This Week

With Frank Romano

This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Well, as promised, Bill Isaacs has found another cartoon for us.  It shows Moses and it say, “Use your finger to scroll down for the next five commandments.” 

So, by the way, you didn’t know that Moses, you know, used a tablet…

Ha ha.  It is to laugh. 

I didn’t get that joke from Dov.  Worst paying college degrees in 2010, Worst paying College Degrees: 

18.            Graphic Design. 

In the United States, we graduate every year, 40,000 two year and four year Baccalaureate graduates with graphic design degrees.  40,000.  Now, there are only jobs for seven of them.  And those seven should know how to make a page that can actually print.  Unfortunately, that’s not taught in most art schools.  They don’t teach you how to make a page print.  They don’t teach you had to make a page.  They teach you how to design, they teach you the aesthetics.  That’s part of the problem, I think. 

Graphic design programs are run out of just about every college you can possibly imagine, and the reason is, they’re very inexpensive to run.  They don’t pay the professors very much, they don’t need a lot of technology, they just need a room to show samples.  It’s mostly look at what other designers have done and then doing projects and evaluating them.  That’s what graphic arts education is in the United States.  And as a result, it’s not only the worst paying occupation; it’s actually one of the worst places to find a job. 

I mean, the next time you go to a restaurant, ask the waiter or waitress what they went to college for.  It used to be they would have said, “To be an actor.”  Now they say, “Graphic Design.” 

I’ll take fries with that…

By the way, there are some great graphic designers out there and I’m not putting them down, I’m just saying that I think it’s a problem with the Universities and Colleges.  You know, turning out all of these graduates for which there is absolutely no employment, but then that’s always been the case because I have a Liberal Arts Degree and I know a lot of my friends, there were a lot of jobs for people with Liberal Arts Degrees either.  So I’m not picking on graphic designers.  So, please don’t send me any hate mail.  Although if you do, I know it will be well designed. 

No email address for you…

I’ve had saving cities money.  It says here – I forget what city this is, it says that they’ll save $18,000 annually in paper costs.  The problem is that the way that they’re going to save the money is not print things out, which means they will only exist as files.  So there’s a lot of people saying, well wait a minute now.  A lot of things can happen within government and we won’t even know what’s going on. 

One person said, “They shouldn’t be conducting public business out of public view.  And if those government devices are – they’re using…” whatever they’re doing should be in the public record.  Well that’s going to be the problem because it’s all going to be electronic at this stage of the game, so you’ll see City Counselors and other people in local governments now doing things electronically – no paper trail, no way of knowing what’s going on. 

Ostensibly, they’re going to be saving money, and of course in this day and age, that’s a big thing, so as a result it’s going to happen and the iPad now creates a new form of iGovernment.  Sad story. 

An antiquarian book store in the Los Angeles area, 105 years old.  Dawson’s Book Shop.  Dawson’s Book Shop.  Closing down.  They’re selling off the 3,000 collectible books they have, marking them down significantly.  A sad story.  Because as we move to the electronic age with eBooks, the previously read book goes away.  And with copyright and other protection systems, digital rights management, you can’t give your copy of your eBook to someone else.  In the old days, you could sell your paperback to a store for peanuts and then they would sell it to someone else for peanuts and that way the information would circulate more.  Now we’re saying, that’s not going to happen, or it’s going to happen on a very limited degree.  So I think it’s a problem.  I think that used books created another entire level of literacy in the United States for people who couldn’t afford the original price of that book. 

And they’re not going to be able to afford the eBook because the eBooks are not that inexpensive.  In fact, you’re going to see them going up in price as the publishers now push because the publisher’s argument was, the reason books are so expensive is because of the printing and paper.  Oh wait a minute now guys, you don’t have that and all of a sudden you’re saying the real cost of the book is in the royalty and in the editorial work.  As an author I can tell you that the royalties are not that high.  And on the editorial side, I’m not sure that that argument holds weight either.  So if you want to use excuses, why you don’t say the one that’s really on your mind.  And that’s greed. 

In any case, that’s my opinion.  Take care. 

NEXT TIME…

Well, I’m on a train.  It’s the Lakeshore Limited from Chicago going back to Boston…

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