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Miscellaneous Good News, December 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

12/27/2003   glimmers of hope from WSJ or NYT -

12/26/2003   glimmers of hope from WSJ or NYT -
  1. [thought you'd never see the Wall Street Journal praise regulation? -]
    Ahead of the tape...Three cheers, by Gregory Zuckerman, WSJ, C1.
    Let's hear it for the SEC! Sure, it has taken guff for being asleep while mutual-fund shenanigans were going on.... But Tuesday's deal with Jean-Marie Messier was a winner. After leaving Vivendi on the ropes, Mr. Messier spent the last 1½ years fighting the company for $25m of severance, clogging four courts in two countries and battalions of lawyers.
    [Hey, maybe we should put this under makework too!]
    In one swoop, the SEC made Mr. Messier give up his big claim, and pay a $1m fine to boot. The fine, along with $50m to be paid by Vivendi, will go to shareholders, another smart move. Mr. Messier can't be an officer or director at a public company for 10 years. That can't be helpful as he tries to build a NY investment bank - just what Wall Street needs.

  2. A conspiracy so vast, book review of George Soros' "The Bubble of American Supremacy," by Byron York, WSJ, W3.
    [Both Soros and Bob Reich (WSJ, A10 today) are unfocused in their prescriptions to what ails the American economy, but Soros is ahead of Reich in that he at least has a vague goal to focus his prescription, namely fostering "open societies." It'll take a while for these guys to "get" the worksharing imperative. There are three big hurdles:
    1. It's operating on your retinas to try to change your socio-economy, ie: upstream in your income flow, from within.
    2. It's against generations of "work is better than leisure" and "work hard to get ahead" i.e., long hours, and "I'm busier than you, therefore I'm more important than you,: i.e., the Puritan work ethic and the Catholic "dignity of labor."
    3. It's manipulating the time dimension which most people would just as soon leave as a stable and ignorable feature of the woodwork or background of life.]
12/25/2003   glimmers of hope from WSJ or NYT - 12/24/2003   glimmers of hope from WSJ or NYT - 12/19/2003   glimmers of hope from WSJ or NYT -
  1. Wind energy planned in Britain, pointer (to A6), NYT, C1.
    Energy companies, including Royal Dutch/Shell, plan to erect more than 1,000 turbines off the coast of Britain in a $12.4B project to build the largest source of wind energy [in the world? - not explicit].
    [Target -]
    British plan major 'wind farm' to generate power along coasts, by Heather Timmons, NYT, A6.
    ...Britain has pledged that 10% of its energy will come from renewable resources by 2010.
    [This is a lot smarter than France's dependence on nuclear powerplants.]
    ...The project is vast. \It\ involves 15 sites.... Groups of hundreds of turbines will be installed - ..\..The wind farms...would generate as much as 7 gigawatts of electricity - enough to supply 4 million households, or...meet 7% of Britain's energy needs.... The project...is expected to start generating electricity in 2007.
    [Note that to gain traction, this concept still took more than a generation (33 years) after U.S. Earth Day and it's not happening in the U.S., where e.g. Nantucketers are still fighting a private windfarm proposal. This is a pattern - innovative ideas are publicized in America but dumbed-down America is not the first to implement them. Here's hoping the pattern happens soon with Timesizing.]
    ..\..The Crown Estate, which controls British public lands, including its seabeds, asked companies to submit bids for coastal wind farms in July. are among companies that won leasing rights of up to 50 years for the project. ...Said Marcus Rand, CEO of British Wind Energy Assoc., "This puts the U.K. in the fast lane to becoming a world leader in offshore power generation."
    [and windpower generation, offshore or on, and renewable energy sourcing, wind, geothermal or anything else. Wayta go Britain! Too bad you're not as smart at giving Blair a vote of non-confidence when he gets suckered into Bush's distracting and unprovoked invasion of a terrorism-irrelevant third-rate dictatorship, or at implementing automatic unemployment-offsetting workweek fluctuation to maximize your domestic consumer base.]
    ...The turbines will be visible from the shore only on very clear days, the companies said, so that public outcry, at least about the view, is expected to be minimal.
    [Nantucketers and U.S. wind firms take notice.]
    The project's biggest obstacle may come in the form of a small waterfowl related to the American loon, the red-throated diver, which feeds in and around some of the sites....
    [So eliminate those sites +/- substitute others - it's a big coastline.]

