From Publishers Weekly
From "Soccer Moms," the legendary swing voters of the mid-1990s, to "Late-Breaking Gays" such as former Gov. Games McGreevey (out at age 47), Burson-Marsteller CEO (and campaign adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton) Penn delves into the ever-splintering societal subsets with which Americans are increasingly identifying, and what they mean. For instance, because of "Extreme Commuters," people who travel more than 90 minutes each way to work, carmakers must come up with ever more luxury seat features, and "fast food restaurants are coming out with whole meals that fit in cup holders." In a chapter titled "Archery Moms?", Penn reports on the "Niching of Sports": much to the consternation of Major League Baseball, "we don't like sports less, we just like little sports more." The net result of all this "niching" is "greater individual satisfaction"; as Penn notes, "not one of the fastest-growing sports in America... depends substantially on teamwork." Penn draws similar lessons in areas of business, culture, technology, diet, politics and education (among other areas), reporting on 70 groups ("Impressionable Elites," "Caffeine Crazies," "Neglected Dads," "Unisexuals," "America's Home-Schooled") while remaining energetic and entertaining throughout. Culture buffs, retailers and especially businesspeople for whom "small is the new big" will value this exercise in nano-sociology.
Alan Bean, Apollo 12 lunar module pilot, Skylab mission II commander, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project backup commander, backup astronaut for the Gemini 10 and Apollo 9 missions and eventually head of the astronaut candidate operations and training group within NASA's astronaut office, spoke exclusively to Flightglobal.com about his time as an astronaut at the Autographica event in London on 12 October.
A member of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in October 1963 he became lunar module pilot for what was the second Moon landing in November 1969. He and mission commander Pete Conrad explored the ocean of storms, deployed several surface experiments and installed the first nuclear power generator station on the Moon. Richard Gordon, the mission's command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit photographing landing sites for future missions.
Those giant waves—"undular bore waves"—were photographed Oct. 3rd flowing across the skies of Des Moines, Iowa. (Credit: KCCI-TV Des Moines and Iowa Environmental Mesonet SchoolNet8 Webcam.)
"Wow, that was a good one!" says atmospheric scientist Tim Coleman of the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Alabama. Coleman is an expert in atmospheric wave phenomena and he believes bores are more common and more important than previously thought.
A story both intimate and epic that paints a vivid picture of Midwestern farm life.
From the beginning of the twentieth century to World War II, farm wife May Lyford Davis kept a daily chronicle that today offers a window into a way of life that has all but disappeared. May and her husband Elmo lived through two decades of prosperity, the Great Depression, and two World Wars in their Midwestern farming community. Like many women of her time, Davis kept diaries that captured the everyday events of the family farm; she also kept meticulous farming accounts. In doing so, she left an extraordinary record that reflects not only her own experiences but also the history of early twentieth-century American agriculture.
"If you owe the IRS lots of money, forget about it. We'll take care of it. We'll get them off your back. You won't have to pay all of what you owe. So, why should you pay what you really owe when our expert former IRS agents can negotiate a low settlement for you?"
The above is a paraphrase of the many commercials that I've been seeing on television lately. The premise is that through no fault of your own, you have failed to pay the taxes that you owe, and the mean and nasty IRS wants its money. There is no reason for you to despair, because there are companies who can help you negotiate a settlement with the government.
If your municipality isn’t looking at creative ways to develop new strategies that include having a state-of-the-art network infrastructure to support economic growth and development, they will be stagnating your property value and quality of life in your area. This was the message I conveyed in a speech on intelligent business campuses at the RTC last week.
Simply put, the three most important words in real estate (“location, location, location”) have turned into “location, location, connectivity” in urban, suburban and rural America.
Corporate site selection committees have included broadband connectivity as one of the top three criteria they are looking for when researching locations for corporate facilities. If your community does not have a good platform for broadband connectivity, it will simply be passed over in favor for one that does.
