Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

[Our "powerless to change fulltime" pose whimpers on...]
6/24 Working less, with all the stress - More professionals - many of them parents - are cutting back to part time, but at what cost? by Alison Ross, Bos Globe, E1.
...A growing number of parents are realizing: Working part time is no panacea for people struggling to juggle the demands of career and family.... "Everyone thinks that working less is the ideal solution to all the stress in today's world, but it may in fact cause you more distress," Says Rosalind Barnett, a senior scientist in the women's studies program at Brandeis University who has studied the issue. "You have to give up a lot in career advancement, in pay, in benefits, and a lot of people don't realize that going in."
[Note that all these sacrifices for shorter hours are Non Applicable when "full time" is defined downward, as it was for most of American history. Otherwise we'd still be working a standard 84-hour week as Big Steel was - the last holdout - as recently as 1924. The problem only arose in 1941 when, although we cut the US maximum workweek 2 hrs/wk for each of the previous 3 years, we stuck it at 40 because of Lend Lease and Pearl Harbor, and never resumed the cuts as planned after the war.]
[We have this to say to Katy Abel, Lise Johnson, John Day and the other featured victims in article -
Enough is enough. Are we to go on forever getting more work-saving technology AND more pressure to WORK MORE? This is just plain nuts!
[Get off the defensive and start ridiculing your robopathic, workoholic, masochistic colleagues. YOU are the future, not them! They not only need to "get a life." They need to stop hogging the nation's most overlooked and underestimated vanishing natural resource - market-demanded work. We're not talking about government makework and artificial job-creation-for-its-own-sake. We're talking about the imperative of spreading the work-saving benefits of technology by CUTTING DOWN WORK. Yes, we said IMPERATIVE, because if we don't, we get technological work savings as unemployment and underpaid "part" time.
[The whole implication, the whole PURPOSE of technology is to REDUCE WORK. We either reduce work or create a huge distortion in our society. And guess what. We've been creating the distortion since the end of World War II, though it only really "hit the fan" since 1970. Look at our bulging prisons. And if somebody tries to object that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys," ask them "Where's the beef? Where are the jobs?" Fluid-workweek timesizing calls their bluff anyway because it 's bidirectional. Currect fixed-workweek economics, however, can only go up - and only by not enforcing its own official maximum 40-hour workweek. So where's the beef on all these technology-created jobs? - and peanut-pay jobs at McDonalds don't count. Creating jobs is creating work. Creating work is inefficient. Why we would use technology to inject inefficiency? If "technology creates more work than it destroys," where are the incentives for bringing it in?! Fixed-workweek economists are passive luddites, because they don't really want what technology is offering. They want to pay lip service to "freedom" and "liberty" without accepting the most basic kind of freedom, FREE TIME.
[And how the h*** are we supposed to get "family values" with no family TIME?
[What is it with these otherwise intelligent people, including women? They just can't imagine lower FULLTIME? They've never thought about 1776 when people worked from dawn to dusk for peanuts, and the subsequent 164-year period when hours came down and wages went up? They've never considered that long hours go with low wages, not high, in the long run - can they say "sweat shop"?
[This is NOT OPTIONAL. We either DO this or have NO real progress ever again. In fact, we'll get a bigger and bigger underclass and more and more social turmoil. WAR will remain our ultimate solution to hidden unemployment and marginalized workers. We need timesizing and we need to get going on it. Those who love to work can continue working long hours - AND reinvesting their overtime earnings in training and hiring - just to make sure that overtime is not due to a skill bottleneck. No reinvestment, no overtime. And "no overtime alone." And no multijob cumulative overtime. We've got to stop driving down our own scarcity and value and pay by overworking in a highly technologized society. You want to work long hours? Move to New Guinea or some other pre-technology culture. We think you'll find not even they are as stupid as us in this matter. Pacific Islanders only work 18 hours a week while at our vaunted "advanced" level of social evolution we're doing 50-60-70 hours. And all because we don't have the chutzpa to seize control of the TIME of our lives? Pathetic!
[We've designed an alternative. We call it Timesizing. Let's DO it.]

