EthInves ver 2.0 The On-disk Almanac of Ethical Investing copyright 1988 Jerry Whiting PO Box 20821, Seattle, WA 98102 >>> CHAT <<< Welcome to the second year of EthInves. A what a year it's been: a new tax environment, the Soviet-U.S. missile treaty, the rising Latin American debt crisis, the falling dollar, the ever-present trade deficit and how can you mention 1987 without mentioning Bloody Monday. In spite of all this uncertainty and rapid change, you are still looking for sound investment options. Your task is to earn a comfortable return on your investment while monitoring its social, political and environmental impact. No small task. I hope that the information and resources contained in EthInves will make those decisions a little bit easier for you. As you may have noticed, ver. 2.0 is considerably larger than 1.3 I hope that you find much of this new material helpful. If not, write or e-mail me and let me know. What do you need? What don't you use? What can't you find? My future plans for EthInves include more ancillary material that may be of interest to EthInves users. For example, this edition includes a list of all the nuclear free zones world wide. The next edition (ver 2.1, 7/88) will have a database of the members of Congress including address, phone and committee memberships. I have recently acquired Borland's Quattro. Expect to see much of the financial data in spreadsheet/database form from now on. If there's interest from folks, I can also bundle other author's shareware: IRA calculators, loan rate utils, etc. The response the last 6 months to EthInves has been very positive. If this good fortune continues, EthInves will become a quarterly publication by year's end. EthInves readers can receive a free sample copy of RECON, the newsletter that keeps its eye on the Pentagon, by writing editor Chris Robinson and mentioning EthInves. The periodical of the year award goes to The Whole Earth Review for their Winter '87 issue "Signal". If you are a hacker, media freak, samizdat or committed culture watcher you'll want to catch up with a copy of this excellent magazine. $5 from Whole Earth Review, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA, 94965. In fact, you should be a subscriber ($20/year). Ramblings ... With all-digit phone numbers, how long are they going to keep putting letters on phones? In other words, when will we lose being able to spell out phone numbers? When is someone going to put a clock/calendar into my answering machine so that I can program it like I do my VCR? I could simply tell it my regular working hours and never have that sudden flash the minute I get to work. Now that all of us with day gigs are in the habit of timeshifting David Letterman AND VCR's are in 52% of American homes, when will the advertisers get hip and push for programming around the clock? What public library will be first to put a jukebox of CD-ROM's on-line accessable via your modem? Local call so that's free. All we need now are lots and lots of reference books and journals on disk with an elegant search routine on the front end. I'm not holding my breath but one day ... Anybody else get a mailing from their local cable company offering a computer hook-up, software and on-line services as an option? Will cable companies with their large installed infrastructure start to rival phone line based information utilities (CompuServe, The Source, etc.)? I've been hearing more and more about progressive personal computing throughout the Soviet bloc. Will glasnost bring about telecommunication and floppy disk exchanges with folks in the Soviet bloc? What would a public Soviet-US computer network be like? Will your local user group have a sisterSIG in Poland? Can you honestly tell me you have seen a non-trivial HyperCard stack? Not a glorified hyperDA but a real app I'll use day in and day out. I have faith. Just wish I had the time to play with HyperTalk. One of my few New Year's resolutions, along with PostScript. If I were to win the lottery tommorrow, I'd buy a Compaq 386 to run Windows386. I would never turn it off because I'd configure Windows to run comm software in the background and periodically download stuff from designated networks. The rest of the time it's in auto answer mode. And when I sit down to use it, all of this is transparent to me. Or I'd get a Mac II with an AST 286 card and wait for Apple to release A/UX, their flavor of Unix and be able to run all three operating systems. Then I'd get a 976- exchange number locally or a 900 area code number nationwide and you could download stuff from me, having it billed to your phone. I'd don't know what the phone company's attitude is but you could have pay as you go information utilities. The Spell-Checkers-Are-Great-But ... Dept.: They are but until they're hypertext or randomized or in some different form, you're gonna miss out on all the great new words you learn while you're looking for the something else in a printed dictionary. Once again, thanks to all of you have provided me with both information and inspiration during the last year. EthInves started with my own search for ethical investment vehicles for my own I.R.A. After looking high and low for what little information is generally available, I decided to share this information with you. Jerry Whiting PO Box 20821 Seattle, WA 98102 Through computer gateways: [DE3MIR]jwhiting PeaceNet: jwhiting The WELL: jwhiting