Author: A.T.

From Gilman Miller: “You wrote recently of a couple who never earned more than $70,000 a year, yet retired a couple of years ago, aged 62 and 60, with a net worth of $3 million. Assuming they both worked for 40 years, they retired with more money than they ever earned working! And that is assuming the 70k combined income peak was a constant (which it surely was not) and that they paid no taxes on that 70k (which they surely did).”

A.T.: Since the average after-tax income over their lifetimes would have been a lot lower than $70,000 (salaries were a lot lower 40 years ago) – maybe just half $70,000 on average, after tax – Gilman notes that they retired with more than double their entire lifetime earnings.

Gilman Miller: “The problem,” he continues, “is that most people would see this and either assume it was untrue, or that they lived in miserly denial for 40 years, or that they lucked into buying Berkshire Hathaway back when you first wrote about it. In other words, that this is unattainable to most of us or simply not worth the sacrifice. It is attainable and it need not rule out having fun and even indulgences. Keep spreading the gospel and the rule of 72!”

A.T.: Put $4,000 a year into a Roth IRA and manage to compound it for 40 years at 12% and you will have $3 million. Of course, $3 million 40 years from now likely won’t buy what $3 million does today, which is why you will want to save and invest even more if you can (and to fully fund your 401(K), if one is available to you). But Gilman makes a good point.

That Rule of 72 he refers to, for those new to it, is simply that you can estimate how fast money will double by dividing its rate of growth into the number 72. Money growing at 4% takes 18 years to double, at 7% just a tad over 10 years, at 12%, 6 years. (“Why does this work? No one knows,” I once wrote. “It’s a rule.” Whereupon all the mathematicians descended on me like e-mail pigeons in a cyber version of Hitchcock’s The Birds.)

Enough with the gloom and doom already. (If you missed them, the last three columns have been about Year 2000.)

Faithful reader Bill Nagler offers us this important news:

While leading the Friday evening services, the Rabbi noticed a member of the congregation, Bernie, walk in with a St. Bernard. The Rabbi, horrified, asked the Cantor to continue the service and went over to talk to Bernie.

Rabbi: "What are doing here with a dog?"

Bernie: "The dog came here to pray."

"Oh, come on." says the Rabbi.

"YES!" says Bernie.

Rabbi: "I don’t believe you. You are just fooling around; that’s not a proper thing to do in temple."

Bernie: "It’s true!"

"OK," says the Rabbi (thinking he would call Bernie’s bluff), "then show me what the dog can do."

"OK," says Bernie. He nods to the dog.

The dog proceeds to open up the barrel under his neck, removes a yarmulke, a tallis and a prayer book, and actually starts saying prayers in Hebrew. The Rabbi is so shocked he listens for a full 15 minutes.

When the Rabbi regains his composure, he is so impressed with the quality of the praying he says to Bernie: "Do you think your dog would consider going to Rabbinical school?"

Bernie, throwing up his hands in disgust, says, "YOU TALK TO HIM! He wants to be a doctor!"

I promise to get back to some jokes, but Y2K is sufficiently important I thought we should give it one more day before moving on (temporarily).

Have you begun making harmless contingency plans and laying in an emergency supply of essentials you probably won’t need — but just in case you do? Now, when it’s easy, is the time to do it.

From Brian Schiel: “I’m working as a contractor on a Y2K project at the University of Michigan. This is my second Y2K project, and you can count me among those in the Y2K alarmist camp. You’ll find an excellent paper about the embedded systems Y2K problem at www.tmn.com/~frautsch/y2k2.html. It explains, better than anything else I’ve read, why embedded systems are going to cause more and more problems as we approach the Year 2000.”

From Craig Hagstrom: “All programmers agree the Y2k problem is simple. I recently worked for a company that went broke waiting for companies to flood in to us, bearing code to fix, but they never came because fixing the code is too easy to need outsourcing. It’s not the fix, but the testing that kills you.

“It’s grimly funny to hear a computer science major tell you how simple it is to fix, when their system consists of perhaps 4 programs running against a database of 200 test records spread over half a dozen tables and using 3 record definitions. That’s the kind of sample database you get when you buy Microsoft Access, or similar PC databases tool. They can patch their 4 programs, write and run a quick program to expand a field in their database, and they’re ready to go again. And they can shut down their little application any time they want to, to do such a restructuring.