  2. The other front: America's economy, letter to editor...by Hoover Institution's research fellow David R. Henderson of Pacific Grove CA, NYT, A34.
    Bob Herbert ("Another battle for Bush - American workers, in need of some allies," Dec.15) sees the current $15 minimum wage as "pathetic." He's right, but for the wrong reason.
    The minimum wage is pathetic, not because it's too low, but because it makes unemployable our least productive and most vulnerable workers. Those whose productivity falls short of the minimum wage are not able to get or keep jobs. Raising the minimum wage would further hurt their chance for jobs.
    [This is true. The concept of a minimum-wage control violates two fundamental principles of economic design -
    1. It's a per-job control instead of a per-person control such as a minimum-income (from all sources) per-person control, and per-job regulation is the province of the free market because job requirements are impossibly varied in size and scope, while persons' requirements are quite confined within a narrow range by comparison.
    2. It attempts to balance a money dimension (of which there are three: income, wealth, and credit PER PERSON) without first balancing the prerequisite foundational time dimension (namely, worktime per person) and therefore it oozes into dependency-creation aka charity. It is not optional to balance worktime per person (ie: workweek regulation) - it is a mandatory "given" that is inherent in the logic aka semantics of the variables involved.]
    In fact, the minimum wage should be abolished.
    [Also true, but like so many current hare-brained and micromanaging regulations, it should not be abolished before the proper general-level, central, balancing, single regulation is in place and operational, namely, unemployment-offsetting workweek fluctuation combined with overtime-to-training&hiring conversion. Only when the Holy Grail of present-day economic designers is in place, the Single All-Sufficient Control, is it safe to dismantle all the silly, stifling, burgeoning detailed regulations that have sprung up since we dropped the central, efficient one due to world war in 1941, and eternally froze the American workweek at the historically accidental and arbitrary 1940 level, regardless of wave after wave of subsequent work-saving technology, which we therefore doomed ourselves to "enjoying" as cumulating, economically anxious un(der)employment instead of cumulating, financially secure free time.]
    The NY Times put it well in an excellent 1987 editorial, "The right minimum wage: $0.00." You stated, "Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working people out of the job market."
    [This is certainly true in the age of short-sighted, US-consumer-market-gutting outsourcing.]
    That was true then, and it's true now. Those who want to help the poor should concentrate on eliminating barriers that prevent them from getting jobs, rather than erecting new ones.
    [Also true, and way out in front among these barriers is the downward inflexibility of the American workweek, which came down from the 80-84 hour level between 1776 and 1940 as agriculture and half the manufacturing sector were mechanized, but has not come down one minute in the last 63 years. And as predicted by Dahlberg in 1932, the consequent labor-disempowering imbalance has resulted in a regressive re-lengthening of the actual "full time" workweek, with associated shrinkage of the job market and huge tangential inefficiencies in terms of welfare, disability, homelessness, crime, forced early retirement, forced delated retirement, forced self "employment," and forced part-time. We invite David Henderson and the Hoover Institution to stop externalizing (dba ignoring) all these "little" problems that their simple-minded "deregulate everything" tack has worsened. But we thank David for bringing up the issue in a calm and commentable way.]

  3. Washington wire...- Bush fails to lift Republicans' image heading into 2004, by John Harwood, WSJ, A4.
    [So there's a chance we'll be able to lose this nest of neo-con vipers in the center of power.]
    In the WSJ/NBC poll, Bush's adversaries retain big edges on Bush's taxcuts [for the rich] haven't widened his party's tax advantage....
    Republicans' 35% national defense edge is smaller than pre-9/11.
    [Compare next column -]
    Washington wire - ...Mixed message, by John Harwood, WSJ, A4.
    Americans show rising optimism about the economy but not Bush's handling of it.

  4. [one piece of (superficial) good news -]
    U.S. jobless claims fell in latest week [from 375k to 353k], WSJ, A2.
    [but then, there are fewer and fewer people eligible.]

12/18/2003   glimmers of hope from WSJ or NYT -
  1. [1 UPsizing]
    Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. - Plant will be built in China along with Kenda Rubber, Dow Jones via WSJ, B6.
    ...to produce radial passenger and light-truck tires...in Jiangsu Province...owned jointly...construction expected to begin in mid-2004...tires available in late 2005....
    [Unspecified new low-wage jobs.]

  2. [an'a bunch of population goodnews -]
    Average age hits 25.1 for first-time moms, AP via WSJ, D5.
    ...The rise reflects a drop in teen births and an increase in the number of women who are putting off motherhood until their 30s and 40s. The age of first-time American moms has risen steadily during the past three decades
    [logical during a mounting labor surplus and wage stagnation]
    from an average of 21.4 in 1970. The latest figure, for 2002, was released by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
    Women contemplating motherhood "are more likely to wait," said CDC statistician Joyce Martin [any relation to new Canadian PM, Paul Martin?]. "It's good overall for infant health, because birth outcomes for teen moms are problematic."
    The teen birthrate has dropped 30% in the past decade to a historic low of 43 births per 1,000 women in 2002.... The government attributed the drop in the teen birthrate to health campaigns by public and private agencies that discourage teen pregnancies and promote abstinence.
    [Non-Bushy-PC to mention condoms or pills.]

