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Soft Peddling Disaster
Internet Use Declining
Before we get into the latest on net declines and what they mean, I want to begin this week by following up on some of the information that was posted by the web bots and how I got onto this week's topic: Declining Use of the Internet - and what it means for all of us.
Let's rewind to a couple of weeks ago when I told you that the web bots were expecting the resignation of Alan Greenspan from the Federal Reserve. We had expected it to happen around the 14th of December. However, after we published the "notice of likely event" on the public side of this site, more bots began reporting back to us that a meeting had been held involving George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Alan Greenspan and that supposedly Greenspan was giving Bush the "high sign" that things were going to change because he planned to get out. Now further, according to the web bot returns, the President and VP since convinced Greenspan that he should not leave now because it would create perception problems for the Administration" that frankly, they didn't need right now.
While all of this was going on, the web bots kept telling us that we should expect to see two major economic shocks - on the order of the WTC 9/11 event, between now and March 1. Honestly, we had expected Greenspan to stick by his guns and retire, but apparently this was not to be the case. The Administration may be waiting until the country is for sure coming out of recession before cutting him loose. And by all accounts, there are a number of reasons why Greenspan should not be allowed to leave for a very long time. The "why?" is where it gets interesting.
As I've told you before, or at least hinted broadly at, there are a couple of very "difficult to measure" trends competing right now to form our collective future. One of these is the complete bust in the Internet sector. Another is the depth of the recession which is continuing to deepen despite the "happy talk" which is floating around. The tip off on the underlying dynamic, as usual, has come from the web bots.
The conversation went something like this: "George, ****** here. You know what's interesting as hell? The web bots are dying. And it seems like the reason that we are getting less feedback is the number of discussion sites that we can find are declining. In the past, we had been hitting something like 4,500 sites per hour. But now we're down to less than half that and the reason is with all the ISP's shutting down, and companies laying off people, web traffic is drying up. I'm not sure if we actually get an award from DoD how much we can deliver if the trend continues."