Driving me in from the airport, the cab driver spoke in broken English about the peace talks between Syria and Israel. He was not excited about the possible surrender of the Golan Heights. Taken in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Golan is internationally known as a vital security buffer between Syria and Israel. But Israelis tend to focus on the Golan's lesser-known strategic value: It is a vital source of water in an arid land.

"It is the stuff of life," said the cab driver. "You can't give back the water."

He grumbled as we rolled past a horizon dotted by construction cranes and the boxy buildings more familiarly found in Asian boomtowns like Hong Kong. Like many developing hot spots, Tel Aviv screams functionality.

Israel's greatest accomplishment has been that of turning this dry land into an agricultural miracle. The Israelis are irrigation magicians. But water, even though it is the stuff of life, is no longer the centerpiece of Israeli thought.

Israel has caught the Internet bug. Badly. In the bar at a local hotel, the talk was less of the peace process and the recent political scandal involving the President, but of overnight Internet millionaires and the wonders of high technology. The new greed has made the trip from Silicon Valley to Silicon Wadi. The romantic notion of the kibbutz seems quaint at best. "In the last seven years, things have changed dramatically," said one man at the bar. "It's no longer a place where people pull together to get something done. Instead everyone's racing to become the next stock-rich success story."

In Tel Aviv in winter, there aren't many tourists, but there are plenty of visitors. Investment bankers, venture capitalists and others seeking to mine the growing technology boom here have taken over the town. American firms are everywhere. The 10-hour "shuttle" to and from New York is packed. Continental Airlines added a flight to Tel Aviv only last fall.

The thrill of the technology explosion ripples through the area just north of Tel Aviv. But that excitement focuses on only a portion of the Israeli economy. Outside of technology, the scene is not as bright. The Kibbutz slice is ailing, heavy industry is struggling, and unemployment is at 9.2 percent. A massive (and successful) war against the once triple-digit inflation has brought broader growth to a standstill. But the dismal scientists believe the economy will start picking up steam this year.

Regardless, the growing legion of Internet millionaires don't really notice the ailing piece of Israel. One local journalist groused that the United States had successfully exported the get-rich, go-go aspects of the New Economy, but it had failed to send over the charitable elements.

A glance at the daily newspaper Ha'aretz 's listing of Israeli stocks in New York turns up a host of new names, like ECI Telecom and Gilat Satellite, along with old hands like Koor Industries. Most curious: the listing of Applied Materials. The American semiconductor equipment company has been acquisitive in Israel, and many Israeli technology professionals hold AMAT stock, making this monster of the Nasdaq an adopted Israeli stock trading in the United States. America Online has also shopped in Israel

The success of the high-technology sector helped drive the Tel Aviv stock exchange to a more than 50 percent gain in 1999, in local currency terms. And the wild ride continues in stocks like Internet Gold, a local Internet service provider, and Comverse, a maker of Internet firewall software.

Much of the Israeli high-tech boom flows from the military. Intense technology training programs turn out brilliant technologists. After their release from full-time service, they become entrepreneurs, encouraged by the words and funds provided by the Americans who are crawling around the country looking for investments that will help them leapfrog the competition.

The technology boom here has overshadowed the peace talks with Syria. Could a bad outcome to the talks hurt the technology explosion? The answer is always the same, a scoffed "No way." It is a familiar refrain to those who have listened to the Silicon Valley crowd airily dismiss its skeptics. Technology and money are bigger than politics, even here in Israel, perhaps the most political region in the world.

Dave Kansas is editor-in-chief at The Street.com

"That guy" was working for an Internet startup, and his paper worth had recently soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The banker watched him cross the room. "If I hear about one more guy making that kind of money, I'm going to shoot myself," the banker said. He had a look of disgust on his face despite the fine caviar he was at that moment washing down with a sip of Champagne.

What a time we live in, when investment bankers whine about the rich without a trace of irony. The rich certainly are different from you and me, but I never thought I'd live to see them become different from investment bankers.

Recently, I found myself in conversation with three friends. Instead of trying to handicap the weekend's football games, they were talking about investments (they were all eager to invest in independent films), new homes and the millennium. They weighed their New Year's options: chartering a "private boat" in the Caribbean, renting an entire top-drawer restaurant in Manhattan or jetting off to Rome for a day or two. I'm going to a snowbound wedding in St. Paul, Minn.

This season of holiday excess and disparity brings out the bitterness in everyone. Everyone's rich except … everyone else. Just scratch the surface of a Manhattan evening and the same decadence that infected the late 1980's is there. Long lines on Thursday nights, no available cabs, friends with parties at Lutèce, drinks at Danube, weekends in Paris and London. Clever conversation now revolves around your interior designer, your dog walker and your new DVD-electronics setup. It all becomes a blur before dessert. Is this growing up or getting fat?

The new extravagance snuck up on us quietly. For a while there, it looked as though this decade's boom was all about inconspicuous consumption. Essentially, its subtext was that everyone was atoning for the wild days of the 1980's. In 1997, in the midst of a strong stock market, you could hop in a radio car and hear the driver moan about how things really roared in the 1980's.

But it's hard to keep all those dollars bottled up. Quiet chatter about diligent work has given way to smooth conversation about private jets and second homes.

