Timesizing® Associates

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Good News, Oct. 11-20, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

10/20/2000  glimmers of intelligence -

1. [Scott Adams hilites overwork -]
   Dilbert, by Scott Adams, Boston Globe, C12.
   [In first of three frames we see an employee talking, as we find out in frame 3, to the pointy-haired boss -]
   You're working me too hard! I want to get home in time to kiss my daughter goodnight!
   [Several times on the campaign trail Phil Hyde met employers who claimed that the megahours people, especially young people, are working these days are "their own choice," but the fact is, that in a high-frequency downsizing economy, despite supposedly low unemployment, no one wants to be the first to leave the office.]

2. Everglades restoration plan passes House, with final approval seen - Congress is trying to correct a major environmental error it made in 1948, by Eric Schmitt, NYT, A19.
   ...That year, the lawmakers ordered army engineers to biuld levees and canals to curb flooding in South Florida, then in the first stages of a building boom. By changing the water flow, the engineers inadvertently guaranteed that the Everglades received too little water in the dry season and too much in rainy weather. A half century [has been] long enough for the levees and canals ordered in 1948 to destroy half the Everglades....

3. [A new female head-of-state in erstwhile Ceylon -]
   Sri Lanka: Cabinet sworn in, by Celia Dugger, NYT, A8.
   President Chandrika Kumaratunga...swore in a large cabinet of more than 40 ministers at her official residence.... Her ruling coalition emerged from elections short of a parliamentary majority....
   [Kumaratunga - it rolls off the tongue like some of the Indonesian names - like, Budiono Sri Handoko, or Hasudungan Tampubolon - or for that matter like some of the ancient Hittite names, such as, Shuppiluliumash, or Shargallisharri.]

4. UN forum condemns Israel for 'war crimes' in territories, by Stephanie Nebehay, Boston Globe, A21.
   [Ready? Altogether now, "AntiSemitic! AntiSemitic! AntiSemitic!"  Seriously, the UN forum has a lot of guts to call a spade a spade when it's precious Israel in the dock. And this a country who is into American taxpayers for, what is it, $4 billion in "foreign aid" every year, and for 'fairness' we have to shell out to Egypt another $2-3B? Truly the Israelis have forgotten their own scriptures. "Why have I chosen you, O Israel? It is not because you are the greatest of the nations that I have chosen you, but because I love you." 'Twould indeed be grand if modern Israel was worthy of such love by showing some of it toward the Palestinians.]

5. Media have failed the electorate, letter to editor by Samuel Sinclair of Brookline MA, Boston Globe, A22.
   Sadly, the focus of the media's coverage of the presidential election has been too much about minor detail mistakes and personal traits than on the policies espoused by the candidates. How much print and air time are given to stories about little personality quirks, such as smirks and sighs, rather than the candidates' records and ideas! The Globe has run its fair share of these.
   I also believe the so-called "liberal" media have gone out of their way to lay off Governor George W. Bush regarding his Texas record. The Globe has often focused on Gore foibles but has done little digging into Bush's shady business dealings in Texas or his untruths on Texas policies.... The nation has generally been let down by a media trying too hard to look centered and evenhanded.
   Your editorial page may speak favorably of Gore, but your reporting has devoted disproportionate attention to Gore's personality. It is funny that so many people in the media decry the lack of real issues in the race and then go and write so many stories that focus on everything but the issues....
   [Hear hear.]
   It is not that campaigns today are devoid of issues. The media fail to cover the issues. I ask that you get off the focus on kisses, moods and bungled phrases and pay attention to what really is at stake here - our nation's future.
   [Well said.]

6. Gambling riches give Indian tribes new clout, by Tatsha Robertson, Boston Globe, A28.
   [Good. It's payback time. And whitey sure has a lot to compensate the Indians for, considering he broke every treaty he ever made with them.]

