Timesizing® Associates

---

Good News, August 1-10, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

8/10/2000  glimmers of hope -

1. 2 UPsizings (one on the same day it's announcing a downsizing!) - unspecified new jobs -
   1. Cambridge SoundWorks plans eight new stores, by Chris Reidy, Boston Globe, C9.
      ...A manufacturer and retailer of home theater, home audio, and multimedia products, the Newton [Mass.]-based chain has just opened its 27th store, in North Reading [Mass.]. Over the next 12 months, the chain hopes to open as many as 8 stores, and beginning next summer, the plan is to expand beyond its current markets of New England and Northern California....
   2. Informix opens an office in Westborough [Mass.], by Ronald Rosenberg, Boston Globe, C4.
      ...A 20-year-old database and e-commerce software company based in Menlo Park, Calif., has opened an office in Westborough with plans to expand its management presence there, according to Peter Gyenes, the company's new president and chief executive....
      [Doncha wish this guy would make up his mind? We got him in both our upsizing and downsizing sections today - unspecified up and 430 down. He's only been in three months and boy, is he confused!]

2. Survey finds women in cyberspace majority for 1st time, by Leslie Walker, Boston Globe, C2.
   Teenage girls went online in greater numbers than any other group in the U.S. during the past year, creating a female majority in cyberspace [50.4% in May 2000] for the first time...according to a report released yesterday by Internet market research firms Media Metrix and Jupiter Communications.... Female users made up only 38% of all Internet users in 1996.... They reached parity with male users in February [2000] and outnumbered them three months later.... Over the past year...girls...12 to 17...ranks online soared 126%, while the number of boys that age who went online rose only 45%. Researchers found teenage girls are flocking to chat rooms and Web sites for their favorite magazines, fashion styles and rock bands.... Women over 55 also signed online in droves. Their ranks increased by 109% during the year, with various genealogy, health and fun Web sites [being targeted].... Women in their child-bearing years flocked to Babygear.com and Pampers.com...while college-age women spent time at sites selling textbooks..\.. MediaMetrix analyst Anne Rickert...said the data suggests...that women tend to be more utilitarian in their Internet use than men. The report found that women don't spend time on a lot of different sites, but return to those that save them time and money.
   [That duzzit! Wimmin are smarter. Gotta git us reincarnated as wimmin next time round.]

3. Nation's strictest gun law enacted by [NY] Governor's [Pataki's] pen, by Richard Perez-Pena, NYT, A18.
   ...The law's measures...include:
   • Requiring that all new handguns be test-fired before they are sold, so the telltale markings they leave on bullets and shell casings can be entered into a computer database.
   • Requiring background checks...for those who by handguns at handgun shows....
   • Raising the eligibility age for a handgun permit and buying a handgun to 21 from 18.
   • Instructing the state police to study "smart gun" technology that would allow a gun to be fired only by its legal owner....

4. Amtrak gains riders in July and expects record year, by Matthew Wald, NYT, A17.
   [More power to 'em. We love trains.]

1. U.S. acts to protect vital horseshoe crab, by Francis Clines, NYT, A12.
   ...announced plans [yester]day for a 1,800-square-mile sanctuary from Delaware Bay out into the Atlantic to protect the rapidly dwindling stock of horseshoe crabs that are vital to the pharmaceutical industry and to the annual migration of a dozen species of shorebirds....

2. Lowe's won't sell products from endangered species, AP via NYT, C3.
   ...The nation's 2nd-largest home improvement retail chain said yesterday that it would stop selling wood products from endangered forests. Lowe's issued an immediate ban on products from the Great Bear rain forest of British Columbia.... Last year, Home Depot, the biggest home improvement retailer in the U.S. pledged to stop the sale of wood from endangered areas by 2002.

3. US productivity reported best in 17 years, AP via Boston Globe, D2.
   ...over the past 12 months at the fastest pace in 17 years... [So where's the corresponding pay?]
   ...while labor costs declined....
   [No wonder we have a ludicrous concentration of wealth. More productivity and less pay. Where can it go but up into a stock bubble owned by the top 1%.  But are they counting Americans' megahours or just assuming the purely theoretical (for most people) 40-hour week?]

