Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

5/27 EU-Italy deal drags euro to record low vs. dollar, by Malcolm Foster, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, E3.
...The European Union late yesterday relaxed demands that Italy stick by a commitment to cut its 1999 deficit to 2.0% of GDP, allowing it to be as high as 2.4%. "This could lead to the end fo the whole fiscal rigidity that made European monetary union work in the first place," said Matthew Robertson [of] Neuberger & Berman.... The [euro's] decline has been largely driven by sluggish growth and high unemployment in Europe.
[That's because, although it's ahead of us in this, Europe has never realized the vital corelation between worktime regulation (work sharing) and unemployment. It needs to drop reliance on workyear reduction (longer vacations) and focus seriously on the workweek, and it needs to concurrently facilitate individual firing for cause (which it has made very difficult) while obstructing mass layoffs and unemployment benefits, and flex up benefits for "full time" whatever level that comes down to.]
That's in contrast with the United States, where the economy has been expanding for nine years and the jobless rate is near 29-year lows....
[This is nothing short of self-sedation on the part of ever-boasting, ever-naive America. The fact that the Fed has released astronomical "currency" numbers to be accumulated and "de-currencied" under the bulging mattresses of the financial markets, where alone the Fed loves inflation, is not expansion. It is tricking ourselves into thinking we're moving upstream (progressing) while we're treading more and more water (paper capital gains) and slipping downstream in the current (stagnant and sinking consumer markets). The picture was exactly the same in the Roaring 'Twenties, with the economy and government makework on a much smaller scale. As for our meaningless jobless rate, give us a break!]
Just yesterday, France, the regions' 2nd-largest economy, said consumer spending fell 0.2% in April.
[Well the French, despite their experimentation, have never unddestood the (consumer-)market-building potential of wealth centrifugation via work sharing, or agreed on the power of workweek reduction. So they have never done it consistently or sufficiently (they did do it somewhat flexibly in the Robien Law of 1995-96). And as for their 0.2% "fall" in consumer spending, what about our 2.3% drop in orders for durable goods in April (previous page in today's Globe)?]
"Growth in the US is much stronger than the rest of the world," said Ivar Bjornstad [of] Den Norske Bank....
[Some Europeans will always be taken in by our big dumb chest-thumping, and big dumb Norwegians are among the nicest, naivest of them. Human beings like to cling to the belief that the status quo is working SOMEwhere anyway. But as America builds more and more prisons, and the top 5% of us have to masturbate harder and harder for the illusion of progress, the status quo looks less beguiling and more boring. Currency union was way premature in Europe anyway. You need to have a lot more linguistic, skill, worktime, income and wealth unification before you can have a successful currency unification.]

