Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2026: A quick value calculation, part 2, what’s the automation/job loss issue?

 

Longshoremen serving U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast ports went on strike yesterday.

Here’s something that I find weird about this strike:

  • Foreign labor can’t take these jobs.
  • Only U.S. management can.
  • Impact on consumers is essentially nil, either way.

Interesting, to an economist. That puts a different light on the union’s “no automation” stance.  I think it’s fundamentally different from (say) auto workers.

Let me pin down a few more facts, maybe correct some prior errors.  That’s what this post is about.

What are ILA demands?

 

From CNBC, we get a crisp list of demands, quoting the head of the ILA International Longshoremen’s Assocation:

  • “5 an hour per year increase over six years,
  • all royalties for containers handled,
  • and strict language against automation.”

For this post I’m interested in the last one.

The royalties thing seems to be a modest worker-productivity-related bonus.  Modest seems reasonably, considering that some of the folks at issue are swinging around 40-ton containers of stuff.  Probably inadvisable, possibly infeasible, to provide a strong incentive to hurry.

OK, what does ” …. strict language against automation.” mean?

Taking a step back, the automation technology at issue is clearly explained on gCaptain.  From my layman’s perspective, they have machines now that’ll move/sort cargo containers just like packages.

They’re described as “robots”.  The key thing is that they do this without requiring a crane operator.  The robot operates the crane automatically, including routing of the containers via barcodes.  (I.e., like UPS package sorting).

Let me pause here and say that I immediately thought of Terminator.  I’ll try to suppress that.

Automation means moving tractor-trailer-loads of stuff, in metal shipping containers, off ships, without human intervention.  Near as I can tell.  Crane operators and associated personnel lose their jobs.  Apparently, the West coast branch (of the ILA, I think) agreed to this in the last round of negotiations, and lost (and estimate of?) 700 jobs at one port due to automation of that facility.

So they want the operating company to agree not do to that, in the East and Gulf ports.  They don’t want to lose these jobs.  So they don’t want automated (robot) unloading of containerized freight.

Here’s what makes this kind of interesting.

I may regret saying this, but.

I think to a very large degree, they can’t lose these jobs to foreign competition.  Or, really, to any competition.

And that’s what makes this interesting.

The usual anti-Luddite argument is that automation is inevitable.  If you don’t automate and put those workers out of their jobs/reduce your costs, then your competitor will, and run you out of business.

So in the normal case, sure, Luddite are losers.  Working to prevent a labor-saving (and so presumed cost-saving) change is always a losing proposition.  The  jobs will be competed out of existence, one way or another.  As the business owner, either I cut costs by firing my workers and so the business survives without those jobs, OR I don’t and go out of business, and neither the business nor the jobs survives.

Either way, the Luddites lose their jobs.

Anyway, the kneejerk reaction is “here’s the union, trying to be Luddites, wanting to ban automation … what a losing proposition that is.

But … no.  Not necessarily, in this case. 

First, where else is the freight gonna go?  And these are 100% (I think) union ports.  If the ports remain non-automated, then … they remain non-automated.

It’s not like some U.S. city can grow a brand-new, rail-connected ocean port, with automation but no ILA workers, and undercut the rates at existing U.S. ports.  Can they?   At least not in short order.

And there is no second.  I stand by my opening.  The only entity that can force automation/job loss on these ports is management.  Not foreign competition.

Further, from the import consumer’s perspective, longshoremen’s wages account for a pittance in the overall cost of imports.  (See last post.  That needs some checking into, below, but is probably correct-enough as is.)  Given that, there’s no driving need to kill these jobs with automation.

Heck, pay them double what you’re paying them now AND keep the system as-is (no automation), and best guess, that’ll cost me 25 cents on the $100 in imported-goods’ cost.  Which, by the time they are marked up and sold, I won’t even notice.  If I would have noticed it, at wholesale cost.

Yesterday’s crude calculation, checked, still peanuts.

My claim from yesterday is that the wage bill for longshoremen at U.S. East and Gulf Coast ports is a trivial fraction of the cost of the imports they handle.

My estimate was a quarter-of-a-percent.  In that neighborhood.

No math mistake.  I put what I did yesterday into a spreadsheet, and got the same answer I got yesterday.  FWIW.

