Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

1. Polluting Siberia paper mill seen as relic of Soviet ways - Campaign against a threat to Lake Baikal - Greenpeace and its allies think there are alternatives to a plant's 3,500 jobs, by Russell Working, NYT, C4.
   [Alternatives such as???]
   ...[attracting] foreign hikers, boaters and hunters....
   [Tourism? Pathetic. The only ready alternative to this kind of situation is sharing the diminished work - in the field, aka Timesizing.]
   ...The issue goes beyond the lake. Throughout the former Soviet Union, industry has turned waterways into environmental catastrophes....

2. U.S.- European Union tax dispute is growing, NYT, C4.
   ...The dispute is over a tax break, worth billions of dollars, that federal law currently allows exporters through the use of so-called foreign sales corporations, subsidiaries set up in places like the Virgin Islands, Barbados and Guam. Overseas sales channeled through these subsidiaries escape both sales tax and duties. In 1999, hundreds of U.S. companies, including Boeing, Microsoft and GM, saved about $4B by using these legally sanctioned offshore tax havens.
   Despite an agreement between the US and the EU not to challenge each other's tax policies, the EU challenged the policy on the ground that [it] amounted to an illegal effort to subsidize exports by making them more competitive. An appeals panel of the WTO agreed in a ruling 3 months ago, setting off the administration's effort to come up with an acceptable alternative...that in its opinion met the world trade body's objections.... The US would repeal the foreign sales corporation plan and replace it with special income tax rates for both export and nonexport foreign sales by eligible manufacturers. The [EU] said, however, that the changes meant US-based companies would still have to export to benefit - the very aspect of the original plan that was condemned by the WTO.
   The US proposal also contained 2 other elements that the [EU] considered incompatible with global trade rules - a 50% US content requirement for products benefiting from tax breaks and a transfer pricing plan that allocates a proportion of profits to the foreign sales corporation.
   [Lucky the EU got together for strength. Sounds like America's idea of "free trade" is "Heads I win, tails you lose." And yet, for all its strained chest-thumping towards Europe - straining to accommodate its own near-sighted CEOs, America continues to cramp its own consumer base (i.e., workforce) with a record trade deficit. Didn't we just have a "qiki" omen on 4/20/00 to the effect that "Trade deficit for Feb. hits record $29.2b"?! So what good is all this contorted "corporate welfare" doing anyway? When there's no cap on executive compensation, and nothing but a purely rhetorical "labor shortage" to centrifuge wealth (actually just much publicized spot skills shortages because spoiled employers aren't training), it doesn't matter how many taxbreaks government gives corporations, it won't show up where it counts (in the American consumer base) because our executives are already getting a record 400 times what low-paid employees are getting - and that kind of dough you couldn't spend in 100 lifetimes. We either need another really big war to restore our production-consumption balance or - and maybe we can do it the intelligent way this time - a real labor shortage to harness market forces in raising wages and benefits, engineered by overtime enforcement and workweek reduction à la Timesizing.]

1. [If the economy is really "booming," if workers (and not just skills) are really scarce, then how come Massachusetts has resurrected the major makework program of the Depression, the WPA, on a state level?? -]
   Putting the folk in folklore - State survey looks at people engaged in 'living traditions', by Scott Alarik, Boston Globe, City 4.
   [This is the kind of story that makes fiscal conservatives see red, in more ways than one.]
   ...Since being hired by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in April 1999..\..Massachusetts state folklorist Maggie Holtzberg...has launced an ambitious statewide survey to document the commonwealth's diverse folk cultures....
   At right [photo caption], Maggie Holtzberg, state folklorist, visited St. Patrick's Church in Roxbury to record songs rehearsed by a group of Cape Verdean elders for an after-school program. Below, Kathy Neustadt (left) and Holtzberg (right) spoke to Anahaid Kazazian, an Armenian embroiderer, in Lexington about her craft.
   ...So why is...Holtzberg, whose official title is Folk and Traditional Arts Coordinator..\..poking around the Big Dig? ...Said Holtzberg..."This survey is dealing with living traditions. We want to have a link with the past; but what we're most interested in is how people came to a tradition, how they learned it, whether that's a traditional fiddler or a Big Dig tunnel worker."
   Maggie Holtzberg (left) [inside photo caption], and intern Kate Kruckemeyer (right) tour a Big Dig site with tunnel worker Dominic Mazzeo to learn how he came to his job and something of the rituals in his community of sandhogs.
   [Maggie Holtzberg, as you might imagine, is now on a fishing expedition to justify her hand in our pocket -]
   Have a tradition to share? blowout, Boston Globe, City 6.
   State folklorist Maggie Holtzberg may be interested in something you or someone you know does. She offered these rules of thumb:
   "We are interested in a disparate array of traditions, but what do they have in common? They are skills and artistry learned either within a family over many generations or within a trade or ethnic culture. They are learned through observation and imitation more than through books or schooling. So if you have something like that [every one of our thousands of component immigrant cultures has "something like that"! - why not at least restrict it to Massachusetts Indian or colonial cultures?! - ed.], something that has been passed down to you through your family, trade or community, something that's dear to you, that's what we're looking to find and document."
   If you think you qualify, or know someone who does, contact the Massachusetts Cultural Council at 727-3668 or e-mail Holtzberg at maggieholtzberg@art.state.ma.us
   [This is all very lovely but it is, in Milton Friedman's immortal words, "Doing Good with Other People's Money." In other words, it's arbitrary and unfocused and susceptible to charges of elitism. It amounts to forced charity, and many of the people who are forced to pay for it in their taxes can ill afford it. It's a subsidy for some minority's or individual's tastes or hobbies. It is inherently unfair. It cannot be extended and made fair without bankrupting the state, because there are so many "living traditions" in a diverse population like that of Massachusetts. It is a prime example of taxation without representation - exactly the problem that got America started as a nation separate from Britain 2¼ centuries ago. This is another great argument for gradually replacing "representative" democracy with issue-oriented referendums. We suggest people contact the "Cultural Council" to question its unfocused existence, or email Holtzberg to suggest she target cultures which do not require such straining to find a common thread - and a thread to Massachusetts and our pocketbooks as taxpayers.]

