Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

1. Romania won't compensate neighors for cyanide spill, AP via NYT, A12.
   [Apparently goldmines use cyanide in gold extraction from low-grade ore, and some Romanian goldmine was dumping waste cyanide behind a dam which it then allowed to overflow, sending cyanide down streams into the Danube (Europe's longest) and Tisza Rivers into Hungary and Serbia, which are demanding compensation. The spill is compared to the one on Colorado's Alamosa River in 1992, which the EPA estimates will cost $170m in total cleanup costs.]
   ...Serbian fishermen, wearing protective gloves, scooped dead fish from the Danube today.... Belgrade authorities announced they would deliver drinking water by truck....

2. AOL calls off open-access lobby efforts - AT&T left unopposed in Mass. ballot fight, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, C1.
   [...against state and local laws requiring open access to fast cable/modem systems - creeping monopoly.]

1. 2/14 Working better or just harder? - The productivity miracle may be a mirage, op ed by Stephen Roach, NYT, A27.
   [Hey, isn't Steve Roach of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter the guy that used to like downsizings because of the bump they usually gave stock prices - until a relative of his (his sister?) got devastated by a downsizing back in the mid-90s? - It's all just numbers until it happens to you or someone you care about.]
   The U.S. ended 1999 on a truly spectacular note - two consecutive quarters of close to 5% growth in worker productivity, according to government figures reported last week....
   [But Americans are now working the longest average workweek among the industrialized nations, having ousted Japan for this dubious distinction (and Japan's the one that coined the term "karoshi" for "death due to overwork"). And this extra work is not accounted for in current calculations of our productivity, so of course it looks like each American worker is outputting more - s/he is working more and probably outputting less per time unit.]
   The dirty little secret of the information age is that an increasingly large slice of work goes on outside the official work hours the government recognizes.... Courtesy of laptops, cell phones, home fax machines...knowledge workers are now online in cars, planes, trains and homes, virtually tethered to their offices. The "24/7" culture of nearly round-the-clock work is endemic to the wired economy.
   No one doubts that the hard-working people in the service sector are getting more done than they used to . But improving productivity is not about working longer; it's about adding more value per unit of work time. [Therefore] to the extent that work time is being understated, productivity is overstated.
   [And wages are also overstated. In other words, these supposedly "futuristic" people are working hard, not smart. So to cut to the chase...]
   Acceleration of productivity growth through hard work alone isn't sustainable: people simply can't work harder and harder [i.e., longer and longer hours - ed.] indefinitely....
   [And even the steps we've taken so far along this "been there, done that" path, have placed us back around the workweek level of 1910 with a real wage sliding down to that level as well. If this is the future, the future is a nightmare we've already lived through. The alternative is Timesizing.]

2. 2/13 Loose change - The magic number, by Susan Trausch, Boston Globe, blowout C1, C3.
   What's the number tthan brings financial peace of mind? It used to be $1 million [or] a year's worth of mortgage payments on hand in a liquid account..\.. High rollers call their magic number a "hunge" - short for $100m \but\ now, the sky's the limit....
   [Well well, if it isn't G. K. Chesterton's pan-utopian flaw. A generation of geeks with no life toys with unlimited acquisition. "I just want my share" has come to mean "I want as much as I can get" - no matter how little of it I can actually use. Funny, we always get into this kind of starved "never enough" grasping...before a great depression, as in the 1920s. Here's the antidote -]
   For others, the magic number is not a number at all, but an achievement: founding a company and taking it public, making partner at the firm, getting the degree, a better job offer, [or in our case, designing & publishing the best trajectory for social evolution over the next millennium - ed.] or finally having some free time..\..
   [If we stick to numbers, we're faced with the challenge of designing a "fair share per person." We used to equalize on a point, like one person, one spouse (monogamy), or one person, one vote (universal suffrage). Now we need to equalize on a range. Ultimately that should be a range of money per person. But if we start by trying to balance money, we end up just generating dependency, because we're giving away money for nothing. We must start by equalizing work (and, necessarily, marketable skills of course) within a certain range, such as between 10 and 30 hours a week. How should we set the lower limit on the range? It's not something the free market can define because it's part of the predefinition of the free market, part of its cultural framework. So what's the next-best approach to "let the market decide"? You can't beat a referendum of all the affected population. And with all our technology, we can use electronic democracy to do this. And to make the referendum question less academic, we can ask it in terms of "define unemployment" or "under-employment." Then we can define the upper limit on the fair share of work per person by reference to the lower limit - if under-employment is too high or rising, over-employment among the minority where work and skills are concentrating is defined as too high or rising. So we shorten the maximum workweek - gradually, no big jumps (this can also be a referendum call, i.e., rate of correction). Also, we have ways of making the cap of the workweek minimally stifling (we simply automate reinvestment of overtime profits and earnings in OT-targeted training and hiring). What do we call all this? Timesizing. And when all this balancing-on-a-range of employment (and skills - from the training we just mentioned) can no longer satisfy our constantly rising expectations, we map the 5-phase solution structure from the time dimension of employment onto the first of the money dimensions (probably income per person).... After all, we don't want to escape G. K. Chesterton's trap only to fall into Philip Hauser's trap by assuming one step to permanent perfection and not allowing for rising expectations!]
   "This business is about managing expectations"..\..says a sales manager, describing his work at the Boston offices of a top Wall Street investment banking and brokerage firm.
   ["Managing" or actually accommodating and satisfying - IF they're reasonable. And "reasonable" is defined in long-term ecological terms as "sustainable" - and in line with the very long-term trend away from greater violence and drama, and toward greater gentleness and variety.]