  3. In Bolivia, smaller families spur higher hopes - 'They see themselves as the least developed country in Latin America, and they wanted to rise above that.'  Dr. Amy Pollack, president of Engender Health., by Raja Mishra, Boston Globe, front page & A30, flagged by colleague Kate.
    EL ALTO, Bolivia - Patients flowed steadily into the gleaming health clinic in this slum on the mountainous fringe of the Bolivian capital [which one - Sucre or La Paz? Bolivia is the country with two capitals.]....
    1. Yolanda Sahire...a part-time secretary, had come for her regular birth control injection. With three children, she has decided her wages will support no more.
    2. Juan Apaza...spoke proudly of his recent vasectomy. He has two sons and earns a modest salary as a tailor. He'd heard about the clinic from a radio ad. "We decided not to have any more children because I don't have regular work," he said.
    3. And then came Beatriz Silva...who sells cheap kitchenware in a nearby market. She has two children - and...just missed her period. "I have no money to support children," she tells a doctor.
    Three people. Three stories. All part of a larger tale transforming the developing world.
    [Thank God. And a serious problem for the neaderthal economists whose ultimate driver of growth is population expansion. Of course, if they'd solve the maldistribution of money.... - which we do on the basis of the same 5 phases as the Timesizing full-employment program after we've established balanced employment distribution.]
    Throughout the year, the Boston Globe has been chronicling the millions of lives lost every year in poorer nations - the needless victims of preventable diseases. Many outside the developing world, confronted with this staggering toll, ask: Why won't the poor help themselves by having fewer children?
    In Bolivia and many other countries, they are. Far fewer.
    [Hallelu Yah!]
    In a largely unheralded trend, birthrates in developing countries around the world have declined steadily[?] over the last several decades, thanks to economic growth, urbanization, medical improvements, and expanding educational opportunities.
    Aggressive and imaginative population control programs have been critical to changing local lifestyles. As a result, the world's population is growing far more slowly than it would have, had the birthrates of the 1950s not been curtailed. In Bolivia, for example, mothers in 1970 had an average of 6.5 children. Last year it was 3.9....
    Fertility rates have also been falling in the majority of developing countries, among them India, Pakistan, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia....
    The decline in brithrates has profound and hopeful implications...for human welfare in dozens of nations long beset by too many people to feed, house, govern, employ, and care for....
    [A constraint that is a function of our primitive, short-term, downsizing-rife capitalism and one that is specifiably extended by Timesizing Capitalism, thanks to its automatic full-employment feature guaranteed by unemployment-offsetting workweek-reduction and employment&skills-spreading.]
    2/3 of Bolivians now live in urban areas, where, without farms to work and with living space tight, the incentive is strong to have fewer children.... In farm country, more children provide extra hands in the fields. But in the city, they can be an economic drain..\..
    Beatriz Silva['s] family lives in El Alto, a slum of more than half a million people. Like most of their neighbors, they were driven by poverty and disappearing farm jobs to move here from a rural section of this mountainous South American country.... Silva grew up as one of six children. She wants to stop at two.... "I cannot feed more," she said.
    Another change: Silva is a highschool graduate, the first woman in her family to reach that milestone. More and more Bolivian women are attending schools, where, in addition to academic subjects, they are taught about birth control. Government statistics show that knowledge of modern contraception methods among Bolivians jumped from 68% in 1989 to 86% a decade later.
    Better educated women are also more likely to seek work over perpetual parenting. Silva feels this way. She is a dreamer, who imagines a better life for herself and her family....

12/17/2003   glimmers of hope from WSJ or NYT -
  1. [1 UPsizing]
    Hyundai Mobis, WSJ, A8.
    ...established a company...named Mobis Parts America..\..to provide autoparts for Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Motors Corp. vehicles in Central and South America.... The South Korean parts maker [also] plans to invest $5m to set up a center in Florida that will provide autoparts beginning in April.
    [Unspecified new low-wage jobs.]

