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

5/31/2001  glimmers of intelligence -

1. 3 UPsizings, adding 450 + unspecified new jobs -
   • Etc. - Tiffany & Co. opened a 100,000 sq. ft. jewelry factory in Cumberland RI, that has 150 workers and will employ 450 eventually, a spokeswoman said, Globe wire services, Boston Globe, E7.
   • Miscellany - Finsbury Ltd. will open an office in New York, by Stuart Elliott, NYT, C7.
   • Miscellany - Mark Pasetsky opened Mark Allen & Co., New York, a PR agency, by Stuart Elliott, NYT, C7.

2. Economic scene - With privatization of Social Security, market risks could put a hole in the safety net, by Prof. Hal Varian at UC/Berkeley's School of Info Mgmt & Systems, NYT, C2.
   [Barchart caption -] Is this any place to invest social security? Since the 1870's, the stock market has averaged 7% annual returns. But in many years, stocks have done much better - and much worse.
   ...[And,] there are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of that 7% figure.
   • Start with volatility.... Over the last century, stock market earnings have ranged from minus 48% in 1931 to plus 49% in 1933 [he must mean 1934]. True, the market was especially volatile during the Depression, but even in the postwar period, returns have ranged from minus 25% [1975] to plus 40% [1955]. Given this enormous variability, it's hard to be all that sure the expected yearly return is even positive....
   • Then there's the market's recent performance....
   • Suppose your grandfather put $100 into each of the 39 major stock markets in the world in 1921, [the] yearly return that investment [would] have earned by the end of the 20th century...is a shocking 3.11% [because] a lot of bad things happened in the 20th century.
     • The German stock market disappeared twice, in 1931 and in 1944.
     • Most European markets in occupied countries were liquidated during World War II.
       [Hmm, this could be another important way in which war acts as a centrifuge and activator of concentrated, less active capital.]
     • In the early 1960's, the Egyptian and Argentine stock markets collapsed.
     • In fact, according to..\..two financial economists, Philippe Jorion and William N...Goetzmann, this nation's stock market is quite an anomaly, scoring the highest of those 39 markets in both longevity and average return. And even the U.S. market looked pretty shaky in the 30's....
   Social Security was created in 1935 as a safety net.
   Over the years, it has grown to become the primary source of retirement income for a substantial part of the population. At the same time, private accumulation of retirement savings has virtually disappeared [down to about $40,000, which] if you exclude company retirement plans, drops to $13,000.
   ..\..As the mutual fund prospectuses tell us, "past returns are no guide to future performance."... [So rather than privatizing Social Security and putting it all in the stock market] it makes more sense to return to the original model of Social Security as a safety net against poverty, with stock market investments as a separate retirement program, clearly recognized as a risky investment by all concerned..\..
   [Here are our cheap&cheerful guesstimates of the data from the bar chart of annual stock market return (whose source is Robert J. Schiller of Yale) -
   1872 4.5, 73 2.5, 74 -4.5%, 75 -1.2, 76 -1, 77 -20, 78 -4, 79 10
   1880 44, 1 20.5, 2 -2, 3 -1, 4 -10.5, 5 -19, 6 21, 7 7.5, 8 -4.5, 9 -.5
   1890 2, 1 -10, 2 12, 3 1, 4 -22, 5 -1, 6 0, 7 -.3, 8 15.5, 9 25
   1900 0, 1 16, 2 15, 3 4, 4 -20.5, 5 26, 6 17.5, 7 -2, 8 -29, 9 31
   1910 10.5, 1 -8.5, 2 -1, 3 1, 4 -10, 5 -10.5, 6 25, 7 2, 8 -25, 9 9.5
   1920 12, 1 19, 2 2, 3 21, 4 -.3, 5 20, 6 20, 7 5, 8 30.5, 9 41
   1930 -12, 1 -25, 2 -48, 3 -15, 4 49, 5 -11, 6 497 6 28, 8 -35, 9 10.5
   1940 -1, 1 -12, 2 -13, 3 11, 4 13.5, 5 12, 6 32, 7 -15, 8 -1, 9 2
   1950 10, 1 25, 2 14, 3 8.5, 4 -1.5, 5 40, 6 32.5, 7 2, 8 -9, 9 35
   1960 4, 1 3, 2 15.5, 3 -5, 4 19, 5 12, 6 8, 7 -10, 8 12, 9 7.5
   1970 -10, 1 3, 2 10, 3 15, 4 -19, 5 -25, 6 32, 7 8, 8 -12, 9 10
   1980 10.5, 1 20, 2 -11, 3 22, 4 15, 5 2, 6 20.5, 7 27, 8 -4.5, 9 12
   1990 19, 1 -4, 2 28.5, 3 5, 4 9, 5 -1, 6 41, 7 34, 8 35, 9 40
   2000 14, 1 -5]....

