SERVICES

Andrew Brehm

Burwell Enterprises, a Sioux Falls, S.D.- based provider of business services, announced the promotion of Andrew Brehm to general counsel. Brehm previously worked as an attorney for Jack Link’s and Dorsey and Whitney and was former Minnesota U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman‘s press secretary; he will be based in the company’s satellite office in Minnetonka.

AIRPORTS

The Metropolitan Airports Commission announced it has selected Steven Berling as IT assistant director, client services. Berling most recently was with Andersen Corp. as an IT manager of device management and procurement. MAC owns and operates Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and six general aviation airports in the Twin Cities.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Kraus-Anderson Insurance, Burnsville, announced the hires of Andrew McDonough and Andy Podmolik to its Employee Benefits and Human Resources consulting business. McDonough previously worked at Surest, a UnitedHealthcare health plan; Podmolik was with Huntington Insurance in Minnesota. … Merchants Bank, Winona, announced it is celebrating its 150th anniversary. The bank has branches throughout the Twin Cities’ east metro and western Wisconsin.

HEALTH CARE

Advent, a national in-office treatment provider for chronic nose, sinus, snoring and sleep apnea issues, announced the opening of a clinic at 6640 Shady Oak Road, Suite 255, Eden Prairie.

LAW

The Minnesota Client Security Board announced it has elected attorney Cheryl M. Prince as chair. Prince has been an attorney member of the board since 2019 and is a shareholder at the Hanft Fride law firm in Duluth. The Client Security Fund was established by the Minnesota Supreme Court, and
is funded by Minnesota attorneys to reimburse clients who suffer loss of money or other property due to the dishonest conduct of their attorney. … Fredrikson, Minneapolis, announced that attorney Amy Anderson has joined its Health Law Group in the Minneapolis Office. … Maslon, Minneapolis, announced the return of partner Anna Petosky to the firm’s Litigation Group. Petosky also has been a prosecutor in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis. … Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services, St. Paul, announced the following staff additions: Clare Pledl, staff attorney; Hassan Olow, intake interviewer; Madelyn Larsen, social worker, Rochester; Nya Devos, staff attorney, Worthington, and the retirement of Paralegal/Intake Interviewer Jeannie Williams.

MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY

Nuwellis, an Eden Prairie-based developer and provider of bodily fluid management systems, announced the appointment of John Erb as chief executive officer. Erb has served as interim CEO since February.

NONPROFITS

YWCA Minneapolis announced the following incoming board members: Cheryl Bethune, Bio-Techne Corp.; LaToya Burrell, Zinpro Corp.; Jill Davies, Best Buy; Marcheta Evans, president, St. Catherine University; Karissa Kirvida; Minya Nance, Culture Core; Shelley Sánchez; Katie Schoeneck, Thrivent Financial; Cheryl Winston, Target Corp., and Ebony Wyatt, General Mills. … Project for Pride in Living, a Minneapolis-based affordable-housing and employment services provider, announced the hire of William Price Sr. as senior director of real estate development; he most recently was with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. … The Landing MN, a Rochester, Minn.-based nonprofit aiding those experiencing homelessness in Olmsted County, announced the promotion of Erin Sinnwell to director of development. Sinnwell previously was communications manager and before that was executive director of Family Promise. … Project Refocus, a Minneapolis organization focused on violence prevention, youth mentorship, community safety and economic empowerment, alongside Wolfpack Promotionals, which champions local entrepreneurship and economic growth, announced their planned move to 2034 W. Broadway Ave., Minneapolis.

OPENINGS

National jewelry retailer Kendra Scott announced the opening of a location at Southdale Center, Edina. … Twin Cities Premium Outlets, Eagan, announced the planned openings of Bonjour Crêpes and Portland Leather Goods.

REAL ESTATE

Grasons, a national franchised estate sale and business liquidation service provider, announced the opening of Grasons of Dakota County, serving Apple Valley, Burnsville, Eagan, Lakeville, Rosemount and surrounding communities. The franchise is owned and operated by Mike Harms.

