Timesizing® Associates

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

11/10/2000  glimmers of intelligence -

1. [1 UPsizing - repeat of yesterday plus figures]
   Nissan says plant in Mississippi will open in 2003, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...The plant will be able to produce 250,000 vehicles a year, employing 3,300 workers when it starts and 4,000 employees at full capacity....

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   British Telecommunications to split into 2 companies, by Suzanne Kapner, NYT, W1.
   ...amid fierce competition and mounting debt.... In doing so, British Telecom follows in the footsteps of AT&T and, to a lesser extent, WorldCom....
   [Hey wait a minute, didn't these clowns just recently get their big butts aggregated to the XXXL size? Why don't we save a lot of inefficient yoyoing up and down and just rule out mergers in the first place!]

3. [Here's a long overdue invention -]
   Jackhammer that keeps all the sleeping asleep, by Tina Kelley, NYT, C19.
   ...A jackhammer quieter that a crowded bistro may be in New York's future. The Raptor is a helium-driven gas gun that can cut through six-inch concrete with nail-like projectiles moving nearly as fast as a mile a second...instead of the [usual] louder, diesel-fired compressor..\.. Its inventors say it is 25% faster than a jackhammer, safer and easier on workers because it rests on the ground and is operated remotely. [It] was honored yesterday by Popular Science magazine as one of the year's 100 most significant technological innovations.... The Raptor originated at the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY...[from guys like] Jim Higgins, Gaby Ciccarelli, Mano Subudhi and Louis Gerlach..\.. One of three scientists who hold the patent to the machine \is\ Bob Hall.... The Gas Research Institute of Chicago holds the license to the technology and hopes it can be marketed within a year.... Work is still under way on the silencer for the machine.
   [That would seem to be fairly basic here.]
   The goal is for it to produce only 82 decibels at the muzzle...- about as noisy as a whistling teakettle or a crowded restaurant. Regular jackhammers produce 130 decibels....

1. 2 UPsizings (unspecified new jobs) -
   • Nissan will build a truck plant in Mississippi, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
     ...a $900m factory near Canton, Miss. to make pickup trucks and SUVs [and employing] 3,000-4,000 people..\.. North America is Nissan's largest market, accounting for about 30% of its sales; [only] 25%...come from Japan....
     [Oh no-o-o, not more SUVs!]
   • Mapletree [Networks] plans Westford [Ma.] center, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, C9.
     ...A Norwood [Ma.] startup that makes...omponents [such as] boards and modules for telecom switches to handle a range of...traffic, including voice, fax, wireless and broadband Internet services..\..plans to open a research and development center in Westford [already home of Sonus Networks and Lucent Technologies' former Cascade Communications division] to gain a better presence in the heart of Massachusetts' telecom startup region. Mapletree...has 60 employees.... [It] plans to expand, depending on how many more engineers and systems developers it can attract....
     [Oh how passive. Now companies' plans are job-market contingent? Where's the training? Where are the market-commanding wage offers? Some economic "boom" when wimpy CEOs play the victim and say, "Our expansion plans depend on how many qualified people we can get." Isn't it CEOs who are always sneering at the "lump of labor fallacy" which (falsely) claims shorter-hours advocates falsely insist there's only a fixed pool of employment (not "labor"!) out there that has to be shared, and now these whiners are claiming there's only a fixed pool of job candidates (= "labor") to be shared??? "Heads we win, tails you lose."]

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Court blocks Heinz purchase of Beech-Nut, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   The H.J. Heinz Co. was barred by a federal appeals court from buying the owner of a rival maker of baby food...while antitrust authorities press their case to stop the merger. The decision could kill the transaction.
   [Here's hopin'!]
   Heinz and Beech-Nut together would have roughly 30% of the U.S. baby food market; Gerber Products, a unit of Novartis AG, has nearly all of the rest.
   [So where were antitrust regulators when Gerber was in takeover mode - or in other industries, when Fleet was engulfing BankBoston etc.?!]

