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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (27080)	1/7/2003 11:21:38 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 74559

Hi Maurice, Wow. That was a terrific post. Way above the norms here on SI. Bravo. The Globalstar fever is something that I got a chance to witness up close and personal at a meeting in Silicon Valley in late April, 2000. I'd already come to conclusion that GSTRF was dead, except for the obit, when I met with about 50 or so subscribers to George Gilder's Technology newsletter. As you recall, Gilder was touting G* at the time and had been for a while. Our host at this affair was a mechanical engineer with decades of experience in the Valley. He sang the praised of G*, having just been given a red carpet tour of their NOC in San Jose. He was wowwed by the technological wizardry of it all and spared no superlatives in singing the praises of the system. Not wanting to be a pariah as well as a Cassandra, I bit my lip and only talked in private with a couple of people about my reservations regarding the absolutely dismal uptake of the handsets by the market. Were I a better judge of market psychology, I would have followed my intuition and shorted the hell out of the stock and made a tidy profit. But, alas, I was only to be an astute observer. Like you, I hope to have faith in technological advances increasing the wealth of society in general and especially the wealth of the insightful in particular. But unlike you, I see the market system that surrounds the kernel of technological advance as basically amoral at best and typically immoral at most times. Virtue? What a ridiculous concept when talking about anything to do with Wall Street. That died the day Ronald Reagan took office. That's when the gloves came off and the brawling began. We won't see virtue in the markets ever again. The pie is too small and shrinking too fast for that to ever be the case again. -Ray