[ Sales tax on the Web? Sales tax anywhere?!]
6/24 Rendering unto Caesar, by Hiawatha Bray, Bos Globe, D1.
...Some of those Internet bargains are made possible by the absence of old-fashioned sales taxes. But this week in Virginia, a band of bigwigs from government and Internet industries began trying to work out ways to close this lovely loophole....
[First of all, Hiawatha, sales taxes aren't old-fashioned. They're relatively new, older only than value-added taxes (VATs). Secondly, they constitute a regressive, business-burdening and slowing force, so their absence is hardly a "loophole." It simply leaves business alone and lets the middle class and the poor just pay their lower income taxes and not give the rich an additional free ride by paying into the government for every little item they purchase. Sales taxes are costly and time-wasting to collect, and we should abolish all sales taxes with the exception of luxury taxes, and also with the exception of unrenewable energy taxes (gas taxes) IF their revenues are strictly devoted to renewable energy research and production and not frittered away on road building and maintenance.
[If we need more money right away than we're getting in when we abolish sales taxes, then REGRADUATE THE INCOME TAX! Today's top brackets are far far far far FAAAAR more wealthy they can ever possibly spend in hundreds of lifetimes anyway. And as for "stifling their incentive," since when do human beings need or value or benefit from INFINITE incentives? We see someone who has roughly 25% more than us and that's IT - we want it. Much more and it's hopeless. Much less and it's boring. What we benefit more from is sharing and circulation, not the isolating and insulating and stupifying unimaginable excess of the few. The more concentration, the less circulation. In the long run, this problem is broken down and solved piece by piece by Timesizing and its family of balancing programs without graduated income taxes, but in the meantime, graduated income taxes are MUCH MUCH healthier for the economy than general sales taxes.]

["Good news" from hell - a 'labor' union for doctors...]
6/24 AMA's delegates decide to create union of doctors - Faced with power of HMO's, the Assoc. alters longtime stance, acts to give leverage to physicians, by Steven Greenhouse, NY Times, frontpage.
[Now let's get this straight (& correct us if we're wrong). They've already got the power of life and death over us. They've got their own tightly controlled and bottlenecked professional schools, the costly and snobby med schools, sparsely dotted across the land. They've got their snooty professional organization, the AMA, hoary with age and wealth and lobbying and skills-rationing power. And now they think they need a WHAT?!]

[British taxpayers get dragged into saving a dog of a luxury car for BMW.]
6/24 Rover rescue package, Bloomberg via NY Times, C4.
The German auto maker BMW and the British government announced a rescue package for the car maker's struggling Rover operation in Britain. Under the deal, the Gov't will contribute $243 million over six years linked to productivity improvement targets....
[That's supposed to impress us? How about at least being as minimally intelligent as the Mass. and other legislatures in this country and linking it to JOBS?! à la our Raytheon and Fidelity taxbreak scams?!]
The deal is expected to save thousands of jobs at the Rover Longbridge plant, where a range of new models will be built....
[Well as we suckers in Massachusetts found out, "expected" and "actuated" are two different things. And let's face it, NOTHING can save the Rover. It's too hard to work on with just too much stuffed under the hood. We thought of buying one once but Lady Luck saved us. And nobody's heard of it outside Birmingham, England.  Rolls Royce we've heard of.  Jaguar we've heard of.  MG we've heard of.  But Rover??? That's a DOG!]

6/23 Measure to limit imports of steel is killed by Senate, NY Times pointer to frontpage, C1.
...a blow to union and steelmakers and a victory for Pres. Clinton, who had warned that the legislation would revive protectionism. The bill, which became a divisive argument over the merits of free trade and the economic wisdom of protecting steelworkers [and American wage levels] at the expense of raising [no, merely maintaining] prices on a range of everyday goods, would have rolled back imports of steel to the levels before the Asian economic crisis, ending a surge that began as countries sought to export their way out of trouble.
[The naivete of free-traders is beyond belief. How many times do we have to learn this disastrous lesson? [Here's a juicy historical precedent. It has been observed many times that "war is good for the economy" - providing it isn't on your own soil. We've often mentioned the major reason - war centrifuges and dynamizes wealth by withdrawing labor hours from the job market - but another unappreciated reason is that it cuts through the greed-masking naive idealism of free trade and gives domestic industries a chance to grow. Now our history lesson, digested from Jacob Harris Patton's Political Parties of the United States, 1902, Chapter IX: "Our First Important Tariff":

