Timesizing® Associates

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Good News, Sept. 21-30, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

9/30/2000  glimmers of intelligence -

1. Holy days - Time off for observance, by Richard Perez-Pena, NYT, A8.
   In the home stretch of the presidential contest, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut is leaving the campaign trail for several days to observe the Jewish High Holy Days. This weekend is Rosh Hashanah ["Head-of The-year"], the Jewish new year.... Mr. Lieberman, the first Jew on a major party's national ticket, already misses campaigning one day a week because he observes the Sabbath, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
   [We don't like his Big Snuggle up to corporations, but we like his ability and willingness to take these holidays and stand back from the campaign hullaballoo. The Fourth Commandment started the workweek reduction concept, so if it's socialist or communist, so is the God of Moses. (It isn't , because it's only one central enabling regulation, not any number of stifling peripheral regulations like socialism/communism.)]

2. Speak, cultural memory...- A debate over preserving languages, by Alexander Stille, NYT, A17.
   ...The revival of indigenous languages is a growing movement among Native Americans from Hawaii to Cape Cod, and it is fast becoming a subspecialty in the field of linguistics as well.... There are 211 indigenous languages still extant throughout the United States and Canada, but only 20 of them are spoken by the youngest generation of their communities....
   • Only one, Navajo, has more than 100,000 speakers, and it too is declining among the young.... [photo caption -] Navajo Marines [were trained to use] their language as a code in the Pacific during World War II [= the famous "code talkers"]..\..
   • Over the last seven years, Jessie Little-Doe Fermino, a member of the Mashpee tribe on Cape Cod, has been on a single-minded mission to revive the language of her ancestors, Wampanoag, the one that greeted the Pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth Rock and that gave the state of Massachusetts its name....
   • Daryl Baldwin...is reviving the language of the Miami Nation in Indiana and raising his children in it....
   • Hawaiian...had dwindled to about 1,500 fluent native speakers by the 1980's, when a group of professors at the University of Hawaii at Hilo began a concerted effort to reclaim it. They set up a school in which elderly Hawaiian speakers taught the language to the children. Gradually, by adding a new grade each year, they succeeded in creating a pre-school-to-high school system in which Hawaiian is the primary language of instruction..\..
   Akira Yamamoto, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kansas, who works each summer at the University of Arizona's language reclamation institute [said that] one reason [to preserve languages is that] languages, like animal species, contribute to the richness and diversity of the world: "If you speak English, you have one world; if you speak Navajo, you have another world."
   [And diversity alias variety is the raw material of variability, which is the raw material of adaptability, which is the basis of survivability. As biologist Ernst Mayr in his "Populations, Species and Evolution" (p.398) says, "Variability is inherent in any natural population and is favored by natural selection on account of the frequent superiority of [e.g.,] heterozygotes and the diversity of the environment."]
   For example, Mr. Yamamoto points out, in the Algonquin family of languages, noun endings are divided into two basic categories, animate and inanimate. So while Romance languages separate nouns by gender, the Algonquin sees the world in terms of things that have spirit and things that do not....
   [But maybe the kids are using up precious cranial computing capacity?]
   Advocates answer that students in the Hawaiian program score slightly higher in standardized tests than native Hawaiian students from English-language schools. And the program's first graduates to enter college all passed their English composition tests....
   [Basically, the more languages you learn, the easier it gets.]

3. Carl Sigman [dies], 91, songsmith who made generations hum, by Douglas Martin, NYT, A15.
   
   • theme song to the 1950's "Robin Hood" series -
     "Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen,
     [Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men,
     Feared by the bad,
     Loved by the good,
     Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.]"
   • "Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think" (1950)
   • "What now my love" (1966)...
   ...[He had the] conviction that the best songs reflected natural conversational language.... The title, Mr. Sigman always said, was the hardest part....