3. [Kinda clunky in this form but - here's timesizing already in operation in our economy -]
   General Motors to idle 2,200 workers at van plant, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   [As in Dutch names like "Cornelius van Plant"?]
   The GM Corp, which is cutting back vehicle production for the 4th quarter because of swelling inventories of unsold cars and trucks [will] idle about 2,200 workers at its Wentzville, Miss. commercial van plant for two weeks beginning Monday.
   [Now it's starting to sound Czech, but Christmassy - "Good plant Wentzville last went slack, on the Feast of Stephen...." Hey, alternating biweekly periods ain't too smooth but it sure beats downsizing cuz it saves skills and morale, and minimizes the damaging effects of sales slumps in particular industries on the economy's consumer base as a whole, instead of magnifying them the way downsizings do. However, Timesizing.com recommends a smoother approach = constant micro-adjustments in the corporate workweek instead of these big one- or two-weeks off, and on, and then maybe off again.... The problem with them is that they're based on the assumption that the slump is temporary, whereas continuous week-by-week workweek adjustments in the form of adjustments in the number of working hours per day, a week at a time, makes no such assumption and can therefore track gradual trends and alert and mobilize a firm's entire workforce (including top mgmt) to counter negative trends.]
   The plant makes the Chevrolet Express and Savana full-size vans. GM idled two Mich. car assembly plants for a week last month, affecting about 9,500 workers, as it sought to ease oversupplies of unsold Oldsmobile Auroras and other vehicles.
   [Notice here another hallmark of depression...excess inventories and "oversupplies." Compare "over-capacity" in one of today's - 11/09/2000's - bankruptcy stories.]

1. Profits up? Time to strike, by Brian Lavery, NYT, W1.
   Immediately after Ryanair PLC [in Ireland?] reported sharply higher after-tax profits, the airline's pilots voted to authorize a strike over working hours.... Ryanair said its online reservation system held its costs down despite the addition of 10 new routes.
   [Probably not only its online rez system contained costs but - not hiring enough new pilots and overworking the old.]

2. A request to link two power grids, Bloomberg via NYT, C14.
   INDIANAPOLIS...- American Transmission, a venture that will run electricity transmission for six Midwest utilities, has asked federal regulators to promote the combining of two regional power grids to cut costs and improve service...the Midwest Independent Transmission System [in the Midwest and] the Alliance Regional Transmission Organization [in Ohio and the Virginias]....
   [They don't have to be combined, but they do have to be linked. *Buckminster Fuller's dream was to link the power grids of the Western and Eastern Hemispheres across the Bering Straits so that power capacity with low demand on one side of the planet could be used for peak demand on the other side as the Earth turned under the Sun.]

1. Dabbling with online voting, Reuters iva NYT, A25.
   The U.S. will take a few more steps toward voting over the Internet today when voters in several California cities, along with about 200 military personnel, will be allowed to cast ballots using computers.... Military personnel...will be given a program on a floppy disk that when paired with a program at election headquarters will enable them to vote.... So far, voting over the Internet has been limited to a smattering of tests....
   [Another small step closer to *Buckminster Fuller's vision of ongoing 24-hour telephone (or e-mail, he would now add) referendums.]

2. And two aspects of the critical impotence of advanced computer technology -
   • Bill Gates, skeptic,
     letter to editor by Kumar Venkat of Cupertino CA, NYT, A28.
     I have worked in high technology for 16 years, and I share Bill Gates's skepticism that technology and capitalism alone will somehow solve fundamental problems like poverty, illiteracy and lack of health care around the world (news article, Nov. 3).
     In the United States, where it should have been easiest to accomplish major social changes through technology (given the wide proliferation of high technology, a very strong economy and a high rate of literacy), it is clear now that the gap between the rich and the poor has actually increased over the last decade. [Also,] in the same period in India, at a time when that country was turning into one of the leading software centers in the world, the percentage of the population living in poverty increased significantly.
     It will take more than simple faith in technology to solve major social problems.
     [People have been jawboning and dancing around this issue for centuries now and part of the holdup is a language problem. If we want to save the word "technology," maybe we should be looking for some social technology that can enable our societies to catch up with our high (computer) technology. If we put a fraction of the design smarts into social technology that we put into software design, we would have all our major social problems (or "bugs") fixed by now. What kind of social technology are we looking for? Well, obviously it has to solve the Chesterton pan-utopian trap, because that trap is precisely what the technological utopians who have finally evoked Bill Gates' skepticism have fallen into - the simple faith that no one will want more than his share (or even know what it is in the first place, let alone what units/dimension(s) it should be in). One of our biggest holdups in solving our major social problems has been our naive fixation on the low end to solve these problems. For example, we keep trying to raise the minimum wage or the poverty line. But Chesterton's phrasing betrays a huge clue. The real problem is at the top, not the bottom. We need to define "share per person" as a range with not only a bottom but a top. In other words, granted that we need to equalize on a range and not just on a point, we need to define not just the bottom of that range but also the top. This is a huge step for human thinking to take. It has always been blocked by quick assertions that any cap or upper limit on human acquisition would dampen incentive, and so it involves the admission that maybe past a certain point people no longer need any further incentive (or society certainly doesn't need them to have it), or, more interestingly, it may involve the realization that past a certain point people need a change of gears in their incentive. For example, maybe their incentive needs to shift from completely unaccountable spending power (of which they've got far too much to ever spend anyway) to dedicated or earmarked spending power. For example, in the Timesizing program, the accumulation of working hours per week by someone is capped for purposes of earning unaccountable spending power, but unlimited if they earmark overtime earnings for overtime-targeted training and hiring, implying a shift toward corporate-empire-building incentive from simple unconnected personal gratification incentive which has long since changed into mere hoarding and advance-the-number games.]