3. Click here for today's TIMEsizings - 5/31/2001.

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Etc. - Fidelity Investments, Globe wire services, Boston Globe, C9.
   ...the biggest mutual fund company, plans to open an office in the Indian capital of New Delhi and is looking for staff to run it....

2. U.S. venture capital sees treasure in Europe, by Suzanne Kapner, NYT, C1.
   ..."Europe reminds me of Silicon Valley in the early 80's," said John Fisher, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who moved to London from Redwood City, Calif., in February to open his firm's European office. "The opportunities in Europe are better than they are in the U.S."...
   [And Europe has a lot more "socialist" job protections than the once-great USA. Shades of the U.S. National Football League, which was described by one of its team owners recently as "Thirty-two fatcat Republicans who vote socialist." And wonder of wonders, the NFL works better than any other U.S. professional sports league. Now we're not arguing for socialism, because socialism is a burgeoning maximum of stifling detailed controls. We're arguing for a new alternative to that, a stable minimum of liberating generalized controls, theoretically just one. That one would be the Holy Grail of economic designers, the Single All-Sufficient Control - sortof one-control Libertarianism involving a single regulation so well-designed and centrally-positioned in the Body Economic that it can do the work of all the burgeoning regulations and programs and bureaucracies and taxes that are now attempting to do the job - and not doing it very well. Yes, we have a candidate in mind that meets these stringent criteria - but we cheated. We "stood on the shoulders of giants" like Arthur Dahlberg, who way back in 1932 said, "For I believe that our balking, backfiring profits economy can - by injecting one planned adjustment - be made to work in socially desirable ways, and even be made to satisfy high-grade engineering standards of efficiency, with even less involved governmental interference and industrial control than we already have." (Jobs, Machines and Capitalism, 23.) Our flexed-up, more gradual and market-oriented version of what Dahlberg had in mind (a one-time jump down to a 20-hour workweek) - Timesizing, where the workweek is determined dynamically and automatically (and gradually) by the under-employment rate, and any overtime automatically targets, triggers, funds, sizes, and paces its own resolution in terms of on-the-job training and hiring. Let's get with it before braindead Dubya charms us into another big Pentagon buildup during this age of maximally dangerous weapons and domestic violence and minimal common sense.]

1. Authors analyze culture of work, economic changes, by Carlo Wolff, Boston Globe, G11.
   ...Don't be put off by the vinegary title of Jill Andresky Fraser's "White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and its Rewards in Corporate America." It's a[n] analysis of the allegedly booming '90s and their current hangover.... Andresky Fraser is finance editor of Inc. magazine and a general editor of Bloomberg Personal Finance. Her book is the result of four years of research into what she calls a nagging paradox: "How to reconcile the buoyant optimism of the chief executives, business leaders, and management consultants I interviewed regularly...with the often bleak workplace stories and comments I was hearing from my other sources, all those women and men outside the executive suite."...
   Andresky Fraser focuses...on the changing definition of work, how and why it has been devalued, the way corporations wring blood from stones (shifting from pension plans to 401(k) systems is an example), the ageism technology creates. "Corporate America's campaign to replace postwar employment practices with ever more demanding, stressful, and unrewarding workplace conditions [e.g., cubiclization? - ed.] has been fought, in large part, on the public relations front," she writes. "It's been a two-pronged effort:
   • to minimize the fall-out from negative changes among a company's current employees, retirees, and laid-off personnel; and
   • to offer a long-term rationale for change, despite its costs, to the larger community of institutional investors, government lawmakers and regulators, and potential employees and business partners."
   The spin campaign has failed, her book suggests. We live in a "culture of overwork" that comingles the office, home, the workweek and vacation time. That's why so many people crash in their cubicles, staring vacantly at the computers in an oblivious state. That's why so many people don't buy the corporate line.
   "Overwork is epidemic, for men and women whose job demands keep increasing, not because of career advances but because of a corporate environment that has depended upon squeezing...more and more work out of fewer people with fewer resources," Andresky Fraser writes.
   In the '90s, economic growth masked such trends. But the constriction of the market and the emblematic dot-com implosion has thrown them into high relief, curtailing tolerance for corporate downsizing and worker "redeployment" and reviving the dream of a human, user-friendly workplace.
   Andresky Fraser's interviews with hundreds of workers and analyses of "binge and purge" firms from General Motors to Microsoft to Intel made her angry - and hopeful. The quandaries she probes - what's the purpose of a longer life and greater health in an economy that devalues workers over 40? - drive the book. So does the Internet, which, she documents, can be a valuable organizing tool for the marginalized professional.
   Ultimately, both..\..Nancy Folbre's "The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values"...and Andresky Fraser's book...suggest that their authors, like their subjects, have had enough. "With the evolution of the Internet, the involvement of white-collar unions, and, perhaps most important, the support of major players in the investment community, white-collar workers [are] no longer isolated targets of a harsh new work world," Andresky Fraser concludes. "Change seem[s] possible, even inevitable. Perhaps one day, I will try to interview someone after 5 p.m. and will be told that our conversation needs to wait until the next morning. I won't complain."
   [Sounds like Jill is making some keen observations from inside - sorta like operating on her own retinas. Our view, of course, is that the deterioration of work is due to the factors outlined by Jeremy Rifkin in his "The End of Work." If you're going to pour labor-saving technology into an economy, you simply have to reduce the workweek to keep the work and the spending power spread around to cover your entire population, however thinly the work (the wages will not be thin because the shorter workweek will starve the market for workers, instead of flooding it as long workweeks do, and market forces will drive up the price of labor (wages) as they do to the price of any scarce commodity), or your workforce loses leverage and respect. Jill apparently has not penetrated beyond to explore the real crunch for investors and the top brackets - they funnel so much income into so few hands that they actually strangle the markets away from their own necessarily huge investment targets, thereby guaranteeing that high levels of economic activity are unsustainable. We are seeing the "foothills" of this problem in the current downturn. Our solution of course - Timesizing.]

