From The Street...
Monday, August 26, 2002
Do You Still Need Salesmen?
To do deals, you still need to look folks in the eye....(duh...)
Economist.com
Face-to-face communications
Press the flesh, not the keyboard.
Aug 22nd 2002
From The Economist print edition
In a wired world, physical presence counts more than ever.
AS A young man in the City of London, recalls Sir Martin Sorrell, boss of WPP, a marketing group, he was struck by the magnificence of the partners' room at Hambro's. The bank's top brass sat in a vast hall above Bishopsgate, surrounded by their aides. "There was a lot of noise,? he says, "but everybody knew what everyone else was doing.
The newish mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, began his working life as a trader for Salomon Brothers, and has recreated something similar in his office in City Hall. Officials work in cubicles within a giant, open bull-pen, rather than in private offices. Again, the aim is to free the flow of information. The inevitable conclusion: seeing other people in the flesh is a different, and sometimes better, way to make sure that news and views flow freely than anything that electronics can offer.
One of the mysteries of the wired (and wireless) world is that proximity still counts. In spite of September 11th, and the predictions that everyone would travel less and have fewer meetings, people still want to gather to do deals, to drum up new ideas and to court customers. Indeed, in some ways, physical presence counts even more than it used to. Tony Venables, an economist at the London School of Economics, believes that businesses that thrive on face-to-face communications - or what some call F2F - now account for a growing share of economic activity.
Of course, the arrival of the Internet and of cheap long-distance telecommunications means that lots of activities that once required physical presence can now be conducted online. Customers can pay a bill, book a hotel room or place a bet without walking to the bank, travel agent or bookie. The fall in the costs of undertaking such routine transactions has allowed companies to move them out of expensive city centres to cheaper locations.
But other kinds of business seem to need proximity more, not less, these days. Look at the way the venture capitalists who financed the Internet boom huddle together along Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto; or the clustering of media folk along New York's Avenue of the Americas. ?If you are doing a multi-million-pound deal, you need to eyeball them,? says Dame Judith Mayhew, chairman of the policy committee of the Corporation of London. ?You don't do that down the line.?
Cities are still highly efficient ways to ensure that eyeballers can see each other. Some trades seem to thrive on density. In a paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Sukkoo Kim points out that 40% of American employment is packed into 1.5% of its land area. Those cities that specialise in some services-notably finance, insurance, property dealing and wholesale trade-have tended to pack more and more workers on to the same land, he argues, unlike those that specialise in services such as public administration or retailing.
Why might that be true" Michael Storper of the University of California, Los Angeles, has written a paper with Mr Venables on : Buzz: The Economic Force of the City. They argue that cities are where information and ideas are developed and swapped. But not all information is equal. Some (a bank statement, say, or a booking) is easily codified and electronically swapped; while some (?"I have a deal for you", "why don't we do it this way?") requires context and trust to be meaningful. It is the second kind of information that requires F2F.
As a result, many activities are bifurcating. Hollywood film-shooting is continuing to move out of town, for instance, while deal-making, which requires trust and lots of parties, stays in town. And this split does not apply merely to the movie world. Much American manufacturing is going to small and mid-sized cities inland. A typical beneficiary is Memphis, where Federal Express has its hub. The deal-making and design tends to remain in the big cities of the two coasts.
For individual companies, the key question is when and how to bring people together. Companies with lots of outlets need to keep branch staff in touch with head-office staff. One company that works hard at this is Wal-Mart. The retailer's founder, Sam Walton, spent much of his time tramping round the company's stores. Nowadays, regional and district managers spend four days a week on the road, listening to what store workers are saying.
Even a company such as Oracle, which tries to do as much as possible electronically, finds that it needs regular face-to-face contact. Jim Flynn, its head of corporate communications, brings his regional staff together once a quarter. "It's the only way to work through complicated co-ordination issues," he says. Moreover, in a global business with different national thresholds for irony and humour, and with English widely spoken as a second language, the Internet can breed misunderstandings if not backed up with regular meetings.
For companies whose lifeblood is creativity, personal contact matters even more. Silicon Valley was born from long nights spent drinking in the now-defunct Wagon Wheel bar in Mountain View, California, where the early geeks and semiconductor executives thrashed out technical glitches together over beers. Big pharmaceutical companies struggle to build into their bureaucracies the sparky communal brainstorming that creates breakthroughs. According to Louise Redmond, head of organisation effectiveness at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), recent meetings of staff from around the world have revealed gaps in research programmes that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. She says that GSK has increasingly tried to cluster teams working on a particular project on the same physical site.
