#Industrial Agitator Market

[robertemma27-blog]

Industrial Agitators Market Dynamics: Navigating the Rapid Growth

The global industrial agitators market size is estimated to be worth USD 2.6 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 3.2 billion by 2028, at a CAGR of 4.0% during the forecast period.

Increasing demand for homogeneous mixing, growing need for energy efficient mixing equipment or industrial mixer in pharmaceutical, chemical and food & beverage industries, and growing adoption of customized industrial agitators are some of the major factors driving the industrial agitators market growth globally.

The major agitator companies in the industrial agitators market include SPX Flow, Inc. (US), Xylem Inc. (US),Ekato Group (Germany), Sulzer Ltd. (Switzerland) and NOV Inc (US).

Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=59649096

Driver: Growing need for energy efficiency, flow maximization, rapid mixing, waste reduction, and other advancements The increasing requirement of optimizing mixing processes is pushing industrial agitator companies to develop industrial mixer that helps achieve low power consumption, flow maximization, rapid mixing, and other advancements. Mixing, blending, fluid handling, separation, thermal heat transfer, and other processes are integral to companies for production and manufacturing across various industries, such as chemical, food & beverage, pharmaceutical, and other industrial markets. Rapid innovations and emerging trends in industrial mixer application are driving the need for more energy-efficient, speedy mixing and low costs mixing/agitation technologies in the said market. For instance, in 2022, SPX FLOW launched a new APV Flex-Mix Pilot industrial Mixer for the food & beverage industry to test small-scale pilot batches of low to high-viscosity product samples using a single unit. This pilot industrial mixer is useful for companies focusing on small-scale production or craft producers producing a variety of products in small batches. This helps cut costs and reduce waste during the testing phase due to small batch production.

Restraint: High costs for maintenance and repairs of industrial agitators Industrial agitators require significant upfront investment by agitator companies. This might create a barrier for some agitator companies, especially smaller ones. The cost of industrial mixer can vary depending on their size, materials, and complexity. Furthermore, the maintenance process for industrial mixer consists of replacing worn parts and changing the lubricant, bearings, seals, and other components. Any wear and tear or fault in a component of the industrial agitators can lead to an expense to the client. The maintenance activity applies to various factors in an industrial mixer, including simple adjustments in components of the industrial mixer, troubleshooting by standard exchanges, fault identification and diagnostics, repairs, mechanical corrections, renovation, reconstruction, or complete exchange of the rotating part, and so on. However, the impact of this restraint is expected to reduce with time due to the growing advancements in agitation technology and the subsequently increasing opportunities for industrial agitators market.

Opportunity: Rising usage of industrial mixing technologies in several applications Advancements in technology have led to the development of more efficient and effective industrial mixer that can offer greater control and precision in mixing. As more industries seek to improve their manufacturing processes and achieve greater product consistency, the demand for industrial mixer is increasing.  This presents an opportunity for agitator companies to offer new and improved mixing equipment that can meet the needs of industries looking to optimize their manufacturing processes. Furthermore, there is a growing need for customized mixing solutions that can meet specific requirements. This presents an opportunity for agitator companies to offer specialized products that can be tailored to meet specific needs of different industries such as pharmaceutical, chemical and food & beverage. In June 2022, considering the increasing importance of using industrial agitators and industrial mixer in different industrial processes, Sulzer launched its latest addition to the SALOMIX industrial agitator family, the SSF150.

Challenge: Emerging trend of renting industrial mixer due to high costs or shorter time span usage Users or purchasers of industrial agitators or industrial mixer may look for options other than capital purchases. If a client is not able to afford the industrial mixer or needs the industrial mixer for a shorter time, then renting industrial mixer can be considered the most reliable option.  This is one of the suitable alternatives garnering attention in the industrial agitators market for rental industrial agitators/industrial mixer. Rental industrial mixer offers a fast and cost-effective way of fulfilling the need without the high cost of a capital purchase, allowing purchasers to fulfill their mixing needs at a fraction of the original industrial mixer cost. This would largely benefit the buyers at a time when most of the end-user industries are considering or have already slashed their capital expenditure budgets.

[roseaa11]

Data Bridge Market Research analyses the industrial agitators market will exhibit a CAGR of 6.20% for the forecast period of 2022-2029. Data Bridge Market Research report on coating additives market provides analysis and insights regarding the various factors expected to be prevalent throughout the forecast period while providing their impacts on the market’s growth. The rise in the demand for the various applications is escalating the growth of coating additives market.

[stillnaomi]

during WW1, the British government was so scared of socialism that it decided to build 500,000 spacious and good quality homes for the higher strata of blue collar workers, in order to avert any chance of revolution. this would give jobs to many of the demobilised troops and would stop a large section of the proletariat agitating about their living conditions. previously, the government had steadfastly refused to interfere in the freedom of the housing market, despite large sections of the population living in slum housing

as Major Astor of the Local Government Board told parliament during a debate on the scheme:

“When we talk of expense and cost let us realise that everything is comparative, and let us measure the cost of our housing proposals by the cost of Bolshevism to the country and the cost of revolution. The money we propose to spend on housing is an insurance against Bolshevism and revolution. What is the cost to the country of industrial unrest and strikes? You have only to realise the conditions under which many men and women live to realise that unrest is fully justified.”

believe it or not, revolution was seen as a serious threat. this is how the minutes record the PM, David Lloyd George, speaking in a Cabinet meeting on March 3rd 1919:

“In Europe we were now faced with very serious conditions. Russia had gone almost completely over to Bolshevism, and we had consoled ourselves with the thought that they were only a half-civilised race; but now even in Germany, whose people were without exception the best educated in Europe, prospects are very black.

“Bavaria was already in chaos, and the same fate might await Prussia. Spain seemed to be on the edge of upheaval. In a short time we might have three-quarters of Europe converted to Bolshevism. None would be left but France and Great Britain.

“He believed that Great Britain would hold out, but only if the people were given a sense of confidence—only if they were made to believe that things were being done for them. We had promised them reforms time and again, but little had been done. We must give them the conviction this time that we meant it, and we must give them that conviction quickly.”

this is what communists mean when we say that the capitalist state only gives out concessions when its power is under threat

read more about the Homes Fit for Heroes initiative and its politics

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Surveillance pricing

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Correction, 7 June 2024: The initial version of this article erroneously described Jeffrey Roper as the founder of ATPCO. He benefited from ATPCO, but did not co-found it. The initial version of this article called ATPCO "an illegal airline price-fixing service"; while ATPCO provides information that the airlines use to set prices, it does not set prices itself, and while the DOJ investigated the company, they did not pursue a judgment declaring the service to be illegal. I regret the error.

Noted anti-capitalist agitator Adam Smith had it right: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Despite being a raving commie loon, Smith's observation was so undeniably true that regulators, policymakers, and economists couldn't help but acknowledge that it was true. The trustbusting era was defined by this idea: if we let the number of companies in a sector get too small, or if we let one or a few companies get too big, they'll eventually start to rig prices.

What's more, once an industry contracts corporate gigantism, it will become too big to jail, able to outspend and overpower the regulators charged with reining in its cheating. Anyone who believes Smith's self-evident maxim had to accept its conclusion: that companies had to be kept smaller than the state that regulated them. This wasn't about "punishing bigness" – it was the necessary precondition for a functioning market economy.

We kept companies small for the same reason that we limited the height of skyscrapers: not because we opposed height, or failed to appreciate the value of a really good penthouse view – rather, to keep the building from falling over and wrecking all the adjacent buildings and the lives of the people inside them.

Starting in the neoliberal era – Carter, then Reagan – we changed our tune. We liked big business. A business that got big was doing something right. It was perverse to shut down our best companies. Instead, we'd simply ban big companies from rigging prices. This was called the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. It was a total failure.

40 years later, nearly every industry is dominated by a handful of companies, and these companies price-gouge us with abandon. Worse, they use their gigantic ripoff winnings to fill war-chests that fund the corruption of democracy, capturing regulators so that they can rip us off even more, while ignoring labor, privacy and environmental law and ducking taxes.

