September 2010 dooms du jour

Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

hopes/dooms du jour,
September, 2010
[Commentary] ©2010 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 117, Harvard Sq PO, Cambridge MA 02238 USA (617) 623-8080 - HOMEPAGE

wed-thu

9/29-30/2010

::: triweekly updates (archives) -

TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work'

-
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

Sharing The Pain Of Layoffs Means Losing Fewer Jobs, 9/29 HuffingtonPost.com
HERNDON, Va. - ..Studies show that even those who find work again never fully bounce back. Similarly, when the recession ends and sales go back up again, companies that laid people off have to deal with considerable hiring and training costs. So wouldn't it be great if there was some way to limit the number of people who got laid off, even in a deep recession? As it happens, there is. It's called work sharing... The basic idea is that rather than lay off a portion of their work force, employers would reduce the hours of all workers... - see whole article under today's date.

German jobless rate drops to lowest since 1992, 9/30 Reuters via FOXBusiness.com
NUREMBERG, Germany - .."Numbers in short-time work are on the decline and temporary employment is already more or less back at pre-crisis levels of mid-2008 again... - see whole article under today's date.

Jobless rate falls unexpectedly - The Live Register fell in September for the first time since February, 9/29 IrishTimes.com
DUBLIN, Ireland - ..Small Firms' Association..Director Avine McNally said the annual increase of 5.4% showed the market was still facing challenges, with many workers on short time working or reducing working hours. "Jobs have to be the number one priority – livelihoods, individuals and families are being affected every day by reduced working hours, short time working and the uncertainty about future employment," she said... - see whole article under today's date.
[Then stop straining to maintain a low-tech workweek in the high-tech age and redefine "full time" downward - it's happening anway; it might as well happen the right way - Moses did not mean the six 12-hour-day workweek he brought down from Mount Sinai to last forever!]

So shorter hours and worksharing are happening anyway, but not the best way. The argument that work is infinite because human desires are infinite ignores the absence of infinite money to satisfy those desires or pay for that work and the increasing scarcity of good 40-hr/wk jobs to maintain wages and spending in the age of robotics. Thus, shorter hours is a strategy that is being reinvented hundreds of times a day across the U.S. in this recession and thousands of times a day across the world in both public & private sectors, in every industry, and in a variety of ways. Many countries and U.S. states already have worksharing programs to cushion the transition to permanently shorter workweeks that automatically adjust to our rising levels of productive technology in the Age of Robotics. These programs currently are designed to be temporary. Here's what their permanent program will look like when they finally succumb to the inevitable.

doom du jourtm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)
– face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (above):

cascading ECONOMIC COLLAPSE via $$ funnel-up (archives) - solved by war, or smarter, timesizing -

Dow eases 22.86; Quarter ends today, 9/30 WSJ, C1.
[The ultimate Dowphemism: "eases"...]
..down..0.2%, to 10835.28...

Consumers, CEOs more fearful on economy - For job market, a Catch-22
as Americans hope hiring will pick up and employers wait for shoppers to spend,
9/29 Boston Globe, B8.

European austerity protests roil the continent, 9/30 WSJ. A1 pointer to A8.
[The wealthy's solution to every crisis, never mind it caused it: more austerity for everyone else, extra luxury for themselves. Result? No customers, no markets, no marketable productivity, and no stable investments for...the wealthy and their extra luxury... More pillows for the most pillowed, fewer mattresses for the least pillowed. Third World here we all come - unregulated, downsizing-not-timesizing capitalism is accomplishing faster what it always accused over-regulated makework-not-sharework communism of doing - reducing all to the LCD = lowest common denominator. The only escape? Worksharing (temporary funding) and timesizing (sustainable funding). Meanwhile, speaking of "Third World here we all come" -]

sun-mon-tue 9/26-27-28/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

Bruederle: Germany GDP Growth Close To 3% 'Very Much Assured', 9/28 IMarketnews.com
BERLIN, Germany - ..Germany's "extra large upswing" was only possible because most businesses held onto their staff, helped by the government's subsidies for short-time work... - see whole article under today's date.

Monks: Austerity 'too much, too fast', 9/28 EurActiv.com
BRUSSELS, Euro.Union - ..In some countries they added new schemes, Kurzarbeit, which has being quite successful... In the most successful economies - in Austria, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent in Germany - social dialogue is playing a part in producing some agreed approach to the deficit. The Kurzarbeit schemes have come out of that dialogue process. We would like to see it used much more... - see whole article under today's date.

Welfare-To-Work Program's Demise 'Really Demoralizing', 9/27 HuffingtonPost.com
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - ..Burton and the five other moms at his nonprofit earn $11.03 per hour and work 32 hours a week. They will all be let go come Friday... - see whole article under today's date.
[So the self-vanishing USA can't even maintain its self-supporting-consumer reclamation program at a 32-hour workweek level. This is how "the first shall become last."]

Love of work is losing its lustre, 9/26 Sydney Morning Herald via brisbanetimes.com.au
ADELAIDE, South Australia - ..At 38.9 hours, women in full-time work put in 3.9 fewer hours per week than men... Professor Pocock said surveys had shown a high proportion of Australians considered 35 hours a week to be ideal... - see whole article under today's date.

Work/life balance - Sole traders slash working hours, 9/27 StartupSmart.com.au
PERTH, Western Australia - Sole traders, traditionally seen as the hardest workers in the business world, have cut their working hours back more than any other group in the last 10 years, new research suggests. Bankwest’s Working Times Report found that there has been a three-hour drop in the average working hours of sole traders in the last decade, down to 40.8 hours a week... Business owners are still working far longer hours than their employees, according to Bankwest, with 34% working more than 60 hours a week. However, this has dropped by 5% in the last 10 years. Overall, business owners work an average of 50.7 hours a week, down from 53.3 hours in 2000...

Y so little hard work - VICTORIANS are spending less time in the office than they did a decade ago, 9/26 Herald Sun
MELBOURNE, Vic., Australia - Gen Y is leading the trend away from long working hours. The state's full-time workers put in an average of 41.2 hours a week in the year to August... That's 1.2 hours less than they did a decade ago. It's also a smidgen under the national average of 41.4 hours... - see whole article under today's date.
[Welcome to USA 1939-1940, when the standard workweek max was cut from 42 to 40 hours a week.]

Coffee Smiths return reflects two-way recovery, 9/26 Stuff.co.nz
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand - ..The seven staff were put on slightly shorter hours to enable them to all work at the branch in the western part of the CBD (central business district)... - see whole article under today's date.
[Hours cuts instead of jobcuts are a quite common response to crisis the world over when managers and business schools aren't intent on self-destruction, everyone else first...]

BONUS clip 1 - Putnam hires outside speech therapists to fill vacancies, 9/26 Charleston Gazette via wvgazette.com WINFIELD, W.VA. - ..The two LinguaCare therapists will cost the county $75 per hour, and will work a combined 35 hours a week, estimates Putnam County Special Education Director Annette Pratt
... [35 hrs/wk is quite common and acceptable for Americans, but not for those Lazy French!]