The need to put the right people together also feeds into office design. At WPP, Sir Martin says, "we're blowing out walls and creating coffee areas." No longer are accountants and media people assigned to separate floors. Instead, they work side by side in teams to ensure that they keep talking to each other.
As companies try to get more staff to work on the road or from home, they lose the water-cooler conversations that sometimes spark useful ideas. Margaret Exley, chairman of Mercer Delta, a consultancy, argues that some employees, especially in customer services, rarely see their boss's face, even for a performance appraisal. Some sales teams get round this by having regular meetings on the road. One beneficiary of this trend is Starbucks, a coffee chain that is increasingly used as a substitute office. Several stores have even turned spare space into meetings rooms, according to Howard Behar, Starbucks' president for North America.
Companies with scattered staff also often try to bring them together in occasional conferences; and these have become much more intensive, carefully planned affairs. That partly reflects a shortage of corporate cash for jamborees. Ed Griffin, head of Meeting Professionals International, a trade association of meetings planners, says dolefully that finance executives have recently taken over responsibility for meetings budgets from sales and marketing departments. He worries that they may not grasp the extent to which a well-run conference can motivate sales staff. It is, he says, a matter of transmitting emotion, not just facts: "If you do it on a television screen, you lose 50-75% of the ability to create valuable relationships." If he is right, then companies will need to think even harder in future about how to make those eyeballs count.
The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.
Friday, August 23, 2002
Digital pictures...
Megapixels...the new measure of performance and quality in imaging!
Consumer digital cameras have gone through a couple of generations of chips for "digital" cameras that are replacing film. And likewise for video cameras. Marketeers pounce on this and gleefully advertise "pixel counts" of three times the number of pixels of one of their chips in a three chip device. Sifting thru all this, and understanding how it relates to "scanning" lines, "TV" lines, plasma display specs, and "dpi" numbers for computer screens and printers is not easy - for me (and I've been at this for awhile..) or for customers who need to understand all this before buying. Or do they?
It gets back to why do people buy. It is not based on the highest number of pixels, that's for sure. But I've always believed that people buy from somebody they like; and they use specs or feature -benefit lists as their justification to the Boss. They trust the person they are buying from to deliver what he said, and that it will do what he said, and that the seller will bust ass to get any problems solved just to preserve the relationship. Even if there is no person involved, like Amazon, the same reasoning applies.
But back to the spec wars, and the numbers used to fight them.
One medical instrument supplier has discovered that the number of pixels is not the sole determinant of "resolution"; for their low light application; "dynamic range" is as important. By this they mean color depth in bits. Six bit color is bad, 8 bit is usual, ten bit and higher are better. With more levels, or possible values, for each color component, better color rendition and, yes, resolution, result. Never mind that most video processing and storage chops off at 8 bits, except in high end production and post processing applications.
But did you ever try to convince a "top surgeon" of anything? Or try to explain to him the physics of color reproduction, per Charley Poynton ? Hoo Hah! Such Guys Know What They Like - and despite all the attempts by manufacturers to quantify the performance of their cameras,
The Surgeon Buys The One He Likes - The One With The Best Picture.
Just like at Sears. Hmmm...
This was true when I first put single tube striped filter color camera onto an arthroscope in St. Louis in 1981, and it is true today when a megapixel four-chip HD camera head the size of a handball is screwed onto a brain surgeon's operating microscope.
So why the fuss? Well, unlike broadcasting, color and motion are not as important - so far - in many medical practices. They've had to get along with little lipstick-sized cameras with small imagers with filters with lousy (compared to even DV cam) pictures. Just to be able to see the upsides of Katie's Lower Bowel live was reward enough; who's gonna argue about colorimetry?
This is changing as medical imaging gets more sophisticated. More on this in a subsequent posting....
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
Cable Sinks...
Investor anxiety hounds cable
Financial markets question the very underpinnings of the industry By John M. Higgins Broadcasting & Cable 8/19/2002
Cable companies are accustomed to angry subscribers, but lately they're seeing a deeper furor from a new direction: shareholders.
"I believe the wrath of God will come down on all of you who screw shareholders," said a letter that came into the headquarters of one MSO last week, copies of which were addressed to each member of the board of directors. After being drawn to the company's plan to grow by launching new services, the investor called the company's strategy "more of a scam to defraud investors."
