Key Feature

I have a confession to make: Back in college, I acquired a disturbing habit. That is, I began to regularly lock my keys in my car by accident. I don't know if it was the stress of my coursework or some other external force that caused me to pick up this tendency (as I had never done it in high school); I only know that I ended up making a humiliating call to my mother and/or a locksmith to come to my rescue on multiple occasions as a result. However, while I may not have gotten any smarter over the years, cars apparently have.

My new car, a 2016 Ford Fusion Titanium, uses a keyless "Fob" (from the German word "Fuppe", translated as "pocket" - basically just a small IR remote) for entry and exit in lieu of a traditional key, meaning that I typically don't have to take my "key" out of my pocket during the normal course of my commute. While this has certainly reduced the risk of me locking my "key" in my car, I do occasionally find myself taking it off my keychain for some reason (usually to hand to a hotel valet or attendant at a carwash).

Now, you may presume that in these situations I would be vulnerable to the same mishaps as before, but surprisingly enough, my car has me covered. As it turns out, when I attempt to lock my car, it checks to see if the fob is still inside; in the case that it is, the car refuses to lock and honks the horn to inform me that the fob is within. While this feature may not seem like a dealmaker, it definitely bailed me out at my local Publix earlier today when I separated my fob from my keychain, dropped it in my cup holder, and later proceeded to attempt to lock my car as I was disembarking (I had just left a carwash where, as usual, I had to separate my fob from the keychain).

Needless to say, I owe the engineers at Ford a big "Thank you" for this feature; without it, I would probably be helping myself to serving of Humble Pie about right now. Sometimes, it's the smallest things that make all the difference.

STEMulus Package

The April 2016 jobs report came out today. It indicates that U.S. employers added 160,000 jobs this past month, the lowest rate in 7 months as economic growth is moderating. President Obama touts this as a success story, declaring that he has added 14 million jobs since taking office, 3rd-most among U.S. Presidents (behind FDR and Reagan). However, the real story is one level deeper.

While President Obama's figures are accurate, the one statistic that is conspicuously absent is the quality of the jobs that are being added. If you dig a little deeper, you'll see that the jobs lost during the recession were mostly middle-class manufacturing jobs. On the other hand, most of the jobs added since have been entry-level and temporary service-sector jobs. This helps explain why while jobs are being added, wage growth has been stagnant.

This is a bad deal. Replacing good jobs with poor ones isn't going to do the economy much good in the long run. The good news is that there are plenty of good jobs available in the U.S. The bad news is that we have a skills deficit that is preventing us from filling those jobs, because unlike the jobs lost during the recession, these require education and training.

Case in point, it is projected that the U.S. will add over 1.5 million positions for Software Engineers over the next 10 years. However, the U.S. is only graduating about 40,000 Software Engineers per year. Do the math and you see that at that rate, we'll be short about 1.1 million Software Engineers. It goes without saying that these are good, lucrative jobs; jobs that are ripe for the filling but that we simply don't have trained people to take.

The problem is that we have a skills management issue. The jobs of the 21st century economy are here and they're good ones, but they require skills that our people aren't getting. Only 8% of all U.S. college students are in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) programs. By comparison, in China, where the educational system does much more to emphasize careers, about 30% of all college students are studying STEM. If we don't have enough Americans to fill these STEM positions, guess where they're going to go?

At the same time we're facing this problem, our political leaders have chosen to fight over - wait for it - raising the minimum wage. Seriously? Compared to the real employment problem we're facing, the minimum wage is little more than a distractionary issue. Instead, we desperately need to focus on giving our people the skills and training they need to succeed in today's economy.

In a nutshell, our problem is that we have a 20th century workforce and a 21st century economy. Fixing this begins with education, where we need to emphasize STEM as a cornerstone for success in today's world; there's no reason why a developing nation should be graduating more engineers and scientists than the U.S. We already have the most advanced and capable higher education system in the world; if only we can use it in conjunction with the private sector to give students the skills they need to be successful today, sub-2% economic growth, wage stagnation, and underemployment will quickly become the issues of yesterday.