I’ve posted links and summary information on the May 24, 2005 Special Election for the Madison Schools Referendums.
Keillor on the Decline of Radio
The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel’s brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and Internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.
Charles McCarry Chat
Ex CIA agent and author Charles McCarry posted an online chat recently.
What Westerner’s Don’t Know About Keiretsu
Jeffrey K. Liker and Thomas Y. Choi discuss Toyota & Honda’s vaunted supplier system.
Inc’s Best Cities to do Business
Madison is 38, while Green Bay is #4 in Inc’s latest list of the best cities to do business in.
GM Gives it up – Discusses Hybrid License with Toyota
Toyota continues to build volume for it’s supplier network by discussing a deal for hybrid auto technology with GM. Ford did the same with it’s Escape small SUV Hybrid. Generally bad news for domestic parts suppliers.
This looks interesting: Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota’s System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It by Michael N. Kennedy
WW2 Landmarks: VR panoramic scenes
Mickael Therer announced an impressive collection of Quicktime VR WWII European landmark scenes. Beautiful work.
Feingold’s Big Business Tax Cut
Russ Feingold voted for this giveaway (I’d like a 5.25% tax rate, please). Alex Berenson looks at one of the windfalls: Large drug companies:
A new tax break for corporations is allowing the biggest American drug makers to return as much as $75 billion in profits from international havens to the United States while paying a fraction of the normal tax rate.
The break is part of the American Jobs Creation Act, signed into law by President Bush in October, which allows companies a one-year window to return foreign profits to the United States at a 5.25 percent tax rate, compared with the standard 35 percent rate.
…….
Though the companies stand behind their accounting, financial analysts and tax lawyers say that the drug makers’ claim defies reality and that their profits come mostly from sales in the United States.
Happy Mother’s Day
Jon Carroll on “Our Mothers, Ourselves“:
She learned to scuba dive. She was active in the League of Women Voters. When I was 28, she and my stepfather moved to Ethiopia. She worked for the World Health Organization, preparing educational materials that said, in essence, “Please do not defecate in the river.”
SUV Slowdown
Salvador Sotello, for example, recently paid F.H. Dailey Chevrolet in San Leandro $41,000 for a new Chevy Tahoe LT (yes, with leather) SUV that had a sticker price of $58,000. The sale was an anomaly in what is otherwise a pretty dismal selling season. “It’s been pretty quiet,” saleswoman Crystal Gonzalez said the other day. “Been pretty slow.”