That MSO isn't alone. Every public cable operator is under assault in the financial markets, battered by angry investors who have lost billions of dollars and by short-sellers and hedge funds that profit from declining stock prices. Long-routine and long-arcane accounting policies abruptly make headlines as critics worry about abuses similar to those seen at scandal-ridden Adelphia Communications.
Investors who clamored for growth and shoveled cash at operators to invest in new services are suddenly questioning the size of their spending.
Cable operators have all seen dramatic slides in their stock prices during recent months, hit by a combination of worries about Adelphia-esque book cooking to general anxiety about heavy debt. On average, MSO stocks have plummeted about 73% this year. That's even worse than the already vicious 36% drop in the NASDAQ Composite Index.
What's maddening to cable executives is that the stock slump comes just as MSOs are hitting their operational stride. MSOs just posted uniformly great gains in operating cash flow for the second quarter, the best showing in years. The major MSOs posted 10%-15% revenue growth and 12%-27% operating-cash-flow growth. And unlike networks and stations posting gains only in comparison with terrible performance last year, the cable guys are building on fairly strong, recession-resistant 2001 performance (except for AT&T).
Cox Communications CEO James Robbins expressed enormous frustration over the contrast between the stock market and Cox's success in bundling new data, phone and digital cable services. "We're just in the ditch," he said. "Until we can prove the bundle and where it's leading us, we're going to stay in the ditch."
A frustrated Mike Willner, Insight Communications CEO and chairman of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, said cable stocks are trading at "hysterical lows." He pointed to the last downdraft in 1996, when MSOs faced scary competitive threats from telcos and DBS, $70 billion in capital spending to upgrade systems, and the uncertain prospect of new digital and high-speed Internet services on those upgraded systems.
Willner argued that $60 billion of that $70 billion has been spent, with DBS competition manageable, telcos gone and the new services clearly strong. "With all those risks behind us, does it make sense that cable stocks are selling at historical lows again?" he asked.
Indeed, the best-performing cable stock is Comcast, which gets to brag that it's down only 46% for the year. Scandal-plagued Adelphia, of course, has dropped pretty much 100%.
Stocks that were trading at 20 times annual operating cash flow 18 months ago are trading at 6.5-9 times today, levels last seen during the "highly leveraged transaction" lending crisis in 1991. Investors are valuing MSOs at $2,500-$3,000 per basic subscriber, down from $4,500 or so early last year. The stock slide makes it difficult and expensive to raise money, either equity or debt, and pretty much impossible for operators to look for any acquisitions. And it completely stresses out employees, especially senior executives holding stock options now badly under water.
Why is cable so special? After all, the recession and 9/11 have battered the broad market and even other media sectors just as badly. Disney and its ABC network have taken shareholders on Mr. Eisner's Wild Ride. Fox Entertainment has been off 30%-40%. TV station groups Young Broadcasting and Granite Television trade as if they were heading into Chapter 11. Radio-station giant Clear Channel has plunged 50% in the past three months.
The difference is that the ad-supported media are being pounded largely by the ad cycle. If not crippled by a huge debt load, they'll probably bounce back when the ad spending turns back upward.
Cable's crisis is more fundamental. Investors and lenders are questioning the very financial underpinnings of the business. They're doubting, for example, whether operating cash flow-the fundamental measure of cable operators' performance for years-is a valuable yardstick any longer. They're criticizing cable operators' strategy of not just plowing all their spare cash into system rebuilds but borrowing even more to add more services in more markets.
They say they want to see "free" cash flow. Not EBITDA earnings "before" interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, and capital expenditures but the money left over after the cash-burning elements of that equation-interest, taxes and capital expenditures-are paid for.
That's a dramatic crisis of faith, because cable operators have hugely negative free cash flow. A long history of stable cash flow has let them operate with much more debt than businesses more vulnerable to a recession, such as newspapers or retailers, would ever dream of trying to carry. That can dramatically increase an operator's return on capital-the most important of all financial measures-but interest costs also eat up free cash flow.
More important, to prepare for new services, operators have spent heavily to rebuild their systems: new headend gear at every central office, new trunks down every major road, new nodes in every neighborhood, new amps on every block, new drops from the pole to almost every house. That creates the opportunity for huge new revenues from digital, high-speed data and, for some ops, telephone services. But every digital subscriber requires capital for a new $300 set-top box. Almost every data customer needs a new drop from the pole.
