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It is our mission to make surplus and recycled medical supplies, durable medical equipment and related items/activities available to needy populations around the world in order to improve the health and quality of life of the recipients and to empower the recipients to live with increased dignity, independence, and hope.
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Great local group.
A study is about to give Madison Avenue a fresh pummeling: McKinsey & Co. is telling a host of major marketers that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.
That shocking statistic, delivered to the company’s Fortune 100 clients in a report on media proliferation, assumes a 15% decrease in buying power driving by cost-per-thousand rate increases; a 23% decline in ads viewed due to switching off; a 9% loss of attention to ads due to increased multitasking and a 37% decrease in message impact due to saturation.
“You’ve also got pronounced changes in consumer behavior while they’re consuming media,” said Tom French, director at McKinsey. “And ad spending is decreasingly reflecting consumer behavior.”
Car and Driver, Road & Track, Automobile, Motor Trend and the rest of the magazines further down the car mag food chain are all supported by advertising. Unless a magazine is subsidized by a non-profit organization (e.g. Consumer Reports) or charges an exorbitant price per issue, it can’t survive without advertising. Few readers have problems with ads per se; they consider them literally wallpaper. But when the ads outweigh the content, questions begin to arise about who’s calling the editorial shots. Put a one or two-page ad for a new car in the middle of a glowing review of the same and those suspicions can easily turn to full-scale paranoia. Sneak in a multi-page “special advertising section” formatted to look and read like the rest of the magazine and credibility stretches to breaking point.
I don’t know whether High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) acts more like fat than does sugar (compare here and here) but it’s worthwhile pointing out that HFCS is a child of the sugar quota. The import quotas raise the US price of sugar well above the world price (~24 cents per pound compared to ~9 cents per pound) and encourage consumption of HFCS. Reflecting this fact, the main defenders of the sugar quota are no longer Florida sugar growers but rather mid-West corn growers.
The HFCS business is a cartel – prices are the same, change quarterly on the same day and enjoy, as Tabarrok points out, subsidies. Years ago, working in the water and juice industry, I sent a letter to the anti-trust division complaining about this. A lawyer deep in the bowels of the justice department phoned me and said that “as long as Bob Dole is active on this issue, nothing will change”. I assume someone has replaced Dole as a friend to the corn processors.
Geothermal heating and cooling is based on one simple fact: that 6 feet down in the ground the temperature is the same—between 50˚F and 60˚F- the whole year round. This means that it is relatively cool in the summer, and relatively warm in the winter. Geothermal heating is thus quite different from solar heating: solar heating works worst when you most need it–in the cold, cloudy, snowy conditions of winter; the source for geothermal heating and cooling is not affected by the weather.
For geothermal cooling, all one needs to do is to circulate water in a pipe through the ground to cool it, and use this cool water to cool the air pumped through the house in the heating ducts.