1. Danish voters [53.1%] say no to Euro; a blow to unity, by Roger Cohen, NYT, front page.
   [A bigger blow to unity would be if they all joined and they all went down with no fellow Europeans to help them. Before you unify a currency in any functional way, you have to unify the language, the skills, and the acceptable workweek-per-person range. Then it would also be most helpful to unify the acceptable income-per-person range and the acceptable wealth-per-person range. If you don't, the "Great Leak Upward" will bring you down and you won't be able to control it because you're dealing with too many variables at once, like languages, skills (or lack thereof), workweeks vs. unemployment rates, incomes vs. poverty rates, personal net worths vs. personal indebtedness.... The first step is to unify the skills and the workweeks, and that would mean Timesizing.]

2. Number of [health-]insured Americans is up for first time since '87, by Robert Pear, NYT, A15.
   After [falling] relentlessly for 11 years, the number of Americans [with] health insurance [rose] last year...the Census Bureau reported. The proportion of people [with health] insurance [rose] for the first time since 1987 - to 84.5% in 1999, from 83.7% in 1998....

3. U.S. [FDA] approves abortion pill [RU-486]; drug offers more privacy, and could reshape the debate...- Gore is 'pleased', Bush calls the pill decision 'wrong', by Robin Toner, NYT, front page.
   [See also the near-fullpage ad, "President Clinton - Don't leave women worse off than we were eight years ago," by Center for Reproductive Law and Policy at *crlp.org, NYT, A21, which says in part, "The Global Gag Rule punishes women's health organizations around the world for advocating reform of abortion laws in their own country. It restricts the rights of women and threatens our rights here at home...," not to mention being completely out of step in a time of global overpopulation and need to shift from quantity to quality, or in Bucky Fuller's phrase, to "doing more with less."]

4. Bill banning sale of Social Security numbers advances, AP via Boston Globe, D2.
   ...The measure would bar governments at all levels from selling SS numbers, displaying them to the public, or using them in checks they issue. \The\ privacy measure...was quickly approved by the House Ways and Means Committee.... Propelling the legislation is concern about identity theft, one of the fastest-growing crimes in the U.S., which victimizes 750,000 people a year.... Across the country, an army of information brokers and private investigators are said to be stealing personal financial data and selling it..\..usually...on the Internet....

5. Pierre Trudeau is dead at 80; Dashing fighter for Canada, by Michael Kaufman, NYT, front page.
   Canada's ex-[Prime Minister] Pierre Trudeau dies, by Colin Nickerson, Boston Globe, front page.
   ...yesterday [of] complications resulting from prostate cancer and Parkinson's disease....
   [Now here was a 'glimmer of intelligence' indeed, Canada's JFK - who survived! Let's see if we can cull some glowing aphorisms from notre chef glorieux, des morceaux de son esprit, his renowned wit -]
   
   • "Reason before passion."
   • "Living next to [the U.S.] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt."
   • "Fuddle duddle!"
     [When asked later, this is what Trudeau said he said to annoying reporters, when actually what he said was more like F*ck off!  Canadians, ever paragons of niceness, promptly had big posters made picturing Trudeau in arrogance-rampant mode with the caption "Fuddle duddle!"]

1. 2 UPsizings, totaling 60 new jobs + unspecified -
   1. Web firm plans hiring, by David Bushnell, Boston Globe, G1.
      ...Tvisions Inc. of Watertown says it's on a hiring binge. "We're looking to hire 60 people by the end of the year," said Nan White, marketing director for 6-year-old Tvisions, which has 180 employees at the redeveloped Watertown Arsenal complex....
   2. Land Rover output project, Reuters via NYT, C25.
      ...The maker of SUVs [will] invest $190m in its manufacturing site at Solihull, England, as part of a plan to nearly double annual output over five years and bring the Freelander SUV to the U.S. The money will go toward a new press shop and assembly line for future products, as well as efficiency improvements....
      [That last bit about efficiency is a counter-argument, but we're assuming the new press shop and assembly line will mean some new jobs, otherwise unspecified.]

