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Good News, March 16-31, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

3/31/2001  weekend glimmers of hope -

  1. P2000's zero emissions come with $6m price tag, by Royal Ford, Boston Globe, D1.
    ...experimental Ford four-door sedan.... Three fuel cells stored in the trunk power the experimental sedan, and a 12-volt battery kept onboard starts the car and powers some accessories....
    [The electric car of the future progresses apace - Buckminster Fuller's dream.]

  2. [1 industry UPsizing]
    Harbinger of bad times - The ranks of job recruiters are thinning out rapidly, by Katie Hafner, NYT, B1.
    ...[However,] the rest of the recruiting industry, outside of high technology, appears to be relatively unscathed.... Paul Hawkinson, publisher of the Fordyce Letter, a newsletter for recruiters, based in St. Louis, was also sanguine about fields outside of technology. Mr. Hawkinson said 2,009 new recruiting firms had sprung up in the last six months....
    [But what about just the last three months? What about just the last month?]

  3. [a columnist redeems himself from obsessively scapegoating Nader - despite the Supreme Court's more
    decisive role and Gore's failure to carry his own state - and characterizes the Bush "presidency" so far -]
    The feeling of a coup - Mr. Bush's radical moves and policy reversals, op ed by Anthony Lewis, NYT, A27.
    We are learning something these days about the power of a willful president. Without a popular mandate, George W. Bush is making radical changes that will have long-term consequences for this country and the world. He is making them in a hurry, and for the moment there are no checks or balances to stop him.
    Day after day headlines tell us of fundamental policy reversals. A string of Bush administration decisions has halted steps to protect the environment. Limits are going to be "restudied." The reasons given for the environmental decisions have been almost insultingly unconvincing. [For example,] the arsenic limit...had not had "thorough review" in terms of "sound science." In fact, the limit was proposed by highly regarded scientists after extended study....
    The American public would almost certainly vote to protect roadless parts of the national forests, as it would to reduce the amount of arsenic in water.... Nor is Mr. Bush moved by the arguments of respected Republican elders [such as] former Senator Howard Baker \who thinks\ the program for dismantling Soviet weapons...should be funded in full..\.. But the public is not the audience that concerns Mr. Bush and his appointees. They are out to please the interests that supported and financed his campaign: timber companies, mining companies and the rest....
    The Bush motto, a Washington quip has it, is "Do it my way or no way." That catches the willful quality of these first months. But there is more to it than that.
    This is the most radical administration in living American memory. I use the word deliberately. Today's right calls itself "conservative," but it is not that. Conservatives want to conserve. That is why Teddy Roosevelt started the national parks and the conservation movement. George W. Bush and his people are driven by right-wing ideology to an extent not remotely touched by even the Reagan administration.
    And we haven't seen the half of it. As..\..the head of the Forest Service, Michael P. Dombeck, [who] resigned the other day...said of opening the national forests to road-building, the decisions "will have implications that will last many generations."
    All this from a man who ran as a "compassionate conservative," concealing his hard-edged ideology, and who could not get half the voters to vote for him even in that guise.

  4. Click here for today's timesizing stories - 3/31/2001.

3/29/2001  weekend glimmers of hope -
  1. House committee acts on spam, NYT, C6.
    The House Energy and Commerce Committee moved yesterday to curb unsolicited e-mail, known as spam, passing a bill that would required such commercial electronic messages to include valid addresses so that recipients can easily request that their names be removed from the mailing lists. The bill would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to take action against senders of spam, and it would allow Internet service providers to sue in federal court for $500 a message, up to $50,000, if a person or company violated the law....