  2. Study sees population growth slowing, by Jon Hilsenrath, WSJ, B4B.
    ...The United Nations [has] complet[ed an] ambitious project - projecting world-population trends over three centuries.... While some question the usefulness of such long-term predictions - which history has shown are often wrong - UN officials say the exercise will help to give policy makers around the world a stark glimpse of the choices they face, especially on issues like pension 'reform' [our quotes], health and the environment....
    [That would be fine if this was a realistic prediction based on the experience of the 20th century -]
    The world's population quadrupled during the 20th century, and the UN projects it will continue to soar for the next 50 years, most notably in developing countries.
    [But what they call "soaring" for the next 50 years is wildly diminished for some reason -]
    ..\..From 6.1B in 2000 [it is expected to] reach [only] 8.9B by 2050....
    [This doesn't make sense given the logarithmic nature of the quadrupling during the 20th century, meaning the rate of increase is itself increasing so that, by far, most of the quadrupling was in the last few decades, and is still going strong. Plus much of the brakes on population growth last century involved huge wars (WW1 &2...) and genocides (Armenian, Jewish, Ukrainian, Tutsi-Hutu...) and plagues (post-WW1 flu, AIDS...) and starvation (Ethiopia, the Ik...), without which the population would be MUCH huger. Here's their pollyanna hyper-optimism at work -]
    ...After...2050, it is expected to level off through 2300 as developing countries reduce fertility rates to about two children per woman.
    [And by what magic is that supposed to happen - with the Catholic Church's brain still firmly lodged in the 15th century and brain-dead fundamentalism on the rise worldwide? The UN really needs to make up its mind if it's doing a forecast to scare us out of our current stupidity or a best-case scenario that reflects what positive changes now could accomplish. Right now, this prediction has the same kind of change-in-midstream fraudulence as Bush's taxcuts, designed to not really devastate the economy for 10 years when he's personally safe in some survivalist bunker in the high Sierras. The UN has unaccountably softpedalled population growth for the first 50 years (MIT's Limits to Growth team predicted 12-16B by then) and then REALLY softpedalled it. Even the 8.9B by 2050 instead of coming out with a clean 9B is propagandistic. This mixed-up excuse for a "forecast" by the UN Dept. of Economic & Social Affairs is a big disappointment. It's only value is that they've established an appropriately long forecasting horizon of 300 years.]

  3. [But here's a rather trenchant rebuttal for Ridge's self-defeating proposal on illegal aliens (see 12/11/2003 #1) -]
    Immigrant social costs, letter to editor by Lawrence R. Foster of San Ramon CA, NYT, A34.
    Re "Ridge favors a status short of citizenship for illegal [aliens]" (news article, Dec.11):
    If the federal government is considering granting some form of legal status to the millions of illegal [aliens], it should also accept the responsibility of fully reimbursing those border states that have borne a disproportionate share of the rapidly rising costs that these [aliens] incur.
    Schools, hospitals and prisons are increasingly overwhelmed by such costs, which are now being borne by local taxpayers....

12/16/2003   glimmers of hope from WSJ or NYT - 12/12/2003   glimmers of hope -
  1. A Court infused with pragmatism - Campaign-law ruling turned on concern for real-world effect - One more area of law reflecting Justice O'Connor's vision, by Linda Greenhouse, NYT, A30.
    ...Few people had predicted that the court would uphold all...the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act..\..the new campaign finance law['s] major provisions so unequivocally.... "Having been taught the hard lesson of circumvention by the entire history of campaign finance regulation," [the 5-4 majority] said, Congress was well justified in including state and local party committees within the statute's regulatory reach....
    [And right below -]
    A new battleground in political fund-raising, by Glen Justice, NYT, A30.
    DC...- One day after the Supreme Court upheld the largest overhaul of the nation's campaign finance law in three decades, strategists from both [major] political parties were preparing for a new fight about how campaign money is raised, with Republicans - not Democrats - doing most of the complaining this time....
    [Compare, on the next page -]
    A candidate captures a vote, if not a heart, by Sheryl Stolblerg, NYT, A31.
    ...Gina Marie Santore..\..won breakfast with..\..Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, the Dem presidential candidate who declared in a debate last month..."As a bachelor...I get to fantasize about my first lady." He went on to say that he would want "a dynamic, outspoken woman who was fearless in her desire for peace in the world and for universal, single-payer healthcare and a full-employment economy"..\..
    Mr. Kucinich...made a splash at a televised debate by lashing out at the host, Ted Koppel of ABC News, who had pressed him about his low poll numbers and lackluster fundraising. Mr. Kucinich...accus[ed] the news media in general and ABC News in particular of "trying to set the agenda for this election" by ignoring his campaign and focusing solely on polls and money instead of issues....
    [You tell'em, Dennis! Note also the nice photo at the top of the page of progressive Rep. Charles Rangel, an army sergeant in the 1950s, saluting Gen. Wesley Clark.]

  2. A Republican divide widens - Party's internal immigration debate is reignited by Ridge, WSJ, A4.
    [Background - see yesterday, 12/11/2003 #1. Hey, maybe now we can at least talk about this issue without getting gagged by name-calling.]

  3. Retail sales outperform forecasts - Rise of 0.9% in November..., WSJ, A2.
    [But easy to do if you set the forecasts low and heavily dependent this year on pre-Xmas discounts. Compare Oct's decline, 11/15-17/2003 #3.]