1. [Efforts rev to preserve endangered languages as well as species -]
   World's dying languages, alive on the Web, by Michael Pollak, NYT, E13.
   ...The website for Ethnologue (www.sil.org/ethnologue) [is] a reference work on the world's more than 6,000 oral languages, [which] represent only a fraction of those that are endangered, dying or dead.... Some organizations equate the extinction of a language with the loss of a biological species, and they are trying to call attention to the need to record and preserve as many threatened tongues as possible....

2. [Ellen Goodman moans re mtns of mahvellous email -]
   When e-mail runneth over, op ed by Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, A19.
   ...The odd thing is that the high-tech companies keep boasting of products and processes to keep us more in touch while everyone I know is trying to hold back the [tsunami]....
   I read a study the other day showing that the average corporate e-mailer spends two hours a day doing e-mail. The figure has grown by 50% in just one year.
   [Here's another example of the runaway inflation of makework when you keep pushing work-saving technology into an economy with a frozen pre-technological workweek.]
   I don't know if anyone is writing a thesis on e-mail, but I'm sure we are communicating more and thinking less....
   Sitting here at my desk, clicking and skimming my way through 332,331,330, I find some great stuff. I can tell you exactly by e-mail is a good thing. But what do we do now with waaayyy too much of a good thing?
   [Radical idea - Hire a human secretary?]

1. 2 UPsizings, 200 new jobs + unspecified -
   1. HomeRuns.com sets up in DC, by Stephanie Stoughton, Boston Globe, E9.
      ...A Burlington [Mass.]-based online grocer plans to reach beyond its Boston market to serve the Washington, DC area by the end of October. ...It is working out of a 145,000-sq-ft fulfillment center in Landover, Md. HomeRuns has hired 200 employees, and now has a fleet of 809 vans and trucks in the Washington market.... HomeRuns.com's expansion comes at a time when other Internet grocers are retrenching. Streamline.com said lsat month it planned to sell its Washington, DC and Chicago operations to Peapod Inc....
   2. Canadian firm opens Northborough plant, by Naomi Aoki, Boston Globe, E9.
      BioChem Pharma Inc...opened a new $25m product development center in Northborough, significantly expanding the company's US operations. The company, known for discovering the...AIDS treatment 3TC/Epivir, will develop vaccines and therapeutics at the site....

2. [Employer argues for timesizing. Employees take long-term poison pill and argue for overtime.]
   Tentative deal is reached to end monthlong transit strike in Los Angeles, by Barbara Whitaker, NYT, A14.
   ...The union and the MTA [Metropolitan Transit Authority] had been at odds over proposals by the MTA to reduce overtime pay - which can add $20,000-$50,000 to a driver's annual income - and add part-time workers. The MTA suggested the changes to deal with a $438m operations deficit that is projected over the next 10 years....
   [The article does not tell us how the final agreement turned out, but in the meantime, we have an interesting situation here where the employer is arguing for timesizing (cutting hours and creating more jobs, here specifically converting overtime into jobs) and the union is presumably fighting it, even though it would probably mean more union members. The labor movement 'got stupid' and split on this fateful issue in 1930s, half forgetting the powerful realization of their fathers that as long as they kept cutting hours, they would keep harnessing market forces to raise pay. The fact that a near-sighted group that kept flogging "work hard to get ahead," even though it kept weakening their wages in the longer-term as work-saving technology poured into the economy, basically conspired with FDR's initial misunderstanding of shorter hours to lay the axe to roots of the American labor movement once the labor shortage of World War II began to wear off in the late 1960s.
   [The worst mistake a company can make is to start relying on overtime as a regular thing, especially a transportation company where drivers' accident rates rise steeply as overtime hours advance.]