  2. Click here for today's roundup of timesizing stories - 3/29/2001.

3/25/2001  weekend glimmers of hope -
  1. Time off is still best antidote to burnout, by Jerry Ackerman, Boston Globe, J1.
    ...For two years, beginning after her graduation from Tulane University in New Orleans..\..Dena J. Smith...was on the hot seat..\..at Speechworks International Inc. in Boston...as project manager for the installation of complex voice-recognition reservation systems for two major airlines. She worked 10 to 12 hours a day, often seven days a week. She never used all of her vacation days..\.. Burning out on the job was something that happened to others.... But in hindsight [she] thinks she may have been near the end of her rope when she asked for a transfer to Singapore....
    [Let's see, seven 12-hour days is an 84-hour workweek, the level of people in Dickens' "dark Satanic mills" in the 1820s nearly two centuries ago, and the level of plantation slaves in the Deep South ("deep" in hell).]
    The company OK'd a transfer to Singapore and arranged for a less strenuous project so Smith could, at last, take time off for herself..\.. By last September, her supervisors saw she needed a change, and fast. "You can't keep up that pace that long," said Mark Holthouse, VP for operations. "You begin to make mistakes."...
    [Sounds like the company was not the bad guy here, but who "managed" all that responsibility into one "job" in the first place? It's really sloppy management that's to blame for drifting along laying gigantic workloads on as few people as are stupid enough to "go along to git along."]
    Episodes of near-exhaustion such as Smith's have become increasingly commonplace in US workplaces in recent years as vacations take a back seat during volatile, roller-coaster economic times. "People are under a lot of pressure, especially at companies trying to be profitable for the first time," said Kathleen Greer, whose Framingham firm runs employee assistance programs. "I think it was getting out of hand at some companies."
    [Why the past tense, Kathleen? Let's throw in the inside-page header and subheader at this point to clinch the undercurrent of corporate whitewash in this article -]
    Companies taking pains to avoid employee burnout - Time off still a crucial way of keeping spirits up
    [But the subhead tells it all. "Boy, you sure wouldn't think it, and we sure don't act like it, but...'Time off is STILL a crucial way of keeping spirits up' - old, outdate, unfashionable "time off." Gee whiz, haven't we evolved past THAT yet? Here it is, the 21st century and employees still need to SLEEP and take TIME OFF?! Pathetic!"]
    Last year, one-sixth of Americans responding to a national survey sponsored by Oxford Health Plans reported not taking all the vacation time they had coming, often because of on-the-job pressure to complete a project or to take on a new one....
    [And that's probably conservative because the real workaholics would never take the time off to answer such a survey.]
    ...Worrisome for employers..\..said Jo Ellen Moore, a Southern Illinois U. professor...is her belief that most [burnouts] had once been highly motivated workers. "It's your best people who are susceptible to burnout," she said, because "in order to burn out, you have to be on fire."
    Part of the problem workers face is finding the time to get away in an economy that has built itself around the idea of working 24/7....
    [Surely one of the biggest crocks that Corporate America has ever dumped on itself, let alone on its employees.]
    By law, most European nations require all employees get four weeks off with pay each year. Paid vacations of five and six weeks are common in Austria, France, Germany, and Scandinavia. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the average paid vacation in 1997 - the latest year for which it has data - was just under three weeks for someone employed for five years. It rose to four weeks after 20 years on the job.
    Mindful that keeping good help costs less than recruiting new employees, many US employers have adopted more liberal policies and practices to encourage employees to take time off.
    [If there were really that many such US employers, they would follow Nucor and Lincoln Electric and abolish layoffs in favor of hours cuts.]
    [Only two examples? Not too encouraging. Especially when followed by a general statement that works as a 2-edged sword -]
    Many companies also require employees to take all their vacation time during the year it is given or soon afterward, to prod them into taking extended time off.
    ["Use it or lose it" can easily be read by employees (and meant by the company) as saying "real producers for the company don't need vacation and they're the ones we'll never lay off." But annual vacations just are the same as a more balanced life throughout the year such as a shorter workweek alone can provide. And certainly the ad hoc "charity approach" is flawed, despite its making a good story for the boss -]
    At Natick-based CommercialWare Inc., HR director Marc Krug said he goes one step further for employees [yeah sure, what a saint!] he thinks are overstressed. "We tap them of the shoulder and say, "Take the afternoon off. Take a week off."...
    Smith...now has a better understanding of burnout. "It happens when the employee doesn't really understand that they are doing the job of two people, and the company doesn't see it either, or take steps to avoid it."
    [Exactly the culture that you'd expect if, contrary to media belief, we are swimming in labor-saving technology and have a global labor surplus, so naturally employees in general feel so unpowerful that they'll put up with a lot of pressure, and lazy short-sighted management will tolerate a lot more mistakes and "doing things over" (makework) because, hey, that's just the way things are, that's reality. The long-term solution for this morass of self-mutilation and masochism is Timesizing. Only what employers will squeal is an "acute labor shortage" (as in France today - see articles below) will prod them, (they're the ones that need the discipline!) into becoming good managers, after a generation of being spoiled rotten by floods of resumes. One advantage of a shorter workweek and a greater labor shortage that doesn't often come up is the fact that it disciplines a nation's management - similarly to the labor shortage of wartime - into becoming much smarter managers. Much of management is timing and scheduling skills - exactly what present-day managers in America and Japan are losing because they no longer need them. It's going to give France a subtle but increasingly visible and decisive edge in global competitiveness that will more than offset any of the supposed disadvantages of which French employers currently complain because they can't work people round the clock.]
    Only Mexican companies offer workers less vacation time [than American companies].
    [This is from the accompanying chart "Vacation daze."]
    ..\..82% of US companies provide workers with vacation time of 14 days or less after one year of service....
    Vacation days...for employees with 1 year of service..\.. [Compare this with our roundup from a previous article on our vacations page.]