   • Tax breaks for the rich? Sure, for philanthropy,
     letter to editor by Stephanie Reckler of NYC, NYT, A28.
     Re "Yes, even the rich deserve a tax cut," by T.J. Rodgers (Op-ed, Nov. 4): Mr. Rodgers's wealth is a result of the excess of the 1980's, and his philosophy is the continuation of that excess.
     What he deems a constructive use of his tax breaks - investing in even more advanced technology companies - will benefit only people like himself. He will not be helping the homeless, the elderly who do not receive the prescription drugs they require, or families who cannot afford nutritious food for their children.
     If Mr. Rodgers had stated that his tax breaks would further his philanthropic endeavors, I would agree that he deserves a tax break. Otherwise, let the government keep Mr. Rodgers's money and use it to further services that can help those who need them most.
     [Stephanie Reckler offers more social design clues. Why not combine the ideas of investment and philanthropy, for example. What's the most important and widespread thing that people need? Well-paying jobs and the skills to qualify for them. Humans have been naively focusing their philanthropy on the symptomatic level or adhoc basis of fighting brushfires. We can congratulate ourselves all we want about "record low unemployment," but if we've got record working poor, disability, homelessness, and incarceration, we've just kept ourselves looking at a feel-good "problem indicator" that we have carefully defined to exclude most of our major social problems. Stephanie's letter suggests we use the tax system to solve these problems. The Timesizing program does this, for example, by imposing a tax on corporate overtime (and later individual overwork = overtime from all sources) and granting a complete exemption if the overtime-exploiting corporation uses its overtime profits to "retire" the overtime by hiring additional employees (or uses it for training if no qualified additional employees can immediately be found).]

   [Note that the first letter also gives evidence of impoverishment due to technological displacement of human jobs. India has always been functionally luddite, using for example twenty people with tiny scythes to trim a lawn instead of one person driving a motorized lawn mower. If some of their newfound high technology "carelessly" rubs off on their own society and starts spreading the "virus" of efficiency and work savings - with no workspreading reductions in the workweek - we would definitely expect to that "the percentage of the population living in poverty increased significantly." Humans talking the talk of "24/7" cannot even begin to compete with robots that actually "walk the walk" and are made of much more durable and easily interchangible parts. And the more employees new technology displaces from their jobs, the more concentrated the national spending power and the smaller the nation's consumer base and domestic markets. As Walter Reuther said to Henry Ford when Ford showed him around a newly mechanized plant in the late 30s and said "Let's see you unionize these robots," - "Let's see you sell them cars."]

1. 11/05  Herb's way - Chairman's unconventional business strategy has made Southwest Airlines a model for success, by Matthew Brelis, Boston Globe, F1.
   ...The secrets of CEO Herb [Kelleher]'s success -
   • Employees come first, customers second [and stockholders third??].
     [Sounds like Herb either already practices some form of timesizing to avoid downsizing, or would like to hear about it. We refer him to Lincoln Electric and Nucor Steel.]
   • The team is important, not the individual.
   • Hire for attitude, train for skills.
   • Think like a small company.
   • Eschew organizational hierarchy.
   • Keep it simple.
   [And isn't this the airline with its HQ at Dallas' "Love Field"?]