3. [Here's something else hiliting a short-term goody = long-term disaster -]
   We're not responsible - When good times go bad, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A31.
   However this election turns out, future historians are likely to see this as the year that America failed a big political test.... The basic rule of fiscal responsibility for a national government is...the same as...for a family: Pay off your debts and build up financial reserves when things are good, so that you can draw on those reserves [when things are bad]. And these are the best of times for America's government in at least three ways.
   1. ...We are at peace, with no significant military rivals.... Things are unlikely to stay this easy [and] one way or another defense spending will eventually have to rise from its current low.
      [Maybe, or maybe if we elect 'peace-mongering' Ralph Nader it could go lower.]
   2. ...Our demography is as good as it's going to be for the foreseeable future [i.e., it's only going to be getting worse from here on]. The modern US government is in large part in the business of insuring the income and medical expenses of older citizens. Starting just 10 years from now, the population eligible for Medicare and Social Security will start rising, and rising, and rising, with no end in sight. And so will the bills. If taxes on the diminishing fraction of our population that isn't retired are to stay tolerable, we'd better start saving now.
      [Maybe, or maybe we'll just start pushing back and eventually abolishing the whole concept of retirement.]
   3. ...Right now...the rest of the world \perceives\ the US economy [as] the place to invest your money..\..and indirectly the federal budget...benefits from [this] perception.... Huge inflows of foreign capital have been keeping US interest rates down and stock prices up, both of which also keep the money flowing into federal coffers. ...Even without a crisis...foreigners will eventually discover more opportunities outside the US....
   So the responsible, sensible thing for the US government to do is to run very big surpluses right now.
   [And for some reason he stops short of saying, "AND PAY DOWN THE DEBT."]
   Indeed, budget analysts who take the long view argue that even without the tax cuts and spending initiatives proposed by the presidential candidates we [will] not be running as large a surplus over the next decade as we should - that if anything we should be raising taxes and cutting spending.
   But...our leaders [have] never really tried..\..to explain that long view to the public.... So...
   • on one side the public feels, [quite] correctly, that politicians like Al Gore, who use...half-truths to push for half-responsible policies, are talking down to them.
   • On the other side the public feels, quite wrongly, that politicians like George W. Bush, who tell them that they can have their cake and eat it too, are men of the people. Mr. Bush's willingness to trust in the public's innumeracy [= math illiteracy] continues to boggle the mind. In the second debate he offered possibly the biggest misrepresentation [oh go ahead, say "lie"] yet, this time declaring about his tax plan that "most of tax reductions go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder." (That sound you hear is the giggling of millionaires and the guffawing of multimillionaires.)
     [Nice touch. We've often imagined those sounds as Steve Forbes touts his flat tax "for ordinary people."]
   ...Maybe better politicians could have made a better case for the right policies.
   [Or maybe Paul Krugman could spend some ink on Ralph Nader and John Hagelin and other more responsible politicians.]
   Or maybe the fault is not in our politicians but in ourselves.
   [Maybe in yourself anyway, Paul. Have you ever gone outside the box and examined third-party platforms? Or are you scared of losing your gig at the Times?]

• Real campaign issues still lurking beneath the surface - First on the list of unmentioned issues in the presidential debates is the growing inequality of income, by Emerita Prof. Carolyn Shaw Bell of Wellesley College Economics MA, Boston Globe, D4.
  ...Much viewer frustration arose from things that were not discussed at all, or that lay hidden beneath the surface of what was said. One [can] discern a hidden agenda, including income distribution, foreign economic policy, and the role of government.
  First of the list...although implicit in the different designs for tax cuts, aid to education, and new federal health benefits, is the growing inequality of income.
  [Nice use of the word "designs" - very actionable - implies possibility of redesigning. And in the next sentence, nice use of the word "flaw" reminiscent of G. K. Chesterton's pan-utopian flaw, which is all about income inequality.]
  Evident since the 1970s, income inequality has been the major flaw in our extraordinary record of continuous prosperity, economic expansion, and growth. Facts abound to present the problem.
  