It turns out that keeping gigantic, opaque, complex corporations honest is really hard. They have so many ways to shuffle money around that it's nearly impossible to figure out what they're doing. Digitalization makes things a million times worse, because computers allow businesses to alter their processes so they operate differently for every customer, and even for every interaction.

This is Dieselgate times a billion: VW rigged its cars to detect when they were undergoing emissions testing and switch to a less polluting, more compliant mode. But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands. Computers don't make corporate leaders more evil, but they let evil corporate leaders execute far more complex and nefarious plans. Digitalization is a corporate moral hazard, making it just too easy and tempting to rig the game.

That's why Toyota, the largest car-maker in the world, just did Dieselgate again, more than a decade later. Digitalization is a temptation no giant company can resist:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo

For forty years, pro-monopoly cheerleaders insisted that we could allow companies to grow to unimaginable scale and still prevent cheating. They passed rules banning companies from explicitly forming agreements to rig prices. About ten seconds later, new middlemen popped up offering "information brokerages" that helped companies rig prices without talking to one another.

Take Agri Stats: the country's hyperconcentrated meatpacking industry pays Agri Stats to "consult on prices." They provide Agri Stats with a list of their prices, and then Agri Stats suggests changes based on its analysis. What does that analysis consist of? Comparing the company's prices to its competitors, who are also Agri Stats customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

In other words, Agri Stats finds the highest price for each product in the sector, then "advises" all the companies with lower prices to raise their prices to the "competitive" level, creating a one-way ratchet that sends the price of food higher and higher.

More and more sectors have an Agri Stats, and digitalization has made this price-gouging system faster, more efficient, and accessible to sectors with less concentration. Landlords, for example, have tapped into Realpage, a "data broker" that the same thing to your rent that Agri Stats does to meat prices. Realpage requires the landlords who sign up for its service to accept its "recommendations" on minimum rents, ensuring that prices only go up:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

Writing for The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein lays out the many ways in which these digital intermediaries have supercharged the business of price-rigging:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-05-three-algorithms-in-a-room/

Goldstein identifies a kind of patient zero for this ripoff epidemic: Jeffrey Roper, a former Alaska Air exec who benefited from a service that helps airlines set prices. ATPCO was investigated by the DOJ in the 1990s, but the enforcers lost their nerve and settled with the company, which agreed to apply some ornamental fig-leafs to its collusion-machine. Even those cosmetic changes were seemingly a bridge too far Roper, who left the US.

But he came back to serve as Realpage's "principal scientist" – the architect of a nationwide scheme to make rental housing vastly more expensive. For Roper, the barrier to low rents was empathy: landlords felt stirrings of shame when they made shelter unaffordable to working people. Roper called these people "idiots" who sentimentality "costs the whole system."

Sticking a rent-gouging computer between landlords and the people whose lives they ruin is a classic "accountability sink," as described in Dan Davies' new book "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind":

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

It's a form of "empiricism washing": if computers are working in the abstract realm of pure numbers, they're just moving the objective facts of the quantitative realm into the squishy, imperfect qualitative world. Davies' interview on Trashfuture is excellent:

https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/fire-sale-at-the-accountability-store-feat-dan-davies/

To rig prices, an industry has to solve three problems: the problem of coming to an agreement to fix prices (economists call this "the collective action problem"); the problem of coming up with a price; and the problem of actually changing prices from moment to moment. This is the ripoff triangle, and like a triangle, it has many stable configurations.

The more concentrated an industry is, the easier it is to decide to rig prices. But if the industry has the benefit of digitalization, it can swap the flexibility and speed of computers for the low collective action costs from concentration. For example, grocers that switch to e-ink shelf tags can make instantaneous price-changes, meaning that every price change is less consequential – if sales fall off after a price-hike, the company can lower them again at the press of a button. That means they can collude less explicitly but still raise prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

My name for this digital flexibility is "twiddling." Businesses with digital back-ends can alter their "business logic" from second to second, and present different prices, payouts, rankings and other key parts of the deal to every supplier or customer they interact with:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Not only does twiddling make it easier to rip off suppliers, workers and customers, it also makes these crimes harder to detect. Twiddling made Dieselgate possible, and it also underpinned "Greyball," Uber's secret strategy of refusing to send cars to pick up transportation regulators who would then be able to see firsthand how many laws the company was violating:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html

Twiddling is so easy that it has brought price-fixing to smaller companies and less concentrated sectors, though the biggest companies still commit crimes on a scale that put these bit-players to shame. In The Prospect, David Dayen investigates the "personalized pricing" ripoff that has turned every transaction into a potential crime-scene:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-04-one-person-one-price/

"Personalized pricing" is the idea that everything you buy should be priced based on analysis of commercial surveillance data that predicts the maximum amount you are willing to pay.

Proponents of this idea – like Harvard's Pricing Lab with its "Billion Prices Project" – insist that this isn't a way to rip you off. Instead, it lets companies lower prices for people who have less ability to pay:

https://thebillionpricesproject.com/

This kind of weaponized credulity is totally on-brand for the pro-monopoly revolution. It's the same wishful thinking that led regulators to encourage monopolies while insisting that it would be possible to prevent "bad" monopolies from raising prices. And, as with monopolies, "personalized pricing" leads to an overall increase in prices. In econspeak, it is a "transfer of wealth from consumer to the seller."

"Personalized pricing" is one of those cuddly euphemisms that should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. A more apt name for this practice is surveillance pricing, because the "personalization" depends on the vast underground empire of nonconsensual data-harvesting, a gnarly hairball of ad-tech companies, data-brokers, and digital devices with built-in surveillance, from smart speakers to cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Much of this surveillance would be impractical, because no one wants their car, printer, speaker, watch, phone, or insulin-pump to spy on them. The flexibility of digital computers means that users always have the technical ability to change how these gadgets work, so they no longer spy on their users. But an explosion of IP law has made this kind of modification illegal:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is why apps are ground zero for surveillance pricing. The web is an open platform, and web-browsers are legal to modify. The majority of web users have installed ad-blockers that interfere with the surveillance that makes surveillance pricing possible:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But apps are a closed platform, and reverse-engineering and modifying an app is a literal felony – several felonies, in fact. An app is just a web-page skinned with enough IP to make it a felony to modify it to protect your consumer, privacy or labor rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

(Google is leading a charge to turn the web into the kind of enshittifier's paradise that apps represent, blocking the use of privacy plugins and proposing changes to browser architecture that would allow them to felonize modifying a browser without permission:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

Apps are a twiddler's playground. Not only can they "customize" every interaction you have with them, but they can block you (or researchers seeking to help you) from recording and analyzing the app's activities. Worse: digital transactions are intimate, contained to the palm of your hand. The grocer whose e-ink shelf-tags flicker and reprice their offerings every few seconds can be collectively observed by people who are in the same place and can start a conversation about, say, whether to come back that night a throw a brick through the store's window to express their displeasure. A digital transaction is a lonely thing, atomized and intrinsically shielded from a public response.

That shielding is hugely important. The public hates surveillance pricing. Time and again, through all of American history, there have been massive and consequential revolts against the idea that every price should be different for every buyer. The Interstate Commerce Commission was founded after Grangers rose up against the rail companies' use of "personalized pricing" to gouge farmers.

Companies know this, which is why surveillance pricing happens in secret. Over and over, every day, you are being gouged through surveillance pricing. The sellers you interact with won't tell you about it, so to root out this practice, we have to look at the B2B sales-pitches from the companies that sell twiddling tools.

One of these companies is Plexure, partly owned by McDonald's, which provides the surveillance-pricing back-ends for McD's, Ikea, 7-Eleven, White Castle and others – basically, any time a company gives you a hard-sell to order via its apps rather than its storefronts or its website, you should assume you're getting twiddled, hard.