Value of exports ignored. The focus of the first articles I read was on imports, and how this might inconvenience consumers, U.S. manufacturers, “the supply chain”.  So I didn’t even think to include value of exports.

I’m guessing value of exports would be about half the value of imports, but I haven’t checked that recently.  (You have to be careful to avoid exports of non-tangible items.   Whatever it is, all it does is make the longshoremen’s wage bill look even smaller, in proportion to value of imports and exports combined.

But see next point.

Bulk commodities should have been excluded from the calculation.  Similarly, military materiel is unaffected.  Or so I read.  And at least one more, common-sense category.

As I understand it, this contract is only for movement of containtainerized freight.  Or nearly.  Stuff in shipping containers.  (Cars, I’m unsure of.)

I read that oil and gas, for example, were unaffected, along with a throwaway line about bulk cargoes in general being unaffected by this particular contract.

Best guess, bulk freight makes up a small percentage of value of imports.  Just scanning the graph below, I’d guess no more than a third.

Source:  Tradingeconomics. com.  Used without permission.  Red annotations are mine.

Wage bill waffling.  Finally, for the pro-forma wage bill, I just plain made up everything except the cited average wage of $35 an hour.  The $35 figure, I read somewhere, and saw it instantly disputed.

In any case, in the pro-forma, I had every union worker under this contract (estimated at 45,000 here, because I read that somewhere) working an 8-hour shift every day of the year (so as to overstate the wage bill, if anything), at an average wage of $35/hour (because, as note above, I read that somewhere).

I have since read that around 75,000 ILA members  may be at these ports,  not all covered by this contract, but all will obey the strike order (none will cross a picket line).  So, even with all the other assumptions of the pro-forma, if you used this figure, you’d up the wage bill by 2/3rds.

Conclusion.   It’s still peanuts.  The wage bill for the workers at question is a small fraction of a percent of the value of the goods they handle.

Post #2025: A quick value calculation

 

Longshoremen serving U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast ports went on strike today.

I have been searching in vain for one simple statistic:

How much do the wages of these longshoremen add to the cost of goods imported into the U.S. through these affected ports?

Near as I can tell, nobody has this pre-calculated.  So I’m going to roll my own.

Before I do, take your best guess.  Is it roughly:

  1. 2.5%
  2. 0.25%
  3. 0.025%

The commonly cited numbers are:

  • $3.5T in imports annually (from this government source).
  • About half of that flows through affected ports.
  • About 45K longshoremen.
  • Average wage of East Coast longshoremen of (say) $35 an hour.

So, assuming that all longshoremen put in one shift per day, 365 days a year, the wage bill for the longshoremen serving these ports is ($35 x 45,000 *8 =~) $12.6 million dollars a day.

By contrast, the typical daily value of goods imported through these ports would be ($3.5T/365/2 =~) $5 billion a day.  This is also a widely-reported figure, typically described as “damage to the U.S. economy).

So the answer is b).  As a fraction of value-of-goods-imported, that’s ($12.6M/$5B =) 0.25%.  Currently, the cost of U.S. longshoremen adds about a quarter of a percent to the cost of good imported through these ports.

And the difference that’s keeping the two sides apart appears to be about $10 in hourly wages.  So the actual money at issue is on order of 0.1% of the cost of imports.

I dunno.  Maybe it’s just me.  But it seems like this would be a relevant number to know, as you form an opinion about this strike.

Given the value of goods at issue, and the relatively small difference between asked and offered wage (I read it as $60 versus $50 an hour, five years from now), and given that West Coast longshoremen already make a wage at about that level, and yet the U.S. economy has not collapsed, I’d like to think that this is going to be a relatively short strike.

Post #2024: Have Republicans finally jumped the shark/turned the corner/gotten fed up?

 

An amazing thing happened over the weekend.  Or, rather, didn’t happen.

Recall the “13,000 illegal immigrant murderers” story that got a flurry of press coverage last Friday.  Including, of course, prominent mention by the Republican candidate for President.

Post #2022: 13,000 murderers … something something something … illegal immigrants? It’s our theme for the coming week.

It now appears that Republicans have stopped citing that number, merely because it’s total bullshit.  This seems like a new development in the campaign, i.e., letting go of something that juicy, just because they had no idea what they were talking about.

Contrast that to the theme from just two weeks back, Haitians Eating Pets.