1. [1/535 of Congress is independent. That one is Bernie Sanders of Vermont. He doesn't have the cure, but boy, does he have the diagnosis -]
   Falling behind in boom times, op ed by Bernie Sanders, Boston Globe, A15.
   When US leaders extol the virtues of the "American Way" to foreign leaders in overseas economic gatherings, they should keep in mind that at least 11 other countries rank ahead of the United States in terms of the pay and benefits their workers receive. In all of those countries, every worker is guaranteed health care, superior parental leave benefits, free or inexpensive college education for their children and far more vacation time.
   The truth of the matter is that in the "booming economy" [ah, somebody's finally quoting it without our having to do it - ed.] of this, the richest country on earth, 30% of American workers earn poverty or near-poverty wages because the minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation [ed: wrong and superficial! - it's because workweek shrinkage has not kept pace with our astronomical technological expansion of productivity] and we have lost millions of decent-paying manufacturing jobs [correct! - ed:]. Low-wage American workers are now the lowest-paid in the industrialized world. In this nation of "family values," more than 20% of our children live in poverty.
   [And now, he targets abolute center -]
   Moreover, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were 25 years ago. In 1973, the real (inflation-adjusted) hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers averaged $14.09. By 1998, that wage had fallen to $12.77. Even more alarming is that young entry-level workers without a college education saw their real wages fall by more than 20% between 1979 and 1997. While workers' wages have risen in the last few years, millions are still behind where they or their parents were a generation ago.
   To maintain their standard of living in the face of declining wages...the average American is now working an entire month longer every year than he worked just 20 years ago. According to a recent report from the ILO, employees in the US have surpassed the Japanese and now have the dubious distinction of working the longest hours of any workers in the entire industrialized world. Our workers put in 234 more hours every year than the Canadians, 420 more than the Germans, and 567 more than the Norwegians. The number of Americans who work more than one job increased 92% between 1973 and 1997, and 37% of Americans now put in more than 50 hours a week.
   [Hello-o, is anyone out there capable of understanding that if we flood the market with labor hours, the laws of supply and demand will drive the value of those labor hours down, down, down? That's why wages are so poor, and you don't change that by intervening and changing the minimum wage for every job, however diverse, to the same figure every few years. You do it by reducing the number of labor hours on the market - you CUT THE WORKWEEK.]
   The confusion over the state of the "booming" economy rests with the fact that some Americans are doing extremely well. In fact, the richest people in the country have never had it so good [since 1928 - ed.]. With an explosion in the number of billionaires in recent years, and with the CEOs of major corporations now earning 419 times more than their employees, the U.S. has, by far, the most [uneven] distribution of wealth and income of any major nation [i.e., it has the kind of distribution seen only in minor nations = 3rd world nations - ed.]. The richest 1% of the population now owns as much wealth as the bottom 95% of all Americans combined.
   The time is long overdue for my colleagues in Congress to start...representing the needs of the middle class and working families of this country [while we still have a consumer base to speak of - ed.]. Among other things, we should:
   [And here Bernie should have something to respond to his entire paragraph on overwork. If he had a well-designed presentation of that, he could avoid three of his actual other four items - restoring the graduated income tax, raising the minimum wage, and enacting single-payer national healthcare. These and more would happen automatically by market forces and in much more flexible, diverse and practical ways. And everyone would have a lot more time and money to "see the obvious" in terms of his fourth item, renegotiating our trade agreements and balancing our record-breaking trade deficit. So let's quickly run through what he should have said -
   [We should:
   • redesign and enforce our current overtime laws so that no one is incentivated to overwork unless they're enjoying it so much they're willing to reinvest their overtime earnings in overtime-targeted training and hiring (that's our Timesizing program, Phase 2 and Phase 3)
   • get a meaningful and popular definition of unemployment, unlike our current window dressing - one that includes welfare, disability, homelessness, and incarceration
   • as long as unemployment is too high or rising, SLOWLY adjust the workweek downward to increase the amount of automatic overtime reinvestment in training and hiring
   • if people start worrying that the workweek is getting too low, we shift the pressure for absorbing the underemployed onto a population variable, such as imports, immigrants or births
   • if we've done all we can in this employment area and we still have a problem, we repeat the same phases in the first of the money areas (we suggest money per person = "income," - NOT money per job = "wage," which is the province of the free market and should be decontrolled as full employment and income balancing make wage controls, including minimum wage laws, unnecessary).
   [We call it Timesizing (as opposed to downsizing).]

