During this time the practise of Policy by Press Release rose to prominence as ill-founded concepts like the “Bomber Gap“, “Missile Gap“, and “Submarine Gap” were leveraged to justify a massive expansion in military spending.  U.S. Doctrine from the end of the Vietnam era to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to essentially outspend the Soviets while engaging them in proxy guerilla wars in weak communist ally states and financing developing countries through the World Bank.  It is thought by many (mostly Pro-Reagan) historians that it was indeed the US Military-Industrial Complex that won the Cold War and bankrupted the Soviet Union by simply outspending them.

Nowadays, we live under the spectre of far more benign [perceived] enemies.  Most of us in the technology industry fear Microsoft’s Goliath and align with Google’s David more meaningfully than any political discourse, though we only rarely cower under our desks in fear of a Vodka-soaked phone call between Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt (which I am positive has happened).

Google only stumbled its way into Microsoft’s crosshairs nine years ago, whereas Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates has long sought to get in on the action on the Internet and the Web in particular.  The two are presently in a pitched battle on a number of fronts, including Search (Microsoft recently launched Bing), Mobile (Google’s Android is a pattern-cut copy of MSFT’s Windows Mobile strategy), The Browser (Chrome versus the dreaded IE), Email (Google is making inroads into institutional and corporate email services), and Productivity Applications (Microsoft Office as an app and a hosted service versus a number of nascent Google Apps).

Most recently, Google responded to the Bing launch by going after MSFT’s supposed crown jewels with an announcement about Chrome OS.  Microsoft then parried with its own vapourware announcement about Web Office.  Engaging Microsoft on another front on an increasingly expansive battlefield might seem like the smart thing to do, but as Kevin wrote, Spite is not a business strategy. This is akin to pissing in your neighbour’s yard just because he took a whiz in yours.

The Soviets, like our more modern evil empire whose Kremlin sleeps in the dales just outside Seattle, were more cagey than we might have thought in those days.  They didn’t match the US and NATO move-for-move in force expansion, and rather than counter Reagan’s famous SDI initiative with a Star Wars system of its own, they simply rejiggered their ICBMs to penetrate airspace using different methods and geared fighters up to be able to shoot down satellites from within the mundane confines of our atmosphere.

No … the Soviets didn’t join in the arms race — instead they were quite content to watch their enemy blow its own brains out, expanding US debt in leaps and bounds (US debt doubled under Reagan in a single year, mostly on the back of military spending) while their own programs pursued less lofty goals, financing battlefield weaponry and troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

We didn’t know it at the time, thanks to a lot of propaganda from our own leaders, but the Commies were actually the underdog.  And like any underdog, the Soviets capitalized on American fear and loathing to nurture an inflated perception of its own militarism and level of armament, hoping that the US would collapse under its own weight trying to keep up — and it nearly worked.  Some would argue that it has — and that our current and previous economic hiccups, heaped atop rampant social problems in the US, are the reckoning for decades of rampant Cold War spending — and may not be remedied anytime soon.

Google is apparently trying to match Microsoft on every front in the technology industry — but it too is an underdog.  It’s attempting to do so with far fewer employees (Google has 20K employees – Microsoft has 90K), far fewer financial resources, and no apparent profit model associated with many of these businesses.  Microsoft has also had the benefit of nearly 30 years — all supported by revenue growth in the rising tide of the PC revolution — to expand its business aspirations from its core business of supplying Operating Systems.  Furthermore I would argue that the core of Microsoft is no longer Windows, and has instead long been its much more expensive product offering, Office.

If Google is attempting to parlay its underdog status into some sort of puffer fish role, in forcing Microsoft to compete on many more fronts than search, then the insincerity of these efforts is pretty transparent to most of us.  And it will fail.  I use MS Word and Apple’s Pages, but would not even consider using Google Docs.  As a web app, it delivers a far poorer user experience at the point of my absolute maximum requirement for efficiency and dexterity.  Google’s Chrome browser isn’t much better than Firefox, and as I’ve pointed out frequently, Android is a duplicate of Microsoft’s own floundering efforts in the mobile space with little improvement.

Microsoft is likely snickering (I know I am) as it watches Google’s many flailing attempts to strike it in different arenas.  Particularly so in Operating Systems.  Slapping a GUI onto Linux, particularly when said GUI developer is Google — a company apparently bereft of UX designers — is a cynical, me-too play that will alienate the Linux Community and pale in comparison to OSX.

According to Yahoo Finance! on MSFT and GOOG, Microsoft has 3x the revenue and 20% more cash reserves than Google.  That’s an amiable war chest and revenue stream that means it’s unlikely that Google can cause Microsoft to spend itself into oblivion.  Google, on the other hand, is moving in too many areas and executing poorly in most of them.

If Google truly wants to hurt Microsoft it needs to double-down on a sincere effort to unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange and thereby dominate the ways in which we communicate at work.   Otherwise, much as the Soviet Union really collapsed due to radical downward shifts in the price of oil and lack of access to credit, Google may suffer from a decline in CPC advertising and all of the air will spew out from its puffer fish act.

In May Day parades, the Soviets would invite Western leaders to the review stand, as bombers and missile launchers would run circles past the parade ground.  These Westerners would return to their peers wide-eyed with parables of impressive arrays of weaponry and massively inflated estimates of actual force sizes.  Unlike during the real Cold War, Google’s foe is not self-invested in grandiose estimates of its enemy’s fortitude and the rest of us are quite aware that in many cases, such as the ill-fated Orkut and other flailing products, Google’s emperor has no clothes.

And unlike our former evil empire’s round-faced leader, Ballmer is under no pressure for Perestroika.

Case in point:  Recently, Microsoft announced they would build a research and development centre in Vancouver, and in turn use that operation to recruit and nurture smart people from around the world who were being prevented from entering the US due to immigration hassles.  Microsoft said it as plainly as they needed to:  they had effectively tapped out the supply of smart software people trickling out of U.S. universities, and thanks to increasing costs and constrains imposed by the U.S. INS,  it was just too difficult to fill that void with educated foreigners ; both  which circumstances put U.S. -based tech companies at a pretty significant disadvantage.

From the perspective of those seeking to put Vancouver on the map as far as software and product development is concerned, this served as a tremendous endorsement, and a opportunity which could be seized upon by the local tech community.

The conditions themselves, in turn, couldn’t really be better for any company big or small to operate a research and development centre in a Canadian city in general, when the strength of the dollar, the numerous government incentives such as SR&ED, and Canada’s liberal immigration policies regarding talented individuals such as Engineers.

These are conditions that Canada should capitalize on, specifically by relaxing further the immigration policies regarding software engineers and marketers, creating temporary work visas which can be turned around at the port-of-entry and can serve as a gateway to permanent residency (such as we have with NAFTA), and actively promoting the Canadian tech industry to workers abroad.

The benefits of these preconditions are obvious: diversity of talent equals an increasing wealth of ideas, knowledge, and research — which would ensure that tax credits like SR&ED pursue increasingly meritorious ideas and opportunities. It would also take advantage of a significant mis-step by our friends south of the border.

On my personal blog, I rarely restrain myself from criticism of the Bush government and US foreign policy. So my bias is well-known.. 🙂

As the US Economy is jerkily shifting from a decades-long manufacturing cycle, as the UK did through the 1980s, to a nation that generates the greater part of its wealth from intellectual labours, their leadership is ignoring the obvious: the country lacks enough talent to conceive and build this new intellectual, cultural economy.

It says something about Bush’s vision for America that while he posits an amnesty bill for the millions of illegal and largely unskilled immigrants coming from Mexico and Latin America, he imposes and reduces a cap on legal immigration visas for skilled workers, such as the H-1B.