2. [And don't miss Dave Barry's wonderful piece this weekend. It absolutely epitomizes what Andresky Fraser said above about "corporate America's campaign to replace postwar employment practices with ever more demanding, stressful, and unrewarding workplace conditions" - and she might well have added "and ever less customer service and consumer value." Here's just a taste of Dave Barry's examples from the newspaper industry -]
   Read it and weep, by Dave Barry, Boston Globe Magazine [and syndicated papers across the continent], 10.
   On behalf of the newspaper industry (new cost-cutting motto: "All the news that"). I wish to announce some changes we're making to serve you better.
   [Yeah right. Just like Dave's definition of the U.S. Senate, "White male millionaires working for you."]
   When I say "serve you better," I mean increase our profits. We newspapers are big on profits these days. We're a business, just like any other business, except that we employ English majors.... In the past few decades, all of the..\..locally owned newspaper[s] were purchased by large corporations, which were in turn purchased by larger corporations, and so on, so that today the entire American newspaper industry has been glommed together into one giant media conglomerate owned by Wall Street, which frankly does not care what your city council did. What Wall Street cares about is profits.
   [George Soros with your concern about "open societies," take note.]
   Here at the newspaper, we get hourly phone calls from Wall Street. "Send more profits!" Wall Street shouts, then slams down the receiver.
   [Uncanny example of this just two days later = "Unresolved clash of cultures - At Knight Ridder, good journalism vs. the bottom line," see 5/29/2001.]
   We must comply, because otherwise Wall Street would shut down the newspaper, and we would starve to death, because, as English majors, we have no useful skills.
   [Beautiful, Dave. We're starting to get the same kind of feeling as people got about Will Rogers - if he wasn't saying it with a splash of humor, they'd have had him shot.]
   So the bottom line is that we've had to cut costs. Here are some of the ways we're doing this:
   • Recycling stories....
     [Dave uses the Middle East fighting example, but remember how the media went on and on and on about O.J. Simpson, and still now about Clinton (giving us 'Clinton fatigue'), and, O God will we ever hear the end of Jon Benet?...]
   • Staff cutbacks. The typical newspaper staff has been reduced to one editor, one managing editor, 14 assistant managing editors, 39 deputy assistant managing editors, and one reporter.
     [It really is astonishing how much and often these isolated CEOs can downsize without touching the really incompetent do-nothings. And how, exactly, do they pass their "face time," you ask? Scott Adams' Dilbert has nailed it countless times, and here's Dave Barry's version -]
     The editors spend their days holding meetings to think of new ways to cut costs...
     [This may be a good point to call attention to #7 on our realms of makework page.]
     ...while the reporter (who, for budgetary reasons, is not allowed to leave the building) looks out the window, in case news occurs in the parking lot.
   • Product placement....
     [I.e., putting company names or logos on everything, including chunks of the news.]
   • Using fewer words. Not need adjectives, adverbs.
     [Sounds like Dubya.]
     Nouns, verbs can communicate story gist ("Middle East Fighting").
   • Weaker endings to columns.
     