As a keynote speaker, I also presented these concepts on Tuesday to an urban symposium at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in Milwaukee.
The critical message is the same whether it is for a 5,000-person village in Virginia, a 50,000-person county in downstate Illinois or a 500,000-person city in Wisconsin: “Economic development equals broadband connectivity and broadband connectivity equals jobs.” Without connectivity, there will be little economic development and little if any new jobs.
The table below represents the layers of critical infrastructure that must be taken into account when reviewing regional opportunities.
Some residents of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey who live inside the boundaries of Verizon's FiOS network will be the first to be able to take advantage of Verizon's new 20/20 FiOS service. As the name implies, 20/20 FiOS is a symmetrical 20Mbps connection (same speed in both directions), and it's one of the first symmetrical services to target the consumer market.
Available today, 20/20 will cost $64.99 per month and will include Verizon's Internet Security Suite and 1GB of online backup (up to 50GB can be purchased at "competitive rates").
Susan Retta, the company's VP of Broadband Solutions, was quick to compare the new plan to cable. "For more than a decade, the Internet has been defined by how quickly you can download content," Retta said. "Our 20/20 FiOS service changes everything by creating an entirely new category of US broadband where 'fast' means fast in both directions."
We're a long way from this type of service, unfortunately. AT&T sells us slow copper internet services.
The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
It's the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches.
The mediocre record companies, mediocre A&R guys and the mediocre acts are struggling to stay in place. They're nervous that it all might fall apart. So they wait. They wait for 'proof' that this new idea is going to work, or at least won't prove fatal. (It's the impulse to wait that made them mediocre in the first place, of course).
So, in every industry, the middle waits. And watches. And then, once they realize they can survive the switch (or once they're persuaded that their current model is truly fading away), they jump in.
The irony, of course, is that by jumping in last, they're condemning themselves to more mediocrity.
About a decade ago, Wal-Mart adopted another approach, following advice from Ernst & Young. Wal-Mart transferred ownership of its stores to various in-house real-estate investment trusts. REITs pay no corporate income tax as long as they pay out at least 90% of their income to shareholders as dividends, which are usually taxed. Wal-Mart paid tax-deductible rent to those REITs. For one four-year period, the setup saved the retailer an estimated $230 million on its tax bill, even though the rent payments never left the company.
That strategy was the focus of a Wall Street Journal article in February. Since then, at least six states, including New York, Illinois, Maryland and Rhode Island, have passed laws attempting to prohibit the maneuver, which also has been used by banks and other retailers such as AutoZone Inc. The practice is being challenged by tax authorities in at least four other states, court records show.
Rockets still pierce the heavens in a halo of smoke during launches, and engineers and military men still crack open bottles of vodka to celebrate a successful launch. What has changed are the passengers. Nowadays Baikonur embraces the world, from wealthy space tourists to the world's first Malaysian cosmonaut, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, who blasted off for the international space station on Oct. 10.
The city itself is a rusting relic of the golden age of Russian rocketry, yet if anything, its place in the space industry is heading toward expansion. For at least four years after the space shuttle program ends in 2010, the U.S. will completely depend on Russia - and Baikonur - to send its crews to the international space station.
Facilities and equipment are workable but old. Remnants of demolished buildings and pieces of rusty metal dot the landscape along the roads to the launchpads. Dozens of apartment blocks that were abandoned after the 1991 Soviet collapse stand in rows like tombstones, their windows bricked up.
To test claims by users that Comcast Corp. was blocking some forms of file-sharing traffic, The Associated Press went to the Bible.
An AP reporter attempted to download, using file-sharing program BitTorrent, a copy of the King James Bible from two computers in the Philadelphia and San Francisco areas, both of which were connected to the Internet through Comcast cable modems.
We picked the Bible for the test because it's not protected by copyright and the file is a convenient size.
In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When we tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked.