These companies use the enshittification playbook to trap you into using their apps. First, they offer discounts to customers who order through their apps – then, once the customers are fully committed to shopping via app, they introduce surveillance pricing and start to jack up the prices.

For example, Plexure boasts that it can predict what day a given customer is getting paid on and use that information to raise prices on all the goods the customer shops for on that day, on the assumption that you're willing to pay more when you've got a healthy bank balance.

The surveillance pricing industry represents another reason for everything you use to spy on you – any data your "smart" TV or Nest thermostat or Ring doorbell can steal from you can be readily monetized – just sell it to a surveillance pricing company, which will use it to figure out how to charge you more for everything you buy, from rent to Happy Meals.

But the vast market for surveillance data is also a potential weakness for the industry. Put frankly: the commercial surveillance industry has a lot of enemies. The only thing it has going for it is that so many of these enemies don't know that what's they're really upset about is surveillance.

Some people are upset because they think Facebook made Grampy into a Qanon. Others, because they think Insta gave their kid anorexia. Some think Tiktok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama bin Laden. Some are upset because the cops use Google location data to round up Black Lives Matter protesters, or Jan 6 insurrectionists. Some are angry about deepfake porn. Some are angry because Black people are targeted with ads for overpriced loans or colleges:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/04/meta_ad_algorithm_discrimination/

And some people are angry because surveillance feeds surveillance pricing. The thing is, whatever else all these people are angry about, they're all angry about surveillance. Are you angry that ad-tech is stealing a 51% share of news revenue? You're actually angry about surveillance. Are you angry that "AI" is being used to automatically reject resumes on racial, age or gender grounds? You're actually angry about surveillance.

There's a very useful analogy here to the history of the ecology movement. As James Boyle has long said, before the term "ecology" came along, there were people who cared about a lot of issues that seemed unconnected. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. What's the connection between charismatic nocturnal avians and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? The term ecology took a thousand issues and welded them together into one movement.

That's what's on the horizon for privacy. The US hasn't had a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling the newspapers what VHS cassettes you were renting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

We are desperately overdue for a new consumer privacy law, but every time this comes up, the pro-surveillance coalition defeats the effort. but as people who care about conspiratorialism, kids' mental health, spying by foreign adversaries, phishing and fraud, and surveillance pricing all come together, they will be an unbeatable coalition:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Meanwhile, the US government is actually starting to take on these ripoff artists. The FTC is working to shut down data-brokers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

The FBI is raiding landlords to build a case against Frontpage and other rent price-fixers:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

Agri Stats is facing a DoJ lawsuit:

https://www.nationalhogfarmer.com/market-news/agri-stats-loses-motions-to-transfer-dismiss-in-doj-antitrust-case

Not every federal agency has gotten the message, though. Trump's Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell – whom Biden kept on the job – has been hiking interest rates in a bid to reduce our purchasing power by making millions of Americans poorer and/or unemployed. He's doing this to fight inflation, on the theory that inflation is being cause by us being too well-off, and therefore trying to buy more goods than are for sale.

But of course, interest rates are inflationary: when interest rates go up, it gets more expensive to pay your credit card bills, lease your car, and pay a mortgage. And where we see the price of goods shooting up, there's abundant evidence that this is the result of greedflation – companies jacking up their prices and blaming inflation. Interest rate hawks say that greedflation is impossible: if one company raises its prices, its competitors will swoop in and steal their customers with lower prices.

Maybe they would do that – if they didn't have a toolbox full of algorithmic twiddling options and a deep trove of surveillance data that let them all raise prices together:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-06-05-time-for-fed-to-meet-ftc/

Someone needs to read some Adam Smith to Chairman Powell: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[correlance]

Remember that one fan theory I wrote about Alastor having a rivalry with Thomas Edison in the 1920s? Well, I decided to do a bit more research; it turns out that, not only was I right, but Edison really hated radio. He loathed it so much that he wrote not one, but several articles railing against the "radio fad" in 1926, to the point where an anonymous person wrote "letters to the editor" to argue with Edison.

Gee, I wonder who it could be doing that in the Hazbin-verse? /s

GIF and art originally by karumkin on Twitter/X (2019).

There was also a slew of increasingly aggressive telegrams sent back-and-forth between Edison and radio proponents, with Edison penning thinly-veiled insults that offended even mild critics of the "Wizard":

"The radio is a commercial failure, and its popularity with the public is waning. Radio is impractical commercially, and ethically distorted, and is is losing its grip rapidly in the market and in the home. There is not 10% of the interest in the radio that there was last year.

Radio is a highly-complicated machine in the hands of people who know nothing about it. No dealers have made any money out of it. It is not a commercial machine, because it is too complicated. Reports from 4,000 Edison dealers who have handled radio sets show that they are rapidly abandoning it; and, as for its music, it is awful.

I don't see how they can listen to it. Thousands of people have signed a petition asking that sopranos be kept off the air. Of course, most of them don't know that the soprano voice distorts the radio. The phonograph is coming into its own because people want good music. The fact is that the radio never had a high peak of popularity.

In towns where 25 or 30 dealers were handling radio sets, only one or two are now handling them. A farmer 5 miles from town buys a radio, perhaps on the installment plan. A wire becomes loose. The dealer has to arrange to fix it. This happens time and time again. The business becomes unprofitable for the dealer to engage in. He does not make any money out of it. None of them has. They are giving it up as fast as they can. It is not a commercially successful machine, because it is too complicated.

Static is awful, and the difficulties of tuning out--and now, they're stealing each other's wavelengths! It is too bad that the radio has to be too complicated. It was a big and interesting thing, and the people responded to it, but they want good music, and they found it is not to be had on the radio. That is why the phonograph is reclaiming its own."

Quote from "Edison and Radio", Radio News, December 1926, "in which the Editor takes issue with Mr. Edison's claim that radio is a failure; yet it is pointed out that the radio industry owes Edison a great debt; wherein facts are figures are given to show that radio is on a steady increase; granting that neither radio, nor the phonograph, is yet perfect; how the interest in radio is steadily increasing, and radio dealers are now making good money":

"Since the publication of the famous interview with Mr. Edison, the press, and particularly the radio press across the entire country, has been more or less agitated...I do believe that Mr. Edison has not been recently in-touch with radio sufficiently to appreciate fully the tremendous advances that have been made. Mr. Edison is a busy man, and a tremendously busy inventor. It would be well-nigh impossible for him to be in-touch with all of the various commercial phases of radio all over the country; and, like other executives, he obtains his reports from his subordinates, and such reports often as not may be highly colorful, and even wrong...[thus, the radio industry is unwilling to accord Mr. Edison anything]...as to Mr. Edison's remarks, the statements that follow are facts, which can be checked up by anyone who is unbiased."

Imagine Alastor and Vox with "Stayed Gone" in Episode 2, and Alastor and Lucifer with "Hell's Greatest Dad" in Episode 5, but happening entirely over letters and telegrams, because mass media and television didn't exist yet. The closest musical numbers would likely be "Farmer Refuted" and "Your Obedient Servant" from Hamilton.

Per the book The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross:

Page 276: "[Edison's] phonograph business faced a challenge in the 1920s unlike any that had come before: the advent of commercial radio stations, and the wide availability of free music broadcasts and other entertainment. By the end of 1921, an estimated 1 million listeners had access to radios, and listened to programs broadcast from the Eastern seaboard. A single station in Roselle, New Jersey, which offered the voices of operatic stars among its musical programs, had a broadcast range of a thousand miles, covering New England and the mid-Atlantic states, and reaching as far west as Missouri. A contemporary newspaper account explained to readers not yet acquainted with the phenomenon that those who owned radio sets could enjoy entertainment that was 'literally as free as the air'. Charles and Theodore Edison [proposed a combination phonograph-radio]...their father need not feel slighted because the vacuum tube, a key component of the radio set, was a modern descendant of Edison's experimental work on the incandescent lightbulb. Edison did feel slighted, however; such, at least, was the opinion of Thomas Cowan, a former Westinghouse employee...[who conducted experiments in radio broadcasts with the aid of a phonograph Edison was willing to loan him in 1921]. Cowan had several conversations about radio with Edison, who became upset and recalled the loaner when he heard the Westinghouse broadcasts...[Edison's sons were embarrassed, humiliated]."