Operators call that "success-based" capital spending, which investors should like because it brings new money. But it also means that Cox will add $1 billion in debt this year, according to Bank of America analyst Doug Shapiro. Charter is adding $1.6 billion; Cablevision, $1 billion. Comcast's cable operations should generate $457 million in positive free cash flow but turn negative for a year after it buys AT&T Broadband's systems.
The heavy-capital-spending cycle is supposed to be coming to an end, and some companies are predicting that they will start generating free cash flow within a year. Robbins said that's the way cable has always worked. "There's two to three years of heavy spending, then you harvest."
Investors want more evidence that the harvest is really coming.
"There's a crisis of confidence in capital-consuming companies," said one hedge-fund manager. "I'm not sure there's a lot the companies can do except demonstrate eight quarters of movement toward free cash flow."
SIDEBAR
The new cable math?
Insight and NCTA chief Mike Willner is leading a move to get MSOs to agree on how to count things like subscribers and capital spending.
With all operators tarred by the accounting scandal at Adelphia Communications, cable operators are discussing development of uniform standards for reporting some basic operating statistics to investors.
Insight CEO Mike Willner, who is also chairman of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, is orchestrating the move. Joining him are CEOs of all the major publicly traded cable companies, including Cox Communications Chairman James Robbins, Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts and Time Warner Cable Chairman Glenn Britt.
The goal isn't to overhaul financial-accounting issues, such as how to treat the cost of hooking up new customers-expense it against operating cash flow or capitalize it. That's the turf of the Financial Accounting Standards Board.
But operators regularly put out other operating statistics that are calculated differently by different companies. Take bulk-rate deals. If Cox or Insight gives a 100-unit apartment building a 20% bulk discount, they count that as 80 basic subscribers. Cablevision, counts 100 subscribers.
Or operators are starting to break out "success-based" capital spending, meaning money tied to a new revenue source. Investors don't quibble about the $300 set-top given to a new digital cable customer the way they worry about a $20 million system rebuild. But what if a new high-speed Internet customer needs new wiring? The modem is clearly "success-based." But should an upgraded "drop" to the house from the pole be characterized as "maintenance" capital?
There's no clearly right or wrong way, and the variances have been known among analysts for years. But, given Adelphia, they're suddenly drawing scrutiny.
Willner wouldn't discuss the evaluation. But Robbins supports it: "I think it will be helpful for everyone, especially the investors." Another operator said, "They're talking broad strokes. None of this changes revenues or cash flow."
Executives say it could take several weeks to decide whether to move ahead.-J.M.H.
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Survive This a Hoax...
NYPOST.COM Gossip: PAGE SIX
Deplore this.
NO, NBC isn't planning a new reality series hosted by the two California teens who were abducted from a lovers' lane and raped earlier this month. The Los Angeles New Times ran a satirical story reporting the network had signed Tamara Brooks and Jackie Marris to host a show called "Survive This!" during the February sweeps. The paper quoted an NBC exec who described it as " 'Survivor' meets Hannibal Lecter." NBC was flooded with calls after the hoax appeared. "I hope it gets people to think about the nature of television and the business that it does," the New Times' Tony Ortega told the Hollywood Reporter.
Friday, August 16, 2002
Survive This - - -
This is so outrageous it must be a hoax...but the story is still up on the New Los AngelesTimes site. New Times L.A. | newtimesla.com | News : Fault Lines
The classic Paddy Chayefsky movie "Network" where killing someone on air was considered to increase ratings comes to mind. I'm going to rent it to see it one more time. Like much of George Orwell's allegorical predictions, reality is worse than even he imagined.
This article describes the deal NBC has made with two Southern California teen age rape vistims. Excerpts:
"Tamara and Jackie are just lucky they got there first..."
"All the media exposure, plus the seven-figure deal each of the girls is expected to get from NBC for the reality program, will go a long way toward helping them to feel better, the experts insisted."
"Good looks definitely don't hurt when you're looking at putting people on TV. And to put it bluntly, jailbait sells! One thing you've got to say for Ratliff -- he may have been a psycho with a deathwish, but at least he had good taste in victims."
