Amazon and Queens: What Happened?

“Amazon on Thursday canceled its plans to build an expansive corporate campus in New York City after facing an unexpectedly fierce backlash from lawmakers, progressive activists and union leaders, who contended that a tech giant did not deserve nearly $3 billion in government incentives.” – The New York Times, February 14

That was the story.  How did it get to that point?

We start with Amazon’s 14-month-long search for a second headquarters, which we were led to believe had the honest objective of building it from the ground up.  In November that company announced that it had not chosen the likes of Baltimore, Little Rock, or Salt Lake City, but gone with perhaps the most obvious location, from which it extracted an agreement for $3,000,000,000 in subsidies and tax savings.  That fetched the remarkable amount of resistance, ostensibly about the money but under the surface as much or more about Amazon’s strength, the strange concern that the 25,000 new or brought-in jobs with average annual compensation said to be $145,000 were not unionized, the bad side of gentrification, and the catchall concern of “income inequality.”  Then Amazon suddenly backed out, saying that “a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward.”

Many were in favor of the project.  They included both Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, most owners of nearby Long Island City, Queens businesses of all sizes, nearby public housing residents hoping the area’s jobs situation would improve, many others around the city and state, and the Times Editorial Board, which, despite having decried the deal in a November 14^th piece, called Amazon’s withdrawal an “embarrassment to the city” and “an opportunity lost,” and said that as a result the city could get “a reputation for the smugness of its politicians and their hostility to business.”  De Blasio was particularly loud and colorful in showing his anger at the cancellation, saying that day that “you have to be tough to make it in New York City,” and writing a piece, published two days later also in the Times, including the unchosen solution of “if you don’t like a small but vocal group of New Yorkers questioning your company’s intentions or integrity, prove them wrong,” calling Amazon’s move a “capricious decision to take its ball and go home,” saying that “they didn’t want to be in a city where they had to engage critics at all,” and that “a project that could’ve opened a path to the middle class for thousands of families was scuttled by a few very powerful people sitting in a boardroom in Seattle.”  Amazon has now stated that they will not build this second head office anywhere, but will instead enhance their existing and planned locations.

So, who won and who lost?  The largest winner was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a U.S. representative not even of that district, who spearheaded the opposition and took center stage in what, when combined with the proposed Green New Deal and Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid and quick fundraising, has been a sudden burst of activity from the leftmost part of the Democratic Party.  Local community activists in general and specifically, who now know what they can do, also benefited. 

From there, though, almost everybody lost.  Amazon, who seemed arrogant anyway in choosing New York after its seemingly-necessary-only-to-milk-it search, now also comes off as petulant, spoiled, and oversensitive.  As put by Doug Herendeen, show host for WRTA Radio in Altoona, Pennsylvania, they may now be replacing Walmart as the large company people on the left most love to hate, which is quite an achievement, especially for a firm, per Kevin Roose, with a “bedrock” principle “that being loved by customers is all that matters.”  Cuomo, de Blasio, and New York City, who now all seem like impotent bystanders, also lost heavily. The people of Long Island City, Queens, the city, and New York state, since per de Blasio will not have their employment, infrastructure, or cost of living issues helped by the withdrawal, were defeated as well.        

Where will we go from here?  There will be fewer large subsidy offers for a while, but I doubt they will go away permanently, as the appeal of bringing in good jobs is just too strong.  The Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez Democrat wing will continue getting attention, and will garner more votes in next year’s presidential primaries than we would have thought a month ago.  And Amazon, though reviled now by many more, will keep cruising along – a cherry on the top of this debacle was the news four days later, per Niall McCarthy in Forbes, that “Amazon Paid $0 In Federal Income Taxes Last Year.”  That on $11.2 billion net profit, and the difference between the “statutory” 21% corporate levy rate and the $129 million “tax rebate” they received, actually giving them a negative levy, is $2.48 billion in Amazon’s favor.  Whether they get the last laugh, though, is very much unknown.

Slowbalization – More Causes Than You Might Think, and Clear Employment Effects

Another good drawing festooned a provocative article late last month.  This, on the cover of the January 26^th-February 1^st Economist, was of a snail with its shell replaced by a view of Earth and the title “Slowbalisation – The future of global commerce.” 

