Several weeks ago, Robin Washington, editor of the Duluth News Tribune, emailed me that he was helping on the Duluth Budgeteer and that they needed some letters. He wrote that it should be about something in the Budgeteer.
I looked at the Budgeteer again and didn't see anything that I could write about. I thanked Robin and wrote that I didn't have anything in mind. Of course, later I did. Bill Gronseth, Superintendent of the Duluth Public Schools had written a column, and I came up with the letter below.
However, somebody else did write a letter that was published. This week I emailed Robin that if my letter had not been published this weekend, I would post it here, which precludes it being published in the Budgeteer according to its rules about prior publication.
My submission was:
A Duluth school superintendent and board decide that a major investment should be made in school buildings. The decision is contentious with much opposition to its scope and funding. A private company makes a nice profit from the project.
Some of the money for the project has to come from the classroom costs.
The Minnesota Legislature decides that it can't pay all the local school aid that has been scheduled. Now there is even less money for classroom costs.
Many of those who show up to vote on a school funding referendum turn down any increase. The additional property taxes would have made up some of the costs.
Now the Duluth Public Schools have to figure out how to provide some instruction with the funds they do have for operation. To do so, they are increasing class sizes, lengthening class periods, and cutting out music and art which have a proven record in helping boosting learning skills.
The net result will be that fewer students will do as well in school.
Who's to blame? The teachers, of course!
Showing posts with label Duluth Budgeteer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duluth Budgeteer. Show all posts
Sunday, May 06, 2012
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Republican spending vs. Democratic spending
Pete Langr wrote an interesting column this week on how the Republicans and the Democrats are looking at the budget, each from the wrong perspective: "Taxes aren't the problem: the real solution is to control supply costs". As of my writing, the Duluth Budgeteer has not posted his article on line. Watch for it at http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/tag/group/Budgeteer/tag/Budge%20Opinion/
My take is that the Republican goes to a certain restaurant every week and pays one dollar for his dinner and leaves a dime tip. One dollar for dinner?!? Yep, I could do that in the 50s when I worked at a grocery store. Meat, potatoes, and a vegetable for one buck.
But the Republican refuses to spend more than that dollar for his dinner. Over the years he gets less and less food. After a time he refuses to tip because he isn't getting his "value". Now he is lucky to get a half a cup of diluted coffee for his buck.
Meanwhile the Democrat orders the same meal and pays whatever is on the check. The restaurant, appreciative of his business, gives him more food, of course charging more over time. The Democrat is getting so much food that he needs "a box" for the extra. But he never asks to get less food for a lower price. Because the customary tip has changed from ten percent to twenty percent, he willingly includes that in his bill. Now he is paying more than $36 for what once was $2.20 bucks worth of food. And he is happy to do so.
My take is that the Republican goes to a certain restaurant every week and pays one dollar for his dinner and leaves a dime tip. One dollar for dinner?!? Yep, I could do that in the 50s when I worked at a grocery store. Meat, potatoes, and a vegetable for one buck.
But the Republican refuses to spend more than that dollar for his dinner. Over the years he gets less and less food. After a time he refuses to tip because he isn't getting his "value". Now he is lucky to get a half a cup of diluted coffee for his buck.
Meanwhile the Democrat orders the same meal and pays whatever is on the check. The restaurant, appreciative of his business, gives him more food, of course charging more over time. The Democrat is getting so much food that he needs "a box" for the extra. But he never asks to get less food for a lower price. Because the customary tip has changed from ten percent to twenty percent, he willingly includes that in his bill. Now he is paying more than $36 for what once was $2.20 bucks worth of food. And he is happy to do so.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Are fewer manufacturing jobs always a bad thing?
Dick Palmer picked a poor example about the decline of manufacturing when he mentioned Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak. How many rolls of film has he been buying recently? Few people use film anymore; most cameras are now digital and can take many more pictures than film cameras. In fact, it is difficult to even sell a film camera on eBay. "State exports may be up but nation still hurting", Dick Palmer, Duluth Budgeteer, 2011-01-06.
Technological changes have led to many more job changes, but I'll come back to these in a bit.
Another contributor to job changes for over two hundred years has been low cost manufacturing, whether by low-cost labor or high productivity. Weavers in England and India were put out of business by power looms in England. Instead of high-skilled weavers, children could and did operate the machines.
New Englanders stole some of the designs and set looms up in Massachusetts. They hired hundreds of young women to operate the machines. Feeling exploited, workers organized into unions to push for more rewards for their labor.
Then the textile mills lowered their costs by moving to the South where unions were not tolerated. Even then, people found opportunity for better paying jobs and to attract labor, the companies had to raise wages.
Then shipping became cheaper, and textile companies found even lower cost labor in Asia and Central America. And as labor becomes more expensive in those countries, the companies move on to other countries.
Higher productivity means fewer people are needed to manufacture the same amount of goods. Higher productivity comes from more and more mechanization and now computerization. Even in the 80s, Ford could produce cars for less than GM because it used more mechanization and fewer workers. Fewer highly skilled machinists are needed thanks to numerically-controlled machine tools. Write a little program to make the cuts, put the code into the machine, and have a cup of coffee.
My father was a well-regarded dental prosthetic technician specializing in crowns. I have a folder of letters from dentists praising his work. When I got a crown last year, the dentist waved a wand over my teeth, an image appeared on the computer screen, he rotated the image and made some adjustments, he clicked OK, and a machine in the basement proceeded to make the crown. We chatted awhile, and then he went downstairs to get the crown. He put it in my mouth, pulled it out, made some adjustments with his drill, put it back in again, had me grind my teeth, and so on. In two hours, I had a new crown in my mouth, not a temporary to be replaced in three weeks and several visits later.
