Leonard Gray / L’Observateur / February 5, 2000

Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that everyone else in the world is getting richer, either by launching their own internet business or by playing the stock market? It’s a wild time in America. The internet has spawned entrepreneurs ofevery make and model, all with their own dot-com companies and likely not paying taxes on most of it. Pay-for-view pornography websites alonemust be pulling in billions of dollars every year.

However, that’s far from the majority of e-businesses. Looking attelevision on Super Bowl Sunday, it seemed every single commercial, besides pushing their own goods or services, also mentioned their website. It seems everyone has a website.And while it seems to be good business to launch a website for your company, many companies only exist electronically. There’s no actual”place of business” or a building where walk-in traffic can come.

Therefore, it opens a tremendous loophole for tax evasion and/or consumer fraud.

One of the biggest problems on the internet is the proliferation of “spam” sites. That’s those annoying pop-up boxes that appear when you may belooking at another site, or they crop up uninvited on your e-mail and activate when, out of curiosity, you open it.

I don’t have a webpage, not even a personal one. That doesn’t mean I neverwill, it just means I can’t think of what I would include on it, never mind who would look at it.

The stock market is another matter. A recent survey showed that 48percent of Americans own stock. Of course, that figure also includesretirees who earned stock options over the years and people who participate in various pension plans such as 401(k) plans.

I was given some shares of stock in a start-up company several years ago.

In that time, the stock has split several times, shot up many times in value and now is barely worth the paper it’s printed on. The company itselfhas gone through several stages of bankruptcy and I’ve gotten tons of annual reports and stacks of letters detailing various buyouts.

I have absolutely no earthly clue what any of it means. I’ve kept the stockbecause I like the artwork of the certificates.

I never learned about the stock market. The jargon baffles me completely.I’ve seen film of people at a stock exchange, all the people shouting and waving and I have NO clue what is going on, nor understand how anything is accomplished.

Yet, more and more, people are suddenly stock-savvy, to the extent of day- trading on the internet which, to me, is only a new way to aggravate yourself or get addicted like any other gambling habit.

There’s a lot of money out there and people are scooping it up by the bushel.

Someone, I need to figure out how to get my spoon to the river and take a few sips out of that money river.

I’m not greedy. I just want a taste.

LEONARD GRAY is a reporter for L’Observateur.

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