"Edison calls radio a 'failure for music', thinks phonograph will regain its own": The New York Times, 23 September 1926. Underlining the usefulness of radio for purposes other than musical programs, Edison did tune in to a radio broadcast of the Dempsey-Tunney fight in 1926, which he was too deaf to hear. He had to rely on family members [usually his wife, Mina] to summarize what had transpired at the end of each round.

"Radio satisfactory on bout, Edison says": The New York Times, 24 September 1926. Defending the quality of musical broadcasts, the radio industry offered expert testimony to rebut Edison's claims [in the next week's newspaper]. See: "Broadcasters disagree with electrical wizard", The New York Times, 3 October 1926.

The "radio fad": A few months later, [after much outcry from the radio industry], Edison was willing to grant that radio might not disappear, but he had a new criticism: listeners' aesthetic sense would be damaged. "Undistorted music, in time, will sound strange to those brought up on radio music," he predicted, "and they will not like the real thing." See: "Thomas A. Edison sees a menace for music in the radio", Musician, January 1927.

"Edison's fears [about the Edison Company not succeeding in the radio business] were realized, though it had been Edison's intransigence (refusal to change one's views) that put the company at such a great disadvantage as a late entrant...on 9 October 1929, Charles Edison prepared a report for his father that showed a loss of $1.3 million due to start-up costs for the [Edison] radio...he could not know that, two weeks later, the stock sell-off would begin with Black Thursday, on 24 October, followed by Black Monday and Black Tuesday...a few days later, Thomas A. Edison, Inc., announced that it would cease producing [music] records [altogether], and refit the factory for the production of radios. The announcement was accompanied by a mention of regret, as the phonograph was 'one of Mr. Edison's favorite inventions'."

"An employee reported observing Harvey Firestone tearfully explaining to Edison that the collapse of business due to the stock market crash of 1929, and the Great Depression, meant that he could no longer continue to financially support Edison's laboratory. Edison was heard, sneering, 'He's a Goddamned lightweight.'" ("I saw your fiasco on the picture show, and I just couldn't resist. What a performance! Why, I haven't been that entertained since the stock market crash of 1929, hahaha! ...so many orphans.")

Edison's death at the age of 84 on 18 October 1931 was also, ironically, commemorated through radio broadcasts: "[The next] night, two radio networks, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting Company (CBC), jointly broadcast an 8-minute tribute that ended on the hour, when listeners were asked to turn out the lights. The White House did so, and much of the nation followed, more or less together, some a minute before the hour, others on the hour. On Broadway, 75% of the electrified signs were turned off briefly. Movie theaters went dark for a moment. Everything seemed connected to Edison: the indoor lights, the traffic lights, the electric advertising, everyone connected via radio, which Edison now received credit for helping to 'perfect'. In the simple narrative that provided inspiration for posterity, one man had done it all..."

Some numbers provided for how much radio was making:

1922: $46.5 million (~$860 million in 2024)

1923: $120 million (~$2.2 billion in 2024) (156% increase)

1924: $350 million (~$6.3 billion in 2024) (186% increase)

1925: $449 million (~$8 billion in 2024) (27% increase)

1926: $520 million (~$9.1 billion in 2024) (14% increase)

Overall, per another source:

1922: $60 million (a little more than the previous statistic)

1929: $842.6 million

From here, we can tell the biggest gain was in 1923-1924. Per another source: "Total cost was about $120.00 to buy a new radio in 1926; in today's money, that is about $1,500 to own a radio." That would mean that 7.6 million radios were sold by 1926; an impressive feat, considering that the United States only had a population of a little over 117 million people at the time.

Percentages of United States households with radios:

1925: 19% (5 million households)

1929: 35-40% (200% increase)

1930: 12 million households

1939: 28 million households

The number of licensed broadcast stations surged from just 5 in 1921 to 500 by 1924, per yet another source. In the early years, household radio ownership was highest in the Northeast and on the West Coast. In large sections of the South, Midwest and Great Plains, stations and radio sets were scarce. However, there were notable exceptions.

There were 732 radio stations total across the country by 1927, and the average radio was on 2 hours and 25 minutes per day. People who couldn't afford radios purchased them on installment loans, through which the full price of a new radio could be paid over time. Radios had even more advertisements for washers, dryers, and refrigerators, causing people to use even more merchant credit and installment loans to purchase these shiny, new technological devices.

However, radio sales also took a hit with the Great Depression, as average income levels fell from $3,270 per year in 1920 ($53,300 in 2024), to $2,300 per year by 1929 ($41,500 in 2024), then to $1,500 per year by 1932 ($35,500 in 2024). However, buying a radio also became cheaper, dropping from a costly $200 ($3,200 in 2024) in the early 1920s, to just $35 ($630 in 2024) by 1929-1930.

By the time Alastor died in 1933, 3.6 million radio sets were sold that year alone. By the mid-1930s, 67% of American households had radio sets, and by 1939, about 80% of Americans—over 100 million people—owned radios. Radios were in almost every house, and some Americans even had radios in their cars. The Golden Age of Radio lasted from the 1930s to the 1940s, before being eclipsed by television in the 1950s. Radio hosts went from being paid $10 per broadcast in 1921 ($180-200, 1-2 hours per night, 3-4 nights a week, for a weekly salary of $720-800; monthly salary, $2,900-$3,200; annual salary, $34,800-$38,400; modern-day annual salary range for a radio show host is $30,000-100,000, depending) to making triple-figure salaries in the later 1930s.

Another source lists the following salary ranges for radio hosts:

$2,500-2,700 a year to be an announcer in 1927* (~$45,000-$48,000 range in 2024)

$2,400 a year to be a dramatic director (~$43,000 in 2024)

$4,000 a year to be a program director (~$72,000 in 2024)

New Orleans' first radio broadcast was on 31 March 1922, with WWL. The station wasn't started as a commercial one; but rather, "more of an experiment, started as an interest in wireless communication picked up nationally". The station did not go commercial until 1929, meaning that Alastor also probably had at least one other side job.

Also see:

"Early Radio Announcers Invented Their Profession in the 1920s"

"The History of the Radio Industry in the United States to 1940"

"'A Godlike Presence': The Impact of Radio on the 1920s and 1930s" by Tom Lewis

American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age by Clifford John Doerksen (see excerpt here)

Race and Radio: Pioneering Black Broadcasters in New Orleans by Bala James Baptiste (Note: The earliest Black broadcast in New Orleans was in 1945, meaning Alastor was white-passing.)

"Golden Age of Black Radio - Part 1: The Early Years" (Note: The first Black radio announcer, Jack L. Cooper, hosted in 1929.)

"How African Americans Entered Mainstream Radio" by Bala James Baptiste, the author of Race and Radio: Pioneering...

[communist-manifesto-daily]

The Communist Manifesto - Part 3

[ ◁ First | ◃Prev | Table of Contents | Next ▹ ]

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

[ ◁ First | ◃Prev | Table of Contents | Next ▹ ]

[redraspberryleaf]

You seem to know a thing or two about wool (and definitely more than I do :D )

Is it possible to use wool in normal fabrics like we use cotton today, or are those too fine to work well with wool?

Because if I could replace some of my cotton T-shirts with ones that have similar properties but are made from wool, that'd be awesome!

(also feel free to post a long ass diatribe about what wool can be used for and what not, I love that shit)

Okay so I'm by no means an expert I just have adhd and knit but the answer to your question is yes but there is a catch.

So wool has finally been having the resurgence it deserves in athletic and technical wear because it already does everything they've been trying to engineer other fabrics to do and poured a ton of money into trying to achieve with synthetics. Wool can keep you cool and keep you warm, it helps regulate temperature and humidity, some sheep produce wool that will absorb moisture off of your body into the fibre itself to wick and achieve evaporative cooling at once while some breeds like Icelandic sheep are entirely waterproof. Wool is amazing! Wool is also stretchy and antibacterial to a degree and just does really well with sweat and body odor in general so it just is a natural fit for athletics and outdoorsmanship.