Not all Comcast-connected computers appear to be affected, however. In a test with a third Comcast-connected computer in the Boston area, we were unable to test with the Bible, apparently due to an unrelated error. When we attempted to upload a more widely disseminated file, there was no evidence of blocking.
This is the first in a series of conversations about the "Big Questions" the John Templeton Foundation is conducting among leading scientists and scholars.
Margalit Mathan and Peter August found themselves caught in a maze of medical appointments and conflicting professional opinions when their 7-year-old daughter developed serious eye problems related to her juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.
The Berkeley family decided to consult yet another professional. They turned to a health care advocate, an adviser who specializes in helping patients and their families cut through the health care bureaucracy to find the help they need.
"It's been this huge roller coaster with the medical system and negotiating her different needs and the different information we're getting from different doctors," said Mathan, a high school psychologist. Her daughter, Siona, was diagnosed two years ago with arthritis, a condition that can cause eye inflammation and, in Siona's case, led to glaucoma.
Private health care advocacy is a new and growing field emerging at a time when an increasing number of Americans find themselves dealing with a chronic disease, aging family members or the bureaucracy of health insurance.
A professional advocate might have some background in health care, such as nursing or medical social work. But the business of health advocacy is unregulated, and people who call themselves a health advocate might have no training other than helping a family member through a difficult illness.
Three weeks ago my wife and I flew China Eastern from Beijing to Shanghai and, thanks to traffic miracles on both ends and the absence of the usual Beijing departure hold, made it door-to-door in about four hours.
Today I flew US Airlines from Washington to Boston, a more-or-less comparable route, in just about the same door-to-door time. One difference: Beijing-Shanghai is more than half again as far (576 nautical miles, vs. 343). Another: often I've been loaded onto a 747 for the Chinese route, versus the Airbus 319 that is standard for US Air. But here's the general compare/contrast rundown:
When individual borrowers began to suffer, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson didn't seem overly concerned. The market would clear out the problem through the foreclosure process. Loans would get written off; properties would change hands and be resold. When upstart subprime mortgage lenders ran into trouble, Bernanke and Paulson shrugged again. The market would clear out the problem through the bankruptcy process. Subprime companies like New Century Financial filed for Chapter 11, others liquidated or restructured, and loans made to the lenders were written down. Meanwhile, Paulson and Bernanke assured us that the subprime mess was contained.
But as the summer turned to fall, and the next several shoes dropped, their attitude changed. And that is because the next group of unfortunates to fall victim to subprime woes were massive banks. In recent years, banks in New York, London, and other financial capitals set up off-balance-sheet funding vehicles called SIVs, or conduits. The entities borrow money at low interest rates for short periods, say 30 to 90 days, and use the funds to buy longer-term debt that pays higher interest rates. To stay in business, the conduits must continually roll over the short-term debt. But as they searched for higher yields, some conduits stuffed themselves with subprime-mortgage-backed securities. And when lenders became alarmed at the declining value of those holdings, they were reluctant to roll over the debt. Banks thus faced a choice. They could either raise cash by dumping the already-depressed subprime junk onto the market, or bring the conduits onto their balance sheets and assure short-term lenders they'd get paid back.
Have you noticed how even Presidential races have now been reduced to dollar figures? I don't mean the effect that money has on shaping political agendas and voter perceptions - this has been going on since at least the time of Pericles. I am referring instead to the assessment of candidates' appeal to voters based on how much money they have raised in their election "war chests". Hillary is deemed to be the frontrunner because she has raised X million dollars more than Barack, who is ahead of John Edwards and so on and so forth. This is so much like the order book of an IPO (initial public offering), for chrissakes. The more orders that flow in during the book-building period the better the chances that the issue will be "hot" and open for trading at an immediate premium. Hillarydotcom and Barrackdotcom.