“The problem gets big when you have 500M records spread over 200 tables using 150 record definitions, all on a system that cannot be out of action for more than 30 seconds at a time. The FAA … law enforcement … the phone company. Scaling up from the preceding paragraph, such a system might take (say) 5 weeks of pure run time to restructure the database and load new versions of the programs. But if the system has to keep running at the same time, then you’re looking at perhaps 6 months just to PLAN the changes, another 4-6 months to plan how to test the thing, and two or more years to implement. The problem is exponential, which is why the IRS has tried 3 or 4 times to rewrite its systems and failed every time. It’s too darn big.

“We are about to hit panic mode in the world of commerce. As the first big failures hit unprepared companies, the rest will get religion real fast. (Go read Cory Hamasaki’s description of the Jo Anne effect at www.kiyoinc.com/current.html) Since there isn’t enough time left, you’re going to see hurried fixes that are not tested at all. You are going to see an amazing amount of fear in the next year, with managers grasping at any possible escape. The major disruptions from year to 1/1/2000 will come from (1) Y2k errors involving forward-looking date calculations, and (2) simple programming errors from rushed and untested Y2k ‘fixes.’”

From Jerry Holsinger: “While you claim that there are intelligent and knowledgeable people on both sides of the Y2K problem, the only ones that I know of on the ‘it’s all hype side’ sound pretty naive when you read what they write.

“For what it’s worth, I have a Ph.D. in E.E. from MIT and have been involved with hardware and software development for over thirty years, though I am not a programmer. I have software that I developed to manage my own investments which has severe Y2K problems. As a result I have enough background to understand why Y2K has the potential to be a severe worldwide problem, which I believe it will be. I also know from first hand experience how hard it is to get non-technical people to understand and believe that Y2K is a serious and real problem.

“Please do not spoil your outstanding effort on the Y2K problem by publishing further information that only makes the work of people who are serious about the problem that much harder.”

From Ken Shirriff: “Interestingly enough, my bank’s online access is not Y2K compliant. Their web code is written in JavaScript and can’t be more than a year old, but they didn’t deal with Y2K. The web page asks for the date as 6 characters MMDDYY and rejects any request that has YY < 70. The code has the comment: ‘check that year is not before 1970.’ Obviously this will break in 2000 if they don’t change the code by then. (The bank, by the way, ignored the email I sent them about this.) The two points of this example are: a) It’s easy to write non-compliant code in any language, not just Cobol. b) People are still writing non-compliant code for applications such as banking, even with all the attention on the Y2K problem lately.”

Continuing yesterday’s comments …

From Walt J: [In answer to someone who had said Y2K is mostly hype by overpaid consultants out to whip up hysteria to drum up business …]

“Blaming consultants for so-called Y2K hype is the intellectual equivalent of blaming doctors for disease, meteorologists for hurricanes, geologists for earthquakes. These are the folks who have worked with the problem the most — and they would make far more money if they shut up and just let things fail than by pointing out the magnitude of the problem.

“There will be failures, and a tiny number of them can have devastating consequences because the number of coded dates and embedded systems is so damn large. Anyone familiar with the software metrics literature (e.g. Capers Jones) knows how fragile most software is, and how difficult it is to fix.

“I’m almost out of the stock market, except for some serious hedging (LEAPS – both puts and calls) and some formerly out-of-the-money OEX LEAPS — puts — that have become very profitable in the last few weeks. In this market, the best offense is a good defense.”

[A.T.: LEAPS are long-term options. Pretty much like regular options, but extending out a year or two instead of just a few days or months.]

From David Eddy (some of whose work can be found at www.y2ktimebomb.com): “A fundamental problem with computers/systems is that they’re really seen as an impediment to advancement thru the management ranks. Techies only go so far. And when the managers see themselves advancing without understanding even the basics of systems, the learned message is that systems & techies are just commodities to be swapped around like used cars.

“When I entered programming fresh out of college in 1970 at a Boston insurance company (though I am eternally grateful for the solid technical training & experience I gained) it was screamingly obvious that business management there had abdicated responsibility for the systems. And over the past 28 years things have really only gotten worse. So now the maintenance bill is coming due for this structure we’ve been building non-stop for 50+ years & there’s no sinking fund, no plans & no one really understands where the critical weak points are.

“Big problem. Bummer.