At the close of the second war with Great Britain in 1815, American manufactures had increased beyond precedent. This was owing in great measure to the suspension of commercial intercourse with England, which had hitherto furnished nearly all the foreign made articles used in the United States. Thus from necessity the American people began to manufacture those articles for themselves.... (American People, p. 713.)
In a speech in Parliament in 1816, Lord Brougham declared that he saw the resumption of vast British exports to America after the war's end as much more important than British exports to European markets during the war both because America was more likely to pay than war-exhausted Europe and because by doing a loss-leader, Britain could stifle in the cradle those rising manufactures in the United States, which the war had forced into existence contrary to the natural course of things [whereby England, the "workshop of the world," did the manufacturing for the world]. (Hansard's Parl. Debates, 1st Series, XXXIII, p. 1099.)
By 1816, England had been training her people for a century or more for this pre-eminence in mechanical industries. In addition to highly protective tariffs, she forbade, by stringent laws and severe penalties, persons taking from the kingdom any machine used in manufacturing. As soon as the peace treaty was signed in late 1814, English merchants flooded the markets of the United States with their goods. These were offered at very low prices, frequently below cost, with the avowed intention of destroying American domestic manufactures, which had come into existence during the war. This they did effectually. Great multitudes of American working people were thrown out of employment, causing much distress; while the prospect was that henceforth American industries would be held in bondage to British manufacturing.
The statesmen of that day, following the advice of Alexander Hamilton, had a policy based upon reason and common sense to lay a firm foundation for America's future progress country by imposing a tariff on foreign-made articles sufficiently high to equalize the cost of their production, or in other words, to counterbalance the low wages paid the workers in Europe. They designed to promote the industries of the whole land, endeavoring meanwhile to make them as diversified as the wants of the people required. They wished also to develop the natural resources fo the country . In accordance with these principles, Congress passed a tariff (1816) sufficiently high to produce revenue and protect American industries, which having had no foreign competition for the war years, had been carried on prosperously, until overwhelmed by loss-leading British exports as soon as the war stopped....

[The NY Times biz section got upstaged by USA Today today, soooo - ]
6/21 World's richest now total $1 trillion - Stock and Internet boom adding up, frontpage pickup =
Technology, stock market click for world's richest, by James Fox, USA Today, p. 2A.
...Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the world's richest man, says his net worth grows from $51 billion to $90 billion in the past year, Forbes [July 5 issue] says. [Forbes ] splits the rich into three classes:
1. The "working rich," who got rich by themselves [don't they mean "by themselves"?] or by using inheritances to further pad their fortunes.
2. "Coupon clippers," who are idle rich heirs and heiresses.
3. Those who got wealthy by being royalty or dictators. [Wouldn't royalty be like heirs, and dictators be like "working rich"?]
Overall, three of the top [six]...made their money [with] Microsoft [- Gates, Paul Allen $30b, Steve Ballmer $19.5b]....
[We don't care what the Libertarians and oglers say. That much wealth spread around would bring so much more real human progress so much faster, that the fact we're still talking about "trickle down" and have no operating system to centrifuge wealth in the necessary floods, not trickles, is the biggest insult to our intelligence on the planet. The more concentration, the less circulation, and the only developed program we know of to change this obscenity, gradually, intuitively and in a market-oriented way, is Timesizing.
[But never mind the big "shocked and indignant" routine. That and a howitzer will get you progress when the Sun goes nova. Let's talk about the marginal utility of wealth. Labor is so common, powerless and underpaid these days that the top brackets are concentrating enough money to actually suction the markets away from their own investments since, hey, they don't have time to spend it. That's the angle that ultimately always bursts a bubble. There's no solid spending inside it. It's all debt, and artificially low unemployment and interest rates, artificial government job creation, and capricious charity on the part of the rich. Our system badly needs a tuneup, and our "tuneup manual" tells how - Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]

6/21 Doctors discuss merits of unionizing at meeting, by John Bacon, USA Today, 3A.
Almost 500 physicians gathered Sunday at the American Medical Association's annual meeting in Chicago to debate the merits and risks of forming a labor union. The delegates [represent] about 290,000 of their colleagues, or about one-thrid of U.S. physicians.... Frustrated by some managed care companies, the delegates in December asked AMA trustees to investigate collective bargaining....
[Well, the Civil Rights Movement finally took off when it started involving the offspring of the upper middle class, Senators' kids and so on. Maybe the same will happen for the labor movement, but we doubt it unless they get a grip on their overall over-supply by using timesizing to dynamically adjust their availability to the job market.
[Doctors in over-supply? We thought the whole purpose of the AMA was to prevent this, and we must say, they've done a smashing job till now in American history. But it looks like the B-Schools and CEOs clubs have finally got it over on them, so they're squealing. "How are the mighty fallen...!"]