There, not only did the Republican ticket refuse to quit spreading that lie, they went into a tizzy over being “fact-checked” about it, AND the Republican VP candidate (whatever his name is*) went so far as to admit that even if it isn’t true, they were justified in exploiting the lie for political gain because …  something something something lamestream media fake news … something.

* JD Vance (no periods), James David Vance, James David Hamel, James Donald Bowman.  reference.

Two weeks ago, they wouldn’t back off that lie despite pleas from the Republican Governor of Ohio, and the Republican mayor of the city in question. Heck, even after tacitly admitting that it was not true, they justified continuing to use it.

But now, is it possible that the Party of Trump has finally hit its limit on folks makin’ shit up, just to get people riled up?

A bifurcated distribution

The polling pretty clearly shows that about half the population is die-hard pro-Trumpers.  No amount of (e.g.) messy divorces, extramarital affairs, sexual assaults, bankruptcies, fraud convictions, felony convictions, a private no-witnesses tête-à-tête with Putin, praise for dictators, praise of pro-Nazi groups, incoherent speeches, flagrant lies, riots at the Capitol aimed at interrupting the peaceful transfer of power, threats to jail political opponents, and just plain ordinary nastiness will make them reconsider their choice.

I sat down just now to figure out how many of the Ten Commandments Trump routinely has broken.  Lie?  Check.  Steal?  Check.  Adultery?  Oh yeah.  Then I realized that if he had adhered to the Fourth Commandment (Sabbath), he wouldn’t have been out on a golf course two Sundays ago, making himself a potential target.  In any case, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he does not routinely appear to break six out of the ten.  I can only assume that above-average performance is why he’s such a favorite among self-described Christian fundamentalists.  That, and his crystal-clear stance on abortion, whatever it is this week.

 

Instead, they just lap that up.  No amount of hate-centered chaos is too much. Near as I can tell, as far as mainstream Republicans are concerned.

For example, most recently, when Trump asserted that Harris was born mentally retarded, Republicans cheered.  (Some?) Apparently, that’s exactly the sort of useful political debate that mainstream Republicans long to hear.  Claim that your political opponent rode the short bus, and you’ll get (some) cheers from a mainstream Republican audience.

This, despite some obvious evidence that if anybody has cognitive problems, it’s — wait, is that a fly in here? — the old fat guy, not his opponent.

So, to current Republicans, this is self-evidently funny:

But this stuff?  Maybe not so much.

 

There seem to be some Republicans who, for whatever reason, react negatively to Trump’s habit of (e.g.) pissing on our war dead, on the Congressional Medal of Honor, and on the democracies that are our long-term allies in maintaining international order.

Or just the general atmosphere of lies, hate, and puerile name-calling that is the core of the Trump campaign.  All of which they were willing to overlook … until some some red line was crossed.

Maybe for some, it was shoving an Arlington National Cemetery employee out of the way so that the Candidate could be filmed, grinning and thumbs-up, standing by the graves of recently deceased U.S. soldiers, to make a campaign ad.

Obviously, that wasn’t objectionable to the core of the Republican party.  But, plausibly, a few were mildly put off by that.

In any case, here’s why I think Republican election strategy has finally changed.

The core of the Republican Party is going to vote for Trump no matter what.  No matter how fundamentally un-American or anti-democracy his behavior is.

But now, as the election nears, every red line he crosses, he manages to alienate just a few more self-described Republicans.  Who then join the long list of prominent Republicans who say they aren’t going to vote for him.

They (Republicans) may have finally reached the point where the over-the-top bullshit is counterproductive.  As fun as it may be, it doesn’t get Trump any additional votes from his base.  Instead, each new outrage now seems to be chipping loose just a few more rock-ribbed Republicans who have (finally) decided that enough is enough.

And so, now that they have maxed out the gains from this strategy of generating outrage at every possible opportunity, and the truth be damned, it’s time to switch to pretending that the Trump candidacy is sane, normal, typical Republican fare.

So that’s what I expect to see, for the last month of the election.  I expect to see a concerted effort to portray the Republican candidate as a sound and serious proponent of democracy and the American Way.  Contrary to all existing evidence to the contrary.