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EMAIL ITEMS to businessnews@pioneerpress.com.

Twins center fielder Byron Buxton left the clubhouse early today to get a magnetic resonance imaging exam.

On pace for a possible career high in games this season — he played 140 in 2017 — Buxton left Saturday night’s 9-3 loss to Washington after the sixth inning at Target Field with left-side soreness. An all-star for the second time, he hit two doubles in the American League’s 7-6 loss, decided with a home run contest, this month.

Buxton, 31, was on the seven-day concussion IL in mid-May after colliding with teammate Carlos Correa while chasing a fly ball. He has otherwise been healthy and leads the team in WAR (3.9), home runs (23), RBIs (59), doubles (14) and triples (4).

The Twins are expecting an update sometime during Sunday afternoon’s rubber game against the Nationals.

Hometown clinician

Nationals outfielder Alex Call, who went 2 for 4 in Washington’s victory on Saturday, was born in Burnsville but grew up in River Falls, Wis., where he attended high school.

Asked which he considers his home, Call said, “I take the best of Minnesota and the best of Wisconsin. It’s a really special area. I’m a Midwest kid. The River Falls community, that’s where I’m from. It shaped me into who I am.”

Saturday marked his second game at Target Field.

“It’s fun to come back and play,” said Call, who entered Saturday’s game as a pinch-hitter after center fielder Jacob Young hurt a finger trying to bunt. It was the second inning, and he inherited an 0-2 count, but singled to drive in the game’s first run. In the seventh, he hit a solo home run to give his team a 6-2 lead.

“It’s still really special because it’s every other year,” he said. “A lot of fun this weekend.”

Before Friday night’s game, Call — with the help of his high school coach Ryan Bishop and the MLB Players Trust — held a baseball clinic in River Falls.

“It all lined up perfectly with the off day the day before,” Call said. “I was able to show up and had an amazing time with the kids, (and) got in some good instruction. It was just really special; I was in all those kids’ shoes, going to camps like that. Just really important to give back and have fun and encourage the next generation.”

Briefly

Catcher Ryan Jeffers and his wife, Lexi, welcomed a healthy baby boy on Saturday.

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Edward Lotterman

One beauty of economics — the study of how human beings use scarce resources — is that its basic principles apply to life even if money is not involved. Opportunity cost, externalities, sunk costs, marginal changes, imperfect information all pop up in non-monetary human relations.

These may be within the household: Whom do we marry and why or what careers we follow.

But economic principles also show up in apparently non-monetary actions of our nation: Whom do we wage war against and why? Which of us is put in harm’s way and how? Which of us escapes combat? When U.S. forces are firing live ordnance against our enemies on a monthly, if not weekly, basis, these are not abstract questions. They cut deeply to who we are as a nation and a people.

This obviously is a personal essay. It springs from two chance reminders from my past as I was reading about current issues.

One reminder is a snapshot of a USAF F-105 Thunder Chief nosing over to drop a second napalm bomb on a hillside in Vietnam in 1970. The second one is the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s daily casualty report for July 22, 1970, detailing all the brigade’s killed-in-action and wounded in the 24 hours ending at 4:00 p.m. that day. Fifty-five years later, I still re-read it every July.

It lists two men killed and 12 wounded. Five years into the 173rd’s seven-year stay in Vietnam, these were high numbers. Except for the first KIA listed, the other 13 casualties all were from one unit: Company A, 4th Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment was one of 16 rifle companies in the four infantry battalions of the oversized brigade.

One first lieutenant had been wounded the day before. The “WIA-MFW B/Legs” notation told us that he had been wounded in action with multiple fragment wounds in both legs. His comrade, 1Lt. Kenneth Slaughter, had been killed only hours before the report was issued. It also listed 12 of his men wounded at the same time.