4. Rate of minorities getting mortgages reported up - Groups still turned down more often than whites, AP via Boston Globe, D2.
   WASHINGTON - A higher percentage of blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians were approved for home mortgages last year than in 1998 [according to] data released yesterday by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council...comprised of the bank regulatory agencies, including the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. [FDCI]....

1. [1 UPsizing, unspecified new jobs]
   Dow Chemical to expand U.S. manufacturing, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...The No. 2 U.S. chemical maker..\..said it planned to spend more than $325m to build a U.S. plant...somewhere in the U.S. Gulf Coast region and expand a plant in La Porte, Tex., to increase its production..\..of a chemical...polymeric methylene diphenyl diisocyanate [cyanate sounds ba-ad] used to make insulation and padding...by more than 50% by 2004. Expansion of the plant will begin this year, while selection of a site and construction on the new plant will take place next year....

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Arbitrator splits Arthur Andersen into 2 companies - End of 3-year dispute - Accountants and consultants will form world's biggest firms in separate fields, by David Leonhardt, NYT, front page.
   Ending one of corporate America's most bitter family feuds...the International Court of Arbitration \in Paris\ cleaved the world's largest consulting firm from the world's largest accounting firm yesterday. The ruling frees Andersen Consulting, with 65,000 employees, from its parent company, which now consists entirely of Arthur Andersen, a tax and auditing firm with 77,000 employees. In exchange, Andersen Consulting will have to give up its name and pay Arthur Andersen $1B.... Joe Forehand, chief executive [of Andersen Consulting] said he and his partners had not yet decided on a new name..\..
   The ruling is the latest example of the separation of consulting units from accounting firms. Such splits have come as the SEC has proposed restricting firms from selling advice to companies they also audit. In February, Ernst & Young sold its consulting business to Cap Gemini, and PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG are also moving to shed their consulting units....
   [How ironic. Auditing and advising are finding out from hard experience that they've a natural conflict of interest. Meanwhile, our short-memory Congress has recently repealed the hard-learned Glass-Steagall Act of the 1930s which learned the hard way that banking, brokerage and insurance should all be separate. So now again, bankers, brokers and insurers can all repeat the mistakes of the 1920s and mix it up in one another's businesses.]

3. Environmentalists protest oil barge in the arctic, AP via NYT, A14.
   BARROW, Alaska...- Environmentalists early [yester]day boarded a barge carrying oil-drilling equipment in the Arctic Ocean to protest exploration plans by BP Amoco.... Greenpeace is protesting the construction of a BP Amoco drilling platform off the north coast of Alaska in the Arctic Ocean.... Greenpeace said it would threaten the Arctic ecosystem.

4. Linux finds a tiny home, by John Markoff, NYT, C6.
   ...IBM researchers plan to announce that they have developed a complete version of the Linux software that runs on a prototype computer only 2.2"x1.89"x0.48" [thus] pushing..\..the free Linux operating system..\..beyond its server computer roots....
   [Any counterweight to Microsoft Windows gets our support.]

5. An effort by U.S. to [set back] the IMF is set back - Developing countries vote against an increase in lending rates, by Joseph Kahn, NYT, C1.
   [So the IMF is a big camouflaged charity forced on the U.S. taxpayer after all - which would be less of a problem if it weren't for the fact that it amounts to our rich people paying our money to poor countries' rich people. What did they expect when they let the "developing nations" vote on the IMF's board? This is like letting welfare mothers determine their own welfare benefits.]
   ...Developing nations, which make up a substantial voting bloc on the fund's board and double as borrowers, do not want to pay more for their loans or to agree to apply for help less often....
   [As we were saying, this whole mishigas would be a lot more meaningful if we ourselves had any sort of cap on the "Big Leak Upward" of limitless executive pay and general wealth concentration - or if at least the developing nations had such a cap. But neither side does, so the whole IMF shtick is just propping rich dictatorships and their families and friends in poor nations, and letting our power elite get that 'feel good' feeling using our taxmoney for what often, via debt forgiveness, amounts to international charity.]
   Some board members from poor countries also disagreed with the reasons the Group of Seven gave for wanting to raise rates. The industrial nations said higher rates could make more money available for new lending and the forgiveness of debts of the poorest countries. "This is a case of them asking the poor to help the poor," a board member said....
   [As we were saying, the rich nations' rich want to feel good but not get any less rich, and they're doing it with our money without asking us, so why shouldn't they play the same game in the third world and "give help" but not risk much of their own dough. It's a perfect scam - everything done with "OPM" = "other people's money."]