2. [NYT columnist focuses on women and 'time crunch' -]
   Focus on women - A new poll finds wide discontent, by Bob Herbert, NYT, A31.
   ...The new economy has bolstered the incomes of millions of families, but it has also exacerbated the sense of estrangement between the haves and have-nots, and has left many women with the feeling that they have less and less time to spend with their families and properly care for their children. The analysis was drawn from a series of focus groups and a bipartisan poll conducted for Lifetime Television and the Center for Policy Alternatives. The joint project was called Womens' Voices 2000.
   ...The major issues of concern to poll respondents were
   • the ever-tightening "time crunch" (more time at work, less time with family) and what was perceived by many respondents as a decline in the nation's moral values. The best way to reverse the decline in moral values, according to the poll, was for parents to spend more time with their children.... 59% of women with children under 6 said they were finding it harder to balance the demands of work and family now than they did four years ago, when the last Womens' Voices analysis was conducted. And 30% said it was "much harder".... The time crunch offer[s] difficulties that approach the level of paradox....
     [That's the paradox we're unravelling here at Timesizing.com. We'd say the paradox is based on the unwillingness of CEOs to recognize that overall, their own markets are based (1) on their own payrolls and (2) on their solution, if any, to the Chesterton pan-utopian flaw. In other words, they can't do what Raytheon did, and as our whole current economy is doing, and give all their payroll to a few people. And the way to avoid and reverse that is to cut the workweek, spread the work and earnings around as widely as possible (defined by absorption of the unemployed and incarcerated), and thus solve the time crunch.]
   • ...72% would like their health insurance to be independent of their employment. ["Delinking" in the words of Cambridge activist Terry Crystal.] This was not even one of the issues the pollsters had intended to ask about, but it came up repeatedly in the focus groups that preceded the polling.
   • ...87-93% of...women said equal pay and benefits for women should be one of the top political priorities in the U.S. ...Said Celinda Lake, who conducted the polling with Linda DiVall, Linda Williams and Anna Rivera..."Women are now more likely to say they are concerned about the growing divide between the rich and the poor.... "
     [And we agree with Nader that the income gap (dba the wealth concentration) pre-empts and aggravates the gender, age, and race gaps, and is aggravated, in turn, by the "time crunch." The time crunch only exists because we have been taking the time savings of technology in terms of more downsizing and incarceration instead of more financially secure leisure time. These are the results of a CEO-lobbied, government-sponsored, 60-year-long rigidification of the workweek despite waves of technology.]
   • ...retirement is a major worry for many women. 77-85% of...women want pension benefits that can be transferred from one job to another.
   • ...48% of...women feel they will eventually be responsible for the care of a parent or other elderly person.
   • The polling appeared to show that, more than ever, class distinctions among women are being shaped by whether a woman is college-educated and married. Women who are neither are frequently in a woeful economic state.
   While these concerns do not all lend themselves to government solutions...there is a noticeable sense among women that government should try to do what it can.

3. ['Make haste slowly' - especially in reducing your already reduced consumer base -]
   Under pressure, Putin postpones military cuts, by Patrick Tyler, NYT, A14.
   MOSCOW...- Facing opposition from his military commanders, Pres. Vladimir V. Putin postponed plans today to cut the armed forces by a third and said, "There will be no wholesale, massive reductions of the Russian armed forces"....
   [Of course, it would greatly help economic dynamism if the armed forces were to actually receive their pay with no delays.]
   Military, law enforcement and security services take up about 35% of the Russian budget....
   [First get thing humming by defining 'overtime' and establishing a heavy tax on it - with a complete exemption for reinvestment in overtime-targeted training and hiring. Then absorb existing high unemployment and under-employment by adjusting the workweek downward. Then and only then start cutting the military. The only full-employment policy that can out-compete Hitler's and then FDR's and now the Republicans' military approach is Timesizing.]

4. [Lesson in deeper democracy alias more choice - Canada has 5 viable political parties.]
   Canada: New switch to Liberals, by James Brooke, NYT, A10.
   ...In Parliament,
   1. the Conservatives have 15 seats,
   2. the New Democrats 19,
   3. the Bloc Quebecois 44,
   4. the Canadian Alliance 58, and
   5. the Liberals 160.
   [Of course, Canada still doesn't have the depth and breadth of binding, issue-oriented referendums that Switzerland has.]