They U.S. is turning away creative minds (including engineers) at the border, throwing millions of babies out with the bathwater, as they attempt to ebb the flow of “good” jobs being taken from America’s labour force and handed to foreigners. At the same time, those jobs are in turn being fully-outsourced to foreigners residing overseas, as companies attempt to cope with the fact that they can’t meet hiring goals for specialized positions.

In today’s market we compete equally for dollars and for workers on a global stage. When a company outsources its call centre, which uses largely unskilled labour, to India that should not be considered a problem for an advanced nation like the U.S. But when a U.S. company outsources R&D to India (or in this case, Canada) it should be considered a crisis. Microsoft’s move, from a U.S. perspective, is just exactly that. And it shows the grit which companies like Microsoft will go to route around the damage that is Bush’s immigration policy.

The Bush government, by limiting H-1 Visas and making it generally difficult to become a productive, creative resident of their country, has created a window which Canadians can and should exploit to bring talent to our nation: talent which will be trained and coached at the expense of U.S. companies, and will eventually spin out of these R&D centres and create their own new companies sparking new innovation.

This process can be exemplified by the number of Canada’s technology startups (meritorious or not) created by former Nortel executives throughout the last 10 years. That these have all represented a substantial increase in value for Canadian economic development, and the collective intelligence of our software community in general, would be tough to question.

With the quantity of resources available to technology entrepreneurs in cities such as Vancouver, the real challenge today is spending it effectively by hiring talented individuals.

So as our dollar approaches parity with the U.S. dollar making our salaries competitive, as our quality-of-life (particularly in Vancouver) far exceeds that of technology meccas like Seattle and Silicon Valley by all apparent measures, and as our government’s financial support for entrepreneurship continues to give a stage-to-orbit boost for many different ideas, the only pennies needing to drop really are a more sophisticated approach to valley-style Venture Capitalism and continuing expansion of immigration policies to support innovation.

With those two tweaks to our existing structure, a lot will change in the fortunes of Canada’s (specifically Vancouver’s) technology entrepreneurs.

In the meantime, bring more Microsoft’s to the suburbs of Vancouver. They will import some of Canada’s more brilliant Entrepreneurs and their co-workers at U.S. expense for our future benefit.

-Ian.

Here are details on Version 2.0

-Ian.

——– http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030513/ap_on_hi_te/ microsoft_hoax

Microsoft: ILoo No Hoax After All Tue May 13, 7:14 PM ET By HELEN JUNG, AP Business Writer

SEATTLE – What’s true with the iLoo? Microsoft Corp. and its public relations firm changed their story — again — Tuesday about whether the United Kingdom division had been developing an Internet-enabled portable toilet.

On Monday, three representatives for the software giant told news agencies, including The Associated Press, that an April 30 news release trumpeting the “iLoo” was a hoax and apologized for “any confusion or offense.”

But on Tuesday, the company reversed itself, saying the iLoo was real but now has been killed.

“We jumped the gun basically yesterday in confirming that it was a hoax, and in fact it was not,” said Lisa Gurry, MSN group product manager. “Definitely, we’re going to be taking a good look at our communication processes internally.”

It’s a public relations embarrassment for a company famous for micromanaging news releases, interviews and promotional events.

“It’s definitely not how we like to do PR at Microsoft,” Gurry said.

The iLoo was described as a portable toilet equipped with a wireless (news – web sites) keyboard and a height-adjustable plasma screen with high-speed Internet access. Microsoft’s MSN division was “in the process of converting a portable loo to create a unique experience” in time for the summer festival season, according to the release.

Several news organizations, including the AP, carried reports of the project. An AP reporter specifically asked whether it was a hoax and was assured last week by Microsoft, its Portland, Ore.-based PR firm Waggener Edstrom and another PR firm in London, Red Consultancy, that the project was real.

On Monday, technology Web site CNET, based on a tip, wrote that the iLoo was a hoax and quoted Microsoft spokesman Nouri Bernard Hasan as saying, “I can confirm it was an April Fool’s joke.”

The AP and The Wall Street Journal also were told Monday by two company spokeswomen that the iLoo was a fraud.

On Tuesday, though, Microsoft said it had relied on bad information from a Microsoft employee in the United Kingdom who said it was a hoax, Gurry said. After more talks with people in London, the company determined it was a real project, after all.

The U.K. division likes to run clever and innovative marketing campaigns, Gurry said, and had thought an iLoo would appeal to the British. MSN typically allows its units to tailor their own campaigns to their regions, she said.

But MSN’s executive team, which had heard of the iLoo through news reports, took the unusual step of killing the project on Monday, she said, believing that the portable toilet “wasn’t the best extension of our brand.”

It’s still unclear how much work was ever done on the iLoo. Gurry said she did not know how much time or money was spent on it.

The company had said it was building a prototype and was in the process of converting a portable toilet. But MSN marketing manager Tracy Blacher said Tuesday in London that the company had not done that. Rather, Blacher, who described the project in the original news release that quoted her repeatedly, said MSN had some discussions with portable toilet manufacturers, which she said she could not name because she was not at her desk.

-Ian.

———- http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030507/ap_on_hi_te/ internet_toilet

Microsoft Plans Toilets With Web Access Wed May 7, 1:03 PM ET Add Technology – AP to My Yahoo!

By The Associated Press

SEATTLE – Now on the way: “Surfing on the loo” with Internet access at portable toilets.

The iLoo being developed by the MSN division of Microsoft Corp. in Britain is a standard portable toilet — a loo to the English — with a wireless (news – web sites) keyboard and extending, height-adjustable plasma screen in front of the seat.

There would also be a “Hotmail station” with waterproof keyboard and plasma screen on the outside for those waiting in line.

MSN officials say they’re negotiating for the manufacture of toilet paper imprinted with Web addresses that users may not have tried.

“The Internet’s so much a part of everyday life now that surfing on the loo was the next natural step,” MSN marketing manager Tracy Blacher said. “People used to reach for a book or mag(azine) when they were on the loo, but now they’ll be logging on.”

The device is expected to be in use at festivals this summer in Britain, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Tuesday. There’s no word on if, or when, the iLoo will make its way across the pond.

British Airways, Air France End Concorde Thu Apr 10, 9:48 AM ET Add Business – Reuters to My Yahoo!

By Daniel Morrissey and Noah Barkin

LONDON/PARIS (Reuters) – The Concorde began its final descent on Thursday as British Airways and Air France said they would stop flying the world’s first and only supersonic jetliner because flagging passenger demand could not cover its rising costs.

The decision to retire the slender, needle-nosed jet to museums after 27 years of service brings down a potent symbol of Franco-British engineering prowess and the jet-set lifestyles of the rich and famous who flew on Concorde.

“Concorde changed the way people traveled,” British Airways Chief Executive Rod Eddington told reporters on Thursday. “With its going, we must lose some of the romance from aviation.”

But the costs associated with the fuel-guzzling jet had become too onerous for the only two airlines that fly the 100-seat plane. Both carriers said falling revenues and rising maintenance costs was behind their decision.

Air France, Europe’s second-largest airline, said it was halting Concorde flights from May 31, while British Airways, Europe’s biggest airline, said it would stop commercial flights in the days leading up to the end of October.

The plane’s demise comes nearly three years after the crash of one an Air France Concorde shortly after take-off from Roissy Charles De Gaulle airport near Paris in July 2000.

The crash, which killed 113 people, forced both airlines to ground the planes for over a year.

When they resumed transatlantic service in November 2001, the global economy was slowing and the civil aerospace market heading into its worst ever downturn following the September 11 attacks in the United States.

Although the Concorde has always been linked in the public eye to champagne-quaffing, lobster-dining celebrities with money to spare, the reality is much different.