2. Deficiencies in care of dying, pointer summary (to A1), NYT, A2.
   Millions of Americans have signed living wills and power-of-attorney documents, thinking the papers would help them avoid unwanted treatment and prolonged deaths, but in many cases those measures turn out to be useless.
   At life's end, many patients are denied a peaceful passing, by Denise Grady, NYT, front page (A1).
   ...There are many reasons that the documents, known collectively as advance directives, can fail:
   • people lose or forget them [in the example cited in the article, the nursing home had never sent the 91-year-old woman's living will or power-of-attorney to the hospital when she broke her hip]
   • living wills are too vague to interpret
   • relatives disagree about what the patient wanted
   • hospital staff members mistakenly fear prosecution for stopping life support
   • doctors overrule the family and refuse to stop treatment
   • some experts say the very idea of living wills is flawed, because the course of illness is too unpredictable to be anticipated in a simple document [so "just suffer!"??]
   But the failure of advance directives is just one symptom of a much larger problem:..."We have
   • an entire health care system not friendly to end-of-life care
   • a work force not educated to end-of-life care
   • an entire population just climbing out of the era when it was taboo to talk about it,"
   said Dr. Linda Emanuel, VP of ethics at the American Medical Assoc....
   [So maybe Guy Waterman - who walked up Mt. Lafayette to die his way (see our 'glimmer of hope' for 2/20/00) - was right.]

1. Panel reports widespread torture by Turkish police, AP via Boston Globe, A16.
2. Baby found in Logan toilet [Boston Airport], by Mac Daniel, Boston Globe, B4.
3. Women said to earn 76.5% of mens' wages, AP via Boston Globe, A10.
4. Demand for big-ticket goods logged steep decline [6.4%] in April, AP via NYT, B3.

1. [In wake of their betrayal of labor by freezing the floodgates open to cheap, unsafe, unecological, undemocratic Chinese labor competition -]
   Democrats fear labor's wrath at polls - Democratic lawmakers hope labor leaders will 'see the bigger picture in November', by Anderson & Simon, Boston Globe, A22.
   [We could say "Dream on" but what's the alternative, the Republicans? They're the main ones behind the "free trade" fatuosity. Increasingly this country needs a third party.
   • The Reform Party is the closest, but they're in chaos - lately they've been in-fighting fiercely over whether to make Pat Buchanan their presidential candidate - they're damned if they do (by Pat's racist image) and damned if they don't (by continuing Perot's stranglehold on the Party).
   • The Libertarians, who want to dismantle all of government except the courts and defense? Who needs them when both Republicans and Democrats are moving their way as fast as their little hands can grab money?
   • The Greens? This Party would be the best if they could only get it together. Right now they "couldn't organize a two-car funeral." Their petulant clinging to time-consuming consensus methods and flaky terminology (the Green Party holds "gatherings," not conventions) are the chief culprits. Plus in Massachusetts, their HQ is in the peripheral town of Lawrence, not in "the hub" (Boston).

2. 5 shot to death and 2 injured at a Wendy's, by Barstow & Rashbaum, NYT, front page.
   ...Investigators said yesterday that the crime appeared to have been carefully planned and timed, and they believed that one of the gunmen had either worked at the restaurant or knew someone who did because of the knowledge they displayed about how the place operated....
   [A followup story on 5/27, "Two men are arrested in massacre of 5 workers at a Wendy's - Police say a suspect is a former worker for the restaurant," by Robert McFadden, NYT, A11, confirms that one of the gunmen had indeed worked at the restaurant.]