"Survive This! contestants will be briefed by the girls before they are helicoptered to a remote, secret location. If things go according to plan, NBC will have placed several paroled repeat sex offenders in various locations miles from the drop zone. The contestants will have 48 hours to find safety at a remote building made to resemble a rural sheriff's station. NBC hasn't decided who will portray the show's "sheriff," but staffers said overtures have been made to both Orange County sheriff Mike Carona and Kern County sheriff Carl Sparks."
"Asked if he's worried about the implications of unleashing career criminals on young victims for the sake of entertainment, the network exec threw up his hands. "You have to give the people what they want! And what they want, frankly, is graphic TV. We're in the television business, and this show will benefit NBC on a lot of different levels. Think of the tie-ins we'll be able to do with the local news programs, not to mention the kind of things we'll be able to do with ET and Access Hollywood. I can see a screaming Pat O'Brien running from a violent perp as he takes part in a little first-person journalism."
I am not making this up....
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
French Toast...
Big business having problems in Europe, but not for the same reasons as AOL and Disney.
Vivendi Loss, Washington Post
Tres Mauvais!
Vivendi Loses More Than $12 Billion
By John Leicester PARIS –– Debt-laden French media giant Vivendi Universal reported a loss of more than $12 billion for the first half of the year as it took a bigger than expected charge to reflect a writedown in value of its assets.The company also said it plans to sell at least $9.8 billion worth of assets, including the U.S. publisher Houghton Mifflin that it acquired only last year.
The sale plans signaled the first step to break up the media and entertainment conglomerate constructed in a two-year buying spree by former chairman Jean-Marie Messier.Messier was initially hailed as French business marvel for his efforts to transform Vivendi, once simply a water company, into a world-leading media giant to rival the likes of AOL Time Warner Inc. But his reputation took a dive as Vivendi racked up huge debts and the largest losses in French corporate history.
Messier was ousted in July, leaving Vivendi struggling with $18.6 billion of debts. Messier's replacement, Jean-Rene Fourtou, has sought to control Vivendi's borrowings and what he has called a cash crisis at the company.
Monday, August 12, 2002
Ann Coulter Stops Yelling...
This is the transcript of Ann Coulter, author of Best Seller "Scandal" being interviewed by Brian Lamb on CSpan yesterday. She's been on TV a lot promoting and defending her book; it is refreshing to hear a non-hysterical interviewer talk calmly to her, and hear reasoned responses replacing the usual Uzi bursts required on Most Cable News Talk Shows. Booknotes Transcript
Doubting Consumers...
A study published in the journal Psychology & Marketing claims that chronic self-doubters are more likely than others to define personal success by a owning a nice house or a new car. Lots of bullshit in here and psychobabble, but hey, it's what these folks do for a living. And the conclusion is instinctively attractive. Like the book entitled "the Myth of Mental Illness..."
no doubts...
FCC actions
From the Washington Post....
Digital Monsters
The Federal Communications Commission finally got its act together and voted to require electronics manufacturers to include digital tuners in all new television sets by 2007. Millions of Americans had been rioting in the streets, demanding thatthey pay several hundred dollars more for a feature that they don't want and will never use.
If that hasn't been going on, one can excuse the FCC for thinking so, caught as it is between two of the most powerful lobbies in Washington: Hollywood and the broadcasters. The poor TV set makers didn't have a chance.
TV makers say they will sue to get the ruling overturned. "This is pretty bad public policy," Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, told The Washington Post. "We're not a regulated industry. Well, at least not until today."
The broadcasters have long been a favorite of the permanent FCC bureaucracy. If the National Association of Broadcasters asserted that TV viewers had to have their eyelids stapled to their foreheads lest "free-over-the-air-local-broadcasting" perish from the earth, a segment of the FCC would merely inquire as to which type of Swingline the NAB thought might do the job.
The NAB is mortified that its members will be left out of the digital age unless the government mandates a niche for them. It also has an interest in a related FCC action that got less attention, but is potentially much more important. The FCC just voted to consider requiring those mandated digital TV tuners to include a "copy protection" scheme backed by Hollywood.
Both the broadcasters and Hollywood hate and fear new digital video recorders like TiVo and ReplayTV. Broadcasters loathe the fact that such units can instantly skip over commercials. (In theory, subscription-based services like cable do not need ads, but for-profit over-the-air broadcasters always will.) And the content owners fear that putting digital copying devices in the loop will spell doom for fat profits and high margins.
