Timesizing® Associates

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Good News, January 1-15, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

1/15/2000  3 glimmers of hope -

1. Rise in death rate after New Year is tied to the will to see 2000, by Robert Hershey, NYT, front page.
   ...People in New York City died at a remarkably higher rate during the first seven days of 2000 [1,791] as compared with the same period in 1999 [1,187, or 1998: 1,305, or the last week of 1999: 1,226], and they may be emblematic of the nation as a whole. Many researchers have long believed that people are able to postpone their deaths when they face a major event like a family wedding....
   [Well that's good news - this means that death is somewhat under our conscious control.]

2. [1 UPsizing - bittersweet]
   Ames Department Stores plans layoffs and new hiring, Dow Jones via NYT, B3.
   ...The discount retailer [based in Conn.] said it planned to cut 493 jobs at three distribution centers [including] Mansfield, Mass..\..while adding 100 positions at a fourth...in Westfield, Mass....
   [This story indicates no attempt on the part of Ames to transfer the 88 doomed warehouse workers (data from today's Boston Globe story, C1) the 85-90 miles from Mansfield to Westfield in Mass. So we've treated them as a downsizing of 493 and a separate upsizing of 100, rather than a single reduced downsizing of 393.]

3. [1 UNtakeover]
   RPC to spin off Chaparral, a boat builder, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
   ...to shareholders in the third quarter to focus on its service and equipment business for oil fields....

1. [Courageous new prez of Indonesia continues housecleaning.]
   Indonesia President's shake-up claims more of his top officials, AP via NYT, A12.
   [For example,]
   ...Pres. Abdurrahman Wahid [replaced] the armed forces' top spokesman, Maj. Gen. Sudrajat [with] an air force marshal, Graito Husodo.... Sudrajat [said] last week that the president did not have "the right to interfere in the internal affairs of the military" even though he is commander in chief under the Constitution.... For two decades the army, which is the strongest branch of the military...monopolized the spokesman's job....

2. [Greenspan says a few correct things amidst his confusion -]
   Fed chairman discusses the 'limits' of the economy, by Richard Stevenson, NYT, C2.
   [We like that idea of 'limits', but here's an observation that he's got backwards -]
   ...Fueled by the stock market boom, demand for goods and services is outstripping supply in the domestic economy, said Mr. Greenspan....
   [The idea that you can maintain consumption based on the Ponzi scheme of a stock bubble, let alone use such a bubble to 'outstrip' production, is one of the truly whacky notions that surfaces during every episode of unfettered speculation. At least Greenspan mentions the possibility that our whole 'boom' is really just a bubble -]
   ...Much of his speech was a long rumination on the degree to which technology-driven changes have fundamentally altered the economy. The answer, he said, might be much clearer in a decade. "We may...conclude from that vantage point that [in 2000 we were] experiencing a once-in-a-century acceleration of innovation, which propelled forward productivity, output, corporate profits and stock prices at a pace not seen in generations, if ever," he said.
   "Alternatively, that 2010 retrospective might well conclude that a good deal of what we are currently experiencing was just one of the many euphoric speculative bubbles that have dotted [we'd say 'stained'] human history," Mr. Greenspan said....
   [It all depends whether we start centrifuging the spending power soon enough, voluminously enough, and acceleratingly enough to keep up with and outstrip (to coin a phrase) the work savings of technology, which right now and as long as we have a frozen 60-year-outdated workweek, will keep going into unemployment > welfare/disability > crime/homelessness/suicide. Note today's (1/14/00) clunker on the widening pay disparity in Massachusetts.]
   [And the way to initiate that high level of wealth centrifugation is to start reinvesting in our own markets, via wages, at the appropriate HUGE levels compared to today. The way to start this level of reinvestment is to segue through private-sector moves into a confiscatory tax on corporate overtime profits - with a complete exemption for reinvestment in retraining and hiring. Doing the work sharing before we get any further into income or wealth sharing will enable us to halt and reverse the generation of dependency within our society.]