   [Again we say, thank God for Dave Barry.]

3. [And be sure to catch Dave Warsh's rap on recent ads for the 'morning after' pill -]
   David Warsh, pointer blowout (to E2), Boston Globe, E1.
   The appearance of consumer ads for the "morning after" contraceptive pill may be even worse news for the Republican Party than the loss of the Senate to the Democrats.

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Boeing's Russian edge - Aircraft giant hiring creative engineers who are trapped in post-Soviet slump, by Sabrina Tavernise, NYT, C1.
   [...which would make it, by our reckoning, a capitalist slump.]
   [Photo caption -] Boeing operates a design center near the Kremlin in Moscow....
   ...In recent years, designers from Russia's aerospace industry have not been very busy. A decade-long slump in domestic demand after the fall of the Soviet Union shows no sign of ending.
   [Funny - sounds a lot like Japan, the second-biggest world economy, but shrinking fast.]
   ...The Boeing Co. has taken advantage of the collapse. Its Moscow design center, which it opened with 10 Russian scientists in 1992, now employs about 650 Russian engineers, scientists, and computer specialists from Russia's biggest aircraft design bureaus.
   Boeing contracts with the Russian companies, including Ilyushin and Tupolev, which are then able to pay salaries as much as 10 times the average Russian designer's pay of $200 to $500 a month. [Even so,] Russian engineers, who generally are used to improv[ing - wake up, NYT editors!] designs for existing airplanes rather than develop[ing] new products, are also relatively inexpensive.... Said Sergei Kravchenko, Boeing country executive for Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union..."There's no other place in the world where there are so many underemployed PhD's applying for jobs as car mechanics"..\..
   [That's right. Next door in Cambridge, Mass., they apply for jobs as cab drivers. And in Iceland, so many people have PhDs you have to have one to get unemployment bennies. (Just kidding.)]
   "Quality caught our eye" in Russia, said Sergei....
   [Yeah, low-priced quality. This UPsizing doesn't really compensate for Boeing's 650 layoffs today (5/26/2001), because, as so often, the downsizing will happen a lot faster than this upsizing, which happened over the last 9 years.]

2. Click here for today's TIMEsizings - 5/26/2001.

• Senate Republicans step out and Democrats jump in - Jeffords defects, forcing shift in agenda, by Seelye & Clymer, NYT, front page.
• A question of governing from the Right - Strategy of G.O.P. is now challenged, by Richard Berke, NYT, front page.
• Upheaval in halls of power - GOP losing Senate with Jeffords as independent, by Glen Johnson, Boston Globe, front page.
• One man's shift changes all the rules of politics - Senator's move ripples through nation - Now the Bush administration, which had confined its worries to the relatively easy task of accommodating Republican moderates, will have to seek to satisfy the inclinations and demands of Democrats, by David Shribman, Boston Globe, front page.
• Energy legislation - Move gives Democrats more muscle on environment, by Robert Schlesinger, Boston Globe, A25.
• Mr. Bush's fumble, editorial, NYT, A24.
• America's political terrain, jolted by one man, letters to editor, NYT, A24.
• Jim Jeffords's long goodbye - How a moderate Republican lost his place in the party, by Garrison Nelson, NYT, A25.
• Forcing Jeffords out, editorial, Boston Globe, A22.
• Bush and Lott blew it on Jeffords, by Scot Lehigh, Boston Globe, A23.
• A Vermonter all the way - 'I have changed my party label, but I have not changed my beliefs', by Joan Vennochi, Boston Globe, A23.

5/17/2001  glimmers of intelligence -

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   Arthur D. Little unit spinoff developing wireless video, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, C6.
   ...The Cambridge [Mass.] consulting firm yesterday said its division in England has spun off a new company...called Alphamosaic..\..developing a low-cost technology that could support new affordable wireless videophones as soon as next year....

