Monday, February 02, 2004

Gaza - will this be serious, or a ploy? Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 9:41:35 PM     Angering Settlers, Sharon Says Most May Have to Leave Gaza By JAMES BENNET Published: February 3, 2004 ERUSALEM, Feb. 2 — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Monday that he might seek to evacuate almost all Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, outraging members of the settlement movement he helped create. "I am working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews in Gaza," Mr. Sharon told the liberal daily Haaretz. He made similar comments in a very tense meeting of legislators from his Likud Party, said people who took part. ********

Atlantic survey Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 2:44:19 PM     Good to look at the Atlantic Monthy The Real State of the Union. Many good articles, and stuff to analyze. For example According to Farber's analysis of the most recent Displaced Workers Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, covering 1999 through 2001, shows that workers with more than sixteen years of education saw an average reduction in income of roughly 23 percent upon finding new jobs; in the mid-1990s the reduction averaged only 12 percent. This shows why firing and rehiring is logical for organizations. Universitites denyng tenure and hiring a younger faculty member would be a good example. and  (One recent study found that U.S. financial-service firms are planning to move more than 500,000 jobs—or eight percent of the total work force in that sector—offshore within the next five years. These relocations will include higher-status, higher-income jobs than such transfers have typically included in the past; jobs in financial analysis, research, accounting, and graphic design are among those expected to be moved offshore.) If the lead article is to be believed, economically things are not only not bad, but pretty good, *now*. Trends are harder. At the moment it appears to be an open question whether in the coming years the middle class and the poor will advance quickly (as they did in the late 1990s) or stagnate (as they did throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s). We're poised on the cusp between broad-based wealth creation and stagnation: while productivity growth has helped keep wages rising for the employed, immigration and the continued movement of jobs to offshore locations weakens the labor market and depresses wages. Given the continuing rapid pace of innovation and productivity growth, it appears likely that broad-based income gains will eventually resume, and that the prevailing conditions of the next several years will more closely resemble those of the late 1990s than those of the 1970s. But for that to be assured of happening, unemployment will need to drop significantly below six percent. And however much the typical middle- or working-class family sees its income rise on an absolute basis, the incomes of the richest families will likely improve even faster. But then look at this. Worker insurance against job loss. But what he misses is that such a program earns fees which have to be paid by someone, and it genrates profit, which goes to...?  It doesn't add up. A more radical variation on this concept comes from Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, who believes that continuing financial-market innovations may soon enable private insurers to offer "livelihood insurance" that could protect workers from potential declines in their occupations (though not against an individual worker's underperformance within a flourishing field). Similar products might insure against the eventual devaluation of specific academic degrees in the United States (such as those in software engineering or Russian language), or even against declines in the performance of the U.S. economy as a whole, relative to the rest of the world. (As Shiller notes, the fact that the past century was a good one for America does not necessarily mean that the next one will be.) Collectively, these products might lessen the large and arguably increasing risks inherent in the U.S. capitalist system.   ********

creeping business - charging for email Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 1:36:52 PM     Difficult.. hould people have to buy electronic stamps to send e-mail? Some Internet experts have long suggested that the rising tide of junk e-mail, or spam, would turn into a trickle if senders had to pay even as little as a penny for each message they sent. Such an amount might be minor for legitimate commerce and communications, but it could destroy businesses that send a million offers in hopes that 10 people will respond. The idea has been dismissed both as impractical and against the free spirit of the Internet. Now, though, the idea of e-mail postage is getting a second look from the owners of the two largest e-mail systems in the world, Microsoft and Yahoo. Ten days ago, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that spam would not be a problem in two years, in part because of systems that would require people to pay money to send e-mail. Yahoo, meanwhile, is quietly evaluating an e-mail postage plan being developed by Goodmail, a Silicon Valley start-up company. ********

Etzione on the value of the sea vs mars. Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 1:27:08 PM     The ocean floor is more promising than Mars rocks. By Amitai Etzioni You can't accuse the Bush White House of excessive imagination. The president's latest "vision" is a replay of a 40-year-old idea stolen from JFK: men (and women) heading for the moon and beyond by 2030. Real creativity would set that crew down in another place altogether: the deep ocean floor. Although oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth, less than 5% of them have been mapped with the same degree of detail as Mars, and that was before the two most recent Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed. We have rarely ventured below 6,500 meters in the oceans, although they reach more than 11,000 meters deep. We know much less about the ocean floor and the deepest layers of the oceans than we know about either side of the moon. And yet, the potential payoffs are huge. ********

The intel investigation.- quote from Powell. Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 8:51:10 AM     From Slate's summary of the day's news. Meanwhile, Post columnist William Raspberry quotes from Secretary of State Powell's seemingly solid Iraq U.N. speech last February. "Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions," Powell said. Raspberry ponders that and concludes it's about more than bad intel. He says he is "increasingly inclined to believe that the administration lied to us." And  from the Observer, "Senior American officials concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt. Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Comment: the problem is, we clearly neer knew what the dministration was actually doing. Conclusions, such as to go to war, reached early, and the world acted as if there was some deliberation still going on.   ********