2. [Somebody finally explains the McCain phenomenon -]
   Why not fat and happy? op ed by Anthony Lewis, NYT, A29.
   ...Populist campaigns usually arise from adversity. In this time time of unprecedented prosperity [ed: just like the Roaring '20s!] one would expect voters to be fat and happy, contented with the status quo. Why, then, are so many turning to an iconoclast, a candidate who promises to shake things up?
   The answer must be that a good many Americans, however full their pockets [may be, and the wealthy keep assuring them that those pockets are full - ed:] are discontented with something. And the something is evident: the political system. Fewer and fewer people vote: in 1996, under half of those of voting age [the lowest since 1924 - ed.]. Why vote when you feel that policy is shaped not by your votes but by money? [Arianna Huffington] summarizes it this way [in] a new book..."How to Overthrow the Government"..\.. "The economic boom of the 90's has masked a looming national crisis: a corrupt political system that auctions off public policy to the highest bidder and leaves the majority of Americans feeling alienated from their own government."
   ...[She once] pungently argued conservative views [but] her viewpoint seems to have undergone a sea change. The book is devastating on the flood of money into our politics.... Her former husband Michael spent $28m of his family fortune in an unsuccessful race for the Senate in 1994.... Al Checchi spent $40m trying to be governor of California in 1998.
   Lobbying is another of her targets.... Dwayne Andreas, chairman of Archer Daniels Midland [ADM, has] given more than $3m to the parties in soft money, and they get $300m a year in ethanol subsidies. "How this differs from Al Capone buying off judges in Chicago is a topic worthy of debate in civics class," Ms. Hufffington writes.
   ...[She also] attacks what she calls "the culture of greed" that makes the rich much richer while "more children are homeless than at any time since the Great Depression." She savages Republican attempts to abolish the estate tax for the sake of the rich.
   ...Writing a column about politics...she said, brought her "face to face with distorted priorities, the abuse of language, the neglect of poverty as a social issue. I couldn't bear to hear them going on about our prosperity....
   We have a democratic system of government, but it seems unable to respond to urgent needs. The power of money prevents economic and political reform. In California the prison guards' union is so powerful that even the most sensible criminal law reform is blocked - because the union wants more prisons and more prisoners....
   [Hm, more destructive job desperation despite our media-spun "labor shortage." The whole nation has become a makework campaign, with the wealth-owned media constantly assuring us that jobs are plentiful and jobseekers (not just skills) are scarce. If jobseekers are so scarce, why are municipal and state governments all over the country so desperate to create jobs? Could the media-spun "labor shortage" be just a ruse to justify the continued short-sighted excuse for a strategy of downsizing in the private sector? The truth is, we have a labor surplus and a skills shortage. And we have a skills shortage because of the labor surplus - employers have been so spoiled by floods of resumes that they have raised job qualifications beyond all precedent and almost completely quit training. Training programs have long been the first budget item they cut in a crunch. By now they're so lazy they'd rather lobby for visas for cheap pretrained workers from India and Bangladesh than bother with training of their own.
   [And as for the unresponsiveness of our money-drowned "representative democracy" - why not just move on toward Buckminster Fuller's dream of issue-oriented 24-hour telephone referendums?! - we have the technology.]

3. Wall St. firms reward chiefs for strong '99 - Big paydays at Merrill and Morgan Stanley - It's not Silicon Valley, so they'll have to get by on $26m or so, by Patrick McGeehan, NYT, B1.
   [The excesses of CEO pay roll on, lately 419 times that of ordinary employees, according to Bernie Sanders above.]