1. When tilting at windmills pays off - Investors throwing millions at fuel cell, solar power ventures,
   by Syre & Stein, Boston Globe, E1.
   ...These companies are attracting megamillions on scant actual business.
   1. One example: Evergreen Solar Inc. of Waltham, which is raising $40m in an IPO that could value the company at $165-200m+. Evergreen's revenues of $1.1m through the first half of this year were earned almost exclusively through research, not by selling the solar products it is in business to make....
      
   2. Beacon Power Corp. of Woburn has been even more ambitious, registering an IPO to sell as much as $115m in stock to fund its business of developing flywheel electric storage systems. Beacon reported revenues of $269,000 last year.
      
   3. ...The early August IPO of Active Power Inc., which also makes a flywheel energy storage system...was priced at $17 per share, and the stock finished yesterday at $64.375, giving the company a market value of $2.4B. The company's revenues through the first half of this year: $861,000.
      
   [Hey, unlike dot-coms, at least they're making some money.]
   ...The popularity of distributed power companies is driven by two factors: the deregulation fo electric utilities and the increasing demand for extremely reliable power to support a world of...computers....
   [They neglect to mention the severe power shortages that deregulation has allowed in, e.g., California.]
   ...Said analysts Hugh Holman of CIBC World Markets, "Utilities in a monopoly have been very good at squashing the development of distributed resources. We're not in the gradual and somewhat stop-and-go process of prying the power business from monopolies"....
   Alternative power is described as "distributed" because relatively small or even tiny amounts of generating capacity will pop up at many places across the old power grid, typically at the sites of customers who need backup resources or simply want to produce their own energy. Just like the alternative power of the old days, most distributed electricity is environmentally friendly. Fuel cells generate power by [clean] chemical reaction [unlike coal burning plants let alone nukes], and solar power [cleanly] converts sunlight into electricity, using silicon....
   [Hey, maybe we could use this "distributed" lingo to market Timesizing. After all, Timesizing gradually replaces half of the gigantic discretionary investment of today with "distributed" small automatic reinvestment, targeted and triggered by the incidence of overtime. The reinvestment goes into training and hiring in overtime-pressured areas.]

2. Clorox head rejects bonus,
   AP via NYT, C19.
   OAKLAND, Calif...- Craig Sullivan, chairman and chief executive of the Clorox Co., has passed up a $296,900 bonus.... In the fiscal year ended June 30, shares of the cleaning products giant dropped 14% [while] Mr. Sullivan's salary and long-term incentive pay topped $1.2m....
   ["Incentive" pay for reducing shareholder value???]
   ...But he and five other Clorox executives decided to pool their bonus money and spread it among senior managers, Clorox said in a letter announcing its Nov. 15 stockholders meeting....
   [Well, Craig Sullivan is no Charlie Butcher (see 9/26/2000), but it's better than not sharing the windfall. Evidently Sullivan hopes to forestall shareholder wrath, but if the stock is down, why are there any bonuses in play at all??? Sounds like a perverse incentive design.]
   The company's stock has fallen recently, in part based on slumping sales from its $2B acquisition of the First Brands Corp., the maker of Glad bags....
   [And here we have yet another downside of takeovers besides downsizing and downsized markets.]

1. Senate approves $7.8B plan to aid Everglades - House vote is not yet set - Army Corps of Engineers would catch rainwater and guide it to delicate ecosystem, by Lizette Alvarez, NYT, front page.
   [Oh-oh, anything with the Army Corps of Engineers is liable to be overengineered and about as sensitive to pre-existent nature as Disneyland. Can't we just cap and roll back development around the Everglades - get the Nature Preservancy in there to buy up acreage?!]