BONUS clip 2 - NORC [National Opinion Research Center] of Chicago hiring Field Interviewers locally, 9/26 Examiner.com
CHICAGO, Illin. - ..For this current Field Interviewer position you will work 25-30 hours per week... [Shorter hours is just fine when it lets U.S. employers avoid paying "full time" benefits and further weaken consumption, marketable productivity and sustainable investment...]

States raised taxes by the largest amount in some 30 years.., 9/28 WSJ, A1:2 pointer to A1:5, A4.
..roiling voters and complicating the debate over Bush tax cuts.

GE set a venture with a Harbin Power subsidiary to make and supply wind turbines to China customers, 9/28 WSJ, A1 pointer to B3.

doom du jourtm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)
– face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (above):

looting- and layoff-triggering MERGERS in the news (archives) -
Mergers&acquisitions (M&As) provide a last resort for incompetent CEOs and a highway to monopoly - Management's
economy-shrinking merger skills need replacement by economy-growing workspreading skills - Real CEOs don't do 'M&As' -

SouthWest Airlines agrees to buy AirTran for $1.4 billion, the first major merger between discount carriers, 9/28 WSJ, A1 pointer to B1.

growth-choking DOWNSIZING in the news (archives) - all reversible by a shift to timesizing -

The largest number of bank failures in nearly 20 years has eliminated jobs, accelerated a drought in lending and left the industry's survivors with more power to squeeze customers,
9/27 Wall St Journal, A1 pointer to C1.
[Well, that should speed up the effects of the industry's Kevorkian strategy on itself.]

Outsourcing fairly healthy public libraries, town hears a roar - Saving [rich] taxpayers money by replacing [unspecified##of] unionized workers,
by David Streitfeld, 9/27 NYT, A1.
Santa Clarita, Calif. - A private company in Maryland has been taking over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas...
Now the company, Library Systems & Services [any relation to rigged-voting-machine-manufacturer Electronic Systems and Software?], has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city...

BANKRUPTCY tsunami in the news (archives) - staunched only by risky war or safe timesizing -

Banks keep failing, no end in sight - Since WaMu fell, 279 lenders have collapsed; lost jobs, curtailed lending and the big get bigger, 9/27 Wall St Journal, C1.

cascading ECONOMIC COLLAPSE via $$ funnel-up (archives) - solved by war, or smarter, timesizing -

Los Angeles reported record 113 degree temperature as a heat wave baked California,
9/28 WSJ, A1 pointer to A8.

The Dow industrials closed down 48.22 points, or 0.44%, at 10812.04 as investors sold financial stocks, 9/28 WSJ, A1 pointer to C5.
[The pyramidal bubble inflates haltingly again...]

Structure of excuses - Using fake problems to block real solutions [to mass unemployment], op ed by Paul Krugman, 9/27 NYT, A21.
[And we hope he makes the direct connection with weakened consumer markets, weakened marketable productivity and weakened investment opportunity.]

Depositors continue to play it safe with their money.., 9/26 Boston Sunday Globe, A1 pointer to G1.
..despite the historically low interest rates being offered by banks.

Currency union teeters, 'Mr.Euro' is forced to act, 9/27 WSJ, A1.
..Jean-Claude Trichet...
[Currency union is premature until you've balanced worktime per person and the three big monetary variables, income per person, wealth per person, and credit per person, and btw gone thru all the concomitant linguistic unification and skill liquification.]

fri-sat 9/24-25/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

Brown suggests work sharing instead of furloughs or layoffs, 9/24 Sacramento Bee (blog) via blogs.sacbee.com
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Asked which he preferred to use with state employees in a cash crisis, furloughs or layoffs, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown this afternoon had another idea altogether: work sharing, which pays partial unemployment benefits to people whose hours have been reduced... Brown was governor when the program, the first of its kind in the nation, was enacted in 1978... - see whole article under today's date.

Office overtime stresses the heart, 9/25 DeccanChronicle.com
CHENNAI, India - ..An international study has shown that that those who worked 10- or 11-hour days were up to 60% more likely to suffer heart disease or die younger than those who worked shorter hours... - see whole article under today's date.

'Macro' forces in market confound stock pickers, 9/24 Wall St. Journal, A1.
[How hard can it be? Deepening labor surplus leads to weakening consumer markets, leading to less marketable productivity, leading to fewer sustainable investments (let alone profitable ones).
Why is it happening? Because the postwar babyboomers grew up and in the 1970s, replaced the labor surplus of the Great Depression. Wages plateau'd and began slowly sinking. Fatuous business schools and CEOs started divesting from their employment base in the name of Efficiency, but that of course meant divesting in their own foundations in the consumer base and the consumer markets, and slowing the velocity of monetary circulation. Now these bozos look around and think it's just an unfortunate Act of God, when they themselves engineered it, by pursuing Efficiency in terms of fewer employees (and consumers!) instead of merely in terms of fewer working hours with the same number of employees and consumers, or more. Dumba dumbdumb.]

Credit unions bailed out - U.S. backs $30 billion in bonds to stabilize key institutions, 9/25 WSJ, A1.
[Credit unions are chickenfeed compared to the real "key institutions" that need stabilizing, namely the consumer base and the "employment basement." How to easily do both at once? Adjust the workweek downward, as we did informally from 1840 to 1938 and formally from 1938 to 1940, before insanely freezing it ever since despite wave after wave of worksaving technology and new employees (women, immigrants, illegal entrants, offshore "employees" in outsourced jobs...).]

Durable-goods demand fell, slowed by steep drops in airplanes and cars..., 9/25 WSJ, A1 pointer to wsj.com
New home sales stalled.

wed-thu 9/22-23/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

Safe at Siemens, 9/23 Financial Times via ft.com
FRANKFURT, Germany - ..In line with the German tradition of co-operation between labour and management, this wide agreement on job security acknowledges the sacrifices in pay cuts and short-time working that staff made through and after the financial crisis... - see whole article under today's date.

Siemens Agrees To Minimize Layoffs While Restructuring, 9/22 Wall Street Journal via wsj.com
FRANKFURT, Germany - ..Siemens has agreed to avoid layoffs wherever possible by shifting personnel between locations and resorting to short-time work programs... - see whole article under today's date.

So shorter hours and worksharing are happening anyway, but not the best way. The argument that work is infinite because human desires are infinite ignores the absence of infinite money to satisfy those desires or pay for that work and the increasing scarcity of good 40-hr/wk jobs to maintain wages and spending in the age of robotics. Thus, shorter hours is a strategy that is being reinvented hundreds of times a day across the U.S. in this recession and thousands of times a day across the world in both public & private sectors, in every industry, and in a variety of ways. Many countries and U.S. states already have worksharing programs to cushion the transition to permanently shorter workweeks that automatically adjust to our rising levels of productive technology in the Age of Robotics. These programs currently are designed to be temporary. Here's what their permanent program will look like when they finally succumb to the inevitable.

doom du jourtm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)
– face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (above):

BANKRUPTCY tsunami in the news (archives) - staunched only by risky war or safe timesizing -

Blockbuster reel nears end of its bankruptcy filing,
9/22 Wall St Journal, B1.
..over $900m in debt...

cascading ECONOMIC COLLAPSE via $$ funnel-up (archives) - solved by war, or smarter, timesizing -

Investors dumped the dollar and bought Treasuries and gold in response to the prospect of further actions by the Fed.., 9/22 WSJ, A1 pointer to C1.

