OK, so we shouldn't use a few examples like the PairGain fiasco to suggest that it's time to abandon the optimistic view that people are basically good. Without the day traders, the market would never have had a chance to top 10,000. The engine of technology evolution is personal greed, not some altruistic "I wanna make life better for everyone" claim, but when greed gets in the way of common sense, it's time to send up distress signals.

Several of us at EE Times have warned about immature initial public offerings. The public's fascination with anything ".com" drives many to prepare a prospectus long before the first elements of their business plans have been executed. Luckily, semiconductor and EDA software leaders look positively conservative compared with the Web portal business, where some downright shady deals have shot stock prices into three figures overnight.

The greed of traders and startup founders also is partially to blame for venture capital hyper-flipping, where a company is sold long before its first customer-product shipments have been completed. That was becoming common in EDA and has become the preferred mode of business in communications. Is that caused solely by large companies anxious to acquire startups and VC firms ready to hawk unimplemented ideas? No. It's also driven by the dollars of Sand Hill Road, wooing engineers to leave internal-development teams at larger companies as soon as they've become proj-ect managers.

While stock fraud obviously warrants a jail term, most people seem to wink at manic day trading and company-pumping. But is this capitalism at its best? Maybe because I'm approaching curmudgeon status, but a lot of the current trading and investment mania seems to be fueled by our attention-deficit-disorder culture. Folks in their early 20s appear not only to live beyond their corporate and personal means, but also to live with a narcissism that suggests that learning HTML and a few DSP codes leaves you only months away from a CEO's half-mil salary.

Some insist that a post-modern economy is better for the environment, since we're trading not in goods or services but in brain power. Perhaps. But I see a phony economy driven by a democratized and mindless belief in prosperity based on no tangible advantage. The day when someone stops in midtrade or midacquisition and says, "Wait, we're paying $300 million on the basis of one individual who developed a slightly better pulse amplitude modulation code? What were we thinking?" will be the day that the millennium market crash begins.