DoomwatchTM vs. Timesizing®
Collapse trends - Nov. 16-30, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

11/30/2001  headlines from hell -
  1. Initial jobless claims up last week, pointer digest (to C5), NYT, C1.
    ...up 54,000, to 488,000 in the week that ended Saturday, the Labor Dept. reported.
    The report also showed that the number of people continuing to draw benefits in the week ended Nov. 17 jumped to 4 million, the highest in 19 years, from 3.7m....

  2. Thousands on welfare face cutoff in a recession, pointer summary (to A21), NYT, A2.
    Tens of thousands of families in New York will reach a 5-year lifetime limit on federal welfare aid tonight, the largest group ever [to] do so and among the first to face such a cutoff during a recession. The state, which is required by its constitution to aid the needy, has spread a safety net of sorts for about 38,000 families - 30,000 in the City - whose welfare grants will be canceled over the weekend.

11/29/2001  headlines from hell -
  1. Japan: Retail sales fall, by Alan Cowell, NYT, W1.
    Japanese large-store retail sales fell 7.1% in October from the month last year, the largest slide in two years and another sign that consumers are tightening their belts and bracing for a deep recession.
    [Tightening their belts? - or looking in their pockets and finding - nought but a yen for yen.]
    With the jobless rate at a record 5.3% and wages falling, consumers have cut back on purchases of everything from clothing to cars....

  2. S. & P. cuts credit rating of Japan - Cites slow progress of economic change, by Ken Belson, NYT, W1.
    Standard & Poor's reduced its rating of Japan's credit by a notch, to AA [from AAA?], today, penalizing the government of the world's second-largest economy for failing to curtail its fiscal deficit or revive its faltering economy. The move, which equated Japan's creditworthiness with that of Italy, the lowest among the Group of 7 major economies [oh the ignominy!], dealt a blow to the fiscal overhaul program of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi by making Japan's immense debts more expensive and burdensome....

  3. Campus recruiting declines as [US] economy sputters, by David Bushnell, Boston Globe, G1.
    Corporate recruiters are no longer storming college campuses in the Boston area and handing out lucrative job offers. The demise of many dot-com companies, the aftermath of 9/11, and the struggling economy are responsible for the dramatic turnaround, according to college officials. Many students graduating next June will have to market themselves aggressively to get a job offer, the officials said. By contrast, many of the students who graduated in 1998 and 1999 could count on receiving multiple offers from employers, and then select the highest bidder....
    [But now, many of them are getting laid off....]

11/27/2001  headlines from hell -
  1. [And here it comes, Ye Officiale Worde -]
    Economists make it official: U.S. is in recession - A formal beginning in March, by Richard Stevenson, NYT, C1.
    [That's last March, as in EIGHT (8) months ago. The cretins finally concur - too late to be useful. And who are these cretins?]
    WASHINGTON - The group of economists that tracks business cycles [is] the National Bureau of Economic Research's [NBER's] business-cycle dating committee.... [And the Boston Globe's version -]
    Sensing recovery [hey, it's good for biz], Wall St. calls recession old news, Boston Capital column (by Syre & Stein), BG, D6.
    [No kidding. But Wall St is just POed cuz these eggheads are throwing a wet blanket on their current attempt to get the people with more money than sense back into...Wall St of course! Back to the NYT's version and its touch of Halloween -]
    The group's statement put a headstone on a remarkable period of economic vibrancy. The last decade included

  2. Performance - Surgeons need steady hand, and sleep, by Eric Nagourney, NYT, D9.
    A single night on call can impair a surgeon's steadiness of hand, leading to possibly serious mistakes, a new study...in the current British Medical Journal..\..reports.... The researchers..\..gastroenterologists from two Danish universities, Aarhus and Copenhagen, wanted to know how sleep deprivation affected the motor skills of surgeons.... [They] found that the surgeons had "significant deficits" in speed and accuracy after a night of disrupted sleep and suggested that their patients might be at risk.

11/24/2001  headlines from hell -
  1. [clueless professional economists of the world, unite! - a dopey doubleheader -]
    The arbiters of recession stand ready - Panel's official word could come in 3 days, by Jonathan Feuerbringer, NYT, C1.
    Monitoring [i.e., diagnosing] the economy - As fiscal engine stalls, the mechanics [i.e., prescribers] line up, by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, C1.
    As Congress struggles to pass a stimulus package, a debate is breaking out among economists over whether the $75-100B that the House and Senate seem willing to spend will be enough to pull the economy out of its downturn. With a declaration expected as early as Monday that the economy is officially in recession, some experts talk about needing a fiscal stimulus package that...ranges $100-400B....
    [Like we're going to believe any of these idiots savants when, never mind the disease let alone the cure, half of them are still worrying about when and if the patient got sick?]

