Timesizing® Associates

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

12/09/2000  glimmers of intelligence/hope -

1. 3 UNtakeovers -
   1. Bear Stearns and Hicks [Muse Tate & Furst] halt [Johns] Manville buyout, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
      ...[after Manville] said it would not accept a bid below the $3B...initially offered in June....
   2. Rockwell [International] set to spin off its Collins subsidiaries, Reuters via NYT, B3.
      ...[i.e.,] its Rockwell Collins avionics and communications unit...based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, leaving Rockwell mainly an automation company..\..based in Milwaukee....
   3. ["good, but..." -]
      Getty [Petroleum Mktg] rebuffs third offer by United Refining, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
      ...[but] urged shareholders to back a bid by Lukoil Holding of Russia....
      [Oh there's a brilliant move. With all the gangsterism we've thrown the Russian economy into with our rush to "free" markets, the geniuses at Getty want to sell out to a Russian company. Why not just avoid the delay and all jump off a high building.]

2. If it's funny, you laugh, but why? - Humor is the subject of growing interest, with sobering results, by Emily Eakin, NYT, A23.
   ...For the ancient Greeks, laughter was serious stuff. Some, like Plato, thought it could incite violence and disrupt the social order. \He\ it tightly regulated in his Republic. Socrates thought it should be used sparingly - like salt. Pythagoras swore off it entirely and [forbade] his followers to indulge.... Others, like Aristotle, thought it was what distinguished men from beasts.... History is littered with the sober efforts of learned men to make sense of [humor]. The question of whether Jesus had ever laughed so consumed medieval Christian scholars that the University of Paris devoted an entire conference to it in the 13th century. (The evidence was apparently inconclusive....)
   [But modern theologians, like Harvey Cox, are convinced He did.]
   ...The Renaissance brought
   • Hobbes' superiority theory (laughter marks the sudden attainment of power over someone else), which gave way first to
   • Kant's incongruity theory (laughter occurs when perceptions don't conform to logical expectations), and finally, to
   • Freud's relief theory (laughter releases pent-up nervous energy).
   [Or all three. The most general and comprehensive is Kant's, because with Hobbes', the key word is "sudden" - you didn't logically expect superiority so quick or easily, and with Freud's, the key phrase is "releases pent-up" which translates to "sudden release" which translates to, you didn't expect to relax so quickly or easily. To us, the key element in humor is even more general - the juxtaposition of extreme opposites. Hobbes' example brings together inferiority and superiority, Kant's brings together logical and illogical or expectations and surprises, and Freud's brings together tension and relaxation.
   [There's a close connection between humor and creativity, which involves bridging mental gaps, the wider the gap, the greater the creativity, such as bringing together a roof and a flounder's back in Bill "Mr. Synectics" Gordon's example - the desire for a roof that rejects heat in summer and accepts it in winter and the color-changing nodules in a flounder's back. The difference is that in creativity, there's no necessary opposite or contrast, while humor gets you going in a certain direction and then flips direction. The mind zips back and forth between the two directions at 60 cycles per second and you laugh, a larger-than-usual inhalation followed by a rapidly repeatedly interrupted exhalation, ranging from heh heh heh heh heh, to ha ha ha ha ha.
   [Laughter is akin to weeping, which is the same process greatly slowed down - the mind plods back and forth between the two directions, eg: where you should be and where you are, and the larger-than-usual inhalation is followed by a very slowly repeatedly interrupted exhalation, sometimes so slowly there's no breath for any repetition and you only give one big waaaaaaaaaah instead of the more familiar boooohoooohoooo (actually more like waaaahaaaaahaaaaa).
   [For Phil Hyde, Humor is the saving grace, the Fourth Person of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost/Joker - the Great Hangup, the Great Hungup, the Great Crybaby (the Paraclete, the Comforter, He Whom comes to us in our sorrow and brings us tears), and the Divine Jester or Clown (He Who comes to us in our tears and hands us a card that says, in ornate print, "Your Story Has Touched My Heart - NEVER BEFORE HAVE I MET ANYONE WITH MORE TROUBLES THAN YOU HAVE. please accept this expression of my sincere sympathy." and by just magnifying our tragedy to epic proportions, reduces it to absurdity and changes our tears to laughter). The Divine Clown also appears in Tony Hillerman's stories (such as Sacred Clowns, 1993) about the Hopi, ever the experts on "the humor of God" or the spirits. Eskimos, too, in their frigid habitat used laughter especially as a saving grace. Whenever anything dangerous happened to anybody, such as falling through the ice, they killed themselves laughing. Guess it kindof gave rescue ideas a chance to gel or if infectious and delaying, at least made for laughter in paradise. Check out also Dave Barry's Sunday column tomorrow, 12/10/00, where he talks about first the children, then the rescue squad, laughing their heads off at the mother who, dressed only in her underwear, glued herself to the kitchen floor in trying to save money doing the tiling herself.]
   ...One prominent venue for specialists [today] is Humor, the academic journal of the International Society for Humor Studies, founded in 1976....

