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

11/30/2001  glimmers of vaguer hope -

• [1 UPsizing]
  J. Jill opening, by Chris Reidy, BG, E5.
  Quincy MA-based J. Jill Group, which started out as a catalogue business selling clothing to middle-age women, had the grand opening of its first Boston store yesterday at Prudential Center. ...The strategy is to augment its catalogs and a retail Web site with a chain of stores. J. Jill now operates about 50 stores.
  [Unspecified new jobs.]

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   Pharmacia to spin off Monsanto, pointer digest (to C2), C1.
   ...its 85% stake in Monsanto to shareholders in the 2nd half of next year. The company said the move would allow it to concentrate on its pharmaceuticals business, which is growing faster than [its] agricultural business....

2. Bush signs Internet tax ban, NYT, C4.
   ...Bush renewed a ban on Internet taxes for two years, saying the legislation would "ensure the growth of the Internet is not slowed by additional taxation and that holiday shoppers will not be burdened by new taxes on their online purchases."...
   [Great, now repeal all sales taxes and make them unconstitutional. As Milton Friedman said, you get less of what you tax, more of what you subsidize. If we want more consumer spending, stop taxing it. If there is a shortfall in government revenues to pay for all the jobs programs we have until we get smart enough to implement worksharing a la timesizing, then raise them in the short run by restoring the high graduated tax levels of World War II which were so successful in helping pull us out of the Great Depression - after the feel-good New Deal has contributed so little to that end.]

3. ["good, but..."]
   Chile: Good news on economy, by Clifford Krauss, NYT, A16.
   After months of climbing joblessness, the unemployment rate slipped to 9.7% from 10.1% for the quarter that ended in October, with a particular improvement in the rural provinces.
   [Good news, but...still way high. Chile needs worksharing worse than Japan, and Timesizing is the most gradual and market-oriented version.]
   The figures suggested that some parts of Latin America may be starting to shrug off an economic slowdown that was worsened by 9/11 and comes as good news for the government as congressional elections approach next month. The economy in [the] neighboring Argentine, however, continues to worsen.

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   Buy.com buyout completed, Reuters via NYT, C4.
   [Guess this is a third kind of untakeover besides a spinoff and a merger unravelling.]
   Shareholders of Buy.com approved a buyout by the company's founder, Scott Blum...who...paid 17 cents a share, or $23.6m, to acquire it....

2. A defector from the Taliban speaks out, blowout pointer photo headline (to B3), NYT, B1.
   Mullah Amirjan Selabe, who commanded 30 Taliban soldiers before defecting and fleeing to Pakistan, is reinventing himself. "I want to learn English," he says. [photo caption]
   Taliban defector - From Jihad to thoughts of studying computers, by Norimitsu Onishi, NYT, B3.
   [Here's a man who is traveling through timeframes, from earlier to later stages of human social evolution. What are these timeframes? How many are there and what should we call them? Which one are we in now in the West? (Are we all in the same one?) Which one did this man start from in Afghanistan? Ideas? Discssussion? timesizing@aol.com]
   ..."I want to change my character is Pakistan," Mullah Selabe offered as an explanation..\.. After slipping across the border out of Afghanistan...a month ago..\..he unfurled the Taliban's telltale black turban, replacing it with a gray one with white stripes.... Meeting a woman photographer for the first time, [he] even stretched out his hand to shake hers, a surprising gesture in a region where men and women do not touch in public, much less a Taliban man and a foreign woman. ...The head-to-toe burkas that came to symbolize Taliban rule in the West may have been new in Kabul, but it was the traditional way of dress in the countryside.... Here in Quetta [Pakistan] he has been living in a small room, relying on help from people from his home province..\..
   The son of a mullah, he was educated in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, where his family had fled during the war with the USSR. He studied Pashtun literature at a university, intending to write for an Islamic newspaper....
   [So he has time-traveled before, but in the halfway future of Pakistan he focused on the past. Much of his mind is still in the 7th century when the prophet Mohammed walked the Earth. Same with Osama bin Laden. Is this numbering of centuries the best we can do to describe the kind of time travel these men and probably billions of other humans today experience? This time Mullah Selabe wants to go further into the human future -]
   He is worried about his wife and five children, who remain in his home village. He mentioned again his desire to study English and computers.
   [But there are hurdles -]
   Asked about his thoughts on the United States, he offered, like many people in the world's poor corners, a conflicted view. He hates America, he said, for what he perceives as its bias against Muslims and for its bombing of Afghanistan, which has killed civilians.
   [The truth is, this guy and others like don't have a clue what America is like. How could they? It is far beyond their experience. In a milder way, Japan, particularly Tokyo, particularly the Ginza, is beyond the experience of Americans who have never been there. There is nothing in New York or Paris like the street after street after street...block after block after block...of brilliant night-bursting lights and signs and animations and cartoons. Japan is ahead of America in many ways, Tokyo more futuristic than New York. But Japan's insular speech and writing hide that fact and permit Americans to go on with their noisy chest thumping in increasingly vulnerable naivete. For that matter, Japan's writing itself is pictographic and syllabic, frozen in an age thousands of years in the past evolution of the alphabet of the Americas and Europe. But this only sets off Japan's wide lead in personal technology more vividly, the way its miniture cars and trucks highlight its giant bullet trains, far beyond the Boston-Washington Acela Express in speed, far beyond anything in Britain, but on par with the TGV of France. How can these Japanese people still write like Hammurabi in the 17th-century BC and drive on the left like London coaches in the 17th-century AD, but have multi-purpose toilets with control consoles larger than a 747's, ubiquitous vending machines that will cook meals and wash glasses for you, and completely automated subways? But it's Americans who have set themselves up as The Future with their incessant prating, and so, they draw the attentions, whether peaceful or violent, of the uncomprehending away from Japan and France and even next-door Canada and, most dramatically, Iceland - all of whom have the sense to keep quiet about their advancement.]
   But on the list of countries he would like to visit, he said, America ranks first.
   He would go, he said, "just to gain knowledge, to get an education, to support Islam."
   [In short, to straddle the time frames. Humans in general, and the noisy ones in particular, had better get a handle on these time frames, or there will be plenty more 9/11's.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Bank One set to hire 600, Bloomberg via NYT, C5.
   ...to work on computer systems and World Wide Web development to improve customer service. The workers will be hired in Chicago and Columbus, Ohio, in the next three months....
   [So does that mean technology really does "create more jobs than it destroys"?]
   Bank One, which is based in Chicago, is consolidating several computer systems that handle deposits, loans, wire transfers and customer service operations.
   [Hmm, doesn't sound long-term.]
   The CEO, Jamie Dimon, has said the conversion will cost about $200m, be completed by 2003...
   [So it's not long-term.]
   ...and save the company $200m each year when finished.
   [Hmm, so by consolidating these systems, betcha they're saving a lot of work. And wanna bet they're concentrating those savings by cutting jobs and not hours?]
   The new employees will focus on the computer systems project and improving Web operations....
   [And that means getting more money out of customers without the intervention of a human being.]

