's serial failure to understand any of the science behind the COVID-19 crisis (since renamed my Publius as the COmmunist VIrus Disease-19 to force the Communist Party of The Center of Everything to accept its responsibility for the plague). Don's weird ramblings are well understood to all those who follow Publius. Indeed, anticipated years ago.