2. 11/06  10,000 turn out to hear Nader urge 'shift in power' - Washington is site of last 'super rally', by James Dao, NYT, A24.
   [Nader remains the only bright spot in this millennium year's otherwise bleak puppetshow, with plutocrats pulling the strings of what is flatteringly referred to as "democracy" in the world's largest political economy with the industrial world's tightest concentration of wealth.  If everyone who was disgusted with the ultimatum the wealthy are trying to shove down our throats - the dreadful "choice" of Gore the bore & Bush the wh*re (or vice versa) - if every one of them actually voted for Nader, the way voters had the guts to do in 1860 for an unknown gangling squeaky-voiced country bumpkin (from a new independent third party) named Abraham Lincoln, we'd again have one of our greatest presidents, instead of a pathetic counsel of despair.]

1. ["Good, but" times two -]
   Jobless rate holds steady at 3.9% - Fewer [jobs] created; workers put in fewer hours in October, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, C1.
   [Good that it's not going up, bad that it's not going down and instead, being billed as a "record low" - as long as your records don't go back further than 35 years, because during the 1940s we had such low unemployment rates that anything over 2% unemployment was regarded as alarming - and the unemployment rate today counts less than then.]
   ...The US Labor Dept...report also showed the drop in the number of hours that Americans worked to its lowest level since 1995.
   [Is this an English sentence, Kimberly??? At any rate, "since 1995" isn't saying much in view of the fact that Americans are now working the most working hours per year in the developed world, even longer than Japan, the folks that gave us the word "karoshi" = death by overwork.]
   Employers typically reduce hours as a first step, before they begin layoffs.
   [That's news to us. Good if it's widespread, but bad when they don't keep reducing hours instead of reducing their payrolls - and with them, their own and their customers' markets!]
   The tight labor market also pushed up wages sharply.
   [If the labor market was really tight, MORE jobs would be getting created and a real unemployment rate would be getting LOWER. We suspect that the alleged "sharp" rise in wages is an exaggeration -]
   ...With the unemployment rate still at a 30-year low, wages responded with a 6 cent increase in October, to $13.89 an hour....
   [And what "random" group are they polling for that figure, pray tell? And anyway, how much did productivity recently jump - and how much was it undercounted - and how many families with children can get along with only one breadwinner working for $13.89 an hour these days? During and after World War II, one breadwinner could comfortably support the family. Our whole economy has been distorted by our lack of an automatic way to cut the workweek and spread the work and spending power around as wave after wave of work-saving technology has been introduced.]
   

2. Israel's liberals must speak out for Palestinians, op ed by James Ron, asst. prof. of sociology at Johns Hopkins, NYT, A19.
   [This comes in the context of the 10/20/2000 story "UN forum condemns Israel for 'war crimes' in territories," by Stephanie Nebehay, Boston Globe, A21, and Sharon's provoking a religious war with the Palestinians by visiting a sensitive mosque a few months ago. And all this Israeli disrespect for another religion and mannerless brinksmanship with their neighbors is subsidized by American taxpayers to the tune of $5B a year, which also necessitates a gesture of equal concern for Egypt costing us $3B a year, and all comes at a time of taxcuts in Israel, for example, see 8/15/2000 story "Tax cut in Israel". If Israeli is going to behave like a spoiled brat, why in the world are we subsidizing them? Why are we subsidizing them even if they behave well? Why are we subsidizing anybody overseas (witness our recent $1.3B from Clinton to Colombia, see 8/24/2000 "Clinton defends the outlay of $1.3B to Colombia - An anti-drug effort...") when we've got plenty of projects to spend money on right here, including record homelessness - or, we could pay down our GOP-multiplied national debt, or, we could cut OUR OWN taxes, not Israel's?!]

1. Venture investing flees Net start-ups - Attention now turns to networking, publishing, and medical companies, by Beth Healy, Boston Globe, C1.