2. [UNtakeover #1]
   China: Telephone breakup planned, AP via NYT, W1.
   China plans to break up its dominant phone company, China Telecom, into two smaller concerns as part of an industry restructuring.... Regulators hope that competition will strengthen Chinese carriers as the country joins the WTO on Sat. and prepares to open its closed market. One of the companies will keep the China Telecom name while the other will merge with two smaller carriers created in recent years.

3. [UNtakeover #2]
   Sale of U.S. Vision falters, Bloomberg via NYT, C2.
   GLENDORA, NJ - ...A company that sells prescription glasses and contact lenses through J. C. Penney Co. dept. stores said [yester]day that a group of shareholders had canceled an agreement [12/28/2000 #3] to buy the company for about $24.9m [originally $35m]. Norob [nee Norcross Roberts], an acquisition company formed by a group of shareholders who already own 25%...decided against buying the rest of the stock...because of a decline in US Vision's retail operations and prospects....

4. [glimmer of insight]
   The real war, op ed by Thomas Friedman, NYT, A21.
   If 9/11 was indeed the onset of World War III, we have to understand what this war is about. We're not fighting to eradicate "terrorism."
   [Well, yes we are, but grant him the point for a moment.]
   Terrorism is just a tool. We're fighting to defeat an ideology: religious totalitarianism.
   World War II and the Cold War were fought to defeat secular totalitarianism - Naziism and Communism - and World War III is a battle against religious totalitarianism, a view of the world that my faith must reign supreme and can be affirmed and held passionately only if all others are negated....

1. [1 UPsizing, 350 hirings (but only after 990 firings)]
   11/25 Bank of America plans hirings [and firings], Bloomberg via BG, E5.
   ...350 people in its securities unit by mid-2002 as the 3rd-biggest US bank says it aims to bring in more talented bankers and traders from the ranks of those fired on Wall Street.
   [Sounds great, yes? No. Check the next sentence.]
   The Charlotte-based bank is making room for prospective hires by eliminating 600, or 7.5% [10/25 #4], of the 8,000 jobs in its corporate and investment banking unit.
   [Oh that should make room for them all right. Each of the new hires can have nearly two cubicles apiece. Especially since they cut some 390 jobs earlier in the year. So this is really a net downsizing and the casualties are 990-350= 640 lost jobs. Here's their rationalization -]
   ...During the late 1990s, at the height of the investment-banking boom, Bank of Boston had to settle for lesser talent in some cases, because top bankers at rival firms were earning big paychecks and bonuses and were so busy that few wanted to consider changing jobs, said Russ Gerson, a financial services executive recruiter at A.T. Kearney Inc....
   [Again, training isn't even considered. Again, the embrace of maximum turmoil to cover the complete incompetence of many of today's CEOs as managers. And notice that this turmoil creation is mutually interfering because while you're trying to steal some other CEO's employees-of-the-moment, he's trying to steal yours. The situation resembles the political past when when rulers raided and looted one another for centuries. We've finally almost totally outgrown it on the political level, with a few exceptions, like Israel's persistent and paranoid occupation of Palestinian land on the West Bank and in Gaza. But it's still rampant in the economic area. Rampant, inefficient, wasteful and unsustainable.]
   "Clearly the quality of individual we are going to be able to attract who has been displaced by other firms is going to be higher than when we were trying to pull unwilling players out of these firms," said Bill Hodges, head of debt capital markets for Bank of America.
   [Don't be too sure. These people are other firms' rejects. Seems like they don't have much respect for their late 1990s judgment. Seems they don't have much respect for their current workforce. Generally, people who don't respect others don't respect themselves. Bank of America is therefore an unworthy no-win employer. People with any self-respect should avoid this corporate slough of personal insecurity like the plague. Sort of like guys who go from girl to girl until they get the self-knowledge and confidence in their decisions to actually make a decision. Too bad when it gets carried over into corporate life, especially in the top executive offices.]

