No Capitalism Without Conscience

CNN MONEY -- President Bush said today: "At this moment, America's greatest economic need is higher ethical standards, enforced by strict laws and upheld by responsible business leaders," Bush said in a speech delivered to the Association for a Better New York. "In the end, there is no capitalism without conscience, no wealth without character. ... There are more scandals hiding in Corporate America," he said. "We must find and expose them now so we can begin rebuilding the confidence of our people and the momentum of the markets. ... Responsible business leaders do not jump ship during hard times ... do not collect huge bonuses when the value of their company dramatically declines ... do not take on tens of millions of dollars in compensation as the company prepares to file for bankruptcy, devastating the holdings of investors. (07/09/02)

Does Ethics Require a Belief in God ?

Ed Brownlee writes: The objection that ethics needs god seems to depend on at least three questions: can altruism evolve?; can ethics be developed without a perfectly ethical model or modeler?; and is ethics not so different from other human behaviors that it must be of a non-human origin?  (07/09/02)

Forgiving Myself

Noel Frederick McInnis writes: My serenity of whole being is forsaken in the same place that it is otherwise realized, within myself rather than in my outer world. The honking horn itself was neither upset nor distracted. All upset and distraction originates and sustains its existence in me, not in any stimulus that may evoke it. None of the incidents in my life is causal of my response to it. My reactions and responses are caused by me, albeit often unconsciously according to established patterns of habit, rather than by the effects to which I attribute them. This is indeed fortunate, for if the state of my own being were dependent on the state of the world around me . . . well, as they say, “There goes the neighborhood.” (07/09/02)

Interview with Stephen Wolfram

New York Times -- Could you try to explain your big idea?  One of the big things that I ended up discovering is that the intuition that had been my intuition -- and I think everyone's intuition -- isn't the whole story. When we see a lot of complicated things in nature, it's our standard intuition that there must have been a lot of effort that went into making that thing. Because when we do engineering, when we see things in everyday life, our impression is that to make something complicated takes a lot of effort. The fact that it's possible to have a simple computer program that makes something very complicated is sort of counter to our normal intuition. One thing that I hope will happen as a result of the science that I've done is that people's intuition will gradually change. For me, it took probably 10 years to internalize this -- and I probably haven't fully internalized it yet.  (07/09/02)

The Rich Lost 2.6 Million Million Dollars in 2001

CNN NEWS -- LONDON, July 8 (Reuters) - Rich investors on both sides of the Atlantic lost $2.6 trillion -- or six percent of their wealth -- in 2001's plunging markets, according to a survey. The mountain of assets wiped off in just one year is roughly the size of the entire private banking industry in Switzerland, where wealthy client assets managed by banks are estimated at between $2 trillion and $3 trillion. ... The rich are alarmed by the wealth destruction and are becoming risk averse, shifting to cash and money market funds, it said. (07/09/02)

The $64, 000 Question on Natural Gas

Petroleum and Natural Gas Watch -- "So, the $64,000 question is this: can the natural gas industry ever again settle into a price range that can stabilize supplies without causing an economic train wreck? Unless and until that question is answered in the affirmative, it is not possible to lend any credence to official projections that call for increased supplies of natural gas, many more gas-fired power plants, and vigorous growth in GDP along the lines of the previous decade’s expansion." (07/09/02)

Merk & Co. Claimed $14 ,000,Million Dollars in False Revenue

CNN MONEY -- Merck & Co. shares tumbled Monday after a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by the company revealed that more than $14 billion, or 10 percent, of revenue reported since 1999 was never actually collected by the company. ...  "For a company such as Merck to reflect as revenues in its financial statements billions of dollars of co-payments a customer makes directly to another company, the pharmacy, which the pharmacy collects and never remits to Merck, just does not reflect the economics of what is occurring," the paper quoted Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant at the SEC. "If that is what the SEC accepts, then investors are in trouble and our financial reporting indeed needs improving," added Turner, who is now an accounting professor and director of the Center for Quality Financial Reporting at Colorado State University. (07/09/02)