“No question that the hype surrounding the speculation about what will or will not happen come January 1, 2000 (personally, I’m thinking things will be very quiet) is out of control & will get MUCH worse.

“And this is not to deny the fact that Y2K is a major problem. Just ponder these numbers:

– 12,000 IBM MVS mainframes (‘big iron’)
– 40,000 IBM DOS/VSE midrange
– 400,000 IBM AS/400 midrange
– 500,000 DEC VAX midrange

“That’s just the hardware [that all needs to be checked out and fixed as needed] & ignores vendors such as Wang, Data General, Prime, Computervision, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Perkin-Elmer, Control Data, Bull, and dozens of others.

“One final item. Have you ever spoken with a software development person who’d actually worked on an on-time, on-budget project? Seen even MightySoft deliver products on time?”

From Roleigh Martin: “One of your letter writers is very ignorant in thinking embedded processors do not pose a problem. I’ve written widely on the problem. Please see my published articles, speeches, web pages, at my web site: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roleigh_martin

“Also, visit the G-8 Countries Y2K Virtual Conference on Y2K (link at my home page) — I’m one of the 30 some invited Y2K experts worldwide participating in this conference that resides on the internet on an ongoing basis.”

From Terri Reid: “One of things I like most about explaining Y2K is the fact that people can find out for themselves. When I first heard about Y2K, I was a little frightened — it seemed almost overwhelming — then I decided to do a little digging on my own. I e-mailed the public affairs office of my local electric company — a little company here in the midwest called Commonwealth Edison. The public affairs official e-mailed me back and asked me to call him later that week. (I’m a freelance writer in the area, so I had a little bit of clout.) I called him — he wasn’t in, so I left a message. He returned my call the following week and told me that he couldn’t talk to me about it over the phone — but the ‘gals in the Rockford office’ were typing up a letter for me. That really perked up my interest. I thought, if there was nothing to worry about — if they were Y2K compliant — he could talk.

“I finally received a letter from Comm Ed stating that they were aware of the Y2K problems in their system (Oh, goody!) and they were working to correct them. Their goal is to have the problems fixed by 3rd quarter 1999 (I suppose they couldn’t say 4th quarter because people might begin to panic). Then, as I was talking to the city reporter for our local paper — who happened to have interviewed this P.A. guy in person — he commented that he was told, sure we might have the problems fixed, but we won’t have done any testing yet. Comm Ed also announced last month that they are trying to sell all of their power plants by spring of 1999. Hmmmmmm, kind of convenient — don’t you think?

“Anyway, my New Year’s 1999 plan is to sit at home and watch Dick Clark’s smiling face as the ball slowly makes it way down in Times Square and then wait for the T.V. screen to go black. I’m making sure I have plenty of candles, wood for the fireplace and a generator full of gasoline. My best advice is — check it out for yourself — that’ll really make you jump into action.”

A.T.: Well, candles, firewood, tuna, a generator — I think these are sensible precautions. They make us all stronger — bought today, not in December 1999 — as households, neighborhoods and a nation, even though most of the stuff will likely go unused. (But they’re also good for hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, Homer Simpson-like industrial accidents — you name it.)

I don’t see a whole lot of reason for most of us to panic. I would like government agencies and businesses all to be quietly panicking, however … or whatever level of concern is the closest to panic that still allows you to think and act rationally. I hope every police department, every fire department, every phone company, every railroad, every power company (especially those!), and all the rest are quietly but fervently working their brains out right now to make Y2K as close as possible to a non-event. (And not just here: planetwide.)

From Richard Routh: “I enjoyed your article ‘How Real Is Y2K?’ published on September 03, 1998. I used to think about Y2K as does Krishna Kunchithapadam when I first heard about the problem. I used to think as you do when I had spent only about 100 hours studying the Y2K problem. The more I studied (about 1000 hours now), the more convinced I became that we are headed for an unavoidable and complete societal infrastructure meltdown. My background includes: (1) Ph.D. in computer science, (2) former adjunct advisor to Reagan’s Cabinet on Artificial Intelligence issues, (3) last six years spent as CEO of an advanced computer technologies company (The GINESYS Corporation). It is interesting to note that those who have studied the problem the most are either the most concerned, or they are greatest advocates of emotional, irrational, platitude-ridden arguments of euphoric hopefulness (denial). Kinda scary, isn’t it?