In the unbylined piece, and its summary in the Leaders section, we see that that word, “coined by a Dutch writer,” has been apt for the past few years.  The authors say that we can already talk about “the golden age of globalisation,” which ran for 20 years ending in 2010, and that it “was something to behold,” when shipping and telephone call costs came way down and “business went gangbusters.” 

The reasons it is not now the same go well beyond the current White House occupant, or even similar pseudo-populists in the likes of Poland and Hungary.  Per the authors, goods-moving rates have stopped falling, services are often impossible to transport, more parts are being made nearer their consumers, and “multinational firms have found that global sprawl burns money and that local rivals often eat them alive.”  “Cross-border bank loans” have plummeted from 60% of 2006 GDP that year to 36% recently, and “gross capital flows have fallen from a peak of 7% in early 2007 to 1.5%,” both largely caused by more cautious lending attitudes from the Great Recession.  Other metrics down from 2007 include trade in goods and services as percentage of GDP, intermediate imports as the same, the percentage of profits “multinational,” and the share of S&P 500 companies’ sales from other countries.  Even services that can be done remotely are not crossing borders as much as I, anyway, had expected, with information technology positions still often turning up near the top of lists of most promising American careers.  Accordingly, instead of, as it may have seemed, the Trump administration working to bring vigorous intercountry trade to a screeching halt, its tariff actions, instead, have had a “fragile backdrop.”

The real problems with slowbalization go beyond damaging people benefitting from cheaper and better products.  They include, per the authors, cutting emerging countries’ selling opportunities, impeding solving international problems such as immigration and tax avoidance, and helping China to “win regional hegemony faster.”  Although globalization has been one of the three largest factors of the permanent jobs crisis, even if it were to disappear completely automation and efficiency would stop manufacturing and easily optimizable service jobs from returning to anything like their 1950s ubiquity. 

Here are a few pertinent observations, some old but all valid.  The frequency and amount of international trade has not moved only in one direction even for the past several decades, let alone over centuries.  Tariffs are stupid, and cut prosperity in unmeasured ways much more than any job creation or often-in-vain-anyway job preservation adds to it.  As we saw with the auto industry in the 1980s and 1990s, overseas competition is one of the best drivers for American companies to improve their products.  Although its evidence is now in latent demand instead of official unemployment, our country has excess capacity in workers.  These four realities apply no matter what the world trade situation.

How can we expect American jobs to be affected by slowbalization?  The current unhurried downward trend for service providers will not accelerate but will continue.  They will be temporarily shored up in areas protected by tariffs.  They will improve for people connected with Canadian or Mexican trade, and worsen for those working for companies exporting elsewhere.  As shifts in trade laws generally involve treaties and negotiations, change will not be quick, so even if there is an overall reversal of anti-globalization attitudes, it will take years to see its results.  Yet, as with the weather, if you don’t like the current situation, wait – it will change. 

Intense Fostering of Workaholism: The Latest Ugly, Depressing Business Fad

The top two-thirds of the front page of the January 27^th New York Times business section showed a bold picture.  Drawn in red, yellow, and black Soviet-mural style, it had three present-day, youngish adults, holding a portfolio, a smartphone, and a computer tablet, at attention and indicating support for something, with, below them, a commuter train and platform and in large letters “TGIM!” (Thank God It’s Monday).  The headline of the Erin Griffith article said “Drudge Report,” and the next largest type asked “How did millennial workaholism become an aspirational lifestyle?”

Before I get into this piece, I’ll tell you what it got me thinking about.  I worked for 14 years, 1988 to 2002, in AT&T information-technology-related cubicle jobs.  I was outstanding at such fringe attributes as organizing and managing my time and work, focusing my efforts, and accomplishing a great deal, to the point where I wrote and was paid to give a presentation on those things titled “Ten Free Hours a Week.”  The one thing I did not do, though, was work extra hours.  While my management occasionally postured about a general need for the likes of me to do that, they never required it, and I was never admonished either formally or informally for not staying longer.  The mini-analysis I did showed that, even if such behavior meant more pay and a slightly higher chance of promotion, it would have an expectation of only a few dollars per hour.