1. [1 UPsizing - 40 temp jobs]
   Campers see police in new jobs, pointer summary (to A20), NYT, A2.
   The city of Stamford, Conn., as part of its efforts to be in the vanguard of community policing, is running a summer camp. It is attended by 350 children and provides jobs for about 40 high school students as counsellors. Most of the camp's adult staff members are police officers who are assigned during the rest of the year to patrol public schools.
   [Sure is different from the 1950's. Then the idea of police patrolling public schools would have seemed bizarre.]

2. [A good idea linked to a never-ending series of items such as -]
   Married-couples tax cut gets a veto from Clinton, by James Gerstenzang, Boston Globe, A4.
   [Back and forth, legislators have wasted time on this for decades. Some months ago a letter to the editor of the Times or the Globe had the answer, and though we've lost the exact reference, fortunately colleague Kate has not forgotten the idea. It is to simply leave current arrangements, whatever they are, in place and let taxpayers choose their filing status (single, married, filing singly or jointly) according to their own perceived advantage, regardless of their actual marital status. Taxation should be lifestyle-neutral in any event. Once you get into special pleading for this or that circumstance, the micromanagement never ends.]

3. [The Queen Mum passes 100 one day, and the next, Sir Alec cashes in, 14 years short.]
   Sir Alec Guinness, elegant actor of film and stage, is dead at 86, by Albin Krebs, NYT, front page.
   ...He was the antithesis of the personality or star.... "Everything I've done has been on the spur of the moment," the actor said some years ago. "That's why my career has been so haphazard." ...There was, however, one sort of script he avoided, the sort proffered with the assurance, "It was written for you." [He once rejected one with the reply,] "But no one came to take the measurements." ..\..Possessing a plain-as-porridge but chameleon-like face, Sir Alec was one of those gifted actors who left audiences awed with his seemingly effortless, perfect performances, which he carried off with quiet subtlety and undemonstrative skill.... Although it was often said that as a master of disguise he was an actor with no face of his own, it was, in fact, the intelligent use of his malleable features that served him so extraordinarily well. In situations where lesser performers required several lines of dialogue to accomplish an effect, Sir Alec used his own facial shorthand - the faint curling of a lip...the quizzical upturn of an eyebrow...a sudden brief smile that could radiate approval or signify chilly disdain. Particularly in motion-picture close-up, he did not so much act as allow his face to react to what another actor was saying.
   [Our favorite was The Man in the White Suit, but Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and Star Wars are right up there.]
   ..\..In his autobiography, "Blessings in Disguise," published in the United States in 1986, Sir Alec cleared up longtime speculation as to whether he was an illegitimate child. He was indeed, he said. \Born in 1914,\ he was knighted in [1959] by Queen Elizabeth.... He lived modestly in an unpretentious house in Hampshire, in the south of England, with his wife, Merula Salaman, a former actress. They were married in 1938 when both were appearing as animals in John Gielgud's production of "Noah"..\.. "My theater tide began to come in because of Sir John's generosity, for from that point [1934] on I was never truly out of a job unless I wanted it that way," Sir Alec recalled..\.. In the years to come he was to refer often to the older actor as "the great hero of my youth," and in fact on more than one occasion, the older man helped him along in his career, encouraging him and offering him money when he needed it....
   [Effortless the acting of one who is fatherless, but happy the fatherless who finds a father in deed.]

1. [Vudda meddavor -]
   Addicted to talking - Cell phones are fast becoming the new cigarette, op ed by Joel Conarroe, NYT, A25.

