Economic News 2000 November

updated: 2021-01-03

2000-11-01

2000-11-01
Wright Flight on Kaufman Mall
"On Wednesday, 2000 November 1, freshman and sophomore Engineering students at Old Dominion University tested aircraft of their own designs - designs based on the calculations of the Wright Brothers, who had not graduated from high school.   Without the benefit of calculus..."
 

2000-11-02

2000-11-03

2000-11-04

2000-11-05

2000-11-06

2000-11-06
Bob Port _NY Daily News_
Rick Lazio calls on Hillary to cough up shady Indian-American business-man's campaign donations
"immigrant restaurateur Sant Singh Chatwal, who funneled at least $210K in soft money to the First Lady, has been accused of misusing his bank director's position to obtain $14M in bad loans.   Chatwal, an Indian-American, also owes untold millions to creditors pursuing him, including an estimated $30M or more in taxes owed to the IRS, the city, the state and several other states...   'Mr. Chatwal owed money to the U.S. [tax-victims] and instead gave it to Mrs. Clinton's campaign," said Lazio spokesman Michael Marr...   In September the president and first lady raised a reported $500K in a private party at Chatwal's penthouse, including checks from at least 14 Chatwal businesses...   Chatwal, who started the Bombay Palace restaurant chain and acquired several New York hotels, has eluded creditors for more than a decade, filing for bankruptcy protection at least 62 separate times.   In 1995, Indian banks trying to recoup $22M in all forced Chatwal into bankruptcy court to liquidate his personal assets.   But he claimed in court to have only $2,600 to his name and no checking account."

2000-11-07

2000-11-07
Paul Drury _Electric News_
Dot-com death toll mounts
"A total of 5,677 employees were let go by US Internet companies in October, up from 4,805 in September, according to Challenger, Gray &emp; Christmas, a placement firm that tracks lay-offs.   Since last December, it says, a total of 22,267 dot.com jobs have been lost."
 

2000-11-08

2000-11-09

2000-11-09
Alissa J. Rubin & Aaron Zitner _LATimes_
vote fraud: a political tradition

2000-11-10

2000-11-11

2000-11-12

2000-11-13

2000-11-13
_Chemical & Engineering News_/_ACS_
2001 Employment Outlook
"Hiring of new graduates in 2001 is expected to be robust -- barring a large economic down-turn [this 11 months into an economic down-turn, 6 months after the stock-market crash] -- but while competition for the best and the brightest will be strong, candidates will still have to work hard for just the right position."
index
 

2000-11-14

2000-11-15

2000-11-16

2000-11-16
_CNN_/_Money_
More dot-coms hit skids: 130 Internet firms have gone out of business since January
"according to a new study by Webmergers.com ...   Challenger Gray released a report last October saying that about 22,267 dot.com cuts have been announced since 1999 December, when the firm began tracking such data.   Of the 274 companies tracked from 1999 December through 2000 October, 44 of them -- or 16% of the total -- have since failed."
 

2000-11-17

2000-11-18

2000-11-19

2000-11-19
Julianne Malveaux _Mindfully_
Growing Lay-Offs in Supposedly Tight Labor Market
"With the national unemployment rate remaining at 3.9% for the second month in a row, little attention is focused on those who have difficulty finding employment.   Instead, the Federal Reserve Board has focused on the 'tight' labor market, where supposed worker shortages may well lead to higher wages and, thus, inflation...   But isn't it about time workers demanded more money for their contributions? After all, for all this talk of expansion, workers only began to see their wages rise in late 1998...   According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 936 companies laid off workers this September.   Each action involved at least 50 people for a single establishment.   Over 106K workers were involved.   This number was higher than for any month since the BLS began collecting this data in April 1995.   Most of those involved in mass lay-offs came from the manufacturing or service industries.   You don't need BLS data t make the point about lay-offs...   While the volume of lay-offs seems high, the September number represents less than 1% of total employment, at 135.4M workers.   Some consider these lay-offs a minor problem and point out that most people who are laid off find new jobs within the quarter.   They might also note that, thanks to our tight labor market, fewer and fewer workers experience unemployment.   But while the unemployment rate is low at 3.9%, more than 13M people, or nearly 9% of us, experienced unemployment in 1999.   The numbers were higher for African Americans, at 12.6%, and Hispanics, at 11.3%.   Since few workers recover effortlessly from unemployment, and since many move on to jobs that pay less than their previous job, economic hardship is more extensive than the unemployment rate would suggest.   With a sluggish stock market, many companies have responded to their stock-holders' demands for higher profits by reorganizing or merging.   They haven't created new value but they hope that new organizational structures will increase productivity and profits.   Time will tell whether new organization can increase profits, but, generally, organizational restructuring causes the possibility of lay-offs.   September's pace will probably continue, regardless of the labor market."
 