However, many of my peers took a different approach.  Some were in the office – working from home was then only emerging there – sixty or seventy hours per week, the overage unpaid of course, and made sure that everyone knew that.  Productivity and performance, in that environment where constructive criticism was rare and supervisors seemed to ignore differences between employees, varied absurdly – in fact, I once told my boss that I was doing from two to ten times as much work as any of my five similar-job coworkers.  People took divergent views on what tasks they should be doing, a critically important judgment area in a setting with little outside control.  I cannot determine how much my or their approaches hurt or helped them, but never saw any correlation between hours worked and promotions received.

Time worked, though, varies with companies.  I was there not long after Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems became infamous for people being expected to work extra-long hours.  And while some set expectations for that during hiring, it was and is informal pressure that drives that. 

That brings me back to the article, which showed how forcefully some of today’s cubicle workers are being persuaded to put in more time.  According to what Griffith wrote, the main perpetrators are not only specific CEOs or proprietors, such as multiple-business owner Gary Vaynerchuk, but a commercial workspace provider.  Apparently, if your office is in a WeWork facility, you are treated to throw pillows, neon signs, and even cucumbers in water coolers bearing messages such as “hustle harder,” and “don’t stop when you’re tired.”  The piece is lacking in any indication of how many people live this way, but WeWork’s count of 400,000 tenants, and its $47 billion market valuation, mean that it’s more than a few.

So what are the problems with that?  At the top of the list is what I thought of over and over while reading the article:  the philosophy is self-serving.  One37pm, Tesla, and Quora, three companies Griffith cited, would prefer to hire fewer people by getting dozens of unpaid hours from those they get, representing massive savings.  Another is confusion between the founders’ efforts, which are entrepreneurial, and the employees’, which are not.  Working for a fast-moving new company does not make you an entrepreneur – if you want that, you can start one of your own.  Business owners put in huge amounts of time, which they accept since they have a chance of earning not something like $140,000 per year plus benefits but multiples of that, or, if at a smaller scale, making a living from doing something they fully control.  (We cannot validly compare these expectations to those given new lawyers motivated by the business-ownership rewards of firm partnership.)  If they, per a former Yahoo CEO, “are strategic” about sleep, bathing, and even trips to the bathroom, that is toward knowing that they, not their management or business owners, will fully benefit from everything they achieve.  The language Griffith relates is full of such independent-firm references, most insidiously Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk exhorting his non-business-owning employees that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”  Extra benefits such as bringing in lunch food and providing ping-pong tables, while of value, are transparent efforts to maximize work time.  Hiring a mercenary third party, whether WeWork or another, to push long hours is ultimately cowardly.  And even the slogan is wrong – if you are working seven days a week, what is significant about Monday?

As long as there are businesses, there will be crazes.  In 1970’s Up the Organization, Robert Townsend torpedoed “synergy” by calling it “a business fad like hula hoops, which holds that two plus two makes five.”  After an appropriate if ineloquent barnyard epithet, he said that “two plus two usually makes three, and you know it.”  To name more, in the 1980s we had adoration of anything Japanese, before we found out that that country’s success was illusory and unsustainable; in the 1990s, unrestricted telecommuting got us less work, when employees who could not succeed in environments designed for getting things done went home to their handpicked distractions.  And here we have another. 

If this “hustling” propagates, what will happen?  People will burn out, and what would have been company-beneficial 20-year careers won’t make it to five.  Businesses will lose lawsuits, when juries determine that heart attacks, strokes, and other excessive-stress results were their fault.  People will write reams of articles and stacks of books, devastating cubicle-job employers in general as well as the specific companies involved.  We may even see France-style legal restrictions on what workers can be required to do outside of normal business hours.  And even production will be a disappointment, as the studies, showing that hourly work accomplished after 45 or 50 per week first drops off then crashes, are verified.  The trend, if this is one, is as detrimental as any business fad I have ever seen – let’s hope for all of our sake that it does, indeed, go the way of hula hoops.