2. 11/25 Staying off welfare, editorial, BG, D6.
   Congress must abandon its "get tough" attitude on welfare reform and focus instead on "what works."...
   
   • Content-rich support [huh?] and training programs work....
   • Leaving welfare takes time....
   • This should be an education nation.... [huh?]
   • States should get incentives for reducing poverty, not just cutting welfare rolls....
   • Congress should take advice from employers who say day care is essential for the workers they hire.
   • Spreading food stamps and Medicaid as far as they can go will help those trying to break into - and stay in - the work force....
   [Very lovely, we're sure, but to really "focus on what works," Congress must look over at 35-hour workweek France. See yesterday's article "Growth gaps widen as French leave Germans [in] dust" (11/24 #1). The fact is that Congress should cut the micromanaging grocery-list approach that has been the ineffectual liberal tradition ever since FDR threw together his borrow&spend New Deal to check the shorter-hours movement. Congress should make it a lot easier for everyone to earn a good living by trimming the workweek, engaging market forces to raise wages and activate spending power, and dismantle all the strained and costly New Deal and Great Society etc. programs that will then be unveiled for the relative failures they are and exposed as patently unnecessary. The most gradual, democratic and market-oriented approach to trimming the workweek yet available is Timesizing.]

3. 11/26 Europe plans a constellation of satellites, by Jennifer Lee, NYT, C4.
   Around the world, countries are moblizing to build independent satellite navigation networks, troubled that the Global Positioning System [GPS], the only functioning worldwide network, is run by the United States military and controlled by the government.... The EU says that the US cannot guarantee the reliability and availability of the GPS civilian signal, as US national security needs could potentially trump any other needs..\.. Europe also wants a larger share of the billions of dollars made in maintaining and making satellite navigation equipment. Right now that business is dominated by the US and Japan..\..
   Galileo has the most momentum of the alternative satellite projects.... At an estimated cost of 3.6B euros (about $3.16B) for design and deployment, Galileo would be the most significant infrastructure project by the European Union to date..\.. Galileo arose from Europe's concerns about falling behind the U.S. technologically. \It\ has sparked interest in countries outside Europe [such as] Canada...Russia...China...Israel, India, South Africa and Australia.... Some officials in the US Defense Dept. are concerned about an independent satellite system that could erode their military advantage..\..
   [Ri-i-ight, everyone loves competition except when they own the monopoly.]
   Russia [in addition] has said it will launch three satellites before the end of the year to resuscitate its ailing Global Navigation Satellite System, a military-operated system known as Glonass.... Only six satellites are now running....
   Another technology developed under the American military which has since passed into wide international use is the Internet. But whereas GPS is strictly under American control, the Internet was intentionally designed with no central authority....

• [1 UPsizing]
  Mitsubishi to expand electric power business in U.S., Dow Jones via NYT, C5.
  ...Japan's largest trading company plans to invest $130m to expand its electric power generation businesses to the U.S.... Its American unit, the Diamond Generating Corp., and an independent power provider, Tenaska Inc., [will] build three natural-gas-fired powerplants in Ala., Ok., and Wash...scheduled to come onstream in 2003 \with\ a combined generation capacity of 2,400 megawatts....
  [Unspecified new jobs.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   China: Chip plant opened, by Craig Smith, NYT, C3.
   A computer chip maker, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp...completed construction of its first silicon wafer fabrication plant in Shanghai....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. ["good, but" -]
   Russia's economic rebound, editorial, NYT, A32.
   When Communism collapsed in Moscow a decade ago, the Russian economy was in a stupor.
   [Yeah, thanks to Jeff Sachs' stupid "shock therapy."]
   It is only now springing back to life....
   [Well that's just dandy, but when your percentages have sunk so low, very slight improvements look big.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Thailand: Contract for a gas plant, by Wayne Arnold, NYT, W1.
   Samsung Engineering won a $200m contract to build a gas separation plant in southern Thailand.... The plant is part of a plan to build a pipeline to carry natural gas from fields offshore across Thailand to Malaysia..\..
   [Unspecified new jobs. However -]
   Trans-Thai Malaysia...is pushing ahead with the plant despite local opposition....

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Breakup bucks trend in mining - WMC, in Australia, will split company, by Becky Gaylord, NYT, W1.
   SYDNEY...- The Australian mining company WMC Ltd. rejected [yester]day a $5.8B takeover proposal from Alcoa, a partner since the 1960's...
   [Good WMC, good WMC.]
   ...calling the offer inadequate.
   [Whatever.]
   WMC instead plans to split the company into two, spinning off its 40% stake in an alumina venture with Alcoa.
   [Doubly good, WMC!]
   The venture, Alcoa World Alumina & Chemicals, produces more than a quarter of the world's alumina, which is used to make aluminum.
   [What a coincidence - duh.]
   WMC's nickel, uranium, copper and fertilizer operations will be listed as another company.
   Ian Burgess, the chairman of WMC, said, "We believe the stock market will value the two companies more highly than if WMC continued with its current structure."... [Hell with the stock market. The job market will value two companies more highly than one. And the job market rests on the consumer base while the stock market only rests on the job market. Stocks symbolize the average value of worktime units at a given company, just as currency symbolizes the average value of worktime units in a given economy.]