3. [Our national debt is $5¾T. The interest is the biggest budget item. Now at last...]
   Government unveils plan to buy back US bonds, by Martin Crutsinger, AP via NYT, A6.
   The Clinton administration, seeking to operate in the new world of budget surpluses, adopted rules yesterday that will allow the government to buy back up to $30b of the national debt this year, something that hasn't happened for at least a century. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers...noted that under current surplus forecasts, the entire $3.6T [portion of the] debt held by the public could be eliminated over the next 15 years.... Those long-range projections are based on assumptions that the current good economic times...continue and that [both parties] resist the urge to spend the surplus on new government programs or in tax cuts.
   [Not to mention the assumption that there is a surplus in the first place, a silly notion made possible by the invalid addition of the Social Security fund to the main government budget pool, yes, the very same Social Security fund that is predicted to go bankrupt by 2034. At least if we use it to pay down the national debt, it's more likely that this credit reserve will be there in 2034 when we need it to borrow it back to bail out Social Security.]
   Elimination of the $3.6T of publicly-held debt would mark the first time that the debt held by the public has been eliminated since Pres. Andrew Jackson accomplished the feat in 1835. However, even if that goal is accomplished, it would still leave the sizable $2T in debt the government owes to the Social Security trust fund, money that will be needed to finance the baby boomers' retirement.
   [Whoah, this is gettin' complex. So they're just adding the SocSec "surplus" to the budget now to be able to call it a "budget surplus" - and they're going to pay off the PUBLICLY-held portion with that? - which presumably will just add it to the SocSec portion of the debt for a net gain of zero? Why don't they just do some straight and meaningless in&out accounting and use the current SocSec "surplus" to pay off the SocSec portion of the national debt, for a simpler and cleaner exercise in futility and empty rhetoric?]

4. [And another thing that hasn't happened for at least a century...]
   U.S. is returning 84,000 acres to Indians, by Michael Janofsky, NYT, A13.
   DENVER, Jan. 13 - In the largest return of public land to American Indians in the continental United States in more than 100 years, the federal government is giving back 84,000 acres in northern Utah that it took from the Utes in 1916 to secure the rights to oil shale reserves. "We consider this part of the Clinton-Gore environmental legacy.... We're trying to do the right thing, returning the land to its rightful owners"..\..Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said in an interview today, reflecting the anticipated benefits of the arrangement for Pres. Clinton, as well as for VP Al Gore in his quest for the presidency....
   [So now the federal government wants brownie points for returning what it stole?]

5. Chevron to settle underpaid royalties, AP via NYT, C2.
   The Chevron Corp. agreed to pay $95m to resolve claims that it and affiliated companies underpaid royalties for producing oil from federal and Indian land for 11 years, according to the Justice Dept....

1. [Here's an absolutely GREAT precedent -]
   Severance deals at HMO voided - AG halts $1.3m for 2 ex-officers, link move to 'discrepancies', by Knox and Wilmsen, Boston Globe, front page.
   Massachusetts...Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly..\..stripped Harvard Pilgrim Health Care's former chief executive and chief financial officer of the $1.3m [corrected on 1/14, A2 to:] $1.8m in "golden parachute" severance pay the two had negotiated when they abruptly left the troubled health plan last May.
   AG...Reilly said he terminated the executives' [Allan I. Greenberg's and Thomas J. Brophy's] contracts "for cause," and added that it was related to "discrepancies that led to the receivership," referring to last week's state takeover of Harvard Pilgrim to prevent its financial collapse.... One source in the AG's office...said, "We're not done yet."...
   [This could be a REALLY valuable precedent.]

2. [Corporate "suit" sees the light -]
   Chief leaving No. 2 bookseller - Another departure at Barnesandnoble - A top official says he wants time to pursue Internet interests and be with his family, by Doreen Carvajal, NYT, C8.
   ...Chief executive Jonathan Bulkeley....

3. [And another Good Thing -]
   US reportedly to seek breakup of Microsoft, by Segal and Chandrasekaran, Washington Post via Bos Globe, front page.
   WASHINGTON - The Justice Dept. will demand that Microsoft Corp. break itself into three separate companies as a condition of an out-of-court settlement of the government's antitrust lawsuit, say sources close to the case....