["There they go again" - ]
5/26 Firms face challenge of filling skills gap, Bos Globe, C4.
[Oh no, not more whining from CEOs, demotivated by 30 years of massive and growing labor glut into expectations of picking even the most idiosyncratic and specialized skill mix right off the shelf at the bulgingly overstocked Job Market!]
...According to a national survey of 300 executives by Select Appointments North America, a contract staffing firm [and guess who pays them]..\..a shortage of skilled workers is the greatest challenge facing US businesses [and] is limiting sales for some businesses by up to 33%.... Senior management executives in technology, business services, management consulting, and finance were surveyed. More than half cited finding trained workers the number one challenge facing their businesses in the next four years.
[Can you spoiled rich boys spell t-r-a-i-n-i-n-g? And even if you can dimly remember, you've already got a depression-scale labor glut that can be fixed only by war (our usual "solution") or cutting the workweek and spreading the work. Here's an indication of war - ]
The majority of surveyed executives cited the skills most lacking were the "softer skills" such as listening, problem-solving, and interpersonal relations. Technical, or "hard skills," ranked lower in terms of importance and need.
[Well, guys, that is the world YOU created by not getting yourselves a smooth, automatic way of allowing people to become MORE human as technology makes the world LESS human. In other words, a smooth automatic way of passing the huge work-saving benefits of technology along to the population at large in terms of shorter working hours and more free time for family, friends, community, religion - you know, all those "soft" quality-of-life things that you sneer at until they manifest in employees who can't "listen, problem-solve or relate interpersonally."
[The very fact that you've gotten into this bizarre, dehumanized circumlocution, "interpersonal relations," and away from simple "courteous service," is symptomatic of our short-term absentee capitalism that will do almost anything but deal with people. That's what's "limiting sales up to 33%" as any shopper can tell you - surly sales staff, taking their cue from arrogant management.
[And now that Directory Assistance has been robotized and banks want to charge extra for dealing with human tellers, we need quickly to "timesize for humanity" or we'll downsize ourselves into another big war, which the "accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia and big fussing over China spying on us (as if we haven't been spying on them) makes a lot more likely. It looks like our wise and forebearing plutocrats are trying to mold our opinion toward war. What a relief it must be for Congress to have a non-internal FF (foe focus) once again!]
Many companies are turning to contract employees to handle the shortage....
[Oh there's a piece of hot news that's two decades late!]
Some 86% of companies surveyed said they use contract employees to cover a shortage of technological skills and would consider temporary workers to cover other needs....
[Hey if contractors and temps can handle it, there's no shortage. What there is is a rising constitutional unwillingness, on the part of CEOs, to lock into paying full-time benefits like health insurance and pensions when labor is so common and cheap and dropping further in opportunity cost almost daily.]

5/25 Mass. advocates hail Clinton family-leave plan - Foes: Plan would be costly, hurt small firms, by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, D2.
...On Sunday, Clinton told graduates at Grambling State University in Louisiana he would change federal regulations to allow workers to collect unemployment benefits while at home caring for newborn or adopted children....
[Why don't we drop the off-target, market-bucking ingenuity and just cut the workweek! Parents don't need all kinds of complicated, tax&bureaucracy-intensive government charity. THEY JUST NEED MORE TIME FOR THEIR CHILDREN - or whatever else they want to do for the world. Specifically subsidizing reproduction at a time when global population is doubling every few years and nature is suffering is just NUTS.]

5/23 Bridges to the future, by David Warsh, Bos Globe, H1.
[David discusses the trend toward earlier retirement that reversed in the mid '80s, but fails to see the significance of the whole phenomenon.
[With the workweek ratcheted at 40 hours per person by overtime laws and fulltime-tied benefits, there's no way for Americans to benefit from rising technology levels or provide non-marginal work for everyone without cutting worktime per person. The twin trends of ever-lengthening education and ever-earlier retirement were ways to cut the worklife per person. Compare the Europeans who, by and large, are cutting the workyear per person via lengthening vacations.
[David notes that the crummy jobs that older workers are relegated to, in between when they get downsized and when they can afford to retire (if ever), now even have a special name, "bridge jobs." But the whole glow he puts on this, that it's a lifestyle choice (as if people select to retire later) instead of a matter of simple financial necessity and often, desperation, is a symptom of his own insulation, gender bias (women are the predominantly impoverished gender in retirement, as discussed recently on NPR) and naive buying into the prevailing hap hap happy talk. Anything but mar the glow of our current 1920s deja vu, eh, David?
[Now these often part-time bridge jobs are only crummy by comparison with full-time jobs for employees safely far from retirement, i.e., younger than 50 and preferably than 40. But imagine if the global workweek came down from 40 to 30 or even 20, however gradually. Then these bridge jobs would no longer be crummy, not only because full time would now be them, but because ALL jobs would now be bridge jobs! In other words, they would define the new "full time" AND they would be universal.
[What we're essentially talking about here is something like Timesizing.]