  2. [And speaking of George Will (on our "collapse" page this weekend, 3/26, here's another conservative on "will" as a topic -]
    Working its will - Glory of a runaway Senate, op ed by William Safire, NYT, A23.
    [Boy, there's a turbid title if there ever was one. They should have cut the smartass and called it - "Why a conservative Senate should pass McCain-Feingold aka tough campaign finance reform."]
    ...Money talks, but money is not speech. That, in essence, is the offense and defense of campaign finance reformers. ...The hurdle that Senators John McCain and Russell Feingold must jump is this: does the restriction of money in campaigns deny anyone freedom of speech?
    Of course it does. But we abridge free speech all the time, Because no single one of our rights is absolute, we restrain one when it treads too heavily on another.
    That's why our courts have held repeatedly in the past century that the Constitution permits restrictions on political contributions. Just as anti-trust laws encouraged competition in business, anti-contribution laws have enhanced competition in politics. Freedom of speech is diminished when one voice who can afford to buy the time and space is allowed to drown out the other side. [As in Phil Hyde's three campaigns against the Kennedy's in Massachusetts for example.]
    Washington opponents of campaign finance reform offer less lofty arguments...
    1. "Holding down the number of paid political spots will increase the power of the media at the expense of political parties." And what do my ideological soulmates find so terrible about that? The wheezing liberal voices of the Bosnywash corridor are, as often as not, clobbered by the intellectual firepower of conservative columnists, Wall Street Journal editorialists and good-looking talking heads. Wake up and smell the right-wing cappucino, fellas.
    2. "If we close the soft-money loophole, money will soon find another way to reach politicians." Fine; that will provide a campaign platform for the next generation's great white hat....
    3. "If this goo-goo abomination passes with all its amendments, and any one item is struck down by the courts, then the whole thing must go up in smoke." Do Republicans really want to hold the unseverability gun to the head of the Rehnquist court?...
    Tomorrow, the senators seeking to keep in place the Clinton-McAuliffe fund-raising abuses that so polluted the 90's will offer the Hagel substitute for the McCain-Feingold bill. It's sabotage, plain and simple; "limiting" soft-money gifts to a half-million dollars per fat-cat family per election cycle. ...I'm an optimist and I believe in the two-party system.

3/24/2001  glimmers of hope -
  1. [1 UNtakeover]
    American Skiing and MeriStar halt merger plans, AP via NYT, B3.
    ...amid concerns from minority shareholders and worries about obtaining the financing necessary to operate the combined company. The companies said yesterday that their boards has called off the deal [worth $230.2m, see 12/12/2000] as American Skiing's shareholders were gathering to vote on it....

  2. Farmers joining state efforts against bioengineered crops, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, front page.
    North Dakota is weighing a bill that would make it the first state to ban planting of a genetically modified crop, reflecting a surge of concern about such crops in legislatures around the country. The North Dakota bill, which would impose a two-year moratorium on growing genetically modified wheat, is one of more than 40 state bills introduced this year that would regulate biotech crops or the labeling of foods made using genetic engineering.... But the ND bill, which has already passed the state's House of Representatives, signals another trend as well - that concern about genetically engineered crops is now coming not only from environmental and consumer groups but from farmers, who have generally supported such crops.
    ...Virtually all the state bills proposed in past years failed, [but] the ND bill has made headway precisely because its main backers are some of the state's own farmers, not the usual biotechnology opponents. While many of these farmers say they are not in principle opposed to bioengineered foods [the more shortsighted they! - they of all people should have more respect for the subtle and incalculable long-term effects!], they fear losing the ability to export their crops to Europe, Japan and other places where consumers are shunning such food and where governments strictly regulate it....
    [Thank God for Europe and Japan. So much of present-day industry, especially agribusiness and nuclear power, and especially in America the land with the shortest history, is careless about the long-term. These birdbrain farmers spend decades selling us on "pure food" and then they want to jump into "frankenfoods" overnight with no labelling. Dumb dumb dumb. Here's hoping they're waking up, if only because they're getting slapped to the cautious decision by Europe and Japan.]