1. [Only possible positive outcome of MONGO merger - with apologies to Edgar Allen Poe & NYT headline writers -
   "Once upon a midnight dreary,
   As I pondered weak and weary..."]
   Merger may produce the rival
   Microsoft has always dread-
   ed, by Steve Lohr, NYT, front page.
   [Literary allusion credit goes to the fertile and twisted mind of colleague Kate Jurow.]

2. [Glimmer of sanity in stock market?]
   Investors dampen merger euphoria - AOL and Time Warner slump as firms face task of how to turn big deal into bigger profits, by Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, D1.
   ...AOL stock fell 8-5/8 to 64 on the NYSE, while Time Warner, which had soared 27½ on Monday, fell 6¼ to 86....
   [This intensified the following day -]
   Investors seem to want to keep AOL-Time Warner asunder - The combined market value is now less than before the deal was announced, by Alex Berenson, 1/13 NYT, C1.
   ...Yesterday, AOL shares fell...to $60 and...Time Warner shares dropped...to $79.625....

3. [Glimmer of clarity from Boston Globe financial team?]
   Mergers of health care firms often just don't work out, Syre and Stein, Bos Globe, D5.
   The Internet and media industries are ecstatic this week over the proposed combination of America Online and Time Warner. A few years back, people in health care were excited about the benefits of mergers. They aren't so excited any more.
   • Harvard Pilgrim Health Care...a merger of 2 HMOs - is operating under state receivership....
   • Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a union of 2 Boston teaching hospitals, recently announced a big staff cut to cope with an expected $100m loss in 1999....
   • Healthsouth, a huge [consolidated] chain of rehab hospitals, has seen its stock fall from 30 to 6 since the middle of 1998.
   • MedPartners, a company that bought doctor practices nationwide, lost more than 75% of its value in 1998 and decided to get out of the business.
   • Several of the country's largest nursing home chains filed for bankruptcy last year after their aggressive acquisition strategies went awry....
   Why the dismal outcomes?...
   • Cost savings have proved elusive....
   • Blending the cultures is difficult....
   • The business is stubbornly local....
   • The government is a big but unreliable partner....
   Are you listening, AOL?

4. [1 UPsizing]
   Pizza chain's expansion, AP via NYT, C12.
   Little Caesar's Enterprises Inc. is continuing its foreign expansion, planning to open 300 restaurants in Mexico by the year 2010. The restaurant chain, which is based in Detroit, said [yesterday] that 200 outlets would open in the first five years.... Last month, Little Caesar's said it would open 400 restaurants in Japan in the next five years.

5. [1 UNtakeover]
   Silicon Graphics spins off its media server unit [SGI Mediabase, as an Internet company], Dow Jones via NYT, C4.
   ...[says] it would be a significant minority shareholder in the spinoff....

1/09-10/2000  glimmer of hope -

1. [Columnist cautious -]
   1/09 It's OK to bet on the next big hit - but use your 'fun money', by Charles Jaffe, Boston Globe, C4.
   [And note the use of the word 'bet'. Charles expands on this the next day -]
   1/10 And they call it Smart Money? by Charles Jaffe, Bos Globe, A12.
   People ask me all the time why I don't make investment picks.... For proof of why I consider such activities folly for a journalist, go no further than Smart Money magazine...which I generally consider to be one of the better [personal finance] reads..\.. The magazine...acknowledged that its picks for 1998 were below average...and if you had [put even money on their] 11 stocks...you would have suffered a loss of 13%.... In fact, two of the magazine's fund picks for 1999 also came up losers (though the thrid was up more than 180%). The difference between the magazine and...individual investors...? The editors can't forget about their losers, as their [mistakes] are forever in print for the world to see. And they're not playing with real money....

1. ABC and NAACP in a job pact, pointer blowout (to A7), NYT, B1.
   Two days after NBC announced an agreement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP], ABC said it reached its own deal with Kweisi Mfume, the president of the NAACP. ABC said it intended "to increase opportunities for qualified people of color in the network television industry" both in front of and behind the camera, and underscored its existing diversity plans, such as formal mentoring efforts and programs to encourage minority hiring.
   [So now the onus is on CBS to follow suit, or lose PR competitiveness. This is just like the companies tumbling out of the (anti-)Global Climate Coalition, yesterday DaimlerChrysler, last month Ford! Hey, maybe we can develop a "progress by embarrassment" technique here. This is basically how Herbert Hoover got Big Steel to abandon their 84-hour workweek in 1922-23 - he embarrassed them with the example of all the other industries that were already working with much shorter workweeks, and Judge Gary and his cronies finally came down to a 48-hour workweek for steelworkers.]