“If you spend time re-assuring people now that they do not need to take RADICAL steps to provide for their families’ survival, I predict you will spend the rest of your life regretting the misdiagnosis the way a physician does when he misdiagnosis cancer as something minor — only in your case, you have a much larger audience. Please proceed with caution.”

More tomorrow.

With all the focus on an improper White House dalliance, it’s easy to lose sight of a couple of other items of note: the unlikely but possible global economic meltdown and – even harder to get a grip on – the possible difficulties 14 months from now when all the 999s on time’s odometer turn to 000s.

Like most of you, I am a babe in these woods. Like most of you, I don’t think anything really terrible is going to happen. (Having lived through many of them, I don’t count a recession, for example, as terrible.) But even those of us who are just essentially powerless spectators make a serious mistake, I think, if we don’t take precautions – and now, or soon, when it’s the easiest thing in the world to stock up on a couple of month’s emergency supplies just in case. If you missed my broad, non-technical rationale for this, please click here.

Today and tomorrow: Insights from folks much more competent than me.

From Dan Frerking: “I am a software developer for a small insurance company in the midwest. I also have a 4 year degree in Computer information Systems. My expertise is in Oracle, Cobol and C programming languages. We are wrapping up our Year 2000 project of which I was in charge of the coding part. I was amazed how much of our software was not compliant including the operating systems of our UNIX, NT, and Novel servers, and our phone switch. Just about everything needed to be upgraded or changed. We were lucky. We are only a 4-year-old company with very recent hardware and very modern tools.

“Krishna’s comment that any compentent [sic] CS grad student can fix all Y2K problems in matter of days is laughable.”

A.T.: Dan has a lot more to say, some of it technical, some of it pretty simple – and scary. To read it, click here.

From Fred Holborn: “I’ve done extensive research on Y2K and found that having lots of smart people working on it doesn’t insure success. Check these out. Then check your pulse …

DoD: High Ramp to Completion
www.dtic.mil/c3i/y2k/slides_1998/sld005.htm

DoD: Some mission-critical DoD systems will not be Year 2000 compliant
www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun1998/n06301998_9806303.html

DoD: How will the Defense Department’s 30,000 computer systems react as Jan. 1, 2000, begins ticking?
www.defenselink.mil/news/Jul1998/n07021998_9807023.html

DoD: Y2K Standard Briefing:
www.dtic.mil/c3i/y2k/slides_1998/july1998.ppt

Navy: The U.S. Navy and the Y2K Challenge: Answering the Bell
www.cnoy2k.navy.mil/NY2K/document/SOCOM/Default.htm

DoD: A National View of Nuclear Deployment
www.dtic.mil/c3i/y2k/slides_1998/sld024.htm

From Bruce Chapman: “Your thinking on Y2K tracks pretty well with George Gilder, one of our senior fellows, who also is a sponsor and the moderator of a forthcoming national conference on the public policy issues of Y2K. [A.T.: It was September 24. But you can get a sense of it by visiting the Web site at the end of Bruce’s message.] This is the first conference that puts the full public policy agenda on the table. Chairs of the House and Senate Y2K committees (Sen. Bennett, Rep. Horn) and the White House Council on Y2K will be there, as well as a host of state officials, business people, techies and writers.

“Here’s the problem (in addition to the Grand Canyon of marbles analogy you cited): With the Clinton sex scandals and Asian stock market flu absorbing the news, the important is being driven out of public attention by the immediate. We run the risk of public opinion going straight from Bill-Gates-Will-Fix-It to We’re-All-Gonna-Die. Which, as you say, is not constructive.

“We plan to air some public policy solutions, not the least of which is that media and responsible politicians AND CORPORATE LEADERS (who typically are taking a go-it-alone stance) have to move this problem way up the agenda of governmental interest – in Congress, yes, but especially in the Administration.

“You can check out the conference at www.discovery.org.

“P.S. I first had the Year 2000 problem pointed out to me when I became director of the U.S. Census Bureau in 1981 and took my initial tour of the mainframes. We all laughed about the problem ‘someone’ was going to have in 19 years!”

Tomorrow: More (but soon: Gummi Bears)

__________________________________
continuation of Dan Frerking’s comments:

“A normal Cobol system can have several hundred modules. Some of them are what I will call ‘Main’ programs that have what we call ‘Copy books,’ which are small pieces of code, or file descriptions. They also ‘call’ other Cobol programs. For Krishna, it is kind of like a Header and a Library in C. Cobol can get its data from several sources, either a database like IBM’s DB2 or a unique COBOL database file called VSAM ‘Virtual Sequencial [sic] Access Method.’