1. Most say poverty line too low, study finds, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C2.
   Most Americans think a family of four requires $35,000 a year to make ends meet, twice the US government's threshold for poverty, a new survey shows. The survey, released at a conference on the working poor...organized in part by Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based research organization..\..supports what many poverty experts have argued: The poverty line, first set in 1963, doesn't account for the changing needs of child care, education, transportation, housing, and medical care....
   How poverty is defined determines who is eligible for food stamps, Head Start, and other government aid. Poverty starts at about $17,000 a year or less for a family of four, the government says. In 1998, about 34.5m Americans, 12.7% of the population, were poor by that standard.
   According to the survey by Lake Snell Perry & Assocs., 92% of Americans say a family of four needs at least $25,000 to make ends meet and 69% say $35,000 is needed....
   [So by each of those standards, what percentage of the population is poor?]
   The telephone survey of 1,001 Americans age 18 and older was conducted April 27-30 and has a margin of error of +/-3% pts..\..
   The median US household income was $38,900 in 1998.

2. ILO reports union repression, by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, C4.
   Workers trying to organize face increased risk of intimidation, threats and murder around the world, according to a report by the International Labor Organization. Trade unions are barred in Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates, and the governments restrict such groups in Bahrain and Qatar, the report said.
   [Hmm, that coincides with countries whose treatment of women is also straight from the 8th century.]
   The ILO said it had inquired into accusations of murder of trade unionists in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala and Indonesia, and of physical assaults in nearly a dozen countries including China, Argentina and Haiti.
   [Surprising how bad we treat our consumer base!]

3. House, in 237-197 vote, approves "normal" [our quotes - ed. - we'd say "frozen"] trade rights for China - A Clinton triumph [he don't have the common sense of a 2x4] - After debate on rights, big GOP majority swings the vote [debated & discarded, apparently], by Schmitt & Kahn, NYT, front page.
   WASHINGTON... - In a stunning victory for the Clinton administration and corporate America [meaning ordinary Americans are now completely excluded from representation -ed.] the House today swept aside economic restrictions on China that were part of anti-Communist policy for two decades.
   [And didn't we just have a "qiki" omen on 4/20/00 to the effect that "Trade deficit for Feb. hits record $29.2b"?! Here we have another compelling case for direct issue-oriented electronic referendums.]
   ...Lawmakers voted to give Beijing permanent normal trading privileges [ah, weren't we calling this "most favored nation status" just yesterday??? -ed.] aftger months of fierce lobbing that pitted business against organized labor.... 3/4 Republicans voted in favor; 2/3 Democrats voted against.
   [So Democratic leadership has split from Democratic rank and file, and ordinary Americans have no representation among the top 2 presidential candidates. This trends toward civil war/class warfare within America rather than America vs. China. Bill Gates and Ted Turner better hurry up and push gun control down the NRA's craw.]
   The vote virtually assures the end of the annual Congressional review of China's trade status....

1. Stocks continue to fall, pointer blowout (to C1), NYT, A2.
   Nasdaq falls to its lowest level of year - Broad market declines for 5th consecutive day, by Jonathan Fuerbringer, NYT, C1.
   ...The Nasdaq composite dropped 199.66, or 5.9%, to 3,164.55, its 10th-biggest decline ever in percentage terms....

2. An oops in Time Warner's battle for the Internet - Corporate spying with an Internet edge - A Time Warner unit enlists employees in a ploy against Southwestern Bell, by Stephen Labaton, NYT, front page, C2.
   ...A flier accompanying the paychecks of Time Warner Cable's Houston employees this month offered them a choice of free Internet service or the chance to win $100. "To qualify," it said, "we need your help in accomplishing our objective which is to locate areas in Houston that Southwestern Bell (our competitor) can and cannot service with their high-speed online service." To get the reward, employees...were instructed to call Southwestern Bell, order high-speed Internet service, cancel the order if it was confirmed, and report their results to an administrator in Time Warner Cable's Houston office....
   Time Warner said today that the effort was an error of judgment by local managers and was halted as soon as a regional executive learned of it. Nonetheless, Southwestern Bell says it will file complaints Wednesday with the FCC and the Texas Public Utilities Commission [to] force Time Warner to repay Southwestern Bell for its expenses in processing the [bogus] orders, which can be as much as $370 for each order, plus legal costs....

• Ethiopia cites further gains on enemy soil - Warplanes bomb Eritrean troops, Addis Ababa says, by Karl Vick, Boston Globe, A2.
  ...Both sides "invested" [our quotes - ed.] in Russian-made MIG fighter jets when the conflict broke out two years ago [or was it ignited by the arms industry? - ed.] ....
  [Kate: Here are two of Africa's poorest nations fighting a costly air war over a worthless strip of land.  Phil: Surely we can do better than "population control by arms merchants."]