2. Bill Gates turns skeptical on digital solution's scope, by Sam Verhovek, NYT, A18.

1. [more auto companies timesizing, not downsizing -]
   U.S. auto sales sag, another slowdown sign - Temporary plant closings, some in election swing states, by Keith Bradsher, NYT, C1.
   ...This week, G.M. has closed 3 of its 25 assembly plants in North America: two factories in Lansing, Mich., that make small cars and a factory in Orion, Mich., that makes full-size cars. DaimlerChrysler has quietly closed this week 7 of tis 16 factories in North America, including two plants that make sport utility vehicles [thank God for that!], two that make pickup trucks, and one each that makes small cars, large cars and full-size vans.... GM and DaimlerChrysler each said that the closings were only scheduled to last one week.... Under the automakers' contracts with the UAW union, workers continue to receive 90% of their base pay when temporarily laid off.
   [So wouldn't it make sense to just trim hours and pay by 10% on a continuing basis (to a 36-hr workweek) and keep things going, instead of all this jerking around? That's the flexible model that Nucor Steel uses.]
   But because many workers have nearly doubled their pay with extensive overtime for the last seven years...
   [Well, that's just stupid, inefficient, and family-bashing, both on the part of the workers, the union, and the company.]
   ...this could still represent a small financial setback for many families...
   [We suspect the financial setback for the families is nothing compared to the emotional setback of all that overtime.]
   ...as well as a warning that the economy might not be as strong as it once seemed....
   [Heavens to murgatroyd, that's the 2nd 'blinding glimpse of the obvious' we've found in these pages today.]

2. From embers of burned out, a cry: I want my life back - 'I realized that either I had to change my life, or I was going to die.' - Sam Goodner, [entrepreneur,] Catapult Systems, by Josh Hyatt, Boston Globe, C5.
   ...Goodner was attending a 4-day conference in Toronto. He was sitting at a morning seminar, taking notes, when he found his hand trembling and tears plopping onto his notebook paper. What the speaker was saying so shook him up that he fled the conference, spending the day wandering around the city.
   [And, we hope, wolfing Canadian buttertarts.]
   ...A speaker at that Toronto conference described how some entrepreneurs succeed in reaching their goals but can't allow themselves to appreciate their achievements. "You reach your goal of creating a company that makes $1m a year and you've already got the new ideal of making $5m," says Goodner. "So you end up feeling like you haven't accomplished very much." Divorced, overweight, and "fundamentally unhappy," Goodner says he "knew one thing, and that was how to work a lot."
   ..\..Lately, burnout has become an especially hot topic among dot-com-ers who, whether they've gotten rich or not, share one abidling trait: utter exhaustion. Whatever fired them up to blur the [boudary] between their cubicles and their homes - the chance to explore new technologies or to investigate unimagined tax brackets - seems to have lost some of its seductive power. After last spring's Nasdaq smackdown, Internet businesses now have to be managed much like other, more mundane enterprises.... So it's no surprise the cry can be heard with increasing frequency: I want my life back.... [Said] Goodner..."I don't know if you have to hit rock bottom to bounce back...but I hope I will never hit it again."
   ...Since then, he's slowly learned...how to incorporate exercise into his life..., what limits to put on his schedule ("no more than 50 hours of work a week") [rad! -ed.], and where else to focus his energies ("The relationship I'm in now is the most fulfilling I've ever had.").
   He meets monthly with a counselor, who, among other things, "calls me on it when I start going down the path of saying, 'I could be doing better,'" Goodner says. "It's really all about taking baby steps to pull back the throttle and become a more complete person. And once you are one, you have a lot more to offer everybody - including your company."

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Dell to open sales and support center in Fort Worth, AP via NYT, C4.
   The Dell Computer Corp. [plans] to open a new...center that will employ about 500 people by next spring. The payroll could reach 1,000 people by 2002....

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   FMC to split in two and spin off part of unit, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...A maker of machinery and chemicals [will] split into two companies and spin off 20% of its machinery buiness through a public offering in 2Q01.... FMC, which employs about 15,000 people worldwide...might reassign some employees but expected no layoffs.
   [Layoffs usually go with mergers, not spinoffs.]

3. [Here's a pleasant switch -]
   Gore accuses Bush of waging 'class warfare', by Katherine Seelye, NYT, front page.
   [This accusation usually flies in the opposite direction - even though CEOs typically attack loyalty by downsizing before employees attack loyalty by switching jobs.]
   BURBANK...- Turning his opponent's language against him, VP Al Gore delivered a stinging rebuke of Gov. George W. Bush's tax-cut plan [yester]day, calling it a redistribution of wealth that amounted to "class warfare on behalf of billionaires"....