The January Jobs Report: After Sorting Through the Disclaimers, It Looks Good, But the AJSN Says Latent Demand for Work Was Up 1.3 Million

Before we consider the data, we need to look at the caveats the Bureau of Labor Statistics put on this morning’s Employment Situation Summary.  They were “workers who indicated that they were not working during the entire survey reference week and expected to be recalled to their jobs should be classified as unemployed on temporary layoff… However, there also was an increase in the number of federal workers who were classified as employed but absent from work.  BLS analysis of the underlying data indicates that this group included federal workers affected by the shutdown… Such a misclassification is an example of nonsampling error and can occur when respondents misunderstood questions… If the federal workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work had been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate would have been slightly higher than reported.”

Whew.  I think all that means that the data, understandably and almost perforce, did not accurately reflect the government shutdown.  So, what did it apparently tell us?

First, it showed a second straight huge gain in nonfarm payroll positions, 304,000.  Second, the official seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate rose 0.1% to 4.0%.  Third, unadjusted joblessness, up 0.7% to 4.4%, showed not only the large seasonal difference between December and January, but the greater optimism of those not working that they might be able to do that, and other factors beyond those two.  The measures of how common it is for Americans to be working or strongly trying to work, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, each increased 0.1%, to 63.2% and 60.7% respectively.  Private nonfarm payroll wages went up only 3 cents per hour, less than inflation but closer to that than last month’s jump, to reach $27.56.  The count of people unemployed for 27 weeks or longer sat at 1.3 million.  One change we can disregard for now is the 400,000 burst in those working part-time for economic reasons, or looking to increase their less-than-full-time labor hours, to 5.1 million, an unknown but doubtless substantial share of which almost certainly reflected idled full-time government workers with side ventures.

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the measure which shows how many more positions could be filled if all knew that getting one were as easy as getting a pizza, returned to within 45,000 of its January 2018 level, or up 1.27 million from December’s, as follows:

The largest changes to latent demand since last month were one million more from those technically jobless, followed by a 171,000 hike from people wanting work but not looking for it for 12 months or longer.  Compared with a year before, nothing changed much, with the largest worsening from those in the just-mentioned category, and small but meaningful improvements in those unemployed, those not wanting a job, and those in the military, in institutions, or off the grid. 

How can we evaluate January’s data?  The picture, though fuzzier than usual, is still there.  The 304,000-job gain, which blew away published estimates of 172,000 and 165,000, should have little to do with the government shutdown.  The supporting numbers are generally consistent with good times, with more people, if not yet getting jobs, changing their statuses to ones closer to that.  Otherwise, we will need to look at February’s data – if, of course, the government is fully open at BLS survey time.  In the meantime, through the fog, I saw the turtle take another step forward.     

How and Why Does the World Need to Rethink Retirement?

A piece came out in the December 4^th New York Times with a title intriguing to me.  Unfortunately, Katie Robertson’s “Why the World Needs to Rethink Retirement,” after presenting a list of things it would be nice for retirees to have, became only a compendium of the current Social Security and Medicare equivalents in nine other countries – useful, but hardly suggesting revolution.  So how can we do that?

Until around 1860, Americans worked as long as they could, so there was no such thing as routine retirement.  The first such law was passed in 1861, allowing most naval officers to stop working at age 62.  Thirteen years later, a railroad, the Canadian Great Trunk, implemented the first North American private business retirement system.  In the 1880s, German chancellor Otto Von Bismarck created a state retirement program which was the first major plan to use the age of 65, which, as life expectancy there was then 45, had a rather different significance.

According to one source the proportion of American men 65 years and older working dropped steadily from 68.3% in 1890 to 41.8% in 1940, though another claimed observers disagree on how much, if at all, the rate of labor-force participation in older men declined between 1875 and 1935.  The same proportion for women followed no clear pattern, fluctuating between 6.1% and 8.3% from 1890 to 1940.  The largest single American retirement plan started in 1920 for 500,000 civil service workers.  Later in that decade, retirement became commonly viewed as a tool to reduce unemployment, and in 1935, implementation of the Social Security Act served to start the current era of aging.

Employment rates for older men dropped for the next several decades, but all who retired did not stay that way, as about 25% of those retiring from 1969 to 1973 had worked again for at least some time by 1979.  Around that time there was a backlash, with older people wanting to work equating their situation with those of blacks and women, wanting freedom with a lack of discrimination.  Serious concerns about retirement in general also characterized those years, with some thinking it was inefficient and economically destructive.  During the economic expansion of the 1980s and 1990s, more attention became paid to older employees in both commercial and academic sources.