2. Taco recall prompts call for labels, pointer digest (to A1), NYT, C1.
   [apointin' to the much more turbid headline -]
   Labeling genetically altered food is thorny issue, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, front page.
   [and linking to the big Boston Globe article today -]
   Down on the farm - As controversy mounts, farmers second guess the rush to plant biotech crops, by David Chandler, Boston Globe, D1.
   ...Caught in the middle are American farmers, who have rushed to plant the biotech corn, soy and other crops in the last four years. To many of them, genetic engineering increasingly is just a big fat headache.... In just four years, with hardly a label to let consumers know, these genetically altered crops have found their way into vast numbers of processed foods at the grocery store.
   Now, what seems clearest of all in the great morass of conflicting views over the new seeds is that the farmer's razor-thin profit margins are profoundly at risk. That's why, this year, farmers across the land have been voting with their fields, cutting back on their planting of genetically modified seeds for the first time since those seeds hit the market in 1996.
   [Thank God! This was a stupid and poorly tested idea. Its very unconfidence was manifested in the whole information-withholding routine - effectively a denial of the kind of money-back guarantee that comes with new products that the developers have real faith in. And for all we know, the interactions are potentially so complex, you couldn't test this stuff properly in short of a century anyway. The whole faddish, obsessive, desperate movement is symptomatic of CEOs' pathetic desperation for short-term megabucks regardless of long-term suicide, and the desperation of the rest of us for jobs, now that the whole of our government and much of our private sector has become makework, makework necessitated by freezing our workweek at the 1940 level and then introducing wave after wave of automation and robotization to take over the heavy - and then lighter and lighter - lifting.]
   In particular, farmers planted at least 20% less genetically engineered corn this year than last. And the trend is likely to continue. Far from dying down, the controversies and resistance to the crops seem to be growing. Japan - the biggest foreign customer for US corn - is set to join some European nations next year in prohibiting the import of genetically modified crops....

3. The analyst as bomb thrower - Thomas Brown has an attitude, one he likes to share - Is bigger always better?,
   by Danny Hakim, NYT, C1.
   For years, Thomas K. Brown threw verbal darts [at] a profession known for cozy collegiality. A top-rated stock analyst, he frequently blasted top bankers who were stringing together mergers at prices he believed were too high.
   [But maybe they had already so deeply stinted reinvestment in their own markets via their own employees' pay, and so highly concentrated the profits in their own few hands, that they had nowhere else to put it.]
   ...Mr. Brown's favorite target, however, remains..\..Hugh L. McColl Jr.... Much of Mr. Brown's criticism of Mr. McColl is directed at his acquisition strategies. As chief executive of NationsBank, Mr. McColl was an aggressive buyer, purchasing BankSouth in 1995, Boatmen's Bancshares in 1996 and Montgomery Securities in 1997. His acquisitions culminated in 1998, when NationsBank merged with - and eventually took the name of - Bank of America. "He has always confused size with winning," Mr. Brown wrote in a recent commentary.... "Shareholders don't care about owning the biggest bank," he added. "They want to own shares in the banking company that is going to provide them with the best risk-adjusted return on their capital."
   After falling 16.5% last year, Bank of America's stock has [recovered] 9.5%...but it lags the 12.3% return of the...KBW Bank index.... "There's been some concerns because McColl has done so many mergers and he is thought of, along with Crutchfield, as one of the two big serial acquirers of the industry," said James Ellman, a Bank of America investor who manages the $80m Merrill Lynch Global Financial Services Fund and a $200m offshore fund....
   [Time for another reading of E.F. Schumacher's "Small Is Beautiful."]

• [a good idea? - saves $2500/year of college expenses anyway]
  A college that isn't for everyone...but then, maybe you're not everyone..\.. - Warren Wilson [College] in NC weaves liberal arts education with a strong work ethic, by Michael Kenney, Boston Globe, C6.
  [Photo caption -] Students are required to work 15 hours a week at campus jobs that range from landscaping to plumbing...or forestry, carpentry or construction,...or vehicle maintenance, or working on the college's organic farm.... A $2,475 credit for the work program goes toward room and board of $4,644. Tuition this year was $14,125..\.. US News & World Report ranks Warren Wilson among the best regional arts colleges in the South, while Time magazine has rated it as one of the 20 prettiest campuses in the country..\.. Enrolment this year is 728 - 457 women and 271 men - as the school moves toward a goadl of about 800 students by the fall of 2003....
  [Still, $14,000 tuition these days??? Back in the 1960s the tuition at the University of Toronto was never above $500. This is progress? And at 15 hours a week for how many weeks? - yielding a $2475 credit - is that minimum wage? If there are four months' vacation when you're in college, - that's 4x4= 16 weeks plus one for good measure = 17 weeks annual vacation, leaving 52-17= 35 weeks in the school year, minus a week at Christmas and a week's spring vacation, say 33 week of classes and 15-hrs/wk work program. So $2475 work credit divided by 33 weeks of 15 hrs/wk = 2475/33= $5/hr. Is that the minimum wage at the moment? Nationally it's still $5.15 (see 2/18/99). And then how many hours/week of classes and homework are we talking about? More than 25 - which with the 15 would yield the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act maximum of 40 from 1940 on? One gets the feeling that our 'education' system is just conditioning quiet little workoholics.]

