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Connie Wilson - Sat 23 Aug 2008 06:31 PM CDT
altheakims - Tue 19 Aug 2008 04:28 AM CDT
Richard - Sun 17 Aug 2008 06:57 PM CDT
sspl05 - Sat 02 Aug 2008 07:21 AM CDT
ihatehogconfinements - Mon 21 Jul 2008 06:45 PM CDT
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Wednesday, July 27
Costco: The New Anti-Walmart
by
Caroline Vernon
on Wed 27 Jul 2005 04:00 AM CDT
 Costco: The New Anti-Walmart
I
am in the process of trying to recruit Costco to come to Iowa so we
will have a socially responsible alternative to shopping at Sam's Club
or Walmart. Will keep you posted of any developments along the way.
From the NY Times:
By Steven Greenhouse
Issaquah, Wash.
Combining
high quality with stunningly low prices, [Costco] appeal[s] to upscale
customers - and epitomize[s] why some retail analysts say Jim Sinegal, [the chief executive of Costco Wholesale,] just
might be America's shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton.
But not
everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street
analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to
Costco's customers but to its workers as well.
Costco's
average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its
fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at
many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of
Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be
an employee or a customer than a shareholder."
Mr.
Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street's assumption that to
succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on
benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street's profit
demands.
Good
wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover
and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more
affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they
like that low prices do not come at the workers' expense. "This is not
altruistic," he said. "This is good business."
He also
dismisses calls to increase Costco's product markups. Mr. Sinegal, who
has been in the retailing business for more than a half-century, said
that heeding Wall Street's advice to raise some prices would bring
Costco's downfall.
...At
Costco, one of Mr. Sinegal's cardinal rules is that no branded item can
be marked up by more than 14 percent, and no private-label item by more
than 15 percent. In contrast, supermarkets generally mark up
merchandise by 25 percent, and department stores by 50 percent or more.
To read the rest of this article, click here:
Tuesday, July 19
Odds 'n' Ends
by
Chad Thompson
on Tue 19 Jul 2005 01:33 PM CDT
 Odds 'n' Ends
Today
seems to be one of those days where the news outlets are focused on
all-Karl-Rove-all-the-time, and some little things have flown past the
radar. Here are a few things that caught my eye.
Turning Over The Soil
The Des Moines Register ran an interesting special report Sunday on the coming property shifts
bound to happen in Iowa as a large generation of small farmers begins
to pass from the scene. It's a rather amazing fact that about
half of the state's farmland is owned by those 65 and older with a
quarter being held by those 74 and over.
The
issues of "local control" will haunt us if land begins to shift from
small farmers to corporate farmers and out-of-state interests.
How do we magically expect farm operations to be "good neighbors" when
the owners live in Chicago or Minneapolis?
KA-BOOM!!:
For a little fun, the Register is hosting a video
(Streamed QuickTime) of this morning's implosion of Knapp and Storm
halls on the Iowa State Campus. It's amazing how big a crowd can
be on a Tuesday morning.
Lose Weight: Drink More Milk? (Or Not?)
A
physician's advocacy group filed a lawsuit against three main dairy
advocacy groups to stop them from running an ad campaign promoting the
incredible fat-burning properties of milk consumption.
Not surprising:
PCRM
said the dairy industry’s weight-loss campaign is based solely on two
small-scale studies using questionable methodology, led by Michael
Zemel, Ph.D., an industry-funded researcher at the University of Tennessee.
Since 1998, Zemel has accepted nearly $1.7 million in research grants
from the National Dairy Council (NDC), and $275,000 from General Mills.
Gee -
who could doubt those studies? Look - there are valid reasons to
promote milk and dairy consumption, but paying someone to conduct
faulty studies to support a pre-supported conclusion is not one of
them. (Not surprising - the writers at the Coalition to Support Iowa's [Corporate] Farmers took offense at someone questioning the honesty of an ad campaign.)
Ethanol - A "Corn Dog"
A group of Cornell researchers pointed out that ethanol is not a magic solution to America's energy problem:
[E]thanol boosters are ignoring some unpleasant facts:
Ethanol
won't significantly reduce our oil imports; adding more ethanol to our
gas tanks adds further complexity to our motor-fuel supply chain, which
will lead to further price hikes at the pump; and, most important (and
most astonishing), it may take more energy to produce a gallon of
ethanol than it actually contains.
The
important thing to keep in mind: they're right. It takes
energy to produce the crops and process the outputs into ethanol (or
other biofuels). It sure won't help America's energy problem if
we have to burn more oil in tractors, pesticides, fertilizers and
processing plants.