12/11/2003   glimmers of hope? -
  1. [1 UPsizing, 100 new jobs in India]
    Google to open center in India, by Mylene Mangalindan, WSJ, B4.
    ...The popular web-search technology company plans to open an engineering R&D center in India, its first outside the U.S., early next year...in Bangalore in March, and hopes to hire about 100 engineers initially....

  2. Panel proposes ways to constrain executive pay, by Joann Lublin, WSJ, A6.
    ...an advisor panel of the National Assoc. of Corporate Directors in DC....
    [They shouldn't strain themselves. The first approach to constraining astronomical individual income must be via constraining astronomical individual working hours - at least those from which you can derive unaccountable spending power instead of, for example, being required to reinvest 100% of your overtime earnings in training and hiring. If you make your first approach an attempt to constrain income directly, you'll just wind up generating dependency on the low end and resentment on the high end because when you take money from A to give to B, it's not nearly as clearly that you're giving A something inherently valuable as when you take working hours from A to give to B - and A inherently gets more free time. As our expectations rise, we'll eventually have to constrain income per person, but we'll need an automatic worktime-per-person constraining system in place by then (A) to get our expectations up that high and (B) to guide us in setting up the income constraints.]

  3. Start up, sell, start up, sell, pointer (to C6), NYT, C1.
    Howard Yellen...belongs to a special breed known as serial entrepreneurs. They thrive on the excitement of creating a company from scratch, but then they get restless or bored and move on to start another one. "I'll help my clients [clients??] get their share of the money and then - poof - I'll be on the next start-up," said Mr. Yellen..., who has about 20 new business ideas in his pocket.
    [which would seem to contradict the "having clients" model. Compare Bill Wolf of eastern Massachusetts whom Phil Hyde shaved off his beard to go visit in the mid-70s. Bill for some reason thought that moving a large chunk of the bustle of Boston west to Framingham or Worcester would be some kind of panacea.]

12/05/2003   glimmers of hope -
  1. [UPsizing #1, 2100 restored jobs -]
    Brokerage firms are beefing up - Hiring is finally back in vogue after more than 2 years of pain; Big bonuses in the bond market, by Randall Smith, WSJ, C1.
    ...Overall securities-industry employment, which peaked at 841,000 in March 2001, hit a recent low of 794,000 in May 2003, according to the Securities Industry Assoc. Since then it has rebounded to an estimted 803,000 in October..\..
    Merrill Lynch & Co., for example, plans to hire roughly 2,100 brokers during the next 3 years after thinning the herd by 7,700 since mid-2000.... The broker cutbacks at Merrill, which left the firm with 13,400 brokers in September, had put the firm in danger of being overtaken as the No.1 retail brokerage firm by the Smith Barney unit of Citigroup Inc., which has 12,254 brokers. But last month, the head of Merrill's James Gorman, announced the firm aims to boost broker headcount by 5% annually over the next 3 years, hiring 650 brokers in 2004. Similarly...now the firm is adding bankers in th[e] area \of\ municipal bonds...in an effort to rebuild the business.... Merrill is also hiring in debt-related sectors such as mortgages, credit derivatives and foreign exchange.

  2. [UPsizing #2]
    Brokerage firms are beefing up, by Randall Smith, WSJ, C1.
    ...Another major firm, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has signaled its intent to raise its headcount by as much as 2% next year....
    [Unspecified new jobs.]

  3. [UPsizing #3]
    Brokerage firms are beefing up, by Randall Smith, WSJ, C1.
    ...The Credit Suisse First Boston [CSFB] unit of Credit Suisse Group plans to ramp up next spring's campus recruiting of summer employees and junior analysts and associates, according to people at the firm. One goal, the people said, is to rebalance the firm's workforce after sparse hiring during the past few years left more senior people doing relatively lower-level work....
    [Sounds familiar. Unspecified new jobs.]

  4. [UPsizing #4]
    Safeway Inc., WSJ, B8.
    ...plans to open 45 new stores and remodel 160-165 stores. Square footage should grow 2%.
    [Unspecified new jobs.]

  5. [a glimmer of intelligence -]
    Consuming globally, letter to editor by Pres. Jan Lundberg of Sustainable Energy Institute of Arcata CA, NYT, A34.
    The problem with Paul Krugman's worldview ("The good news"...Nov.28) is that global consumption is unsustainable, especially as the population increases. [He] writes, "We are not, it turns out, condemned to live forever on a planet where only a small minority of the global population has a decent standard of living." His claim assumes unlimited oil and natural gas consumption - about to halt globally as peak production passes. Even if it could be perpetuated, Earth is already being fried.
    He says "the critics of globalization do have some valid points." But he scarcely lists any. Aside from oil, he might have mentioned that corporate globalization is through the barrel of the gun, as has been demonstrated from Chiapa to Miami when people are trying to protect what is "decent."
    [Perhaps Krugman atones for his sins somewhat with his op ed on the opposite page -]
    Looting the future - Governing like there's no tomorrow, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A35.
    [although this op ed has a shorter time horizon, that of the Bush administration.]