Over the past few years, per Robertson’s article, the two main directions of national retirement programs have been toward closing gaps in coverage and increasing eligibility ages.  In most places, employer-provided pensions have become much rarer, though self-funding options, now in Canada, Australia, and The Netherlands as well as here, are appearing in more places.

While officials more uniformly recognize that some type of national retirement plan is necessary, they also are loath to allow all of the extra time from increased life expectancy to go toward sponsored idleness.  But retirement has still gathered a lot of that – while, despite a recent American dip, lifespans are near all-time highs almost everywhere, typical retirement and pension-onset ages are sometimes slightly higher than 65 but frequently lower.  The examples Robertson cited were 56 for men and 53 for women in Brazil, as low as 60 but going up to 62 for France, 60 for women and 65 for men in Great Britain, as low as 60 in Canada, 65 years and 6 months in Australia, 65 years and 7 months in Germany, 66 in The Netherlands, and still 65 in Japan.  With longevity at age 65 now eighteen years in the United States and higher elsewhere, since Bismarck’s time retirement lengths have jumped; as of 2010 the chancellor, to get the same relation between retirement and death times, would have to set the work-stopping age at 98. 

So where should we go from here?  Clearly, much older people should be fed and covered for health expenses, and, with the physical significance of being 65 today hardly the same as a century ago, postponing benefits is at least justifiable.  The difference between the mid-20^th-century situation and now, though, is that there is less demand for employees.  As above, a major reason for implementing Social Security in the 1930s was to cut back the number of workers, and if we were to start Medicare and other payments at, say, age 70, that would be the equivalent of increasing it – so let’s keep retirement age increases modest.  As well, the baby boom generation, perhaps more than any other, has blurred the line between main career and retirement years by not only working later but working off and on – that trend should continue with later cohorts.  Health care expenses have reached the point where it is somewhere between aggressive gambling and outright recklessness for most people middle-aged or older to not have insurance coverage, and Obamacare or whatever program replaces it seem likely to continue for all.  Accordingly, retirement is losing its meaning – and that is how the world, ready or not, will need to rethink it.          

A Perception Problem of Large Felines, and Other Species

In the Big Cat Republic, deep in the wild jungle, two different types of animals live together.  The lions and leopards generally get along well, often sharing dens and living happily ever after, and the laws call for them to have equal rights. 

For generations immemorial, though, that had not been the case.  Leopards had generally been considered inferiors, even by those in their own species.  The Big Cat legal system reflected that, and lions enjoyed much more freedom.  In particular, leopards were prevented, formally or strongly informally, from pursuing many ways of getting food, which the lions could do to the limits of their abilities and ambitions.  Lions often convinced leopards that they were incapable of doing the things they themselves did, and, through tradition along with the strong inertia characterizing interspecies change, that remained the way for untold ages.

Relatively recently, though, they had had a revolution.  When today’s elders had just finished their cubhoods, many leopards and a remarkable share of lions began publicly questioning the interspecies status quo.  Leopards should be equal, they said.  In a remarkably fast turnaround, laws were put into place, and, in far less than half of a normal leopard or lion lifespan, leopards were guaranteed the same privileges and opportunities as lions.  In the Big Cat Republic, it became the law of the land that leopards could hunt or gather edibles in all ways allowed to lions.

Of course, after untold generations of tradition, not all lions or leopards internalized the changes.  Many lions still tried to stop leopards from getting the food they wanted.  When their actions were overt, they were found in violation of the law and penalized.  Large numbers of leopards, themselves, had been reared in a different world, and continued acting as if they were limited, while others avidly pursued the food acquisition techniques denied to their ancestors.  In the meantime, lions were not only free, but were still expected, far more than for leopards, to get as much food as they could. 

As the interspecies revolution became solidified, lions and leopards wanted to know how they, compared to each other, were faring in general.  Overall statistics showed that leopards, who were getting an average of two-thirds as much food as lions soon after the laws were changed, were still only at four-fifths half of a lifetime later. 