Because of all this a lot of brands have started to produce wool base layers, tees, and sportswear. Smartwool is an example of a company that's gone all in on wool, but a lot of other companies have small lines of wool garments or one offs.

The problem with most of what is on the market right now is that companies want to make it as easily digestible for consumers as possible. They expect that people aren't going to shell out for the fancy wool tee shirts if the experience isn't the exact same as a cotton tee but slightly elevated. Even if caring for a garment isn't necessarily harder but is just different, generally people won't go for it. Because of this there are two issues I have with how a lot of these are produced.

1. Superwash

Most of these are going to be made with superwash yarns. The websites aren't very clear in listing that but they don't really have to be and most people don't really care about that. Unless you're a fibre artist of some sort you probably don't know or care about what that means so why would they list it?

What they do say is that their garments are machine washable and that you should lay flat to dry. That means that even though these products are listed as 100% wool there is some sort of treatment or coating to seal the scales on the wool and make it so they can survive agitation in the wash and regular detergents.

While I'm not totally against superwash in all contexts and know it has a time and a place for sure I think it's important to recognize that a lot of the properties of wool that we love are achieved BECAUSE of the scales on the wool and when you start messing with those your wool isn't going to perform as well across categories. If you're okay with superwash, then go for it. Just know that your wool isn't going to wool as hard as it could wool.

2. Merino

So merino has somehow become shorthand in recent years for luxurious soft yarn. This isn't totally wrong but it isn't totally right. Merino is probably the most popular bread of wool sheep on the planet. It's heavily used because while the fibre is still relatively cheap it is also very fine and flexible which means it's softer, won't prickle the skin, and can be spun into smaller threads. I think they're some thing like a third of the diameter of a human hair??

While all this is great, it means most of these sheep are coming from industrial farms. If animal welfare is your jam (I hope it's everyone's jam to some degree at least) this is where you're going to start worry about farming practices. Industrial scale farms, even in countries with a lot of protective laws, and where you will have sheep with massive scarring as a means to prevent infection, rough handling, and rougher shearing practices. Now I grew up in a farming area, so I know a lot of things that may seem barbaric actually make a lot of sense in practice, and my roomies family have sheep and have string opinions on which of these practices are important to keep around... but I'm not going to get into that knitty gritty (hehe knitting, get it??).

Outside of animal welfare, when you get into these types of farms shitty shearing and frequent shearing are actually a big issue for wool quality. You see, if you aren't doing a nice smooth shear in one go or are shearing the sheep frequently, you start getting a lot of fibres with shorter than typical staplelengths. While this can mean that some of these fibres are softer because they aren't spending as long being exposed to the elements and sun, it also means that the yarns that are spun up from them will be weaker and more prone to breakage.

Honestly I like merino just fine but it really is the clandestine of the yarns. It does the job and all but it's deeply overhyped by good marketing and has just become the go to because people who generally know textiles but aren't total wool nerds know it will do the job and know it will be recognizable to the consumer as a good material. There are just so many other breeds that produce fibre better suited to all kinds of specific jobs that get passed over for merino and so now passionate hobby farmers and yarn nerds are the only ones keeping all these other breeds alive.

So yea, your tee-shirt will probably still be a great and durable shirt, but the quality won't be exactly what you were dreaming of when you first heard about all the amazing things about wool.

So Yes!!! You absolutely can get wool tee shirts and they will be pretty rad, however they won't be the perfect dream shirt that you imagine when you hear a yarn nerd talk about all of the best properties of wool. I have had wool base layers in the past, and I'm planning on buying a set and a tee that will fit my body these days since I've long grown out of my old ones. Will it be perfect and the most ethical thing? No. Will it be better than something synthetic or a lot of plant based options? I personally think so, but that's for you to decide for yourself:).

[lokiondisneyplus]

After the climactic release of the historically successful Avengers: Endgame – the 22nd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the penultimate release in their “Infinity Saga”, the culmination of 11 years of brand-building, the second-highest-grossing film of all time – Marvel decided what the world really needed was more Marvel.

Armed with classic Hollywood hubris – the misguided conviction that the public would never tire of what they were selling – Marvel Studios rolled television production into their main business model, with “Phase Four” delivering more television shows than movies. The effect was a flooding of the market and a dilution of the brand, not to mention the release of the worst MCU movie, Eternals.

Forcing narrative crossovers between television shows and movies had the adverse effect of turning the former into homework and the latter into ads for the former. This practice was an act of artistic self-sabotage, ruining what could’ve been Marvel’s most sublime film, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, by burdening it with a host of tonally-off, studio-obligated B-stories crowbarred in to promote upcoming television titles.

After a run of disappointing films that weighed down once-fun franchises with po-faced gravity – Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 – and a slew of ordinary television shows – The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Moon Knight, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Secret Invasion – we’ve officially reached a state of Marvel fatigue, with questions looming around the state of the superhero industrial complex.

It’s in this cultural moment that Loki, the acclaimed solo show for the titular character, arrives for a second season. It doesn’t just have to live up to an inspired first season but also has to push back on all the bad vibes, a difficult task given the heavy presence of Jonathan Majors, the breakout star who was arrested in March on domestic violence charges.The great charm of this season is that it cultivates the feeling that it could head anywhere and be anything. Loki doesn’t just explore free will as a theme, it actually feels as if it artistically possesses it.

The good news is that, whether or not it can be spun as state-of-Marvel narrative correction, season two is a worthy successor. Blessed by the fact its titular character, Tom Hiddleston’s charismatic God of Mischief, remains a slippery figure, Loki is allowed to move forward with no clear lines drawn between good and bad, protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain. Characters hold convictions until they don’t, make choices that will have ramifications, agitate for themselves, then for the greater good, and try to navigate a world whose rules shift beneath their feet.

It’s largely set, once again, in the Time Variance Authority, a comic bureaucratic labyrinth charged with policing multiversal time lines. Offering obvious symbolism at a time when Marvel is struggling to retain coherence in the midst of its “Multiverse Saga”, the TVA prizes the one true “Sacred Timeline”, pruning infinite possibilities back for the sake of cosmic narrative purity.

The TVA is an inspired retrofuturist space steeped in Eastern Bloc mid-century design and early Terry Gilliam films, satirising the pernickety dictums of workplaces and government offices – “limit your lunch break to 17 minutes!” proclaims one poster. From its dated tech – ’70s-style computer monitors, reel-to-reel tape machines, chrome hi-fis – to its curved surfaces, coloured floor tiles and lurid-emerald key lime pie, it’s a rare work of inspired production design by a studio otherwise synonymous with green-screening its way to rush-job eyesores built by an army of non-unionised offshore digital effects artists.

Everything in the TVA looks shabby and neglected, evoking its place as an office lost to time. The plot machinations of season one found an Avengers-adjacent Loki commandeered by the authority – Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson), upper-management Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and others – to pursue a variant of himself, Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), through time and space.

It ended with an explosion of multiversal time lines and revelations about the true history of the TVA: its top-down system of authority a matrix of illusion, its mind-wiped employees existing in a state of suspended limbo, its time line-culling operation seeming a lot like a morally questionable act of mass slaughter.

In the fallout from that climax, season two finds characters questioning whether the TVA is an entity worth preserving or destroying, not to mention the meaning of their own existence and the ramifications of choice. It’s a study of free will and moral responsibility, housed in 45-minute episodes of action-oriented television. Its chief writer, Eric Martin, both lionises liberty and weighs up its gravity, while happily dealing in the all-American fear of governmental oversight.