• [More outrageous whining for charity for the rich -]
  Sox seek $275m from city, state for new Fenway - State leaders receptive, but Menino balks, by Meg Vaillancourt, Boston Globe, front page.
  Boston Red Sox chief executive John Harcourt yesterday detailed a tentative financing plan for the team's proposed $627m ballpark project, calling for $275m in public funds and offering a $352m commitment from the team....
  [Soaking taxpayers for subsidies for HOBBIES??? Give us a break! One East Boston voter Phil talked to today on the signatures circuit asked why these millionaire ballplayers don't just ante up out of their own excessive salaries. And check out some of the costly background of these type of slime in our 7/7/99 story, "Beware of Sox proposal - taxpayers have been torched in other cities," by Derrick Jackson.]

1. Chief of fiber optic leader retires, citing exhaustion, by Lawrence Fisher, NYT, C2.
   SAN FRANCISCO...- JDS Uniphase, the largest component manufacturer for fiber optic equipment, said today that Kevin Kalkhoven had retired as co-chairman and chief executive.... Mr. Kalkhoven said that he was leaving because of exhaustion after several years of 100-hour weeks....

2. [The sedation-for-employees/sympathy-for-employers continues about our bogus low unemployment -]
   Jobless claims decline again, AP via NYT, C2.
   New claims for unemployment benefits fell last week, leaving claims at a level suggesting that businesses are scrambling to find workers....
   [No need to "scramble" - just raise pay and TRAIN. And if you can't figure out where or how much, look at your incidence of overtime.]

• German unions rethink strategy, ask members to propose reforms, AP via Boston Globe, D16.
  FRANKFURT - In the egalitarian world of Germany's consensus economy, there was a time when unions held out for one-size-fits-all contracts that covered nearly every field from shipbuilding to semiconductors.
  [Here we go. Germany is about to flush itself down the toilet of copying us, just like Japan did. Listen to this arrogant U.S. rhetoric -]
  But with Europe's biggest economy scrambling to compete in a global economy where wages are increasingly set by local conditions and profitability...
  [So it's global for high executive pay and low employee benefits, but local "divide and conquer" for wages.]
  ...Germany's most powerful union seems finally poised to rethink old tactics...
  [Just as Japan did in rethinking that silly old tactic of lifetime employment - thus entering the brutish world of downsizing, sinking wages, employment and job security, a shrinking domestic consumer base, and an ongoing depression.]
  - and in doing so could give an extra boost to Germany's fledgling economic recovery.
  [Or the U.S. will spin it that way anyway - until the disaster can no longer be hidden.]
  A breakthrough came recently when IG Metall, the world's largest union representing 3.4m metal and electronics workers...invited its members to contemplate a wide range of "reform" topics [our quotes - ed.] that once were considered taboo.
  That includes mixing up pay scales, accepting different work weeks for different industries, and even allowing opt-out clauses for companies that cannot afford the unions' demands....
  [Unless we integrate our economies around a common workweek, we will disintegrate, as the U.S. is today, with ever-widening income gap, and record homelessness and incarceration. The real reforms that IG Metall needs is automatic overtime-to-training&hiring conversion and the fluctuating economy-wide adjustment of the workweek against the under-employment rate, including incarceration, homelessness, disability, welfare, conventional unemployment, and the working poor who need 3-4 part-time jobs to live like dogs. In short, timesizing.]

1. No more lunch at Seoul Exchange, by Samuel Len, NYT, B2.
   The lunchhour break at the Korea stock exchange will be abolished, probably starting Monday, the Financial Supervisory Service said. The exchange has reconfigured its computers to run through the lunch hour....
   [Another example of human masochism making machines worsen their lives instead of bettering them.]
   The abolition of lunch hour had been planned for some time...
   [Oh, that makes it OK then, right?]
   ...but had been delayed because of protests from unionized workers.
   [Those damn unions. Wanting to "enjoy life"? What a nerve!]

2. Mommy gap is widening, op ed by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, Boston Globe, A19.
   ...Economist Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University finds that the gap in hourly wages between women with and without children is greater than the gap between men and women.... Consequences...? Millions of women won't have the wherewithal to support themselves into old age....
   [Ah, what a potential market for timesizing, both to have more family time and to push up wages by cutting the much denied global labor surplus (see Argentina story below, recall ongoing Japanese depression in 4/05/00 & 4/01 stories, oops, that's taboo, - we mean recession, & note today's closing 5/13/00 of Ford's biggest plant in England) and incentivating employers to set up the pervasive on-the-job training they need to solve the skill shortage they keep misnaming labor shortage!]