2. Britons honor Queen Mum as she turns 100 - Affection for her withstands shifting views on royalty, by Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe, A2.
   ...The Queen Mum has no secret to her longevity, though she is fond of a gin and Dubonnet before lunch.... She is, according to those who know her, a formidable woman of considered opinions.... On hearing the national anthem on television, she urged a companion to turn it off, saying, "So embarrassing unless one is there. Like hearing the Lord's Prayer when playing canasta."
   She was unimpressed when T.S. Eliot gave her and her family a private reading of his poem "The Waste Land." "We had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem - I think it was called The Desert - and first the girls got the giggles, and then I did, and then even the king. Such a gloomy man," she said of Eliot. "Looked as though he worked in a bank, and we didn't understand a word."
   ...When the queen once asked for a second glass of wine with her lunch, the Queen Mum shot her a look and a subtle admonishment: "You know you have to reign all afternoon."...
   [On the background question, "Should the monarchy be abolished?" -  In the United Kingdom and the Dominions (e.g., Canada) it serves to split the symbolic head of the state (the Queen and her representative in each Dominion, e.g., the Governor General of Canada), from the functional head of state, the prime minister. This gives the parliamentary form of government two important advantages over the republican form of government, where the symbolic and functional are united in the President -
   • assassins don't know which to assassinate - kill the PM and the Queen immediately appoints a new one, kill the Queen and she's just a figurehead anyway - but kill the President and you've nailed both the symbol of the nation and the functioning head of the Executive Branch. Not surprisingly, there have been more Presidential assassinations than PM or Monarchial (e.g., Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, not to mention attempts, during the existence of Canada since 1867, and no Canadian PMs or Governors General assassinated at all - closest was an important MP, Thomas Darcy McGee, in 1868.)
   • it's much easier to change functional head of state in a parliamentary system than it is in a republican system - the process of declaring a vote of no confidence in the ruling party in parliament and calling an election, which will replace the Prime Minister, is much easier and less traumatic than the process of impeaching a sitting President, as the U.S. found out when it tried to impeach Johnson (1860s), Nixon (1970s) and Clinton (1990s).
   • the convergence of the symbolic and functional head of state in a republic has probably had a subtle restricting effect on the number of political parties in the USA, and therefore on the ease of introducing submerged issues into the national debate. The two major parties have gradually strengthened their duopoly, and many Americans are openly hostile to independents and third parties, fearing, perhaps, that the risk of instability is just too high. This is a serious handicap to the nation's general feedback function, or in system dynamics, its cybernetics.
   [Many republics generally following the U.S. model, such as France, have moved to correct this problem by setting up a ceremonial figurehead President for stabilizing symbolic purposes and retaining the easily replaced Prime Minister for functional purposes. Americans have criticized this as too unstable. But the greater stability of the United Kingdom and e.g. the Canadian Dominion has not elicited such criticism. So bottom line on abolishing the monarchy, "if it works, don't fix it" or, "leave well enough alone."]

3. Newfound planet circles start easily seen from Earth, by Alexandra Witze, Boston Globe, A3.
   Astronomers have a planet circling the star Epsilon Eridani, making the discovery the closest planet known to the nine in our solar system. Only 10½ light-years from Earth, the star Epsilon Eridani is visible without the aid of telescopes. It is the 5th brightest star in the constellation Eridanus the river, which appears about a third of the way above the southeastern horizon an hour before sunrise....
   [The star is visible with the naked eye, not its planet.]
   ...William Cochran, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the planet's discoverers...is scheduled to present the findings Monday in Manchester, England, at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union. At the same meeting, other astronomers will present details of eight other newly discovered planets, including only the 2nd solar system known beyond our own. The total number of know exoplanets - planets circling stars other than the Sun - now tops 50. [The newfound closest] planet could be considered the most "normal" or those, Cochran said....
   [Good, maybe when we ruin Earth we can pop over there and start on it.]

1. Chavez unveils Venezuela economic plan, asks foes for help, by Alexandra Olson, AP via Boston Globe, A8.
   ...A former paratrooper who spent two years in jail for leading a botched coup is 1992, Chavez has won the trust of Venezuela's poor majority by vowing to end corruption and spread the country's vast oil wealth more equally....

2. Novartis ended use of gene-altered foods - Company says confirmation, in letter to Greenpeace, is not new, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, C4.
   ...One of the world's leading agricultural biotechnology companies, acknowledged yesterday that it had eliminated genetically engineered ingredients from all of its food products. The policy was disclosed in a letter sent by a company official to the environmental group Greenpeace and later confirmed by the company. Novartis, which makes Ovaltine, Gerber baby foods, Wasa crackers and various health foods, said in the letter that it had basically achieved its goal by June 30.... Novartis said last year that it would eliminate genetically modified ingredients from Gerber baby food...because buyers seemed to be wary of them. But it had not been known that Novartis was going to take the same steps for its other foods as well..\..
   Novartis is the first big food company to eliminate genetically modified ingredients from all its foods worldwide, Greenpeace said. Various companies, such as Frito-Lay and McDonald's, are dropping genetically modified corn or potatoes from some of their food in the United States. And many companies are eliminating them in food sold in Europe, where consumer resistance to such products is particularly strong....
   [Have to move to Europe to get pure food.]
   The move could put Novartis is a delicate spot because its agricultural division continues to sell genetically modified seeds....