3. At lunch, Prince Philip outwits the Yankee press, by Warren Hoge, NYT, A4.
   ...Here, after all, was the man who once asked a Scottish driving instructor, "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" The British press has been catching him out for years; was it now the Americans' turn?
   ...Did he exchange e-mail with [grandson Prince William] while he was in Chile on his year off before going to university? "I don't think it's any of your business," was the response....
   [If only Clinton had had the sense to say that at a number of junctures over the past 4-5 years!]
   Is he bothered by the electoral chaos in America? "No, it's quite a relief that you've got a presidential system and you're not still in the Empire."
   [One suspects that means, Thank God you designed and implemented a trouble-prone imperial presidency after you left the Empire. Calling elections and splitting power in today's multiparty parliamentary systems is not nearly the big deal it is still today in America's gettin-old republican system where two-major-parties-only makes for confrontation and deadlock, and the bunch-up of symbolic and functional responsibilities upon the President guarantees his (s)election will be taken far too seriously by far too many people, be tough to get rid of midterm by an altogether too-difficult-to-actuate impeachment process, and focus the attention of anyone with an assassin's bent completely on him. In the parliamentary systems, who does the assassin target, the prime minister? But the PM is just the current head of his ruling party who can be given a vote of no confidence at any time and thrown out in a midterm election with no big impeachment trauma. So does the assassin target the governor general or the Queen herself? But they're just figureheads. This may explain why the USA has a great many presidential assassinations and assassination attempts compared to the parliamentary systems, which admittedly have the advantage of having been much improved by watching the Yankees' long debugging process with their also-much-imitated republican system. Speaking of which, after the recent flip in the Florida saga -]

4. The contest - Pick an arbiter: courts, politicians or the public, by R. W. Apple Jr., NYT, A11.
   [And no, we don't agree that the Electoral College guarantees that the candidates will "go everywhere" and give every state or province an equal voice - one person can't possibly go everywhere even in much less populous Canada, and the idea of equal voice in a thinly disguised plutocracy is an illusion, despite today's Globe letter -]
   Canada needs an Electoral College, letter to editor by Merle Kew, NYT, A18.
   [What Canada and all the rest of us need is a thorough-going 24-hour issue-oriented referendum system, as futurist comprehensive-thinker Buckminster Fuller envisioned decades ago. Nothing on earth can save the whole paternalistic corruption-prone representative approach (dba plutocracy) into the fourth millennium. We need an end-run around the whole corrupt logjam in Congress and we need to turn the whole money-drowned crew of PAC&lobbyist-hobbled "representatives" into mere housekeepers of the public will, as discovered via an ever-expanding issue-oriented electronic referendum system complete with linguists and logicians skilled in turning controversial issues into step-by-step, branching decision trees so we stop communicating past one another.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   3 research centers for California, pointer digest (to A20), NYT, C1.
   Gov. Gray Davis of California announced the creation of three research institutions dedicated to nanotechnology, biotechnology, and telecommunications and computing.
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. 2 UNtakeovers -
   1. ["Good, but..."]
      Amid talks, Abbey board rejects bid by Lloyds, by Suzanne Kapner, NYT, W1.
      The board of Abbey National PLC rebuffed a takeover offer from Lloyds TSB Group today, setting the stage for Lloyds to appeal directly to Abbey's shareholders. The approach from Lloyds came as Abbey National was working out the final details of a merger with the Bank of Scotland [although] the two banks have yet to agree on a management structure....
      Faced with declining profit margins, British banks have been looking to mergers to cut costs and increase revenue by cross-selling products....
      [And with each merger and subsequent downsizing, we get a weaker consumer base, weaker markets - and further declines in profit margins. Ergo, a death spiral. But the next one seems 'cleaner' -]
   2. Baltic ferry bids rejected, Bloomberg via NYT, W1.
      Deutsche Bahn, the state-owned railway company, which has been trying to sell assets to stem losses forecast at $2B or more annually through 2005, nonetheless rejected offers from two bidders for Scandlines, a ferry company it has owned jointly with the Danish government since 1998....