1. Greenspan urges Congress to fuel growth of derivatives, Bloomberg via NYT, C19.
   ...before the U.S. share of that market and associated benefits are lost to other countries....
   [What an idiot!
   • Isn't this the same Greenspan who had the prudence and risk-averseness to pull his personal moola out of the stock market in the mid 1990s?!
   • Isn't this the same Greenspan who organized the huge bailout of the hedge fund in fall '98 when they lost their "$3T bet" - in derivatives?!
   • Isn't this the same Greenspan who is presumably the icon of laissez faire capitalism?! And now he wants the government to intervene (and add fuel to a firestorm)?!
   What a doofus!
   [And you know, there's a sublimal message being broadcast to all of us that aside from the saps on salary who are working 60+ hours a week, 1/3 for free, we really don't need to work at anything but a dabble or two in day trading and the financial markets will support us all. Aside from the problematic majority of Americans who own no stocks, and the problematic majority of those who have their stash tied up in pensions and 401Ks, the recurrent folie en masse that the financial markets - in magnificent, bubble-like isolation - can support the whole economy on a sustainable basis is sort of like believing the Mississippi delta can support the whole country, no matter how dry it gets upstream. And now Greenspan wants to expand the delta even further, blind to the dessication in American agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, banking.... blocking our record disability, homelessness, metal illness, suicide, incarceration.... What does it take to wake up these wealth-insulated economists? Guess it takes a rerun of 1929 and the Great Depression II!]

2. High anxiety over attorneys' soaring pay - Some worry that the raises will create disparate classes within the private sector, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, E1.
   [And "some" would be "worrying" too late - recall the record 400-to-1 ratio between American top executive pay and that of ordinary workers??!... Even back in the early 1990s the top executive of our little software branch of Information Resources used, at the monthly wine tastings, to speak of the guys in the xerox room as if they were sub-human. Classless society? Dream on.]

1. Spread of attacks on web sites [e.g., Yahoo, Buy.com, eBay, CNN, Amazon.com, ZDNet, E*Trade] is slowing traffic on the Internet - Attorney General says there are no solid leads, by Richtel and Brinkley, NYT, front page.
   The strength of the Internet [its openness] proves to be its weakness, by John Markoff, NYT, C1.
   Companies won't say if they were insured for Net attacks, by Joseph Treaster, NYT, C6.
   Man indicted in computer case [- Allegedly wrote secret "time bomb" into program code], AP via NYT, C7.

2. Macro viruses pose a growing threat - Taking simple precautions can prevent some, not all, pesky Internet contagions, by Simson Garfinkel, Boston Globe, D4.
   ...a little program that hides inside a word processor document or spreadsheet...that can do a world of damage to the computers of both beginners and sophisticated users....

3. [THIS is progress?!?]
   Dress codes are getting too personal..., op ed by Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, A23.
   ...A handful of years ago TGIF [Thank God It's Friday] was bought out by corporate America and became known as Casual Friday. This takeover was a way to tell employees they had hip, fun bosses so laid back they would let them wear khakis for the last 12-hour day of the requisite 60-hour week. This has led to the sort of self-delusion that my father engaged in when he went to the law office on Saturdays - without a tie!...
   [Hmm, the assumption that the 60-hour workweek is common, if not standard again. And if we're on salary, fully one-third of those 60 hours are unpaid, since we're technically on a 40-hour maximum workweek standard since the Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 decreed a 44-hr maximum in 1938, a 42-hr max in 1939, and a 40-hr max in 1940. But with the prestigious "exempt from overtime" classification of "salaried professional," the FLSA and a 33¢ stamp will get you...charity for the rich. And with so many individual employees doing it, never mind corporate charity from the government - we're doing it ourselves as individuals, all over the "Land of the Free." Wasn't the 60-hour workweek roughly where we were back in 1900? Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt (hairshirt?!). If this is the way we're perverting the promise of wave after wave after wave of work-saving technology, no wonder we have resurgent Luddism! We delude ourselves into thinking it's great to be "salaried professionals" so we don't care about such petty concerns as giving our employer a blank check on our lives. Now we have no lives. We might as well repeal the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. And the "free" market is going to do exactly as much to correct this by itself as it did to abolish slavery - in other words, nothing. We think we're God's Gift to the World while Europeans have 5-6 weeks of vacation every year and in addition to that, France now has a 35-hour maximum workweek that they ENFORCE. No wonder Europe is suspicious of our American "miracle" economy. Yeah, we're the Chosen People all right, - chosen for the self-delusion of "prestigious" slavery.]