“If you are lucky and the data source is DB2, and the date columns are numeric 6 (YYMMDD), you can alter a table in the database and add columns to hold the entry and create a new index using it without affecting the programs that use it. This will solve half of the problem – storage. The other part of the problem about the programs will be discussed later.

“If you are not that lucky and using VSAM, and the dates are stored YYMMDD, records are physically stored like the following. Notice how 99 is bigger than 98 but 00 is less than 97.

“The obvious thing to do is to expand the field to numeric 8, and add 19000000 to them. That is great, but every program that uses this file will have to be recompiled with the file description changed. If not, they will abort at runtime. When you recompile them, any intermediate dates will have to be lengthened, any screen input dates will have to be lengthened, any date validation will have to be changed, all report programs will have to be changed, any strange date logic will have to be changed.

“Now, multiply this by several hundred dates in several hundred ‘Main programs’ and several hundred ‘Copy books,’ and several hundred ‘Called programs.’ And one more thing … they all have to come up at the same time with no bugs!!!

“It gets a lot more fun if source code is either lost or an old version. The place I used to work had lost the correct version of one of the Called programs. When I recompiled these programs and tested them, the payroll checks were coming out at $5,000 for 40 hours a week for a data entry operator. The data entry operators thought I was doing a great job, but the boss was not amused. It took two weeks of trial and error to get it working correctly again. I could not imagine how long it would have taken if the code was lost.

“I would also like to dispel the myth that it is mostly a COBOL problem. Most programs including MS Access 2.0 and Oracle’s Developer 2000 tools have problems. Look at their web sites if you do not believe me.

“Oracle is the 2nd largest software company in the world. Their main product is their database, but they also make tools that are used to develop client server applications, and are increasingly focusing on the web.

“Oracle has been marketing their tools as Year 2000 compliant. While this statement is true, it is not as cut and dried as that. The truth is as recently as a couple of years ago when you install Oracle on your server by default the date format is DD-MON-YY, this causes a little problem. If you type in 01-JAN-00, and the current date is before 2000, it interprets the date as 01-JAN-1900. If it is 01-JAN-2000, and you type in 31-DEC-99 it interprets it as 31-DEC-2099. The fun part is, it writes it to the database this way, so if a Y2K compliant program reads it, then the results will be wrong.

“There are several work arounds for this problem, including upgrading to a ‘Date enhanced version’ that they just released, and changing the date format to interpret it differently, but they both include going through every program and physically changing any non year 2000 code i.e. anything that says DD-MON-YY.

“It only takes missing one little problem in the middle of one program to corrupt your database. What is bad about this is the problem will show up on the compliant programs, and not in the one with the bug.

“I am not an authority on other newer products like Visual Basic and Paradox but I have heard they may have these same problems. It is not the products themselves that are not year 2000 compliant, but the way they are being used.

“As for embedded chips … I can think of at least one example of how a date may cause a chip to fail. The scenario is dependent on this assumption. An embedded chip has storage parameters like this.

‘flag’    one character in length
‘date’   2 characters in length
‘flag2’  1 character in length

and so on…

“If the logic in the chip either adds 1 to a 99 or gets the number of years since 1900 (something like tm_year for you C programmers) then what will happen? 100 will be put into the date field resulting in an overflow, and 0 put into flag2. Now what does flag2 do? And what does 0 mean to the chip? Shut a life support system down? Open a valve in a nucular [sic] power plant? Shut off fuel to the jet engines? I do not know. It may not do anything, but the possibility is there.

“What does all of this mean? It means there is a real problem out there. And we should not be listening to any cocky student who does not have a clue about what he is talking about. It also means that everyone that wants to maintain our high standard of living that this country enjoys, should be doing everything possible to ensure that their organization can survive. If we do not take this thing seriously, then the topic of conversation in the soup line in March 2000 will be ‘hey remember when the Dow was only down to 7600?’ and ‘Do you think it will top 500 this week?'”

Well, here’s a way to do two great things at once. It doesn’t seem to be fully developed or kink-free yet, but it’s an intriguing idea … and it can’t hurt to try it: www.charitymall.com.