[One tenth of one percent? - "Oooh nooo, Mr. Bill!"]
5/22 Jobless rate rises [0.1% to 2.9% in Massachusetts] - But number employed hits new record in April, by Kimberly Blanton, Bos Globe, F1.
[So what good is it to have more people employed if there are even more people looking? - if we keep up this kind of good news, we'll get bigger job lines and smaller pay.]
The vast majority of new jobs were in the service sector, especially business services.
[Of course, more low-paying jobs - but what did we expect in this "boom for the boss"?]
..\..5,900 new jobs added in April pushed the number of people employed in the state to...3.18 million....
In April...Vermont's jobless rate [fell] to 2.6% from 3.1%, and New Hampshire's to 2.4%.... "The last time New England had three states under 3% was in July 1988," said Denis McSweeney, regional commissioner of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. At that time Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont all had rates below 3% [while] Massachusetts had 3.3%....
[Was that before or after we "fiddled" the rate?]

[Two more executives who forgot about incentives for anybody but themselves and their buddies, but in a last-minute switch, zapped their personal share just before a shareholder meeting with lots of employee protesters present - ]
5/20 US Airways executives forgo bonus - Chairman, CEO make offer in bid to end divisiveness, by Frank Swoboda, Wash Post via Bos Globe, C3.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. - ...A new bonus plan...proposed by the company's board of directors last year..\..would give 30 top executives bonuses as much as four times higher than their base salary [while] airline employees...haven't had a raise in nearly a decade. Yesterday, standing in front of a room half full of yellow-shirted flight attendants protesting what they called the greed of a corporate executive who last year earned nearly $35 million in total compensation, [US Airways chairman Stephen] Wolf unexpectedly announced that neither he nor [CEO Rakesh] Gangwal would accept a penny from the new bonus fund, which was later approved by the shareholders....
[With absentee owners (shareholders) this gullible and malleable, we're heading straight for a wealth-blackhole depression.]
Wolf's statement was so low key that it almost went unnoticed by his audience. Before the meeting was over, he would repeat the pledge three times to make sure everyone understood what he had done. Wolf told reporters he thought it would be too divisive if he and Gangwal were to take the money. Wolf, however, did defend the plan, during a lengthy question-and-answer session at the meeting, as necessary to attract and retain top executives at the nation's sixth largest airline - and the top carrier at Boston's Logan Airport.
[So who needs the absolutely "top executives" anyway, and who judges who they are? Chainsaw Dunlap is expensive - is he a top executive? He's killed as many companies as he's helped. What about Robert Palmer of DEC? He was expensive and all he could do was downsize - no vision, no upside, just downsize and sell off.]
At one point, a passenger service representative choked back tears as he recounted how pay concessions exacted by the company when it was near bankruptcy in the early 1990s had taken an emotional toll on his family. Holidays and vacations were slashed, forcing him to work enormous amounts of overtime just to stay afloat. He said he and his wife were drifting apart and he seldom had a chance to spend time with his two teenage daughters.
[These kamekazi top executives blather on about family values and in this age of unsurpassed work-saving technology, they collect millions and billions of dollars while pressuring employees to forgo family time. Family values with no family time? HA! What a contrast to John Tu and David Sun of Kingston Technologies in the story on our glimmers of hope page today who just announced a third huge bonus in 3 years to be divided among their 1000 employees - they've shared $20 million a year this year and last, and $38 million the year before.
[Then there's Lincoln Electric of Cleveland that also shares out annual bonuses in this range every year. It's time we highlighted these CEOs who know how to reinvest in their own markets via their own employees' pay, celebrated them, cultivated them, and starved the other monsters of good employees.]
"I want to be able to fall in love with my wife again," he pleaded. "I want to be able to be home and be with my daughters."
Wolf, standing somberly at the podium while the man spoke, acknowledged, "you have not been compensated at a fair level for a number of years." And then, in a rare public confession, Wolf told the man: "My wife and I don't have any children. At 57 years of age I wish we did; I would love to be able to spend my time with them."
[Maybe that's it. These guys don't have a life so why should anyone else?]