2000-11-20

2000-11-21

2000-11-22

2000-11-22
Julian Betts _San Diego Union-Tribune_
Limiting US High-Tech Workers
"At the same time that measures are taken to increase the number of young people who have access to higher education in California, the state mush also take steps to ensure that more public university students enter high-tech majors.   It is a little known fact that the cost of educating students in high-tech fields such as engineering and science often exceeds the student fees and state funding a campus receives.   Per-student subsidies from the state simply do not reflect the significantly higher costs of training students in these majors.   As a result, every single campus in the University of California system currently limits enrollment in 'impacted majors' such as computer science.   In fact, 7 out of 8 UC campuses serving under-graduates have set enrollment limits for engineering and/or computer science, and 6 of 8 campuses have set limits on biological sciences."
 

2000-11-23

2000-11-24

2000-11-25

2000-11-25 07:15PST (10:15EST) (15:15GMT)
Alex Kirby _BBC_
Science takes a back seat in discussion of "climate change" and the Kyoto Protocol at The Hague, Netherlands
"Perhaps the most abiding impression of the conference, though, is of almost total unreality.   It has been an Alice-in-Wonderland world, where words acquire meanings they were never designed for, and serious men and women believe numerous impossible things for days on end with straight faces."

2000-11-26

2000-11-26
Bill Sloat _Cleveland Plain Dealer_
Ancient American skeleton has European DNA
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"Fifty feet underground, the cavern is the best preserved of the 4 oldest sites of human activity ever discovered in Ohio...   The idea that the earliest colonizers could have started out somewhere in Europe is a radical notion rooted in a rare genetic link called 'haplogroup X', a smidgen of DNA passed down through women that dates back more than 30K years in caucasoid peoples...   Somehow and somewhere, X mysteriously got splashed into the gene pool of American Indians living on this continent before Columbus arrived.   Recent genetic samples from pre-Columbian remains in Illinois show that this rare European DNA was around centuries before 1492.   Today X is found in about 20K Indians, primarily those speaking Algonquin languages, mostly Chippewa people in Great Lakes states.   It's also found in 3% of Europeans.   To some researchers, its presence suggests the Mongolian ancestors of most Indians -- a people long recognized as the original Americans -- were late-comers.   Genetic tests show the X factor is completely absent from East Asian and Siberian populations...   Since 1996, however, archaeologists across the globe have found genetic indications of several migrations, along with evidence that people came from Polynesia, regions near Japan and even western Europe.   For example, artifacts recovered in Sheriden Cave, along with others being excavated in Tennessee, may have been fashioned using chipping techniques that were pioneered in stone-age France."
 

2000-11-27

2000-11-27
_Los Angeles Regional Technical Alliance_
Lay-Off Tool Keeps Climbing at Troubled Los Angeles Dot-Comx
"Nationwide, lay-offs in the dot-com sector total 22,267.   Last month alone, there were 5,677 job cuts in the dot-com sector, a new record for a single month and the fifth consecutive month of increases, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc...   Things could get worse before getting better in the dot-com sector.   The Nasdaq has been down-trending most of the year, and few dot-coms have had much success raising capital in the private or public markets.   The worst of the shake-out may arrive with the upcoming holiday season, which could make or break some Web commerce and content companies, like eToys Inc."
 