The idea is to link you with whatever online store you’d go to anyway, but to get there through the Charity Mall. Why? Because many of these online merchants currently pay commissions to Web sites that funnel customers to them. And the Charity Mall proposes to pass 100% of those commissions on to the charities of your choice.

One such destination, which pays as much as 15% to its associate Web sites, is Amazon.com.

Readers of this column certainly know I am a fan of that company – I recommend it all the time (and also barnesandnoble.com, which is equally good). But readers also know I think the stock has probably been wildly overvalued, or else, at least, way ahead of itself. So I’ve been short.

I send them business but hope the stock will fall to more reasonable levels.

So, as I say, here’s a way to do two great things at once. Access amazon.com not directly but through www.charitymall.com, and you will (a) cost AMZN yet another 15% of its already thin margin, upping its loss-per-transaction even higher, and (b) shunt a little cash off to a good cause.

The caveats here are several:

• In the first place, from the look of it, the Charity Mall is just getting started. Who knows whether it will manage to get its act together? I’m told there are some other similar sites (I haven’t seen any), but they take a piece of the action. The Charity Mall proposes not to take a dime, earning its keep, instead, from advertising. So it’s possible that, with best of intentions (or at least I sure hope they have best of intentions), somehow the deal won’t work out as planned. Still, you lose nothing by getting to your various online merchants through the Charity Mall, unless you had some other way of getting, or directing, the donation of these commissions.

• Also, though 100% of its sales commissions goes to charity, as I write this, the list of Charity Mall charities is very small, and you seem only able to direct your gift to “the general fund,” which spreads the largesse (which I have a feeling may be something like $42 thus far) over all of them. Indeed, they have links to far more online merchants than charities right now. (But that’s OK: It’s actually kind of helpful to see the array of possibilities.)

(A much more impressive, albeit still young, site is www.charityweb.net. It has charities signed on ranging from the Salvation Army of Southern California to the Young Entomologists’ Society, Inc. of Lansing, Michigan, – “We provide young people, parents and educators with a combination of programs, publications, and educational materials that enrich their insect and spider studies through dynamic, innovative, and enjoyable learning experiences.” And from India Partners (Christians empowering self-help projects in India) to Sacramento’s Happy Tails Pet Sanctuary. In addition, this site offers to do a lot of useful things for your local charity, so check it out. But only 50% of the loot from Charity Web goes to charity.)

Anyway, if you thought it was tough for AMZN to make money selling you books at 30% off … by activating the associates rebate, you force them to try to make money selling them at, effectively, 45% off. Helloooooooooooo, stock drop!

And if you believe that charity begins at home, you could set up your own Web site (easy!), join Amazon’s associates program (free!), and get those 15% rebates for yourself.

Or do what I do: Find your way to Amazon through my Web site, andrewtobias.com (still in its fledgling stage, and so far designed mainly to give folks an easy way to find this Web site).

I placed the AMAZON logo prominently on my site, because the more books you buy from them, the more money I think I will make – two ways.

Say 1,000 of you felt like buying a $20 book this week and chose to buy it from Amazon – but reached Amazon by clicking its logo on my site. That would be $3,000 out of Amazon’s bottom line and into mine. And with the stock selling at 1,000 times hoped-for earnings, that $3,000 hit would chop $3 million off the market cap. If 50,000 of you bought a $20 book each week for a year, that would be $7.8 million extra for me and (using the same fanciful calculation) a $7.8 billion hit to AMZN’s market cap (bringing the stock down past zero, at recent prices, and my small short position well into the black).

All of this is just playful, I hasten to add. If you’re going to direct your online commissions to anyone, it should be charity, not me. And I have grudging affection and respect for Amazon. The company gives all indications of being much too smart to be gamed past the point it wants to be – when the time comes to stop buying market share and start earning profits, my guess is that Amazon has as good a chance as any to flip that switch successfully.

But for now – heck. Fifteen percent is 15%. “Use it or lose it,” as a friend of mine used to say.

Let’s say you wanted to find a really inexpensive way gradually to drive your customers insane. Here’s what you would do. First, you would find a vaguely Hawaiian sounding endless loop of a saccharine melody. Then you would put it onto the Musak-like system of all your airplanes. At the same time, you would put it on the endless loop of the endless wait customers experienced when calling in to make or change a reservation. Then you would just keep it playing, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over – YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda – for three years.