Eddington said more than two-thirds of Concorde’s passengers were business travelers. Falling stock markets, a drought in mergers and acquisitions and weak economies have forced City of London and Wall Street banks to cut tens of thousands of jobs and even high-flying CEOs to rein in their outlays.

“Recently, we were filling only about 20 percent of the seats,” Air France Chairman Jean-Cyril Spinetta told a news conference.

HIGH COSTS, LOW REVENUES

British Airways said retiring its Concordes would result in $130.5 million of write-off costs for the year that ended March 31, 2003, while Air France estimated the cost of retirement at between 50 million and 60 million euros ($64.63 million).

Spinetta said this one-time writedown would be partly offset because the plane would no longer be a financial drain on the company.

He said Concorde had dragged down profits by about 50 million euros in Air France’s most recent fiscal year, which ended on March 31. Operating costs for the plane per seat-kilometere, had surged 58 percent since the July 2000 crash, Air France executives said.

That forced carriers to charge high ticket prices for London-New York and Paris-New York flights, which took under three-and-a-half hours on the supersonic speedster.

The $6,980 average price tag for a Concorde flight from London to New York, which has passengers paying $39 a minute for a three-hour flight, looks a lot steeper these days than it did in recent years of economic opulence.

“The problem at the moment is because of the economic downturn there are far fewer people that are prepared to pay that price,” BNP Paribas analyst Nick van den Brul said.

In addition, spare parts were hard to come by and the planes were in need of constant maintenance.

Pieces of the rudders used to steer the jets, which cross the ocean at up to 1,350 miles per hour, have fallen off in flight at least six times during the past 13 years.

Air France said manufacturers had made it clear that new costly parts programs would have to be launched soon to ensure continued service.

Concorde’s four Olympus 593 engines, designed by Britain’s Rolls-Royce and Snecma of France, are the most powerful pure jet engines on any commercial plane, but consume vast amounts of fuel.

NEXT GENERATION

Eddington said there would be a “significant gap” before the next generation of supersonic aircraft was built, and it would have to overcome the problem of the sonic boom. Regulators do not allow Concorde to fly at supersonic speed over land, limiting its route potential.

Aircraft maker Boeing Co proposed building a jet dubbed the “Sonic Cruiser” that would fly just under the speed of sound at Mach 0.98. But the idea met with little interest from airlines, which instead wanted a more efficient aircraft to save on operating costs.

Instead, Boeing is now developing a mid-sized wide-body jet known as the 7E7, which it says would cut fuel burn by up to 20 percent compared to similar sized jets in the air today.

“There does not seem to be a viable market, at least in the current environment, for the premium service that a supersonic airplane would offer,” said Todd Blecher, a spokesman for Boeing’s Seattle-based commercial jet unit.

Both Air France and British Airways said they would turn over their combined fleet of 12 Concordes to interested museums.

($1=.6435 Pound)

($1=.9283 Euro)

Toy Stories

*If you want to reduce serious adults to silly smiles, ask about their favorite childhood toy – the one they held onto for years, or perhaps still have. Some toys live long beyond the days of boyhood and girlhood.*

*By Ross Atkin * | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Who says that toys are just kid stuff? When mountains of gifts are opened tomorrow in homes across the US, their young owners may discover that they’ve been given passports to a world beyond any they’ve known. The toys they unwrap may transport them to distant stars and faraway countries, to a land of fantasies and imagination, where they get to be astronauts, parents, and kings or queens.

What the young recipients might not realize until much later, though, is how much of an impact those toys could have on their adult lives.

Some playthings nurture, instill creativity, or make tough times easier for a child. But the best toys open the doors to the future by fostering deep-seated interests and talents – and their effects can last for a lifetime.

Just ask Caryn Amster. When she was barely tall enough to be seen behind the cash register, Ms. Amster helped out in her parents’ Wee Folks toy store on 79th Street in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.

Over the years she has seen, time and time again, how profoundly a toy can change a child’s life.

In fact, she is so convinced of the power of child-toy ties that she is writing a book about her parents’ store and the toy memories of some of its former customers.

She recalls two boys who often visited the store and grew up to be engineers.

“Did their meticulousness come first,” Amster wonders, “or did they learn to be meticulous by building these very intricate 450-piece boats, the battleships and sailing ships that came in huge boxes?”

No one can say for sure what the connection is, but it’s generally agreed that the how isn’t that important. The outcome is what matters, and for generation after generation, toys have taught important lessons.

*My first teddy bear*

One of the earliest lessons may be that the world, while a big and strange place, can also be soft and inviting.

Toys allow children to nurture and feel nurtured, according to Dolph Gotelli, who teaches environmental design at the University of California, Davis. That’s why Professor Gotelli gives teddy bears to the infant children of friends. Those bears provide a warm welcome to the world for their young owners, and the comfort they offer can stay with children for years.

Stewart Goodbody, a professional woman in New York, knows this firsthand. Ms. Goodbody received a Velveteen Rabbit on her first birthday and still has it. “Having my stuffed animal for 24 years has been a great source of comfort for me,” she says.

Some children, growing up in turbulent times, find solace and understanding in a particular toy. Weeble Wobbles are a good example. Created in 1969, the egg-shaped plastic people may have looked kooky, but their family ties and counterweighted bodies gave them a lovable quality.

“Weeble Wobbles were absolutely wonderful,” says Rebecca Laurie, a media relations specialist at the University of Denver. “It is the only toy set that I can think of in the late 1970s and early ’80s – during a time of mass divorce and the liquidation of the nuclear family – that seemed to promote family and togetherness.

“The Weebles weren’t perfect. They rolled around if you tipped them over and had two-dimensional faces, almost as if they were clumsy,” she says. But they allowed children to play house and deal with real-life issues while also “being injected into a fantasy world.”

Fantasy worlds, whatever form they take, aren’t just fun for children, they are valuable training grounds, say experts. They give children a chance to try on new situations and develop their values in enjoyable, low-pressure ways.

Take, for example, the Lionel electric train that Richard Culver of Salisbury, Mass., received the year he was 6.

The toy didn’t cause him to grow up to work for a railroad, but it did have a lasting effect on his life in ways he couldn’t have imagined.

It might be expected that it would instill a lifelong romance with rail travel, and that’s true. He takes Amtrak whenever he can, sitting in the back of the train so he can envision a red caboose like those that intrigued him as a boy.

But it was the village he created inside the tracks of his toy train that impressed him the most – and continues to influence where he lives as an adult.

“The village fascinated me – it would change each year in some way,” Mr. Culver says. “It was nothing special, just decorated cardboard houses with cellophane windows, bottle-brush trees, and the essential mirror lake with skaters, all on cotton batting.”

Still, simple as it was, “it formed my vision of what a town should be,” he says. “I’ve never been a suburbs guy. The New England village is still my ideal of the American community.”

*Creating an imaginary world*

Toys such as Culver’s train are important in children’s lives because they encourage them to draw on their imagination and creativity, says Gotelli. In many cases, he adds, such playthings reflect a desire to mimic the adult world.

When Whit Alexander was growing up at the height of the space race, he dreamed of becoming an astronaut. Playing with his Major Matt Robinson action figure, he created elaborate space adventures, using the household pets as “designated aliens.”

His wish to be a space traveler didn’t come true. The Seattle resident instead worked for Microsoft and became cocreator of Cranium, a well-known board game. But he does see the toy astronaut’s lingering influence on his life. “I recently took up flying lessons, and that sort of brings the dream of flight a little closer to reality,” he says.

Gotelli also created living-room “productions” when he was a boy. In his case, the main character was a Howdy Doody marionette, which now hangs on his studio wall. Today, he teaches a class called “Fantasy, Imagination, and Creativity,” and often uses toys from his collection in class discussions. He laments the rise of computerized toys and the demise of those that tap a child’s imagination.