3. Jobless claims fall; consumer index up - Downturn may be near end, Bloomberg via BG, B2.
   [but this is the pre-holiday shopping season and jobless claims have been so far up and consumer index down, it don't take much...]

4. Ebola vaccine on fast track - 9/11 attacks accelerated drive toward human testing, by Liz Kowalczyk, BG, B1.

5. Viewing New England region behind myths, by David Sharp, BG, C5.
   • ..."To foreigners, 'Yankee' refers to all Americans," \said\ Jacob Conforti, a history professor at the University of Southern Maine....
   • "To Southerners, 'Yankee' applies to Northerners.
   • To Northerners, 'Yankee' applies to New Englanders.
   • To New Englanders, 'Yankee' applies to people in a small town in Maine who eat pie for breakfast."
     
   [Glad we got that straightened out!]

6. Four U.S. companies sign the first trade deals with Cuba - Food sales could be an important crack in the embargo, Reuters via NYT, A8.
   ...Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Riceland Foods, and ConAgra....

7. Economic scene - In a model for lending in developing nations, a Bangladesh bank [Grameen Bank] relies on peer pressure for collateral - A new system takes advantage of factors that traditionally helped local moneylenders, by Hal Varian, NYT, C2.

8. English pot smokers' pub ['Dutch Experience' in Stockport] may prove a model - A cannabis cafe, popular with neighbors, has no barroom brawls, by Sarah Lyall, NYT, A3.

• Ruling tightens air pollution standards for power plants, by Richard Perez-Pena, NYT, A18.
  ALBANY...- [NY] state's highest court [two days ago] upheld a July ruling that the Pataki administration had acted illegally in racing to install so-called mini-power plants around New York City without conducting environmental reviews.
  The ruling means the plants must undergo time-consuming testing or risk being shut down. More importantly, it sided with environmentalists who demanded the plants meet a much stronger standard for particulate pollution than one enforced by the state....

1. [1 UPsizing - unspecified new jobs]
   Miscellany, by Suzanne Kapner, NYT, C8.
   Leo Burnett Worldwide, Chicago, part of the Bcom3 Group, is forming a venture with four agency executives in Hamburg, Germany, to open an agency there named Red Rabbit Leo Burnett....
   [Not 'Rotes Kaninchen Leo Burnett'?! Quick, summon l'Akademie Allemande and the language police!]

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   British wireless operation strikes out on its own, by Suzanne Kapner, NYT, C1.
   LONDON - ...[Yester]day's spinoff [was] mmO2. British Telecommunications' wireless unit....
   [Ain't that name jess tooo clever? Where's the vomitorium?]

3. [glimmer of intelligence - yanking the $3½B/yr leash on America's Mideast pit bull -]
   Powell takes firm Mideast [meaning Israel] stance - Says settlements, violence [& occupation!] must end, by Anthony Shadid, Boston Globe, front page.
   WASHINGTON - Sec. of State Colin L. Powell delivered the Bush administration's most comprehensive vision of an Israeli-Palestinian peace yesterday, demanding that Israel stop building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and end its occupation through negotiations, and insisting that Palestinians make a "100% effort" to end terrorism and violence....
   [How about giving the Palestinians some more civilized alternatives, like land and freedom? Right now they're virtually surrounded by a heavily armed, heavily US-subsidized paranoid-aggressive racist state that wants only to grab more Lebensraum. Yet current political correctness allows them to compare the weak Palestinians to bin Laden and doesn't allow anybody to compare them to the German push for more "living space" (Lebensraum) prior to World War 2. But truly, Sharon is gradually turning Israel into Judaism's worse WW2 enemy. Not much real similarity to real Judaism in that! Here's what showed up in The Economist of London on this -]
   Pull back the tanks, says Bush to Sharon, 10/27/2001 Economist, 44.
   [This should say "Yank the tanks, fielded by cranks and paid for by us Yanks, says Bush to Sharon."]
   JERUSALEM - Israel's assault on Palestinian cities
   ...An Israeli newspaper reported that privately Mr Bush, apprised of civilian casualties in the West Bank, had suggested that the Israelis could "go to hell"..\..
   Israel [has been making] armored incursions into six Palestinian towns..\.. The American State Dept...told Israel to end [them] "immediately." But this, Israel's foreign minister explained, was meant "not in the chronological sense but rather in the intentional sense"..\.. "Immediately, in English, doesn't mean at once," Shimon Peres explained in Hebrew to Israeli journalists in Washington on Oct. 23rd. "It means as soon as possible."...
   Barely had Mr Peres concluded his lesson in creative semantics than he was called to an unscheduled meeting with...George Bush, who told him in semantically unequivocal terms that the seizure of these cities was exactly what America does not need at this stage in the Afghan war.
   [Does America ever need it?]
   Mr Bush tempered his anger with the grudging recognition that Israel needs a face-saving interval between reprimand and response. Even so, barring some new dramatic event, Israeli forces are expected to be out of most of the Palestinian towns by the weekend.... Israeli diplomats, instructed to draw an analogy between Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority and the Taliban, made little headway against the White House's stern dismissal of that comparison....
   [And speaking of bogus analogies, Sharon's attempt to equate criticism of himself with criticism of Judaism has no more validity than bin Laden's attempt to equate opposition to himself with opposition to Islam. "Ariel" Sharon, in fact, is acting more like Caliban than his namesake sprite in Shakespeare's The Tempest. And as Jewish-mothered colleague Kate has just pointed out, Caliban rhymes with Taliban. Furthermore, Sharon's attempt to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism might have a little more validity if he himself wasn't so "anti" his Semitic neighbors, the Palestinians, fifty thousand of whom have been homeless for the last fifty years. The kid gloves are gradually coming off with Israel. Sharon and his policies are a disgrace and an embarrassment to Judaism and the Hebrew Bible. Why do we care? We'd care a lot less if $3½ billion of our U.S. tax dollars, the biggest chunk of our euphemistically dubbed "foreign aid" budget, weren't handed out to Sharon every year. That SOB is implicating us in his pitbull behavior. Quit taking our money, Caliban Sharon, and you can desecrate your Scriptures and commit national suicide any way you want. You're making our experimental attempt at generous restitution for the Holocaust look more and more like a big botch every day.]