  • The difference between the highest incomes and the lowest has widened in almost any group of people considered. The typical chief executive's salary used to be 15 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker; now it's 40 times as great.
  • Between 1973 and 1993, income among those in the top fifth of the distribution rose by 1.3% per year, while income for the middle two-fifths...changed scarcely at all, and in the lowest fifth income declined year by year.
  • The top 5% of the income distribution received 15% of the total income in 1970 and 21% in 1997. The lowest [fifth] received 5% of all the income in 1970 but only 3% in 1997.
  These facts describe a degree of inequality that has widened during the past 30 years. Do we, as a people, want to do anything about it?...
  [Good that she prioritized this. Bad that, like many economists, Carolyn implies that doing something about it is optional. Where is the economist's warning about what over-concentration of wealth did from 1929 to 1941? The devil's advocate would answer her question, "Do we want to do anything about it?" as she's left it, with, "Why? Why bother?" He'd go on to point out -
  1. "Income inequality is the driver of growth. As long as there are no big gaps in the ladder, everyone except the topmost on the income distribution, from lowest to highest, can see someone else who has about 25% more than them, and want it, and tend to get it. 25% is the epicenter of human quantitative motivation, according to H. F. Clark and Robert K. Merton - much more than 25% is hopeless, much less than 25% is boring. That everyone can see some Jones's with roughly 25% more than them to envy, keeps the economy in expansion mode." The rebuttal to this argument is ecological and has to pull in data about the finitude of the biosphere. This line of rebuttal is associated with "The Limits to Growth" of 1971 and, we believe, featured in Anders Hayden's new book.
     
  2. But there is another warning about the extreme concentration of wealth which should be covered even by mainstream economists because the marginal efficiency of (concentrated) capital is a standard neo-classical doctrine. The other warning is that wealth concentration eventually reaches a point where it's suctioning the markets away from its own investments. That is, it reaches an extreme that is self-contradictory, self-undermining and self-destroying (because depression-generating and -perpetuating). The fact that mainstream economists persist in ignoring this item in their own toolkit of doctrines is tantamount to the same kind of "hidden agenda" that Carolyn discerns in the presidential candidates. So, "physician, heal thyself." We'd say "cast not the first stone" but it's good that Carolyn brought this up and prioritized it.]