5/16-17/99  6 steps closer to the edge -

1. 5/16 [At last an 'Economic Principles' article from David Warsh worthy of that title - about a smart guy with a stupid theory.]
   One big [productivity] wave, come and gone?, by David Warsh, Boston Globe, p. G1.
   ...Last week the US economy posted its second quarterly productivity gain of 4%...virtually unprecented for so late in a business cycle....
   [However, the productivity figure is going to be inflated if the workforce (employment) is undercounted (to, e.g., depress the unemployment rate). A lot of this index sweetening was done in the last 15 years - for example, the Social Security fund was added to the general budget under Reagan to make our budget figures look better than they are. We're surprised that Lester Thurow hasn't jumped on the productivity swelling trick as he jumped on the unemployment shrinking trick. See 4/20 story near top of our unemployment page. Also we have the fact that GDP can be going down while productivity is going up - if the workforce shrinks enough. Because GDP is roughly overall output, while productivity is average output per employee.]
   Alan Greenspan...thought the rules had changed, somewhat. The Fed's forecasts of inflation and growth in business activity had been "generally off" in recent years, said Greenspan, inflation on the high side and growth on the low, apparently because of increasing efficiency throughout the economy....
   [We don't understand all the stunned surprise on this. Isn't efficiency what technology is for except for the rare occasions when it is for quality alone? But oh, we forgot, the "party line" in our culture is that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys," even if it's more efficient and work-saving, because by the magic of partitioned thinking, jobs and work are completely different concepts and bear absolutely no relationship to one another, at least in the minds of our wealth-serving economic theorists.]
   The evidence [is] "compelling, if not conclusive," according to [Greenspan] - "for a technology-driven rise in the prospective rate of return on new capital and an associated acceleration in labor productivity."...
   [Ah, doesn't he have that backwards? After all, the technology is not running itself. The sentence should read - "The evidence is compelling for a technology-driven acceleration in labor productivity and an associated (i.e., resulting) rise in the prospective rate of return on new capital." Anyway, apparently Greenspan was so obsessed with this that he called a powwow of two dozen of the nation's top productivity experts, omitting, according to Warsh, the best one, Robert Gordon of Northwestern University. Now why Warsh would regard a leading authority of quality change as the top expert on productivity - a quantity change, is beyond us - except Warsh really seems to want to talk about him and his "fascinating insights into the nature of economic change.]
   For years, Gordon has been [making] the argument that increased productivity percolated through the US economy in "one big wave," starting in the first years of the 20th century and petering out at the end of the 1960s....
   [Guess he overlooks the huge productivity drop of the 1930s, as government floated makework campaign after makework campaign, and resistence to new technology reached luddite heights in many places. Spell 'featherbedding'. By our count, that makes two waves, pre and post the Great Depression, each spurred by a world war which cut the workforce and goosed technology, and capped by the workforce recovering its numbers enough to depress its wages, allow astronomical wealth concentration and depress demand (and resulting supply/output).]
   Why? Gordon believes the inventions of the late 19th and early 20th century [in four clusters] were "more fundamental creators of productivity" than are the devices of the electronic-Internet era.
   1. electricity [motors, lights, appliances]
   2. gas engines [cars/trucks, airplanes, roads, supermarkets, suburbs - ah, how are suburbs 'productive'?? or supermarkets for that matter. How are trucks more productive than steam-drawn freight trains?]
   3. 'rearranging molecules' [plastics, drugs]
   4. communications/entertainment [telephone, radio, movies, TV - how is entertainment 'productive'? How are movies and TV 'productive' apart from training programs?]
   Applications of each of these four innovations had the effect of greatly increasing human capacity to do work, Gordon says.
   [A strange formulation, to be sure. God forbid these innovations should merely enable humans to do a greatly increased amount of work in the same amount of time, or the same amount of work in a greatly decreased amount of time. No, the implication of his formulation is that these innovations turned humans into superhumans with a "greatly increased capacity to do work" - and that the amount of work available to do was not a limiting factor - and so presumably infinite - and that the demand for work done was not a limiting factor - and so presumably infinite (this agrees with the homo economicus as an entity with infinite wants and desires - a direct contradiction of economists' marginalist theory of prices) - and we do not even need to bother about the time expended to do the work - we can take it as a negligible factor. Hey, at least we're still considering humans to be an important factor in this formulation, because after all, human capacity is still the major focus or at least the shared focus (with 'work').]
