Word: shrunk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...California recession shrunk tax revenues and led to astronomical deficits in the state budget. Normally fractious politicians in Sacramento, embarrassed by the perennial budget debacles that have plagued the state and apprehensive about the seemingly-endless recession, have joined to make California more business-friendly. Last year, the state legislature passed comprehensive pro-business workers' compensation reform and began to loosen the noose of bureaucratic and environmental regulations that have for so long driven businesses out of the state...
Where does all that leave NASA's more traditional strengths, deep-space science and human space flight? Diminished, perhaps, but not eliminated. Interplanetary spacecraft can be shrunk and adapted to serve both science and industry. Take the Pathfinder probe. Costing a reasonable $150 million, this ; robotic land rover will parachute to the surface of Mars in 1997 and roam around sampling the planet's atmosphere and geology. Says Larry Dumas, deputy director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, where Pathfinder is being developed: "You're getting back to a scale of spacecraft that we really haven't seen...
Perhaps so, but labor knows it will be tough to regain anything like its former clout. Union membership has shrunk from a high of 35% of the workplace in 1945 to 22% in 1980 to only 16% today; corporate downsizing exacerbates the trend. In bleakly familiar fashion, Philip Morris and NCR said last week they would shed a total of 21,500 jobs in the next few years. Such cutbacks have hollowed out the core of American manufacturing, from which labor has traditionally drawn its rank and file. The number of U.S. autoworkers, for example, has shrunk from nearly...
...single operating blast furnace. It glows over an industrial wasteland near the Polish border where thousands have lost their jobs. Since unification, Eko Stahl has cut 85% of its eastern German work force as it closed or restructured its inefficient and overstaffed - plants. The number at Eisenhuttenstadt has shrunk from 12,000 to 3,500, and the remaining workers are threatened with layoffs unless the government is allowed to spend $478 million for modernization so the plant can be sold...
...whole incident was very puzzling. My first reaction was to laugh and marvel at the powers of electronic communication. E-mail has brought people closer to one another than ever before; anyone can instantaneously connect with virtually anyone else on the globe. Inexpensive and efficient, e-mail has shrunk the world even further. Although networks often have their share of logistical problems (as we at Harvard know well), the network's record is still invariably better than that of the post office...