What this means is that in the next few years, as analog VCRs join 78s and 8-tracks in the hall of old formats, a new "digital rights management" regime may confront coach potatoes. Making digital copies of digital shows may be forbidden or only allowed under certain circumstances or with an added fee. Maybe "time shifted" viewing will only be allowed for a set period of time, after which your copy of the show self-destructs. Or perhaps building "data bases" of shows (what used to be called "tape libraries") will be simply illegal.
Just as the record industry used the digital revolution to expand their copyright claims, there is every reason to expect the video world to see the same thing -- with the FCC on the side of lobbies.
Washington Post story...
Contributing Editor Mike Godwin exposes the push to impose "digital rights management" on consumers here:
Digital Rights Management
Shortcomings as cat poo...
"Wear your flaws right out there on your sleeve; they're part of your humanity. Hiding them in the litter box might make you look better for a little while, but eventually it stinks up the whole house."
---Graham Kraquerz
http://mkrupnick.go.cc
Sunday, August 11, 2002
Gilder and Bork -
George Gilder interviews Robert Bork, principled martyr to some; scary neanderthal reactionary to others, in the new American Spectator.(Not yet on line...). Bork's last book, Slouching Toward Gommorah, decries the rise of pornography and decadence in the media, and the collapse of cultural norms.
RHB: ...Look at the use of vile language of television now - one character recently used the "F" word thirty times in thirty minutes. The people who produce this stuff say it's necessary to be authentic....but where I live I don't hear that stuff at all. Except on television...
GG: ....The slide to Gormorah is largely an optical illusion created by a dying broadcast media as they slide towards irrelavance. Soon no one will watch the ads that finance them...Watching television is a deeply depressing experience for most intelligent people. It leads to a sense of depression about the future of the country that I don't think corresponds to what is actually happening out there...
Thursday, August 08, 2002
Mogombo Guru...
Reading and quoting "contrarians" is fun, but this fella is really scary...the End is Near...
The Daily Reckoning
An excerpt:
I am now convinced that we are not only seeing the end of the bull market, but we are seeing the end of the world as we know it. To expect that capitalism and free enterprise will always conquer the overwhelming panoply of bizarre manifestations of too much credit-created money, too much socialist government and too much stupidity in America is too, too rich. That we lasted as long as we did, behaving as irresponsibly as we have, is merely testament to the poor performance of the rest of the world.
The stock market will almost certainly never again, for as long as you are alive, rise to the levels seen, because there has never been an instance of the same bubble occurring twice in succession. There was only one South Seas Bubble. There was only one Tulip Bubble. There were two Stock Bubbles (the Twenties and the Nineties), but they were seventy years apart, so they were obviously not in succession. I'm not even sure that there WILL be a stock market when it is over. I'm not even sure that the dollar will survive. The Roman denarius didn't, and we are on the same glide path that they took.
================
So grab your wife and head up the hill quick....
JMW
The Daily Reckoning
What is Real?...Does it matter?
The Japanese have a word for what everyone knows is real, but no one acknowledges, to save all from unnecessary embarassment. Like "not seeing" a woman washroom cleaner as she comes into a men's toilet to clean. And, they have a word for what everone knows is not true, but agree to pretend is the truth, so that everything goes along smoothly. Much of the Japanese economy functions based on these ideas. I
Parallels abound in US politics, religions, and in business. Broadcast television's "conversion" to digital has a certain component here. Realists who try to "spoil it for everybody" by acknowledging the pretense are attacked by the high priests of the status quo, who defend their crumbling empires vigorously.
Make your own assignments of who is who in this story:
A doctor of psychology was doing his normal morning rounds when he entered a patient's room. He found a patient sitting on the floor, pretending to saw a piece of wood in half. A second patient was hanging from the ceiling, by his feet.
The doctor asked the first patient what he was doing. The patient replied, "Can't you see I'm sawing this piece of wood in half?"
The doctor inquired of the first patient what the other patient was doing. The first patient replied, "Oh. He's my friend, but he's a little crazy. He thinks he's a light bulb." The doctor looks up and notices the second patient's face is going all red.
The doctor asks the first patient, "If he's your friend, you should get him down from there before he hurts himself." The first patient replies, "What? And work in the dark?"
Wednesday, August 07, 2002
Thank Goodness The Government is Forcing Them !
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/reg/2002/pd071702d.html
"The General Accounting Office has warned that it will cost small stations about 242 percent of annual revenue to go digital"