3. 2 automakers act on weakening sales - GM to slow production and Chrysler asks suppliers to cut prices,
   by Keith Bradsher, NYT, C2.
   ...Chrysler...expected to make many fewer cars in January, February and March by eliminating overtime and by not operating some factories at all for a week or two at a time....
   [A true glimmer of intelligence because this is timesizing, not downsizing - in other words, cutting hours and not jobs. As for asking suppliers to cut prices, which "automakers seeking financial improvement have relied on for decades," how about asking automaker executives to cut their bloated pay?!]

4. Grocery chain deliverymen to get $3 million in back pay, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, C20.
   [For those of you who don't think that it would be "unconstitutional!" to limit working hours per person and clearly aren't aware that we have a maximum-workweek law, albeit poorly designed and enforced, already in place in this country, check out this story -]
   ...Food Emporium, which uses more than 100 deliverymen at more than a dozen stores in Manhattan, agreed to the settlement after the company was sued on charges of violating minimum wage and overtime laws. [If we had well-designed and effective overtime laws (aka maximum workweek laws), we could get rid of the minimum wage laws, and all the makework that has accompanied them, because market forces would raise wages to much higher levels on a much more gradual and flexible basis than the abrupt and distorting minimum wage laws ever could. Here's the general direction we should go in with this.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Compaq to open lab in Cambridge [Ma.], by Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, D9.
   ...The 41,000-square-foot lab...employs 50 people, including 30 researchers. Most of the work is devoted to improving the interaction between computers and people, including research on speech recognition and machine vision....

2. As European Union meets, 60,000 protesters gather, by Tom Heneghan, Reuters via Boston Globe, A19.
   ...mostly French, Italians and Spaniards, seeking equal social rights and opposing a trend toward global capitalism. The protesters marched in the rain, demanding that the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which the summit [in Nice, France] plans to endorse, enshrine equal social rights in all 15 EU states....
   [God knows what's at stake here, and this article is "American provincial" to a fault in terms of its uninformativeness. The rest of the article bogs down in squabbles between France and Germany after trying to portray anyone who would have any complaints whatsoever with globalization as leftist or worse. But hey, at least this huge protest got a brief mention in the Boston Globe, which is more than we can say for the New York Times today. The evolution of our cheerleading media into Pravda and Izvestia slouches on.]

1. 2 UNtakeovers - 'virtual' undoing of $377m + $?? in takeovers -
   1. Xerox plans to spinoff electronic paper company, pointer digest (to C2), NYT, C1.
      Xerox, its finances in chaos and its stock in free fall, plans to spin off a small company that demonstrates [that] its technological prowess, at least, remains intact.
      The company, Gyricon Media, will make a flexible, paper-thin material that can be used to display computer-generated text. Xerox expects one of Gyricons's first aplications will help create changeable signs for retail stores....
      [That's good. We have long believed that we should move a lot further toward time-of-day pricing, or rather, queue-or crowd-control pricing in the sense that, the bigger the crowd or the longer the queue (and therefore, the higher the demand), the higher the price - and vice versa.]

   2. Lucent picks name for spinoff, Bloomberg via NYT, C8.
      Lucent Technologies renamed the microelectronics unit it plans to spin off Agere Systems Inc., taking the name of a company it acquired earlier this year...in April for $377m.

2. [the many virtues of OJT -]
   On-the-job training saves deer, Globe staff photo by Barry Chin, Boston Globe, B1.
   ...A young deer...ventured onto the unstable ice \of\ Cambridge Reservoir \just outside\ Route 128 [near Boston, Mass., yesterday(??)], and thrashed and slipped over and over before it fell through a jagged hole into the frigid water..\..
   A Waltham Fire Dept. rescue squad...had already planned an ice-rescue training exercise for the day \so they simply practiced on the\ confused white-tailed buck. [They] spent two hours in survival suits, crawling over the cracking ice and floating in a raft to the deer.... "It was pretty happy to see us," [said firefighter Ronald Parker]. "It was exhausted. I think he knew we were there to help it"..\.. Firefighters...Parker and Mark Reardon reached the buck and kept him from drowning, as Parker told him: "Relax, big fella, you'll be all right." Then, patting the deer on the forehead, Parker secured it with two lassoes and placed it in a rescue basket. Other firefighters dragged Parker, Reardon and the deer to shore. Later in Lincoln, the animal was released....
   [(Strange but true - the Cambridge Reservoir is in Lincoln, Mass.  Toff Cantabridgians - "we are the Ah-thens of Ahmerica, dahling" - drink the oil&salt runoff of Route 128's 'low salt zone'. Very tasty, actually.)]

