“How they see the water level”.

Another way to see the water level is: The tide goes out and the tide comes in.

Those that can ride the tide reap the benefits of their knowldge; those who can’t ride the tide must stay grounded and possibly swept away by the incoming tide.

Some concepts last forever, others simply get covered over and are compost for the newer concepts.

If we examine the universe, we’ll see that two stabilizing factors are the cycles of orbits and rotation.

This is my half empty, or, possibly half full.

Bye.

This is, of course, merely the bloated corpse of print media rising to the pond surface to belch forth bubbles of decomposition. Don’t mistake it for a sign of returning vigor, no matter how you wish it were so.

Paper based media is ultimately doomed. Long-term, it is incredibly wasteful and therefore unsustainable (remember the arguments about how digital photography could never replace film?…Go find film for your Brownie.) Sooner or later, someone will develop a viable paid content model for the internet (and its inevitable development would be well served by the collapse of the moribund paper print industry). You can argue about the tactile delight of paper print all you want….its days are limited.

Deal with it.

It’s an old business school adage that if the railroads had realized that they were in the business of moving things from place to place, they’d be running UPS and FedEx and airlines today. Instead, they thought that they were in the choo-choo train business.

Magazines and newspapers are in the information business. Sadly, too many of them are wed to the idea that they are all about killing trees and pimping advertising. True, the advertising brings in the revenue, but I’m the customer, and I don’t generally buy because of the quality advertising. I buy information or entertainment.

I can get information anywhere these days, or more accurately, I can get information from anywhere without getting out of my chair. Digging through it is another matter.

Finding *good* information is the challenge, and having things I should know about brought to my attention when I didn’t know I should be looking for those things is very valuable indeed.

I can find loads of senesless drivel, like this bit I’m writing, all over the Internet. A good news organization acts as a reliable filter, and provides solid editorial fuctions. That’s a service a customer will pay for.

Sadly, most magazines have gone the drivel route, and I can get free drivel on the internet. The mags write short, useless pieces tied to the advertisers they are wooing. Most magazines are mighty thin these days, and all they offer are advertisements and articles written to tie into said advertisements … and then blame the Internet for their demise.

The only print mag I still get is The Economist, and I usually read that on line too. The hardcopy is for the airplane. I subscribe to the on line version of the Wall Street Journal. I’ve let my other publications lapse; they’re no longer providing value.

And Bing, your writing would be every bit as entertaining whether in pixels, black ink, or goat’s blood.

In a somewhat unrelated note; I am happy to see that more and more universities are experimenting with providing textbooks in digital form. Remember the terror of not being able to acquire a copy of a required textbook because some lunkhead professor (or lackey TA) didn’t order enough for the bookstore? I’m sure those rather worthless tomes will continue to be extravagantly priced…but at least you’d be able to get one. Got to pay the turds in the ivory towers!

Somehow the Sumerians (or perhaps some other pack of ancient scoundrels….I forget which) managed to get over the loss of cuneiform clay tablets. Times change, and we primates get ever more diabolical.

Business Week,, what an interesting title for a company/mag…almost makes one think there is something happening
in the market place other than Banks Failing,,,,99 and counting so far this year…

Guess the name of the 100th bank and win a free toaster…I wonder if failed bank cheque blanks will be come fashionable to collect…..you know like baseball cards…could be money in this,,,,could store them next to Business Weeks last edition

In hindsight I realized one could have had a great stock market strategy by shorting all of the companies whose corrupt or incompetent CEO’s made BW’s covers in the late 1990’s and into the early 2000’s. I let my subscription lapse when it became apparent there was little willingness to tell the emperer’s they had no clothes. Oh wait..I should have known from word “Week” in the title, kind of like Entertainment Weekly…