In 1988 Forbes Magazine hailed Chuck Feeney as the twenty-third richest American alive. Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to a blue-collar Irish-American family during the Depression, a veteran of the Korean War, he had made a fortune as founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the world's largest duty-free retail chain. But secretly, Feeney had already transferred all his wealth to his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies. Only in 1997, when he sold his duty free interests, was he "outed" as one of the greatest and most mysterious American philanthropists in modern times. A frugal man who travels economy class and does not own a house or a car, Feeney then went "underground" again, until he decided in 2005 to cooperate in a biography to promote giving-while-living. Now in his mid-seventies, he is determined his foundation should spend the remaining $4 billion in his lifetime. The Billionaire Who Wasn't is a tale of one of the greatest untold retail triumphs of the twentieth century, and of what happens to a unique man and his family when confronted with wealth beyond imagining.
Tax avoidance is the flip side to Mr Feeney's philanthropic coin. He is addicted to it. “Chuck hates taxes. He believes people can do more with money than governments can,” says a friend. In 1964 a young New York lawyer, Harvey Dale, told Mr Feeney that changes in the tax laws threatened his business, which was running risks that could put the founders in jail. On his advice, Mr Feeney and his co-founder, Robert Miller, transferred ownership to their foreign-born wives, from France and Ecuador, respectively.
In 1974, through a deal with the American government, the firm turned the Pacific island of Saipan into a tax haven. Then, in 1978, Mr Feeney grouped his various investments, including his shares of DFS, in a holding company, General Atlantic Group Limited, in tax-free Bermuda. To escape the American taxman, everything was still registered in his wife's name.
Mr Feeney carefully shunned all outward evidence of wealth. But as soon as DFS became reliably profitable, he started the practice of giving 5% of his pre-tax profits to good causes. In 1982 he created a foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, based in Bermuda. Two years later he signed over his fortune to the foundation, except for sums set aside for his wife and children. His net worth fell below $5m. When he broke the news to his children, he gave them each a copy of Andrew Carnegie's essay on wealth, written in 188
In-theater ads hit $456 million in 2006, up 15% from 2005, says the Post, citing a report by the Cinema Advertising Council. For perspective, this is about the size of Viacom's "digital" revenue. The head of the council, Cliff Marks, who also happens to be head of sales for the public play in the sector, National Cine-Media (NCMI, see below), says that the introduction of digital projectors is helping spur adoption, as advertisers no longer have to burn ads onto film.
WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.
The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.
The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation...” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.
Even five, six years ago, Izvestia, Pravda and a thousand other Communist papers were written in a language that seemed designed to fill up as much space as possible without actually saying anything. Because, of course, it was dangerous to take up positions that might have to be defended. Now all these newspapers have rediscovered the use of language. But the heritage of dead and empty language these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of sociology and psychology.
Dave mentions his recent poor experience with American Airlines. I've had a number of those tight connections / run through the airport / arrive at gate / flight is closed / yet there is 5 or 10 minutes until departure time experiences.
However, I can recall two positive AA experiences:
Extremely poor cabin conditions:
I arrived at my middle seat (9E) for a redeye West Coast to Chicago flight only to find that my left seatmate (9D) was very, very big and had the armrest up while occupying some a portion of my seat. The woman to my right in 9F had a cat under her legs....
I wrote a letter to AA's CEO (Bob Crandall) and they promptly sent me my money back.
Years later I flew through AA's then hub in Nashville. My in bound flight was delayed and I faced a very tight connection to the last Dallas/Fort Worth plane of the evening. I stood up to depart my plane when my name was called. A bus drove me to the departing plane, just in time. That will probably never happen again.
I've also had many good experiences on United and Midwest Airlines. Your mileage may vary.
Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) requested federal funding for several projects as part of this year's annual appropriations process. The projects, with the amounts designated by his constituents and several national organizations were released by the senator.
Maureen Taylor has dated a photograph to 1913 by studying the size and shape of a Lion touring car's headlamps. Armed with her collection of 19th-century fashion magazines, she can pinpoint the brief period when Victorian women wore their bangs in tight curls rather than swept back. Using a technique borrowed from the CIA, she identified a photo of Jesse James by examining the shape of his right ear.