• US establishes Hawaii preserve - Clinton describes submerged paradise of 84m acres - 'In some areas, such as the central Indian Ocean, 90% of the coral reefs have died,' by Jesse Holland, AP via Boston Globe, A3.
  ...the largest US nature preserve...to help save the coral reefs and wildlife that inhabit the area.... The new Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Reserve encompasses the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge set up by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt \and is\ as large as Florida and Georgia combined, contains nearly 70% of the United States' coral reefs, as well as pristine remote islands, atolls and submerged lagoons....Clinton said..."Pollution, damage from dynamite fishing, coral poachers, unwise coastal development and global warming have already killed over 25% of the world's reefs."... Tammy Leilani Harp, a seventh-generation Hawaiian from a [fishing] family [said] her family and other Hawaiians took only what they needed from the seas and left the rest. "We must stop destroying what we have or there will be nothing left to pass on when we are dead and gone," she said....
  [Dynamite fishing - that has to be the stupidest, most suicidal way to make a living we "intelligent beings" have ever come up with. "Let's kill EVERYTHING around here and then go around and scoop up the ones we want." Brain dead.]

• Kirch bails out owner of Muppets, pointer digest (to W1), NYT, C1.
  EM.TV & Merchandising, the company that recently acquired the "Sesame Street" characters, escaped financial collapse by announcing a bailout from the Kirch Group....
  [Thaaaat's good. We just hate when some shaky morons acquire something good and then drag it down with them.]

1. Book notes risks of busy schedule, by Jerry Ackerman, Boston Globe, H2.
   ...For seven years, Jody Heymann, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, has been accumulating data on...work-family conflicts. The result is a just-published book, "The Widening Gap: Why American Working Families are in Jeopardy and What Can Be Done About It," from Basic Books. The book concludes that standard inflexible work schedules and current family-leave policies impede job performance and impair the educational success of children....

2. Pennsylvania - Amish child labor is topic of talks, AP via Boston Globe, A23.
   GAP - About 25 Amish leaders met Friday with two Pennsylvania members of Congress in an effort to preserve a centuries-old tradition of having children work.... The Amish leaders are seeking an exemption to federal child-labor laws barring teenagers from working in sawmills and woodworking shops. Some Amish businesses have been fined for violations..\.. The lawmakers, Rep. Joseph Pitts and Sen. Arlen Specter, support legislation that would allow Amish youths to work in limited, supervised settings....
   [The legislation of the last 150 years that seeks to spread the vanishing work by limiting worklife per person - pushing it later by longer "education" on the low side and pulling it forward with earlier and earlier retirement on the high side, will all become unnecessary and be superceded as the workweek gets shorter and shorter to something remotely like the brevity it should be at for our current level of technology (probably 16-20 hours per person per week and falling). Meanwhile, in many cultures, children are involved in adult activities as soon as possible for training purposes. Only in the bizarre recent industrialized cultures with their unlimited accumulation and lack of rebalancing jubilee traditions has child labor turned into a sick and exploitative thing and a stealing of scarce work from heads of household. In the Amish tradition, it's pretty clear that "child labor" is on-the-job training rather than exploitation because there's no hint that their family values are deteriorating and there's little likelihood of Amish children competing with, or taking jobs from, outside labor. So here we have another culture-clash that timesizing will resolve in a more human direction by modifying our culture in a more human direction.]

• AMA backs access to morning-after pill,
  by Lindsay Tanner, Boston Globe, A3.
  ...The American Medical Association...'s Council on Medical Service is recommending that..\...the so-called morning-after pill...be made easier to obtain [i.e.,] "should request that the FDA consider making emergency contraception pills available over the counter." ..\..The morning-after pill, taken within three days of sexual intercourse, is essentially a high-dose birth control pill that prevents ovulation, or if that has already occurred, blocks implantation of a fertilized egg. In most cases, the pill is available only by prescription.... The pills are "considered safe and effective by the medical community as a whole," the council said..\.. The council's report is scheduled to be debated by a committee at an AMA meeting tomorrow in Orlando, Fla.  The committee could then send it to the AMA's policy-making board, the House of Delegates, during the 4-day meeting.... Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said AMA support for over-the-counter use would be "an extremely important step for prevention of unintended pregnancy in a country where half of all pregnancies are unintended.
  [And an unintended pregnancy is likelier to be an unwanted pregnancy. If we want a population of high-quality people, we need to realize that high-quality adults come from high-quality children. Children who are wanted children are likelier to be high-quality children. And pregancies that are wanted are likelier to produce children who are wanted.]
  "If every woman of reproductive age had ready access to [the morning-after pill], it would prevent 800,000 abortions a year," Feldt said. ...Morning-after pills are not as widely opposed as the RU-486 prescription abortion pill approved by the FDA in September.... Planned Parenthood...does not consider the [morning-after] pill a type of abortion, because it does not work if a fertilized egg has already implanted itself in the uterus, the scientific definition of pregnancy....