*Connecting generations*

But Gotelli would wholeheartedly approve of a gift like the one Kurt Praschak of Pompton Plains, N.J., received as a child. Most of his boyhood toys have long since vanished, but Mr. Praschak continues to hold onto several hundred toy dinosaurs, many of which were purchased for him by his grandfather.

Through playing with these plastic miniature dinosaurs, Praschak developed a fascination with fossils, and he has passed it – and the toys – along to his 7-year-old son, Derek.

When Praschak was a boy, he felt that the toy figures represented power, excitement, and mystery. “Let’s face it,” he says, “most kids love dinosaurs.”

Even today, he glues himself to the TV to watch Discovery Channel specials on the prehistoric themes and devours news reports about major new fossil finds. “I suppose it all traces back to that old box of dinos,” he says.

Beyond fueling his continuing interest in prehistoric life, he sees the miniature dinosaurs connecting four generations of males in his family. When his son is playing with the toys, he’s “connecting in some way with a great-grandfather he never met,” Praschak says. “I sit in my living room and watch him having an absolutely great time with the very same toys that captivated me decades before. It’s almost like being able to open a door on the past and revisit my childhood.”

*When I grow up, I want to be…*

For some children, however, a toy doesn’t just foster an interest, it sets them on their future career path.

Tom Holland of Calabasas, Calif., can attribute not just one but two careers to toys he received as a boy. A 1964 Sears 8-mm moviemaking kit led to his becoming a television producer. But the nostalgia for a number of toys from his youth also caused him to form Windmill Press, which reprints pages from Sears and Montgomery Ward toy catalogs from the 1950s to 1980s. These are filled with nostalgia-inducing photos of such classics as Betsy Wetsy dolls, light sabers, Twister, and a tea set made from real china.

Toys “help us explore new things and shape our personalities,” Mr. Holland says.

Cynthia McKay of Castle Rock, Colo., loved Monopoly growing up, but was always struck by how some players ended up penniless at the end of the game. As a result, “I decided to attend law school, hoping to work as a pro bono or consumer lawyer, representing the ‘underdog,’ ” she says.

“With my legal background I began a corporation to assist individuals and would-be entrepreneurs hoping to make their mark in life. I finance them with no interest and watch their motivation grow into a viable living.”

Monopoly also made a difference in the life and career of Phil Orbanes of Danvers, Mass. He worked for Parker Brothers for 12 years – serving as chief judge of the US and world championship tournaments during that time – and is currently writing a history of the company. He now owns a classic games company.

Everyone can learn life lessons from Monopoly, he says – especially how to compromise and negotiate. “A player who is obnoxious or a bully or browbeater gets shut out of trades,” he notes. “But the best players handle things with such finesse…. As a result, if you lose to them, you feel like you’ve lost to a worthy opponent.”

*Girls remember ‘boys’ toys’*

There are perhaps as many lessons as there are toys, but in some cases children have learned about the ways of the world from the playthings they did /not/ receive. This was especially true for the girls in past decades who asked for toys they didn’t get.

Instead of chemistry sets and telescopes (often thought of as most suitable for boys), they were given dolls, carriages, and Easy Bake Ovens.

Ann Hatch of Texas, who grew up in the late 1950s and early ’60s, agrees that toys reserved for boys had an impact on young girls that was every bit as great as the Barbie dolls so many owned.

“I’ve always loved space and science fiction, but girls just didn’t get spaceships and ray guns and other cool stuff like the boys did,” she says. “So when I had a son many years later, and Star Wars was at its peak, I relived my childhood through my son’s space toys, movies, and Princess Leia.”

Sharon Hussey of New York City is one of many female baby boomers who, because they received only “girl toys,” reserve their fondest childhood memories for gifts given to their brothers or male friends.

“I loved playing with my brother’s Erector set and chemistry set,” says Ms. Hussey. “I was more interested than he was in those things, but those were considered boy things, and although my parents didn’t discourage me, they didn’t think to get me my own.”

Today, this experience factors into her job as a senior vice president with Girl Scouts of the USA. “My work,” she says, “is focused on making sure that girls feel valued and empowered and that their sense of curiosity and adventure is not constricted by gender.”

As the tomboy daughter of toy-store owners, Amster didn’t have to wait for a brother or male friend to get the toy she wanted. She had the pick of any product in her parents’ business. One of her favorites, she recalls, was a pair of Fanner 50 toy revolvers, which allowed her to play shoot-’em-up games with the boys in the neighborhood. With her toy gun, she could be “one of the guys.”

*Their own wheels*

But somehow the division between toys most suitable for girls and for boys didn’t necessarily extend to wheeled vehicles. Women today, therefore, are as apt to remember a favorite bike as men are.

Ms. Hussey viewed her bike as a surrogate horse when she was growing up in Brooklyn: “I remember the feeling of both adventure and self-sufficiency that came with being able to get around on one’s own.”

Bicycles weren’t the only vehicles competing for girls’ affections. Big Wheels – those funky, low-slung tricycles – were also a big hit. Not the least bit sedate – as most traditional “girls’ toys” could be – plastic Big Wheels practically screamed speed and excitement.

Liza Gutierrez-O’Neill of Boca Raton, Fla., was one of the few girls on her street who owned a Big Wheel, and she recalls relishing the daredevil instincts it brought out in her.

Heather Wilkins of West Hollywood, Calif., took part in Big Wheels competitions against friends for the best “skid out – the longest black mark on our parents’ driveway.” As an adult, she often recalls those experiences, since she handles public relations for Razor Scream Machines, the stylishly revamped “Big Wheels” of today.

Ms. Wilkins wants another generation to experience the same sense of excitement and delight that she did when riding on her Big Wheel – feelings that come from a toy that allows children to dream big and expand their horizons while having a good time.

And that, say experts, is what the best toys are all about. They open up a world of fun, a world of possibilities. That’s why just the mention of them has the power to make adults smile, even decades later.

———–

November 28, 2002 Postcards From Planet Google By JENNIFER 8. LEE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.

AT Google’s squat headquarters off Route 101, visitors sit in the lobby, transfixed by the words scrolling by on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk: animación japonese Harry Potter pensées et poèmes associação brasileira de normas técnicas.

The projected display, called Live Query, shows updated samples of what people around the world are typing into Google’s search engine. The terms scroll by in English, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, French, Dutch, Italian – any of the 86 languages that Google tracks.

people who shouldn’t marry “she smoked a cigar” mr. potatoheads in long island pickup lines to get women auto theft fraud how to.

Stare at Live Query long enough, and you feel that you are watching the collective consciousness of the world stream by.

Each line represents a thought from someone, somewhere with an Internet connection. Google collects these queries – 150 million a day from more than 100 countries – in its databases, updating and storing the computer logs millisecond by millisecond.

Google is taking snapshots of its users’ minds and aggregating them. Like a flipbook that emerges when successive images are strung together, the logged data tell a story.

So what is the world thinking about?

Sex, for one thing.

“You can learn to say ‘sex’ in a lot of different languages by looking at the logs,” said Craig Silverstein, director of technology at Google. (To keep Live Query G-rated, Google filters out sex-related searches, though less successfully with foreign languages.)

Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things. Country to country, region to region, day to day and even minute to minute, the same topic areas bubble to the top: celebrities, current events, products and computer downloads.

“It’s amazing how similar people are all over the world based on what they are searching for,” said Greg Rae, one of three members of Google’s logs team, which is responsible for building, storing and protecting the data record.