  2. Brazil: Jobless rate rises, Reuters via NYT, C2.
    ...to 6.6% in Oct. from 6.2% in Sept.... The Brazilian Statistics Institute said...that despite a slight improvement from a rate of 6.8% in Oct/2000, the trend over the last few months continued in October, with more people giving up job hunting amid a worsening economy....

  3. [another problem with "free" trade - NAFTA vs. WTO -]
    Mexico to ignore a trade ruling, Bloomberg via NYT, C3.
    MEXICO CITY...- The Mexican government said [yester]day that it would ignore a World Trade Organization [WTO] ruling to lift duties on high fructose corn syrup, turning instead to the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] to protect sugar producers....
    [Guess 'free trade' is 'free,' except when it isn't.]

11/23/2001  headlines from hell -
  1. German economy jolts Europe...- A German executive warned, 'We don't see any light at the end of the tunnel' [Gerhard Vogel, CFO of FAG Kugelfischer ballbearings], pointer summary (to C2), NYT, A2.
    Germany moved closer to a recession and may already be in one because new statistics show that its economy, Europe's biggest, contracted slightly in Q3.... The news sent shock waves across Europe.

  2. Bank problems spread in Japan, pointer summary (to C3), NYT, A2.
    Two of Japan's largest banks [UFJ Holdings (Sanwa, Tokai and Toyo) and Sumitomo Trust & Banking] reported bleak earnings for the first half of the fiscal year, the latest addition to what is turning into a grim report card for the country's lenders.

  3. Japan: NTT posts 6-month loss, by Ken Belson, NYT, C3.
    Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, Japan's dominant telecommunications carrier...lost $2.1B in the 6 mos. ended Sept. 30...after writing down soured investments made overseas.
    [i.e., after meddling in areas that were none of its damn business, like so many bored CEOs who should just quit before they ruin their companies and thousands of lives.]
    ...To cut costs, NTT plans to shift 100,000 workers to lower-paying jobs at subsidiaries.
    [Oh this should yield a lot of suicides!]
    The company will offer severance packages as compensation to persuade employees to move.

  4. In a survey of [NJ] businesses, a bleak view, NYT, A25.
    TRENTON...- Owners of small businesses in New Jersey are more pessimistic about their prospects for the coming year that have been in any year since the early 1990's, according to survey results by the NJ Business & Industry Assoc.... About two-thirds of the 1,600 small-business owners who participated in the assoc's 43rd annual Business Outlook Survey said their industries had entered a recession or were heading into one, twice as many as said so last year....

11/22/2001  headlines from hell -
  1. Japan: Service industry slumping, by Ken Belson, NYT, W1.
    ...worst in nearly four years....
    [geez mabeez, what else can go wrong in the world's 2nd biggest economy?!]

  2. Employees' retirement plan is a victim as Enron tumbles - Helpless workers stand by as their savings evaporate, by Richard Oppel Jr., NYT, front page & C4.
    [Compare Polaroid recently, and Lucent, and.... American "pension" has become dying in harness or dialing 800-KEVORKIAN - tho some morons don't even want to let you do that! See today's headline #5 below.]

  3. Workplace bias claims jump after Sept. 11 - The EEOC has received 123 complaints nationwide [of bias] against Muslims between 9/11 and 11/20, up from 47 for same period last year, by Diane Lewis, BG, B1.
    [Compare headline from hell two days ago, "Increase in hate crimes," below.]