Two only had sprained backs, thrown through the air by the blast of the 15 pounds of TNT as the bursting charge in a 94-pound dud 155mm U.S. howitzer shell. Some enterprising Viet Cong had defused this and turned into a booby trap detonatable by wires from brush a few hundred feet away. Ten men had suffered FW or MFW (fragment wound / multiple fragment wounds) to legs, arms, hips and elsewhere. Three who had been hit in the head or face were all marked (NED) for “no eye damage.”

However, their lieutenant’s death was macabre, listed as “KIA-T/A. B/Legs, R/Arm.” “TA” meant “traumatic amputation” — blown off — rather than “S/A” for “surgical amputation.” Putting their leader’s scattered body parts in a “Pouch – Human Remains” had to have been terrible for the unhurt men in his platoon, but almost certainly something they had done before.

While rifle companies had a nominal strength of some 220 men, it was rare for any to have much over 135-150. Including the lieutenant from the day before, Company A had suffered literal “decimation.” One-tenth of them had been struck down even if not killed. Lt. Slaughter was a high school graduate rushed through Officer Candidate School who died two days after his 21st birthday. As the next-senior officer, he was slated to take over as company commander in September had he lived. I knew him only as a name tape on the uniform of someone I had sold a money order to or perhaps stood with in the developed photo pickup line at the tiny PX. Other info about him I learned only after his death.

A somber tale. But 55 years later, how does it really matter? And what economics can possibly lie in any of this?

It matters a lot. And economic principles aid our understanding.

In 1970, questions of justice permeated who we sent to Vietnam and what tasks they were given. Over 15 years of war, 64 graduates of Edison High School in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia would be KIA. So would nearly 50 from Detroit’s Central H.S. Only 22 Harvard University grads perished. Over 300 West Point grads would die, but the number of lieutenants with 12 years of school and six months of OCS (such as Lt. Slaughter) killed was far higher.

In a rifle company in the 82nd Airborne two years earlier, none of us enlisted men in my platoon of 50-plus had a college degree. But at Landing Zone English in Vietnam, the 25-man military intelligence detachment just down slope from us had only two or three without bachelor’s degrees.

Many in the army had sneered that the “AA” in the 82nd’s shoulder patch meant “Almost African” rather than “All-American” because we had the highest proportion of Blacks of any division. Getting the extra $55 in jump pay on top of PFC base pay of $137.70 helped keep families alive in South Chicago or on the Mississippi Delta. The bunkmate below me kept $10 a month for haircuts, shoe polish and sodas. The rest went to his mama on their sharecropper 40 acres.

Yes, details now differ. There is no draft and no exemptions therefrom that favored middle- and upper-class white boys. Pay is higher now and attracts nearly enough enlistees. War is higher tech. Shot-down unmanned remote control drones supplant human military casualties — but not so for civilians. Seal Team and Delta Force members are true volunteers.

Nevertheless, questions of justice over who our society chooses to send to war remain sharp. Moreover, issues of how efficiently or inefficiently we expend resources matter to society. And the opportunity cost of what we do not fund because we spend $950 billion in taxes on “defense” involves justice as well as efficiency.

The broadest issue affecting society as a whole is why and when we unleash our military power against other nations or groups within them. In what ways and for which reasons do we do this? Do we consider the negative spillovers, often in the future, of attacks we find convenient now?

Thus my photo of the F-105 dropping napalm on a jungled hillside as far from my camera in 1970 as our condo near the Bell Museum on Larpenteur is from the deli at Como and Snelling.

I first must emphasize that I was never in combat in Vietnam. By then I was a postal clerk and was never in significant danger, never out in the rice paddies or mountain jungle in a rifle company. I had been trained as an 11B, light weapons infantry, and had served briefly as such in the 82nd. But then karma detoured me through the U.S. military mission to Brazil before Vietnam. By then I was more valuable as a postal clerk than a rifleman. I saw very unpleasant things and had passing scares, but my life was never really in peril.