3. Dozens in Argentina are hurt as police halt jobless protest, by Bill Cormier, AP via Boston Globe, A12.
   Riot police fired rubber bullets and tear gas yesterday to disperse thousands of jobless workers who had blocked a federal highway for 10 days to protest welfare cuts...and demand the creation of 1,600 new jobs in the..\..northern province of Salta...where tax increases and austerity measures imposed by the new president, Fernando De la Rua have done little to reduce unemployment that far exceeds the national jobless rate of 14%....
   [Hey, what's the problem?! Let them use "the American solution" - toss 1/3 of 'em in prison, hire 1/3 as prison guards and administrators, and the other 1/3 to build more prisons!]

1. [Boy, are we screwed up - less business is better!?? -]
   Report on retail slowdown calms nerves of investors - Interest fears ease, setting off a rally, AP via NYT, C8.
   [This is part & parcel of the ongoing saga, "When investors (longterm) become speculators (shortterm)."]

2. The parallel universe, op ed by Thomas Friedman, NYT, A31.
   ...Although our current election comes at the dawn of the information and biotech revolutions, you'd never quite know it from the presidential campaign, which has been almost a parallel universe, operating on its own [irrelevant] news and historical logic.... My gut tells me that by 2008 we will look back at the Clinton years as a fool's paradise - the quiet interlude after the cold war and before all the forces unleashed by e-commerce, the biotech revolution, the information revolution and global integration reached their critical mass and ushered in a period of radically new political choices and issues in U.S. and global politics.
   Look at the headlines on the eve of this Y2000 election:
   • [a] virus launched by a student in the Philippines wipes out in a few hours millions of dollars' worth of files on 10m computers all over the world....
   • "Evernet" [embedding chips in] anything with electricity.... Not only will this mean that you will always be able to surf the Web everywhere, but...the web will be able to surf you, and know where you are, and what you are consuming, everywhere all the time.....
   • the faster and more diffused networks become, the most vulnerable we all are, not [only] to Big Brother but to the Little Brothers - the Web site, the video store, the hacker, the credit card company...that can amass and sell your personal data....
   • "Freenet" [attacking] copyright
     [but just received a comeuppance today 5/12/00 in Napster case]
   • global 24-hour stock market...
   • biotech...
   ...all...can really only be regulated through global institutions, but none exist today.
   We are all increasingly connected, but nobody's quite in charge.
   [So] small units can wreak large havoc [as in] the love bug.
   Which is why this new era is going to actually demand more global governance, not less.
   But how and in what form?
   [Ah, somebody pops The Question. We at Timesizing.com believe it's not actually "more governance," but "smarter governance" along the lines of Buckminster Fuller's "doing more with less." As the Bible [eg: Jer.31:33...] points out, if you want a better nation, somehow the law has to be "written in people's hearts" because there are just too much of it to detail specifically. This means it has to be simple and intuitive, not complex and controversial. It has to be done by a simple self-interest extending or integrating mechanism, usually linguistic-conceptual. Something that people of diversifying lifestyles can nevertheless agree on. Like monogamy (one adult, one spouse), suffrage (one adult, one vote), seniority (one worker, one rate of on-the-job aging where older is better - now getting blown away by versatility).... Our candidate for next biggie = one adult, one range of market-demanded employment, with free skill access.
   [We need to share the wealth. But first we must share the income, and before that we must share the earnings, and before that we must share the work, and skills. We have designed a complete firstcut program to do this. We call it TImesizing.]
   These issues have not quite rippled into hard political choices yet, so one can't fault the candidates for not discussing them frontally.
   [But some candidates are discussing them frontally. Ralph Nader of the Green Party, for instance, and even some in the "major" parties - or at least some aren't going along with the Roaring 20s-style happytalk that ignores the spreading rot beneath the economic "boom" - ex-Gov. Jim Florio for one, running for Senate in NJ (headlined today 5/12/00 in "Ex-governor puts rival Democrat on defensive in New Jersey debate for Senate," by David Halbfinger, NYT, C30 and discussed in our goodnews pages on 3/28/00 in "A Senate candidate runs against the 'boom'." And then there's Timesizing.com's own Phil Hyde running for Senate against Ted Kennedy in the Y2K Massachusetts race.]

