Answer Yourself! A blog by Sukhpreet Singh

I am not a big proponent of watching too much TV for entertainment. I believe watching 5-6 hrs./week for entertainment should be good enough. Now if your kids watch too much TV thats even worse. Here are a few stats that i picked up from this website:

According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.

I. FAMILY LIFE
1) Percentage of households that possess at least one television: 99
2) Percentage of U.S. homes with three or more TV sets: 66
3) Number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes

4) Number of hours of TV watched annually by Americans: 250 billion
5) Value of that time assuming an average wage of $5/hour: S1.25 trillion

II CHILDREN
6) Number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children: 3.5
7) Number of minutes per week that the average child watches television: 1,680
8 ) Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 hours
9) Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1500

III VIOLENCE
10) Number of murders seen on TV by the time an average child finishes elementary school: 8,000
11) Number of violent acts seen on TV by age 18: 200,000
12) Percentage of Americans who believe TV violence helps precipitate real life mayhem: 79

This quote best sums up the relation between intelligence and TV :
“Don’t you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There’s one marked ‘Brightness,’ but it doesn’t work.” - Gallagher

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In my previous post, i had discussed about how would you compete with free. Here is a perfect example of a music band that found a way to add more value to its listeners and let each listener (or fan) decide how much they want to pay for that “value”.

Recently, Radiohead announced that they will let anyone download their latest album - “In Rainbows” from their website for any price the listener decides to pay. Is that cool or what? In traditional setup, musicians have never made money on record sales. Most of it went to the labels. So artists like Radiohead and Prince, who gave away his newest album (3121) for free inside of a newspaper, are at the front of new wave.

What are the benefits of this new model?

1) Its easy to distribute music and so low overhead costs.
2) Band gets to keep more and more profit.
3) Its easy for fans to download music. They will prefer to download the album from original source rather than some unreliable peer-to-peer network.
4) By giving the choice of having their music for free, bands would generate good will for themselves.
5) All in all there is no loss for a band to go for this model.

Its interesting to point out that an artist only makes about $1.25 USD per each $16.98 retail album and record companies receive approximately $10.00 from that CD. I’m sure many will opt to pay at least $1 and loyal fans would pay more for the album. It’s possible that Radiohead will make more money selling “In Rainbows” directly to consumers than they would have otherwise.

The new model that Radiohead has chosen is great for everyone except for Label Industry. By embracing this model the best band in the world is telling Label Industry “We don’t really need you and we are going on our own.”

I am not a big fan of Radiohead, but just to checkout their new album, I’ll pay about $3 for their album. I am a big fan of Bob Dylan and so if he does something similar, I would not mind paying $8-10 for an entire album.

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In October 8th issue of TIME, I read this:

$500,000 is the amount the Iraq war costs per minute, according to a joint analysis by a Nobel-prizewinning economist and a Harvard scholar, who noted that the amount spent on war each day could pay for health care for 423,529 children.

President Bush recently vetoed SCHIP - State Children’s Health Insurance Program - bill. SCHIP currently covers about 6 million children in families that earn too much to qualify for the Medicaid program for the poor, but not enough to afford their own, private health insurance. The bill the president vetoed would have added $35 billion to the program over the next five years — enough to cover about 10 million children total.

One of his reasoning is:
“This program expands coverage, federal coverage, up to families earning $83,000 a year. That doesn’t sound poor to me.” This is not true - SCHIP would cover up to families earning $60,000 - a family of four.

The point is that he willing to splurge on Iraq War but if a program goes out to help an extra 4 million kids, thats not acceptable. Here is simple math that shows that the amount spent on war for an extra 9.45 days will be enough to get those 4 million kids the health coverage they need, which the President doesn’t agree with.

423,529 children can get health care by => 1 day’s worth of expenditure on Iraq war,
6,000,000 (6 million) children can get health care by => 14.2 day’s worth of expenditure on Iraq war , and
10,000,000 (10 million) children can get health care by => 23.6 day’s worth of expenditure on Iraq war.

So to cover extra 4 million kids, its gonna take 9.45 day’s worth of money allocated towards Iraq war.

Is he trying to do things right or is he trying to do the right things?