  3. Click here for today's roundup of timesizing stories - 3/24/2001.

3/23/2001  glimmers of hope - 3/22/2001  glimmers of hope - 3/20/2001  glimmers of hope -
  1. Soft money speaks too loudly, letters to editor, NYT, A28 re "If soft money goes, then so does free speech" (Op ed, March 17) -

  2. US facing economic crisis, by Lester Thurow, Boston Globe, D4.
    America is in the midst of a hard landing. In just six months, the growth rate has fallen from 5.5% to something near zero. Whether we are actually in a recession (growth rates slightly below zero) or not quite there yet (growth rates slightly above zero) doesn't really matter. The economy has crashed.
    On the ides of March, stock prices in the new economy (as measured by Nasdaq) had fallen more than 60% from their highs a year earlier. Stocks in the old economy (as measured by the S&P 500) were down nearly 25%. This sounds like the old economy is doing better than the new economy, until one realizes that...even with a more than 60% fall in the value of the new economy, it [is] still outperforming the old. The old just never went up very much in the first place. A 60% fall is called a crash - a hard landing.
    [So far so good. A conventional economist is calling for a red alert, even based of the superficiality of his conventional analysis that absolutely bars him from ever mentioning the unlimited, astronomical and increasingly dysfunctional concentration of wealth and income.]
    When the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates, its stated goal was a soft landing - with growth down...to something like 3.5% [not 0%, and] stock prices...down something like 20% - not 60%. Obviously, the Fed missed its stated goals.
    ...If businesses were unable to cut back on production as much as sales fell, their unwanted additions to inventories may keep the economy on the positive side of zero[% Q1 growth], but it will be a hollow victory. Those unwanted inventories will [now encourage firms to cut back production], and this will make the second quarter even weaker....
    At some point, it will be reasonable to go back to see whether the Fed could reasonably be convicted of killing the economy with too many interest-rate increases. There is certainly probable cause. The Fed was raising interest rates long after the nation's stock markets were falling.
    [...because it was paranoid about inflation and careless of covert unemployment and underemployment. And as for the unspendable concentration of wealth, that was not and is not anywhere on the radarscope.]
    In macroeconomic terms, a stock market fall is equivalent to a wealth tax. It reduces purchasing power.
    [But that affects only the insignificant luxury markets. Only a minority of American individuals (forget "households") own stocks, and only a minority of that minority don't have their stocks tied up in pension plans. So too much focus on the insignificant, Lester. A stock market fall reduces purchasing power mostly for the wealthy, so it doesn't reduce actual purchasing signficantly. A stock drop functions mainly as a late wakeup call to the super-rich super-insulated decisionmakers.
    [Yes, we are saying that the so-called "wealth effect" of the stock bubble was insignificant compared to the damage that it symptomized in the overall consumer base and in overall consumer markets, not just the luxury markets, which get a lot more publicity than they deserve. Bear in mind that the concentration of wealth in America today is so intense that the top 1% own as much as the "bottom" 95% (not that it would be easy to get Les Thurow or any conventional economist to dilate upon that subject)! A stock bubble symptomizes a starving consumer base because it indicates that the top brackets are getting ASTRONOMICALLY SO MUCH income that they literally have nowhere else to put it but in stocks. And they are getting that much because the vast majority of people on the other side of the "income gap" have no power to get raises at the appropriate levels and speeds, "appropriate" being defined as keeping pace with real technology-multiplied productivity leaps, which conventional economists constantly, lamely, admit they have difficulty measuring, instead of just DOING IT (but then, paid as they are, but the superrich alumni, they have zero incentive). And the vast majority have no power because they are in gross surplus - because, in turn, CEOs have misused new technology by disemploying them (downsizing) instead of using it constructively for its oft-stated worksaving purpose by facilitating them (timesizing, ie: worktime cuts). And gross surplus drains power by market forces, which raise prices for scarce commodities including labor (labor's "price" is wages), but lower them for surplus commodities including labor.]
    The Fed was also raising interest rates long after oil prices were rising...equivalent to an income tax increase [reducing] disposable income.
    [Oil prices do affect a lot more people than just a minority of wealthy stock owners, so oil price rises are definitely a recession inducer.]
    The Fed was also raising interest rates long after it was clear that manufacturing was in a recession. They must have been telling themselves that manufacturing doesn't matter anymore.
    [So were, and are, most conventional economists.]
    But at the moment, the more important problem is...what should be do done now.
    One answer is a really big interest rate cut
    [And what would that be, Les?]
    (a percentage point or more) at this week's meeting of the Fed.
    [Whoa! Radical!]
    Nothing less has any chance of stopping the downward momentum.
    [You mean like Japan, Les, where their interest rates have been virtual zero for several years and they're still floundering? This is your #1 superficial fix. Here's your #2 -]
    If Pres. Bush were really interested in using taxes to stop the plunge in the economy, he would drop his 10-year tax cut (very little of it comes in the first year) and go for a large one-year temporary tax cut - a stimulus package - that could be extended for another year if needed.
    [Again, tax cuts favor the rich and just strengthen the uncontrolled centripetal forces on income - that are the cause of the recession in the first place. Then Les mumbles something about surpluses, then something about sending economic diplomats to Japan as if we are in any position to staunch their workaholic hemmorhaging of spending power into their top income brackets. Les's brilliant conclusion -]
    President Bush is going to get his baptism of fire very quickly.
    [Hey the only thing you can argue with there is this thief's title, "president." Nemesis will truly be achieved when history turns doublecrossing Double U (Dubya) into Hoover II.]