   In contrast, computers so far have failed to have comparable impact because computers have to interact with human beings [as if the older technologies didn't!]. Human beings are bottlenecks.
   [This is quite a contrast to the statement about the older technologies, that they 'greatly increased human capacity to do work' where humans are still at least a shared focus. Suddenly humans have become a liability. He elaborates - ]
   ...There is an increasing mismatch between the clock-speed of computers and the finger speed of operators who use them to write documents and create spreadsheets, says Gordon. More bandwidth doesn't mean faster thought.
   [So technology is now bad, as well as humans, because its development has not continued to 'increase human capacity', as if it ever did. See, this is where you need linguistics to blast thruough all the sloppy thinking and sentence construction of these social so-called scientists - to hold the string of their verbal balloon so it stops drifting off into space. Did technology change human capacity like stories of the bionic man? No, nothing of the kind. It simply did more work per unit time, or took less time per unit work. And work is vectored or directed or useful or beneficial energy, and the only criterion of beneficiality etc. - the only answer to the question "Work FOR what/whom?" is - for humans. The whole point of this economic exercise, though this seems to have escaped Gordon, is that it's all FOR HUMANS (and by humans cointrary to wandering imaginations, technology has no will of its own.)]
   Moreover, he says, they haven't built the computer yet that can replace a human at any number of demanding tasks: surgeon, pilot, truck driver, small-scale assembly of manufactured items.
   [Well, here he takes his previous disappointment due to his malformed sentences and compounds it. His wording misleads him to believe that technology has been replacing parts of the human body with better components, and now he blames technology for not being able to replace the whole human in many situations. As if technology has a will of its own and is out to take over. As if this kind of talk is not just a coverup for a hidden subgroup of humans who have a will of their own and are out to take over, by distracting others with technological glitz and blaming technology for any complaints about their own monstrous plans. Folks, this is as close as you are going to come to Evil - this is all Evil is = stupid talk from smart people. Hidden arrogance and selfishness and greed from otherwise smart people. And note that by coming right out and admitting to having the goal of replacing people, we have a standard economist contradicting the constantly repeated lie on the part of standard economists that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys" - in other words, that it does not replace human beings. This guy is admitting that technology, at least in the way that standard economists have been using it in since the late 1960s, HAS been displacing people from jobs and therefore destroying more jobs than it creates - which is what worktime economists like Leacock and Dahlberg and Reuther and Technology Inc. and Hunnicutt and Rifkin have been saying all along - technological displacement is REAL and REQUIRES cuts in the workweek for everyone if the job market is not going to get tremendously distorted, ie: concentrated. [Let's straighten it all out by referencing some smart talk from a smart person, Buckminster Fuller. Bucky got it right when he said, Technology extends the human body, it does not replace it.]
   Much of what we are seeing now is "second-order" innovation, according to Gordon: the VCR, for example, which combines movies with television but doesn't have the fundamental impact of either invention.
   [He seems here to be groping towards the distinctions between quantity-boosting (efficiency) technology and quality-boosting technology, and between urgently demanded goods ("necessities") and reluctantly demanded, advertising-intensive goods (real luxuries, little luxuries, and sortof luxuries). But in fact, there is no difference between movies, TV and VCRs - all three of them are in the realm of reluctantly demanded, non essential goods - and all three of them destroyed older jobs. Movies displaced vaudeville, by now, almost completely. TV shut down movie theaters and 'legitimate' theaters all over the country though a few (relative to what there were) remain AND, TV curtailed Hollywood. And VCRs have shut down even more movie and 'legitimate' theaters - we ourselves sure don't go out to the movies or to plays and musicals as much as we used to! And the fact that the cable TV industry is desperately trying to advertise its way into the category of a 'necessity' just can't seem to mask the fact that it isn't anything of the kind.