They have to give Republicans who are on the fence some degree of plausible deniability for all the un-American positions and actions their candidate has taken so far.  Plus the tacky grifts.  They need to smother the voices of the many prominent Republicans who have said they aren’t supporting Trump.

So, my prediction is for a return to pseudo-sanity for the Republican presidential campaign.  A push to remake Trump as a Statesman.  Just for the next month.  Just enough to make those on the fence forget the recent past.

I guess we’ll see what happens next.

Post #2022: 13,000 murderers … something something something … illegal immigrants? It’s our theme for the coming week.

 

Today there’s a big splash in the news, that (something-something-something) illegal immigrants have 13,000 convicted of homicide among them.  This, based on what Rep. Gonzales posted on Twitter.  You can see images of the original ICE letter.

That immediately struck me as odd.  Number-wise.  Very odd.  For a few reasons.

First, that’s a lot.

The population that is drawn from is the roughly 7 million cases on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement “non-detained docket”.  That is, persons pending (in effect) their deportation trial or hearing, that are not being held in custody, but instead have been sent out into the community while they await trial.

So, rough cut, that 13,000 works out to a rate of about 185/100,000 population.  Where the population at issue is illegal immigrants who have are living in the community while awaiting their deportation trial.

Compare that to the annual homicide rate in the U.S., which works out to be about 6/100,000.  Even then, only about half of homicide cases are ever resolved (i.e., somebody is convicted).  So the number of persons convicted of homicide in the U.S. works out to be about 3/100,000.  Restrict that to adults, and you could stretch that to 4/100,000 adults per year.

So the apparent rate of homicide conviction (or maybe just being accused of homicide) in this docket population appears to be about 50 times higher than I would have expected.

But …

Multiply by 3 for the high Latin America homicide rate.  Homicide rates are higher in the countries that account for the bulk of souther-border immigration.  So, where the U.S. runs about 6/100,000, the median for Latin America appears to be about 3 times that amount (per eyeballing Wikipedia).

Multiply by (say) 10 for the fact that this ICE number is lifetime history of having been charged with or convicted of homicide.  The U.S. homicide statistics were per year, an annual rate.  The ICE figure isn’t an annual rate.  It’s “any history of” conviction or pending charges for homicide.  But this is something akin to “ever been convicted or or charged with a homicide”, over their prior lifetime.  A fudge factor of 10 years seems at least plausible, given the ridiculously large fraction of the U.S. population that has “a criminal record”, as opposed to persons charged in any one year (reference).

And at that point, the number starts to make sense.  Those two adjustments:

  • For the higher violent crime rate in typical countries of origin.
  • For “any criminal record” versus “convicted last year”.

And those two factors take you from 3/100,000/year homicide convictions in the U.S., to an expected value of about (3 x 3 x 10 = ) to an expected rate of 90/100,000 with any history of homicide within a relatively young, mostly Latin-American population.

So, just assuming these are average Latin Americans, and that ICE has (belated) access their full criminal history, the ICE figures now begin to make sense.  Just those two adjustments put you in the ballpark of their 13,000 murderers (180/100,000).

But “ICE Docket” is a wild card.

What’s a docket?  That’s a list of pending ICE court cases.  Where those cases are about whether or not to deport the person.

Now it all comes together.  I think.  Here’s my guess as to what’s going on.

First, as the original letter makes clear, if the ICE knows that an illegal immigrant in their custody has a history of serious crime, they do not let go of that person.  For sure, convicted of murder would qualify. So this 13,000 is people that the ICE found out about, after-the-fact.  How many were kept in detention, and so did not end up on this “docket”, is not known.

That factor, by itself, should have depressed the overall rate, and so does not explain why the observed rate is about twice what you would reasonably expect.

Second, it’s a good bet that “the docket” is enriched in individuals with history of serious crime, relative to other immigrants.  That is, of the 7M persons currently on the ICE “docket”, a lot of those people will have some adjudications, and will move rapidly onto and off of the docket.  By contrast, once the ICE finds out that an individual was convicted of a serious crime, that individual remains “on the docket” until that person is given a court order for deportation. And if that that person then does not obey that deportation order, they come back onto the docket and get convicted of failing to obey that court order.

What I’m saying is, it’s a good bet that those cases stay “on the docket” a lot longer than average. Which means that at any point in time, “the docket” is enriched in those cases, relative to plain-vanilla deportation hearings.