2/08/2k  omens -

1. New asteroid that may threaten Earth is found, by William Broad, NYT, A14.
   For the 5th time in 2 yrs astronomers have discovered an asteroid hurtling thru space that might collide with Earth [- in 2022]....
   [We only hope we live to depart with everyone else on that distant date - or experience yet another false alarm. Oops, already recalculated and denied the next day, 2/09/2k - it's gonna miss us.]

2. [We have no great love for the Navajos, because they've been pretty nasty to the Hopis over the years, but on this one we're solidly behind them.]
   Navajos' suit over royalties is thrown out, AP via NYT, A18.
   A federal judge has scolded a former Interior Secretary, Donald P. Hodel, for taking a coal company's side in a dispute with the Navajo Nation, but threw out the tribe's $600m claim against the government.
   [Now get this for stupidity -]
   The judge, Lawrence M. Baskir of the U.S. Court of Claims, has ruled that while Mr. Hodel's actions betrayed the public trust, federal law did not explicitly require him to act in the Navajos' best interests....
   [Whatever happened to common sense? And speaking of braindead literal interpretations of the law, the new "no tolerance" rules in American schools against kids carrying weapons or drugs have actually been used to expel kids for carrying nail files and aspirins!?! We swear, Tom Paine could write "Common Sense" today and Americans would look at the title & say "Duh, wut's dat." We're turning into a nation of dopey mutual victimizers...sado-mazies with an overwhelming proportion of masochists. 'Best' is the software engineers working 70-80 hours a week to develop more work-saving technology - with no overtime pay. Like they say, "Charity for the rich" - and this, willingly, by otherwise intelligent people!]

3. [Today's (2/08/2000) suicide story]

1. 2/06 Getting in - Despite market mania, more than 50%..., blowout headline, Boston Globe, F1.
   ...of US families have been on the sidelines with no stock or fund holdings whatsoever....
   [And a related story -]
   2/06 Prosperity is slow to trickle down, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, A30.
   ...Between 1989 and 1998...the bottom fifth of wage earners say their average incomes grow less than 1% - an $85 rise over the decade, to $12,526, after adjusting for inflation. Incomes for those in the top fifth rose 16%, or $19,039 to $140,846. By contrast, in the boom of the 1960s - previously the longest period of uniterrupted growth in US history - all Americans' pay grew at roughly the same pace, 2 or 3% annually, .said Jared Bernstein, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Today, hourly wages are little changed from 1960s levels. In contrast, the average chief executive's pay is 400 times what he pays his worker - a tenfold increase in the CEO-worker pay gap since the 1960s, according to United for a Fair Economy, a Cambridge group that advocates income equality.
   [There's only one reason for this economic condition. A huge labor surplus. There may be intense skill shortages in particular sectors, but overall there is a huge labor glut. CEOs are so spoiled by floods of resumes in the few remaining high-wage job sectors, that they cut training first in any crunch and then cry "labor" shortage to get more visas for pretrained (and low wage) talent from India and Bangladesh. We have reverse employment Malthusianism. Malthus (1798) said that population grows as 1,2,4,8,16,32... while food supplies only grow as 1,2,3,4,5,6.... Sismondi (1819, 1826) extended it to employment: population grows as 1,2,4,8,16,32... while natural market-demanded employment only grows as 1,2,3,4,5,6..., especially in view of the rapid mechanization of work in the early industrial revolution. And this was offset from 1776 to 1940 by the trimming of the workweek from 80-84 hours down to 40 hours. We now say that the relationship has gone into the negative: population is still growing as 1,2,4,8,16,32... but employment is shrinking as negative 1,2,3,4,5,6... with mechanization, automation, computerization, robotization, cybernetics, artificial intelligence..., and this is about to go geometric, that is, negative 1,2,4,8,16,32.... We must shorten the workweek and do it in a much more flexible and market oriented way than France. We suggest Timesizing.]
   ..."The best economy in 30 years hasn't put much of a dent in this inequality problem"..\..said Jared Bernstein, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.... In another worrisome trend, home buying pushed some to take on ppunishing levels of debt. According to the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances released last month by the Federal Reserve Board, the net worth of the median, middle-class family rose a modest $2,200 over the past decade....
   [Let's take off the kid gloves here - this is saying that middle-class family wealth has only gained a louzy $2200 over the last TEN YEARS. And this is supposed to be a "boom"?!?]