The collapse of the TVA’s artificial reality – “everything you’ve been doing is wrong and all your gods are dead”, Mobius deadpans in classic Wilson fashion – leads characters to their own convictions. Mobius seeks peaceful resolution. Renslayer seeks to preserve her power and the authority’s agency (“all that matters is order versus chaos”). The once-bellicose B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) has a moral reawakening. The dogged Dox (Kate Dickie) is more committed than ever to the cause. The weaselly X-5 (Rafael Casal) wants to explore his new-found independence and maybe become a movie star. The oddball tech guy with the on-the-nose name, Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), is there to both provide comic relief and to save the day from a temporal calamity that may destroy all worlds, or something to that effect.

Loki’s playful riffing on time means every benign use of the word pops – “it’ll take some time”, “remember that time”, “take your time”, “time to go” – and its first four episodes dance along the Earth’s time line at various points of history – 1868, 1893, 1977, 1982 – with plentiful hijinks, dabbling in genre tropes, meta use of Loki’s skills of illusion and misdirection, and creepy fast-food-franchise sponsored content.

Looming over all is the presence of the big bad of Marvel’s Phase Five, Kang the Conqueror, played still, to this point, by Majors. He’s seen here in two variants: a squirrelly 19th-century nutty professor named Victor Timely and the all-powerful end-of-time figure met at the end of last season, He Who Remains. These twin characters are connected but separate enough that they symbolise the series’ focus on free will. One may be fated to become the other, but does that mean that he – and the future – can’t change?

The great charm of this season is that it cultivates the feeling that it could head anywhere and be anything. Loki doesn’t just explore free will as a theme, it actually feels as if it artistically possesses it. While it may not be enough to combat the waning influence of comic-book screen output, this season does feel like a disarming counterpoint to recent Marvel Studios product. Rather than feeling conscripted or forced, a puzzle piece that exists solely to build a bridge between branded content, Loki remains its own thing: a nimble exploration of big themes in a colourful, comic, oddball package.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 21, 2023 as "Changing times".

[askvectorprime]

Dear Vector Prime, does Thunderhoof exist somewhere in the Viron cluster?

Dear Cervine Centurion,

Thunderhoof was one of the many influential Predacons in the employ of the Predacon Council—while his cyborg moose alternate mode and its ability to unleash seismic shockwaves made him a formidable fighter in his own right, Thunderhoof rarely took to the battlefield. Instead, Thunderhoof presented himself a wealthy business tycoon who’d built his personal fortune in the galactic shipping industry; supposedly, he’d abandoned the Predacons during the civil war and become a Maximal, receiving amnesty in exchange for turning over notorious Predacon criminals like Gnashteeth, Overhead, and Polar Claw.

In truth, however, this was all a lie: Thunderhoof was an ambitious Predacon—one with deep connections to the Cybertronian underworld—and he’d used his fake “defection” as a means to eliminate some of his most notorious business rivals and expand his own criminal empire into their vacant territory. In his new position in high Cybertronian society, Thunderhoof uses his connections to smuggle black market arms shipments from offworld Predacon colonies through to the Cybertronian underworld, where they inevitably find their way into the hands of clandestine cells of Predacon agitators. For his services, Thunderhoof receives a handsome fee from the Predacon Council—and Autobot port inspectors with too much integrity to take a bribe inevitably receive a “visit” from some of his employees.

[robertemma27-blog]

Global Industrial Agitators Market is Poised for Significant Growth

The global industrial agitators market is poised for significant growth, expanding from USD 2.6 billion in 2023 to an estimated USD 3.2 billion by 2028, registering a CAGR of 4.2% during this period. This growth is driven by increasing demand across various industries, including chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, and water and wastewater treatment.

Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=59649096

Key Drivers of Market Growth

Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries: The rapid expansion of the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, is a major driver. Companies are investing in specialized and differentiated chemicals, which requires advanced mixing and agitation technologies for production processes.

Food and Beverage Processing: The need for efficient and large-scale food processing solutions is also fueling demand for industrial agitators. These agitators play a crucial role in mixing ingredients and ensuring consistency and quality in food products.

Water and Wastewater Treatment: With increasing environmental regulations and the necessity for sustainable water management, the demand for industrial agitators in water and wastewater treatment applications is rising. These agitators help in maintaining proper fluid dynamics essential for effective treatment processes.

Key Market Segments

By Model Type: The market is segmented into large tank agitators, portable agitators, drum agitators, pail agitators, and tote agitators.

By Mounting: Top-mounted, side-mounted, and bottom-mounted agitators cater to different application needs.

By Component: Components such as heads, impellers, seals, propellers, turbines, and dispersers are critical in the functioning of industrial agitators.

By Form: Industrial agitators are used for solid-solid, liquid-gas, and other mixing forms.

Regional Insights

The Asia-Pacific region is expected to witness the highest growth rate, driven by the expanding chemical, pharmaceutical, and food processing industries in countries like China and Japan. North America and Europe also hold significant market shares due to established industrial sectors and technological advancements in these regions.

Leading Companies

Key players in the industrial agitators market include:

Ekato Group (Germany): Known for its wide range of agitators and complete process plants, catering to diverse applications from pharmaceuticals to biofuels.

NOV Inc. (US): Offers a variety of agitators and mixers under brands like Chemineer and Kenics, focusing on innovative fluid agitation solutions.

Sulzer Ltd. (Switzerland): Provides agitators and mixing solutions, particularly for the oil & gas, power generation, and paper & pulp sectors.

SPX Flow, Inc. (US) and Xylem Inc. (US): These companies are prominent in providing advanced mixing technologies and solutions globally.

[roseaa11]

Data Bridge Market Research analyses the industrial agitators market will exhibit a CAGR of 6.20% for the forecast period of 2022-2029. Data Bridge Market Research report on coating additives market provides analysis and insights regarding the various factors expected to be prevalent throughout the forecast period while providing their impacts on the market’s growth. The rise in the demand for the various applications is escalating the growth of coating additives market.

[haggishlyhagging]

The business of marketing and selling to women literally depends on creating and then addressing female insecurity, and part of the revelatory potential of women's lib involved rejecting the marketplace's sweet-talking promises about life-changing face creams and shampoos—not to mention the entire premise of women as decorative objects. There was good reason for industries that sustained themselves on the self-hatred of women to dread the potential reach of feminist movements. Co-opting the language of liberation to sell their products allowed them to have it both ways, celebrating the spirit of the movement while fostering a new set of insecurities ("Natural-look" cosmetics, anyone?) and a new aspirational archetype.

Charlie, a perfume "for the new woman" that launched in 1973, was the first American fragrance to become a blockbuster, in part because it was Revlon's first to target women under thirty-five. Charlie's iconic ad was a major part of its appeal: in it, model Shelley Hack jumps out of a Rolls-Royce and strides confidently down the streets of New York City in a kicky pantsuit, embodying all the freedom and confidence of the women's movement with none of the baggy clothes or scowling. The accompanying jingle assured potential buyers that this was the fun kind of liberation: "Kinda young, kinda now, Charlie!/ Kinda hip, kinda wow, Charlie!" As Revlon's twenty-point marketing profile of the "Charlie girl" pointed out, their customer was "Irreverent and un-pretentious," "Can be tough, believes rules are secondary," "Can be very soft, but is never passive," "Is very relaxed about sex," and, interestingly, "Is not a Jewish princess." (Here's where I note that my own Jewish mother worked in product development at Revlon until shortly before Charlie's time.)

Indeed, the Charlie girl didn't so much reflect the new vision of young, liberated white femininity as it did present it as a superior alternative to actual feminist activism. In her 2013 book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, Barnard College president and self-described former reluctant feminist Debora Spar testifies to the power of Charlie's decontextualized liberation: "Feminists were loud and pushy, strident, and unfeminine. Charlie, on the other hand, was gorgeous, ladylike, and successful, a working woman and a mom. Who needed feminism if you could have Charlie?" For women like Spar, Hack's embodiment of liberation was much more alluring than the real-life agitators who made her possible. And that attitude, goosed by the product and embraced by its consumers, helped lay the groundwork for today's marketplace feminism, in which image is removed from theory and the fun kind of liberation is the most valuable.

-Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once

[mostlysignssomeportents]

For 40 years, Big Meat has openly colluded to rig prices

On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Noted socialist agitator Adam Smith once wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Smith was articulating a basic truth: when an industry grows concentrated, it grows cozy. Cultural differences between dominant firms are homogenized as top executives move from company to company, cross-pollinating attitudes and approaches. Ambituous, firm-hopping workaholic top brass make all their friends at the office, and so their former colleagues from one or two jobs back remain in their social circles.

Once an industry consists of half a dozen firms, the people running those companies constitute an incestuous financial polycule. They are executors of one anothers' estates, best men and maids of honor at one anothers' weddings, godparents to each others' kids. They play on the same softball teams and take family vacations together.

It would be heartwarming if it wasn't so costly to the rest of us. Remember Smith's maxim: "the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Class solidarity among corporate executives forms a united front to screw us in every conceivable way, from corrupting our politicians to maiming and cheating workers to gouging buyers.

That's the basis of American antitrust law. When Robert Sherman was stumping for the passage of the Sherman Act, America's first major antitrust law, he thundered "If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Or rather, that was the basis of American antitrust law – until the Reagan era, when the fringe theories of the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork were elevated to a new orthodoxy. Under Bork's conception of antitrust, monopolies were evidence of excellence. If a company puts all its competitors out of business, that must mean that it is "efficient."

In Bork's fantasy world, the only way a company could attain dominance is by being so beloved by its customers that every competitor withers away. Governments that bust monopolies aren't protecting the public from "autocrats of trade"; they're overthrowing the winners of an election where you "vote with your wallet" to pick the best company.

But Bork and his co-fantasists couldn't quite manage all that with a straight face. They grudgingly admitted that a certain kind of bad monopolist could hypothetically exist, one that used its "market power" to raise prices or lower quality. Only when these offenses against our "consumer welfare" occurred should the state step in to protect its people.

This may sound good in theory, but in practice, it was a dead letter. The consumer welfare test isn't as simple as "If prices go up after a merger, punish the company." Instead, the government had to prove that the price raises came from "market power," and not from an increase in energy or labor costs, or some other "exogenous factor," like Mercury being in retrograde:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/10/you-had-one-job/#thats-just-the-as

And wouldn't you know it, it turns out that the mathematical models prescribed to distinguish greed from unavoidable circumstance inevitably "prove" that the monopolist wasn't at fault. Surely, it's just just a coincidence that the priesthood that understood how to make and interpret these models were Chicago School Economists who sold model-making as a service to companies that wanted to raise prices.

Pro-monopoly economists insist that this isn't true, and that their theory still has room to prosecute bad monopolies and cartels where they occur – more, they say this is already happening. In particular, they insist that "greedflation" can't be real, because it would require the kind of conspiracy that Smith warned of, and that their sickly antitrust enforcement is sufficient to prevent:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

This strains credulity. After all, the CEOs of giant companies in concentrated industries openly boast to their shareholders about how they've used the covid and Ukraine invasion shocks to hike prices to increase their profit margins – not just cover their additional costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

While excuseflation is new, open, naked price-fixing by industry cartels is not. Take the meat-packing industry, dominated by a tiny handful of giant corporations whose executives literally ran a betting pool on how many of their workers would get covid each week while working in their cramped, unventilated factories:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55009228

These companies have seen their margins soar – up 300% over the lockdown – while their payments to ranchers and growers cratered:

https://www.reuters.com/business/meat-packers-profit-margins-jumped-300-during-pandemic-white-house-economics-2021-12-10/

All this might leave one wondering whether there isn't something a little, you know, "conspiracy against the publick"-y going on in Big Meat?

Let me tell you about Agri Stats. Agri Stats has been around since 1985. Every large meat packer pays to be a "member" of Agri Stats, and they each submit weekly, detailed statistics about every aspect of their business: all their costs, all their margins, broken out by category. Agri Stats compiles this into phone-book-thick books that each member gets every week, telling them everything about how all of their competitors are running their businesses:

https://www.agristats.com/history

The companies whose data appears in this book are anonymized, but it's trivial to re-identify each supplier. Tyson execs hold regular "naming process" meetings where they go through new books and de-anonymize the data. A Butterball exec confirmed that he "can pick the companies for rankings with 100% certainty."

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, these books are incredibly detailed: "bird weights, freezer inventory, and 'head killed per operating hour.'" Within the cozy meat cartels, Agri Stats acts as a clearinghouse that allows every business in the industry to act in concert, running the entire meat-packing sector as a single company:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-10-03-lawsuit-highlights-why-meat-overpriced/

As interesting as the list of Agri Stats members is, the groups that don't get to see Agri Stats' "books" is just as important: "farmers, workers, or retailers." Agri Stats also offers consulting services to its members. As an exec at pork processor Smithfield put it, Agri Stats advice boils down to four words "Just raise your price."

Agri Stats ranks its members based on how high their prices are – they literally publish a league table with the highest prices at the top. Meat packers pay bonuses to their execs based on how high the company's rank is on that table. Agri Stats meets with its members throughout the year to discuss "price opportunities" and to advise them to "exercise restraint" by restricting supply to keep prices up. When one Agri Stats member considered leaving the cartel, Agri Stats wooed them back by telling them how to make an additional $100k by raising bacon prices.

The reason Dayen is writing about Agri Stats now is that the DoJ Antitrust Division has brought an antitrust suit against them. This is part of a wave of antitrust actions brought by Biden's DoJ and FTC, who, along with his NLRB, are shaping up to be the most pugnacious, public-interest force against corporate power since the Reagan administration:

https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/29124-doj-sues-agri-stats-for-complicity-in-meat-market-manipulation

All this enforcement isn't a coincidence. It comes from an explicit rejection of neoliberalism's core tenets: inequality reflects merit, monopolies are efficient, and government can't do anything. In Biden's DoJ, FTC and NLRB, they're partying like it's 1979:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

What's amazing about the Agri Stats conspiracy to raise prices is that it's been going since the Reagan administration. It's a smoking gun proof that "consumer welfare" never cared about price-fixing and robbing the public (can a gun still smoke after 40 years?). There was never a time when consumer welfare antitrust cared about consumer welfare. It was always and forever a front for "a conspiracy against the publick," a "contrivance to raise prices."

Big Meat has been robbing America for two generations. Some of those stolen funds were used to corrupt our political process. The meat sector gets $50 billion in public subsidies and still gouges us on prices and rips off its suppliers:

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/02/usda-livestock-subsidies-near-50-billion-ewg-analysis-finds

Which means that it's possible that we're simultaneously being ripped off with meat prices and that meat prices are artificially low. Try and wrap your head around that one!

The do-nothing, pro-monopoly neoliberal antitrust is a virus that spread around the world. The EU's antitrust laws were reshaped to mirror American laws after the war through the Marshall Plan, but since the late 1970s, European lawmakers and enforcers have ignored their own laws (just like their American counterparts) and encouraged monopolies as "efficient."

This Made-in-Europe oligopoly, combined with energy and grain shocks from Russian invasion of Ukraine, created the perfect storm for European greedflation. As food prices spiked across the EU, Austrian hacktivist Mario Zechner set out to investigate Austrian grocers' pricing. Using the grocers' own APIs, he was able to compile and analyze a dataset of prices at Austrian grocers:

https://www.wired.com/story/heisse-preise-food-prices/

When Zechner open-sourced his project, collaborators showed up to expand the project across other EU countries, and an anonymous party donated a huge database of prices stretching back to 2017. The data reveals clear collusion among the grocers, who raise prices in near-lockstep, and use gimmicks like cyclic price drops to hide their collusion:

https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise

Not every grocer has an API, and even the ones that do have APIs could easily block Zechner and co from accessing their data. When that happens, they could – and should – turn to scraping to continue their project. They should also scrape grocers elsewhere, including in Canada, where grocers rigged the price of bread:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers

Because Big Meat's "conspiracy against the publick" isn't unique to meat. It's in all our food, it's in all our goods, it's in all our services. The fact that the meat industry was able to rob American buyers, ranchers and farmers for two generations under a 200' tall neon sign that blinked "AGRI STATS AGRI STATS AGRI STATS" night and day is frankly astonishing.

