News Cut: February 16, 2009 Archive

The search for the recession-proof job

Posted at 9:20 AM on February 16, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Economy

In December, I wrote about jobs that may be recession proof. It came on a day when hospitals announced large cutbacks, exploding the notion that health care was recession-proof. It's not.

"Mortician," a reader volunteered, a suggestion that seemed perfect for the times.

But MPR's Tom Robertson pokes that bubble with a needle today, too. It's not that people aren't dying, Tom points out in his story today, it's that when they go, they're going more cheaply. The big caskets aren't selling.

So let's scratch "mortician" off the list, too. What's left?

A TV station in Oklahoma went searching for some last week. "Health care" was #1 on their list. It was an odd conclusion, all things considered, but if you look at the job listings for area medical centers in Minnesota, there are jobs posted despite the announced layoffs.

The Boston Globe today profiles a young couple, victims of the economy who have been looking for work and identifies "career management counselor" as a recession-proof job. How does one break into that business?

Lawyers once were considered recession proof. Those days are gone.

On the other side of the coin, however, heating and air conditioning repair, barbers and hair stylists. And the biggest growth industry is government.

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NTSB zeroes in on Buffalo crash cause

Posted at 10:07 AM on February 16, 2009 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Disasters

The evidence is mounting that icing -- and the crew's reaction to it -- played the main part in last week's tragic Colgan Air crash in Buffalo.

After viewing a video from NASA, one wonders how much the crew -- or most other pilots for that matter -- knew about the existing investigations into what happens when the tails of turboprop aircraft ice up.

The spooky part of the video is at 15:40, when the test plane stalled ("stalling" in an airplane is the absence of lift). The pilots only recovered by retracing flaps, which allow planes to slow down, and descend without picking up airspeed.

Compare that to the National Transportation Safety Board's timetable of when things started to go wrong for the plane in Buffalo:

The NTSB has said problems for the 74-seat Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 occurred when the pilots lowered the landing gear and tried to set the wing flaps to slow the aircraft for landing.

The video adds an additional part to the equation: The actions a pilot must take for a "tail stall," are nearly the opposite of the actions he/she must take for a wing stall, the much more common type of stall.

How much time did the pilots have to take those actions once the plane was (apparently) stalling? Five seconds.

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A day to remember

Posted at 2:34 PM on February 16, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

I might be misreading the national mood, but it feels like more people are interested in the presidency -- historically speaking -- than in recent years. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that President's Day isn't about selling cars anymore.

So, here are three suggestions for the day.

1) Check out this video, which I found on Hulu. The historian notes that the presidency wasn't originally supposed to be at the front of the legislative parade.

It makes you wonder why we never got around to having a "Congress Day."

2) Gary Eichten's interview this afternoon on Midday interview with Ronald White Jr. is not to be missed. So if you missed it, go here. The Lincoln biographer even tackles the subject of the Dakota uprising. White doesn't exactly give Lincoln a free pass for the Mankato executions (which we talked about here last week), but he says people in Washington simply didn't follow what was going on out here. It was a great interview which, like many great interviews about history, leads us to more questions.

3) NPR's Talk of the Nation today featured Edna Medford, professor of history at Howard University in Washington, D.C., who analyzed C-Span's Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership.

It was the phone calls from listeners that got my attention .

From someone who said Richard Nixon was her favorite president: "I still don't know what the big deal was about Watergate."

From someone who said Lyndon Johnson was his favorite: "He drove the white southern Democrats to the Republican Party."

There are so many different ways to go in discussing either one of those choices. During the show, only two presidents who served during my lifetime weren't mentioned by callers: John Kennedy and George H.W. Bush. But at least they're not James Buchanan. Here's the survey

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