2. A dark view of the street - Spotlight shines on skeptic who sees a long slowdown, by Michael Steinberger, NYT, C1.
   [Photo caption -] Stephen S. Roach, Morgan Stanley's chief economist, says that the economy has only begun to hit bottom and that the country is facing a long stretch of anemic growth.
   [We at Timesizing. com agree. The Great Depression proved that downturns are not necessarily cyclical. They can be secular, i.e., permanent unless brought up by war (or an intelligent war-substitute like Timesizing). The easy-reading background on this is in Robert Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers, in the chapter called "The Heresies of John Maynard Keynes." Keynes' big heresies were to recognize that the business "cycle" was not automatically cyclical - the economy could stabilize indefinitely at much less than full capacity - and that government could intervene and fix it. Unfortunately he picked the wrong way to intervene - a blizzard of makework characterized by tax-or-borrow and spend - instead of simply trimming the workweek (employment share per person per time unit) and thereby centrifuging the employment and spending power.]
   Bearishness has its benefits these days. Just ask Stephen S. Roach...currently Wall Street's leading merchant of doom.
   [Roach used to be a gungho downsizer. But then in 1996, a close relative of his (a sister?) got laid off and he changed his view, becoming a frequent critic of downsizing. We used to call him "Cock Roach" but once he changed his view, we dropped our slur.]
   ...He was among the earliest on Wall Street to say that the economy was about to hit a wall - he issued his forecast in early January...
   [We issued ours 28 months ago when Levi's went bust 2/23/1999.]
   ...and no one has articulated the case more aggressively or provocatively.
   [Except us.]
   Indeed, though the economic data remain mixed about the extent of the downturn, he has turned even more negative lately, saying that evidence of a sharp slowdown was "the most compelling I've seen in 20 years."...
   He has also offered a withering critique of the economic "boom" [our quotes] or the late 1990's: Far from being a powerful expression of American ingenuity and industriousness, it was a textbook example of the damage that can be done when financial manias rage unchecked.... Mr. Roach...often goes beyond Fed watching and number crunching to consider the larger forces in the marketplace, as well as the social consequences of economic policy. The conclusions he draws are frequently at odds with Wall Street's prevailing wisdom....

3. Click here for today's TIMEsizings - 5/17/2001.

1. 2 UPsizings, unspecified new jobs -
   
   1. Holland Mark chairman to start new company, by Bernard Stamler, NYT, C13.
      Bink Garrison, chairman at Holland Mark Advertising in Boston, is leaving the agency to start Bink Inc. in Boston, a consulting agency that will specialize in marketing strategy and development....
   2. Biogen plans $350m plant in Denmark, by Jeffrey Krasner, BG, E5.
      ...in a move to avoid the manufacturing capacity shortage that has stymied other biotech companies.... The plant, scheduled to open in 2004 or 2005, will produce Avonex, Biogen's big-selling multiple sclerosis drug, and other drugs still under development....

2. Click here for today's TIMEsizings - 5/15/2001.

1. New drug fights second kind kind of cancer, by Lawrence Altman, NYT, A11.
   [Photo caption -] Gleevec, approved to treat a form [chronic myelogenous...] of leukemia, has also helped patients with an intestinal cancer...gastro-intestinal stromal tumor, or GIST.
   [And, in language we can understand, it works by "targeting bad cells," according to a front-page story in Friday's USA Today (5/11/2001). Back to the Times -]
   Gleevec, formerly known as STI-571, is made by Novartis. It is a new kind of drug that acts like a guided missile, killing only cancerous cells while generally sparing healthy ones....
   [Right next to this NYT cancer article is another one on the subject -]
   New class of cancer drugs shows promise, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, A11.
   ...The drugs interfere with a protein known as EGFR, which plays a crucial role in the growth and survival of tumor cells.... The drugs [represent] a new strategy to aim at particular proteins involved in cancer formation.
   [The previous article indicates that this general class is called "molecularly targeted drugs."]
   This approach [is also] used by Gleevec..\..although with a different target [bad cells]....
   There are two types of EGFR-blocking drugs.
   1. ImClone's C225 and a few others...are monoclonal antibodies...engineered versions of the proteins the body uses to fight off germs and are given intravenously. They bind to the receptors protruding from the tumor cell surface, preventing the intended growth factor [EGFR?] from binding.
   2. The drugs being tested by AstraZeneca, OSI and Pfizer are pills that block the [growth] action inside the cells that [is] set off by EGFR.
   ...Some doctors [say] it might be possible to use two or more of the drugs in combination....

