Nardone Automotive's Fabulous Porsche 928 Restomod Is Fit for a Sci-Fi Anime [CNET]
That’s not an old car. Well, it is. It’s a “restomod,” short for (I didn’t come up with this, don’t blame me) a “restored car that’s also modded,” but what is generally inferred to mean “made modern but still looking vintage.” Car interiors are the last frontier of restomods and the Nardone 928 is an exercise in restraint in an increasingly maximalist place. My ideal aesthetic remains “Italian-Designed Not-Italian Thing.” (Except Nardone is French.)
Revisiting classic industrial designs in a modern context is commonplace. (c.f. KitchenAid, Converse [R.I.P. the Chuck 2], knife-making). What the restomod scene has incorporated into its collective ideals is a welcoming of improvements, in large part as a response to the fusty, “concours” restoration scene that once dominated the collectable car market, where sourcing the last box of new-old-stock cardboard door card fasteners is a mark of authenticity.
Restomodders would simply make a better door card out of modern materials using modern tools like laser scanners and CNC machines. When done correctly, like the Nardone 928, it’s hard to imagine the originally designers and engineers lamenting that someone had fiddled with their designs, but easy to think they’d be chuffed to see how their protégés and fans have reinterpreted and improved their work without the limitations of the past.
Long-time readers of Scope Creep will know that I, 1) Worked at McDonald’s as a kid, which was apparently enough of a formative experience that I bring it up all the time and also still maintain a healthy expenditure at my local franchises. [appx. $230 in 2021, primarily Double Cheeseburgers, extra pickles] 2) Find the economics and business culture of franchise enterprise fascinating, 3) Think that learning about economics on Twitter might be making me sadder and poorer.
As a person who casually calls himself a socialist but also actively engages with early career folks who don’t seem to understand scarcity in nearly any context, let alone externalities, I appreciated Mr. Hodge’s breakdown of the rough unit economics and overheads of operating a Wendy’s. (And they don’t really get a discount on beef! Commodities! Another thing I should not learn about on Twitter.)
I don’t agree with Donald Trump about much—we have wildly different McDonald’s orders—but his surely racism-inspired riff about on-shoring was largely correct: the neoliberal experiment in exporting all the dirty factory work to developing economies, training up foreign nationals at our universities, and then kicking back to watch the money roll in by selling side-by-sides and dusky pastel lounge chairs to Americans is starting to bite us in the ass. We’re becoming a nation of MBAs and javascript pasters and brand advocacy specialists, and besides the negative quality impact its having on our nation’s stand-up comedy index, our lack of practical engineering and manufacturing capability is going to leave us truly surprised when the inertial benefits of the late 20th finally peter out.
Hadrian is an “advanced manufacturing startup that is building ”highly automated precision component factories across the US to enable Space & Defense manufacturers get parts 10x faster and halve the cost of making Rockets, Satellites, Jets & Drones.”
Hadrian CEO and founder Chris Power:
In the decade where we're trying to butt heads with the CCP and win Space Race 2, the capacity that feeds rocket satellite, drone companies is going to fall through the floor because of this capacity issue. They're retiring, so you've got this huge supply and demand imbalance in the worst possible decade that that could be happening. And on top of that, it's not as simple as, say, a Raytheon going, "Hey, Patrick's Machine Shop, you're retiring. Let's take all the digital files that tell someone how to make those parts, and give it to another machine shop." Most of them have been made for 20 years. There's no CAD file. The drawing is in someone's desk drawer. And we've just seen this where we shipped something like a third of all our Stinger and Javelin missiles to the Ukraine. This is on the defense side, but this happens across space semiconductor really. So we shipped all over to the Ukraine. The Biden administration went to Raytheon and said, "Hey, we need more Stingers and Javelins.
And then Raytheon came back and said, "Well, apart from the fact that supply chain's super bottlenecked and we can't ramp up production, we just don't know how to make any of the parts anymore. And it might take a couple of years to figure it out."
They’re basically going to try to combine Agile-type software development processes with JIT manufacturing, in America, to accelerate the development of industrial capability. And then they’re going to try to take the Stinger missile contract from Raytheon, of course.
PR
Boeing’s CCO Ed Dandridge leaves after just two years. (The sixth Chief Communications Officer since 2017! Two years seems pretty miraculous in that context.) IPG wins more (all?) Moderna PR business; IPG Health launches 90NORTH, some sort of denkgruppe that will…help…solutions? It has an “Empathy Engine” which should bill well, because while you make money selling them the Engine, you make the real money selling them the Empathy refills. Edelman’s multicultural practice grows 68% in two years; the biggest creative win listed was a manga for Taco Bell’s re-re-re-introduction of nacho fries. Sounds cool? I missed it. A cynical view is that these groups—which aren’t new; permutations of “multicultural marketing” have been around for decades—are just colorwashing capitalism. (This is both true and also irrelevant since it applies to the whole industry; we’re all shilling capitalism.) The biggest impact these groups should have is to give minority industry talent the opportunity to show they can do excellent work when trusted to speak to an audience they understand, while also not pigeonholing anyone on these teams into some sort of minority specialist corner. (Unless that’s what an individual wants, of course, which is also fine!)