• EBay cancels sale and suspends seller in painting auction... Exponential growth of chicanery in Internet auctions, by Hansell and [Gretel, oops, no -] Dobrzynski, NYT, front page & C2.
  ...The online auction house canceled the sale of an abstract painting to a Dutch software executive for $135,805 yesterday, contending that the seller, Kenneth A. Walton...had violated its rules in a way that artificially inflated the sale price [e.g., by] "shill bidding," meaning that he entered bids on his own sales. [The] Sacramento lawyer said he had done so for friends....
  [Yeah, sure, and check out this nice bridge we have over here in Brooklyn to sell ya.]
  Bidding started at a quarter [on Monday] and was propelled by hints that the painting was by the modern master Richard Diebenkorn.... "Internet auctions remain the No. 1 source of consumer complaints...and they vie with sweepstakes for the top source of fraud over all," said Paul Luehr, the supervisor of the FTC's Internet marketing unit. Complaints about Internet auctions increased a hundredfold in the last 2 years, to 10,700 cases in 1999, outstripping even the rapid growth of the auctions themselves.... The open nature of auction sites...has spawned a wide range of scams. The most common involve sellers...who never ship the promised goods. In other cases, the items sold are damaged or otherwise not as described. But a growing number of cases, Mr. Luehr said, involved rare collectible items from baseball cards to photographs that are outright forgeries.... Many art dealers say that cases of fake art in online auctions are multiplying.... "EBay is one of the greatest avenues for selling questionable merchandise that's ever been invented," said Alan Bamberger, a private dealer in books and art....
  [Caveat emptor = let the buyer beware.]

• The old and the restive, tuned in to their portfolios - Investors 55 and over, with at least one eye on retirement, watch their stocks' every move - In Hank Citron's "war room," the computer is always online to Morgan Stanley and the television is tuned to CNBC. In trading hours, he checks his stocks every 10 minutes, by Blaine Harden, NYT, A25.
  [This is a life? Photo shows him sitting on his artificial exercise machine watching his artificial screen with his artificial headfones piping artificial sounds into his artificial mind. Pathetic. "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Mark 8:36.]

1. 5/07 What crystal ball? - Each week brings new numbers, but the economic measures that matter are few [and] flawed, some say, by Aaron Zitner, Boston Globe, G1.
   ...For the average investor, there are...three economic reports worth following: employment, gross domestic product [GDP], and the consumer price index [CPI]....
   [Note the absence of the key depression-inducing factors, the income gap and the relative strength in the economy of the centripetal and centrifugal forces on spending power.]

2. [The growing difficulty of campaign finance reform -]
   5/08 The latest fund-raising battle, editorial, NYT, A26.
   ...A real problem - the emergence of shadowy tax-exempt organizations that are secretly raising and spending unlimited sums of money to influence federal elections....
   [This is how the first (nation in the world) becomes last (3rd-world roadkill). Do the bored, $$$game-playing, wealthy few stay awake nights figuring out how to sabotage our nation's already severely crippled feedback system?]

• [You think the human species has evolved beyong the war solution to unemployment? - check out Africa today -]
  Congo battle ends alliance of Uganda, Rwanda against Kabila, by Lara Santoro, Boston Globe, A6.
  ...Two of Africa's oldest and closest allies turned their guns on each other in the eastern Congolese town of Kisangani yesterday, wrecking what little chance remained that they would resolve their recent differences and dealing a further blow to efforts to bring peace to the Democratic Republic of Congo....
  [So, first they ally against the Congolese dictator. Then they turn upon each other. And you don't want to know what's going on in Zimbabwe ("Zimbabwe's season of fear - Land grabs, bitterness grows," by Kurt Shillinger, Boston Globe, front page today.)
  [Monday 5/08 we get a cooling in the Congo war - "Rwanda says it is willing to begin withdrawal from Congo - A seeming breakthrough for a U.N. diplomatic mission," by Barbara Crossette, NYT, A10. But on the other hand, Sierra Leone heats up again - "Fighting resumes near the capital of Sierra Leone - U.N. force is in disarray - Britain sending troops to aid in evacuations as rebels battle government," by Norimitsu Onishi, NYT, front page. Wednesday 5/10 we get an alarm sounding on the perpetually smoldering Ethiopia-Eritrean shootup - "Fear a new war may break out," news summary pointer (to A14), NYT, A2.
  [Mankind's oldest, stupidest and most wasteful alternative to an automatic employment-sharing system is alive and "well." And don't assume "it can't happen here." That's what Jugoslavians assumed in the early 1980s, what Lebanese and Iranians assumed in the late 1970s, what Jews assumed in very civilized and sophisticated Berlin in the mid 1920s. And what Columbine High students assumed 2 years ago. Our computer hardware and software technology is way ahead of our social software technology, our technology for sharing the key value of our time. But at least the first complete core example of such technology has been designed and programed. We call it Timesizing.]