Or if it hasn’t yet been three years, it certainly seems that way and, at this rate, will stretch into all eternity.

You would tell yourself you are building an unmistakable aural brand environment – YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda – when in fact what you would be doing is gradually driving all your customers slowly out of their all-too-frequent-flying minds.

And what of Delta’s poor flight attendants? And what of Mozart and Haydn and Gershwin?

YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda; YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, YadayadayadaDAAA, YadayadayadaDUHHHH, dadadda.

Has Delta Airlines no compassion? I would like its executives to have to hear that music every morning for an hour on the way to work. Surely things would change within a week.

Mike E. writes: “I just got back from vacation and saw your column with the footnote about $5 million in bonds and how preposterous that would be to most of us. Well, my parents have lived their entire lives using principles you recommend. They live below their means, buy used cars, buy in bulk, and invest for the future. They retired two years ago (ages 62 and 60) with an estate in excess of $3 million. They must have been doctors, lawyers or some other highly paid profession, right? No, my mom was a public school teacher and my dad was a factory worker. Their combined salaries were never more than $70K a year. They did have a few good stock picks and a long bull market to help their money grow, but it was their consistent saving over a long period of time that made them well off. Anyway, now most of their money is safely in bonds.”

A.T.: Warms my heart. What else can I say?

Who says vibrant political debate isn’t alive and well in America? Your reactions to my comments fell on both sides, vaguely in line with the latest polling numbers:

“Today’s article is as poorly reasoned as any defense of President Clinton that I have read. But then arguments by analogy, such as you have made, will almost always disappoint. The differences between the alleged perjury of the tobacco executives and the President’s alleged perjury are too many to detail in one short message. Here’s the obvious one. The President is elected to lead the nation and is the primary agent of law enforcement. When he broke the law and lied to the electorate, he destroyed the trust that is the very foundation of the office. Tobacco executives do not possess the same public trust and so should not necessarily be held to the same standard. One can reasonably argue that they should or should not be held accountable, but one cannot reasonably argue that they must be held to the same standard. You will find that arguments based in logic or evidence serve you better than such a weak comparison.” – Tim Lash

“This is the greatest thing you’ve ever written. Here’s another one: Why is it always the same people that claim to be against regulations (of, say, guns) that go to such great lengths to regulate what we can see and hear? I don’t get it. I thought they hated regulations. I thought regulations were for liberals. Right? Unless, of course, we’re talking about a radio show with a few dirty words, or a movie with a little too much of that dirty-birdy ‘sex’ stuff. Then, I hear nothing from these guys about ‘imposing on personal freedoms.’ Then, it’s just fine to regulate and impose. I guess a gun, which can blow a bunch of people’s heads off, is of far less danger than a film projected from a wall. I guess guns don’t kill people, Howard Stern kills people. I guess, maybe this is a blatant double standard. What a shock.” – Joshua Rasiel

“What enrages me about the Bill/Monica ‘thing’ is the flagrant hypocrisy of both the press and you liberals concerning the sexual harrassment aspects of it all! Remember the feminazis outrage during the Thomas hearings, the Packwood lynching, and the drill instructor’s execution? We conservative males just ‘didn’t get it!’ But it sure is quiet now, isn’t it, from these same folks! Now it’s ‘consensual sex is ok’ (so was the drill instructors), now it’s ‘a private matter, we don’t need to know!’ It’s enough to make me want to throw up!” – Mark D. Witte

A.T.: Before you throw up, Mark, bear in mind that most of us liberals think Clinton should be the first president in the nation’s history to be censured. (Andrew Jackson was censured, but later the censure was repealed.) That’s not entirely nothing.

“I now better understand my inclination (along with millions of other Americans) to support President Clinton in this sad situation. No, I am not a liberal Democrat, as you most likely are. I HAD always been proud of my Republican bias. NOW, I am not so sure. Back-lash? I think so!” – JR

A.T.: Not to disappoint, but I actually don’t think of myself as a liberal Democrat, but rather as a “DLC Democrat,” also known as a “new Democrat.” The DLC has been chaired by such folks as Governors Bill Clinton and Roy Romer and Senator Joe Lieberman. There’s probably not a lot of difference between a new Democrat and a liberal Republican – say, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld.