[The GOP misses the obvious in defining "compassionate conservatism."]
6/20 Bush: [Prosperity must have a purpose - ] 'Leave No One Out' As Nation Prospers - George W. Bush is espousing a "compassionate conservatism," excerpts from June 12 Cedar Rapids remarks, NY Times, 15 (NE).
6/20 Republicans Stalk a Slogan, Hunting for [Their Identity] - Debating the meaning compassion and the nature of conservatism, by Adam Nagourney, NYT, 4-1 (WK).
[All the Republicans have to do is look in their own history to find the key to "compassionate conservatism." If conservatism is small government and compassion is making it easy for everyone to support themselves (i.e., to find a good job or on-the-job training), then there's a strong theme in the GOP's own history they're overlooking. The general idea is, if we balance the one big thing at the center of the economy, we don't have to keep running around ineffectually trying to balance the many smaller things everywhere else.
[And the center of the economy is easy access to natural, market-demanded skills and work. The whole idea of creating enough artificial work to keep everyone busy for 40 hours a week or more for all eternity despite endless tidal waves of work-saving technology was a goosechase based on a misunderstanding of where the 30-hour workweek bill of 1933 was leading. It was perpetuated, because of that misunderstanding, into the most dragged-out and bloated emergency measure in human history.
[Keynes himself admitted the whole approach was "abnormal" (i.e., temporary) in 1934 and the following year, FDR himself admitted he should got behind the 30-hour bill and pushed it through when the political climate would have allowed it. Talk about 20/20 hindsight.
[So we were stuck with job creation, which didn't work until the war because that's what finally ended the Great Depression, not the New Deal, and we're stuck with lame job creation still, in more and more costly and varied forms, including block grants and enterprise zones and corporate tax credits and corporate bailouts and patronage jobs and government pork barrelling and education subsidies and training subsidies and jails and prisons etc etc etc etc etc, all of which are still as ineffectual as ever. Unless we get into another big war.]

[The draining and pointless obsessing about inflation rages on.]
• 6/20 Greenspan on Inflation: Wait, Don't Wait. Go Figure. by Michael Weinstein, NYTimes, 4-3wk.
• 6/20 Despite the Fears, Inflation Still Refuses to Materialize, by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, 3-3bu.
[The focus on inflation has merit only insofar as all economic problems can in some sense be called inflation. Inflation is a vast cluster of problems that we'll be dissecting, prioritizing and solving one at a time until the end of the universe.
[The first priority component of inflation, contrary to the received "wisdom" of conventional economists, is unemployment. Think about it. You get money for standing in a line or nowadays, just waiting for a check in the mail. Any form of money for nothing dilutes the value of our primary symbol of value, the currency. That includes welfare and disability and prisons and charity as well. And when that value dilutes, people raise their prices to compensate.
[Then why do superficial economists see unemployment as the opposite of inflation? Because they want to control it by invalid means, that is, by fostering fear. Fear of job loss and unemployment or worse in their minds is the best (or only) curb on wage (raise) demands. And wage demands in their minds are the worst form of inflation, because they start the "wage-price spiral."
[The stupidity of this is that it frustrates solution to their own occasional worries about the widening income gap, because how the hey is the income gap going to get bridged if wages don't rise?! And it depresses markets. How the hay are markets going to reach normal levels if the vast majority of people are being confined to a flat-wage surplus status by a fixed pre-high-tech workweek, and the whole vast productivity bonus of all technology since 1940 (when the workweek was frozen) is being amassed beyond the greed of Midas by a tiny minority of the global population - who don't have time to spend it?
[If indeed "U.S. Shoppers Shoulder The Weight of the World," as Gretchen Morgenson's article on p. 3-1 of the 6/20 NYT has it, then think how much faster and fuller would be the "recoveries just starting to be charted in depressed economies overseas" first if U.S. CEOs weren't merging and downsizing U.S. shoppers as fast as they could, but mainly if our shopping was fueled by a centrifugation of wealth to balance our unimaginably astronomical concentration of wealth! Timesizing is the first full economic design to respond to that need in an intuitive, market-oriented way.
[Ed Deming, the economic savior of Japan, said "Abolish fear from the workplace." We agree. As long as we're using job insecurity to control wage raises for the majority while goosing CEO pay beyond spendability, we're absolutely stifling our own markets and strangling our own natural growth rate (which, for you ecologists, does not have to be environment-bashing "doing more with more" but can easily be converted to environment-healing "doing more with less").
[What Greenspan should be obsessing about - he mentions it only occasionally - is inflation in the stock market - because that is a dangerous symptom of the periodic bubble of wealth concentration that finally reaches the point where it actually suctions the markets away from its own mega investments and ... Crash.]