2. ['Good, but' #1 -]
   A broad alliance tries to head off cuts in Medicare - Loss of billions is seen [from cuts] - Union leaders and politicians cite an expanding threat to teaching hospitals, by Raymond Hernandez, NYT, front page.
   [Good that there's some resistance, but -
   
   • Why is there still a move to cut any of the nation's surviving little eccentric money-centrifuges when we still haven't set up an all-sufficient big one in the center (like Timesizing)?
   • Why is there still a move to cut any more government healthcare money when the cuts that have already taken place have resulted in the bankruptcies of hospitals and nursing homes all over the land and reduced the once-supreme U.S. healthcare system to trash? We don't hear many Americans sneering at the Canadian system any more (and whatever its problems, all Canadians are covered).
   • Why is there still talk of cuts when there's a huge shortage in the profession that's the human heart of the hospital, nursing?
   "United we stand, divided we fall." The wealthy and powerful of this land have declared class warfare on everyone else. They have invested in the mass production and availability of weapons and an endless stream of Hollywood "how-to's" on violence. They are dividing this nation more and more widely (one example, the income gap) and they are setting us up for a fall. Setting us all up for a fall, including themselves. It's 6:14 am Tues. and "debhar YHWH...," cf., "the word of the LORD that came to Joel the son of Pethuel: Hear this, ye old men, [for the nation is run by old men - is not the US Senate, as Dave Barry says, "white male millionaires working for you"?] and all ye inhabitants of the land. Hath this [deterioration] been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?..." - Joel 1:1-2....]

3. ['Good, but' #2 -]
   Talks inching ahead on monitoring '72 germ warfare pact, by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, A8.
   [Good, but why is this taking so long? Why nearly a generation (30 years) to tie up? Can we afford this kind of "guilt hydraulics" with such dangerous stuff?]
   GENEVA...- Lengthy negotiations to fashion a verification scheme for the 29-year-old treaty banning biological weapons are edging closer to agreement, although some important issues are yet to be resolved, the talks' chairman...Tibor Toth, a Hungarian diplomat..\..said late last week.
   [And wasn't the ancient Egyptian ibis-headed or dog-headed god, Thoth - wasn't he the scribe of the gods, the measurer of time, the inventor of numbers, the mediator (between Horus and Seth) and a god of wisdom? Let's hope Tibor Toth is tied-in to this tradition and can nail this task for us.]
   Although the..\..1972 biological weapons convention, ratified by 143 countries...was the first to eliminate a category of arms, no enforcement scheme was provided....

1. 3 UPsizings, unspecified new jobs -
   
   1. British Telecom plans a spinoff..., by Kapner with Cowell, NYT, W1.
      ...a breakup of the company into two parts - one containing the wireless operations and the other uncompassing its fixed-line retail and wholesale businesses as well as its Internet and broadband arms....
   2. Toyota to create Mexican unit..., by Micheline Maynard, NYT, W1.
      ...a sales unit for Mexico, the only North American market where it does not build or sell cars and trucks....
   3. $300m [natural-gas-fired] power plant is planned for Long Island, by Al Baker, NYT, A27.
      ...by the KeySpan Energy Corp. and the Long Island Power Authority [LIPA] on an industrial tract near the border of Nassau and Suffolk Counties [to] come on-line by the summer of 2004 at the earliest and be only the second 24-hour-a-day powerplant to be built on Long Is. in the last 25 years [as] part of LIPA's overall strategy to add 700 megawatts of power to its total electric capacity in the next 3-4 years. (A megawatt is roughly enough to power 1,000 homes.)

2. Click here for today's TIMEsizings - 5/11/2001.

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Fleet announces steps to improve service, by Scott Nelson, Boston Globe, C6.
   ...Although Fleet is laying off people elsewhere, 75 tellers will be hired in the coming weeks to staff the 25 or 30 busiest branches in the Boston area....

2. Boston Capital: Don't drill a hole in conservation - Cheney should view it as an investment in energy efficiency, by Syre & Stein, Boston Globe, C1.
   To: VP Dick Cheney...
   We've been meaning to write ever since you delivered your speech on energy policy at the end of April.... Your comment on conservation struck us as pretty wide of the mark. ...You bluntly [said,]"Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."...
   But [conservation] can play an important role, one you seem not to appreciate.... Simply put, conservation is an investment in energy efficiency. It is spending money on a range of technologies - better lighting, more efficient motors, modern heating and cooling systems - to get more output out of existing energy supplies....
   We're talking dollars and cents here, Dick, not squishy stuff like personal virtue. In New England, utilities invested $1B during the 1990s in conservation programs, which resulted in $3B in savings....
   Dick, as a 1950s kind of guy, you may have liked it better when Ford and GM battled to see who could have bigger tail fins. \Recently, however\ Ford has promised to [hike] the fuel efficiency of its SUVs by 25% over the next five years. Just this week, GM insisted it would match Ford step for step, bragging it wanted "to stay a leader in light truck fuel efficiency."... From where we sit...this is a healthier form of competition.
   ...Suffice [it] to say a kilowatt saved produces less pollution than a kilowatt generated.... Dick...just don't shortchange conservation. It makes good business sense. Or as Richard Kennelly of the Conservation Law Foundation puts it, "Focusing on supply to the exclusion of efficiency is simply waste. It's like turning up the heat in your house in winter [without] closing the windows first."