• U.S. now faces big task to fill air-safety jobs, by Robert Pear, NYT, front page.
  WASHINGTON...- Federal officials began struggling today with the immense challenge of hiring and training 28,000 new federal employees to screen passengers and baggage at all airports within 12 months. The new federal work force is required under an aviation security bill passed by Congress today, by voice vote in the Senate and then by a vote of 410 to 9 in the House. All the no votes were cast by Republicans. ...Bush plans to sign the measure on Monday....
  [Doncha just LOVE the contradictions of history, like when Republicans preside over a period of bigger government?! This whole scene is starting to look like the makework of the computer virus industry. Keep writing new viruses so everybody will keep having to buy new virus checkers. In this light, virus writing and air terrorism look like a new kind of Luddism. It's the kind of thing that's going to continue and worsen until we start sharing the vanishing work and making life easier for people, instead of cutting jobs and making life harder. In this light, wars are simply the ultimate makework campaigns. 'And we call ourselves an "intelligent" species!']
  Federal officials said they could not immediately think of any exact precedents for the hiring of so many full-time workers by the government in such a short time....
  [The idea of making this an 8-hour-a-day proposition is ridiculous, in the light of something that came up on our bankruptcy page two days ago (11/15/2001) - "Even with the higher pay that Congress is now considering, the industry will need to attract, train and hold onto people who can effectively perform the vital, if monotonous, task of looking for weapons that are almost never there." We would argue that no one can, day in and day out, "effectively perform the vital, if monotonous, task of looking for weapons that are almost never there" for 8 hours a day. Four might be possible. If we're serious about the major inefficiency of Israeli-level airport security, then we should be thinking about ponying up pay that you can live on in return for four-hour days at most, even if it means a six- or even seven-day, 24-28 hour workweek. Colleague Kate 'Brilliantibus' Jurow, training designer extraordinaire, has a passel of other ideas to make this work. E.g. They should plant a certain number of things for the screeners to find, just to keep them interested and alert. They should know that every hour or so there's going to be something to find, and if they find it they get a little prize or something. They should be rotated every so often onto actually designing these tests/incentives/screenerplums for themselves - this could help them get into the mind of the terrorist in terms of dreaming up new stuff the terrorist could actually use - but they should be sworn to secrecy so terrorists never get the benefit of their imaginations. Of course, the problem with this whole approach is that it gets humans focused, as usual, much more on designing evil rather than good. The whole bin Laden phenomenon is just a result of this kind of perverted focus. Lordy, if put a tiny fraction of the imagination and design smarts that we lavish on evil and trivia into solving our long-term old-chestnut human problems like unemployment and poverty etc., we'd all be living in heaven by now instead of most of us exploring further and deeper layers of Dante's Inferno and Bosch's Garden of Earthy Disgusts. There's a lot more to be designed beyond Timesizing, and even a lot of details within T.S. itself.]

• [1 UPsizing, totaling unspecified new jobs]
  SpeechWorks unit, by Peter Howe, BG, D5.
  SpeechWorks International Inc., a Boston-based company that provides speech recognition systems for business...opened a Tokyo-based subsidiary and launched Japanese-language products. SpeechWorks...sees a large opportunity among Japan's 30m Web-enabled wireless phone subscribers for systems allowing people to conduct transactions and get information by spoken requests and to hear e-mail and Web content voiced by speech synthesizers.
  [Unspecified new jobs.]

• CEO Wetherell slashes pay to $1 due to CMGI woes, by Jeffrey Krasner, BG, D1.
  David S. Wetherell, the leader of fallen Internet star CMGI Inc. of Andover MA, will voluntarily cut his salary to a mere $1 for 2002 in response to the company's "current state of unprofitability," according to the company's proxy statement filed yesterday with the SEC....

• Despite woes, Indonesia economy grew in 3rd quarter [3.5%], by Wayne Arnold, NYT, W1.
  ...demonstrating what the World Bank calls the country's ability to muddle through the global slowdown and its own political confusion....