[NYT's readers debate locus of prejudices toward longer hours.]
6/20/99 Married, With Children: The Workplace Benefits
• ...Married employees...are penalized in terms of promotion and pay raises for being unable to work long hours...., Letter to the Business editor by Karen Clark of Metuchen NJ, New York Times, p. 3-7bu.
• ...What much of the business world would rather leave unsaid [is] the expectation that single, childless workers will work harder [longer hours] than their married counterparts while receiving far less from their employers, particularly in benefits. However, [this only holds true for women at the top of the business world, because for top executives] being married [for men] helps a career [while] it is often assumed that a career is not, or should not, be the primary focus of a married woman..., Letter to the Business editor by Deborah Pringal of Washington, NYT, 3-7BU.
[Two points. First. This problem is solved by giving up on our outworn skimming-charity-jobcreation approach to social remediation and transitioning over to a worksharing approach that taxes skimming, denecessitates charity, and makes it so much easier to earn a good living in fewer hours that the clash between career and family becomes academic. "More family time for higher family values" is not just a political slogan for Timesizing. It really delivers. How can it deliver more pay for less work (= fewer hours)? Two reasons. #1. Productivity is not the problem because technology is taking care of that beyond our wildest dreams of 100 years ago. #2. Pay is much more a matter of skill supply and demand, alias skill surplus and shortage, than of productivity, just the same as prices are. Remember Cabbage Patch and Elmo dolls? - high prices due to pure scarcity relative to demand. Timesizing automatically shares the natural work appropriately to our rising technology levels, as indicated by our comprehensive under-employment rate (unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons, forced part-time and "self-employment"...). By spreading the natural market-demanded work across EVERYONE, there is no "army of unemployed" to depress wages. Healthy wage raises for the vast majority result, not just regardless of shorter hours but paradoxically because of them. The economy goes from nervous, stifled bubble to unbelievable, solid boom with precedents only after catastrophes like the Black Death (1348) and World War II (which worked by withdrawing labor hours from the job market by killing people, not simply by defining, reducing and enforcing a maximum workweek). Inflation is blocked by defining the limit on the workweek as a reinvestment threshold instead of an absolute, stifling "stop work here everybody!" The gear change required at this point means that many people unleash deflationary incentive (love to work) as employers/employees reinvest their overtime profits/earnings in hiring and training. See phases two and three of the Timesizing program or buy the book Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]
[Second point. Karen Clark brushes against another vital question.]
...Why should anyone lament that companies offer health benefits to workers'...children?... The fact is that some of us choose to have children - and that it is beneficial to society as a whole for our children to be raised well.
[Let's go back one step and unearth Karen's glossed-over more-basic assumption that -
...It is beneficial to society as a whole..\..that some of us choose to have children....
[This can no longer be assumed. The considerations are -
• overpopulation, usually felt as ecological constraints - but the problem lies in us, not nature
• "some of us...have children" - no, LOTS of us have children. "Ecological limits" means "overpopulation" means TOO MANY of us have TOO MANY children, OK? So we don't buy Karen's implication that a non-problematic number of people are having children.
• "some of us choose to have children" - no, we suspect that many Americans still fall into having children rather than choosing to have children because that's the default, and that globally, most people fall into having children rather than choosing to because that's the default. The next millennium and probably the next 2-3 centuries will see the the reversal of this default - i.e., the design and implementation of the reversal of this default setting on reproduction, which now and throughout all previous history and prehistory has been set to REPRODUCE. Why will this reverse? Because we have no choice. And human beings have often been very good at changing for their own survival when they have no choice. The linguistic, cultural and economic subsidies on reproduction are already being examined and reversed. This will continue and expand, and will be traumatic for many.
[We are moving our basic social unit
• from the reproductive pair to the productive person,
• from the procreative couple to the creative individual.