1. 2 UPsizings, with 1,150 new jobs
   - Merrill's assets unit, Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, is cutting work force, Bloomberg via NYT, C17.
   
   1. ...Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., however, is adding up to 1,000 workers this year, the company's chairman, Richard Fuld, said.
   2. UBS Warburg, the securities arm of UBS A.G., has also said it plans to add about 150 investment bankers in the United States this year.

2. Click here for today's timesizing stories - 5/09/2001.

1. [1 UPsizing, unspecified new jobs]
   In a shift in strategy, Apple is making plans to open its first stores, by Matt Richtel, NYT, C1.
   SAN FRANCISCO...- Apple Computer Inc. said [yester]day that it was expanding into the retail business, confirming that it planned to open its first store on May 19. A computer industry analyst said the company might open as many as 10 stores as part of a strategy to extend the Apple brand....
   [Later we learn "Apple to open 25 retail stores," Bloomberg via 5/16/2001 NYT, C6.]

2. ['good, but'...]
   ...Consumers slow increase in borrowing \but only\ as jobs are lost, by Riva Atlas, NYT, C1.
   ...Total consumer debt outstanding grew in March by $6B, an increase of nearly 5% on an annual basis from February.... In February, debt grew more than 10%, or $13.4B.... The slowdown was most evident not in credit card borrowing but in...nonrevolving credit, or financing for automobiles, boats, mobile homes and education, among other things - where borrowing declined by 0.6% in total..\.. The figures do not include loans backed by real estate, like mortgages..\.. "What the consumer does is the No. 1 issue for the economic outlook," said Edward McKelvey, senior economist at Goldman Sachs....
   Some economists regarded the slowdown in consumer borrowing with a sense of relief, given the surge...recent[ly. However, the reason may be that] in April...more jobs were lost than in any other month in the last 10 years \and already\ in February...the delinquency rate, or debt 30 days or more past due, was 5.26%, compared with 4.83% a year earlier....

• Tweaking America..., letter to editor by Roger Normand of Ctr for Economic & Social Rights (Brooklyn), NYT, A20.
  Re "For First Time, U.S. is excluded from U.N. Human Rights Panel" (front page, May 4):
  This was not an example of anti-American bias by so-called rogue states like Sudan.... One of the major reasons is that Washington simply does not support international human rights, despite loud rhetoric on the subject. Alone among Western countries, it has refused to ratify three of the major international treaties concerning women's rights, children's rights and economic, social and cultural rights.
  At a meeting of the U.N. commission in Geneva last month, I watched with dismay as American delegates, sometimes acting alone against overwhelming consensus, sought to undermine resolutions on housing rights and women's rights to property and inheritance.
  Is it any wonder that the rest of the world acted to send our government a message that its rogue behavior cannot be tolerated?
  [And as the next letter points out, there is a "most obvious human rights issue on which the US stands apart from virtually all civilized nations: capital punishment." - Joseph Rospars of Arlington, Va.]

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   France: Broken deal hits stock, by John Tagliabue, NYT, B3.
   ...A French court blocked a friendly $7B takeover of Legrand, an electrical equipment maker, by a rival, Schneider Electric....
   [Originally announced 1/16/2001.]

2. Missile treaty paradox, letter to editor by David Misch of Santa Monica, NYT, A22.
   ...It seems ironic that after conservatives spend decades saying that treaties with Communist nations were worthless because Communists couldn't be counted on to keep their promises, it is the United States that is talking about unilaterally abrogating the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

3. Greenest economies, letter to editor by Pres. Don Ritter of National Environmental Policy Institute, NYT, A22.
   ...Technologies that reduce environmental impact while increasing economic productivity exist. But to realize their full potential, public policy must shift from its overriding concern with regulating negative outputs to encouraging greater efficiency and productivity of energy and materials inputs....