   [This whole line of doubletalk from standard economists either started or got a big boost from Rexford Tugwell in his 1933 book, The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts - and, touting job creation, he was ostensibly refuting Dahlberg's "silly" idea of shortening the workweek and sharing the the technology-diminished work. In our view, Dahlberg made sense, while Tugwell is shooting a load of doubletalking bull almost from page one. (Dahlberg's 1932 book is called Jobs, Machines and Capitalism.)]
   "...The computer has not created the paperless society but rather a duplication of electronic activities, all of which generate paper."
   [How wrong can he get? The computer is only the most useful and general purpose machine that humans have ever come up with, as Bucky Fuller pointed out, because it extends the human brain. And as for generating paper, electronic transfer of funds (ETF) by computer, for example, is a lot faster and higher-frequency than the equivalent physical transfer of paper checks would be. And Gordon's tacit attempt to bolster his cuckoo argument that, regretably, computers have not replaced humans, by arguing that regretably computers have not replaced paper, is bizarre and far-fetched.]
   For most of the '90s, the reigning interpretation of...information technology has been that of...economist Paul David's 1990 paper, "The Computer and the Dynamo" [which] argued that...while electricity was...introduced in the 1880s, it wasn't until the 1920s that...the new power \was\ effectively harness[ed] with small motors \so\ a delayed impact [by computers] on productivity was to be expected....
   [This was pointed out years before by Bucky Fuller in relation to inventions coming in first during wars and then gradually filtering into civilian markets - his example was the refrigerator - first used on battleships.]
   Against that interpretation...Gordon's "one big wave" hypothesis will be set.
   [We think that's a trifle optimistic. We think it will be tossed in the trash. Of course, we may have an inflated estimate of the modicum of intelligence possessed by standard economists.... As we said, for starters the Great Depression cuts Gordon's one wave into two.
   [And the real explanation for the phenomena Gordon is trying to explain is a lot more obvious and closer to home, and lacks his forced distinction between first- and second-order innovation. And it involves three phenomena that standard economists completely ignore -
   1. The cumulative effects on the job market of shortening or freezing the workweek or in economese, the effects of Kitchin or Juglar frequency, non-cyclical, generally unidirectional (downward) variations in worktime per person per time unit, or their absence.
   2. The possibility of overall (in economese, "aggregate") labor surplus - standard economists have always had a hard time featuring this, though they should have learned it from the Depression
   3. The negative effect of such surplus on wages - AND the discouraging effect of flat wages on creativity and innovation, a kind of passive luddism that says, Why drop anything in the suggestion box if it's just going to lose me my job? It was to avoid this that Lincoln Electric instituted its lifetime guarantee of employment in the 1950s, facilitated by a workweek fluctuating system to avoid layoffs.
   [Briefly, the Great War (World War I) and the influenza epidemic relieved the previous labor surplus, raised wages, centrifuged wealth, hiked spending activity and markets, and created the boom of the war years and the early 1920s, with a short interruption caused by the sudden influx due to postwar demobilization. In the 1920s, (immigration and) technological displacement due to war-driven innovation outstripped the withdrawal of labor hours on offer in the job market due to workweek reductions and GreatWar-and-flu deaths, so a gross labor surplus - wage flattening - spending activity flattening - consumer markets (2/3 of economy) flattening - industrial markets (derived 1/3) flattening - merger activity heightening pattern developed, culminating in the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 as wealth concentration suctioned markets away from its own investments. And then - the Great Depression.
   [The pattern was repeated in slow motion starting with World War II: the war relieved the labor surplus both by killing and disabling millions of employees, freezing immigration, and nullifying imports, thereby hiking wages and spending and markets and production. However, the usual technological timebomb was created - war again hugely goosed technological innovation - although there was the usual delay in transferring these leaps of efficiency into the civilian markets. A new element was introduced - the workweek was rigidified at the 40-hour level (though a few industries standardized at 35, eg: colleges). The war's reduction of the economy-flattening labor surplus, now not helped at all by workweek reduction, was gradually offset by immigration, the entry of baby boomers into the job market, and the entry of wartime efficiency leaps into the civilian markets. These four factors were insufficiently offset by government makework and the smaller wars (Korea and Vietnam) and so, the shift between the 1960s and 1970s that Gordon identifies as the end of the 'one big wave,' and many others identify as the start of the serious deterioration of the American Dream.]