Just to drive that home, the mix of crimes on the ICE table (Twitter reference above) is oddly skewed.  rom the same data source showing 13,000 murderers, there are just 77,000 convicted of a traffic offense.  So, on the ICE docket, for every six persons convicted of a traffic offense, there’s one person who was convicted of murder.(?)

For the U.S. as a whole, by contrast, there are about 630,00 DUI convictions per year.  (Calculated from the data table in this source.)  Conversely, there appear to be about 10,000 homicide convictions per year (out of 22,000 or so homicides — the rest are unsolved.)  So each year, the U.S. as a whole has 60 DUI convictions for every homicide conviction.  Or about 10 times as many as show up among the immigrants on the ICE’s list.

So that’s a bit odd.  Whatever the underlying list is, it doesn’t appear to be a cross-section of crime.  It seems heavily skewed toward homicide.

Addendum, the next day, say no more:  As it turns out, the ICE list contains people who are literally in state and federal prison, that is, not detained by ICE.  Presumably, ICE continues to track them so that ICE can kick them out of the country when their prison term is up.  Here’s a quote from CNN reporting on this issue, quoting the Department of Homeland Security:

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a Saturday email: “The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”

Summary

All this tells me is that whatever you think this 13,000-murderers figure represents, it’s not the risk of murder in a given year. 

To be clear, near as anyone can tell, the legal immigrant population is more law-abiding that average, and the illegal immigrant population is about as law-abiding (otherwise) as the U.S. native population.  This, based on analysis of data from Texas, it was just over 2.2 individuals per 100,000 population, just a bit below the U.S. average.

Source:  Cato institute

 

You could, in theory, I guess, avoid any chance of this happening by locking up everyone on the ICE docket — everyone awaiting a deportation hearing.  Change the law so that you have to lock up all 7M people who are currently on the ICE docket, but have been released back into the community.  Taking $50,000/person/year as a reasonable guess at the cost of incarceration (based on eyeballing this map), it would only cost about a third of a billion dollars per year.  Plus some large up-front cost to triple the size of the U.S. prison system, which currently incarcerates just over 2M.

To be clear, you couldn’t just lock up that 13,000.  That’s because, as noted above, their history of homicide conviction was not know at the time the ICE (briefly) held them.  (If it had been known, ICE would not have let them go.  They aren’t crazy, after all.)  At the time they were in ICE custody, you don’t know which 13,000 persons had some prior (unknown-at-the-time) homicide conviction.

So to get them all, you’d have to lock up all of them.  And good luck getting that decision past any reasonable judge, under current law.  You’d likely have to amend the laws to make that legal.

None of this matters.  Republicans have found a statistic that has really horrible optics, so they’re running with it.  Whatever it means. 

As with Haitians eating dogs, there’s no way they’re not going to flog that until their base loses interest.  I’m guessing that, as Haitians-eating-pets was the theme for last week, and 13,000 murderers is going to be the theme for the week ahead.

But passing legislation to reduce the logjam in these court cases, and get these people out of the country sooner?  I’m guessing the Dems aren’t going to be smart enough even to mention who is responsible for killing the legislation that would have helped resolve this issue, within the law.  And the Republicans who killed a seemingly bipartisan attempt to address this huge backlog of cases are certainly never going to mention that they did that.

So, we’re up for another week of macho-sounding stuff on this issue, from the Right.  But no attempts to address it.

It’s just too good a story to pass up.  Even if the people telling it have no idea what it means.  Or whether 13,000 is an unreasonably high or low number.

And, for sure, the folks flogging this are going to ignore any hard numbers on the rate of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in the U.S.  Because those numbers don’t tell the story they want to tell.

This is the way my country works now.

Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

 

Skim milk is too high in calories.

Just saying that … leaves me shaking my head.

Think of this as round 2, of this prior post below, that briefly profiled burgers, eggs, and beans as protein sources.  This time around, it’s off-the-shelf animal-based protein supplements. 

Less-than-meat, in a good way, is how I look at this. Continue reading Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

Post #2020: Reflections on my 66th birthday

 

Today is as dreary as it gets.  Cold drizzle all day long.  Might as well write something to match.

My retirement

Is not a cruise ship ride.