1. 10/15 Working class - More companies are creating corporate universities to help employees sharpen skills and learn new ones, by Michael Rosenwald, Boston Globe, H1.
   ["Good, but" - still not continuous, or insufficiently integrated with the workplace and the job market - and still, 'flex-time' doth not shorter hours make.]
   So much for giving them more money, stock options, flex-time schedules, swanky offices and ping-pong tables in lunchrooms. It isn't enough.... "The number one reason people change jobs is [to] gain more skills, become more adept, more valued,"..\..said Sunny Steadman, a recruiter for Management Recruiters of Boston....
   [In other words, to regain the kind of job security and control everyone had before CEOs contracted 'merger&downsizing' hysteria back in the early 1980s.]
   Companies are responding in a big way,...
   [...but then, anything at all is 'big' relative to doing nothing...]
   ...with many of them establishing what amount to corporate universities.... These are serious, multimillion dollar budget think tanks integrated within business plans....
   [Funny how reporters think something is 'serious' if it has a multimillion dollar budget integrated with a business plan. But Jill Barad of Mattel (and she's only one recent egregious example) slammed billions into buying The Learning Company as part of a business plan and Mattel wound up selling it 18 months later for less than 500 million. So 'serious' as used by reporters needed be taken seriously by the ecology-minded, since it oftens covers the faddish, unsustainable and self-destructive.]
   They are designed to sharpen employees daily skills and help them acquire others to advance their careers....
   [Just how do you sharpen daily workplace skills in an ivory tower? But at least it's a start.]
   In 1987 \Boston-based\ State Street Corp...created the State Street Institute. Back then, there were only abaout 400 such operations nationwide, according to Corporate University Xchange, a consulting company in New York. Today, there are more than 1,600.
   [Out of how many possible similarly-sized corporations? ? ?]
   Considered an industry leader, State Street's program runs on an $11m budget...
   [Just to keep this cheerleading in perspective, Jill Barad got $37m severance for wrecking Mattel.]
   ...with 80 employees and 18 classrooms inhabiting 5,200 square feet. The program has five tiers, with new hires going through a five-week in-classroom skills training program. Many have varying backgrounds and degrees, so classes start with an introduction to the securities business and advance to simulations of on-the-job situations....
   [The whole operation is still based on detached 'simulations', instead of based on onsite learning by watching and doing. And it's still making a mountain out of a mole hill - beware that the real purpose here isn't corporate "initiation," i.e., conditioning to give the CEO the kind of loyalty that he's not going to give you. ]
   "What all this training does is create a sense of loyalty to the employer," said Stacey Wagner, a director with the American Society for Training and Development..\.. Employees then take classes in preparation for a new job or to improve on [jobs] they are finding cumbersome.... Companies have found that the in-house setups are more useful than traditional tuition reimbursement programs, which are often used now for senior leadership skill development, to supplement other holes [sic] or for those employees who covet an advanced degree....
   [Before we go on to slam these 'in-house' setups for not being far enough 'in', let's just note the implicit condemnation here of one of the biggest motherhood and applepie issues being lipserviced today by America's politicians all over the country - education. They (and we) should all be talking about training, not education. Education has become just another huge American makework program, pumping millions of unemployables into the job market every year. And there's another glitzy step intervening in CEOs' fad-driven peabrains before we 'go to ground' -]
   Though nearly 75% of all training is still being conducted in the classroom, according to a 1999 report in Training Magazine, most people in the corporate university industry...
   [Oy, yet another intervening, self-important, feather-bedding, makework 'industry'!]
   ...say the classroom is steadily giving way to the Internet. The reason: education tied completely to actual business situations is even more useful for employees and their companies. Also, employees can do the work at their own desks instead of being pulled into the classroom....
   [Ah, sportsfans, for many many jobs, the Internet is decidedly not "tied completely to actual business situations." How we wriggle and writhe to avoid the glaring simplicity of overtime-targeted, onsite, eachone-teachone on-the-job training. Lordy, the Neanderthals did it around the campfire and out hunting. We don't need legions of 40-hour-a-week 'professionals' telling us how to do what came naturally to us for 100,000s of years.
   [Now that we've made that point, on to expose the continuing inadequacy of this approach. In a context where products and software revs are changing month by month, a training model that is not integrated right into the worksite and targeted organically and automatically by overtime rather than by some topdown or outside-consultant's business plan, has no chance of keeping up. These 'almost-universities' are to the continuous overtime-targeted workplace-integrated training of the future as stromatolites are to the eukaryotic cell. Stromatolites are the ancient 6-foot pedestal structures formed by millions of simple-celled lifeforms on the bacteria level, in which different million-cell areas are specialized for different functions - the outer layer of cells specializes in the whole-structure 'membrane' or 'skin', right under that come the photon-to-food converters, under that come the structure replicators, etc. A few of these stromatolites still exist on Australian beaches. They were outcompeted as groups of individual but differently specialized simple-celled organisms ("mitochondria") teamed up to form a complex cell, one doing the membrane function, one the photosynthesis (in plants), one the DNA/RNA etc. The whole story is laid out in Lynn Margolis' pathbreaking book, "The Symbiotic Origins of the Eukaryotic Cell" published back in the late 60s/early 70s. Lynn basically changed the structure of biology from the 3 kingdoms of animals-plants-fungi, to the 2 cell-types of prokaryotic-eukaryotic. All us humans and higher animals (meaning anything 'above' the level of bacteria = "prokaryotic") are composed of millions of tiny teams integrated into and composing individual complex cells = "eukaryotic". Life may be dog-eat-dog survival-of-the-fittest competition etc., but the whole fabric of us is cooperative teamwork, times billions, each complex "eukaryotic" cell the functional equivalent of a whole big kludgy stromatolite of old. When our companies get back to the 'eukaryotic' kind of training, they will pump out the kind of versatility they need in their employees, and a whole new rate of real social progress will ensue that will make this whole "new economy" thing look like a Model-T Ford.]