“He is not perfect?? Give me a break!!! It is truly amazing that I read this line of crap from so many investors. What is obvious is that you are only protecting your bottom line instead of looking at what is best for the United States. It is so important to you that the stock market remain stable and your portfolio increase that you are willing to accept a president that has committed perjury, and had sex with an intern in the oval office. Hello, could you have sex with one of your subordinates and get away with that??? Hello, could you lie after taking an oath to ‘Tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth???’ You are pathetic, stand up, be a citizen, don’t hide behind your stock.” – Aaron Pugh

A.T.: Thanks for your perspective, Aaron. I know passions run high on this topic, and I’m happy to hear your point of view. I’m sure you’ve considered the downside to impeachment versus censure. (I do think censure is appropriate – and as the first in the history of the nation, it’s not a small thing.) The precedent impeachment would set could prove unfortunate. But, that said, I don’t fault those who think resignation or impeachment is appropriate. My column only meant to point out that those people had better also be incensed about the tobacco CEOs and the congressmen who protect them, or else they’re being pretty dramatically inconsistent (in my view). Yes, we should hold the president to higher standards than a tobacco CEO. Then again, lying to Congress about an issue that has caused massive death and suffering seems to me several orders of magnitude greater than lying about an affair. After all, I think Clinton pretty well signaled the voters from the get-go that marital fidelity was not his first strength (to put it mildly), yet he was elected then – and reelected after any voter with a brain must surely have realized it wasn’t his second or third strength either. No one disagrees that what he did was wrong. The only issue, I think, is which – censure or impeachment – is the appropriate response. My column merely suggested that those who come down on the side of impeachment should also be calling for the resignation of a lot of tobacco-perjurer-protecting congressmen – and that if they are prepared to call for that, then their position is consistent and I respect it.

“I do think the tobacco CEO’s should be jailed for what they did. I disagree with you on Clinton. I do not care about his Sex life, and think he denigrates the office beyond repair in this time when most people believe all politicians are barely better than criminals.” – Roly Hughes

“I agree with you completely and I am from a tobacco state. I have already communicated to my congressman, a personal long-term acquaintance, that his actions in this matter have convinced me that he is not the person I want representing me and my neighbors.” – Terry Hough

“My Dad died with emphysema, and I remember the lies those tobacco men told. I saw them. Please note, that although I said he died with emphysema, I did not say that he died from emphysema. He committed suicide because he said he could no longer deal with the pain. So that 400,000 number is definitely off. There are many suicides that need to be included. For those claiming Christianity, I’ll say one thing to you. Matthew 7:2.” – Marie

#

You sent lots more messages, pro and con – thanks for both. Perhaps the most intriguing one came from Robert Brown. (Going to prove, yet again, that the insights you all send me are a lot more interesting than the ones I send you.) I’m not saying I fully understood it, but it grabbed me. He wrote:

“I fully agree with you. As a student of biological evolution, I am regularly humbled by the absolutely foundational force of ‘selective attention.’ Imagine any life form being unable to discriminate between molecules. Now, as eons of discrimination have delivered us to our modern high-strung state, the chief challenge may well be the avoidance of having our selective attention hijacked by various parasites with narrow visions not in our interest. (Not to mention our own bungling use of these potent tools!) The game remains unchanged: plucking sustenance/advantage from a sea of noise/poison.”

“Can you offer any profound advice about buying puts, as a small percentage of my portfolio, on a company which gets a bump in price on ridiculous takeover rumors? I’m thinking of 3Com, which will not, under just about any circumstances, be taken over by either Cisco or Intel. It seems if I bought a few puts I could make a little bit of income. These options trades are very complex and confusing (a good reason, actually, to stay away). Incidentally, my recent interest in options is all your fault! This is what my successful shorts of the Internet sector (Amazon finally gave in) has done to my already considerable ego. And you started me on it with your Amazon article – despite your frequent admonitions to stay away from options.” – Jeffrey Scwarz
A.T.: Knowing nothing whatever about 3Com, here’s my profound advice: Be careful. But puts are obviously much safer than shorts, and with a SMALL amount of money, you will only lose a SMALL amount of money. (Shorting 100 shares of the wrong stock at the wrong time could, by contrast, cost you a fortune.) Over the long run with puts and calls, you are likely to have lots of small losses, some big gains, lots of commissions, taxes, and tax-time paperwork. You will, in short, over the long run, lose a bit of money. But any entertainment has its cost – Super Bowl seats don’t come cheap, and neither does a lifetime of betting on Super Bowls.