Readers Report
Intel Corrects Our Arithmetic
Your article on Intel Corp. picked on us unremittingly ("Intel," Cover Story, Oct. 15). This saga of a sea of screwups punctuated with bad strategies made me wonder: Can we be this bad, or is BusinessWeek this biased?
Then I ran across a Freudian slip: After saying that industry shipments are expected to decline 34% from 2000 to 2001, you suggest Intel revenues will drop 52%, from $33.7 billion to $25.5 billion. Assuming your 2001 number is right, by my calculations these revenue numbers correspond to a 24% drop, not 52%. So I again wonder: Is an error this gross a hint of bias--or merely an indication of the quality of writing and editing? We will work hard to do better. May I suggest you do likewise?
Andrew S. Grove
Chairman
Intel Corp.
Santa Clara, Calif.
Editor's note: We erred. The correct number for Intel's expected revenue decline is 24%.
Government Spending Doesn't Hurt the Private Sector
"Rethinking the economy" (Special Report, Oct. 1) states that increased spending by the government will mean smaller surpluses, higher long-term interest rates, and less private investment. No causal relationship has been proved between government spending and surpluses, private investment, and interest rates. To wit, the 1990s saw increased government spending (at increasing rates)--and, at the same time, bigger surpluses, lower interest rates, and higher private investment.
Sam Katzman
Ridgewood, N.J.
September 11: What's behind the Hatred
While the Afghans are bent on retreating to the Stone Age ("The roots of resentment," Special Report, Oct. 1), America is garnering hate for our foreign policies. We will always be criticized for being self-serving because we are the mightiest nation in the world.
American policy is more than selfishness. Americans always display sympathy and give support to those less fortunate. America should continue its policy to keep the combatants separated and quell those who seek to wreak havoc on the world. If anyone has selfish interests, it's the terrorists and dictators of the world.
J.P. Stakun
South Windsor, Conn.
The U.S. is the only legitimate economic and military superpower. Its culture, from movies to blue jeans, has influenced even the poorest of nations for many years. Nobody gives more humanitarian aid than the government and people of the U.S. (the biggest provider of food to Afghanistan). Despite this, the term "ugly American" is becoming more popular. By nature, however, Americans genuinely want to help others.
I am not advocating an isolationist stance, but many times I feel that the U.S. needs to cooperate better with allies in international affairs and stay out of individual countries' domestic issues unless the whole world gets involved.
Robert Cataldo
Houston
Having worked many years in Saudi Arabia, I feel we could do a lot to create a coalition against bin Laden, but we don't need to apologize for America and the stuff "for which it stands."
George Swan
Henderson, Nev.
You say that Islamic institutions have stepped in to fill the gaps created by a breakdown in social services, and thus "people are switching loyalties to an Islamic belief system." That's what happens when "faith-based" services take the place of those any decent government ought to supply. Clearly, there are many issues to which we must respond differently, but the World Trade Center assault is primarily a crime. If we tolerate their regimes, we are blamed for them; if we don't, that's interference. No misplaced guilt trips, please.
John E. Ullmann
Hempstead, N.Y.
Steer Hijacked Planes from the Control Tower
There is, perhaps, another way to stop hijacking of aircraft: "hands-off landings," now feasible, in which the plane is completely under ground control during the landing procedure ("Keeping the barbarians away from the gate," Special Report, Sept. 24). Control of all the vital parts of the plane--fuel adjustments, ailerons, rudder, flaps, etc.--should be available to the tower. Only when the plane is safely on the ground and taxiing does the pilot resume control.
Why not during a hijacking extend that control into altitude? If a plane were hijacked, control would immediately pass to ground control, and could not be overridden inside the aircraft. If such a system were in effect on September 11, the disasters could not have occurred.
Judson H. Spencer
New York
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Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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