Tom Friedman is taking a three-month sabatical!!!

Article in today's NYT puts a face on rising interest rates in an interview with Joyce Diffenderfer who has $16,000 in credit card debt: "Unless there is a sizable jump in rates, let's say two percentage points within a year, I'm not going to think much about it," said Mrs. Diffenderfer, 47, who earns $14 an hour fielding customer calls at Kunzler & Company, a manufacturer of sausages and frankfurters in this southern Pennsylvania industrial city on the fringe of Amish country. "Less than two percentage points we can handle just by not eating out as much," she said, swiveling her chair away from her computer for an interview late in the day, after the phone calls died down.

Forget rising interest rates. Mrs. Diffenderfer should feel lucky to have a job. Fourteen dollars an hour call center jobs won't be around much longer.

Don't totally understand this article on the PagesJaunes IPO from Reuters entitled: Banks market first, pitch later in PagesJaunes IPO. But it is clear that those with leverage no longer buy into the investment bank IPO process - not the pricing, not the distribution and not the fees. In fact, whenever DSBPI looks at investment banking we see a business with shrinking margins, declining pricing power, and not surprisingly, riskier balance sheet bets. Why do these businesses, then, continue to thrive and deliver profit numbers way ahead of expectations?

REALLY, a huge idea. And the best are this simple. Right before the metal detectors in airports, put boxes to collect coins for charity. Someone make this happen.

In some things we have come to trust machines more than man; particularly when it comes to complicated calculations. Machines just don't make careless mistakes. Why, though, do we not trust machines, to say pilot a commercial airplane? It's all fly-by-wire anyway. We could just punch in the coordinates, align the satellites and let it rip. We could eliminate the careless error.

Maybe it's because machines don't have a sense of proportion. The complex Excel formula and the life-dependent airplane landing are just as important to a machine -- that is to say, not important at all. You can't point a finger at a CPU and warn it not to "mess this one up" or that "there's a lot riding on these tires."

Somehow, with all of our flaws (in this case read: pilot error) we still prefer having "men in the loop." Until computers can understand the gravity of their responsibilities it will stay this way.

Why after EVERYTHING, would Tennet resign today? It's either that the Chalabi/Iran situation is worse than we know, or that Tennet is the only one heading Gore's recent call to step down or that someone had to be a fall guy and heck, might as well be the Clinton apointee.

Read the last line of this bit from the UPI on Spielberg's new movie: DreamWorks has postponed press screenings for "The Terminal," reportedly because Spielberg was doing some last-minute tweaking and John Williams' score was delayed due to his work on the upcoming Warner Bros. release "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." Variety reported Spielberg was reshooting scenes as late as Tuesday and that DreamWorks' marketing department wasn't sure whether to position the movie as a comedy or drama.

If any subscriber is looking for a birthday present for anyone at the DSBPI, may we recomend the Sony VGN-U50/70.

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