My retirement currently shapes up like this:

  1. I have many regrets about my life.
  2. I can’t do anything material about any of them.
  3. I’m going to die before I spend all my money.
  4. I don’t believe in an afterlife.

Suppose, for a moment, that’s the hand you’d been dealt.

What are you supposed to do with that?

So far, the only answer I’ve come up with is “live with it.”

And, thanks to an early retirement, contemplate it at length.

A well-stocked purgatory

Most retirement-related advice will have been written by or about “successful” retirees. Those who have managed to arrive at a fulfilling and meaningful golden-age promised land.

I, by contrast, would best describe my retirement as a well-stocked purgatory.

Physically, I want for nothing.

The joke being that, unfortunately, I want nothing.

To the contrary, I’ve been focusing on döstädning.  Or, at least, getting rid of enough unwanted items and junk to start approaching a state of döstädning.

Now throw in a year-long diet, on top of that.  No, scratch that.  A permanent state of diet.

For 11 straight months, I lost five pounds a month.  But this month, the weight loss stopped.  I have reached a “plateau”.  Apparently this is a near-universal phenomenon of significant weight loss, though damned if I can find any coherent explanation of it.

I’m still obese by any standard measure. I’m not losing any more weight.  And I must continue “to diet”, lest I put that weight back on.   All pain, no gain.

Apparently my body was OK with losing the beer gut, but the man-boobs have to stay?  I’m not seeing a lot of cosmic justice there.

And then there’s the whole thing Dave Barry wrote about in a column titled “Red Hot Memories”.  The propensity of your brain to bring up memories of the most cringe-worthy moments of your life.  As I age, I increasingly suffer from the ailment he described.

If I were tasked with designing purgatory, that would surely be part of the plan.

Conclusion

The weather sucks today.  Maybe I’ll go out to the garage and throw some stuff away.  Maybe I’ll buy myself a nice new sweater.

Nope, got it:  Chicken soup.  I’m gonna make a pot of chicken soup.  Then I’m going to eat some.  Then we’ll see what’s next on the agenda.

Welcome to my retirement.

Post #2018: The five prices of silver, while I can still recall them.

 

I just want to write this down before I forget it, in case I ever need to know this again.

For a silver bullion item of a given weight and purity (fineness), the following prices should occur, from lowest to highest:

Lowest:  Scrap value is what a refiner will actually pay you, to take your silver for re-melting.  It’s what you can sell silver for, if all you can sell it for is scrap.

Generic bar sell-to price is what a bullion dealer will pay for “any bar, any condition”.  If it’s a bar, of the stated weight and purity, they’ll pay that for it.

Coin and good delivery list bar sell-to price.  This is what a dealer will pay for name-brand or mint-issued coins and bars.

Spot:  The price you see quoted on the business news.  This is the price for current delivery of bulk metal of a known fineness, per troy ounce of pure silver content.  This is flanked by or maybe is one of the bid and asked price.  Doesn’t much matter as bid and asked are rarely far apart in an orderly market.

Generic bar buy-from or list price.   This is what a dealer will sell you a generic, any-issuer any-reasonable-condition bar for.

Coin and good delivery list bar buy-from price. This is what a dealer will sell you these items for.

Note that I don’t list “melt value”.  That phrase gets tossed around a lot, and a whole lot of people will show you the “melt value” of your purchase as spot price (maybe even spot asking price) times your weight of pure silver.  I don’t think that’s how it works, for selling silver as scrap (to be re-melted).  Near as I could tell, the price I’d get is the scrap price.  If all I could do is have the silver melted down.  But this fictitious “melt value” shows up often enough to be worth calling out.

As Gresham’s Law would suggest, for silver bars, dealers seemed to be one or the other, with regard to “good” bars or any bars.  Kitco (top-drawer) seemingly only deals in name-brand like-new-quality merchandise.  Buy or sell.  By contrast, those who bought generic bars sold both generic and name brand bars, at different prices.  I think that all makes sense.  Maybe.

The only practical upshot is that if a bar can be sold as a name-brand good-quality bar, it should be.  It’s worth several percent of the value of the bar.  Barring that, if it can be sold as “a bar”, instead of scrap silver, it should be.  Likewise.  And only as a last resort would you send a bar of any sort, in good condition, off to be remelted, and only receive scrap value for its weight in silver.

Conclusion.

God willing, I will never need to know this again.