What is manufactured has changed dramatically in the last few decades.
When I worked at Univac programming mainframes mainframes in the 1960s, dozens of people would thread wires through little iron donuts for the main memory. When I started, a large memory had less than 400,000 characters, each character represented by six donuts. When I left nearly twenty years later, a large memory had about six million characters on an array of integrated circuits on several sets of large circuit boards. Now I carry eight billion characters of memory in my shirt pocket.
The miles of film that Eastman Kodak spewed out and put in little boxes have been replaced by memory cards the size of the end of one of those boxes. On a 1991 trip to Japan I shot nine rolls of film; my cost was over one hundred dollars for film and processing. On a 2007 trip to Japan I shot almost forty percent more pictures on a single memory card that cost less than fifty dollars, and I used the card over and over again for many hundreds of pictures more. My cost of processing was my time to download the pictures to my computer.
What is considered manufacturing has changed even more dramatically. We don't consider software on a disk or downloaded from a website as a manufactured product, but it is. It's just that the balance between design and physical rendering has moved dramatically to the design side. I haven't checked, but I assume that Apple Computer has more employees today than IBM and the "Seven Dwarves" of mainframes had thirty years ago. Apple definitely has more customers spending a lot more money than the mainframe manufacturers did.
The problem is not the decline of an economic sector, but the rate of change of the economy. I think few people, whether individuals or people in government, business, and education, have sufficient understanding of the change. Too many people are judging tomorrow by what happened a decade ago. And too many people are assuming that solutions that seemed to work twenty years ago are going to work today.
Abraham Lincoln said it 165 years ago, "As our case is new, so must we think anew."
To his credit, Dick Palmer has started to think anew. He does end his column with and elaboration on "The secret ingredient to success today is education…"
Technological changes have led to many more job changes, but I'll come back to these in a bit.
Another contributor to job changes for over two hundred years has been low cost manufacturing, whether by low-cost labor or high productivity. Weavers in England and India were put out of business by power looms in England. Instead of high-skilled weavers, children could and did operate the machines.
New Englanders stole some of the designs and set looms up in Massachusetts. They hired hundreds of young women to operate the machines. Feeling exploited, workers organized into unions to push for more rewards for their labor.
Then the textile mills lowered their costs by moving to the South where unions were not tolerated. Even then, people found opportunity for better paying jobs and to attract labor, the companies had to raise wages.
Then shipping became cheaper, and textile companies found even lower cost labor in Asia and Central America. And as labor becomes more expensive in those countries, the companies move on to other countries.
Higher productivity means fewer people are needed to manufacture the same amount of goods. Higher productivity comes from more and more mechanization and now computerization. Even in the 80s, Ford could produce cars for less than GM because it used more mechanization and fewer workers. Fewer highly skilled machinists are needed thanks to numerically-controlled machine tools. Write a little program to make the cuts, put the code into the machine, and have a cup of coffee.
My father was a well-regarded dental prosthetic technician specializing in crowns. I have a folder of letters from dentists praising his work. When I got a crown last year, the dentist waved a wand over my teeth, an image appeared on the computer screen, he rotated the image and made some adjustments, he clicked OK, and a machine in the basement proceeded to make the crown. We chatted awhile, and then he went downstairs to get the crown. He put it in my mouth, pulled it out, made some adjustments with his drill, put it back in again, had me grind my teeth, and so on. In two hours, I had a new crown in my mouth, not a temporary to be replaced in three weeks and several visits later.
What is manufactured has changed dramatically in the last few decades.
When I worked at Univac programming mainframes mainframes in the 1960s, dozens of people would thread wires through little iron donuts for the main memory. When I started, a large memory had less than 400,000 characters, each character represented by six donuts. When I left nearly twenty years later, a large memory had about six million characters on an array of integrated circuits on several sets of large circuit boards. Now I carry eight billion characters of memory in my shirt pocket.
The miles of film that Eastman Kodak spewed out and put in little boxes have been replaced by memory cards the size of the end of one of those boxes. On a 1991 trip to Japan I shot nine rolls of film; my cost was over one hundred dollars for film and processing. On a 2007 trip to Japan I shot almost forty percent more pictures on a single memory card that cost less than fifty dollars, and I used the card over and over again for many hundreds of pictures more. My cost of processing was my time to download the pictures to my computer.
What is considered manufacturing has changed even more dramatically. We don't consider software on a disk or downloaded from a website as a manufactured product, but it is. It's just that the balance between design and physical rendering has moved dramatically to the design side. I haven't checked, but I assume that Apple Computer has more employees today than IBM and the "Seven Dwarves" of mainframes had thirty years ago. Apple definitely has more customers spending a lot more money than the mainframe manufacturers did.
The problem is not the decline of an economic sector, but the rate of change of the economy. I think few people, whether individuals or people in government, business, and education, have sufficient understanding of the change. Too many people are judging tomorrow by what happened a decade ago. And too many people are assuming that solutions that seemed to work twenty years ago are going to work today.
Abraham Lincoln said it 165 years ago, "As our case is new, so must we think anew."
To his credit, Dick Palmer has started to think anew. He does end his column with and elaboration on "The secret ingredient to success today is education…"
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