Was this a problem, and if so, what was causing it?  Lions and leopards disagreed within and between themselves, but predominant communication said that it must be because leopards were still being discriminated against.  Other statistics, though, told a different story.  More leopards than lions, the numbers said, made life choices to seek food in ways that were easier, safer, less stressful, more personally fulfilling, and gave them more time to do other things.  Perhaps more than any other factor, many leopards sharing dens with lions continued to let them gather most of the food.  As a result, leopards, again on general average, lived almost 10% longer than lions, something treated as a fact of life by both and never, even by lions, publicly cited as evidence of unfair treatment. 

As the evidence became clear, and more and more lions and leopards with modern attitudes replaced those with others, did the Big Cat Republic animals make their peace with the issue and recognize the disadvantages and advantages accrued by leopards as mainly a matter of valid personal choices?  Unfortunately not.  Leopards with the rearing and preferences to point them toward being equal hunters with lions showed no understanding of why others were not the same – it seemed incomprehensible to them that many of their fellow country-leopards preferred to raise cubs, feed in less life-dominating ways, and depend more on lions.  As a result, they continued publicizing the food gap and maintaining, despite the laws being firm and penalties severe, they as a species were still being heavily discriminated against.  They were either unaware or not admitting that when equally prepared for and focused on getting large amounts of food, there was no statistical gap between them and similar lions.  And many lions and leopards following this issue, as susceptible to logical fallacies as were certain tall simian bipeds, believed that, despite small and ever-shrinking amounts of true inequity against leopards (and not all Big Cat interspecies discrimination went in that direction), that was obviously the cause. 

Will the good felines of the Big Cat Republic end this worry?  I hope so.  And if they do, maybe there is hope for Americans to properly understand earnings differences between the sexes.

December Jobs Data: Another Strange but Good Month – Per AJSN, We’re Now 15.8 Million Jobs Short

The headline number in this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was indeed an eye-grabber.  With economic and governmental turmoil and a sharply dropping stock market, I thought the projection of 177,000 net new nonfarm positions was high.  Not only was it not, it was more than 100,000 short, as that came in at a huge 312,000. 

Did the other numbers follow?  Not like that, and in many cases not at all.  Both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted unemployment were up 0.2%, at 3.9% and 3.7% respectively, with the adjusted number of jobless up almost 300,000 to 6.3 million.  While the labor force participation rate gained 0.2% to 63.1%, the employment-population ratio sat at 60.6%, meaning the outcomes were split for the two statistics showing how common it is for Americans to be on labor’s front lines.  The count of people officially jobless for 27 weeks or longer held at 1.3 million, but those working part-time for economic reasons, or holding on to part-time opportunities while looking unsuccessfully so far for full-time ones, fluctuated to 4.7 million, down 100,000 after going up twice that last month.  The second most striking change, though, was also positive, as private nonfarm payroll wages were up 11 cents per hour, or about double the inflation rate, to reach $27.48.

The American Job Shortage Number, the measure showing latent demand for work, was hurt by rises in both the numbers of unemployed and those wanting opportunities but not looking for them for a year or more, and increased 328,000, as follows:

Smaller but substantial offsets to the AJSN’s upsurge were changes in the count of those discouraged, off 78,000, and a crash in the number of those in the armed forces, in institutions, or off the grid, over 1 million lower.  Compared with a year before, the AJSN is down 446,000, helped most by about 250,000 fewer unemployed, 100,000 fewer discouraged, and 2.6 million out of the miscellaneous category above. 

Was December a good month?  With that stunning gain in jobs, certainly.  Was it a great month?  No, not really.  The rises in the unemployment rates, which seem caused by the common good-times effect of more people joining the labor force than can get work, do not bother me.  My cause for concern is, despite clear-cut overall prosperity, visible in several of the fringe numbers, specifically long-term unemployed, working part-time for economic reasons, not wanting a job, and, more than anything else, the over 3 million claiming interest in working but not seeing fit to look for it for a year or more.  The lack of progress in these areas say that our continued employment growth is leaving too many people behind.  It does no good for those past the half-year mark of collecting unemployment benefits (or seeing them end), proving themselves at short-hours positions while getting nowhere at working as much as they want, or keeping themselves on the shelf despite harboring hopes of finding something suitable which never seems to materialize, to read about opportunities elsewhere, in other industries, or at other levels.  What is happening with these people needs more attention.  In the meantime, though, the turtle, once again, took a step forward.