2. 10/16 F.C.C.'s rift with industry is widening - Chairman steps up criticism of television, by Steven Labaton, NYT, C1.
   ...[If] William E. Kennard, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission...produced [a TV] series \portraying his relationship with\ the nation's largest broadcasting companiess...it would be the saga of a crass industry that, swimming in a sea of profit and consolidation, has forsaken its obligations as trustees of the airwaves, [in that they've -]
   • corrupted children through sexually explicit and violent programming,
   • ignored the political weal by refusing to provide adequate air time for candidates, and
   • pretty much forgotten about opening its ranks to minorities....
   [Good for Kennard for speaking out. More power to him.]

1. A dirty job, but it seems more people want to do it - Planting the seeds for a resurgence of the small farm, by Julie Flaherty, NYT, B1.
   [Good, maybe we'll break our incredible megamonoculture-borne blight vulnerability and get back some welcome biodiversity! The Times story actually starts with Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, Mass.  "Good, but" the resurgence has a lot to make up for -]
   ...Nationwide, there are 300,000 fewer farmers than there were 20 years ago, while the amount of land devoted to growing declined about 3% between 1987 and 1997, according the Agriculture Dept.  The loss rate is even higher in New England, where cropland shrank 9% in Maine, 12% in Massachusetts and 13% in Vermont....

2. It's break time, pointer blowout (to F3), Boston Globe, F1.
   The manager of Phish says the band is taking a hiatus to spend more time with family and for individual pursuits, but it is not breaking up.

1. Aventis gives up license to sell bioengineered corn, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, C5.
   The EPA effectively revoked the license yesterday for the genetically engineered corn that has now been linked to the nationwide recalls of two brands of taco shells....
   [Thank God! As John Fagan, chairman of Genetic ID, said the other day (see 4th item on 10/11 below), genetic engineering has been 'prematurely commercialized.']

2. FTC: Drug makers quash generics, AP via Boston Globe, E2.
   The Federal Trade Commission wants to examine the records of...30 makers of brand-name drugs and 60 companies that make generics..\..to find whether they keep lower-cost generic drugs off the market...by "anticompetitive agreements" or other strategies.... Over the next five years, drugs with nearly $20B in annual sales in the U.S. will go off-patent, said FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky. While the end of the patents means that pharmaceutical companies stand to lose profits on brand name drugs,... [No problem - drug companies are in record profit now that they've lobbied their way to tax breaks from Congress to pack up their jobs in high-wage continental USA and move to Puerto Rico - see Barlett & Steele's "America: What Went Wrong?" (Andrews & McMeel: Kansas City, 1992), p.96 - and besides, they're biggest profit problem, like that of most other big US companies, is The Great Leak Upward = runaway, unlimited executive pay and perks.]
   ...it also allows lower-cost generics onto the market.
   [Which is a Good Thing, considering Americans pay higher prices for drugs than practically anywhere else in the world.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Restaurants expansion, Bloomberg via NYT, C20.
   Darden Restaurant Inc., owner of Red Lobster and Olive Garden, plans to...open as many as 50 Bahama Breeze and 50 Smokey Bones restaurants in the next 2½ years, the company told an investors' conference in New York.
   [Of course, we're assuming that Darden has told potential investors The Absolute God's Truth here.]