  4. Automaker will drop leadership training program, AP via NYT, C5.
    The Ford Motor Co...plan[s] to discontinue its highly promoted leadership training program at the end of the year.
    [There you have it - the first thing to get cut in a crunch is training.]
    ...The courses...could resume in some form in 2003.
    Soon after becoming CEO in 1999, Jacques Nasser set a goal of cultivating leaders within the company.
    [Good boy, good boy.]
    Mr. Nasser was ousted as part of a series of mgmt changes. Some people had questioned the spending of tens of millions of dollars on courses that might have distracted employees from their regular jobs. The criticism intensified when Ford's profits began sliding in the last year.
    [Well, if you do it right, training intensifies employees' focus on their jobs rather than distracting them. And doing it right involves using the incidence of overtime to target and trigger on-site on-the-job training, whether part-time cross-training of existing employees who aren't occupied full-time, or full-time retraining of existing employees whose jobs are vanishing, or full-time training of new employees from outside if you don't have enough training candidates in the first two categories. The point is to automate this whole process and make overtime automatically resolve itself, so we don't get workload bunch-up, employee burnout and, in the case of hourly waged employees, time-and-a-half expense. This is what happens in Timesizing's Phase 2, which applies to overtime from the corporation's viewpoint, and Phase 3, which applies to overwork (overtime from all sources) from the individual's viewpoint - to include moonlighters and job-stitchers in the overall work sharing and spreading effort as robotization and automation continue to "make life easier" for the human species (but only if they cut hours, not jobs).]

  5. Michigan: Kevorkian loses appeal, AP via NYT, A26.
    [Woe be unto a society that cannot say goodbye gracefully.]

11/21/2001  headline from hell - 11/20/2001  headlines from hell -
  1. Increase in hate crimes, AP via NYT, A14.
    Reports of crimes based on prejudice against the victim's color, religion, disability, national origin, or sexual orientation rose 2% in 2000, the FBI said. In its annual tally of hate crimes, the bureau said local law enforcement agencies reported 8,063 incidents in 2000. The data were supplied by 11,690 local law enforcement agencies whose jurisdictions include 84% of the [US] population. The 2000 total was 187 higher than the 7,876 hate crimes reported in 1999, though the data came from 432 fewer police agencies. Because the number of agencies reporting under the voluntary system varies, officials caution against drawing conclusions about trends.
    [Officials always put forth these cautions. And they never want to project any shocking hard-and-fast cause-and-effect relationship between unemployment and crime that might lead us to pressure them to actually do something to get full employment in this country. However, our record 2m prison population testifies to the fact that we've made it easier for many people to earn a dishonest living than an honest one in this economy. And that, in an age of unbelievable worksaving technology, is an insult to our own intelligence. But is unemployment really rising? Our leaky unemployment rate does everything it can to cushion the news. But check out the article below.]