With millions of Americans obsessively tracing their roots, Ms. Taylor has emerged as the nation's foremost historical photo detective. During a recent meeting of the Maine Genealogical Society, attendees lined up a dozen deep as she handled their images with a cotton glove and peered at the details through a photographer's loupe. One man offered a portrait photo and asked if it could be of his great grandmother, who died in 1890. "It's not," Ms. Taylor said after about 15 seconds; she'd dated the hairstyle and billowy blouse to the early 20th century. When another attendee asked why her great-great-grandfather was wearing small hoops in his ears in a portrait, Ms. Taylor explained, "He was in the maritime trade."
The Internal Revenue Service began this month selecting thousands of taxpayers for audits — even though the IRS has no reason to think they've underpaid their taxes. It's part of the IRS' National Research Program.
The latest hot segment of the technology business appears to be maps.
MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps and GPS (global positioning system) navigation in cars are very popular, and all of those maps came from one of just two mapmaking companies.
Both of those companies now are being snatched up by bigger companies for billions of dollars.
Creating a digital guide to the world's highways and street addresses may be the cutting edge of technology, but it is also just long hours on the road.
Jeremy Onysko's orange van has four digital cameras mounted on the roof. They are snapping pictures every 30 feet — recording road signs, lane markings and anything else a driver might need to know.
Since 1974, Nikon has sponsored a yearly photo competition for images that delve into the worlds beyond the reach of the unaided human eye. The camera maker feted the photographers who made the top 20 "photomicrographs" in Nikon's annual Small World competition at New York's Explorer's Club. The winners were drawn from a pool of 1,709 submissions.
The dozen images collected here (the top 10 images, plus two Wired News picks) capture facets of living organisms that have a technical meaning to the trained specialist, but appear to be pure art to the layperson. The striking images convey something both strange and alien that could almost be sold as the first glimpses of extraterrestrial life. Yet, many of the objects presented here could not be more mundane or down-to-earth: A piece of ivory, a typical aquarium fish, a drop of sea water.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took a knock at one of his chief rivals during a speech to an audience in the U.K., saying Google reads customer email as part of a failed bid to drive ad-based revenue.
The software giant's chief made the remarks during a discussion about consumer software revenue models, and Ballmer used the dialogue as an entry point to take his shot at Google. The video is available to watch via the web site Mydeo.com. Ballmer made his remarks after an audience member asked him if an advertising model could support software business in the future. The CEO said a combination of models - - commercial and ad-paid - - would go forward.
"What's a good example? Will online publications be largely ad-funded as things move from the physical world to the online world?" Ballmer said. "I think the answer is yes.
"Have we seen the migration of things even like email? . . . Our Windows Live Hotmail, in and of itself, doesn't generate much ad revenue. So we've had to put, essentially, a whole portal around it because the traffic around it is very valuable but it's not very easily monetized in the context of mail.
"Google's had the same experience, even though they read your mail and we don't," Ballmer said, to chuckles and and a couple of gasps in the audience. "That's just a factual statement, not even to be pejorative. The theory was if we read your mail, if somebody read your mail, they would know what to talk to you about. It's not working out as brilliantly as the concept was laid out."
How do I say it more clearly? Honestly, folks, we need better leadership than this in the seats of media power, and until that happens, we’ll just continue to miss the point, over and over and over again.
At an anti-piracy summit in Washington Wednesday, NBC’s Jeff Zucker actually called for AT&T and other Internet-service providers to install filtering software to, and get this, “weed out pirated content and unclog networks.” This is one of the most dangerous and desperate things I’ve ever heard come out of the mouth of someone who, among other things, is charged with certain responsibilities vis-a-vis the First Amendment. And the REAL PROBLEM is that this line was likely penned by the Telcos, not Zucker or his writers. I mean, come on! “Unclog networks?” Where have we heard that before?