• Nurses' group splits at raucous meeting, by Anne Barnard, Boston Globe, B4.
  Months of infighting at...the Massachusetts Nurses Association..\..the state's largest nurses' organization, ended with a bang yesterday as the group's more radical wing fired two key staffers and ousted five board members, creating a new board unanimously bent on seceding from the more moderate American Nurses Association.... Such a move could change the nursing landscape nationwide...because the Massachusetts group is seen as a leader on issues such as patients' rights and nurses' working conditions.... The Mass. Nurses Assoc. makes up a tenth of the national group's membership and pays it $1m in dues each year, but some members had come to see [it] as a foot-dragger.
  Board member Barbara Norton said [recent] actions "liberated" the group to work more effectively for goals such as state and federal bans on mandatory overtime for nurses....

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   Worthington postpones acquisition of 3 partnerships, Reuters via NYT, C3.
   Citing an industrywide slowdown in steel, Worthington Industries [is] postponing indefinitely its previously announced [8/16 $300m] acquisition of 3 limited partnerships...MetalTech, NexTech and GalvTech....

2. A historic transition in Mexico, editorial, NYT, A30.
   The inauguration of Vicente Fox Quesada as Mexico's president today...marks the first peaceful transfer of power from one political faction to another in modern Mexican history.... The departing president, Ernesto Zedillo, deserves credit for enabling the democratic transition....
   [That and the recent signed, sealed and delivered Canadian election are making the Land of the Free's current rinkydink voting system look reee-dickle-us. Anybody who has gone into politics in this country has had to weather the cultural shock of finding out what a disastrous piece of crap lurks under the surface. Here in Somerville, we've had "tidal houses" where voter registrations magically rise in mayoral election years and fall in off-years. There's no strong 2d or 3d parties to battle to keep the system honest, so even within the monopoly "Democratic" party there are incumbent political 'machines' that cheat like hell to retain power. We have a state rep district that overlaps Somerville and Medford, and 4 years ago, one ballot box that we know about took three hours to travel half a mile in a Medford police cruiser after the Democratic primary closed, and guess what - the slimy incumbent "won" enough in Medford to overcome his loss in Somerville, though even so, he "won" by less than 60 votes. And just a few blocks to the south of here in Harvard's Litauer School of Government, they're teachin' the kids all this idealistic stuff about how wonderful our "democratic" "system" is?! What a laugh. See also "Mexico president installed, vowing to share power - Ending 71-year rule by single party, Fox is inaugurated and promises reforms," by Ginger Thompson, 12/02 NYT, front page, right next to "Inside [US Supreme Court], humor carries a bite; outside, a loud jury of jeers," by Lizette Alvarez, plus "And in Florida, justices refuse bid for recount," by David Firestone, both 12/02 NYT, front page. As the Boston Herald said, "Flori-duh" or might have said, "Ameri-caca."]

3. Buyers gain online rights in Europe - Effort made to lift confidence in Web, by Paul Meller, NYT, W1.
   BRUSSELS...- The European Union passed rules [yester]day that would allow consumers to sue in their own country an online retailer based in another union country....
   [That would seem to be fairly basic, if still inconvenient.]

4. Dell to offer a Linux system, by John Markoff, NYT, C3.
   [Speaking of "rule by a single party," we got it in operating systems, so any alternative to WINDOWS DOWN YOUR THROAT is mighty welcome.]

5. McDonald's to use more containers from EarthShell, Dow Jones via NYT, C3.
   [Much as we disdain McDonalds 'and all its hosts,' we hafta praise them for this -]
   The EarthShell Corp., a Santa Barbara, Calif., company that develops food-service containers made of biodegradable materials, said yesterday that the McDonald's Corp. had agreed to expand the use of EarthShell's hamburger containers to 172 more stores. That will bring the total to 300 in the Chicago area and elsewhere in the Midwest....