Google’s following – it is the most widely used search engine — has given Mr. Rae a worldview from his cubicle. Since October 2001, he has been able to reel off “anthrax” in several languages: milzbrand (German), carbonchio (Italian), miltvuur (Dutch), antrax (Spanish). He says he can also tell which countries took their recent elections seriously (Brazil and Germany), because of the frenzy of searches. He notes that the globalization of consumer culture means that the most popular brands are far-flung in origin: Nokia, Sony, BMW, Ferrari, Ikea and Microsoft.

Judging from Google’s data, some sports events stir interest almost everywhere: the Tour de France, Wimbledon, the Melbourne Cup horse race and the World Series were all among the top 10 sports-related searches last year. It also becomes obvious just how familiar American movies, music and celebrities are to searchers across the globe. Two years ago, a Google engineer named Lucas Pereira noticed that searches for Britney Spears had declined, indicating what he thought must be a decline in her popularity. From that observation grew Google Zeitgeist, a listing of the top gaining and declining queries of each week and month.

Glancing over Google Zeitgeist is like taking a trivia test in cultural literacy: Ulrika Jonsson (a Swedish-born British television host), made the list recently, as did Irish Travelers (a nomadic ethnic group, one of whose members was videotaped beating her young daughter in Indiana) and fentanyl (the narcotic gas used in the Moscow raid to rescue hostages taken by Chechen rebels in late October).

The long-lasting volume of searches involving her name has made Ms. Spears something of a benchmark for the logs team. It has helped them understand how news can cause spikes in searches, as it did when she broke up with Justin Timberlake.

Google can feel the reverberations of such events, and others of a more serious nature, immediately.

On Feb. 28, 2001, for example, an earthquake began near Seattle at 10:54 a.m. local time. Within two minutes, earthquake-related searches jumped to 250 a minute from almost none, with a concentration in the Pacific Northwest. On Sept. 11, searches for the World Trade Center, Pentagon and CNN shot up immediately after the attacks. Over the next few days, Nostradamus became the top search query, fueled by a rumor that Nostradamus had predicted the trade center’s destruction.

But the most trivial events may also register on Google’s sensitive cultural seismic meter.

The logs team came to work one morning to find that “carol brady maiden name” had surged to the top of the charts.

Curious, they mapped the searches by time of day and found that they were neatly grouped in five spikes: biggest, small, small, big and finally, after a long wait, another small blip. Each spike started at 48 minutes after the hour.

As the logs were passed through the office, employees were perplexed. Why would there be a surge in interest in a character from the 1970’s sitcom “The Brady Bunch”? But the data could only reflect patterns, not explain them.

That is a paradox of a Google log: it does not capture social phenomena per se, but merely the shadows they cast across the Internet.

“The most interesting part is why,” said Amit Patel, who has been a member of the logs team. “You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.”

So what had gone on on April 22, 2001?

That night the million-dollar question on the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” had been, “What was Carol Brady’s maiden name?” Seconds after the show’s host, Regis Philbin, posed the question, thousands flocked to Google to search for the answer (Tyler), producing four spikes as the show was broadcast successively in each time zone.

And that last little blip?

“Hawaii,” Mr. Patel said.

The precision of the Carol Brady data was eye-opening for some.

“It was like trying an electron microscope for the first time,” said Sergey Brin, who as a graduate student in computer science at Stanford helped found Google in 1998 and is now its president for technology. “It was like a moment-by-moment barometer.”

Predictably, Google’s query data respond to television, movies and radio. But the mass media also feed off the demands of their audiences. One of Google’s strengths is its predictive power, flagging trends before they hit the radar of other media.

As such it could be of tremendous value to entertainment companies or retailers. Google is quiet about what if any plans it has for commercializing its vast store of query information. “There is tremendous opportunity with this data,” Mr. Silverstein said. “The challenge is defining what we want to do.”

The search engine Lycos, which produces a top 50 list of its most popular searches, is already exploring potential commercial opportunities. “There is a lot of interest from marketing people,” said Aaron Schatz, who writes a daily column on trends for Lycos. “They want to see if their product is appearing. What is the next big thing?”

Google currently does not allow outsiders to gain access to raw data because of privacy concerns. Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly – Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, face lifts. What is interesting in the aggregate can be seem an invasiion of privacy if narrowed to an individual.

So, does Google ever get subpoenas for its information?

“Google does not comment on the details of legal matters involving Google,” Mr. Brin responded.

In aggregate form, Google’s data can make a stunning presentation. Next to Mr. Rae’s cubicle is the GeoDisplay, a 40-inch screen that gives a three-dimensional geographical representation of where Google is being used around the globe. The searches are represented by colored dots shooting into the atmosphere. The colors – red, yellow, orange – convey the impression of a globe whose major cities are on fire. The tallest flames are in New York, Tokyo and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Pinned up next to the GeoDisplay are two charts depicting Google usage in the United States throughout the day. For searches as a whole, there is a single peak at 5 p.m. For sex-related searches, there is a second peak at 11 p.m.

Each country has a distinctive usage pattern. Spain, France and Italy have a midday lull in Google searches, presumably reflecting leisurely lunches and relaxation. In Japan, the peak usage is after midnight – an indication that phone rates for dial-up modems drop at that time.

Google’s worldwide scope means that the company can track ideas and phenomena as they hop from country to country.

Take Las Ketchup, a trio of singing sisters who became a sensation in Spain last spring with a gibberish song and accompanying knee-knocking dance similar to the Macarena.

Like a series of waves, Google searches for Las Ketchup undulated through Europe over the summer and fall, first peaking in Spain, then Italy, then Germany and France.

“The Ketchup Song (Hey Hah)” has already topped the charts in 18 countries. A ring tone is available for mobile phones. A parody of the song that mocks Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for raising taxes has raced to the top of the charts in Germany.

In late summer, Google’s logs show, Las Ketchup searches began a strong upward climb in the United States, Britain and the Netherlands.

Haven’t heard of Las Ketchup?

If you haven’t, Google predicts you soon will.

———–

Company ethics? They’re not our business

Today The Observer introduces a new series to monitor one of the crucial issues facing business today. Here Nick Mathiason argues that while marketing departments have been busy adding a green sheen to keep consumers on board, the concept of corporate social responsibility has rarely been paid more than lip service

Sunday November 17, 2002 The Observer

The image of Greenpeace activists occupying the Brent Spar oil platform in 1995 after Shell planned to dump the installation supposedly filled with toxic ADVERTISEMENT waste at the bottom of the sea sparked international uproar. In the same year the oil giant was accused of propping up a tyrannical regime in Nigeria to protect its interests.

Meanwhile, rival BP was accused of collaborating with Colombian rebels in a bid to further its business interests.

Swiss giant Nestlé has never lived down campaigns against it for aggressively marketing formula milk to women in poverty-stricken countries. And powerful drug companies were severely embarrassed last year by their decision to sue the South African government to prevent it manufacturing cheap life-saving drugs to treat its Aids-ravaged population.

These issues and many like them spawned the phenomenon of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

CSR says that companies aren’t just profit-making machines. They have wider responsibilities. They must treat employees with respect, limit damage to the environment and act with integrity to customers.

Now every boardroom lives in fear of being fingered as guilty of bad practice. A whole industry of companies has sprung up advising firms on how to present themselves in a good light.

Slick marketeers are employed to convince us that a computer donated to a school by a supermarket really makes a difference.

Business may try to present itself with a clean, green sheen to engender confidence and avoid consumer boycotts. But, increasingly critics say CSR is dead.

A recent report from think-tank Demos said companies view social responsibility as a PR exercise.

Speaking to The Observer, the head of public affairs for a leading supermarket chain admitted: ‘We have to be seen to be doing it,’ he said. This could be CSR’s epitaph.

Meanwhile, the Institute of Public Policy Research controversially revealed only four out of 10 company boards discuss social and environmental issues, routinely or occasionally. And only a third of organisations have a board member with an environmental remit, and a fifth have one with an interest in social issues.