3/18-19/2001  weekend glimmers of hope -
  1. 3/18 Ending the oil age, by Paul Hawken, BG, H8.
    ...In the United States the illusion du jour is that we are running short of energy and need [to] drill for oil...in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, though it is one of the world's most climatically hostile locations [and one of the most fragile - ed.].... Our new president should be leading us out of the oil age, not dragging us back into it.

  2. 3/18 The future is here [the hybrid gas/electric vehicle] - drive it! [$20,000, subsidized by makers], by Jim Motavelli, BG, H8.
    ...The auto industry is changing on its own.... The first hybrids built by US manufacturers will be on the market in 2003..\.. The sophisticated technology under the hood is almost invisible to the driver.... Honda and Toyota were willing to subsidize their hybrid cars to get them to the public at an affordable price..\..
    The fuel cell, invented back in 1839 by a moonlighting British barrister, is only now becoming practical. Like a battery, it creates electricity from a chemical reaction, using freely available, non-polluting hydrogen as its fuel. Automakers are racing to bring a fuel-cell powered car to market. The first will be on limited sale, from Ford and DaimlerChrysler, in 2004....

  3. 3/19 Congress struggles with flood of e-mail, AP via NYT, A16.
    WASHINGTON...- Congressional offices are struggling to handle a flood of e-mail messages from Americans, a study released [yester]day says. House offices get as many as 8,000 e-mail messages per month, and some Senate offices receive as many as 55,000. The overall number sent to Congress reached 80m last year, reports the Congressional Management Foundation, a nonprofit organization seeking to improve the effectiveness of Congress. The study attributed the increase to the ease of e-mail use and the efforts of grassroots Web sites.... Rick Shapiro, executive director of the group...said most offices took three weeks to respond to e-mail messages, and the report chides many of them for responding with paper mail. The best offices, he said, can send an e-mail reply in fewer than four days.
    [Rick has missed the point. Responding is not enough. An automated all-purpose acknowledgement from Sen. Kerry's office is meaningless. The issue is, reading them and registering their issues and their solutions and designs. We need a huge issue tree and a big decision tree for each issue, reducing each issue to a PERT chart. We need regularly repeating, and ultimately continuous, electronic referendums. All this basically ignored e-mail is driving the modernization of government. Right now it is almost entirely wasted, like the vote, as government falls further and further behind, further and further into irrelevance.]

3/17/2001  glimmers of hope -
  1. [1 UPsizing, with unspecified new jobs]
    Zale plans reduction in its store-opening program, Bloomberg via NYT, B4.
    ...The owner of Bailey Banks & Biddle, Zales and other jewelry chains will..\..open 40 stores in 2002, half as many stores as planned in its next fiscal year to cut two-year capital spending by as much as 38% in the face of slower sales.... It had planned to spend $210m in the two-year period, according to an earlier filing.
    [which was unreported in the NYT, so this is all good news now.]