1. Correcting a mistake, by Anthony Lewis, NYT, A31.
   Hardly anyone noticed, but the House of Representatives did something rare and admirable the other day. It voted to correct a legislative mistake that had had cruel consequences for thousands of legally admitted aliens: the retroactive deportation feature of the 1996 Immigration Act. The 1996 law defined as "aggravated felonies" requiring deportation a large number of offenses, including minor misdemeanors....
   [This is a Good Thing. We've got to stop obsessing about the past and start obsessing about designing a better present and future. And as part of that, while we should go easier on deporting immigrants who, e.g., got busted for possession of a marijuana butt 15 years ago, we should also institute regular, binding, public, electronic and telephone referendums on optimum population size at all levels of government, and get some immigration laws and enforcement that are a bit more appropriate to an age of intense global overpopulation instead of to the wide-open spaces and frontiers of two centuries ago. See today's "omen" - 9/23/2000].

2. Swtizerland: Easing the abortion law, by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, A7.
   After three decades of controversy, the Senate has voted to ease the [Swiss] abortion law, one of the most restrictive in Europe. The procedure is now outlawed in all but exceptional circumstances, but the practice is more liberal, enabling some 12,000 women a year to have an abortion....

3. Clinton approves releasing some oil from U.S. reserves - Gore had sought order - 30m barrels earmarked to offset rise in fuel costs - crude prices drop, by Stevenson & Banerjee, NYT, front page.
   [Let's never again get into a Bonus Army situation, where Hoover denied giving World War veterans their bonuses a few years in advance when they really needed them in the depths of the Depression. Too often we have safety reserves that become sacred reserves, untouchable under any circumstances. But while doing this, the U.S. should impose small fuel taxes earmarked entirely for research and development of fuel cells and hybrid and electric vehicles. Let's get moving on this. We completely dropped the ball after the fuel crisis of the 1970s and here we are, once again vulnerable to the 9t-century minds in Saudi Arabia, who still cage their women and chop off hands for misdemeanors.]

4. [At least it's under debate -]
   Canada: Fuel tax debate, by James Brooke, NYT, A7.
   With truckers theatening a strike over high diesel prices, Parliament debated a proposal by the opposition Canadian Alliance to cut federal and provincial fuel taxes, which often account for about 40% of retail prices....
   [Now it's time to quit debating and CUT THE FUEL TAXES. The only excuse for them in the first place was to have every single penny of fuel tax revenues go into research and development of fuel cells and hybrid and electric vehicles. (Did ANY government ever actually DO that?) If governments want tax revenues, let them tax those who have far far more than they can ever spend in hundreds of lifetimes. Tax concentration, not circulation (including transportation). And less you think we're letting truckers off easy, we advocate converting taxes into fees for costs of actual services, and that means taxing trucks for their true costs in wear and tear on the roads, and air pollution. Enough of abusable general tax revenues, easily mistakable for slush funds. Let's move to toward earmarked categories wherever possible, and in general, greater accountability in every possible area, converting the easiest areas first. Fiscal responsibility that is self-regulating by system design - no dysfunctionalizing political intervention required.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   An Internet retailer's move to a new building will bring 900 jobs to South Bronx - An $11m package of tax incentives plays a major role, by Joseph Fried, NYT, A24.
   [[Oops, cancel this. The next day we get "Online grocer delays New Jersey expansion, casting doubt on plans to create jobs in Bronx - Webvan has borne significant losses from investing in new distribution centers," by Jayson Blair [=‘Times reporter who resigned leaves long trail of deception,’ 5/11/2003 NYT, A1], 9/23/00 NYT, A16.]]
   [Whenever there's government handouts, CEOs admit there's a job shortage. The rest of the time, they claim there's a labor shortage so they can offer low pay, no training, and get more visas for tech-trained kids from India who'll work 24/7 for peanuts.]
   A huge building in the South Bronx that has been largely vacant for several years is to be taken over by [Calif.-based] Webvan Group Inc.... Said Fernando Ferrer, the borough president, "It is the largest single shot of jobs in the borough during my public service, which goes back 20 years." And many of the jobs, he said, would be fairly well paying: $30,000 and more a year.
   Webvan plans to move into a nearly 10-acre single-story building at 331 Tiffany Street [in Hunts Point] and use it as a distribution center for the groceries and other consumer items it ships to customers who place their orders over the Internet. The building was a distribution center for the Alexander's department store chain from the 1970's until it went out of business eight years ago....
   ...The city's Economic Development Corp. played a major part by "coming up with a package of incentives...worth about $11m to the company in the form of city and state sales tax abatements and reductions in property taxes. In addition, the company will get tax credits for every person it hires who lives in the area.... The workforce would initially number 500 and eventually grow to 900....
   [What a curious economic "boom" - desperate governments at all levels - city, state & federal - willing to bribe companies with tax benefits (federal enterprise zones and block grants and 'pork barrels'...) if they will only come with jobs, or stay - with jobs. And meanwhile, CEOs in high tech have Clinton convinced he should bring in more poor kids from India who have hitech training because there's such a surplus of hightech jobs they can't fill. Of course, they've defined those job qualifications extremely narrowly, especially if you apply and you're over 50.... And they're sure looking to offer low pay....]

