A local writer wrote that we don't make anything in America anymore, look around. Actually he didn't look around very well; there are several manufacturers in Duluth, Minnesota, and the United States, many of them doing quite well.
Another thing that many people don't look around for is counter-examples to the idea that businesses are efficient and government is not. If you look around, you'll find plenty of examples of efficiency and inefficiency for both businesses and government. Being a contrary sort, I look around for government efficiencies and corporate inefficiencies. Today I found two examples of corporate inefficiency.
We have our house, cabin, and auto insurance with Western National. I paid the auto insurance last month and even have a confirmation number. When I checked today on the statements for the house and cabin insurance, I found that the statement for the auto insurance had a pay button next to it!!!
I sent email to Western National's contact address and received a reply within a few hours. Give one point to WN in the efficiency column and another for courtesy. However, the company is unable to remove the pay button as the online system is not interactive with its other system. Duh! I paid via the online system!! Give WN five points in the inefficiency column. Oh, the respondent did say that the pay button will eventually drop off.
That was a minor annoyance. Microsoft has given me, and probably hundreds of other users of Office 2011 for the Mac, a major time consuming headache.
Once again I find that I am getting duplicate events on my Outlook calendar. Before this was apparently caused by synchronization with Apple's iCal. I turned off synchronization before I spent days and days removing the duplicates. Today Outlook gave me the spinning and spinning beach ball, Force Quit said Outlook wasn't responding, and before I could click "Force Quit", the beach ball stopped. That long pause left me with duplicate items once again. At least at the moment, there are two to ten or so duplicates for each item, not hundreds like before.
I have some sympathy for Microsoft programmers and support personnel having spent a few decades debugging software, my own and that of others. But I find it annoying that such a wide variety of problems exist for years, especially when the producers tout how much productivity they give the users of their software. Efficiency is not passing problems off on customers, or is it?
Showing posts with label manufacturing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manufacturing. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
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…"
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Weak economy with record profits?
I've long thought that blaming government policies for the "weak economy" has been so much hooey and that blaming the Democrats alone for all the "bad" government polices has been even more hooey.
Morgan Heusel looks at all the factors in "Why Corporate America Isn't Hiring". He has a long list of factors including that many companies have learned they are getting just as much work from fewer employees and that older employees are staying longer.
I also note that the Star Tribune has been reporting many Minnesota MANUFACTURING companies have seen increased business, especially exports, and profits. And so many letter writers complain, "We don't make anything in America anymore." Hooey!
Heusel concludes with "we have a jobs crisis not because of a lack of demand, but because we're suffering from a mental recession of fear and uncertainty."
Friday, April 16, 2010
Why was my site suddenly so popular?
When I checked the statistics on my web site this morning I was surprised to see over 100 hits for Thursday. Gosh! I've been lucky to get 10-15 a day.
When I looked at the details, I found there were 65 hits for "Once Upon a Lake", a fable about the rise and fall of the fortunes of the city of Toulouse.
Was this only a few people looking at the page several times or was it a lot of people looking at it? Did somebody make a reference on a more popular site than mine? If so, it was in a chat room and not on a Google-searchable site. The only reference I found was for the page itself.
When I looked at the details, I found there were 65 hits for "Once Upon a Lake", a fable about the rise and fall of the fortunes of the city of Toulouse.
Was this only a few people looking at the page several times or was it a lot of people looking at it? Did somebody make a reference on a more popular site than mine? If so, it was in a chat room and not on a Google-searchable site. The only reference I found was for the page itself.
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