1. Saturn plant will be hiring 200 temporary workers, AP via NYT, C4.
   ...at its assembly plant near Nashville as it increases production this week on its new sport utility vehicle, the Vue....
   ["Temporary workers"? - 1-2-3 organized cheer (whoopeedoo). And yet another huge gas-guzzling, parkingspace-hogging SUV? Aaarrrgh. At any rate, 200 new jobs, temporarily.]

2. Toys 'R' Us will open huge store in Times Sq., by Terry Pristin, NYT, A26.
   ...what it calls the largest toy store in the world..\..
   [But if it's like all the other ToysRUs's and KB Toys etc. - big store, no sales help. And then there's this consideration -]
   With the economic downturn, the decline in tourism and forecasts of a dismal holiday season for retailers, it may be a risky moment to open a $35 million store, especially in a neighborhood that depends on out-of-towners [who aren't real keen on flying/driving into downtown Manhattan right now -ed.] for much of its foot traffic....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

• Technologically enabled - Assistive products allow disabled to enter, remain in workforce, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, G1.
  [photo captions: Illirjan Qirici, who works for Malden Access TV, uses a range of equipment to operate a computer, including a head mouse which controls the cursor.... A computer sensor tracks the stick-on dot on his forehead.]
  ...Other assistive products on the market include...a scanner that "reads" books and reports and a "reading" pen that defines words out loud. Such assistive products have grown from a handful 30 years ago to at least 20,000 today, say specialists. ...They serve...some of the 53m people with disabilities in the nation...around 70% of [whom] are unemployed, according to Louis Harris and Assocs. in NYC. Many who are employed hold entry-level jobs but that too seems to be changing, say specialists, who credit new technology with helping to open a wider variety of jobs for the disabled.
  "Expectations have changed," said Elmer Bartels, commissioner of the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission. "When I broke my neck in 1960, it was not expected that I would go to work and have a life. Quadriplegics did not do that.... Now [however] many more people...are using assistive technology that can be as simple as a levered light switch that is manipulated with an elbow, to a talking computer"..\..
  [Bravo!]
  William Kiernan [is] director of the Institute for Community Inclusion, a nonprofit in Brookline MA that helps people with disabilities enter the workforce.... Mass. Rehab. Commission...pays for technology that can help a person with disabilities remain in the workplace or reenter it....617-727-2183.
  [Compare next Sat.'s article "Converted vans give disabled road access - Electronic features, other modifications let many drive again," by Craig Fitzgerald, Boston Globe, D1.]

• [1 UNtakeover]
  Adelphia Communications to spin off unit and cut debt, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
  ...A heavily indebted cable TV operator [will] sell assets and securities and spin off a telephone business as it report[s] a wider Q3 loss.... Adelphia, based in Coudersport, Pa...will pare debt by...$1.7B by spinning off its 79% stake in the business-phone provider, Adelphia Business Solutions Inc.

1. 2 UPsizings -
   1. Etc...IPG Photonics Corp., Globe staff & wire services, BG, C5.
      ...which makes optical communications components, opened a 70,000-sq-ft world HQ and manufacturing facility in Oxford MA....
      [Unspecified new jobs.]
   2. Wal-Mart says it plans to open five stores in Beijing, Reuters via NYT, C4.
      ...over the next few years.... Wal-Mart China signed a rental contract on Wed. for its first store, a Sam's Club in Shijingshan, a western suburb of Beijing.... The cost of all five would be $25m..... Wal-Mart...entered China five years ago [and now] operates 12 supercenters and 3 Sam's Clubs in China.... Most of the stores are in the southern part of the country.
      [Quick, somebody warn the Chinese that their small business is in the process of being choked to death by mass marketing kudzu. Unspecified new jobs for robot-clerks.]

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   National Service approves spinoff of two of its units, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...North America's leading maker of light fixtures said yesterday that its board had approved a spinoff of the company's...two largest units, \its\ lighting equipment [Lithonia Lighting] and chemicals [NSI Chemicals] units into a separately traded business. The new company is temporarily called L&C Spinco.... The post-spinoff National Service will consist of the textile rental and envelope units.
   ["North America's leading maker of light fixtures" no more. But then, "National Service" was a pretty misleading name for such a company - still is for the new incarnation. And as for the spinoff, what in the world do light fixtures and chemicals have in common?]

3. Federal judge stops effort to overturn suicide law, by Sam Verhovek, NYT, A14.
   ...The judge, Robert E. Jones of Federal District Court, granted a temporary restraining order, sought by the Oregon attorney general, Hardy Myers, and several terminally ill people, as well as organizations in favor of the law....
   [Judge Jones is a true champion of freedom. And later, Judge Jones extended the restraining order, according to "Stay extended against U.S. on Oregon's suicide law," 11/21/2001 NYT, A12.]