  6. Charitable giving rises as markets, economy improve, by Rachel Silverman, WSJ, B2.
    [That's just lovely, but... "Any economic system that relies on capricious charity for vital functions is lethally flawed." Compare Scott Adams' definition of "philanthropy" - 3-frame cartoon -]
    1. Ratbert, "Why did you quit your job as company president?"
      Catbert, "I made a fortune on my stock options (by saving money on employees sent on one-way business trips) and retirement payout.
    2. "I'm going to turn my attention to philanthropy."
    3. Ratbert, "Is that the study of people named Phil?" (that would be "philology")
      Catbert, "It's mostly about watching people beg, and having buildings named after me."
    And folks, Scott nailed that one way back on 10/16/1993 - see p.17 of Dilbert book, "Fugitive from the Cubicle Police" (1996).]

12/04/2003   glimmers of hope -
  1. [UPsizing #1, 3100 new jobs]
    Anadarko Petroleum Corp. announces change in chief executive, AP via NYT, C4.
    ...Robert Allison...retired after...17 years as CEO but [will] stay on as nonexecutive chairman.... During [his] tenure, the company has grown from 300 employees to 3,400 working in about a dozen countries.
    [So, an upsizing of 3400-300= 3,100 new jobs over 17 years, none of which we have caught on this page before.]

  2. [UPsizing #2, 7 new jobs - another attempt by the Wall Street Journal to believe in a general upsizing based on downsizing -]
    Trickle up - Small companies slowly build momentum in the job market - As business comes back, mom & pops add staff; Hints of broader recovery - Gains in health care, building, by Clare Ansberry, WSJ, front page.
    [Here "trickle up" presumably refers to little companies getting a little bigger and "hinting at broader recovery." Usually the phrase is "trickle down" and it refers to spending power from the upper income brackets to the middle and lower where they actually spend it, boost markets and clinch recovery. The problem with "trickle up" in the sense used here is that it's another attempt to reverse the theory, really law, of the marginal utility of concentrated money. Money isn't really just "trickling" up to the top brackets in a mounting labor surplus such as the last 30 years - it's pouring, gushing, rushing up, and the nervous top brackets are at pains to reassure themselves that this huge imbalance doesn't matter, because, e.g., the "invisible hand" rebalances things automatically. Except it didn't in 1929 and we got 9 years of makework-palliated depression that timesizing in 1938-40 (the nationwide 44-hour workweek cap in '38 with a 2-hour cut in each of the following two years) was just starting to actually solve at the rate of a 2% drop in unemployment for each 2-hour cut in the workweek, when Lend Lease and Pearl Harbor replaced timesizing with warsizing and froze the American workweek at the 40-hour maximum ever since (so it promptly turned into a minimum as soon as the babyboomers over-replaced the kill-off of the war around 1970 in the job market and accelerated downsizing in response to technology clinched labor's powerlessness). So here again, the top brackets and the big-company CEOs are trying to convince themselves that no matter how much they grab, no matter how much they punish the consumer base, the little companies will make it all right again.]
    ...Barth Holohan of St. Louis MO hired 7 more employees that month [Oct.] for his in-home healthcare franchise....