Ethanol
has to be a part of a larger energy supply chain - taking into account
solar, wind and other renewable sources. (How about powering
ethanol production with wind farms?)
Thursday, July 14
DM Register: Overhaul the VA?
by
Chad Thompson
on Thu 14 Jul 2005 01:15 PM CDT
 DM Register: Overhaul the VA?
Yesterday's Des Moines Register featured an editorial promoting the elimination of the VA Hospital system.
I'll point out the motivation behind the article:
The
Department of Veterans Affairs underestimated the cost of veterans'
health care this year by $1 billion. Now, Congress is rightly
scrambling to find the needed dollars. Soldiers who risk their lives
for this country are promised health care. Congress has an obligation
to keep that promise.
The
Register starts off with a very salient point. The VA budget -
written two years ago for a FY 2004-2005 request - was drastically
underestimated. Sometimes underestimation happens in forecasting,
but in this case, something else happened between now and when the VA
budget was forecasted 2 years ago. From Reuters:
"The
bottom line is there is a surge in demand in VA (health) services
across the board," said Veterans Affairs Secretary James Nicholson.
The
Veterans Administration assumed it would have to take care of 23,553
patients who are veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but
that number had been revised upward to 103,000, Nicholson told a House
of Representatives panel.
Nicholson
told a House Appropriations subcommittee that his agency's estimate of
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in need of health care services was now
four times greater than thought.
The VA
budget is vastly underfunded - because the number of veterans has
increased by 103,000 in the last two years! The VA has also been
facing the strain of another aging population: The Vietnam
Veterans.
The Register editorial continues:
But
Congress also has an obligation to use taxpayer dollars efficiently.
The outdated VA system doesn't make sense in the 21st century.
The
veterans health-care system runs parallel to the country's existing
network of clinics and hospitals. That duplication is inherently
inefficient.
Tax
dollars support staffing and maintaining clinics and hospitals that
serve only one segment of the population. And sending veterans to
specific locations means some are forced to drive long distances for
their care and medication. It limits their choices in care. It further
fragments an already fragmented health-care system.
What
makes more sense: The government should grant insurance coverage to
veterans, similar to the way it insures millions of Americans through
government programs such as Medicare or Medicaid. With an insurance
card in their billfolds, veterans could receive free care at any
hospital. The government would reimburse the hospital for that care.
That
would allow veterans to receive state-of-the-art treatment at
facilities of their choosing. It would allow them to visit doctors and
pharmacies closer to home. Existing hospitals could add staff to serve
the special needs of veterans the way hospitals already staff diabetic
educators or social workers. Perhaps federal dollars could even pay
their salaries.
The Register here is following a few older assumptions here. To refute a few of them:
- The
Medicare and Medicaid programs are facing financial problems, far more
severe than any predicted shortfalls in the Social Security
budget. The VA costs were underestimated for easily understood
reasons - the Medicare/Medicaid financial shortfalls are due to medical
costs of the program spiralling out of control.
- The VA
does run several satellite clinics to handle routine care, such as
simple checkups, etc. The costs of medicine purchased through the
VA system are also much cheaper than pharmacy-based programs due to the
VA having the ability to negotiate lower prices. (This is what
should have been done with the Medicare Drug Benefit.) For the
most part, the VA prescription system is one of the more popular VA
programs.
- The assumption that VA hospitals are of drastically lower quality. Washington Monthly summed up just how false that assumption has become:
Yet
here's a curious fact that few conservatives or liberals know. Who do
you think receives higher-quality health care. Medicare patients who
are free to pick their own doctors and specialists? Or aging veterans
stuck in those presumably filthy VA hospitals with their antiquated
equipment, uncaring administrators, and incompetent staff? An answer
came in 2003, when the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine
published a study that compared veterans health facilities on 11
measures of quality with fee-for-service Medicare. On all 11 measures,
the quality of care in veterans facilities proved to be “significantly
better.”
Here's
another curious fact. The Annals of Internal Medicine recently
published a study that compared veterans health facilities with
commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes
patients. In seven out of seven measures of quality, the VA provided
better care. It gets stranger. Pushed by large employers who are eager
to know what they are buying when they purchase health care for their
employees, an outfit called the National Committee for Quality
Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance
measures. These include how well the plans manage high blood pressure
or how precisely they adhere to standard protocols of evidence-based
medicine such as prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from
a heart attack. Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in
the health-care industry. And who do you suppose this year's winner is:
Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every
single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA
hospitals.
The
difference is that the VA system in the 1980s and 1990s was forced to
adopt computerized systems to track patients in response to calls for
the VA system to become more efficient.