4. Swift proposes tax-free shopping days Dec. 1-2 - Plan aims to give retail sector a boost, by Chris Reidy, BG, C1.
   With many retailers reporting lackluster sales for October, acting Gov. Jane Swift [of Massachusetts] yesterday proposed a two-day moratorium on collecting the state's 5% sales tax as a way to stimulate holiday shopping....
   [Why not repeal it altogether?! Here we are in a recession and everyone's saying "buy, please buy." But as Milton Friedman says, you get less of whatever you tax and here we are taxing buying with ridiculous nickel-and-dime sales taxes. If we want more circulation and less concentration of money, if we truly want "efficiency", we should be taxing the rich who have way more than they can ever spend anyway, and quit taxing the ordinary employee and the poor, who hoard little or none of what they get. However, the best way to centrifuge spending power is to create, by workweek reduction, a general shortage of manhours so that market forces raise wages and benefits, and a rising tide would life all ships, including the rich, whose current excess rests on an ever-shakier foundation of weakened circulation. Some moderation in the astronomical concentration of income of the last 20-30 years is happening anyway in this recession, as shown in the next two stories - but not enough to turn this downturn around.]

5. Executives pay, by Diane Lewis, BG, C2.
   The Conference Board reports that more than 40% of 77 major companies polled will reduce executive pay raises next year because of the economic downturn. Top brass will get median hikes of 4%, down from 4.5% this year. Salaried workers are expected to again receive a 4% increase. Hourly workers can expect 3.9%, down from 4%.
   [Our clueless CEOs are wondering where their markets have gone. From this little news item, it's clear their markets have gotten vacuumed into their own few BULGING pockets. Four hundred new billionaires in the world over the last few years? And for each and every one of them, how many hundreds or thousands of others slipped below our outdatedly low poverty line?]

6. Washington [State]: More aid for welfare families, by Matthew Preusch, NYT, A21.
   Gov. Gary Locke announced extensions of the state's welfare-to-work program for the 3,200 families who will reach the five-year limit for assistance in August....
   [You may think statewide or nationwide workweek reduction sounds ambitious, but look at the amount of money and effort we are putting into these tiny ineffectual programs. A measly 3200 families affected by this action. We just don't think BIG enough in centrifuging the national income until world war has our backs against the wall. Then at last we shift the taxes from the poor to the rich and, wondrous to relate, the economy booms (the famous wartime boom effect). How much easier, how much less wasteful to accomplish the same withdrawal of excess manhours from the job market by workweek reduction rather than the huge sacrifice of human lives that war entails. Employment-sharing workweek-reduction programs substitute not only for downsizing but also for war casualties. Programs like Timesizing. We should not have touched our national welfare system before having a national worksharing program in place - because the jobs for workfare are just not there.]
   Federal law allows for "hardship extensions" for up to 20% of state welfare caseloads.
   [More and more government micromanagement. When will we ever learn?]
   Under the new rules, benefits equal to 60% of a family's discontinued grant will continue for the children through a trustee.
   [They don't even have the personnel to handle the existing caseloads and now they're talking about "trustees"?!]
   Assistance will also be extended to those who are unable to work and those who, despite following state guidelines for moving off public assistance, have been unable to find work.
   [Let's quit pantywaisting around and make it A LOT easier to earn a living in this country, and an honest living at that. Let's have a nationwide referendum to determine where we want our unemployment, disability and prison levels to be, and then thaw thatfrozen national workweek of ours and push it down till we get them there, even just an hour a year, to where it should be for our level of worksaving technology. Let's tie in training to the incidence of overtime and get much closer to the "continuous training" to which we're always paying lip service. Let's get going on timesizing, not downsizing.]

1. Store opening, by Chris Reidy, BG, C12.
   Quincy-based Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. plans to open today a store in Foxborough MA that it claims is [30%] more energy efficient.... The Foxborough store is projected to reduce annual CO₂ emissions by 987 tons and consume 374 fewer tons of coal..\..thanks to skylights, special glazing and insulation, and recycled glass tiles....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. Motorola to increase operations in China, Reuters via NYT, C4.
   ...invest[ing] $6.6B...over the next 5 years and doubl[ing] its production in that country, one of the world's few remaining high-growth telecommunications markets. ...Tripling its annual investment in China, where production is cheaper, [sh]ould help Motorola cut costs at a time when a global slump in sales of telecom equipment threatens to drag the company into its first full-year operating loss in at least 45 years....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

1. 11/04   More and more, CEOs face temporary employment, by D.C. Denison, Boston Globe, E1.
   [Good... that can only serve to penetrate the thick wall of insulation around our business leaders. Generally, they have sooo much income and wealth they can yank to themselves all the important decision-making power in the nation and at the same time, totally insulate themselves from any negative consequences of any of their decisions. Result? A system with no feedback, no cybernetics, no sustainability.]
   The two prominent CEOs who lost their jobs last week...
   1. Jacques Nasser worked for a family-controlled industrial giant, Ford Motor Co...for only...three [years]..\..
   2. James Goodwin was the head of an employee-owned airline company, United Airlines...for only 2½ years.
   ...[They] were not the only CEOs to find themselves suddenly on the outside last month. In October, 80 CEOs left their jobs, a 31% increase over September, when 61 executives vacated their offices, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement firm that tracks CEO departures. The average tenure among the chief executives who left in October was 4.2 years, down from the 5½-year average for chief executives who left in September.
   The firm does not collect information on the reasons for the departures.
   [As if anyone could get the straight story out of this huddle of happytalkers.]
   But whatever the cause, the data make it clear that the job of CEO is increasingly a short-term position.
   [What a surprise - not. They've been guiding their companies on the basis of increasingly short-term considerations, e.g., stock price.]
   "CEO turnover has been accelerating for the last 10 years," said John T. Challenger....