• Study finds most in U.S. see college education as essential, by Jodi Wilgoren, NYT, A21.
  In a shift that experts attribute to the changing economy...
  [Yeah, that would refer to the further cheapening of human beings as labor leverage keeps lessening, due to continued abuse of technology to downsize the workforce instead of the workweek.]
  higher education is increasingly seen as the ticket to the middle class, with 87% of Americans saying "a college education has become as imporant as a high school diploma used to be," a new study...conducted by Public Agenda [of] New York..\..has found....
  [= Makework for educators. Tax burden for taxpayers. "Voluntary" worklife reduction for citizens. And still no guaranteed link to self-support. Brilliant. We were smarter 7 years ago -]
  Seven years ago, a majority of Americans believed that too many people were going to college rather than directly into technical trades like plumbing or computer repair....
  [Or anything else where you can support yourself, fast.]
  ...now 3 out of 4 think the country could never have too many college graduates....
  [And where is the 3rd-millennium thinking about the continuous workplace-integrated training we need to keep up with the accelerating change in technology and the job market??? Only Timesizing.com's overtime and overwork conversion phases deal with this.
  [This article, and the study it's based on, quickly detours into the ingrained racism of it all. Racism is not our primary problem. Supporting ourselves more easily with all our miraculous technology is the problem. As long as we use technology to downsize, on the expedient-to-employers faith that "oh there are lots of jobs out there," we are supporting ourselves with increasing difficulty, splitting our society wider and wider apart, and losing more and more people to disability, suicide, homelessness, and incarceration. If we solve this one, and Timesizing is the first complete core design to do so, we make things so much better for everyone (and not just the 18% more world millionaires, 5/03 NYT C2 - never mind the percentage more paupers) that racism ceases to be an issue.]

1. Number, and wealth, of millionaires rises, Reuters via NYT, C2.
   The number of millionaires in the world increased by 18% last year, to 7m, driven by strong global stock markets and economies, according to a new survey.
   [So why did we put this under bad news instead of good? Because for every new millionaire, there are 100 newly below the poverty line. So what? Most of these new millionaires were already spending all they wished to spend before they hit the million mark. So we're getting a global concentration of wealth that is so astronomical that it is actually vacuuming the markets away from its own investment targets. And we're getting an unsustainable imbalance between our huge technology-amplified production capability and our flat, income-lacking consumption capability. Why is it lacking income? Because there's a global labor surplus and market forces reward shortages, not surpluses. Why the labor surplus and the employment shortage, the job-seeker glut and the job scarcity? Well, population variables (uncontrolled imports, immigrants, births) and outsourcing aside, we're constantly introducing work-saving technology, but instead of just saving work by trimming hours for all and keeping income flowing to our consumer base, CEOs usually save labor by chopping jobs and deflecting the income flow to wealthy investors and...themselves - ergo the recent astronomical rise of executive pay.]
   The total wealth held by the millionaires [and billionaires presumably] increased 18% as well [coincidence, or some tie-in?], to $25.5 trillion, according to the survey, the 2000 World Wealth Report, prepared by Merrill Lynch and Gemini Consulting.
   The study, which drew on figures from a wide variety of sources, including the IMF and the World Bank, estimated that the wealth of the world's millionaires would continue to increase [ie: the concentration of income and wealth would continue to increase], at a rate of 12% a year, climbing to a total of $44.9 trillion by 2004.
   About 30% of the millionaires live in North America, according to the study, which was the fourth in an annual series.
   The study said that another class of wealthy individuals, a group it called "ultrahigh net-worth individuals" and defined as those who had personal financial assets of more than $30m, had increased by 18%, to 55,000.
   "Their ranks are growing rapidly as family businesses are sold, new technology firms float their stock, and executive stock and option packages rise in value," the study explained.
   The report also said there were 514 billionaires, and that more than half of them were living in North America.
   [Today's "global economy" lacks something that every long-lasting society and culture has had - a "reset" or cap on income and wealth, or at least an effective centrifuge mechanism to play that vital role on the fly. The Hebrews had their great (50-year) and small (7-year) jubilees, the Northwest Indians have their potlatches, the Hopis their redistributive dances. Every sports league resets "games won" to zero at the beginning of each new season for every team in the league. But the prevailing economics of the present-day has no centrifugal institution, despite its lip-service to its own doctrine of the "marginal efficiency of (concentrated) capital." More and more taxes are being transferred from concentrated wealth to threadbare wealth in terms of sales taxes and VATs. Graduated income taxes and estate taxes are being dismantled, pensions curtailed. Rigid, pre-technological, long workweeks and uncontrolled population factors are guaranteeing a gross and growing labor surplus for as far as the eye can see. The glut of jobseekers guarantees that spending power won't centrifuge, but will continue to concentrate in astronomical amounts. And it doesn't matter how much money absolute a nation or a world has - if 99% of it is in the hands of 1% or less of the population - and 55000mlnrs + 514blnrs = 55514 /6B= just under 0.001% (0.0000092) of the world's population, that is one pathetic, miserable, mostly Third-World planet, and getting worse, for all. If the self-styled "intelligent" species on this planet is to make a single meaningful step ahead in progress, as opposed to more and more mere technological whizzbang, it will have to get itself a global centrifugal mechanism on income and wealth that matches and balances the now-overwhelming centripetal forces, referred to as far back as 2000 years ago when Jesus Nazarenus noted, "To him that hath, more shall be given, but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away." The money dimensions (income, wealth, credit) can't be dealt with first without creating resistance up front and dependency downstream. The time dimension must be balanced first. And balancing worktime is the function of the Timesizing full-employment program - full employment regardless of how little time per person per week it may take to earn a good living in the highly robotized future, full employment regardless of how low the workweek must be pushed to share and spread the vanishing, market-demanded human employment. Makework alias jobs programs alias public works and corporate welfare and pork barreling and patronage - it's all been tried and it's always too little too late. Besides, with a frozen workweek it simply guarantees that we'll never get the promise of technology in terms of more of the most basic freedom, free time, because we'll be forcing ourselves to offset every time saving technology offers with more busywork to fill that frozen pre-technology workweek. We must now replace makework with sharework, the sooner the better and the more automatic the better.]