2000-11-28

2000-11-28
John Geralds _vnunet.com_
Dot-com job losses reach record level
Informatics
"2000 November is set to break the record for the most dot-com redundancies, according to a US report.   So far, 8789 people in the US dot-com sector have lost their jobs this month - beating October's 5677 figure.   The total number of lay-offs since 1999 December now stands at 31,056.   According to figures from US placement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas, a total of 383 companies have laid off staff since last December and 20% of those firms have since gone out of business.   Consulting, financial and on-line-based information services suffered the most job cuts, making up 40% or 12,551 of the total redundancies.   Retail came in second with 7863 job losses."
 

2000-11-29

2000-11-30

2000 November
Ferrie Pot, Bas Koene & Jaap Paauwe _Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam_
Contingent Employment (Body Shopping) in the Netherlands (pdf)
"Figure 1 shows unemployment as a percentage of the Dutch work-force.   The figure shows that unemployment in the Netherlands reached its highest point in the early 1980s.   Since then, unemployment has decreased steadily, apart from the brief rise in the period 1992-1994.   The projections for 2000 estimate a further decrease to 3.7%.   Unemployment in the Netherlands is much lower than the European average, and near the current rate in the United States (Delsen, 2000)...   Job growth in the Netherlands has relied predominantly on the growth of part-time and contingent jobs.   Table 3 and 4 demonstrate this development.   They show that only 15% of the job growth can be attributed to the growth of full-time jobs.   In contrast, part-time and contingent employment took account of, respectively, 57% and 28% of total job growth...   Around 12% of current total employment is contingent emploment.   In 1988, this [was] 8%.   Part-time labourís share in total employment has increased from 24% in 1988 to 30% in 1999.   The share of full-time employment based on an open ended contract in total employment has decreased from 68% to 58%...   Around 49% of the agency jobs are classified as [low-skilled technical jobs].   The second largest category is administration with a share of around 31%.   Around 11% of agency jobs are high skilled technical jobs.   Finally, healthcare jobs occupy a minor share in total agency work.   Its share fluctuates around 4%...   Table 12 [89% of agency workers would prefer real jobs, 97.6% of leased employees, 60.5% of on-call employees, 98% of open-ended employees, for a total of 97.1% of contingent employees who would prefer real employment]...   it is important to understand how the legal context influences the relative costs of each of them.   The ease, in terms of legal costs and speed, by which contingent employment contracts can be terminated by the user organisation differentiates them from open ended contracts.   [Major changes were enacted in 1999 which made bodyshopping much easier.]"

2000 November
_Corporate Governance_
Exec Pay Too High
"According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., 103 CEOs left their jobs in September, more than twice last year's rate.   'Many CEOs are barely in control of their companies' fate, much less their own...   A recent Hay Group survey found that 85% of institutional investors believe that executive pay at UK firms is insufficiently related to performance and that 100% thought pay incentives covering 3 or more years should make up a much larger proportion of total reimbursement.   Yet, that same survey showed that 91% oppose the introduction of a procedure whereby share-holders could move resolutions on pay issues at the annual meeting and 97% oppose share-holders having to sanction reimbursement packages."

2000 November
Robert E. Barry _Mechanical Engineering_
The Other Side of the Golden Door
"As a retired professor of engineering, I am outraged by senator Spencer Abraham's sponsoring Senate Bill S2045 to double the number of H-1B visas for foreign engineers and technicians entering this country to more than 200K per year.   American colleges and universities will graduate 162K people trained in technical fields.   The Department of Labor estimates that there will be only 138K openings.   This bill directly injures engineers and technicians who are struggling to be converted from contract to permanent employees in corporations that increasingly treat them as just another commodity.   This is a bill to hold down the salaries of American citizens.   Ask any engineer about recent annual increases.   You should let your representatives in Congress know how you feel about this.   The bills on H-1B immigration are HR3814 in the House and S2045 in the Senate entitled Technology Worker Temporary Relief Act.   Have you ever read those ads in the papers and technical magazines that are obviously meant only for one person?   Corporations and universities regularly cheat on the immigration rules by claiming that there is no American available to fill the position."

2000 November
Edward Rucker _Say-So_
Needed: Stop Signs for Health Care Regulations

2000 November
top 500 fastest super computers LinPack bench-mark (rated in Giga Floating-point Operations/s)
 

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