Last week, the final blow fell. After six years of promises, New Labour caved in to lobbying from industry leaders and dropped plans for a corporate killing bill.

‘Some level of government will have perceived how this offence will play with business,’ said David Bergman of the Centre for Corporate Accountability, which has campaigned for legislation.

What campaigners from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – mainly charities and campaign groups – are furious about is that companies trumpet token projects in public but lobby Governments to retain favourable trade terms.

‘The Bush administration preaches free trade especially when offering advice to developing countries,’ said Oxfam’s Kevin Watkins. ‘But under the 2002 Farm Act it increased subsidies by around 10 per cent to $20 billion a year. These subsidies are devastating poor countries.’

Watkins argues the Farm Act and ‘the sordid deal’ struck between France and Germany to retain Europe’s protection barrier – the Common Agricultural Policy – at current levels until 2013 amounts to a ‘reckless pandering to the big farm lobby’.

Likewise with an eye to its garment industry, the US has failed to lift import quotas on textiles from developing countries. It’s the same story in Europe.

The independent Commission on Intellectual Property set up by the British government said there is evidence that patent protection by international drug companies is driving up the costs of basic medicines.

Dave Timms of the campaign group World Development Movement said: ‘Business may present a cuddly face but international corporations avoid paying corpo ration tax, the world’s poor still die for lack of drugs and clean water and the earth is still sucked dry of resources.

‘Business isn’t wholly responsible for every global crisis. But it is almost always at the scene of the crime.’

Set against the massive life or death issues in which business is involved, CSR seems inadequate. Partnerships between NGOs and business briefly flourished after the 1999 Seattle riots led to World Trade Organisation talks being abandoned.

But CSR was administered what may be the last rites at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg earlier this year. NGOs felt the US government and multinational companies had destroyed the summit’s goal of alleviating global poverty. There was anger at the slow progress on debt relief and increased aid, plus fudges on meeting renewable energy and climate change targets.

The days of partnership between NGOs and business are over. CSR is dead. Welcome to the new campaign age of corporate accountability: demands for binding rules applicable in every country for decent labour and environmental standards.

The battle between big business, government and campaigners is being raised to a new pitch.

Hard to be a saint in the City

‘On current share trends it pays to be socially irresponsible all the way,’ says one City equity analyst of the stellar performance of arms exporters and some oil companies in the current geopolitical tensions.

But other City financiers are taking a more optimistic view about the overall effect of socially responsible investment.

‘It continues to be the fastest growing area of retail investment,’ says Clare Brook, director of socially responsible investment at Morley fund management. Her team moved to Morley two years ago after being offered a chance to work with all the company’s investments, not just a niche ethical fund.

‘We engage with all companies and they appreciate the anticipation of long-term risks from environmental and social policies. We try to get away from the term ethical. What we’re after is sustainable development, which means good performance on the environment and in human rights,’ she says.

Morley has incorporated socially responsible investment into its company-wide voting policy. ‘We vote against any company in the FTSE that hasn’t issued an environmental report or a FTSE 250 company in a high risk sector. A year ago only a third of FTSE issued environmental impact reports, now 2/3 do. We think our voting policy has been instrumental in this.’

Since July 2000 all UK pension funds have been required by law to include a statement on what their social and environmental investment policy is. Individual companies have been lacklustre in voluntarily reporting their environmental impact. About 80 companies in Britain’s largest 350 companies issued environmental reports in the last year.

Trucost are among a raft of companies hoping to fill the gap. It takes basic information from a company’s published reports and costs carbon usage, water pollution and other ‘negative externalities’ that result from business, but which are normally assumed to be free. The end result is an environmental cost expressed in monetary terms. The next step is to get more specific information on the detail of a company’s operation. Each company’s environmental score is publicly available, the reports behind the score are for the company alone.

Morley scores the FTSE 100 companies with a credit ratings agency style A1 to E5 score.

Now there are signs that investment banks are warming to social and environmentally friendly investment. HSBC and Dresdner Bank have made the running in this area in Europe.

‘Business can either change the way it operates or it faces incredible challenges,’ says Morley’s Brook.

Corporate social responsibility code

· Don’t abuse your workforce.

· Don’t cause unnecessary damage to the environment.

· Ensure members of your supply chain are well-treated.

· Treat your customers with respect.

· Don’t do business with oppressive regimes.

· Don’t let patent protection prevent your products being used in cases of national emergency.

———–

When George W Bush arrived in the White House, it was hardly surprising that he looked after Enron – the company had been looking after him for years. In the final extract of his book, Robert Bryce describes how the firm bought its way into Washington’s corridors of power

Wednesday November 6, 2002 The Guardian

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Surely it’s just a coincidence. What else would explain why Enron Oil and Gas, a subsidiary of Enron Corp, would have been in business with George W Bush back in 1986? Bush the Younger was many things, including the eldest son of the vice president of the United States. A successful oilman he was not. Bush’s forays into the energy business had been nothing short of disastrous. In 1984, Bush had no choice but to merge his faltering firm, Bush Exploration Company, with another company, Spectrum 7. But by mid-1986, Bush had done his magic on the privately owned Spectrum 7. The company wasn’t producing much energy of any kind, and Bush was actively trying to sell again. Despite Spectrum 7’s lousy record, it somehow got into business with Enron Oil and Gas. And on October 16, 1986, Enron Oil and Gas announced that it had completed a well a few miles outside of Midland, Texas, that was producing 24,000 cubic feet of natural gas and 411 barrels of oil per day. Enron owned 52% of the well; 10% belonged to Spectrum 7.

Now, the oil and gas business is full of speculators, and wells are often drilled with multiple investors with varying backgrounds. But the early Bush-Enron connection points out just how small the energy business is. Lay’s ties to George W Bush go back to 1980, when Bush made his first bid for the White House. Bush, who had recently served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, needed campaign funds after his surprise win in the Iowa caucuses. So Lay, who had probably met Bush through mutual friends in the energy business in Houston, gave money to Bush’s campaign. Though Bush didn’t win, Ronald Reagan made him vice president. Bush went on to chair the panel that pushed Reagan’s task force on deregulation. One of Reagan’s biggest moves in deregulation involved the lifting of federal controls on natural gas markets, a move that Lay had long favoured.

When the elder Bush got to the White House, he didn’t forget Lay. Bush rewarded Lay during his presidency with one of the most coveted perks of being a presidential pal, a sleep-over at the White House.

When Bush the Younger decided to run for governor of Texas in fall 1993, one of his first stops on the campaign trail was Houston. During his visit, George W Bush asked Lay to be the finance chairman of his campaign in Harris County, which includes Houston. Lay didn’t take the job. He preferred to give George W Bush a $12,500 (£8,000 at today’s rates) cheque and work behind the scenes. In his stead, Bush’s campaign in the county was headed by Lay’s second in command at Enron, Rich Kinder. In all, Lay, Kinder, and other Enron executives donated $146,500 to George W Bush, almost seven times more than the amount they gave to the incumbent candidate, Democrat Ann Richards. The donations by the execs, combined with money from Enron’s political action committee, made the Houston company Bush’s biggest campaign contributor.

After George W Bush defeated Richards, Enron gave $50,000 to Bush’s inaugural committee. Lay began lobbying Bush almost immediately. In December 1994, before Bush moved into the Governor’s mansion in downtown Austin, Lay began sending him regular letters on energy policy, tax issues, lawsuit reform and other matters. That month, Lay asked Bush to appoint Pat Wood, who supported the deregulation of electric utilities, to the state’s public utility commission. Bush complied with Lay’s request. And later on, Bush would appoint Wood – again at Lay’s recommendation – to the federal energy regulatory commission.