2. [Flat-world economist on shorter workweek -]
   Blessed are the weak - I'm O.K., euro so-so, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A31.
   [In the course of an article saying the euro is basically stronger than it looks, we find -]
   ...As the French government introduces seemingly anti-market policies like a mandated reduction in the workweek...
   [And we ask, what about the mandated reductions in the American workweek - from 80 to 40 hours - across 100 years prior to the 1940s? Was Lincoln anti-market when he abolished the unlimited workweek of slavery in 1863? Was the God of Moses anti-market when He cut the Hebrew workweek from 7 to 6 days in the 4th Commandment and established the Sabbath?
   [We agree that the euro is stronger than it looks, but only because the Europeans are a lot further ahead than we are in sharing work by mandated reductions of worktime including a reduced workyear via long 5-6 week vacations and reduced workweeks. As work-saving technology pours into economies around the world, we either share the work (which means mandating reduced worktime per person) or we induce depression via the Ford-Reuther paradox - Ford, "Let's sees you unionize these robots"; Reuther, "Let's see you sell them cars."
   [We either use technology the way it was meant to be used, to make everyone's life easier, or we are passive luddites, invoking its curse, disemployment and depression, rather than its promise. We can go on offsetting its efficiencies with makework and busywork and increasingly shrill and annoying advertising only so long in a world of ecological constraints. Sooner or later we must stop frivolous and wasteful consumption just for the sake of providing markets for people who need jobs because we're damned if we're going to admit that technology actually destroys more jobs than it creates.
   [The whole point of technology is, in Bucky Fuller's words, to do more with less. And if we output more with less workforce and consumer base, we're in trouble. The paradox is easily resolved by outputting more with the same workforce and less worktime per person and the same consumer base with more spending power. That is a situation that can easily accommodate ecological constraints that require outputting the same or less. The first complete program to do this kind of worksharing and worktime lessening? Timesizing.]

1. High court ruling on comp time favors employers, AP via NYT, E2.
   WASHINGTON - State and local governments can tell their employers when to take the compensatory time off that agree to receive instead of overtime pay, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday...if no preexisting labor agreement says otherwise. [This] interpretation of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act is a setback for 127 sheriff's deputies in Harris County, Texas, and for the AFL-CIO, which had supported their legal argument....
   [More substantive evidence that, despite regional skill shortages, labor is in national and global surplus and therefore powerless, as management continues its short-term strategies that continuously reduce its own consumer base by concentrating spending power more and more tightly among the top brackets where it is "invested" instead of spent on products and services.]

2. New economy, old problems - Despite changes, problems of income inequality remain, by Carolyn Shaw Bell, Boston Globe, E4.
   ...The new economy makes up-to-date and exhaustive supplies of information available to an extent unbelievable a few years ago, [but] nothing automatically [improves] the distribution of income....
   [This is essentially a restatement of the Chesterton pan-utopian flaw.]
   The new economy is most troubling because income inequality goes right on growing.
   [Carolyn, you have spent an entire article admirably tilling and hoeing the current limited economic understanding of the "new economy" which understanding, however, your last sentence implies is inadequate because of the continuing growth of income inequality. Now at the very least, we need another article from you on exactly what's wrong, in your terms, with the still growing income inequality. And then perhaps some ideas on how to reverse that widening inequality.
   [The Timesizing view is that work must be balanced before money can be balanced, but once that is done, a work-balancing system, such as Timesizing's 5-phase program, can be generalized and applied to the money-balancing task in numerous stages, such as income, outlay, wealth, debt, credit, persistent high-risk reputation,....]

[The big babies whine nationwide -]
To our Customers, Partners and Shareholders, full-page letter by Bill Gates & Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; NYT, A15; Boston Globe, A20; etc., etc.
[And the part we love - with our italics -]
...Because the government seeks to impose severe limits on Microsoft's ability to work cooperatively with other companies....
[As colleague Kate remarked, "Yeah like when Compaq wanted to go with Netscape and Microsoft threatened to take Windows away from them if they didn't go with Microsoft Explorer instead?"]

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