The Timesizing® Wire©1998-1999 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire™, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080
Lots of work that could be done
but you don't want to pay for it
The Timesizing® Wire
Lots of work that could be done
but you don't want to pay for it
Microsoft TimelineThere may be infinite demands for jobs, Bill, but there is not infinite financing for jobs, as your talk about job reduction so plainly shows - especially when all the funds are compacted into the accounts of the top 5-10% of the income brackets of people like you who just want to leave all the employment to someone else - though you don't seem to mind zooming in and exploiting the market that their employees represent. And there certainly is a finite lump of employment (get it right, Bill - "labor" is number of employees, "employment" is number of job slots for them - not potential jobslots somewhere sometime, but real jobslots here and now) where there is not only finite but diminishing funding for payroll - as guys like you keep cutting "costs," i.e., payroll. Basically, Bill, you are a moron. You want markets without payroll. And you want stock appreciation without payroll. You want a free lunch. Dream on.
Business @ the Speed of Thought
Remarks by Bill Gates
Georgetown University School of Business
March 24, 1999Question and answer period -
QUESTION: During the course of the presentation, you mentioned job reduction a number of times. While, as business students, we can all appreciate what that means for the bottom line [short-term gain - ed.], have you put any thought into what it means for society as a whole?
MR. GATES: Well, part of the lesson of economics is that there are infinite demands for jobs out there, as long as you want class sizes to be smaller, or entertainment services to be better, there's not a lump of labor where there's a finite demand for a certain number of jobs. And so, as efficiency changes, such as in food production, the jobs shifted to manufacturing. As efficiencies were gained there, those jobs moved into services. In fact, there's no shortage of things that can be done. So, it's not like we're going to run out of jobs here.
And for all your technological savvy, you're a damn Luddite. You and your ilk are blocking the whole purpose of technology - to make human life easier. You and your insulated pals use technology to cut payroll instead to increase leisure and personal freedom. The result is that you're reconstructing slavery in America. You've now got anxious people working 60-hour weeks, one third of that for NO PAY, and they not only have no lives, they have no family lives - and so of course they have no family values. You are destroying America and the world in a race to the bottom for everybody but you, on the excuse of obsessive "competitiveness" and B.S. "globalization," and you expect us to think you're hot shit. No, Bill. You only got half of that right, and it ain't the hot part.
You used to be a human being. You've become an insulated, obsessive compulsive monster. You've gone deep within the event horizon of the black hole of concentrated wealth, where only money goes IN and only insulated disconnected decisions come OUT. That ain't a feedback system. Admit it. You don't think America's record prison population and record homelessness is any of your problem, let alone any of your doing. And yet, in a way you are innocent because the design for a better system has never been available before. But now it is.
Bill, your unlimited accumulation is suctioning away the markets from your own and others' huge investment targets, and you are inducing the systemic fragmentation that we overdramatically refer to as a market "crash." Yet we don't have to get close to 1% of the population owning 99% of the wealth for this to happen. It happens much earlier. We don't know when. The economy still has some little socialist wealth-centrifuges operating in the 'basement' that you and your buds haven't dismantled yet, and it's much much bigger now than in 1929. It's going to take a lot more to bring it down. But keep at it, Bill - you and your pals can do it! Or you can start using technological efficiency the right way from now on - to increase human leisure and freedom, instead of to decrease payroll. Timesizing, not downsizing.
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