In fact
(from the same article), the director of the VA during much of the
transformation in the 1990s was singled out in a book on business
management:
By
1998, Kizer's shake-up of the VHA's operating system was already
earning him management guru status in an era in which management gurus
were practically demigods. His story appeared that year in a book
titled 'Straight from the CEO: The World's Top Business Leaders Reveal
Ideas That Every Manager Can Use' published by Price Waterhouse and
Simon & Schuster. Yet the most
dramatic transformation of the VHA didn't just involve such trendy,
1990s ideas as downsizing and reengineering. It also involved an
obsession with systematically improving quality and safety that to this
day is still largely lacking throughout the rest of the private
health-care system.
The
difference between the VA system and the private health-care system is
that the VA has been able to focus on the quality and affordibility of
patient care - not profits.
That's not something we should abandon for another 'privatized' system that degrades quality and pads private profit margins.
Tuesday, July 12
Can Iowa Compete in A Science-based Economy?
by
Chad Thompson
on Tue 12 Jul 2005 12:53 PM CDT
 Can Iowa Compete in A Science-based Economy?
This is
a topic that I definitely have more to speak about, but this will be
fairly short today. Fred Dorr, a former West Des Moines School
Board Member penned an editorial promoting science, math and technical education in Iowa.
American
research-and-development dollars are being invested abroad, where
scientists can be selected from a huge number of bright, ambitious and
Internet-connected people in what dismissively has been referred to as
Third-World countries. And they bring a strong work ethic and
willingness to work for less.
We'd better come up with a response. If we don't, we'll look around and ask ourselves: What's left for us to do?
We
need a plan to identify scientific issues to address in Iowa. They
might include alternative energy sources, livestock and farming odor
mitigation, water purity, chemical runoff and crop bioscience/genetic
concerns. And then we must develop a private industry and government
response. Potential steps:
• Fund a second phase of "Vision Iowa" to encourage the development of intellectual resources in our state.
• Involve Iowa businesses. Why should VeriSign go to Bangalore instead of Boone, Cedar Rapids or Orange City?
• Re-examine our curricular requirements. Are we world-class? Not in math and science.
•
Create a governor's task force to visit our competitors' home
countries. See what they do that we could do better. Have it develop a
statewide initiative with recommended action items.
I will
simply state that I agree wholeheartedly with the need to promote
science, math, computer and technology (CMST) education. Our
state is in a far better position than most to produce young
scientists, engineers and mathematicians. We have a solid school
system (relatively) and two higher education institutions that have
solid history in innovation.
Encouraging better education in technical (and other) areas is literally a "no lose" proposition.
However, not all can be solved by education alone.
The Computational Research Policy Blog noted an article reporting the declining number of majors enrolling in a computer-related field. A reason was given by an educational awareness organization:
Andrew
Bernat, executive director of the CRA, a computing education awareness
organization, says computer science enrollment peaks when the market is
excited about a new development in technology. He says that happened
with personal computers during the 1980s and during the dot-com boom of
the late 1990s.
When there is relatively little buzz surrounding computer technology, he says, enrollment lags.
That's
the case now, but the current enrollment decline is reaching
historically low numbers. "In between (enrollment peaks and valleys),
you still need good, talented people all the time," Bernat says. "There
is a lot to be done in computing."
Here's
the problem with that line of thought, however; in the 1990s,
students viewed computer and technology fields as having a bright and
prosperous future in the United States. The sheer number of
start-up companies and exciting ventures was something that an eighteen-year-old student would want
to be a part of. A similar effect happened in the 1960s when
federal research dollars poured into basic space and science
programs; most senior college professors and engineers pursued
their degrees during the height of excitement generated by the Apollo
program.
In the
1990s, it was also easy to make a decent salary as a fresh college
graduate - programmers and technicians were in high demand in the
domestic market. However, that is no longer the case. For
example: a large employer of new college graduates - Accenture -
announced today that they will be hiring 30,000 new employees in three Asian nations, where labor costs are considerably cheaper.
What does that mean?
It means
that if Accenture needs 30,000 employees that they will invest their
effort into 'new employees' not in the colleges of the midwest - but
into Asian markets for cheaper labor.
They're also brutally honest about their reasons:
"If
we get into a situation, for example, in India where a specific city
has reached saturation from a salary standpoint and from a cost
structure standpoint, we have the flexibility to move and to grow a
different location--not only within India or China or the Philippines
but also outside, say in eastern Europe or Latin America," he said.
"And we have actually started that process as well."
We can
invest like crazy in our educational infrastructure - but what good
will it do if our corporate citizens still view American employees as
"too expensive"?
The
solutions to this issue need to involve the private sector as well as
the public - otherwise the exodus of technological fields will continue
on the same pace that American manufacturing vanished in the 80s and
90s.
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