2. 5/17 Open season on investors - Proposed [federal] securities regulation would reduce states' authority to refuse licenses to [unscrupulous] brokers, by Charles Jaffe, Bos Globe, A13.
   [More undoing of the financial safeguards implemented during the Great Depression, by history-dissing Phil Gramm and his fellow myopics in the U.S. Senate. Ah, recall those long-lost days of yesteryear when the Republican Party was the intelligent party?! Now they're even dumber than the Democrats - and that's pretty dumb! As Monica and no health insurance and campaign funding capers and their visionless extension of Depression-era bandaids etc. etc. testify.]

3. 5/16 Is the long haul too long? - Tired truck drivers may be hazardous to your health, by Bernard Gavzer, Parade Magazine insert in, e.g., Boston Globe, 12.
   Driver fatigue may play a role in up to 40% of heavy truck highway crashes. But some truckers and safety advocates disagree about what actually causes fatigue and how many hours a truck driver can safely manage in one stretch.
   • How big is the problem? "Truck drivers who fall asleep at the wheel are involved in 750 to 1500 road deaths every year," says Sen. Olympia Snow of Maine.
   • Why it happens? Drivers are allowed too many hours behind the wheel, say safety advocates. Erratic work schedules and pay-per-mile schemes, they add, also contribute to overwork.
   • What the trucking industry says. Research "showed that the most consistent influence on driver fatigue and alertness was the time of day, not hours of driving," says Walter McCormack Jr., head of the American Trucking Assoc.
   • What's being done about it. The hours-of-service rules that regulate the trucking industry will be revised for the first time in 60 years.... Says Senator Snow, "We need to revise the antiquated rules governing duty and rest hours."

4. [Riding for a fall - ]
   5/16 No class but first class - Naive '99 grads expect nothing but good jobs and good times - forever, by Matthew Brelis, Bos Globe, E1.
   [In short, they're insulated and they bought the happytalk. But then there's the next story...]

5. 5/17 The 'new homeless' - Harvard Square street people increasingly are those just starting out, by Stan Grossfeld, Bos Globe, front page.
   ...The city of Boston's homeless census...neared an all-time record this year \but the new homeless\ don't turn up in [that census] nor do they like to go to shelters like the Pine Street Inn, which...reported only one male guest in its 18-to-24 age group, despite an average January population of 312.... What street workers are calling the "new homeless"...are young people from dysfunctional families, those who have run away from the state Dept. of Social Services or have passed the age of 18, the agency's basic cutoff point for services. They shun shelters and stay with friends and acquaintances until they wear out their welcome.
   "This new homeless we are seeing is different than before," said Elizabith Ortiz, medical coordinator for Bridge Over Troubled Waters, the Boston-based social services group that serves mostly young people. "You won't see them sleeping in the street. They're too smart for that. They couch-surf in the winter and sleep outside in the summer. They don't see themselves as homeless, and you can never, ever tell these kids are homeless."...

6. 5/16 Trading away our chances to end global warming, by Ross Gelbspan, Bos Globe, E2.
   ...Schemes like "emissions trading" look neat on paper. Unfortunately, they will not slow the melting of the earth's glaciers, the breakkup of Antarctic ice shelves, rising sea levels, warming-driven migrations of disease, the intensification of El Niños, and the relentless increase in floods, ddroughts and severe storms. To do that we must restore the 10,000-year-old balance of our atmosphere that we are destroying with the 6 billion tons of carbon we emit every year.