[In other words, we are moving from family to friends as the important people in life. Even Jesus hinted at this huge approaching switch 2000 years ago in his rarely quoted rap about "I have come to set son against father and daughter against mother..." (Matt.10:35). What else can it mean that in Christ "there is no Jew nor Greek, no slave nor free, no male nor female..." (Gal.3:28) and that "when they rise from the dead [people] neither marry nor are given in marriage but are as the angels in heaven" (Mark 12:25)? Best quote on this: "'Who is my mother? and who are my brothers?' And he indicated his disciples and said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father who is is heaven, they are my brother, and sister, and mother.'" (Matt.12: 48-50). In other words, the group of like-minded people "canoeing" down the river together are "family." Significantly, the next three Letters to the Business Editor take up this theme - ]
• ...Married people do need us singles. What other group foots the bill for the rest of the country without speaking out on its own behalf? by Frank Post of Brooklyn, NYT, BU(3)-38.
• ...The discrimination in the workplace [against marrieds] pales in comparison to what singles face at the Federal, state and local government levels. Tax laws are written to benefit married couples and families (the marriage penalty notwithstanding). [Childless singles] are excluded from the...deductions, child tax credits, earned income credits, adjusted tax tables, etc., that make up our Federal and, in some cases, state income tax codes.... Single childless property owners are compelled through local taxes to subsidize schools to the same or greater extent than the typical family that utilizes that benefit. Lawmakers pander to [marrieds] with rhetoric promising to "ease the burden facing American families today."... Who do you suppose will have to take up the slack?... Opting for marriage/children is a personal choice, not a constitutional right. The state should not discriminate against the single or childless. by Paul Gavin of Dracut MA, NYT, BU(3)-38.
• [Bear in mind, a whole different approach to family values is -
High-quality children from high-quality parents, i.e.,
Intensely wanted children from highly motivated parents, i.e.,
No subsidies for parenting, none at all.
Actual birthing and childrearing is fast becoming, like sex, politics, and religion, a hobby. It is no longer necessary to society or the world, - quite the contrary. It is becoming a danger. And what government should be providing is free contraception in a wide variety of methods, colors and flavors, in easily operable dispensers on every street corner in the land. Let those who, in Karen's words, "choose to have children" and presumably, like any other hobby, have the lion's share of the pleasures therefrom, pay the entire costs therefor. Only the most motivated will choose this expensive hobby and you can bet that the quality of both parents and children will rise, without government preaching about "family values" and huge budget lines for drug wars, etc. etc. etc. And schools - those cost-shouldering, entirely optional, hobby-pursuing parents will be all over the schools and teachers that they are paying for all on their own, and the whole problem of low-quality education will disappear.
[What is the one big problem with this scenario? The widening income gap. Alias, unlimited concentration of wealth. Rich people can have kids and still be louzy parents, because they can hire platoons of nannies, governesses, tutors, mentors, childcarers, and what have you. Income and wealth need to be balanced before we can really yank the breeding subsidies, and we must never yank anything but pursue gradualism in all things.
[But then, our series of economic balancing programs, starting with Timesizing, lays out in general terms the easiest long-term series of gradual, well-designed balancing programs for skills, employment, income, and wealth (and payments and debt). The first in the world, as far as we know. And there are further dimensions to balance. It's really an unending process. Stay tuned for our book. So far, we've only got Timesizing, Not Downsizing into the shipping docks.]

[And let's not forget the last Letter - ]
...At least single or childless workers have more control over their time..., by Larry Armstrong of Spokane, NYT, BU-38.
[unless there's a heavy pressure to work longer hours, especially if it comes from within, and indeed Larry continues his sentence...]
...have more control over their time - and the potential to do more work if they choose. As someone who has been married for 21 years and is childless, I am glad I can make such choices about work. Still, it would be nice to gain a little more respect in the workplace....
[Larry evidently has not realized the critical link between his (and many others') choosing to do more work - and flooding national and global job markets - and the lack of respect for this dirt-common and dirt-cheap commodity, labor, aka human working hours, aka flat-waged and salaried workers, flat for the last 30 years ever since the labor shortage of the World War II killing fields was offset and then overwhelmed by the baby boom and the entry of women into the job market and by wave after miraculous wave of labor-saving technology. Larry baby, we need a system that tells us at what point in the workweek we start contributing to aggregate labor surplus and depressing our own pay. And the only such system we know of, on the shelf and ready to go today at the dawn of the 3rd millennium, is Timesizing.]

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