2. 2/06 Downsizing: It hasn't let up in [Massachusetts] - Despite record-long economic "boom" [ed: our quotes], many still feel the sting of pink slips, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, F2.
   ...Such are the findings of the Corp. for Business, Work and Learning, a quasipublic entity, whose rapid response team helps the [state's] pink-slipped legions regain their footing, remake their lives, and find new work. The team reports that 22,970 workers were downsized in fiscal 1999, up approx. 3400 over the previous fiscal year.... In fiscal 2000, already 12,289 Mass. workers have been laid off.
   [So if they've found 12,289 layoffs in Mass. alone already this year, and we've only found 52,855 in the entire country in company-specific stories on the pages of the NYT and the Boston Globe, obviously they are covering only the "tip of the iceberg."]

3. 2/07 Voting rights undermined, NYT editorial, A24.
   In a deeply troubling voting rights decision last month, the Supreme Court weakened a powerful tool that the federal government has long used to und racial discrimination in voting rights. The tool, known as "preclearance," has acted as a deterrent to efforts by local communities to change their voting laws in ways that could discriminate against minority voters....
   [Great! This, plus their 1976 decision that by some twisted logic, political contributions were a form of "free speech," will guarantee the Supreme Court in the last quarter of the 20th century a contemptible place in history as a major factor in the decline of America.]

• [Now, for all you cheerleaders who keep asking "What bubble?" -]
  FirePond offering sizzles - Stock leaps 356% on 1st trading day, by Matthew Brelis, Boston Globe, C1.
  ...A small, [350-employee, 17-year-old] Web-based software company in Waltham [Mass.] that helps companies respond to customers over the Internet as well as through more established channels, scorched Wall Street yesterday when its initial public offering of stock climbed from 22 to close at 100¼, up 78¼.... In 1998 \it\ posted \a\ $9m loss..\.. Despite the impressive clientele list \including\ GM, John Deere, Sikorsky Aircraft, Empire Blue Cross...and Renault..., last year's losses dwarfed \1998's -\ FirePond Inc. posted a net loss of $28.85m on sales of $34.28m last year....
  [The South Sea Bubble had nothing on this! We could say with Puck, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" but the fact of the matter is, there's such a concentration of spending power in the upper income brackets during these pre-depression periods that the high rollers have an increasing shortage of market-supported investment targets. In other words, they literally have no choice but to make really REALLY risky investments. The reason for the dearth of productivity to invest in that has good solid and sustainable market support? The top brackets are concentrating so much spending power that they are literally suctioning the markets away from their own investment targets. The concentration of wealth has gone past the point of diminishing returns and has turned negative. The simplest correction? Notice how we've kept pouring on the work-saving technology without reducing work per person the last 60 years? No. Well, in the 1840s, the workweek was 80-84 hours a week. The 40-hour workweek was established in 1940 and has not been changed even one hour over the last 60 years, despite armies of robots, computers, ATMs, thousands of productivity-multiplying sequences like: manual typewriter, electric typewriter, IBM Selectric, Correcting Selectric, TyData audiotape-based desk-sized word processor, 64K-ram Osborne bundled PC with daisywheel printer, a succession of IBM/Compaq PCs with HP LaserJets: 128K, 256K, IBM AT, IBM 386, 486, 32-bit, 64-bit, 33 MHz, 66MHz, ... 466MHz, .... We're working on more and more time-saving technology, but if we still have a full-time job, we're working longer and longer hours. We think we're intelligent. We think we're God's gift. But we're working on time-saving technology AND WE HAVE NO TIME. We're morons, that's what we are. We have supposedly high technology that supposedly saves us work, but we're not saving work with it, we're saving 40-hr jobs, and the result is that we've got record disability, homelessness, incarceration, family and workplace violence.... We've made it easier for impoverished people to make a dishonest living selling drugs than an honest one, so we're paying $25,000/yr each for 2,000,000 federal, state and local prisoners. We've have our private sector "saving" jobs by cutting them, and our public sector scrambling to try to "save" jobs by creating them. We are stupid fools, that's what we are. And we now want government-funded childcare. We don't need government childcare. We need more TIME to raise our own kids. We need more TIME to "smell the flowers." We need more TIME for our own unique dreams instead of working 60-70 hours a week on somebody ELSE's been-done-before dream, 20-30 hours of that as UNPAID overtime. If we're so smart, if we're so intelligent, how come we don't have OUR OWN dreams going, right now? We have failed to adjust our workweek down as our technology level goes up. We have split our society into workers and drones, people with time and no money and people with money and no time. Only the latter group has media voice and so if they have time, they ask, "What's the problem?" But usually they can't stop running long enough to ask.
  [The solution? Timesizing.]