    After a long dry spell, hosts of small firms across the country are starting to take on workers again - a significant step in an economic recovery that hasn't seen much job creation.
    [You don't get a real recovery without much MUCH job creation. You only get another uptick or bubble.]
    The nation's 23m small businesses employ an estimated 57.1m workers - more than half of all private-sector employees [but check out the offset in the bulleted list below] - and create more than half of the nonfarm private GDP, according to the Small Business Administration [SBA].
    [A not-disinterested or -unbiassed source of 'objective', 'scientific' data in this area. The SBA is constantly striving to get more money by expanding its importance via the size of its constituency, and with that goal in mind, estimating every possible unit in its army of small businesses. Then the Journal gives us The Dream -]
    A wave of small-business hiring could help sustain consumer confidence and tide the economy over until larger companies regain the will to significantly boost payrolls - and begin restoring the 2.4 million jobs lost nationwide since the recession began in March 2001.
    [Never mind all the jobs lost before that all through the 1990s - just like the 1920s. And never mind that small businesses usually have a lot less of a flexibility-providing cushion of size or diversification than large ones - and operate on slimmer margins.]
    The [dreamed-of] hiring has been spurred by Bush administration tax incentives and a new eagerness by banks to court small firms. Low interst rates have kept home sales high, meaning lots of work for the small construction companies that make up the bulk of the industry.
    [Do they mean "the bulk of the sector" - meaning that small construction companies constitute the majority of small businesses?]
    Baby boomers are retiring and laying out lots of money for specialized healthcare services, which are mainly the province of small clinics.
    [What planet does this Journal reporter live on? Baby boomers are having their retirement plans looted by big-company CEOs. They're being targeted for layoff just before they retire so the big company doesn't have to pay them a pension at all. They're being forced to retire early so they don't get as much pension. And their pension plans have been changed from larger fixed benefits to smaller adjustable benefits.]
    And as big companies shed jobs, they outsource more work.
    [But more to China and India than to here.]
    Even with productivity gains, small companies are finding they simply can't meet escalating demand with the workers on hand.
    [If big companies can meet it, why should tighter-budgeted small companies be any different? This is nothing but wishful twaddle. Here's the confirmation -]
    "Smaller companies have less of a cushion, so when demand picks up, they have so little fat there, they have to hire. So they will be the ones to generate jobs," says Mark Zandi, chief economist for Economy.com, a West Chester PA research firm.
    [Mark Zandi is a self-serving cheerleader. He has zilch business experience or intuition, and he has never seen the likes of the testimonial of Kevin Kelly in the current issue of Fortune magazine called "The fear factor - Why I'm sitting out this recovery—for now." Kevin is using mega overtime, not hiring, and his totally job-insecure, disempowered and intimidated employees are putting up with it.]
    He also believes the continuing corporate and Wall Street scandals have had a greater impact on the top management of larger companies, making them more cautious about aggressive expansion.
    [Mark Zandi is sooo good at telling the wealthy exactly what they want to hear. What a ho' he is, like so many mainstream economists in what in our dreams is the social science of economics. Mark has no stomach for considering the general distrust of "data", e.g., quarterly reports, that the continuing corporate and Wall Street scandals have spread far and wide throughout the US economy and the world. So how many small-biz new hires has this article been able to get specific about? Seven! This whole hype so far is based on only seven (7) added staff members. How fluffypuffy is that?!]
    Some large companies, benefiting from rising orders for consumer products and stronger business spending, have added people as well....
    [No specifics. "Trust us, trust us." Just like the Bush administration.]
    Monthly employment data aren't broken down by size; job-creation data specifically about small firms are available only annually.
    And employment data, drawn from surveys of established companies, often miss small start-ups.
    [But then, they also often miss small crash-downs.]
    During the 20 months after the 1991 recession ended, the government said that the economy generated 303,000 jobs. The number was eventually bumped up to 663,000 because the initial surveys included only established companies.
    [This is all so primitive and pathetic. A modern economy would be adjusting the workweek on a monthly basis, a half-hour at a time, to spread the vacillating but generally diminishing market-demanded employment across everyone who needed it, including all the Americans we are currently warehousing in unemployment, welfare, disability (5.7m), homelessness (940,000), prison(2.2m), not to mention forced early retirement, forced retirement truncation, forced self-employment.... 663,000 jobs is nothing in the face of what few of these figures we occasionally allow ourselves to look at, let alone collect. If we had automatic workweek adjustment against comprehensive unemployment, then CEOs could merge and downsize to their hearts' content with truly no cumulating effect, because there would be a design mechanism assuredly offsetting the devastation they are spreading. But right now there isn't. So the devastation is still cumulating.]
    Some economists tend to discount jobs created by small businesses, because often they don't last.
    [Now LOOK at the following admissions, and ask yourself why in God's name the Journal is trying to spin the burden for leading the recovery down onto small businesses -]

  3. [UPsizing #3, ?? new jobs]
    ...Small companies slowly build momentum in the job market - As business comes back, mom & pops add staff; Hints of broader recovery..., by Clare Ansberry, WSJ, front page.
    In October, Webster Plastics began adding engineers to its Fairport NY plant after an 18-month stretch of occasional layoffs....
    [Unspecified new jobs.]

  4. [UPsizing #4, ?? new jobs]
    ...Small companies slowly build momentum in the job market - As business comes back, mom & pops add staff..., by Clare Ansberry, WSJ, front page.
    ...United Plate Glass Co. is bringing on additional workers to make glass and mirrors for houses and high-rise buildings....
    [Unspecified new jobs.]

  5. Edwards would restrict lobbyists, by Randal Archibald, NYT, A28.
12/03/2003   glimmers of hope -
  1. [1 UPsizing, 300 new jobs]
    Veritas to hire 300 in India, NYT, C2.
    ...One of the world's largest independent makers of data-storage products will hire...over the next 12 months to expand R&D..\.. Veritas Software Corp...based in Mountain View CA [already] employs 500 people in India. They represent almost 25% of the company's engineering workforce.... Programmers in India an cost companies as little as 1/6 as much as employees in the U.S.

