Nine Shift

City of the Future

In downtown Cleveland last month, and one can see how Gen Y is revitalizing downtowns.

The apartments and condos are full, the streets have more people on them at night, the restaurants are sprouting.  Then there's the bikes. 

Gen Y rides bikes.  Cars kill bicyclists (and pedestrians). Gen Y has to advocate for bikes.

Here's a "Respect the Bike" poster in a restaurant window, not a bike shop window.

All the Good Changes That Have Happened

Just for me, and people like me who don't think change is happening or happening fast enough.

1.Am sitting in the middle of the woods up north, where 5 years ago only dial-up was available, now logged on with DSL 24/7.
2.Trains are at record ridership.
3.Automobile driving continues to decline.
4.Suburbs now in decline.
5.Gay marriage pretty well a "done deal."
6.Those telecommuting continue to increase.
7.Both our presidential candidates have enacted health care legislation.
8.Knowledge work rising, percentage of people working in factories declining.
9.Some realization that a four year college degree is necessary.
10.Teacher accountability and evaluation experiments starting.

What have you got to add to the Nine Shift list?

Is The Welder Shortage a Scam?

Is the so-called welder shortage a scam by two-year colleges?

Two year colleges are fighting to preserve their last-century mission of training for jobs that require less than a four year degree. A technical college administrator raised the whole "welder shortage" issue again recently, and it caused my brilliant co-author to do some research on the topic. 

1.There's no shortage from the welder's point of view.
  As one welder put it, name a company that can't bid on a state bridge because they don't have the welders.  And he says, if there actually was a shortage of welders, it would follow the law of supply and demand in wages. It doesn't.

2.Wages are extremely low.
  Entry level ranges from $9 an hour (Oklahoma) to $14 an hour. Blue collar workers used to earn the equivalent of $28 an hour, they don't anymore.  To earn $60,000 a year, the median family income and enough to support a family, one would have to get a job welding 100 miles out in the ocean.

3.High injury rate.
   There are an astounding 1,400 injuries a day (a DAY), mostly to the face, many to the eye. There are objects flying into the eye, burns, UV rays, and one other major category of injury. There are 2 million welders and over 250,000 injuries a year, well over 10% of the welders each year. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a correlation between good welders and low injuries. So just because you get trained and can do a good weld, that does not appear to lower one's risk to injury.

Now you really want your daughter to go into welding?  Really?

 

Driverless Car Really Insane

Would you put your 6 year old daughter/grand daughter in a driverless car going 60 mph?

Here's a follow up question: can a driverless car detect and avoid a turtle in the road?  It's turtle season up north, with thousands of turtles crossing the highway to lay their eggs.  I and hundreds of other drivers swerve and save a few turtle lives.  A few probably aim at them.  Cars have killed off entire species of turtles.

A BBC story heralds a new breakthrough with 16,000 computers together now being able to identify a cat.  Your driverless car won't have 16,000 computers.  What about a tire, a brick, - a person?

Photo: NineShift saves a turtle

Sides Dopey on Marijuana Legalization

The sides lined up on legalizing marijuana demonstrate what we have said that the sides on the 21st Century are not always along political lines. 

The evangelist Pat Robertson says we should legalize small amounts of marijuana.
Opposed to this?  President Barack Obama.  Say what?

Robertson understands one of the excellent reasons:
1.To save tax dollars, and useful human lives, by reducing the prison population.
We needlessly imprison millions of people for nonviolent offenses.

2.The other great reason: huge tax income from the sale of legalized marijuana.

The double whammy of savings plus income will become acutely apparent around 2016.  And Presidential hopeful Andrew Cuoma understands that. 

Suburbs in Decline

Here's the story the Associated Press ran about the U.S. Census figures showing suburbs are now in decline.

"The heyday of exurbs may well be behind us," Yale University economist Robert J. Shiller said. Shiller, co-creator of a Standard & Poor's housing index, is perhaps best known for identifying the risks of a U.S. housing bubble before it actually burst in 2006-2007. Examining the current market, he believes America is now at a turning point, shifting away from faraway suburbs to cities amid persistently high gasoline prices. Demographic changes also play a role: They include young singles increasingly delaying marriage and children, and thus more apt to rent, and a graying population that in its golden years may prefer closer-in, walkable urban centers. "Suburban housing prices may not recover in our lifetime," Shiller said, calling the development of suburbs since 1950 "unusual," enabled only by the rise of the automobile and the nation's highway system.