Posts
- Chisholm teen in Scripps National Spelling Bee today
- Ely Folk School slated for June 6 opening
- What’s behind Mesabi Nugget’s long term idle?
Posted: 27 May 2015 05:24 AM PDT   Preliminaries: Wednesday, May 27, 8am – 4:45pm EDT. Streaming live on ESPN3. Semifinals: Thursday, May 28, 10am – 1pm EDT. Live on ESPN2. Championship Finals: Thursday, May 28, 8pm – 10pm EDT. Live on ESPN. Here’s Cade’s bio from the Scripps site: Cade loves a good sitcom and would like to meet Roseanne Barr because he thinks she’s hilarious. At school, Cade is a member of the drama club and works on the yearbook. He plays saxophone in band and is a competitive swimmer on the varsity swimming team. He also likes to play tennis. In his free time, Cade enjoys reading books and watching movies like the Harry Potter series. Although he considers English his best subject in school, Cade hopes to pursue a career in botany.Well-rounded guy. Good luck, Cade. I’ll have to live vicariously since my competitive spelling career ended in the Cherry High School gymnasium. Written by Aaron Brown for Minnesota Brown © 2014 | Chisholm teen in Scripps National Spelling Bee today |
Posted: 27 May 2015 05:20 AM PDT  Enter the Ely Folk School, slated to open on June 6. A story about the Ely Folk School ran in the May 23 edition of the Ely Timberjay. Modeled after the successful North House Folk School in Grand Marais (site of my next Great Northern Radio Show on June 13), the Ely Folk School will use visiting faculty to teach both locals and those who care to travel about the basics of being a human in the North Woods. Initial classes include log construction, birch bark canoe building, glassblowing, songwriting, an introduction to sauna culture and design, rosemaling, and harvesting wild rice. Find out more about the Ely Folk School. Written by Aaron Brown for Minnesota Brown © 2014 | Ely Folk School slated for June 6 opening |
Posted: 27 May 2015 05:00 AM PDT  About 200 people will lose their jobs and there is no clear sense of when these properties will reopen, though Steel Dynamics indicates it will be at least two years. These properties had already been going through “warm idles,” slowdowns and outright production stoppages. This announcement puts an end to the uncertainty. As previously reported, U.S. Steel’s MinnTac and Keewatin Taconite are both planning major layoffs this year, up to 1,000 jobs by summer’s end, while Cliffs has cut 100 salaried positions at its three Iron Range mines. Magnetation is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, having idled its Keewatin Plant 1 indefinitely as well. On Tuesday, I published my story about Essar Steel’s iron mine project near Nashwauk, a $1.9 billion investment in an efficient new taconite production facility that will open Summer 2016. It would be reasonable to ask, why is Essar able to forge ahead while Mesabi Nugget shuts down and other mines teeter on the brink? As near as I can figure after covering the industry for more than a decade, the answer is that mining and steel are subject to increasingly fragmented, niche markets pressured by global trends. In other words, global prices swing up and down — in the case of 2015: way down. But the world still need steel: it just needs highly specific kinds of steel suited for unique products. Unique steel needs unique ore. Unique ore requires all manner of new processing near the mine site.  Wait a minute, though. Wasn’t Mesabi Nugget supposed to be just the sort of value-added project that would bring the Range into the future? Again, this is true, but complicated. It’s not just about adding value; it’s about adding value at the right price. Mesabi Nugget went online and thrived during historically high iron ore prices. It just wasn’t competitive at lower prices. It’s not the right fit for the current market. This is the tricky business the Iron Range is in, and those who feel our lot is wholly tied to mining had better realize that it will take as much high thinking to keep the existing industry afloat as it will to diversify our economy. Sure, the good prices might come back in a couple years, but there will be fewer mines and fewer jobs left in our region to capture those prices. In some ways it’s almost like what’s going on in media, or telecommunications, or the recording industry. Just when you invest in the coolest CD store in town, digital downloads take out the middleman. You start an MP3 player store, only to find out that those goddamn hipsters are buying vinyl again. The advantage, as always, is with those who control the content and those who control the delivery of that content. They are the ones with options. Hence why the editorial slant of MinnesotaBrown is toward content- and delivery-based economic solutions, not extraction alone. Add value or perish. Win with quality and/or low cost, not quantity alone. Use your head or break your back. These words are no comfort to the workers without jobs today. They did nothing wrong but nevertheless pay the price. This summer the people of the Iron Range, and rural places like it, face a defining economic challenge together. We must not isolate ourselves from each other or the world around us. Written by Aaron Brown for Minnesota Brown © 2014 | What’s behind Mesabi Nugget’s long term idle? |