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Dot Conned
Our friend Phil the software engineer just got dot-conned, as he put it. His 18,000 stock options in the two-year-old start-up that employed him--the 12th largest retailer on the Net--are now worth zilch. The company ran out of money, and there is no more funding available. He predicts a shelf-life of about six more months for surviving dot-coms whose business plan consists of little more than hoping to be bought by a bigger fish, now that V.C. funding for dot-coms has dried up. The Ponzi scheme known as The New E-con-omy has finally collapsed--hail Silicon Satan! But rest assured, urban-real-estate-bubble prices will not be reverting to their former, pseudo-affordable levels; 98% of San Francisco's residents will never be able to afford to own a house, ever. Period.

We predict an immensely stressful future of cut-throat jockeying for an ever shrinking pool of web design/computer jobs, not unlike the kind of SUV driving we see daily on the streets of downtown San Francisco ... On the positive side, we're hoping for an escalating migration of computer hipsters to labor unions. The number of Microsoft "permanent-temps" joining labor unions has quadrupled in the past year, and as Microsoft goes, so goes the nation--perhaps. We can only hope that people will wake up to the fact that their lives are flashing by, and that 80-hour-work weeks are not good for the soul--not to mention one's sex life. Advertising reflects reality, and the phrase "Get a life" only underscores the blatant fact that if you're watching TV, you probably don't have one.

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