One of the more pointless things people running for political office regularly say is, "We need change." Change happens, regardless of what we do. It's one of the three things you can count on, along with death and taxes. Too many of these change-chanters have no idea what needs to change, and worse, they are usually the clueless sort who rail against "social engineering," which would be what making changes requires. Social engineering is only a derogatory term to someone who has never designed a product for resale, managed manufacturing of products that compete in the world market, or considered the effects of decisions that affect society.

There are a lot of things that need to change. If the U.S. is going to be a world power anywhere outside of weapons of mass destruction, the first is moving the country from SAE to the metric system. A company I managed in California was once proud of being "Made in California," but today those products are made in Mexico and China. Only a small part of the reason for that move was the obvious labor costs. A more disappointing reason was that American workers and suppliers were unfamiliar (and unreliable) with metric measurements, and the cost of those errors and remedial education outweighed any advantages local manufacturing provided.

There are now only three non-metric nations in the world and we're in poor company. Manufacturing jobs not coming back to the U.S. until there are competent workers to perform them.

We need to get out of the "back to the fifties" mindset. Carbon-based energy is history and it is killing life on this planet. (Don't worry, the planet will be fine. We'll be gone and something will take our place.) In the rural parts of the country, there is a mindset that the past will drive the future. It's hard to see where technology is taking us when we don't experience much of it in our daily lives. But while we and our local leaders are worrying about the past, the future is unconcerned with our misperceptions.

Thomas W. Day

Red Wing