The prospect of further Treasury buying by the Federal Reserve continued to drive financial markets [ie: economic cosmetics], pushing gold to a record high and beating down the dollar.., 9/23 WSJ, A1 pointer to C1.
..The Dow industrials dropped 21.72 points, ir 0.2%, to close at 10739.31.

The U.S. must sell its GM stocks at an average price of $133.78 to recoup its investment in the car maker.., 9/23 WSJ, A1 pointer to B3.
[Again, WHY is the U.S. government mucking into the stock market? # shares? -]
..304m GM shares, a 61% stake...
[current price? not given in article, only the information that $133.78 is -]
$39.15 greater than the highest level shares in the old GM ever reached during the boom in pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles in 2000...
[Even pure Capitalism would be better than our current crock of suicidal funneling (and resulting decirculation) of the money supply to the tiny population that already has the most, in fact, astronomical levels of, money.]

sun-mon-tue 9/19-20-21/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

Young employees could force dealers to get a life, 9/20 Automotive News (blog) via autonews.com
LAS VEGAS, Nev. - I just got back from a finance and insurance conference in Las Vegas where I bumped into a dealer who used to be open seven days a week but is now closed on Sundays... The dealer told me his shorter workweek has nothing to do with the old “blue laws” requiring businesses to close on the Sabbath. It’s a response to new hires. He said he’s hiring more new college graduates from Generation Y, those born in the 1980s and 1990s. And if he required his younger employees to work Sunday, they’d quit... - see whole article under today's date.
[Well, that's sortof hopeful - like if this was 1910 and we were still rejoicing about cutting down to an 8hrX6day= 48 hour workweek... Has this dealer ever heard of...shifts? But market forces will not force him or any other employer to grok "a life" until there is city- or state- or nation-wide workweek reduction.]

CEO Hans-Georg Harter: In 2010, ZF has returned to profitability - Workforce swells by over 2,000 by late August, 9/21 BYMnews.com (press release)
GERMANY, Euro.Union - ..Kurz-arbeit, Germany's state-subsidized short-time-work program, has now been almost entirely phased out across the Group... - see whole article under today's date.

Child Care a Concern as South Korea Battles Low Birth Rate, 9/19 (9/15) Tom Wilt News via ThirdAge.com
SEOUL, So.Korea - Child care and pregnancy health is a concern for South Korea, as it is facing a chronic low birth rate, says it will allow women to ask for shorter working hours so they can better raise their children... - see whole article under today's date.

No relaxation in working hours during night shift, 9/20 KhaleejTimes.com
DUBAI, U.A.E. - (Q) Is a worker supposed to work eight hours at night shift as is the case with the day shift? In my home country [which is??], we work only six to seven hours at night. Please, clarify.
(A) As per the UAE labour law, in normal circumstances, the daily working hours of an employee is eight hours whether he is working during day or night... - see whole article under today's date.

Is America going Third World? - Bridges crumbling; Schools and firehalls closed; Streetlights turned off - The U.S. decline goes far beyond job losses and public debt, 9/20 Maclean's magazine of Canada, cover story ("Nice Catch!" credit to Maurice Sullivan of Ottawa for this headline).
[And yet is all starts with those job losses and that downsizing, not timesizing, or preliminary worksharing.]

The Recession was Great, the recovery was not, 9/21 Toronto Globe, B1.
[A "recovery" only for academics concerned about defining-away "recession" as quickly as possible. A more accurate metaphor for our situation is to picture a diagonally downward spiral, where every up-arc is hailed by the damage-controllers as "recovery," never mind if it's a jobless recovery, or a nascent recovery, or a stumbling recovery, or whatever -]
18 months = length of the recession that started in Dec.2009...the longest downturn since the Second World War
16 months = length of contractions of 1973-75 and 1981-82
9.7% = U.S. unemployment in 2010
[with longer and longer periods of unemployment per employee]
8 million = workers who lost their jobs as a result of the recession
[with little hope of quick rehiring or rehiring at same or better pay]

Economists' fairy tale world of market prognostication, 9/20 Toronto Globe, B1
..David Orrell, a Canadian mathematician..has delved deeply into the world of economics and.."like unicorns, the plot..is a mythological beast that is often drawn, but never actually seen," he argues in his latest book, Economyths... "Current economic theory is less a science than an ideology peculiar to a certain period of history, which may well be nearing an end," he concludes... Many of the discredited economic ideas we know today [are] starting to crumble now. When they break, the whole thing is going to come down and you're going to see a different approach coming through."
[Yes, it will be called Worktime Economics, and it will be based on Timesizing.]
He compares the market crashes to large earthquakes... The probability of having one of extremely high magnitude is more than zero... If economists brought their current tool kit to geophysics [=seismology], they would have to conclude that earthquakes don't exist \because they believe\ markets are..inherently stable, rational,..efficient... Shaking [earth] would be interpreted as nothing more than a low-level hum that could be safely ignored... "The problem is that they pretended to be able to measure risk." ..They underestimated it. And that in turn made the system riskier. "So the issue is not that they didn't see the crisis coming, but that they help make it happen."

Bank of Montreal courts the ultra-rich - Retail financial giant bulks up private banking unit to serve rarefied segment as industry prepares for massive shift in wealth [upwards?], 9/20 Toronto Globe, B3.
[Same as Chase 15 years ago. More and more hungry wheelerdealers crowding round fewer and fewer people with huger and huger coagulations of money, far beyond what they can spend and even beyond what they can sustainably invest.]

The Conservatives [in Canada] are running on empty, 9/21 Toronto Globe, B15.
[Just like both parties in the U.S.! So what do they do? -]

Harper government spent a record $130-million on advertising last year, 9/21 Toronto Globe, A4.
..a 64% increase in the government's marketing [budget] in a time of unprecedented deficits...
Promoting the governmental action plan ate up $49.5 million, the biggest share of the budget. [photo caption]
[Thus democracy, and vital negative feedback that indicates need for change and adaptation, slips away, and the most adaptive, futuristic nations slip behind, and "the first become last."]

fri-sat 9/17-18/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

Library Visitors Upset By Decreased Hours - Fridays Or Saturdays Cut From Branches, 9/18 WRTV Indianapolis via theindychannel.com
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Library patrons said Saturday they are unhappy with the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library's plan to shorten hours. Beginning Oct. 3, branches will begin closing on either Fridays or Saturdays as the library attempts to trim its budget, 6News' Grace Trahan reported. The central library will be closed on Thursdays, but will stay open on both Friday and Saturday... - see whole article under today's date.

Halifax: Time for municipal leaders, workers to do something for Joe Average Citizen, 9/17 GateHouse News Service via PatriotLedger.com
HALIFAX, Mass. - ..Joe Average Citizen is the first to feel the pain of a poor economy. Layoffs, salary reductions, cut hours – the list is endless. But he pulls himself up by his bootstraps and gets on with it... - see whole article under today's date.