1. A bidding war for teachers spreads from coast to coast, by Jacques Steinberg, NYT, front page.
   [This is what should be happening for all job categories now that productivity is so high - instead of just for teaching and Internet skills - while the productivity bonus pours into the deep pockets of the top income brackets.]

2. Daimler-Chrysler leaving [anti-] climate coalition, NYT, C7.
   DETROIT - ...The American unit of DaimlerChrysler A.G., said [last night] that it was leaving the Global Climate Coalition, a group of heavy-industry companies that lobbies against [pro-environmental] regulations restricting emissions of gases linked to global warming.... Envirionmentalists have portrayed the coalition as a club for polluters and have urged companies to quit it. A succession of companies have left, including Ford Motor last month.

3. [Speaking of air pollution -]
   Canada gets tougher with tobacco, by Timothy Pritchard, NYT, C4.
   Canadian tobacco companies will soon be required to put stronger health warnings on cigarette packages....

4. [Another attack of sanity? - but this one probably short-lived.]
   Investors flee [Web] technology; Dow rises and Nasdaq falls, by Robert Hershey, NYT, C6.
   [This represents a shift of money from Internet companies with no profits forecast for the forseeable future, to older, more stable firms. But it'll reverse tomorrow. (And did.)]

5. [1 UPsizing]
   U.S. plants for National Power [P.L.C.], by Andrew Sorkin, NYT, C4.
   The British utility [plans] to invest $600m to build two power plants in the U.S. in Midlothian, Tex. and Bellingham, Mass.

1. NBC agrees to jobs for minorities, pointer headline (to A12), NYT, C1.
   Acknowledging that talented minorities had most likely been denied opportunities in writing, producing and directing, Robert Wright, president of NBC, announced an agreement with a coalition led by the NAACP intended to generate jobs for them both at the network and on shows it broadcasts.

2. Bonus denied, Disney CEO's pay plunges to $754,000, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, C7.
   ...jeopardizing [Michael Eisner's] standing as one of the highest-paid US executives....
   [Oh "life is rough"!  Let's hope this starts a trend.]

3. Labor policy retracted, pointer headline (to C2), Boston Globe, C1.
   Labor Secretary Alexis Herman retreats from a policy interpretation that held employers responsible for federal health and safety violations in their employees' home offices.
   [The test here is, ARE employers responsible for such violations in their employees' home offices? - can they respond? If they did, we'd be yelling "Invasion of privacy!" so they can't and this policy retreat is a Good Thing.]

1/04/Y2K  4 glimmers of hope -

1. Few year 2000 glitches are reported on first working day - Still more good news does not close the book on risks, experts say, by Barnaby Feder, NYT, C1.
   Year 2000 computer glitches began appearing as much of the world headed back to work yesterday after the New Year's holiday, but they remained scattered and, for the most part, trivial....

2. Brazil having second thoughts about foreign bank inroads, by Simon Romero, NYT, C4.
   ...After a wave of takeovers and heavy investments in recent years, many Brazilian banks have been nudged aside by institutions with un-Portuguese sounding names, like Santander, HSBC, and BankBoston. However, the growth of these banks...is coming under criticism.... Some of Brazil's most powerful bankers are urging the government to limit the power of foreign financial institutions. "The richest countries of the world are wise enough to realize that national interests coincide with a strong, domestically led financial system," said Fernão Bracher, a former central bank president who now heads Bancl BBA-Creditanstalt, a São Paulo bank with Austrian shareholders, though majority-owned by Brazilians. "Why should Brazil, a developing country, be run rough-shod over?"...
   [Gooood question, Fernão.]