3. Lessons of leisure - Recreational studies widen their place in academics, by David Abel, Boston Globe, front page.
   ...In spite of its rocks-for-jocks reputation, leisure studies have carved out a significant niche in academia. Leisure studies professors train their students in everything from the finer points of wilderness living to marketing sports programs as "therapeutic recreation." Today, more than 350 colleges offer leisure studies programs, according to the National Recreation and Parks Assoc., a college accrediting group....

4. [dealing with the rudeness of cellphoners -]
   Hello, is that call for us?, letter to the editor by Cathy Burack of Beverly MA, Boston Globe, A16.
   I share George Rosen's feelings of being trapped when someone starts talking on a cellular phone in a closed space such as a train ("A captive in cellphone land," Commentary, July 31). But rather than "struggle politely not to pay attention to the caller," as Rosen does, I listen quite attentively. I assume the caller is forfeiting the right to to privacy by making the call in front of strangers. So I look right at the caller and freely laugh at jokes, grimace at reports of bad losses, and shake my head sympathetically at tales of romantic failures.
   As you might guess, I've witnessed quite a few phone calls get terminated rather abruptly and new ones made from out of earshot.

1. [1 UPsizing - 4500 new U.S. jobs]
   EMC will revamp its sales force - Firm to focus on new market segments in bid to foster growth, by Ross Kerber, Boston Globe, C9.
   ...To remain ahead \the\ data storage maker...said it will add new sales specialists with technical training, though it declined to specify how many new positions it plans to create....
   [...or whether it will do any of the t-r-a-i-n-i-n-g itself (or just complain that it can't find enough qualified candidates).]
   The company said it plans to accelerate hiring because of growing demand for storage, and will have 4,500 more employees in December than it did a year ago. Previously, it said it expected to add 4,000 jobs worldwide this year..\.. EMC Corp...had 17,500 employees at the end of last year and 20,700 employees at the end of June, including 7,600 in Massachusetts. It is expected to have more than 8,000 employees in Massachusetts by the end of this year....