More Americans living in poverty; losing their homes - U.S. urged to keep funding flowing, 9/17, National Post FP1
43.6M..Americans on or under the poverty line, a 16-year high ..- U.S. poverty at highest level since 1994
338,836 U.S. foreclosure filings for August, up 4% from July
[As the once-strong U.S. consumer base weakens, starved by a downsized rather than just timesized employment basement, the U.S. economy becomes the poor man of the advanced economies as it sinks closer and closer to the backward economies and the U.S. taxpayer is on the hook for more and more billions of decirculating dollars to flatter the egos of the top .01%. The once-great USA is becoming a nation of homeless, the government the proprietor of a huge homeless shelter that must "keep funding flowing" = pathetic.]

Flaherty [Canada's finance minister] pressured for more stimulus - Tepid U.S. a drag - 'We still face a deficit problem', 9/17 National Post, FP1,FP5.
[Ha, Canada's deficit problem is nothing compared to the US's. And still our concentrated media ownershp assigns their columnists to deny the obvious -]

The myth of inequality - There has been no increase in inequality since 1987, by Terence Corcoran, 9/17 National Post, FP11.
[No substantiating data. Just fighting words, attempts at ridicule, quotes from rightwing thinktanks and a graph of taxes paid by top 10% of earners, which could well argue against this columnist if he gives figures on their "earnings." Then he quotes a contradiction of his own subhead -]
.."Over the three decades [from 1979 to 2007] the alternative [smaller] gap measure grew at an annual rate barely one-10th as fast as the conventional [larger] gap measure.".\.
[But it grew. So what is his argument based on? The first thing he mentions is -]
The American public doesn't quite buy the Piketty-Saez inequality scare...
[Piketty and Saez put out an influential graph, but who is this "American public" of whom he speaks?]
The Tea Party movement seems to be more concerned about taxes on the middle class than the rise of inequality...
[Oh, now the Tea Party movement, who get their information from rightwing talkshow hosts, accurately represent the whole diverse American public? - never mind that greater inequality and higher taxes on the middle class go hand in hand as taxcuts on the wealthy proliferate - the less taxation on the upper class, with greater $concentration (and inequality), the more taxes on everyone else = the middle and lower classes. His second basis of argument is -]
The graph itself reeks of implausibility...
[Since when has someone's idea of plausibility been scientific evidence? And what does he find so implausible?]
The huge dip during the Second World War, the flat-line through the 1940s to 1970s, and the sudden escalation over the last 30 years...
[Demographers would not find this implausible. There was a huge labor surplus during the Depression with attendant hyperconcentration of the nation's money supply in the topmost brackets. The labor surplus was being cured by the establishment and reduction of nationwide 44-hour workweek in 1938 (unemployment 19.0%), 1939 (17.2%) and 1940 (14.6%) and then by sending huge numbers of surplus labor hours overseas packaged as soldiers and killing and maiming many of them. A perceived labor shortage back home got employers bidding against one another for good help and the money concentration of the Depression got centrifuged back to the non-rich brackets. The boys came home, begat the "postwar baby boomers" and while they were growing up, inequality/$concentration was a flat-line. But when they entered the job market in the 1970s and replaced the labor surplus of the Depression, presto, "the sudden escalation over the last 30years." What could be more plausible? He seems not at all to notice the corelation between lower inequality and "wartime prosperity" - appears during the First World War as well. Later he discounts the gap because -]
..Only the top portion of the income ladder recorded huge gains in pre-tax income...
[as if that huge amount itself can't diminish the spending power circulated by the consumer base, decelerate the velocity of currency circulation and undermine its own investment foundation in marketable productivity. Then we get to his real agenda -]
Even though the Piketty-Saez version of income inequality history may be shaky [well, it is or isn't it?!], it is being used explicitly to promote higher taxes on the rich...
[He has a graph from the OECD that shows the top 10% of U.S. earners (definition?) pay a higher percentage of all taxes than many other countries. But he doesn't supply comparative figures on money concentration in the top 10% brackets, which is among the highest of many advanced countries (though quite common in Third World countries). So again, this graph could actually be an argument for humungous inequality. Then he gets back to the old rhetoric of -]
..punish the rich and reward the poor.\.
[It never occurs to him to why redistribution in this direction might be vitally necessary. And the answer, of course, is that to maintain the value of their wealth, the rich need not just productivity, but marketable productivity to invest in. And that requires markets, and that requires hundreds of millions of nonrich people spending all or a huge fraction of their incomes, unlike the tens of thousands of super-rich who spend but an infinitesimal fraction of their incomes. In short, as money redistributes up the income scale, it changes from spending power to investing power and greatly decelerates in velocity of circulation. There goes marketable productivity and steady reliable investments. What do we get instead? A downward spiral staircase of bubbles, each one popping as we fully land on it. The P/E ratio bubble of the early 90s, the dot-com bubble of the late 90s, the housing bubble of the early 00s, the bailout bubble of the late 00s... Is this what Corcoran and his backers really want? We call it the Black Hole economy, where even "trickle down" is overwhelmed by The Great Leak Upward.]
Tax the rich, keep taxes high, don't cut taxes: that's the underlying message...
[except that if we had higher taxes on the rich, we could cut taxes on everyone else. We could, for example, abolish sales taxes, which are just about the stupidest thing wealthy "conservatives" ever supported, since they know from St. Milton (Friedman) that you get less of whatever you tax (and we could well afford less coagulated riches!) and with sales taxes we're getting less sales volume - critical for the massive marketable productivity the wealthy NEED to invest in sustainably. So we have another dumb pundit arguing to sacrifice, for the sake of the pecking order of the super-rich, the consumer base and the economic dynamism and sustainability of huge and rapid currency circulation. Good news for the rest of the world, which after the self-destructive and undemocratic (but extremely pushy) Bush years, is rightfully dubious about all recent things American.]
Why..does inequality of incomes..even matter in a market economy where no kings rule by force and no aristocracy plunders the people?
[What planet does he live on? Our CEOs are corporate kings with absolute power, no longer threatening our lives but certainly threatening our livelihoods with mergers and downsizings. Our wealthy are a plutocracy that as peacetime wears on, plunder the people more and more. They adjust the little money sprinklers in the economy from Spray to Stream and point them up to them - the unreformed "tax reform" of the late 80s, the repeal of Glass-Steagall of the late 90s, the toughening of the bankruptcy laws of the early 00s... The charging money for things that used to be free: meals and luggage on airlines, water, bags at supermarkets - Greyhound for several years recently even charged customers for picking up their own Web-bought tickets. And check the costs that have been transfered to the consumer base = we have to do our own gas-pumping, travel-agenting, supermarket-cashiering, book editing (and often printing)... It's all in line with an increasingly nervous plutocracy trying to squeeze just as much money out of a consumer base weakening by the funneling of ever more of M1, the nation's money supply, up to an ever smaller number of Americans. Being rich may be a good thing, but as Mom used to say, you can get too much of anything. The phrase we should be worrying about is money concentration, not inequality. The questions we should be asking are, Is there a point in the concentration of a nation's money supply when it starts to undermine itself? and How do we find that point? and How do we reverse that concentration as much as possible by market forces? Our answer is, restore the perceived labor shortage of wartime prosperity the smart way, by workweek reduction and create a real labor-employment balance where neither side is undisciplined by a steep power gradient. In the long term, it's management discipline that's the problem, not labor discipline, because we need marketable productivity for sustainable investments and wealth, and not just productivity, and that requires markets, and they require consumers, and they require well-paying jobs. So let's engineer full employment and markets, regardless of how short or intermittent a workweek that may require to activate all our consumers, and NOT with government transfers which Corcoran, a strange "conservative" indeed, seems to think we should include in earned income figures. Oh and by the way, isn't Corcoran's whole argument refuted by the headline on the front of this section, noted above: "More Americans living in poverty; losing their homes?" Note also this same-section headline -]

