March 7, 2005

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO

Valve Maker Drops a Bomb on Cost: Attention to manufacturing details helped Marotta Controls contain costs as it ramps up production volumes on a weapons system valve (Joseph Ogando, Design News, 2/21/05)

The engineers who design Marotta Controls' precision pneumatic components sit just a few yards away from the company's manufacturing plant. And that proximity paid off when they designed parts of a new ejection mechanism for the U.S. Air Force's Small Diameter Bomb (SBD) system. This forthcoming system will allow existing fighter jets, including the F-15E, to rack up more kills per sortie by equipping them with a weapons carriage that holds four small bombs rather than one large one. At 250 lbs, each one of the new 70-inch-long small bombs will weigh only half as much as the smallest bomb currently used by the Air Force. Size aside, the new bombs will feature advanced GPS guidance and other targeting systems designed to improve accuracy. And they will feature a new pneumatic bomb ejection system.
One of the nice features of precision guided bombing is that a small, less expensive bomb delivered right on target is more effective than big bombs that fall near the target.

Posted by David Cohen at March 7, 2005 12:30 PM
Comments

Via Instapundit, scroll down to the electronics section of this Sears Catalog from 1978 and check out the prices and quality of the products.

http://www.retrocrush.com/archive2004/catalog/

Posted by: Pat H at March 7, 2005 1:14 PM

"NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO"

Except those areas where the government is heavily involved: education, housing, healthcare...

Posted by: Rick T. at March 7, 2005 1:59 PM

Housing is a function of population growth and ownership, but health care costs much less than it used to (so long as you look at similar procedures, not overall spending, which is just a consumer decision).

Posted by: oj at March 7, 2005 2:02 PM

Health Insurance is going up for me.

So is the cost of my cigarettes and Jack Daniels.

Hmmm, I wonder if there is a connection there.

Posted by: h-man at March 7, 2005 2:25 PM

OJ:

"Housing is a function of population growth and ownership" - but the cost is rising far faster than population or ownership growth.

h-man:

So is my health insurance even though I have only catastrophic coverage and have not had a claim in years. Wonder why? My particular vice is wine and fortunately, while not getting cheaper, the quality per dollar spent has improved substantially.

Posted by: Rick T. at March 7, 2005 5:18 PM

Two mitigating thoughts on housing inflation.

Housing stock is an improving commodity, both from a features to size perspective. Some "hedonic" adjustments are really necessary here to get a true picture. This is a real-life fact.

Aside from quality improvements, any price increase on housing that is related to real increased demand over supply (such as because of pop growth, etc.) is not technically inflation. (Inflation is really the depreciation of paper money versus a commodity given no change in demand-supply.) This may sound like a petty technical point, but is not when assessing whether our rising housing prices are the product of a speculative bubble (The Economist's theory, e.g.) or whether they respond to solid fundamentals.

Posted by: Moe from NC at March 7, 2005 6:17 PM

To get away from Sears and house inflation for a moment...

If we compute (number of dead mad mullahs)/buck, we have a real bargain!

Posted by: John J. Coupal at March 7, 2005 8:15 PM
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