2. [a major U.S. daily takes on the income gap (is the millennium year 2000 working some magic at last?) -]
   A boom for whom?, editorial, Boston Globe, A22.
   The Republican convention is a performance on three stages: the official events at the First Union Center,...the University of Pennsylvania campus, where a Shadow Convention is providing a counterpoint... \and\ the streets of Center City, where 350 noisy protesters were arrested Tuesday.... This is what the drum-beating, puppet-parading marchers are against:...
   • Wealth concentrated so densely that the top 1% of the country owns more assets than the bottom 95%....
   [Let's just pause there for a moment so this doesn't get lost in the "grocery list." Does anyone have a solution for this? Apparently there are some people who think it is a problem and therefore does need a solution, because the protesters are protesting it and the Globe editors are featuring their protest. Let's track through the subsequent plotline and see how far the Globe editors get toward actionable solution design -]
   If these issues were to come up at all, the official convention response would probably point to a generous America that provides for the poor through churches, civic centers and soup kitchens. But..\..Jim Wallis, director of Call to Renewal, a national federation of churches working on issues of race and poverty...is one churchman who thinks the problem is too entrenched to submit to voluntary solutions. "This is not about some people helping other people," he said. "This is about all of us healing as a nation." Charity, in other words, is no substitute for justice.
   [Well that's not very close to "actionable solution design," is it. We're left up in the air with fine words - "healing as a nation," "justice." Somebody's got to roll up their sleeves and do the "assembly language programming" of solution design. "It's nasty work but somebody's got to do it." It doesn't happen by itself or by "free market forces." It has to be researched, designed and implemented. Probably an economic state of institutional justice has to be researched and designed, and then a dynamic transition leading to that state has to be researched, designed and implemented, because that transition is the implementation of the static design of coherent, interlocking economic institutions that deliver the much enhanced state of justice where maybe the top 45% of the country owns more assets than the bottom 50%. Step one is deciding on the goal, or designing a mechanism for getting that decision.
   [As economic designers, we at Timesizing.com have a counterpart to the Globe's statement that "Charity is no substitute for justice," and our counterpart ties in the design aspect. What we have said many times through the last 25 years is, "Any system that relies on charity for vital functions is to that extent fatally flawed." And the reason is, of course, the same reason that the Globe indicates previously - charity is optional. It is therefore both whimsical and capricious, but any rate unreliable. Thus any system that relies on it is unsustainable - and not, in fact, worthy of the name "system" in that area.
   [We have been working on these questions for 25 years and we have designed an extensive solution. It foresees not just one but a series of incrementally enhanced states of economic justice, midwived by enhanced economic democracy. It maximizes diversity and variability, the stuff of long-term societal adaptibility and survivability. It takes all kinds of lessons from ecology, including homeostasis, minimum necessary departure from status quo at each point in the transition, no ultimate end state, continuability, minimum necessary government and constraint.... We have simplified it down to a five-phase program that we call Timesizing. Check it out. It's a finite read, but we believe it has all the necessary elements, and that it is the first economic-core design to succeed in including all the necessary elements. And still, as far as we know, the first and only.
   [Let's go back now to the editorial and pick up the rest of the grocery list, all of which, we maintain, would be vastly facilitated by the solution (OK, let's get more specific - the centrifugation) of the astronomical concentration of wealth -]
   ..\..This is what the...marchers are against:
   • 44m people in America without health insurance...
   • A minimum wage that keeps a full-time worker below the poverty line.
     [Timesizing replaces the minimum-wage approach with something a lot more thorough and flexible - an engineered shortage of labor so acute by today's standards (but not by 1950 standards) that market forces intervene to raise wages by the same multiples that technology has been raising productivity, when not sabotaged by the understandable featherbedding of our marginalized labor force.]
   • A two-tiered education system that Jonathon Kozol said will perpetuate the divisions deep into the next generation..\..
   • the death penalty...
   • welfare "reform" [our quotes - ed.]...
   • genetically modified foods...
   • unprecedented "growth" [again, our quotes] in this country but one in five kids is poor
   • an America where the two biggest growth industries are residential gated communities and prison construction
     [note the similarity of the extreme opposites - barred fences at the top as well as the bottom]

3. Evolution foes dealt a defeat in Kansas vote, by Pam Belluck, NYT, front page.
   ...In a Republican primary of Tuesday, the voters defeated three conservative candidates who supported..\..the state school board's removal of human evolution from the state science standards, making it all but certain that the decision will be overturned....
   [Welcome back to the 20th century, Kansas.]

1. U.S. is proposing new way to fight global warming - Agricultural approach - Granting countries credit for forests and farmland that sop up carbon dioxide, by Andrew Revkin, NYT, front page.
   ...the chief warming gas,..\..just as much credit...as they would for cutting emissions from smokestacks and tail pipes....
   [Good idea. Attack the problem from both ends. Amory Lovins' *Rocky Mountain Institute would probably approve and it may have been his idea in the first place.]

2. Euro-zone joblessness falls, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   As Europe's expanding economy encouraged businesses to hire more people, unemployment in the 11 countries that adopted the euro as a single currency last year dropped to 9.1% in June, from 9.2% in May. The group includes [probably in order of size] Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, [but now randomized?] Luxembourg, Finland and Sweden.
   [Oh bury this in a small paragraph! How can Europe, which has 5-6 week vacations and 40-hr or less workweeks and universal healthcare actually be expanding? Heresy! Why mustn't they have 2-week vacations, 50-60-70+ hour workweeks and iffy revolving-door health insurance like us "to be competitive"?! Why don't they have to foster crisis-management, ignore their families, and be stressed out in order to feel important, like us? How dare they have balance in their lives! How dare they know how to lighten up and have a life!]

• Pact is reached to save a rich tropical forest, by Andrew Revkin, NYT, D3.
  Ending a conflict over the fate of a forest rich in both wood and wildlife, loggers, biologists and the government of Gabon [in west equatorial Africa] have agreed to keep bulldozers and chain saws out of [the Lopé Reserve,] a 1,900-square-mile reserve with the highest density of large mammals ever recorded in a tropical rain forest [including elephant, gorilla and mandrill]....