Changes coming to China - Manufacturing reshapes itself - Low-cost labour no longer sustaining industrial giants, 9/17 National Post, FP3.
[Yep, sooner or later you need markets, not just low-cost labor or robots, because they don't buy much stuff. And if you've gorged on the markets provided by other countries' high-cost labor that did buy lotsa stuff, and in the process destroyed their high-cost labor, you've shot yourself in the foot and are shooting your way up your leg to your sustainability-enabling crotch.]

Will rally G20 for stronger yuan, Geithner tells anxious Senators, 9/17 National Post, FP3.
[The G20 ain't the ones that need rallying on this. It's China's rulers, and with billion$ in US Treasuries, they don't feel any need at all. Bug them and they'll break you financially cuz they're your new central bank.]

wed-thu 9/15-16/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

ADP on European Working Hours: A Critical HR Issue, 9/16 Business Wire via MarketWatch.com (press release)
PARIS, France - ..Do less productive countries work less? "Absolutely not!" answers Chris Brewster, Director of Henley's HR Centre of Excellence. "The countries that work longer hours are the less productive countries"... - see whole article under today's date.

Higher workload for pilots could put flyers at risk, 9/15 HindustanTimes.com
DELHI, India -- ..Normally, airlines cannot ask pilots to work more than nine hours at a stretch in a day and not more than 30 hours a week... - see whole article under today's date.

How 3 firms survived the recession, 9/15 Orange County Register via OCregister.com
ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. - ..Greg Wingert cut hours and jobs as business slowed and recently merged his company with a competitor to save both entities... - see whole article under today's date.

McCullough-Hyde cuts hours, jobs, 9/16 OxfordPress.com
OXFORD, Ohio — McCullough-Hyde Memorial Hospital has eliminated jobs and cut hours — affecting 33 employees — to save an estimated $1.1 million annually as the hospital works to improve its financial stability. An equivalent of 22 full-time positions have been eliminated, representing a 4.8 percent reduction of the total annual man-hours budget, according to CEO Bryan Hehemann... - see whole article under today's date.
[So 33-22= 11 employees have had their hours cut instead of additional eliminated positions. At least Timesizing webmaster Phil Hyde's namesake hospital is not completely stupid.]

Census: 1 in 7 Americans lives in poverty, by Hope Yen, 9/16 Associated Press via WCPO.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The ranks of the working-age poor climbed to the highest level since the 1960s as the recession threw millions of people out of work last year, leaving one in seven Americans in poverty. The overall poverty rate climbed to 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million people, the Census Bureau said...

Fannie, Freddie could cost govt $53 billion through 2020, 9/16 Reuters via TheUSDaily.com

sun-mon-tue 9/12-13-14/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

Working while sick? Study finds even doctors do it, 9/14 The Associated Press via google.com/hostednews/ap
CHICAGO, Illin. - ..Misplaced dedication and fear of letting other doctors down [never mind vulnerable patients] are among reasons the researchers cited as possible explanations... The council, which accredits hospital residency programs, has proposed revisions on residents' work hours and time off to reduce sleep deprivation and the chances for medical errors. The work week limit would remain at 80 hours... - see whole article under today's date.

Gleanings from the FAA's Fatigue Proposal, 9/13 Wall Street Journal (blog) via blogs.wsj.com
WASHINGTON. D.C. - ..Pilots will work slightly more days, but somewhat shorter hours each day, with more scheduled flying and less sitting around... - see whole article under today's date.

Judiciary joins Executive Branch in work hour cuts, but not Legislature - House poised to reject Senate version of fiscal year 2011 budget bill today, by Haidee V. Eugenio, 9/12 SaipanTribune.com
SAIPAN, Northern Marianas - The Judiciary has joined the Executive Branch and autonomous agencies in implementing across-the-board work hour cuts to help bring down government spending to $132 million in fiscal year 2011... - see whole article under today's date.

So shorter hours and worksharing are happening anyway, but not the best way. The argument that work is infinite because human desires are infinite ignores the absence of infinite money to satisfy those desires or pay for that work and the increasing scarcity of good 40-hr/wk jobs to maintain wages and spending in the age of robotics. Thus, shorter hours is a strategy that is being reinvented hundreds of times a day across the U.S. in this recession and thousands of times a day across the world in both public & private sectors, in every industry, and in a variety of ways. Many countries and U.S. states already have worksharing programs to cushion the transition to permanently shorter workweeks that automatically adjust to our rising levels of productive technology in the Age of Robotics. These programs currently are designed to be temporary. Here's what their permanent program will look like when they finally succumb to the inevitable.

doom du jourtm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)
– face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (above):

HOMELESSNESS IN NORTH AMERICA (archives)- sooo unnecessary with full employment via timesizing -

Homelessness problem needs long-term fix, say advocates - [Homeless] housing price tag is $150m [over next 10 years in Canada's capital] - "What you have is, the shelters are becoming people's homes ... There are people living here for 10,15,20 years", 9/14 Ottawa 24 Hours, p.4.

cascading ECONOMIC COLLAPSE via $$ funnel-up (archives) - solved by war, or smarter, timesizing -

Waning economic recovery fuels global uncertainty, 9/13 Wall Street Journal, A1.
[Or maybe not a recovery so much as just the small up-arc of a diagonal downspiral.]

Renewable water on decline: StatsCan, 9/14 QMI Agency via Ottawa 24 Hours, p.8.
..Between 1971 and 2004, the water yield in southern Canada, where 98% of the population lives, fell by an average of 3.5 cubic kilometres a year...

Flash - Overheard, 9/14 24 Hours Ottawa, p.6.
Anti-American sentiment heats up in Iran where 1,000 protesters chanted 'Death to America.'
[These protesters are going to get their wish, thanks to 8 years of the Bush regime (Suicide, Everyone Else First!) and subsequent years of 'Forget real solutions - You don't understand politics!' Our only hope? The slowly spreading state worksharing programs.]

fri-sat 9/10-11/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

The Blue Sky series: Dean Baker's plan to create 9 million jobs, 9/10 voices.WashingtonPost.com (blog)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - ..My favorite is work sharing just because it is so simple, obvious and quick. As Stern points out, this really should not be a big partisan issue... - see whole article under today's date.