Yet violent war was all around us. There was not a day or night that you did not hear artillery fire. You knew what was outgoing somewhere and incoming somewhere else. You heard small arms fire, especially at night. When a medevac chopper or gunship had to go up at night, exhaust from its turbine spooling up fluttered the screen above my ammunition crate bunk. We clerks spent long hours on perimeter guard because infantry units were dead exhausted when back in from the bush. And inevitably, perhaps driving down to the Phu Cat AFB 60 miles south, you might come across an enemy grotesquely dismembered or incinerated in a firefight before dawn.

Excessive empathy is a curse. Napalm flame flashing above trees made me think of the poor guys on the receiving end. So did ground vibrations from three B-52s dropping 324 500-pound bombs in the central highlands just to our west. Sound travels 13 times as fast through bedrock as air, and so the audible rumble came later and then sight of the bombers turning back to Guam.

But I learned that distance from violence makes it less disturbing. I still have occasional dreams of the pass after pass that a helicopter gunship made to save a patrol in a desperate situation a third of a mile off our perimeter. Yet my unease must be a tiny fraction of that of men from either side on the ground that night.

How is this relevant to current national policies? Because more than any other industrialized nation in the world, we are quick to use bombs and missiles against people or nations that have angered or even just frustrated us. No enemy bomb has ever fallen on the lower 48 states.

Only a fraction of 1% of voters have ever been within even a mile of a bomb or howitzer shell exploding. EMTs and ER workers see grotesque mutilations of human bodies, but the rest of us don’t. We never worry that some 20-year-old in a trailer at Minot AFB joy-sticking a Predator drone will mistake our backyard bash for an insurgent conclave and blow us and our toddlers away with the 18 pounds of plastic explosive in a Hellfire missile.

The upshot of the very socially and economically skewed way we staff our military and the complete isolation of our citizenry from the horrific realities of modern weapons means that we are quick to call for and use military force against others. The negative primary, secondary and tertiary results of that radiate out in ripples that eventually rebound to our collective harm.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

School starts up again soon, and parents will trade fighting over video games and cell phones to fighting over schoolwork, video games and cell phones. It’s not an ideal world we have created for ourselves, but it does not have to be this way.

Finding a way to cut down on screen time is arguably a health intervention for young brains. The U.S. surgeon general last year called for social media platforms to include health warnings for children, and smartphone use has been found to intrude on sleep.

With three teenage boys in my home — well, one is 11, but he is furiously trying to keep up with his brothers — there are lessons I’ve learned in keeping their screen time down to a minimum. These tactics are not always successful, and it takes constant vigilance. But when I see one kid doing origami while waiting, or the other working on his art projects, and the other competing in not one, not two, but three different sports, it feels worth it. Exhausting, but also worth it.

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Get to know your router

It’s not uncommon for people to get a router, set up the Wi-Fi and never look at it again. But parents should see the router as an untapped resource when it comes to limiting screen time. Newer routers have built-in features that allow the identification and labeling of individual devices that are logged in — even the ones that come from your internet provider. For example, Spectrum, which I have used in the past, offers the ability to examine each device, match it in the router settings to the device’s IP address, and turn the wireless connection off and on at will.

If your internet provider doesn’t offer this feature, you can go the extra step and set up a wireless mesh network. These devices expand your Wi-Fi’s reach with a second network using your router as the source, creating a chokepoint for every connected device. The $100 Deco mesh network I use has a parental feature on its accompanying app that allows me to group multiple devices under each child’s name and turn off internet access to multiple devices at once.

And while you are in your router’s settings, take a minute to change the password. It’s a step a lot of people don’t take and is a small thing to additionally secure your home, especially if you have multiple smart devices tapping into your Wi-Fi.