There is a growing call for a redress of the imbalance between what John Bogle terms managerial capitalism and owners' capitalism. Bogle describes owners' capitalism in his book, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, as "an enormous transfer of wealth from public investors to the hands of business leaders, corporate insiders, and financial intermediaries."
Headlines remind us of very large payouts to CEOs, regardless of their performance. (In fact, it could be argued that in many cases, payouts are inverse to success, since many have been occasioned by the firing of the recipients.) Some critics contend that managers have received a disproportionate share of the fruits of corporate success, leaving too little for workers or owners. Even hedge funds have been derided as better management compensation devices than investment vehicles.
What's the reason for these phenomena? According to one report, Michael Jensen and Kevin Murphy, in a book to be published in the next several months, C.E.O. Pay and What to Do About It, lay much of the blame at the feet of boards of directors. They claim that CEOs in public companies should be answerable to directors for poor performance but in fact are not. Directors, representing an indirect form of governance, are poor representatives of owners. They are far too lax in influencing employment contracts and management incentives. The options they grant are too generous and fail to take into account the cost of capital employed during the term of the option. The severance payment arrangements to which they agree are too lavish, regardless of the reasons for severance.
At the beginning of Keillor's hilarious new novel, Evelyn sets in motion a circus of zany events when she dies in her sleep -- despite the fact that she's an inveterate insomniac. In a no-nonsense note to her daughter Barbara, Evelyn stipulates that she wishes to be cremated, with her ashes sealed up in a bowling ball and "dropped into Lake Wobegon off Rocky Point." What's more, in the same letter Evelyn unapologetically reveals that for years she's been conducting a passionate love affair with a retired TV weatherman.
It’s been fun and edifying watching Google’s PR engine at work. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has been evangelizing the need for “international privacy standards.”
Google’s most powerful PR tool to-date is the comforting and accessible video series featuring Maile Ohye, a personable young woman who is a senior support engineer, giving a chalk talk about what information Google captures when you search, how it uses that information and how you can control it. The two videos in the series to-date are designed to be very comforting.
The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it. Another blow earlier this week: Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it.
The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies. Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.
Reg Turnill was working for the BBC in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the World's first orbiting artifical satellite.
Turnill went on to cover the space race and travelled to the Soviet Union for the press conference following cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight and eventually was based in the US to cover NASA's Moon programme.
He got to know the German rocket engineer Werner von Braun, who had developed the Nazi V-2 weapon, and also came to know many of the US astronauts.
Mayor Bloomberg, aka Mayor Mike, made a few important points that are as relevant to business as to government yesterday in his Keynote Address at the Economist’s Conference on The Future of New York City as the World’s Business Hub.
1) A Mayor (or any leader) cannot be short term focused nor obsessed with photo opportunities. One has to be as excited about completing a new water tunnel for the City as about glamorous new buildings in Lower Manhattan. Infrastructure upgrades cannot wait; his Administration put more money into the water tunnel project than the five previous mayors combined.
If it were not for Rand McNally, I wouldn’t know I was in Europe, separated by an ocean from my family and friends. As far as I’m concerned, the urban culture of Berlin is closer to the culture of New York City than it is to, say, the German hinterland, to say nothing of the American hinterland. It is only through a certain way of looking at the world — from the privileged view of the orbiting satellite, in this case — that it appears the way it does. Our traditional maps, from the rough sketches of the Middle Ages to the latest map/satellite hybrids of Google, place geographic proximity above all other considerations in terms of importance.
But what about cultural proximity? Lifestyle proximity? “Energetic” proximity? What about the fact that I can take a direct flight (more or less) to any world capital, but to get to a mid-sized city in the States, I have to take two or three? It costs more money and takes more time to get from Denver to Upstate New York than it does from Denver to Amsterdam, Paris, or Milan — wouldn’t that make Denver CLOSER to the European capitals than it is to small cities in its own nation? That is my contention.