But there's never just one ant. If the meatheads running Big Meat were able to do this in broad daylight since the NES years, imagine what all the other industries were able to get up to in the shadows.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"While prison administrators boasted that prisoners were able to earn money while in prison, their assertions were somewhat misleading. In a 1924 article in the Baltimore Sun, Henry C. Raynor, a former prisoner who served a three-year sentence in the Maryland Penitentiary in the early 1920s, complained that prisoners often were forced to spend portions of their wages to purchase necessary items such as bedding, underwear, and clothing—items that many would consider the responsibility of the state to provide. These expenses prevented prisoners from saving more of their wages while engaged in the prison workshops.

The low-wage labor system generated enough revenue to the state to allow the Maryland prison system to operate mostly on a self-sufficient basis and return a profit to the state. The balance for the combined earnings of the Maryland Penitentiary and House of Corrections for 1927 resulted in a surplus of over $33,000 paid to the state treasury. A considerable portion of the surplus came from the profits of prisoners laboring in contract shops and state-use industries. Taxpayers in Maryland during the 1920s contributed little to the general upkeep of the prisons. A 1928 Baltimore news article lauded the convict labor system in the Maryland Penitentiary for being largely “self-sustaining” and noted that the prison “costs the taxpayers of the State less than $60,000 annually.”

While the prison labor system was celebrated by state officials for its rehabilitative benefits, it is clear that the revenue it generated substantially motivated the continued reliance on prison labor. Labor union members were concerned with the competition of prison-made products on the open market. Labor leaders agitated for the ending of private prison contracts and advocated for state-use industries. Labor leaders believed that the state-use system was favorable because it meant that prison-made products would be sold directly to states outside of the free market and thus pose less of a threat to workers in labor unions. Evidence of efforts made by prison administrators to bolster state-use industries can be seen in some of the Board of Welfare minutes. For example, in April 1923, the warden of the Maryland Penitentiary and members of the Board of Welfare discussed a plan to employ female inmates in the House of Correction in laundering the clothing of the inmates in both the Maryland Penitentiary and House of Correction. This motion reflected both the desire to find employment for prisoners and to provide traditional gendered work assignments. During this time, women sentenced in the Maryland prison system were kept apart from male inmates. This separation influenced the type of labor that was considered appropriate for female prisoners, thus reflecting the gender norms of labor that were imposed by the prison administration. The Board of Welfare approved the laundry plans, and in the fall of 1923, laundry equipment was moved to the House of Corrections for the use of female inmates.

Male inmates, on the other hand, were seen as fit workers for labor-intensive manufacturing and road construction. Members of the Board of Welfare sought ways to expand the state-use automobile production, and in the spring 1923, held a meeting in the Maryland Penitentiary “in which all parties interested in the making of automobile tags…were present.” Prison administrators sought to secure auto tag making contracts in states outside of Maryland, and signed a contract with the State of Florida to manufacture automobile tags in the Maryland Penitentiary state-use shops. However, this expansion did not supply enough work to keep all inmates employed, and additional work for inmates was secured by hiring out inmates on state road construction projects. Throughout the summer and fall months, prisoners were taken outside of the prison and transported to road construction sites in various Maryland counties.

True to Progressive Era bureaucratic principles, prison administrators focused attention on the prison conditions and rehabilitation of inmates. One prisoner, Henry C. Raynor, who served a prison sentence in the early 1920s, pointed out the need for better ventilation and temperature control in the cells. Overall, however, he seemed satisfied that conditions in the prison system were improving. Raynor described conversations he had with “old-time” inmates in the prison who spoke of improved food and work conditions compared with those of years earlier. The prison warden enacted clear policies about appropriate disciplinary methods to rein in power abuses of prison guards. Officers who oversaw work in the prison shops were restricted by new prison policies from using undue force to control the prisoners. One officer complained that he had once been able to beat a prisoner in order to instill discipline, but was now prevented from “knock[ing] his block off as he pleased.” This illustrates a shift in prison discipline from a reliance on physical force to more humanitarian policies. In addition, it reveals the expansion of bureaucratic rules and procedures used to govern the actions of guards and civil servants employed at the prison. … In regards to the full implementation of these progressive policies, much depended on the attitudes and behaviors of the prison guards. Raynor remarked that the warden was limited by his inability to automatically dismiss guards from service without major cause. Guards who were resentful of the restrictions placed on them found ways to unfairly punish prisoners anyway through nonviolent means. For example, one domineering officer forced inmates on his watch “to stand in driving rain or snow for ten minutes at a time, for no reason except that to show his power.” While prison policies and punishments were more humanitarian in principle, the attitudes and actions of prison guards responsible for enforcement varied the actual treatment of the prisoners. In similar manner, the ethics of some private contractors at the prison were also suspect. Raynor described how one contractor of a pants workshop would strategically require prisoners to load products during lunch or dinner time as a way to eke out extra work without pay. Another contractor, angered by new terms which required the payment of a higher wage to experienced inmates, attempted to shirk the requirement by rotating inmates through tasks to avoid paying them the higher wage, and a shirt-making firm attempted to “evade the payment of any wage at all to their men, and constantly tried to raise the daily task.” Prisoners brought grievances to the warden in regards to the shirt contractor, and one day the inmates found the “the contract cancelled, the contractor gone, and another in his place who was more fair.” Such accounts reveal that prisoners actively negotiated for fair treatment and that their grievances held some weight with the warden. While the reforms of the 1920s largely improved prison conditions, like other aspects of progressive reform, new prison policies also sheltered racially prejudiced social science recommendations, medical opinions, and merit-based grading systems. Raynor, himself a white male, described his alarm at being seated in the dining hall between rows of black inmates. He learned from fellow prisoners who had been sentenced to the Penitentiary years before, that the “mixing of races” in the prison used to be more standard, but in more recent years “ha[d] been partially corrected.” This “correction” resulted in increased segregation. Revealing racial prejudice as the normative social view of the time, Raynor published evidence of increased segregation in the prison to further his argument that prison conditions were better in the 1920s than they were years before.

Moreover, racial prejudice also affected services that were rendered by private reform groups that operated outside general state jurisdiction. The Prisoners’ Aid Association provided many services for recently released inmates at the John Howard Center boarding house. This center provided temporary housing and shelter and assisted inmates in finding stable employment. However, the housing, meals, and resources at the John Howard Center were only available to white male ex-convicts. The Association reports that similar resources were made available to women and “colored men” through “private houses or other agencies,” thus signaling the separation of resources on a gendered and racially segregated basis. Progressive Era science also led to troubling medical policies and procedures, including sterilization of prisoners deemed as “feeble-minded.” During the 1920s, members of the Board of Welfare and the Board of Mental Hygiene arranged for semiannual joint meetings. The two boards, responsible for the security of those deemed criminal and mentally ill, often communicated regarding the transfer of inmates from the prison system to hospitals and mental care units if they were found psychically unstable. At a joint meeting of the boards on February 17, 1927, the administrators discussed the “sterilization of certain insane and feeble-minded under proper safeguards and with the consent of the patient or his guardian or next friend” and motioned that such “should be authorized by Act of the General Assembly.” Discussions such as these highlight the troubling ethics of progressive reforms. State oversight of normative categories severely restricted the freedom and rights afforded to marginalized inmates and mental health patients. While progressive penologists and civic reformers may have insured better living and working conditions in the Maryland state prison system, such reforms came at the cost of greater state control over those deemed unproductive, both in terms of their labor and their reproductive capabilities.

- Erin Durham, “In Pursuit of Reform, Whether Convict or Free: Prison Labor Reform in Maryland in the Early Twentieth Century,” Master’s thesis, University of Maryland, 2018. p. 60-67.