Stick to old phones

There is a movement toward “dumb phones” or feature phones, but some of these can cost hundreds of dollars — and I would blow a gasket if I lost a phone that cost that much. I cannot imagine what my reaction would be if one of my kids lost one.

So, when it came time to give the oldest kid, now 15, a smartphone, he got my hand-me-down, first-generation iPhone SE, also known as an OGSE. It’s tiny in his big hands and it can’t download the latest apps. But it can make phone calls, text and access the internet via its browser.

That wasn’t his first phone, though — his first phone was a 4G Nokia 225, a bar phone with the mobile game “Snake” on it, and that’s pretty much it. We serviced it with Mint Mobile and later with RedPocket’s $10 1 GB per month plan. This route took more effort and possibly was less cost efficient than simply adding him to our family cell phone plan. Sometimes the texts took forever to transmit, and the calls didn’t go through. But the goal was to teach him to use the phone only as a tool to call and text us, and if it was absolutely necessary, bring up the internet on his very slow browser. Even though it was only $50, we still haven’t let him live it down that he lost it after just one year of use.

The Nokia 3410 mobile phone of painter August Lamm, a former social media influencer with over 100K followers, on a table at her art studio in east London, on February 18, 2025. Once boasting a social media following of more than 170,000, writer and artist August Lamm has ditched her smartphone and is urging others to downgrade to “dumb” phones to counter social media addiction. “When your whole social life is online, you can feel popular,” she says, adding that she “would never go back” to using a smart device. (Photo by BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images)

And yes, his younger brother, who received an identical pre-owned Nokia, also lost his phone about a year later. He is entering freshman year of high school, so all of our children’s phones will soon make their way into different hands — the middle kid will get the OGSE and the oldest will get my husband’s older, but later model phone, an iPhone XR, plus a slightly bigger phone plan to accommodate the increased demands of his academic and athletic pursuits. He’s a conscientious student, a voracious reader, and is responsible in most things, so expanding the data plan is an appropriate step for him.

As for the youngest, I have already identified a new $50 feature phone to purchase for him. Such phones can be found by scouring eBay or websites like dumbwireless.com, which also offers service plans. If you’re interested in learning more about so-called dumb phones, Jose Brioness has a robust YouTube channel discussing all things dumb phone, and Reddit’s r/dumbphones community has helpful tips for beginners.

Make heavy use of screen usage apps

My husband and I have iPhones, so we use Apple’s Screen Time. Screen Time allows you to set up a family across Apple devices, with parents being able to set up restrictions for child users. You can set it up so any new app download requires permission from an adult and set a time limit for app use outside of restricted times. For my purposes, I do wish Screen Time allowed parents to set specific times an individual app can be used, not just bedtime limits, but this deficiency is why I have my mesh network to fall back on.

Microsoft Family Safety can be used across Android devices, Windows PCs and Xbox consoles in the same way Screen Time can be used across Apple products. Google Family Link is available on both Apple and Android devices, as long as everyone has a Google account.

All three are free of cost on their respective platforms and allow parents to control which apps children can download and set time limits. However with Apple’s Screen Time, categories of apps can be fully blocked for periods of time. A child can get around web browsing restrictions by using a non-Edge browser or a non-Chrome browser restricted by Microsoft Family or Google Family Link, respectively.

And if all else fails, there’s always the option to simply take the device away.

Remember this is an ongoing battle

Unfortunately, limiting screen time is not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. Kids are ingenious when it comes to circumventing restrictions, and I have much less control over their school-distributed Chromebooks, which are a necessary evil now. Trying to safeguard your children’s online safety and mental health will also require regular monitoring of their behavior and habits. Are they hiding out in their bedrooms, being quiet? Just like when they were toddlers, it probably means they are sneaking, but now with a school laptop or other device.

However, parents alarmed at the growing drumbeat of negative news concerning children’s smartphone and internet usage have options. It takes more work in many respects, but the payoff is healthy, safe children and their freedom to enjoy a childhood without a device in hand.