And while Lay maintained close ties to the Bush family throughout George W Bush’s stint as governor of Texas, those connections would be even more valuable to him and to Enron if Bush the Younger could throw the Democrats out of the White House. In December 1999, while Bush was pounding the campaign trail, Lay again wrote to his friend, addressing it to “George and Laura” [Bush’s wife]. “Linda and I are so proud of both of you and look forward to seeing both of you in the White House.”

Lay had been one of Bush’s first “pioneers”, each of whom pledged to raise $100,000 for Bush. He had also made Enron’s fleet of aircraft available to his campaign. The Bush campaign used Enron’s jets to fly to different events on eight different occasions – more than any other corporation. During the 2000 election cycle, Lay contributed more than $275,000 to the Republican National Committee. Enron’s total donations to the party exceeded $1.1million. When the outcome of the election was in doubt after the polls closed in November 2000, Lay and his wife, Linda, gave $10,000 to help finance the Bush campaign’s Florida operation during the recount after the election.

After Bush prevailed in the election (thanks to assistance by the US supreme court) Ken and Linda Lay gave another $100,000 to help finance Bush’s inaugural gala. In all, Enron and its top execs kicked in $300,000 for the inauguration festivities. Naturally enough, the day after the inauguration, Lay went to a private lunch party at the White House, where he got to schmooze with the new president one on one. A few weeks later, Lay had dinner with the president.

It wasn’t long before Enron’s bet on George W Bush was paying off in more important ways, too. Although the California energy crisis was raging throughout his first few months in office in 2001, the president refused – for nearly six months – to consider the possibility that the golden state’s power markets were being manipulated. In some parts of the state, electricity rates had gone from $30 per megawatt hour to an alarming $1,500 per megawatt hour. Rolling blackouts – and threats of blackouts – had the state in a near constant uproar. By the time Bush had spent about 180 days in the White House, the state of California had spent nearly $8 billion buying power on the open market just to keep the lights on.

Despite the crisis, Dianne Feinstein, a senator from California – the most populous state in the union – couldn’t get an appointment with Bush. The White House had plenty of time for Enron, though. On April 17 2001, Vice President Cheney had a private meeting with Enron chairman Ken Lay. During the meeting, Lay offered suggestions for Cheney’s energy task force and lobbied Cheney against price caps in California. Cheney quickly adopted Lay’s argument. The day after his meeting with Lay, Cheney mocked the idea of price caps. He told the Los Angeles Times that caps would only provide “short-term political relief for the politicians.” In late May, Bush visited California and, like Cheney, attacked the idea that price caps – something the California governor, Gray Davis, and Feinstein had been begging for – might help the state restore order to its electricity system.

Bush and Cheney were wrong. Enron and several other power companies had been manipulating the California energy market for months and collecting huge revenues for their efforts. Using strategies with colourful names like Death Star, Get Shorty, Fat Boy, and Ricochet, Enron had apparently figured out ways to play the state’s power system and drive up prices. Finally, on June 18 2001, after weeks of rising intrigue, the federal energy regulatory commission approved limited price caps for California. The move quickly settled the state’s power markets.

Enron’s connections in the White House went much further than George W Bush. The new president’s chief economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, was on Enron’s payroll before going to the White House, earning $100,000 in consulting fees from the Houston company. Marc Racicot, the former governor of Montana, lobbied for Enron before Bush named him to lead the Republican national committee. Robert Zoellick, Bush’s choice for US trade representative, served on an Enron advisory council. Thomas White, Bush’s secretary of the army, was the vice chairman of Enron Energy Services, a money-losing charade of a company. Nevertheless, when White left Enron, he owned more than $25 million in the company’s stock. Bush’s chief strategist and political guru, Karl Rove, owned more than $100,000 of Enron stock when Bush took office.

Bush’s White House provided Lay and Enron with unprecedented access. In addition to the meeting with Lay, Enron officials met with Cheney’s task force (the national energy policy development group) five times and talked to it by phone on at least six other occasions about the measure. Their effort shows. The national energy policy development group’s final report – Reliable, Affordable and Environmentally Sound Energy for America’s Future – released in mid-May 2001, contains a number of provisions very favourable to Enron. For instance, the report recommends the creation of a national electricity grid, a move that could allow Enron to trade electric power more readily in all regions of the country.

The report says permitting for gas pipelines should be expedited, a factor that would help Enron, already one of the largest pipeline companies in the world, build more capacity more quickly. The report talks about the California crisis, the need for energy efficiency, increased domestic natural gas production and, of course, India. Didn’t you know that the cost of butane in Bombay is critical to soccer moms in Seattle? Cheney’s group recommended that “the president direct the secretaries of state and energy to work with India’s ministry of petroleum and natural gas to help India maximise its domestic oil and gas production”.

Not only could Lay get Bush’s ear on appointments, he could get federal reports to mention countries like India, where Enron, with the Dabhol electricity and liquefied natural gas project (also mentioned in Cheney’s report), was a major investor.

To be fair, the energy report also discusses America’s growing reliance on energy from Mexico and Canada. But the state department, which participated in the writing of the energy report, didn’t add the India section; the White House did. Ken Lay’s money on George W Bush had been well spent.

———–

Ten years ago grunge musicians and college-age Cassandras who had never held a day job preached that corporate America would crush their generation’s soul and leave them without a pension plan. Films like Singles and Reality Bites chronicled their transition from college graduate to Gap salesclerk.

A few years later the core of Generation X–the 40 million Americans born between 1966 and 1975–found themselves riding the wildest economic bull ever. Salesclerks became programmers; coffee slingers morphed into experts in Java (computerese, that is)–all flush with stock options and eye-popping salaries. Now that the thrill ride is over, Gen X’s plight seems particularly bruising. No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this. Everything the dot-com boom delivered has been taken away–and then some. Real wages are falling, wealth continues to shift from younger to older, and education costs are surging. Worse yet, for some Gen Xers, their peak earning years are behind them. Buried in college and credit card debt, a lot of them won’t be able to catch up as they approach their prime spending years.

FORTUNE recently encountered the bitter and (now) experienced voice of Generation X in a chain restaurant in suburban Dallas. Age 32 and piercing-free, Karen Doss has found out that the alternative rockers were right. To pay for college she worked full-time as a secretary at Pillsbury world headquarters. After graduation in 1993, she accepted her sole job offer as an advertising copywriter, even though she despised the industry. She finally quit last year to get her real estate license so that she could better support her husband while he fulfills his dream of owning a bar.

Halfway to pension age, she has just $5,000 in a 401(k) and $20,000 in home equity. Ideally, someone her age should have at least $100,000 stashed away. “I don’t have a corporate pension, and they aren’t what they were,” she says. “Social Security is obsolete and ineffective. And I already know that I’m going to have to have a private health-care plan. I’m angry that I can’t seem to get a break.”

Yes, yes, yes, we know what you’re thinking. The free-spending slackers have only themselves to blame, since the dot-com boom should have made them rich for life. On the surface that’s true. A 30-year-old today is 50% more likely to have a bachelor’s degree than his counterpart in 1974 and earns $5,000 more a year, adjusted for inflation. But that’s where the good news stops. He also has more in student loans and credit card debt, is less likely to own a home, and is just as likely to be unemployed. His salary probably topped out during the boom, whereas his predecessor’s rose throughout his career. Social Security will start to evaporate as he turns 50–or before, if the lockbox gets raided–so he’ll have to depend almost completely on his own savings for retirement. The comparison with a 30-year-old in 1984 isn’t any rosier.

