RHK: Rest in Pieces

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5514DD 12/5/2012 | 3:09:29 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces You are kidding, right?

To bring it back on topic for telecom, there was a plot once for a "zero floor space 5ESS."

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kww 12/5/2012 | 3:09:29 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces >You are kidding, right?

Absolutely not. This little scheme was floating around in the early 90s. Didn't get much beyond the concept stage. The capacity of the blower that could generate enough horizontal air flow to not cause weird heating problems at the side of the frame that had magically become the top was pretty high, and the thermal modelers killed it. I don't think it even made it to a mock-up.

I stumbled across documents about it while working on one of the myriad plans for creating a hybrid of the GTD-5 and the 5ESS so that they could put AGCS (nee Automatic Electric) out of business.

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optical_man 12/5/2012 | 3:09:28 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces To begin a proper debate, I put forth the following:

Resolved: The Housing Bubble in America does not exist.

Pro: U.S. Consumers have learned not to overspend on singularly focused investments. They have learned that any investment, be it Stocks, Bonds, Muni's, Real Estate, is fluctual, and as such, have spread their investments across many areas, not just Real Estate.

Con: In the post bubble 2001+, U.S. Consumers moved their investments from a seemingly secure, yet unsecure, Stock Market; to a seemingly secure, yet unsecure Housing Market. The same results will follow. Housing will collapse, taking the U.S. economy drastically down for at least 5 years.

Begin debate!

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Drew Lanza 12/5/2012 | 3:09:28 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces Nortel made an annoucement in mid-November that it wouldn't meet expectations and that there were serious troubles.

Telecom stocks had started to fall earlier that year (I think they peaked in April of 2000).

Showing you how clueless I am, it never occured to me that the conjunction of a 'tie' in the U.S. Presidential race and large companies like Nortel saying that the Emperor was wearing no clothes might have created a sort of perfect storm where savvy players concluded that the industry was in trouble AND we could forget getting any help from the government.

foldstein says that Bush stole the election. That's not the way the vast majority of people see it. Most of us see it as a tie. But one in which people got really ugly fighting for the ball. If Gore had walked away with the ball I'm sure that 20% of the populace would say that he cheated. Politics is hardball.

Still, if we were all a little smarter, we would have realized that in a 'tie' situation like this, the odds of either candidate having a clue how much trouble our industry was in and stepping in to force a transition to broadband (like Korea, Japan and some European countries did) were zero.

Thanks for enlightening my day, fgoldstein!

P.S. If anybody really wants to keep this going, I'll try to dig out the press release from Nortel which caused Lightwave Microsystems to shelve its IPO. I think it was dated November 8, 2000. That's when I personally came to believe that the bubble had burst.

Drew

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fgoldstein 12/5/2012 | 3:09:27 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces Drew, you may still cherish your beilef that the election was a "tie", and disregard the 20,000 or so predominantly Democratic voters in Florida disenfranchised by ChoicePoint's antics, but that's not the point. It isn't simply that Gore had more klew about a technology-based economy. It isn't that the Clinton-Gore economy was based on cheap capital (low interest), technology, and young educated workers, while the Bush economic platform was based on extraction industries (oil and gas), high interest (it failed miserably there, trying to increase yields for its wealth-owning benefactors), ignorance (anti-science primitivist religion being given official backing) and foreign workers. No, that wasn't it. Well, at least not all.

The election was, more importantly, a national trauma, one of those events that delineates eras. It was an incredibly divisive election, building upon the fault lines of the Clinton impeachment. And when it did not resolve cleanly, it was clear that the "era of good feeling" -- at least among the financial class, not the political class -- was over. Sure, Bush likes to yap about "September 11", as his code word, as an excuse for whatever he wants. And that too was a national trauma. And it followed close on the heels of the election, putting that out of some people's minds. But by then the economy was already melting down. September 11 did become a convenient excuse, but it's like blaming somebody for starting a fire after the house is half burned down.

Investment is largely a mental and emotional game. Do people think that other people will think that the investment will be worth more? In other words, people buy expecting a greater fool. When the mood shifts downwards, people no longer expect a greater fool to appear, so overvalued things go pop.

Mental exercise: Do you remember the "All your base are belong to us" fad? It was a huge laugh, getting used all over the place and adapted to new things, all through the summer of 2001. On September 10, "All your base" was ubiquitous. On September 12, it was entirely forgotten.

Lest that be used as confirmation of the magic power of that particular date, I raise another precedent. Remember the Beatles? When did they hit the USA? In early November, 1963, they were a new hit act from England, already a hit there but hardly a social phenomenon. November 22, 1963 happened. National trauma. Once people started getting over it, the Beatles were suddenly the cheery, happy-screaming phenomenon that everyone wanted to talk about. I don't see it as entirely a coincidence; their famous Ed Sullivan appearance in February, 1964 confirmed a Beatlemania that had started to build maybe a week after the JFK funeral. (Yeah, I'm old enough to remember that better than I can remember to put the clothes into the dryer.)

I used the term "perfect storm" in the preface to Meltdown. The CAP/CLEC, IXC, ISP and wireless industries all started to get in trouble, for their own reasons, at the same time, and the storm forces converged. I didn't want to politicize the book by mentioning the more-than-coincidence of the election, but the connection strikes me as extremely probable.

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paolo.franzoi 12/5/2012 | 3:09:27 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces
All the Florida recounts done by newspapers after the 2000 election showed that Bush won by a larger amount than the official election total. This does not count the fact that Gore was announced as a winner while polls were open in Republican dominated areas in Florida.

seven

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Scott Raynovich 12/5/2012 | 3:09:27 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces Hey optical_man,

We started a new thread over here:

http://www.lightreading.com/bo...

Want to post your message there?

--Scott

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fgoldstein 12/5/2012 | 3:09:26 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces Seven, you are factually wrong about the recounts, but this is not the place to argue them. Besides, I was noting that ChoicePoint, the folks who take such good care of our confidential credit card data, knocked thousands of good legal Democratic voters off of the rolls, so they showed up at the polls and couldn't vote.

The LR-relevant point is that the election marked a national trauma, and thus changed investor perceptions.

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OpticOm 12/5/2012 | 3:09:25 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces Please stop the nonsense about "stolen election".
It had been proven over and over again to be a false statement, propagated by left nuts.
And I have no intention to listen or discuss further politics on LR posts.
And now, back to the technical discussion....

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desiEngineer 12/5/2012 | 3:09:23 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces fg: Seven, you are factually wrong about the recounts, but this is not the place to argue them. Besides, I was noting that ChoicePoint, the folks who take such good care of our confidential credit card data, knocked thousands of good legal Democratic voters off of the rolls, so they showed up at the polls and couldn't vote.

Well, then don't argue it. You can't say don't argue, and then take a parting shot. That's simply faking that you are taking the high road.

And it's really going to take this thread down the liberal-vs-conservative hate channel.

-desi

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