Once again, the city is no longer shy about embracing wealth. Reminders of an earlier, more dangerous era are eerily prevalent. The Metropolitan Opera is premiering The Great Gatsby . The Talented Mr. Ripley , derivative of Gatsby , is on the big screen. And, of course, the stock market is feeling much like it did back in the 20's.

Most notably, the roaring 90's have captured a class previously unable to participate in the market's riches. The chattering class–the writers, the editors, the information professionals–finds itself in high demand. In an information economy, many of the information providers are getting rich, too.

Even an editor like myself finds himself trying to figure out what stock options are all about. It used to be we journalists could all safely talk about the rich with some distant disdain. Sure, the television types and the odd book author would manage to knock down a couple mil, but that group would inevitably move to the outside of the conversation, becoming a target like those who had "gone over to the other side" to become corporate flacks. Now, however, it's getting tougher to sort out the suffering scribe from the newly paper-rich journalist. Instead of meeting at the Blarney Stone, folks want to meet at the "21" Club or some other ossified place that charges too much for the same bourbon on ice.

I wonder how long the recent fire hose of happiness will continue dousing financial journalists. Someday, the argument goes, the stock market will tumble, the massive demand for financial writers will dissipate, and the journalists will retreat to their cool damp corners like roaches in a newly lighted room. Until then, journalists will continue to grumble about how all of this stock market cash isn't right. Journalists may be getting more dough, but they still enjoy carping about that half-empty glass.

I'm left thinking about the investment banker, my enriched journalist friend and the others finding stock in their stockings. I think what grinds me up is that in this time of peace and goodwill toward men, we're increasingly focusing on what others have that we don't.

It's a Christmas of unrequited greed, which is not what you'd expect in an era as flush as the 1990's. Maybe things will be different a thousand years from now.

Dave Kansas is editor in chief of TheStreet.com.

As the bull market rolls on, the old-media aristocracy (most recently, The New York Times Magazine , on Nov. 21) continues to obsess over the solitary obsessions of the day traders, as though this straggling lot of wired, manic investors holds the key to understanding the new age of money. You would think that the day traders, alone at home with their mousepads and their cute little Schwab accounts, have pushed us to the edge of some kind of national disaster.

It's a class thing. Day traders are considered low-rent losers, delusional suckers. So they get blamed for a market that seems to have lost its grounding in fiscal logic.

Well, the media establishment has it wrong. The term "day trader" is a convenient fiction, because most of the big institutions out there, the ones that move around huge chunks of money and make up the majority of the market, are day traders, too.

Day traders are not some exotic species, despite the media's best efforts to make them seem that way. The media should fess up: they know day traders, lots of them. But the ones they know are hedge-fund managers or other types of traders with cooler-sounding names: proprietary desk traders, for instance. These institutional traders move in and out of positions all day, too. The term day trader, in the current media parlance, is code for "hedge-fund manager without investors or a good college degree." Day traders have no backers among the chattering classes, because the chattering classes have decided to revere hedge-fund managers instead, though most hedge-fund managers do exactly what day traders do, just with other people's money and better institutional connections. Day traders are crack; hedge-fund managers are cocaine. Pick your poison.

Day traders have become the poster goons of all that's wrong with the stock market. They get suckered by two-bit promoters into a life of debt and solitude. They go on violent rampages. They ignore history and its lessons concerning the received wisdom of long-term investing. They work in spare bedrooms, in the company of skinny dogs and smelly hockey equipment. In short, they are the new barbarians.

But day traders make up a thin sliver of the market. There just aren't that many of them. Some estimates put their number in the low tens of thousands. They are really just pilotfish swimming alongside the great white shark.

Now, there are lots of people who have become do-it-yourself investors, who do their trading on line and make investment decisions a few times a quarter, maybe even a few times a month. This group numbers in the millions. You know these people. But, conveniently, the media (especially the old media) often uses a negligently broad stroke to lump just about everyone with an Internet connection and a brokerage account together and call them day traders.

It's not hard to see why. The old-media nobles, whether they like it or not, are complicit in preaching a very conservative world view of investing. On panel after panel, I hear personal finance journalists from dead-tree publications talking, with a pained tone in their voice, about the perils of day trading, with nary a word about the cowboys who dominate the trading desks of every major firm on Wall Street, placing billions at risk, or the aggressive mutual fund managers who attract thousands of clients. Most personal finance stories imply that you should entrust all of your money to professionals, invest for the long haul and avoid getting caught up in the excitement. Leave the excitement to the professionals. Whaddaya know, this is exactly what both Wall Street and the mutual fund complex want you to do. They want to take your chances for you-for a fee, of course. I'm sure it's all a terrible coincidence.

My view? Day trading is a wickedly hazardous occupation. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't even recommend it. But the same goes for running a hedge fund or managing a mutual fund. I've watched friends flame out on those desks, skewered by the nasty nature of the trading game. It is not easy.

Risk is part of the stock-market business, whether you're talking about the day traders at home or the arbs at Goldman, Sachs & Company. Hedge funds blow up all the time. Last fall's spectacular mess at Long-Term Capital Management L.P. far outstrips anything day traders could pull off, even if they banded together. Yet the long-term gang continues to operate, having found flush saviors-and articulate defenders-in their time of need.

So the next time someone spits out the term day trader, spit it bright back at them.

Dave Kansas is the editor in chief of TheStreet.com .