Gen X “has done worse than their parents have done according to a number of dimensions, like net worth and home ownership,” says Edward Wolff, a New York University economist who studies trends in income and wealth. In a recent paper Wolff notes that young households lay claim to a smaller percentage of total U.S. wealth than they did in 1989.

Additionally, the inflation-adjusted median net worth of a Gen X household ($9,000) is lower than that of a comparable household in 1989, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.

Silicon Valley and Manhattan aren’t the only stomping grounds for disgruntled young professionals. FORTUNE interviewed more than 50 Gen Xers in Dallas, Louisville, and Seattle, with jobs ranging from construction manager to software engineer (see table). Battered by the economy and the bad luck of being born between Madonna and Britney Spears, they’re Generation Wrecked.

The kids who toted STAR WARS lunchboxes are the most highly educated generation in American history: Almost 60% of Gen Xers have some college education, and 6.6% have graduate school degrees. The Census Bureau calls their pursuit of higher education the “Big Payoff,” since historically a college-educated full-time worker earns 1.8 times more over his lifetime than a high school graduate.

When you can’t find a job or pay your student loans, though, college can seem like the Big Rip-Off. Today, the median student loan debt is at its highest level ever, $17,000, compared with $2,000 when the baby-boomers were in their 20s. According to educational lender Nellie Mae, graduating students average $20,402 in combined student loans and credit card debt. Those who have borrowed to pay for professional school, especially doctors and lawyers, are increasingly likely to have immense debt that is not reflected in proportionately higher salaries. Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed by Nellie Mae had combined undergraduate and graduate student debt of more than $30,000, and for 22%, their loan payments ate up more than one-fifth of their monthly income.

After midnight at a young professionals party in Louisville, Steve Flores, 31, and his wife, Jessica, 32, mingle, while the rest of the revelers line up for last call. Steve is a communications specialist for the party’s sponsor, Brown-Forman, the big distiller. While working full-time, he is also pursuing an MBA. Although Steve worked to help pay for college, five years after graduation he has $40,000 of undergraduate debt to pay off; Jessica, an art therapist and professional harpist, has $50,000 in student loans. “I haven’t started paying back my student loans for undergrad because they’re deferred. I’m not taking any student loans for grad school,” Steve says. He isn’t so jovial when he thinks about the total tab. “We’re dreading the day we actually have to start paying.”

Those Big Payoff estimates rely on what 50-year-old college graduates make today to guess what 50-year-olds will make 20 years from now. That’s not all that useful. “Whereas their parents experienced rising wages over their lifetime, Generation X may not. So college may have been a bad investment,” says Wolff, the NYU economist. Adds Bruce Tulgan, a Gen Xer and founder of RainmakerThinking, a consultancy that studies labor trends: “I had a college president say to me, ‘I don’t know how much longer I can pull this off because people will start to ask, Is it worth this much money to be that much smarter?’ ”

A common misconception is that Gen Xers left college to find work in the dot-com go-go years. Not so. In fact, the climate in which they began working–the late ’80s and early ’90s–was pretty similar to today’s: an economic downturn followed by a jobless recovery. Gen Xers managed to survive in that environment by denouncing long-held workplace tenets like corporate loyalty.

It would take a skilled cartographer to map 28-year-old David Li’s convoluted dash through org charts at both big and small companies. After college in 1996, Li started out as an analyst for Accenture, worked as a health-care IT consultant for two other firms, and then became CTO of Claimshop.com, a medical claims processor.

Now, unemployed for a year and living in Dallas, Li says, “I’m not really looking for an entry-level position. But I need to realize that the job market now is a lot tighter than it had been when I first graduated from school.” He’s looking at jobs that pay around $50,000, 40% below the salary he was collecting at Claimshop. “I’m just hoping for something more along the lines of what you would normally expect to see from someone who has been out of school for four to five years.”

Li will probably find a job–at 6%, the unemployment rate among Gen Xers is around the national average–but he and others are discovering that previous experience means next to nothing. Jenifer Garcia is temping as a bartender in Seattle after having worked as a hardware tester for Intel, a programmer for MSN, and a manager for Barnes & Noble’s online division. Now the 29-year-old is applying for a full-time file clerk position again. “I feel like I’m 18 again, and not in a good way. I’ve gone through all of my savings and moved back in with my mom.”

Even some of Seattle’s dot-com winners have been humbled. Across town in a tonier part of Seattle, Rachel Best-Campbell and Alex Campbell bought their $700,000 house with proceeds from Alex’s stock options. They sold most of their shares of Cache Flow, now known as Blue Coat Systems, at $96. (The company’s stock now trades at $3, after a recent reverse split.) The Campbells’ luck dried up in April, when Alex was laid off, rehired as a contractor without benefits, then rehired yet again as a full-time employee but at a lower level.

After months of wondering whether Alex would have a job, Rachel feels no guilt about getting rich during the boom. “Clearly someone out there had $96 to pay for that share of stock, and they wanted it, and they bought it. My dad likes to say, ‘My 25-year-old daughter–she’s retired now.'”

Those who didn’t fulfill their early-retirement dreams in the late ’90s are beginning to realize that they may be in the workforce longer than their parents. “You don’t find many 65-year-olds working in advertising, so at some point the money must get good enough for people to retire. I don’t know,” says Luke Blackburn, a 32-year-old senior manager at a Louisville advertising firm. Luke has a house–he used money he received as a gift for a down payment–but little in the way of retirement savings. (Total: $0. He should have $50,000. Although he and Doss are the same age, his savings estimate is less since his living expenses are lower.) “I don’t see much future return for investments, either stock or even Social Security benefits. I plan for the kids, but there’s not much room for extra.” Luke doesn’t have a financial planner either. “The brokers only call you if they think you have money,” he says. “They started calling me when they saw my job promotion announced in the newspaper.”

At least the brokers’ attempts aren’t laughable. At a recent Department of Labor summit, a group of the country’s top economists, politicians, and marketers decided that the best way to get Generation X to plan for retirement was through targeted advertising campaigns. Slogans included “It’s your money, it’s your choice, and it’s your future,” “Save for independence day,” and “Wazzup.” Whatever.

Instead of creating catch phrases, the government should focus on creating retirement options that give Gen Xers –and baby-boomers too, for that matter–the flexibility to withdraw money from their accounts if they’re temporarily unemployed, starting a business, or just taking time out, say financial planners. Most important, the retirement accounts need to be portable to match the winding job paths of Gen Xers.

A New York Life Investment Management survey of high-net-worth Gen Xers found that the respondents thought they needed $2 million to retire. Not even close, says Beverly Moore, who conducted the study. A Gen Xer who makes $100,000 and wants to retire at 59 needs $7.3 million net of taxes to sustain that lifestyle. (That means saving $2,600 a month and assumes an 8% return.) The truth of the matter is that very few Gen Xers are saving enough to reach even the $2 million benchmark.

And a return to economic good times doesn’t guarantee that most Gen Xers will reach that level. Remember that many of the problems that existed in the early ’90s including falling real wages and the slow disappearance of the middle class, weren’t erased by the boom. In the case of wages, they only inched up during the dot-com years. (Economists are still trying to figure out why they didn’t rise more. One possibility: the influx of skilled foreign labor.) And of the wealth the boom created, the richest households gobbled up a disproportionate amount.

Back in Dallas, Karen Doss says she’s angry that she hasn’t been able to rely on family, an employer, or the government to help with her future. “The biggest problem with Social Security is that we have no control,” she says. “Sure, you can put your money away, but Enron will not go away, and there is going to be another WorldCom. [Corporate America] will still lie and steal our money.”

So is Karen prepared? On this subject, she does her best slacker impression. “I can’t even tell you how much I have in my 401(k), and I have two of them floating out there with companies. I’m just going to hope it works out at this point. I just wanna die young so I don’t have to deal with it.”

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