> Machines like these are a huge investment, so as long as they are still working flawlessly

I worked at a Colgate manufacturing facility. They had an NJ plant that had mechanical production lines. They've been running for 40 years so by the time i was there they were running flawlessly day in and day out and no matter what went wrong the maintenance crew knew how to fix it right away.

To save costs they shut down that plant and opened up a new one in SC with fancy brand new electronic machines that were supposed to have much better throughput. It took them years to get all the machines working and even still the old machines produced more in 8 hours than the new ones made in 12 hours. And whenever the was a problem with the machine it was always some wonky issue with the relays, sensors, and timing and we'd have sometimes days of downtime and would need OEMs to come in and fix it.

They wasted millions on that move which was supposed to save money and be more efficient. Many were fired/demoted from that.

It's shocking reading stuff like this.

I know you probably meant that in jest, but it makes sense as we have a sea change between the pre-digital and post-digital generations. And this isn't just a "back in my day, we knew when to get off the lawn"-type of observation; the post-digital cohort is used to copying and pasting bits where the new instance is a perfect reproduction of the old. Naturally, they think that you can copy a NJ factory and paste it in SC, sprinkle in some enhancements, and voila! You get a better version. But the world of atoms is much messier than the world of bits, and in the former even something like getting the floor of the factory to be level is a nontrivial task.

Maybe this just shows that I have some experience under my belt... but I understand that most things take longer and cost more than planned.

So the thought of scrapping a working factory with decades of fine-tuning already done... pains me.

I worked with one project manager who was straight out of school. I couldn't believe that the direction and management of multiple teams of engineers was coming from someone who was going to make all their rookie mistakes on our project... and all the people who hired him already left for new jobs, so no consequences for them.

> Many were fired/demoted from that.

Did they fire/demote the brain geniuses who kicked this off? Because the corporate stories I know like this generally involve the responsible parties getting promotions for their bravery and forward thinking, while the pain falls on the people they forced to work on it and who unaccountably failed to implement their perfect visions.

doesn't surprise me when it costs millions to replace/redesign :)

> You'd be surprised to see how much old industrial machinery is still being used around the world, even in other developed countries. Machines like these are a huge investment, so as long as they are still working flawlessly (and I imagine that the Japanese take maintenance seriously, so the machines will be working flawlessly), it's hard to justify replacing them.

Case in point: when Russia started it's invasion of Ukraine, one of the first things they did was to pillage the industrial areas of the regions they controlled to take away industrial equipment, including farm vehicles.

Although contrary to the popular believe, a lot of equipment in Ukraine is of the latest generation. For example, a lot of farmers use the latest John Deere tractors.

The same is for metallurgy - it was consistently upgraded through the years and not outdated in any way.

Ukraine is piss poor compared to Russia. For years Russia provided Ukraine with underpriced gas while Ukraine’s export prices increased rapidly, but due to the dysfunctional governments they had, they never were able to take advantage of that. Ukraine historically was an agrarian economy that was industrialized with the usual Soviet brutality, accompanied by agriculture collectivization and the usual mass repression. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it inherited a relatively good infrastructure and capital stocks, especially in energy, but it mostly failed to maintain that. Add to that the fact that since 1992, there was only one year when Ukraine had a balanced budget. There was a lot of growth in the aughts due to the high price of metallurgical during this decade, but Ukraine was mostly taking advantage of their existing industrial infrastructure inherited from the Soviets and failed to diversify and sophisticate their economy.

Besides, if the idea is to invade the country to incorporate some separatist regions, it doesn't make sense to destroy its economic basis and end up with a huge refugee problem and a completely deserted land you just conquered.

This is basically propaganda for gullible Americans that never traveled to Eastern Europe.

> Ukraine is piss poor compared to Russia.

I fail to see the relevance of that. Sounds like cheap propaganda.

My point was clear: when Russia started it's invasion of Ukraine, one of the first things they did was to pillage the industrial areas of the regions they controlled to take away industrial equipment, including farm vehicles.

HN had a discussion on how John Deere kill switches were rendering Russia's pillaging useless as the stolen tractors were being remotely disabled once they were moved into Russia.

Industrial equipment, even old one, is often used extensively in spite of existing latest and greatest offers.

> Ukraine is piss poor compared to Russia.

If this is true for all of Russia why do they keep stealing toilets?.

Siberian forest dwellers that get drafted are extremely poor, everything from civilization is a luxury to them

> Ukraine is piss poor compared to Russia.

Yes comrade, Russia is bigger and has a lot of oligarchs so off course there's much more money there, but average citizens are piss poor. Russian elites has been robbing Ukraine for three decades with their Kremlin buddy oligarchs like Medvedchuk, and not just Ukrainian oligarchs a lot of Russian ones were quite cozy there even after 2014. They robbed eastern part of Ukraine after ceasing control over the territory. It proved to be difficult to rob whole of Ukraine with just the dirty oligarchs, so they proceeded with full scale invasion in 2022.

It amazes me how people are incapable of multi-dimensional thinking: you can pick a side without claiming that one of them is pure good and the other is pure evil. But we are also probably talking about the kind of people whose only cultural references are superhero movies and Harry Potter.

Well I guess I'm a gullible Kiwi living in the UK that never travelled to Eastern Europe. And never will, because of the volatility and the general stance towards gay people (mostly that we should be dead).

As OP followed up, doesn't change the facts that Russian soldiers pillaged the crap out of Ukraine as soon as they got there; Russia may be resource wealthy but corruption means that only the boys at the top get the cream, seems like everyone outside of Moscow gets the shit end of the stick.

Regardless, no amount of success excuses the slaughtering of innocents, slava ukraini.