2. [For some reason, without an attached article, right out of the blue on the same page, we find a photograph, with caption, about overtime -]
   Nurses with a message, AP photo via NYT, A24.
   [Caption] About 75 nurses, nurses' aides and other health care workers demonstrated at the New Jersey Statehouse yesterday in an appeal to Gov. Christine Todd Whitman to sign a bill banning mandatory overtime.
   [The photo shows a full-length close-up of three women in a loosely spaced crowd holding signs, the only example of which we can read completely saying "Mandatory Overtime Hurts Patients." Guessing at two other examples, we have "On overtime we nurses Can't provide good care" (...w...Can't...good ca...) and "Disgusted with mandatory overtime" (...usted...ith...).
   [Hey, maybe the nurses' strike at St. Vincent's Hospital in Worcester against forced overtime - Phil Hyde went out to join the picket line on 4/15/2000 - inspired a few more nurses to get "angry as hell" so they're "not gonna take it any more."]

3. [We have an outrageous guy here in the Boston area who poses as an intellectual - one John Silber by name - Boston University brought him up from Texas 20 years ago to pull it out of the red. "Reap the wind, sew the whirlwind." He fired a lot of people, made the Board a bunch of hand-picked yes-men, closed the excellent Adult Education department, the School of Nursing, even, ultimately, his pet Program in Artisanry. He treated people so arrogantly that he evoked a union for practically every kind of employee at the university. Even the faculty tried to unionize. He tried to run for state governor a few years back but he slipped up during a TV interview and insulted one of Boston's favorite newspeople, Natalie Jacobson was it? with a remark bearing sexist overtones? Though running as a Democrat - and this whole state of Massachusetts is Democrat - he gave the opening to the Republican and Bill Weld was elected instead. One of those times when the Dem & GOP 'do the flip' and the GOP guy winds up more liberal than the Dem. (Phil Hyde and Ray Flynn would have done it in the 1998 8th-Congressional race if Flynn had come first instead of second in the Democratic primary.) Well, a few days ago, the Boston Globe published an op ed by this John Silber, in which he argued that a Senator as good as Ted Kennedy should not be subjected to the humiliating bother of running for election every six years. Tony Schinella and Phil Hyde exchanged glances and rolled their eyes, each thinking 'Well everybody knows Silber has lost a chip on his motherboard' and each wondering if he could launch an appropriate letter to the editor, or would it be too sarcastic to be published. Anyway, we have found our champion in a guy from Arlington (where Phil got more signatures than anywhere else) whom neither of us knows but whom Phil phoned up today to thank (left message) -]
   Should incumbents run unopposed?,
   letter to the editor by Saul Rubin of Arlington MA, Boston Globe, A26.
   I APPLAUD JOHN SILBER'S proposal for bypassing certain elections ("Kennedy should run unopposed," op-ed Sept. 16). It would be far more efficient than the current system. We would eliminate all the time we waste going to the polls, and, as a bonus, we would save the taxpayer the cost of running the elections.
           In addition, elected officials could do their jobs much more expeditiously since, without the burden of an election hovering over them, they could dispense with such time-wasting and irritating customs as responding to constituent needs, holding public hearings, speaking to the press, and so forth.
           The only question remaining is how to decide just which candidates qualify. I nominate John Silber to head the decision-making committee. Actually the committee could act quickly and intelligently if Silber were the sole member. No one could question the contributions he has made to the Commonwealth. In truth, I cannot imagine anyone else better qualified by background and experience to hold this position.
   [Beautiful.]