  2. [curbing the Wal-Martization of America -]
    Plots & ploys - What's brewing in the real-estate market -...Food fight, by Sheila Muto, WSJ, B8.
    ...In Californica...several cities and counties have enacted or are considering enacting measures to bar Wal-Mart Stores Inc's supercenter stores, which sell groceries and general merchandise, from their jurisdictions. They're concerned, in most cases, about the impact such stores have on jobs, businesses, traffic and open space.
    Wal-Mart plans to open 40 supercenters in California over the next 3-5 years. The first will open next year in La Quinta, a desert community near Palm Springs.
    [Kiss your community goodby.]
    Most supercenters are between 180,000 and 225,000 sq ft, about twice the size of a traditional Wal-Mart store.
    [Is there anything 'traditional' about Wal-Mart now that founder Sam Walton is spinning in his grave at the nightmare-from-Wall-Street his successors have made of his enterprise?]

12/02/2003   glimmers of hope -
  1. [1 UPsizing, 2000 new jobs]
    Job seekers' tone takes a turn: Hopeful ... anxious ... nasty!, by Kemba Dunham, WSJ, B10.
    ...Electronic Arts Inc., a Redwood City CA game developer...plans to hire more than 2,000 workers during the next four years. More than 200,000 people have expressed interest in working for the company....
    [See also #3 today for this same article from another viewpoint.]

  2. Canada's stance on social issues is opening rifts with the U.S., NYT, front page.
    [Compare -]
    Quotation of the day, by Prof. Chris Ragan of Montreal's McGill University, NYT, A2.
    "You can be a social conservative in the U.S. without being a wacko. Not in Canada."

  3. Job seekers' tone takes a turn: Hopeful ... anxious ... nasty!, by Kemba Dunham, WSJ, B10.
    Steven Brown, the COO of Lyris Technologies Inc., a Berkeley CA software company...placed an ad for a director of marketing positin on several online community boards last month. What he didn't expect was to receive several biting emails from those who saw the ad....
    [Notice that the ad is not reported here. All we get is -]
    Mr. Brown...had simply asked applicants to visit the company's website and tailor a cover letter....
    [Sounds doubtful. This may be another company with the "Wal-Mart motto" = "We abuse our employees and pass the savings to you." At least these executives are starting to get some straight feedback via the Web.]
    ...Hiring managers...have seen a notable increase in angry responses from unsuccessful[?] job seekers. These take the form of letters and phone calls, and a lot of emails, a technology not widely used during the last downturn, but one that allows applicants to impulsively dash off comments more easily. Many of the angriest applicants have been out of jobs for nearly two years and have long ago lost patience with their job search.
    Many applicants are bristling at the extended length of the process and the many demands that can come with job interviews.... After several interviews \for\ a $100k sales job this year at a New Haven CT software company [one applicant] was told to put together a presentation outlining how he would sell the company's billing software. Because [he] had to research the company as well as the product, he says he spent about 60 hours preparing for the presentation. But he had to wait several weeks to make the presentation because the company canceled their meeting three times. When it finally happened, the hiring manager stopped [him] 5 minutes into the presentation with a curt, "I don't think you're qualified for this job." [He] called the next day and let the hiring manager have it. ...The company was indifferent to his gripes.
    [You gotta be really dumb, or far far too desperate, to keep going that long, especially after the clear message of 3 meeting cancellations. But as the pointy-haired boss in the Dilbert cartoon way said back in 1994, "As long as all the other companies are downsizing too, you have no leverage. I can get away with anything!" (Scott Adams' "Fugitive from the Cubicle Police," p. 117.) This is all part and parcel of our failure to adjust to the age of mind-boggling work-saving technology. As the officially ignored or denied labor glut bloats and swells across the nation and the globe, people in all roles become commoner and cheaper. Employers' management skills deterorate (who needs management skills in a huge labor surplus?!), employees get abused as at Wal-Mart (see 6/25/2002 #1), job applicants are treated like trash, and customers are required to do more and more themselves as on robot corporate phone-answering systems and do-all-the-work-yourself online plane&train ticket sites, at bank ATMs, gas pumps, supermarket cash registers, gigantized hardware (Home Depot), toy (Toys R Us), drug (CVS), general (Wal-Mart) stores and with airline meals. Our failure, as a supposedly intelligent species, to make the leap from serendipitous worksharing supplemented by too-little too-late job creation (makework) and militarism to automatic worksharing that would maintain the labor-employment balance, has had devastating effects everywhere.]
    ...Rusty Rueff, exec. VP of HR at Electronic Arts Inc., a Redwood City CA game developer...plans to hire more than 2,000 workers during the next four years [but says] promising candidates will have to go through a "gauntlet of interviews" - from 8 to 10..\..
    [And today's CEO have the brass to lip-serve efficiency?? This company must have a LOT of time to waste, especially if -]
    More than 200,000 people have expressed interest in working for the company....

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