June 18, 2003

Time
So one artifact of the Globe being owned by the Times is that we get articles in the former that sound like (and, indeed, are authored by the staff of) the latter. Case in point: War of the Weeks. Concluding thoughts include:

You are free to ignore daylight saving time or set your watch locally to the noonday sun. But then how will you arrive on time to meetings, or get your children to school before the bell?
I've tried doing this for the last year or two, and am creeping toward success. The end of daylight savings every fall always seems like a plot hatched to make me tired, and to hide the sun from me. One comes home one day to find that he's missed sunset already, and soon one wakes up, goes to work, and returns from work all in the dark. The sun, it is rumored, continues to rise most days, but this does no one who has an indoor job any good. So I start setting the alarm an hour early, promising myself I'll go to bed an hour earlier, maybe go for a run or something in the evening before the sun, which I'll presumably get to see for an hour, goes down. I have not yet made it through to March.

On the other hand, parenthood is going to make it all completely pointless, what with babies not knowing much about daylight savings, nor the existence of nighttime, nor the joy of sleeping in (nor through the night), and so forth.
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D
Total neophyte (non-)economists like myself just completely freak out when we hear stuff like this, by William Greider in the Nation:

Some financial insiders are not persuaded by the official statements. One told me that only three or four of the key decision makers on the nineteen-member Federal Open Market Committee take the deflation potential seriously--those who closely followed the slow-motion unwinding of Japan. By comparison, the more visible fiscal debate in Congress is utterly out of sync with present reality, since both parties are dodging the "d word" and its implications. The White House, I am told, is deeply worried in private, but won't say so for fear of adding to the public's anxieties.
Which doesn't conflict with what they were saying at the World Economic Forum last year. Maybe a Ph. D. in economics would be fun. Oh, wait, I can't afford not to work...
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