Blog-IT-o ergo sum

	1/26/2005

Show me the money

On SS reform:

I liked the answer the Chilean Ambassador to the US gave recently retired US Congressman Ballenger from NC's 10th district at a trade conference in Chapel Hill last November.

Ballenger (puffing his chest with a great aura of formality and statesmanship), �gAmbassador, in light of the huge success of the Chilean system of privatizing your social security system, what can you teach us here in the US if we wish to do something similar.�h

Ambassador (with a chuckle), �gWell unfortunately Congressman Ballenger there is simply no way for you to copy what we did in Chile. You see to invest in such a privatized system you must have money. In your case, all the money you are currently taking in on your system is being spent. There is simply no money to invest. In order to create a privatized system in your country you will either have to cut spending or raise taxes�cand I see very few Congressman who will openly work for one of these two options.�h

editor's disclaimer. The material presented within quotation marks has been slightly modifed. It has been edited to fit this window and has been adjusted per the editor's recollection and limited notes.

12:02:08 AM

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Local Radio on the web...

I won't use quotation marks on this post.

During Monday's Libert Hour show on 1230 AM we inquired if there was a way to pick up a streaming audio feed for the broadcast. The show is done from the WMFR station in downtown High Point and then wired to WMFR's parent station in Winston-Salem to be "engineered." It then gets wired back to WMFR for broadcast from their radio tower.

This all being the case, we thought it should be relatively easy to do something with streaming audio for our fans (and supporters) outside the reach of WMFR's wattage. Well unfortunately not. The show gets "wired" back from Winston-Salem over a phone line. The local understanding of corporate policy is that the feeds can't be streamlined because they currently have no way to charge advertisers for having their material broadcast over the internet.

I can imagine the implications of ASCAP in the case of music stations, but WMFR is talk radio. My rough understanding of the logic in WMFR's case is that they do not wish to allow advertisers to reach an ADDITIONAL audience if they can't be charged for it. It seems like you can pay X dollars to reach 5000 radio wave listeners (whose caculated number is hardly an exact science) but that you can't expect to have someone on-line hear your message since the radio station has not figured out how to get such an event factored into their advertising charges.

I've got to be missing something here. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

6:55:14 AM

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