• In California, solar's time to shine - Alternate power systems and conservation draw new converts, by Evelyn Nieves, NYT, A16.
  [photo caption:] Eric Jorgensen converted his house in San Jose, Calif., to solar and wind power in October to conserve energy and reduce his electricity bills. "California has so much sun that it's silly everyone isn't doing this," he said.
  ...At first, passersby noticed the two windmills on the roof. Now, with energy on nearly everyone's mind, the Jorgensens' place - with solar panels on the back roof [and] a sun oven in the backyard...- is a full-scale attraction. It draws fifth-grade classes, international news crews and fellow homeowners....
  Not since the oil crisis of the 1970's have the words "solar power" been so popular..\.. Rolling blackouts, record-high utility bills, bankrupt and nearly bankrupt power companies - as well as a state campaign that combines pleas with financial incentives to use less energy - are all creating a populace focused on saving energy....
  Advertisements for solar-panel suppliers are plastered all over the state's Sunday newspapers.... The Jorgensens paid $13,000 for their solar inter-tie system, though with rebates, they said, the cost was less than $6,000....
  Lance Drill, a freelance photographer who lives in a tiny studio apartment on the top floor of an aging five-storey building in San Francisco...bought a portable generator and a solar panel over the Internet for $400.... He said he expected to receive rebates...worth almost half his cost.
  Mr. Drill said he expected his [electric] bills, about $80 a month, to drop considerably. A new state program is to reward customers who cut their summer energy use by 20% from the comparable period last year with a 20% rebate on their electric bills for the summer..\..
  He hooked the solar panel on the roof to the generator with a power cord that runs from the roof down the front of the building and through his window.... "Right now," he said, "the radio you're hearing is getting powered from the sun. It still amazes me to think about it."

1. A fair trial for reform, editorial, Boston Globe, A14.
   ...In 1998, Massachusetts voters put this state just behind Maine and Arizona at the vanguard of campaign finance reform by overwhelmingly enacting the Clean Elections initiative..\.. Opponents'...reasons why they they the law [won't] work...are so flimsy that they [show] the law is clearly being opposed by people who are afraid it will work.... The vehemence with which some are trying to squash this law shows they are afraid it will work so well the voters will never let it go.
   [Campaign finance reform is taking sooo looong that our personal instinct is being confirmed - our only hope of cleaning up government and getting a real feedback system with real democracy is doing an "end run" around the whole corrupt mess in our legislatures with initiatives and referendums. For sustained survival, let alone improving health, a huge system like ours needs a really good feedback loop. Right now our plutocracy is in the stranglehold of people with so much money, they can pull to themselves all the decision-making power AND completely insulate themselves from the negative consequences of any of those decisions. This is not a feedback loop. This is an overdose of valium spiked with Prozac.]

2. Kudos to student protesters, letter to editor by Michael Collupy of Allston MA, Boston Globe, A14.
   ...These workers do not make a living wage while cleaning the porcelain bowls for our future elites \at\ the world's wealthiest university....
   Furthemore, Harvard management's claim that the low wages are made up by giving workers educational benefits is obscene. One cannot support a family and study on a weekly salary of less than $300. I thought serfdom ended in the Middle Ages, but not within Harvard's plantation.
   [We agree with the diagnosis but not with the living-wage cure. The living wage concept is simply a higher minimum wage. Its basic invention betrays the fact that the minimum wage approach has failed. So why, we ask would-be reformers, would a higher minimum wage approach work when a lower one failed? When you substitute arbitrary determinations for market forces, you wind up with a system of conscious intervention that inevitably falls behind and delivers too little too late. Our Timesizing approach doesn't fight market forces. It harnesses them. It doesn't try to set a higher price on a common commodity (unskilled labor) in oversupply that must be repeatedly and inflexibly and deliberately adjusted. It starts at the other end of the problem. Timesizing sets up a self-adjusting system that eliminates the over-availability, to the job market, of unskilled labor hours. It withdraws all those desperate extra hours clamoring, competing for use and gradually bidding one another's price down, by cutting each person's share of market-demanded employable hours from the pre-technology level of 40 hours a week that we have not changed now for 61 years. And Timesizing adjusts this work share per person, this maximum workweek, not by well-meaning wishful thinking or deliberate conscious adjustment that gradually falls behind, but by the problem itself, under-employment. If under-employment stays the same or rises, the workweek gradually adjusts downward. It's better than the French way, because they've just got themselves another rigid level. And we really must get ourselves beyond rigid approaches, especially since that's one of the main flaws that allowed the torpedoing of our own shorter-workweek bill in 1933. And once we have our workweek, our workshare per person, at levels that are a little more appropriate for our ever-rising levels of work-saving technology, we must "plug the leaks" in our high quality of life so we don't let it get overwhelmed by other agendas, either from inside by those who want higher interest rates, or from outside by those who want to save the world by moving everyone to America - the Miss Liberty, uncapped immigration solution. It is strange that progressives who can understand the naivete and unsustainability of free trade (unregulated imports) often fail to understand the naivete and unsustainability of open borders (unregulated immigrants). And we haven't even broached the level of responsibility that will be required of us in terms of unregulated births once the environmental constraints of the mature Ecological Age are fully upon us.]