Outlook Grim - The Fading Prospects for Recovery in Europe, by Dean Baker, 9/10 CounterPunch.org
WASHINGTON, D.C. - ..Several countries, most notably Germany and the Netherlands, have implemented a policy of work-sharing to offset the reduced demand for labor. In effect, this policy provides businesses with incentives to reduce the number of hours per worker rather than reduce the number of workers on the payroll... - see whole article under today's date.

Workers hope wage restraint will finally pay off, 9/10 Deutsche Welle
BERLIN, Germany - ..Many participated in state-subsidized short-time working programs, called Kurzarbeit, or agreed to forego their holiday bonus payouts... - see whole article under today's date.

Employer can compensate exempt staff for extra work, 9/11 AZcentral.com
PHOENIX, Ariz. - ..Many employees, in the wake of layoffs, are putting in more work hours. Non-exempt employees must be paid for all hours worked and must be paid overtime (1.5 times their regular hourly rate) for any hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek... - see whole article under today's date.
[Another demonstration of the impotence of our current overtime design as an enforcer of the 40-hour line as a maximum for the workweek (instead of the minimum it's become)?]

BONUS excerpt - Traders who skip most of the day - At Briargate Trading, stock market's open and close is all that matters, then golf - 'From 11 to 2, the markets are pretty quiet--what's the point?', by Kristina Peterson, 9/10 Wall St Journal, C1.
NEW YORK, N.Y. - ..Briargate - an anagram of "arbitrage" - isn't the only firm taking an extended recess during the 6 1/2 -hour U.S. trading day. Trading has become increasingly concentrated in the first and last hours of the session. Those two hours now make up more than half of the entire day's trading volume... In August..nearly 58% of NYSE primary volume, up from 45% in August 2005...

The White House car czar -.."F--- the UAW" - Rahm Emanual, Obama chief of staff, 9/11 WSJ, W1.
[This is why American capitalism is in its death throes - decades of bashing its best customers, by both parties.]

The number of U.S. children being raised by grandparents rose sharply in 2008.., 9/10 WSJ, A1 pointer to A6.
..a Census data analysis showed.
[So our downsizing-not-timesizing-fostered labor surplus has ruined the American family. Now we can start on the US dollar -]

Damage that Russia suffered because of the West's financial crisis has prompted Moscow to consider forming closer ties with the EU, 9/11 WSJ, A1.

wed-thu 9/08-09/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

3 Things We Should Learn From Germany, and 3 Things We Shouldn't, 9/9 TheAtlantic.com
NEW YORK, N.Y. - ..Work sharing works. One reason why Germany's unemployment rate hasn't spiked like ours is the German government [AND 20 U.S. states now] pays companies not to fire workers... - see whole article under today's date.

OSHA to Examine Physician Work Hours, 9/07 HealthLeadersMedia.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. - ..In response to a petition filed last week by Public Citizen and others, OSHA said it will examine the need for regulations that would limit the work hours of resident physicians... - see whole article under today's date.

As foreign demand buoys some U.S. companies, others struggle to attract consumers at home,
9/08 WSJ, B1.
[More export industry propaganda - as if Free Trade (and exports) are the mainstay of a grossly trade-deficited economy, not domestic markets - and as if Free Trade (and imports) are anything but a massive hemmorrhage in a grossly trade-deficited economy... oops, mustn't mention that!]

Vital signs - Consumers continue cutting back on credit card use, 9/9 WSJ, A1 graph caption.
[Or are they just maxxed out on all their cards and the great Save-The-World-With-Debt-Based-U.S.-Consumer-Spending but We-Always-Knew-It-Was-Temporary is over?]

sun-mon-tue 9/05-06-07/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

Four-day workweek would create jobs for Americans [- opinion], 9/07 LivingstonDaily.com
BRIGHTON, Mich. - The U.S. government could solve its unemployment problem by offering a bonus to companies that would be willing to reduce their workweeks to four days instead of five... - see whole article under today's date.
[Members of the general public by the thousands are thinking of this approach every day. It's only the professionals, the informed, the sophisticated, who "know it's impossible" - like flying before the Wright brothers, or reaching the moon before NASA... - here's a well-meaning blogger who's bought into the general time blindness and lavishes sarcasm on the idea of lowering workweeks in response to raising technology levels, never mind the most basic freedom is free time -]

Robert Reich: Economic Illiterate, 9/06 RedState.com (blog)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - In which we learn that the forty hour work week and time-and-a-half overtime ended the Great Depression, not the minor squabble called WWII... - see whole article under today's date.
[This blogger probably LOVES the Czech Republic -]

Czech working-hours longest in Europe, 9/07 PressEurop - English (blog) via presseurop.eu/en
PRAGUE, Czech Republic - ..“Czechs spend more time at work than any other EU citizens,” headlines Lidové noviny, which reports on the latest Eurostat figures on average working-hours... - see whole article under today's date.
[But let's not confuse sustainable and necessary workweek reduction with worklife reduction via mandatory retirement and/or early retirement, both unsustainable and wasteful of our most experienced employees, and unnecessary on the shorter workweeks and longer weekends alias WEEKLY retirement that we should ALL have in the Age of Robotics -]

Work Longer - Moi? 9/07 Sky News via blogs.news.sky.com
PARIS, France - ..But even if the retirement age rises French workers still enjoy some of the best working conditions in the world, including a 35 hour week... - see whole article under today's date.
[As humans live longer, a fixed standard worklife and mandatory retirement at any fixed age is a blank check on the taxpayer, and nature abhors a blank check - earlier retirement is wasteful and unsustainable - expecially when it's no longer needed to provide sufficient jobs for the young in the context of workweek reduction. Why no longer needed? Because natural, market-determined jobs without government makework or union featherbedding will be constantly created by cross-training for, sharing and subdividing the immediately available employment, however much it diminishes due to automation and robotization. Why won't wages also diminish? Because the constantly readjusting workweek max and overtime-to-job conversion will prevent wage-reducing labor surplus and even create wage-raising labor shortage in the eyes of employers. Wages systemwide go by supply and demand like everything else, not by hours or productivity. If long hours made for high pay, the Chinese would be the highest paid workforce in the world instead of the lowest. If productivity made for high pay, we'd always be able to buy our own output and never worry about increasing exports. But capitalism has always run sustainably under a labor shortage, and unsustainably under a labor surplus.]

Breadwinning dads scared to ask bosses to cut working hours: Oz study, 9/05 AustralianNews.net
SYDNEY, Australia - ..Fathers struggling to juggle jobs and family responsibilities admit they are scared to ask bosses to reduce their hours for fear it may harm their careers... - see whole article under today's date.

Unemployment Pain Stretched Thinner, 9/05 SeekingAlpha.com (blog)
NEW YORK, N.Y. - ..So what appears to be happening is that employers are lowering working hours below 34 for many, and at the same time they are hiring additional part timers... - see whole article under today's date.