2. Yugoslav chief upset at some of his allies - Kostunica says the U.S. is [now] 'meddling less than usual' and foresees new ties, by Steven Erlanger, NYT, A8.
   ['Cheezzit, dis guy's onto us!']
   BELGRADE...- President Vojislav said [yester]day that he was having "almost as much trouble from my friends as from my enemies" in the transition from the rule of Slobodan Milosevic, and that he was concerned that his own authority was being compromised.... "The United States has done too much meddling in our internal affairs," Mr. Kostunica said in an interview. "Now it's meddling less than usual, so this will have a positive influence."
   [Us, 'meddling'?! - no-o-o. (Hey, what 'meddling'? - none of that made it into the New York Times which publishes "all the news that's fit to print" - so there really wasn't any, right?)]
   ..\..He was eager to begin a new, more balanced relationship with Washington....
   [In the immortal words of Ralph Crampton, "Sheesh, wudda grouch." Seriously, for a newcomer, this guy's pretty good at setting and communicating his limits. President Wahid of Indonesia is too. Now that they've both 'caught the wave,' let's hope they both stay on top of it and don't get sucker-punched or swamped. Remember what we did to Allende ("THANK you, CIA") and the still-paying, vast, Pinochet-based costs - of all kinds - which that triggered. "He who meddles, mars."]

3. [The concept of 'share' begins its rehabilitation?]
   Strike shuts many Los Angeles agencies - County services hurt as 42,000 walk out, by Todd Purdum, NYT, A10.
   [Photo shows strikers with bullhorn and signs which say -]
   • [Fair share] for L.A. County's working families - Local 660 SEIU
   • ON STRIKE for our fair share
   • FAIR SHARE for L.A. County's working families
   [The concept of 'sharing' is a soft one that is generally avoided by economists, ever eager to coat their soft 'science' with hard-science concepts. But apparently it's still useful to the labor movement, despite the 'Chesterton pan-utopian flaw'. Now all they need to do is define it. One of the nice features of our current Model T version of Timesizing is that the concept of 'fair share' is defined - on a sophisticated modern basis - that...
   • defines it in the per-person dimension, not the per-job dimension (e.g., income per person, not wage per job, or rather working hours per person, not per job - see next point)
   • defines it in the employment dimension (fair share of market-demanded employment per person, or "workweek"), not the (currently) arbitrary money dimension, such as income per person
   • defines it dynamically, not statically (e.g., France's new workweek is frozen at 35 hrs)
   • defines it as a range, not a point (e.g., between 15 and 35 hrs/wk) - unlike a 'minimum wage', a work-sharing approach like Timesizing has a lower and upper limit - and it's the upper limit that's the real problem, because a de-facto lower limit of zero is always close at hand, but on the up side, there is NO naturally or situationally imposed limit
   • defines it to automatically adjust with market need - the lower limit is set by a population's own pain threshold (= the referendum phase, phase 1) and the upper limit is set inversely by the lower limit (= the balancing phase, phase 4)
   [Now are you getting a feeling for what we mean by "economic design"?]

1. 2 UPsizings, totalling 1200 new jobs -
   1. Alpha [Industries] to expand at Haverhill [Mass.] site, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, D7.
      ...The Woburn [Mass.] manufacturer of telecommunications and computer semiconductor said it bought a 125,000-square-foot building and 41-acre site in Haverhill...at 25 Computer Drive...formerly owned by Wang Computer...for $8.75m..\..to support ongoing expansion.... Alpha...expects 400 people will work at the site by the end of next year, of which 200 would be new hires and 200 relocated from other sites.... Alpha has said it needs to add hundreds of jobs to cope with explosive demand for chips and devices it makes that are used in wireless phones, high-speed modems, and other products....