3. [UNtakeover #1]
   Kansas City utility cancels sale agreement, AP via NYT, C4.
   The board of Kansas City Power & Light Co. has called off its agreement to be acquired by another electric company, Western Resources Inc.... Its board had voted on Sunday to terminate the agreement, originally worth $2.1B, [citing] problems with Western's Protection One security subsidiary [and] the 61% slide in Western's stock price since the deal was announced....

4. [UNtakeover #2]
   Monsanto pays $81m for canceled merger, Reuters via NYT, C4.
   The Delta & Pine Land Co., a cotton seed company, said yesterday that its would-be merger partner, the Monsanto Co., had paid it an $81m termination fee and had lifted a restriction on its right to talk to potential suitors.... Monsanto, which had agreed to buy Delta [& Pine] in a deal valued at $1.9b when it was first announced in May 1998, withdrew a regulatory filing relating to the acquisition last month....
   [But we did not see any report of that then so we're counting it now.]

1/1/2000  1 beam of hope -

1. Celebrating a new year, and a milestone for freedom - Black Americans commemorate anniversary of Lincoln's historic proclamation to end slavery, by Randal Archibold, NYT, A27.
   [Now we humanoids like to think we're pretty smart, so you haven't seen anything about slavery in any of the lists of Great Achievements of the Last Millennium because we've conveniently forgotten all about it. Losing slavery is too obvious, and too humiliating because we only did it last century and the great USA did it after practically everybody else (except that refined EC capital, Belgium, à la King Leopold's Ghost), and - we've still got pockets of slavery, e.g., Sudan.... But check this out -]
   From an ancient calendar, scenes of life at the last millennium, book review of Lacey and Danziger's "The Year 1000" (Little, Brown) by Joyce Jensen, NYT, D3.
   ...May - In the year 1000 England under King Ethelred II enjoyed a prosperitiy unmatched in northern Europe. Surviving documents testify to 10th-century trade in wine, furs, fish and slaves, and there is evidence that English woollen cloth was being exported to Europe....
   [The insignificant reference to 'slaves' slips by so easily. Slavery was taken for granted then and right up to last century. Even this century, we still have a lot of fear of slavery even in our white racial memories - our parents used to talk about the Germans (or Russians) wanting to take over the world and turn us into slaves, and there's the great British song "Rule Britannia" that ends "Bri-tons never, never, never shall - be - slaves." A recent dissertation has revised our assumption that the founding concept of this nation was freedom -]
   Dethroning freedom as a nation builder, review of James Block's Univ. of Chicago dissertation by Edward Rothstein, NYT, D1.
   ...[That] the United States was conceived in liberty [in 1776 may be true, but back in Pilgrim times] the primary notion that shaped America is not liberty, it is "agency" [in a] use of the word [that] seems antique and hardly familiar.... Agency is a notion that developed in 16th-century England, in a Puritan challenge to the monarchical order. Agency required...a new interpretation of responsibility: the individual becomes a self-reliant agent able to act freely, but in that freedom a choice is made to serve a larger vision. Agency is not servitude; it is a path freely chosen. And agency is not freedom; it defers to a collective authority....
   [And that kind of deference goes right back to Jesus“ "Render unto Caesar..." (Mark 12:17) and St. Paul's "Be subject to principalities and powers..." (Titus 3:1).
   [So in line with our hunch that it's the too-obvious-to-be-noticed woodwork of history that's most important, we would say the biggest advance in this whole last millennium was the abolition of one person owning another person, equivalent to a 24-hour 7-day on-call status - without pay.
   [So maybe we should get off our high hi-tech horse and realize we're not so safely advanced after all. Even now, even in our best industries (high tech and prisons), we're bringing back slavery in several ways:
   • Techies feel vitally important when they sleep under their desks and work 80-hour weeks with no overtime pay.
   • Prison inmates get far less than minimum wage for manufacturing operations that threaten union jobs on the outside.
   [So all in all, ending slavery looms as our biggest 2nd-millennium accomplishment. But now, we'd better divorce our feeling of self-importance from our state of frenzied busyness and get a-timesizing, or we'll be right back there in the slave galleys with John Norman's Women of Gor. And if that seems exciting, we deserve all the been-there, done-that misery we're bringing back on our masochistic selves.]