  2. [Times reader takes us thru a little common sense - with 20/20 hindsight]
    Greed was good. Look what happened, letter to editor by Peter Riga of Houston, NYT, A24.
    Re: "As stocks tumble, president sounds a note of concern" (front page, March 15):
    Even the most unknowledgeable person in economics and stock trading knows that the collapse was bound to happen.
     [Ah, we take you now to "Sapient chief says he also was fooled," Reuters via Mar. 16 Boston Globe, F5, which states, "Jerry Greenberg, cochief executive of online consulting company Sapient Inc. of Cambridge MA, said he felt foolish for not seeing last year's dot-com mania as a bubble that was bound to burst. "When you look back on it, it's kind of embarrassing," he said during an address at the Internet World trade show in Los Angeles...an address that focused more on the psychology of economic bubbles than on his own company's achievements...." And this guy's a consultant? "Sapient, which advises other businesses on their Internet strategies, recently cut costs and laid off workers as have many Internet companies.... Sapient's shares fell...." Guess this is what they mean by "the blind leading the blind." There was also a hilarious "then&now" cartoon by Tom Tomorrow in the Times on Thursday on the op ed page (A27) called "Op-Art." It portrayed smiling newsanchor "Biff" with Brylcreemed 50s look interviewing confidently smiling (till last frame) financial correspondent "Janet McFreely" in bouffant Jackie-O hairstyle -
    THEN - NOW - Beautiful, Tom. This is going to be the "cartoon of the week" on our badnews roundup on Somerville MA community cable on Wed. (Channel 3, 6-6:30pm for Somerville residents). Back to Peter Riga's letter to the editor -]
    Stocks have been so overpriced with regard to earnings or even possible earnings that the crash had to come. The real wonder is that it took so long.
    But the real culprit is old-fashioned greed, where everyone wants something for nothing. Everyone wants to get rich in the stock market without work and through pure speculation.
     [We usually avoid the word "greed" because it's more informative to say the problem is one of concentrating far too much money in far too few hands to ever spend enough of it to sustain the markets for the productivity that it's invested in - "the more concentration, the less circulation." And the irony is, if we practiced what our worksaving technology implies, we actually could do without a lot of the work that we're now putting in, much of it "face time" and makework, because the whole point of technology is to make all our lives easier. And if we don't take technology's blessing in terms of more leisure and free time, it turns into the curse of more underemployment, welfare, disability, prisons, suicides and - stock bubbles.]
    Stocks are good as long as there is a reasonable relationship between them and their worth or potential worth. Stocks were overpriced because everyone wanted in on the market to get rich quick. Demand was too great, so the prices went through the roof.
     [In actual fact, stocks were overpriced not so much because of what "everyone" did to get rich quick (and there was never a major of Americans in on this - only 45-51% of "households" meaning at least one person in each household regardless of how many people total in the household). Rather, they were overpriced because people who were already rich were getting and concentrating so much of the profit from new technology that would have been spread out among millions of employees' wages if CEOs had cut hours instead of jobs, that the rich literally had nowhere else to put it but the stock market. And now they're pulling it out of the stock market, they're keeping most of it in cash while scanning desperately for "safe havens." This is exactly what happened at the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s.]
    Reality has now set in, and the message is that there is no free lunch. Even in stocks.
     [There may be no free lunch, but our waves and waves of worksaving technology have laid upon us a categorical imperative to cut hours, not jobs, so we don't keep concentrating income and reproducing this grotesque imbalance between the volume of products and services we're pumping out, and the cash-starved consumer base that we expect to purchase them all. We don't have a choice in the long run - we must implement timesizing, not downsizing - and as we're finding out, the long run is "arriving" faster and faster.]

3/16/2001  glimmers of hope -
  1. 2 UPsizings, with unspecified new jobs -
    1. Shaw Group, NYT, C4.
      ...Baton Rouge, La., an industrial piping and engineering and construction services company, said it had signed an agreement with the National Energy Group, a unit of the PG&E Corp., San Francisco, an electric and gas utility, to build three power plans in the Midwest, with 3,300 megawatts of new generating capacity.
      [This must be part of the scramble to get California more juice.]

    2. Ames set to open 5 stores in March, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, F5.
      Ames Department Stores Inc., a regional discount retail chain...will open five stores in four states this month to expand in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions. Two of the stores will be in the Chicago area. The others will be in North Brunswick NJ, Gary IN, and Columbus OH....

    3. Baxter [International] says it will double capacity at Swiss plant, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
      ...A leading maker of medical supplies [will] double manufacturing capacity at a plant in Neuchatel, Switzerland, that makes its hemophilia drug. The company also...might try to meet demand for the drug, a bleeding-disorder treatment, by adding capacity at its plant in Thousand Oaks, Calif....

  2. Click here for today's roundup of timesizing stories - 3/16/2001.

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