   2. [Good, but...]
      IBM computer chip plant revives Hudson Valley role, by Barnaby Feder, NYT, C21.
      IBM said yesterday that it would spend $2.5B to build "the world's most technologically advanced" chip factory in East Fishkill, NY. The project will be eligible for tax breaks, grants and other incentives amounting to $660,000 for each of the 1,000 permanent jobs it is expected to create....
      [Let's see, taxpayers are going to get soaked 660 grand for EACH of 1000 jobs that are EXPECTED (by whom?) to be created and EXPECTED (by whom?) to be permanent? 660,000x1000= $660 MILLION of taxpayers' money is going to the BIGGEST computer company in the world to beg them for jobs at a time when high-tech CEOs across the entire country are claiming they have so many jobs that they can't find enough qualified American candidates for them so they have to have hundreds of thousands more visas to bring in foreign candidates? What's wrong with this picture? EVERYTHING! These goddam CEOs have set things up so that, heads they win, tails we taxpayers lose. And the only presidential candidate focused on this mountain of crap is Ralph Nader because the CEOs have bought and paid for Bush and Gore.]
      The announcement comes just seven years after the IBM Corp., the lower Hudson Valley's largest private employer, rocked the region with massive cutbacks.
      [This is nothing short of job blackmail by the super-rich. What a racket. They pull out seven years ago so they can extort money from taxpayers later to get them to come back. Let's decriminalize marijuana and criminalize something that's really costing us money - corporate jobs blackmail.]
      The factory would represent the single largest investment in New York State by a business and the largest in the computer giant's history.
      [Hooey! What about New York State's over half-billion-dollar investment in the factory? Are taxpayers at least getting company stock out of this? Why not? Are taxpayers even getting any guarantees that a specific number of jobs will be created and that they will be permanent? Why not? (Because NY state politicians have also gotten big campaign contributions from certain sources???) The only satisfaction we in Massachusetts can dredge out of this is that New York is clearly just as stupid or as corrupt as Massachusetts, which in the last five years gave huge taxbreaks to both Raytheon and record-profitable Fidelity, both of whom have had jobcuts since then, especially Raytheon. Until we plug the Great Leak Upward - of unlimitedly many dollars going into unlimitedly few hands - we don't have a prayer of fighting this contradictory, fog-generating job picture and the shake-down of taxpayers and the further concentration of money - railroading us all into another crisis of concentration like the Great Depression. And the only way we can plug the Great Leak Upward without creating dependency is by starting with the concentration of skills and working hours now overloading on proportionally fewer and fewer people in the high tech industry around the world via unaccountable overtime.]
      IBM will build the factory within a building where it had shut down a major chip production line in 1993...
      [Oh so they're not even really building a new factory! They're just using their old one and redoing the insides. And how many times are they going to pull this one and poor dumb taxpayers are going to hand over their wallets to the richest SOBs in America?]
      ...at the tail end of cutbacks that saw its workforce in the region tumble from 30,700 workers in 1985 to fewer than 14,000.
      [That's less than half. And now listen to the contradiction compounded -]
      Although the area has since rebounded and now has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the state, state and local government officials have avidly courted the company. Gov. George E. Pataki hailed IBM's return to large-scale chip production in the region as an internationally visible endorsement of his efforts to make New York more attractive to businesses. "New York's ability to compete...."
      [Blah blah blah. This political criminal is giving away $660,000,000 of New York taxpayers' money to the biggest computer company in the world, led by millionaires or billionaires, in return for unguaranteed jobs that THE STATE BY ITS OWN FIGURES DOES NOT NEED. American "democracy" is kaput. These mock-elected officials are responsible only to the tiny superwealthy power elite in this country and no longer responsible by any stretch of the imagination to its own tax-paying citizens. And this relatively tiny number of super-rich CEOs have no clue about the connection between their overall workforce and their overall consumer base/markets. So they keep inducing depressions - crises of overproduction and overcapacity caused by a crisis of overconcentrated wealth. Pathetic. How did we get this in the Glimmers of Intelligence section?? Oh yeah. It was a "good, but" and in this case the "but" overwhelms the "good."]

2. Why U.S. giants are crying uncle - Europe's top antitrust regulator [Mario Monti] steps up merger scrutiny, by Edmund Andrews, NYT, W1.
   [Glad somebody's antitrust regulator is doing something before we let CEOs scrunch up the corporate rain forest into a wad and drop it.]

3. Polaroid Corp., NYT, C6.
   ...Cambridge, Mass., has agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 25% in the next 10 years.

4. Caught in the headlights of the biotech debate, by David Barboza, NYT, C1.
   [Photo caption -] John B. Fagan, the chairman of Genetic ID, says he is not against genetic engineering, just troubled by what he sees as its premature commercialization.