  2. The people behind the jobless numbers, op ed by E.J. Dionne Jr., Bos Globe, A21.
    [We'd put this on our Homelessness page, but E.J. never mentions homelessness, just unemployment.]
    WASHINGTON - Unemployment statistics are abstract numbers if you have a steady job and expect to keep it.
    At Martha's Table, the venerable food pantry for the poor here, unemployment is measured in how many more canned goods have to be stocked and how many sandwiches have to be put out on the street for people who can't afford to buy their next meal. ...Voluntary programs such as Martha's Table are our canaries in the coal mine. They give advance warning of dangers to come becuase they are the first place the poor turn for help.
    If you talk to Veronica Parke, the president of Martha's Table...for people on the edge of poverty, two aspects of this recession are particularly devastating..\..
    1. "Needs are going up as resources are going down.... The reason the needs have gone up is that the day jobs have dried up," Parke said. Day laborers could once count on work in construction or...moving.... Before the recession, she said, "people could get 3-4 days of work each week." Now they're getting little or none. ...Poor women are hurting too. "Women may have had full-time jobs," Parke says, "and now they're back to 2-3 days a week." The decline in employment in the hotel industry, she says, has been especially hard on poor families.... And even the temporary jobs are drying up. When the national unemployment rate rose to 5.4% earlier this month, the service sector alone lost 111,000 jobs. Nearly all the loss was among temporary workers. ...Macy's [alone] projects hiring 9,000 seasonal workers this year compared with 12,000 a year ago..\..
    2. Parke can tell things are bad because "we're seeing people we've never, ever seen before." Her pantry...is serving almost twice as many people as it did a couple of months ago. Parke's observations flesh out the national statistics. During the last two months, the number of people working part time has jumped 1.1m to 4.5m.
      [So workweek reduction is happening anyway, but uncontrolledly and destructively.]
      Most would rather work full time...
      [i.e., get the kind of full-time pay and benefits we should all be getting for 20-30 hours a week with all our worksaving technology]
      ...but can't. "The single fastest growing segment of the people coming to food banks has been working families," Shelley Retondo, director of Northwest Harvest, told The Seattle Times last week.
      [Knock knock knockin' on Bill Gates's door. Oh we forgot. He only gives to wealthy universities. Of course, forget capricious charity! We need a systemic solution. A powerful antidote to the overwhelming centripetal forces on money in our caveman capitalism. We need the powerful centrifugal forces generated by an employment-spreading program like Timesizing.]
    [Compare two days from now -]
    Hunger in the city - Sad stories and long lines at food pantries, op ed by Bob Herbert, 11/22/2001 NYT, A31.
    ..."We are blown away by the neediness we're seeing," said...the Rev. James Karpen \pastor of\ the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on Manhattan's Upper West Side \which has\ a food pantry in the basement...run by the West Side Campaign Against Hunger.... Even before 9/11, an alarming number of Americans were lining up for assistance....
    "The demand for food is so high it's outstripping our ability across the system to replenish it," said Robert Forney, president and CEO of America's Second Harvest, a national network of nonprofit food banks that provides 80% of the food distributed by private charities.
    [Now what was that B.S. about this being the richest nation, the land of plenty? What an insult to intelligence. What a failure of design - or rather, of design implementation, now that the basic Timesizing design is available.]
    Last year in New York, about 20% of the pantries in the city had to turn people away because they ran out of food. That figure is expected to reach 30% this year, according to Joel Berg, director of the NYC Coalition Against Hunger. A survey of food pantries and soup kitchens released this week by the Coalition showed a rapid rise in the first several months of this year, and then a dramatic additional surge in demand following 9/11. The Coalition called its survey "From Bad to Worse."...
    When you talk about hunger in America, the problems are not the same as in Somalia or North Korea or Afghanistan. Americans are not starving in the streets.
    [But stay tuned, it'll come.]
    But there is something very wrong, in a society as affluent as ours, when families have to choose between food and rent, or when parents have to forgo a meal so their children can eat, or when the elderly look wistfully at food on television - food they can't have because they spent their money on their medicine.
    [Go, Bob, go man! People with good jobs don't go hungry, and the Timesizing program offers a gradual market-oriented way of providing everyone with a good job. Is it counter-intuitive for intuitions schooled in the disgraceful failure we've been flattering as the best country in world - despite its record prison and homeless populations? Sure is. It involves nothing less than engineering what employers will perceive as an acute general shortage of labor in the job market. That acute "shortage" (actually a balance for the first time since World War II) harnesses market forces to centrifuge spending power out of its unimaginably concentrated 'black hole' among the top income brackets and activate it as it spreads out to the millions who really need it and spend it. Is it socialism? No, because socialism is a burgeoning maximum of stifling detailed controls = inefficient and ineffectual micromgmt, and this is a liberating minimum of freeing general controls - in fact, just one = the Holy Grail of economic designers, the single all-sufficient control that so redefines the framework of the free market and positions it on a leveller playing field that the market is actually freer and more vibrant than previously when so much income was going to so few people that they were actually suctioning the markets away from their own huge investment targets. What is it then, if it's not socialism? It's the next stage in the evolution of capitalism, of course. It's capitalism that works a helluva lot better - for everybody, not just the well-employed and well-legacied.]

11/17/2001  par for the (downward) course - 11/16/2001  headlines from hell -
  1. Big job losses add to New York economic gloom, by Leslie Eaton, NYT, front page.
    A staggering 79,000 jobs disappeared from New York City in October....

  2. U.S. testing goes ahead; Could violate ABM Treaty, by James Dao, NYT, A9.
    [The NY Times is pulling its punches by hiding this inside on page 9 and using the subjunctive.]

For earlier collapse stories, click on the desired date -
  • Nov.1-15/2001.
  • Oct/2001.
  • Sep.15-30/2001.
  • Sep.1-15/2001.
  • Aug/2001.
  • July/2001.
  • June/2001.
  • Apr-May/2001.
  • Mar/2001.
  • Feb/2001.
  • Jan/2001.
  • Dec.21-31/2000.
  • Dec.11-20/2000.
  • Dec.1-10/2000.
        Earlier Y2000 months accessible via links at bottom of Dec.1-10/2000 page.
  • Dec.16-31/99.
  • Dec.1-15/99.
        Earlier 1999 months accessible via links at bottom of Dec.1-15/99 page.
  • Dec/98.
        Earlier months accessible via links at bottom of Dec/98 page.

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