So shorter hours and worksharing are happening anyway, but not the best way. The argument that work is infinite because human desires are infinite ignores the absence of infinite money to satisfy those desires or pay for that work and the increasing scarcity of good 40-hr/wk jobs to maintain wages and spending in the age of robotics. Thus, shorter hours is a strategy that is being reinvented hundreds of times a day across the U.S. in this recession and thousands of times a day across the world in both public & private sectors, in every industry, and in a variety of ways. Many countries and U.S. states already have worksharing programs to cushion the transition to permanently shorter workweeks that automatically adjust to our rising levels of productive technology in the Age of Robotics. These programs currently are designed to be temporary. Here's what their permanent program will look like when they finally succumb to the inevitable.

doom du jourtm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)
– face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (above):

BANKRUPTCY tsunami in the news (archives) - staunched only by risky war or safe timesizing -

Bankruptcy court is latest battleground [cum milch cow] for traders - Profiting from bankruptcy cash..,
9/07 Wall St Journal, A1.

cascading ECONOMIC COLLAPSE via $$ funnel-up (archives) - solved by war, or smarter, timesizing -

Housing woes bring new cry: Let market fall,
9/06 New York Times, A1.

1938 in 2010 - But what will save us now?, op ed by Paul Krugman, 9/06 NYT, A17.
[Same thing that saved us then - gently - by creating a wage&market-boosting labor shortage, before World War II did it faster, bloodier and distractingly - a nationwide workweek max in 1938 of 44 hours, reduced two hours a year for the next two years, so that unemployment went down 2% a year in response (1938, 19.0%; 1939, 17.2%; 1940, 14.6%), spending went up accordingly, and markets along with it. Too bad our Nobel-winning economists have absorbed only time-blind "history" (but time has proved a difficult thing for many people to focus on). Check out Ben Hunnicutt's *Work Without End.]

How to shrink a city - Not every great metropolis is going to make a comeback [ah, why would a "great metropolis" NEED to make a "comeback" unless it's Katrina&Bush-whacked New Orleans??] - Planners consider some radical ways to embrace decline, 9/05 Boston Sunday Globe, C1.
[How about that old favorite rationalization: Schumpeter's "creative destruction"? As for Detroit and Cleveland, all they need is worksharing to reverse decline. As for Youngstown OH or Flint MI, they were never "great cities" in the same league but worksharing and its sustainable form, timesizing, would work for them too.]

fri-sat (th-f news) 9/03-04/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

OSHA Should Dictate Residents' Hours, Group Says, 9/04 MedPageToday.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. - ..The federal government already regulates work hours for a variety of industries, including trucking, aviation, railroad, and maritime transportation... - see whole article under today's date.
[And for all industries using wage workers via the overtime section of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.]

Private Sector Adds 67000 Jobs During Better Than Expected August, 9/03 DailyFinance.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. - ..The average workweek was unchanged at 34.2 hours. A 0.1 hour increase in the workweek generally adds about 100000 jobs to the economy... - see whole article under today's date.
[Then a 0.1 hour decrease in the workweek would also generally add 100,000 jobs to the economy, and it's on this basis that all future sustainable economies will automate full employment and markets. How many jobs do you need this month? No problem. Won't that cut wages? No, because we're avoiding a wage-depressing labor surplus, not walking into it blindfolded, as now. What to do about shortage of qualified candidates? Convert overtime into hiring, or on-the-job training wherever needed. Stop moaning and just DO IT, automatically, if you can possibly unclench your deathgrip on your beloved Faith in Insoluble Problems.]

So shorter hours and worksharing are happening anyway, but not the best way. The argument that work is infinite because human desires are infinite ignores the absence of infinite money to satisfy those desires or pay for that work and the increasing scarcity of good 40-hr/wk jobs to maintain wages and spending in the age of robotics. Thus, shorter hours is a strategy that is being reinvented hundreds of times a day across the U.S. in this recession and thousands of times a day across the world in both public & private sectors, in every industry, and in a variety of ways. Many countries and U.S. states already have worksharing programs to cushion the transition to permanently shorter workweeks that automatically adjust to our rising levels of productive technology in the Age of Robotics. These programs currently are designed to be temporary. Here's what their permanent program will look like when they finally succumb to the inevitable.

doom du jourtm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)
– face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (above):

growth-choking DOWNSIZING in the news (archives) - all reversible by a shift to timesizing -

Royal Bank of Scotland plans to cut 3,500 jobs - More layoffs, despite its first half-year profit since '07, 9/03 NYT, B5.
[Thus conducing to its last half-year profit for awhile.]

too little, too late, too artificial, too arbitrary, too military, too eco-stressing MAKEWORK in the news (archives) - all unnecessary with full employment via temporary worksharing & permanent timesizing -

Gates [the non-Bill one] envisions two or three more years of combat operations in Afghanistan before the U.S. transitions to an advisory role, 9/04 Wall St Journal, A1 pointer to A12.
[Red meat for our desperate weapons manufacturers.]

30 false fronts won contracts for Blackwater, by Risen & Mazzetti, 9/04 NY Times, A1.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Blackwater Worldwide [gawd save us!] created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part [99.999...%] to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the "security" company [LOL] came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq...

Five call firefighters charged with arson - Accused of setting 3 blazes in two towns; were paid to help extinguish the flames, 9/04 Boston Globe, B1.
[You screw up your whole society if you get your time arrangements wrong, for example, by clinging to a precomputer workweek from 1940 while you introduce wave after wave of automation and robotics.]

cascading ECONOMIC COLLAPSE via $$ funnel-up (archives) - solved by war, or smarter, timesizing -

Jobs data provide hope - Market rallies on private-sector gains even as unemployment rate ticks up, 9/04 WSJ, A1.
[Stay tuned for America's next lesson = private-sector gains based on public-sector bankruptcy (over $10 trillion national debt and $1 trillion annual deficit) are not "hope" - and btw, rising unemployment data do not provide "hope." So how did they get bad jobs data to sound hopeful? Piece of cake -]

"Growth" [our quotes] in jobs beats estimates, 9/04 New York Times, front page.
[Just lowball your estimates and presto, guarantee yourself a hopeful-looking headline, no matter how bad the news!]

Employers pushed health costs onto workers - This year, employees absorbed all of the premium increases, 9/03 NYT, B4 insider headers (article starts B1).

How to end the Great Recession - To fix the U.S. economy, we must finally deal with wage inequality, op ed by Robert Reich, 9/03 NYT, A19.
[Gotta give Reich credit for articulating the real problem in the New York Times. The unlimited concentration of the nation's money supply (M1) and the fact that the wealthy spend (and give in charity!) a much smaller fraction of their money than everyone else, and as markets weaken, invest less and less of their money. Reich has not yet articulated and confronted head-on the prevailing assumption that any fraction, however large, of the nation's M1 that is consolidated in the topmost tiny part of the population is fine and good, and even beneficial for the economy at large. But he's coming real close. But the Reichster is as time-blind as ever, trapped in taking an eternal, pre-computer, forty-hour workweek forever for granted despite automation and robotics. Outside-the-box thinking? Not yet... Same with Krugman on the other side of the page -]

The "real" story - What are the lessons of 2009-2010?, op ed by Paul Krugman, 9/03 NYT, A19.
[Do we find a single mention of the spread of state worksharing programs in the USA or the success of Kurz-arbeit in Germany?... Nope, just a reference to Germany actually doing quite a bit of stimulus, implying it's the same as the Keynesian makework Krugman is pushing, and a belittling of Germany's success for not having to surf a burst housing bubble like the U.S. (Germany should apologize for not being as stupid?) and having a GDP that is still further below its pre-crisis peak than American GDP (never mind the military padding in American GDP and German independence from GDP "growth" for sustainability). Then there's a grudging afterthought about German employment -]
..True, Germany has done better in terms of employment - but that's because strong unions and government policy [unidentified as shared work rather than makework] have prevented American-style mass layoffs...
[And this is a Nobel-prizewinning economics pundit who is calling in the first paragraph for "bold and substantive" measures to boost the economy? Hooboy. With pundits like this, who needs dunces? "Put up in a spot where it's easy to see, The cryptic admonishment, T-T-T. When you think how distressingly slowly we climb, it is well to remember that...Things Take Time." (Piet Hein, Grooks.)]