2. 11/05   Bay State [Massachusetts] won't join accord on Microsoft, by Peter Howe, BG, front page.
   [Good. Why? David Warsh gives a pretty good summary tomorrow in "Fighting back," 11/06/2001 BG, D1, where he says "of course we should..\..be worried...given its record..\..of abusing its power to clobber Netscape and Java...and emboldened now by what is essentially a win, Microsoft is likely to continue to attempt to stifle innovation." Warsh then goes on to qualify his pessimism by a rather pollyanna quote from William Petty, the real father of economics, "The world refuses to be governed badly." Easy for him to say after the English people had just risen up and decapitated their bad king (Charles I), but it took the French another 150 years to do the same (Louis XVI). Most nations have never done it and even for some that have, it didn't work out too well (Northern Haiti).]
   Atty. Gen. Thomas Reilly said yesterday that Massachusetts will refuse to sign on to the government's proposed settlement of the Microsoft Corp. antitrust suit, calling it an ineffectual deal that will let Microsoft "continue to crush all its competition." Reilly and attorneys general from 17 other states that sued Microsoft have until tomorrow to decide....
   If they do not join, the 3½-year-old federal-state lawsuit against Microsoft could extend for months or years to come, potentially exposing the company to financial penalties or substantially tougher restrictions on its treatment of rival software providers.
   [Fine. How about exposing it to breakup. In the immortal words of The Original father-in-law, George Dyer of Toronto, "When in doubt, revert to original plan."]

1. White Mountains Insurance Group to start new company, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...An insurer run by the former GEICO CEO, John Byrne, is raising $1B to start a new insurer based in Bermuda amid industrywide price increases. The new venture [is] to focus on providing property-catastrophe coverage to other insurers.... The move will bring to about $7.5B the amount of new capital raised in the insurance industry to take advantage of rising rates after insurers were hit with as much as $70B of losses from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. Tiffany to open first store in Beijing, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...The luxury-jewelry retailer [will] open its first store in Beijing to cater to a growing number of affluent customers in China. The store in the lobby of Beijing's Palace Hotel is scheduled to open in December....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

1. Air Force set to run recruiting campaign, by Patricia Lauro, NYT, C5.
   ...will begin...on Sunday the first phase of a $50m...campaign aimed at 16-24 years old.
   [Great, if we don't yet have Timesizing for full employment and high earnings and markets the intelligent way, and we haven't yet fanned the anti-terrorist 'war' or our $4B subsidies for Israel's warseeking Sharon into our usual depression-solving world war, we can at least lure some more of our jobless youth into the military.]
   The campaign, the first from the new Air Force agency, GSD&M in Austin, Tex...
   [Yeah, it would have to be in Texas...]
   carries the theme "cross into the blue" [or the blues?], for both the uniform color and the sky [cle-ver, cle-ver]. The color symbolizes what is described in the initial television commercials as a technologically advanced place where "everything is different and important - especially you."
   [Advanced technology doesn't equate to importance, any more than does busyness.]
   "We show this whole other world, a place where all this applied technology is found, and we invite them in," said Daniel Russ, senior VP and group creative director at GSD&M, owned by the Omnicom Group....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

2. Tyco financing, Bloomberg via BG, E5.
   Tyco International Ltd.'s Tyco Capital unit provided $800m in financing for
   three power plants being built by electricity producer Calpine Corp....
   [Unspecified new jobs. Of course, we're not at all sure this doesn't constitute a double count of the new powerplant Calpine is building near Beloit, Wisc. mentioned on 2/14, or the one in Haywood County, Tenn. (7/20/2000), or the one in Decatur, Ala. (6/28/2000), or the one in northern California (8/06/1999 #2).]

3. Financing in place for Brookline MA hotel - 8-storey inn will rise on parking lot, by Michael Rosenwald, BG, E3.
   ...a $30m Marriott Courtyard in Brookline's Coolidge Corner.... Work is expected to begin next week on a 188-room...hotel in a town-owned parking lot at Webster and Beacon Streets....
   [Unspecified new jobs.]

4. [Plus a glimmer of intelligence -]
   The 'Selfishness' bill, letter to editor by Peter Cunningham of NYC, NYT, A20.
   ...Outside my kitchen window, I witnessed foreign fanatics attacking my country; my impulse is to wave the flag and back an intelligent military response. But judging from recent actions by our own House of Representatives, I question what it means to be all in this together if some of us are profiteering while the rest of us strive to do our best in whatever way we can.
   We are dishonored by the House Republican "stimulus" bill, a brazenly selfish act in a time of war. Whom are these people representing?
   [Especially when it involves Republicans acting like Democrats in terms of big government spending, instead of like Republicans from 1863 to 1932 in terms of pushing down the workweek, spreading the technology-eroding human employment, centrifuging the funneling income, and activating starved consumer markets.]

• [1 UNtakeover]
  Athena IPO, Bloomberg via BG, C9.
  Elan Corp., Ireland's largest drugmaker, filed to spin off its neurological diagnostic testing unit in an IPO to raise as much as $119.7m.
  [What timing! They better cross their fingers & kiss the Blarney Stone.]
  Elan is selling an undiclosed stake in the Worcester-based Athena Diagnostics Inc. that it acquired in 1996.