1. [Time Bomb dept. -]
   Study finds welfare changes lead a million [toddlers & preschoolers] into child care, by Tamar Lewin, NYT, A16.
   ...but many are in low-quality care and are lagging in language and social development, according to a new study...by Dr. Bruce Fuller of UCal/Berkeley and Dr. Sharon Kagan of Yale..\.. The study of nearly 1,000 single mothers moving from welfare to work [in Calif., Conn. and Fla.] found that many of their children had been placed in child care where they spent hours watching television or wandering aimlessly and had little interaction with their attendants.... When asked to point to a picture of a book from among three different pictures, fewer than 2 in 5 [got it right] compared with a national norm of 4 out of 5....

2. [And yes, folks, it's Another Failed Takeover dept. -]
   Mattel chairman steps down after reporting loss in 1999, by Constance Hays, NYT, C1.
   Mattel chief out after 2 tough years - Problems at newly acquired Cambridge unit seen a factor, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C2.
   [NYT:]...Jill E. Barad [was chairman and chief executive of Mattel Inc. for three years.... She was one of just four women heading major American corporations. Her first year [1997] was a stellar one for Mattel....
   [Barad, Jill, climbed up the hill
   To fetch a pile of money...]
   But in 1998, the company reported declining sales, the first in a decade.... [BG:]...Mattel has been stung by slow sales of its traditional toys, which children spurned in favor of computers and video games..\..
   Barad...championed the $3.6 billion purchase in May [1999] of Learning Company of Cambridge, Mass. as a way to expand into faster-growing software and electronic toys.... [NYT:]...It acquired the Learning Co. for $3.8B [BG: 4.25 times revenue].... But the price proved far too high as the unit not only failed to meet sales projections but dragged down the rest of the company. "There is nothing I can say to gloss over how devastating the Learning Company's results have been to Mattel's overall performance," Ms. Barad said in a conference call with analysts yesterday....
   [But Jill fell down and lost her crown,
   Mattel came tumbling after.
   Hopefully she stepped down with style. If the Learning Co. is any indication of what's in store for the rest of the hype-hoped computer and video game companies, we're in for a big shake-out.]
   [NYT:]...One analyst said that the problem [at the Learning Co.] was a lack of new offerings. "They haven't developed any new titles, and their business is old and tired," Mr. Romm of Credit First Boston said....
   [Oh yes, the tyranny of NEWNESS - what a remorseless charette driver! And not one that big merged companies keep up with well.]

1. 45 nations lose vote, NYT, A6.
   Forty-five countries, many among the world's poorest, have lost their vote in the General Assembly [of the United Nations] after failing to pay their dues by Monday's deadline [1/31/00]. Most, however, are expected to pay before the Assembly meets again in September, as has been the case in previous years. Seven delinquent nations, among them Bosnia, Congo Republic and Nicaragua, will be allowed to continue to vote because of extraordinary financial hardship.

2. Web site asks: Who wants to [win a scholarship]?, by Matthew Brelis, Boston Globe, D1.
   In the latest effort to entice Web surfers to spend time - and share information that marketers covet - a Web site scheduled to launch today [freescholarships.com] will give away $10,000 every day for scholarships....
   [But hey, WHO HAS THE TIME?! - we've split into people with money and NO TIME, and people with time and NO MONEY - so it ain't gonna do the marketers much good, because the students they're spying on don't have squat. Some can do the "no mun, no fun - your son" routine, but a lot of them are gonna get back: "too bad, so sad - your dad." The lack of free time on the part of the people with money is becoming the biggest constraint on our economic growth, but of course, that's just part of our whole pathology of unlimited wealth concentration. We socialize and centrifuge risk and loss, and privatize and concentrate security and profit. Aside from its disastrous effects on decision-making and feedback, that ain't a sustainable formula.]

3. Another increase by the Fed brings just a yawn to investors, by Floyd Norris, NYT, C1.
   ..."If they did all [the hinted rate hikes] at once, the markets would rally," said Bruce Steinberg, the chief economist at Merrill Lynch. "By doing this Chinese water torture...the Fed keeps the markets off guard. It wants the markets to help slow down the economy."
   Offguard the markets may be. Worried they are not. There was a time when the Fed's rate actions were viewed as crucial, and the saying, "three steps and a stumble" was well known. It meant that if the Fed raised interest rates three times, stock prices would probably fall. But the Fed's raises last year did not slay the bull, and fear of the Fed seems to be waning....
   [So the good news is that the totally superficial nature of interest-rate jiggling seems to be sinking in. The bad news is that by raising rates, the Fed has farther back to go as it lowers them to zero when the Internet bubble finally fragments. And the longer it takes to exhaust the superficial interest-rate "remedy," the longer it will be before people address the real problem, the astronomical consolidation of wealth and the need for a strong and centrally positioned centrifuge such as Timesizing.
   [The companion article on the front page (A1), "Federal Reserve nudges 2 rates slightly higher," mentions in passing that...]
   ...[the] expansion [of the economy] on Tuesday [2/01/2000] became the longest on record.
   [Too bad it has all the earmarks of a pre-depression period like the Roaring 1920s and is just taking a lot longer to fragment because it's sooo much bigger than in 1929 and has a lot more little socialist centrifuges "in the basement" left over from the otherwise ineffectual New Deal and its successors.]