4. [And here's another goody on the same page. The background, for non-Bostonians, is this. Our beloved airport dba "Logan" is too small but since it's on a peninsula in the harbor and we've landfilled as much as we can without stopping boats from coming in, we can't expand the d*mn thing any farther. So naturally we looked out to Lexington (yes, THE Lexington of "Lexington and Concord" in the history books) where the Hanscom Airforce Base has recently been decommissioned, and we started running a few shuttles outa there to New York. But Lexington is a vahry swahnky town - or some Lexingtonians fancy it so and got used to no flights in the interval between the airforce leaving and the shuttles arriving. So now they're fighting the expansion of flights from Hanscom tooth and nail. So here's a quicky letter from another town that kinda nails the situation -]
   Warfare over Hanscom Field,
   letter to editor by Bob Caceres of Boston, Boston Globe, A26.
   JENNIFER BRACERAS'S [huh, Caceres, Braceras??] 700-word column opposing additional flights to Hanscom Field ("Class warfare over Hanscom," Sept. 21, op ed) can be boiled down to just four words:
           Not Over My Backyard.
   [Beautiful, Bob. Thank you.]

1. Cleanup fights hillbilly stereotype - Battling illegal dumping catches on in eastern Kentucky, by Francis Clines, NYT, A14.
   [A beautiful woman, Karen Engle, attacks ugly dumps and illegal eyesores. What a story!]

2. Satellite Web links let Indian tribes take a technological jump - Broadbank access for reservations where phone service can be a luxury, by Mindy Sink, NYT, E11.
   [Big Frank (former Indian agent in Yellowknife, Canada), take note -]
   ...Earlier this month 120 locations on Navajo, Hopi and Havasupai reservations throughout Arizona, New Mexico and Utah were supplied with new satellite dishes and computer equipment for two-way, high-speed Internet service. In one [Havasupai] case, that meant the state-of-the-art satellite dishes had to be carried down 8 miles of trails to the bottom of the Grand Canyon by...pack mules.... "They are jumping generations of technology in a couple of hours...," said Ed Groenhout, VP for strategic initiatives at Northern Arizona Univerisity in Flagstaff.... Starband Communications (formerly Gilat-to-Home Inc.) of McLean Va. worked with [the] University and the Southwest Navajo Nation Virtual Alliance to create the connections [in a] 3-yr pilot project, the first commercial venture for Starbank, which plans to begin selling 2-way satellite Internet service to the general public later this year. The company made significant donations of hardware and subsidized the installations, and tribes obtained additional money in the form of federal and other grants....

3. [Nader's neat idea -]
   The Green Party - A plug with a purpose, by James Dao, NYT, A20.
   [First the plug -]
   ..."I think [Gore's] going to do to Bush what Clinton did to Dole in 1996," Mr. Nader told reporters. His words seemed intended to reassure liberal voters that casting a vote for him would not help elect Mr. Bush....
   [And now the idea -]
   Mr. Nader also said he planned to spend more time campaigning in states where the election is expected to be lopsided [for Gore anyway], so Democrats would feel comfortable about voting for him. Those states include Texas, New York, Mass., and Calif., he said.