john maddente | midwestern clarity

  Gree tings   I 'm grateful for many things this holiday season and I'm posting a few of the less obvious ones below: Arby's limited time hamburger offering .  Yes, the Deluxe Wagyu Steakhouse Burger is so good, I've written to an Arby's executive urging his organization to make it a permanent menu item. John Authers ' Bloomberg column.  Mr. Authers wrote for the Financial Times for years before moving to Bloomberg.  He's funny, reliably prolific (not sure how he pumps out his rich articles almost daily) and especially well-rounded -- F inance & E conomics (obviously), S ports if a bit heavy at times on soccer (sorry 'football'), M usic, F ilm and H istory. An unnamed community organization that allowed me to scale back my voluntary involvement with grace. A glorious week off to do things of the sort I'm doing today -- reading, writing, cooking, listening to music CDs (yes, I still use that medium without apologies -- right now I'm enj...

Like a pebble in your shoe that won't go away; I've long been annoyed by the amount of ad time viewers suffer through while watching broadcast TV and Cable TV.   Internet streamers and social media viewers are not immune either.  More on that score in a moment. The increased viewer burden is not your imagination.  See  Toni Fitzgerald's Forbes article, " Yes, You Are Seeing More Commercials Than Ever Before " .   The theme was echoed by Gerry Smith of Bloomberg in his 2019 piece; " TV networks vowed to cut back on commercials. Instead, they stuffed in more" .     The unabashed Capitalist in me hastens to add that the ad industry is an essential component  of a robust consumer-based economy .  This post is about advertisers and media platforms practicing reasonableness and a more viewer-considerate methodology.   We all land on web pages that hijack the viewer with an unwanted solicitation blasting on the screen...