Word: plight
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is a measure of irony in the robot industry's plight. Although industrial robots account for only 2% of the $24 billion factory-automation business (such items as computers and other electronically controlled industrial machinery make up much of the rest), the mechanical menials have drastically altered many sectors of the American workplace. Robots perform more than 98% of the spot welding on Ford's highly successful Taurus and Sable cars. At Doehler-Jarvis, a major Ohio metal fabricator, robots load and unload die-casting machines, trim parts and ladle molten metal. At IBM factories across the country, robots...
...there was Joe Biden, gambling that he could pump up the crowd even higher while challenging his middle-class neighbors with the specter of a "nation at risk" from materialist values, declining industries, drug abuse, inadequate schools and kids abandoned to poverty. "It is the plight of our children that is the moral test of our time," he roared in a voice that bounced off the surrounding buildings...
Although the University seems genuinely concerned about the plight of transfers, it has been unwilling to present the only solution that will solve the problem: guaranteed on-campus residency. Instead, steps were taken last year to assure that some incoming transfers would have off-campus housing. The University agreed to reserve for transfer use a block of rooms in the Peabody Terrace apartments at below-market rate. The move is a partial answer--but not a solution...
Bryan may overstate the case, but there is no denying the horrendous plight of the thrift institutions -- or rather of the one-quarter or so of the industry that is foundering by normal accounting standards. Last year the profits of all U.S. thrifts totaled $895 million, down from $3.85 billion in 1985. A year ago the 370 or so weakest institutions were hemorrhaging at the rate of $2.2 billion a year. Now those losses are running closer to an estimated $3.8 billion annually...
...other major factor Wilson cites is the widening class division between blacks who have escaped the ghetto and those who have not. In what may be the book's most contentious section, he argues that the easing of discrimination against middle-class blacks has contributed indirectly to the desperate plight of the underclass. Once, he says, segregation forced middle-class, working- class and poor blacks to live together in "vertically integrated" communities with thriving churches, small businesses and schools. But desegregation laws allowed blacks with stable jobs to flee the ghettos in great numbers, knocking the props from local institutions...