A global economic role awaits Sarkozy of France at the G-20, 9/03 NYT, B1 pointer to B5.
[God save us all, this is the moron who's been trying, against the wishes of his country(wo)men, to weaken French markets and consumption and employment and their foundations in fuller employment and markets via the world's first nationwide 35-hour workweek, by weakening French overtime design and enforcement; this is the nitwit who wanted to copy America in its decade of fastest "creative" self-destruction (LOL), the Bush era, from which we may never recover. The actual inside headline offers more hope -]
France's president may have a tough time selling his G-20 goals, 9/03, NYT, B5 target article.
[His G-20 goals are confined to the financial markets and therefore mere cosmetics for the overall economy anyway.]

Japan counted on cheap yen. Oops -...Euro's slide gives Germany an edge in manufacturing, 9/03 NYT, B1,
[Ironic. Of all the large economies, Germany is the least in need of exports because it has the shortest workweeks and longest vacations and therefore the highest per-capita wages and spending of any of the large economies. In short, it has the best ability to buy its own output. We could have said that about France except for the 35-hr workweek sabotage activities of time-blind Sarkozy. But France is having as hard a time getting rid of Sarkozy as Canada is in getting rid of Harper, or as Britain did in losing Blair, or Aussie Howard...]

wed-thu 9/01-02/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

German unemployment falls - Kurzarbeit impact, 9/01 TheHinduBusinessLine.com
London, Great Britain - ... Kurzarbeit factor - However, perhaps the single biggest factor is the innovative system of Kurzarbeit – or “shorter work” – brought in by the Government during the crisis... - see whole article under today's date.

German unemployment insurance rate, joblessness rate declines, 9/02 Seedol.com
MANILA, Philippines - ..However, the single utmost factor for the success of Germany is the ground-breaking system of Kurzarbeit, also dubbed as “shorter work” that was devised by the government amid the global financial crisis... - see whole article under today's date.

Would more holiday be good for America? by Michael Goldfarb, 9/01 BBC Mobile News World via bbc.co.uk (nice catch, Gail!)
LONDON, England - ..A 2007 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)...looked at 21 of the richest countries in the world, and found that only one, the US, does not impose a legal mandate on employers to provide time off... - see whole article under today's date.
[The USA is looking more and more like the USSR with great chest-beating news control but lousy public education, so Americans are great at increasingly defensive and surly boasting but really have no idea how uncompetitively low their labor standards and living standards are getting - natural when you spend your time bizarrely praising the People's Republic of China and "competing" your way down to Chinese levels, and meanwhile deriding or ignoring Europe (which is only too glad to be ignored by the once-impressive-but-now-self-depressing dinosaur, locked into long working hours and lowering wages in the Age of Robotics - so much for their lip service to Freedom and the Promise of Technology).]

So shorter hours and worksharing are happening anyway, but not the best way. The argument that work is infinite because human desires are infinite ignores the absence of infinite money to satisfy those desires or pay for that work and the increasing scarcity of good 40-hr/wk jobs to maintain wages and spending in the age of robotics. Thus, shorter hours is a strategy that is being reinvented hundreds of times a day across the U.S. in this recession and thousands of times a day across the world in both public & private sectors, in every industry, and in a variety of ways. Many countries and U.S. states already have worksharing programs to cushion the transition to permanently shorter workweeks that automatically adjust to our rising levels of productive technology in the Age of Robotics. These programs currently are designed to be temporary. Here's what their permanent program will look like when they finally succumb to the inevitable.

doom du jourtm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)
– face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (above):

too little, too late, too artificial, too arbitrary, too military, too eco-stressing MAKEWORK in the news (archives) - all unnecessary with full employment via temporary worksharing & permanent timesizing -

Obama declares an end to Iraq combat [read, "makework"] mission - Renews support for Afghanistan effort..., 9/01 NYT, A1.

Leaders pledge effort to reach mideast peace, 9/02 NYT, A1.
[Groovy! Makework for pols as well as weapons makers. Now we can waste millions in White House time while wasting billions on mideast armaments for both sides... = job desperation as robots crash against pre-computer "full time" workweeks.]

BANKRUPTCY tsunami in the news (archives) - staunched only by risky war or safe timesizing -

More banks in trouble, but [survivor] profits are rising, by Eric Dash, 9/01 NYT, B5.
[Third World countries also have lots of money - but it's all at the top. They're like sailing ships with huge and heavy crow's nests. The U.S. is refitting itself on that model...]
..The FDIC..said the list of "problem banks" reached 829 in the second quarter, an increase of 54 lenders, many of which were small community banks. While that is a smaller increase than in previous quarters, the number of problem banks remains at its highest level in more than 16 years... So far this year, 118 banks have failed, with 45 closing in the second quarter...
The stronger [profit] performance reflected the fact that [surviving] banks are also setting aside less money to cover future losses than they were before...
[Ah, we thought the financial "reform" bill was spozed to take care of that...]

cascading ECONOMIC COLLAPSE via $$ funnel-up (archives) - solved by war, or smarter, timesizing -

Wall Street indexes struggle for a direction, 9/01 NYT, B9.
[They've got a direction, down, but Wall Street is incapable of parsing anything but happytalk, especially when it has coagulated so much more of the nation's money supply than allows sufficient circulation in the consumer base for sustainable investment.]

Internal dissent and staff [exodus] may hurt financial crisis panel, 9/01 NYT, B1.
[Or rather, invalid political pressures on them.]

August was disappointing for U.S. automakers, 9/01 NYT, B1.
[Let's see. So far we've bunched up sales in homes and autos by hitting taxpayers for government subsidies. What's next? Sheds and segways?]

In her farewell, Christina Romer says a depression was averted, 9/01 NYT, B1 pointer to B6.
..Chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers...]
[Dream on with that self-serving assessment! Better make it "delayed," not "averted" - and "worsened" the longer it's delayed... Btw, is she quitting before her irrelevance becomes obvious?...]

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For more details on the work-sharing approach, see our layman's guide Timesizing, Not Downsizing which is available at bookstores in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. or from *Amazon.com online.

Questions, comments, feedback? Phone 617-623-8080 (Boston) or email us.

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