4. Senate approves a bill to toughen bankruptcy rules - Harder to avoid paying..., by Eric Schmitt, NYT, front page.
   [Here's an attempt to dismantle another of our scattered surviving wealth-centrifuging mechanisms.]
   ...But in a move that could complicate final passage of the legislation, it also included in the measure a $1 increase in the minimum wage to $6.15 per hour....
   [Funny how we yell and scream about the supposed "socialism" of lowering the workweek, which would harness market forces to flexibly raise wages and benefits, and yet we have swallowed decades of injecting the astonishing rigidity of "minimum wages" into the "free" market. The proper thing to do, of course, is to separate the concept of per-person money (income) from the concept of per-job money (wages), then balance the first (wages) and decontrol the second (wages). And you can't start by balancing money directly - that just generates dependency. You have to start by balancing employment. And you start balancing employment by enforcing the overtime laws - and preferably redesigning them to be simultaneously more effective and less stifling by simply initiating a tax on overtime profits and earnings with an exemption for overtime-targeted training and hiring. And then if you haven't absorbed all your under-employment (including welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons...), you gradually reduce the workweek. As the labor supply becomes tighter, wages and benefits go up automatically without repeated government meddling and without creating a break in the ladder from unemployment (zero wage) to the minimum wage ($5.15/hr). And the inflationary effect of raising the minimum wage is offset by the harnessing of the deflationary incentive of the firms who are willing to reinvest overtime profits in training and hiring and of the individual employees who are willing to reinvest overtime earnings in training and hiring.]

5. Amazon loss soared 543% in 4th quarter - But total sales surged, and books made profit, by Saul Hansell, NYT, C1.
   [The fact that total sales surged while this astounding loss was happening just makes it worse. The fact that books - where they started - finally made a profit while they over-reached into everything else just makes it worse.]
   Amazon.com, the leading proponent of losing money on the Internet to fuel rapid growth...
   [Isn't that the definition of 'pyramid scheme'?]
   ...said yesterday that it lost $323m in the 4th quarter of last year, more than expected.... Once again "investors" [ed: our quotes] who seem charmed by the online retail giant's money-losing strategy appeared to celebrate the loss....
   [Lemmings of the world, unite! Throw off your parachutes! (and jump off the cliff!) - apologies to Marx.]

2/01/2000  Merrill Lynch is set to move into banking - Firm takes advantage of recent [reckless] legislation, by Patrick McGeehan, NYT, C1.
[Fasten your seatbelts. Here we go. The blurring together of the American brokerage, banking, and insurance businesses, with maximum conflicts of interest all along the way, just the way we had them before the Great Depression when they offered one of the chief background "open gates" toward depression. The Republicans passed the Glass-Steagall Banking Act in 1932 to make "good fences and good neighbors" between brokerage, banking and insurance, and it worked fine for over 67 years, but last year they caved to the stupidity, short-sightedness and ignorance of history in all three of these industries (but less in insurance) and repealed the "outdated" Glass-Steagall to "modernize" American banking (7/02/1999 #2). Yeah right. And get this.]
...Merrill is taking advantage of recent changes in national banking laws to roll out new banking services, including a federally insured, interest-bearing account tied to its customers' investment accounts....
[The question for us taxpayers, of course, is ... how closely tied? Betcha the brokerages are sliming their way toward getting federal (i.e., taxpayer) insurance on their investment (i.e., speculation, gambling) accounts. All part of the near- and short-sighted current trends of privatizing and concentrating profits while socializing and distributing risks. These trends are always present in pre-depression periods, and they play a central role in inducing the following depression. But if history is any guide (and what else do we have, ivory-tower econometric models? ha!), all during the pre-depression periods and for some time after the depression starts, we have considerable denial of any problems whatsoever and repeated assurances that we're on a "permanent plateau of prosperity." Sound familiar?]

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