Bob Sanders's Posts - NHBR Network/NHBR's online b-to-b network

IT’S TIME TO MAKE WORK

2009-11-30T17:28:43.000Z

A friend of mine sent me this graphic of the progress of our jobless recovery, which reinforces the doubts about the way we are spending our way to employment.

We already know from several articles in NHBR that the amount thus far spent per job created (or layoff avoided) borders on the absurd. Last month the state for instance reported that after more than $407 million in contracts, it created the equivalent of 3007 full time jobs. That’s comes out to $135,449.75 per job. Even if all those contracts haven’t been spent yet, and it comes out to only a 100 grand or so a job, I doubt that many people working on the highway this summer or winterizing homes are making even that kind of money.

Maybe we have been going about it the wrong way. Thus far, the spending hasn’t been directly to create jobs, as were a lot programs (like the WPA) during the Great Depression. The idea is that this time we shouldn’t “make work” but instead “target” spending on things like Saving the Financial System, Create Modern Infrastructure, Upgrade Education, Stop our Dependence on Foreign Oil, etc.

To make a “sustainable” recovery we have to spend our way into a new economy, and jobs will be created along the way, or so the thinking goes. This is a more efficient way of spending, supposedly, because the private sector is ALWAYS more efficient than government, no matter what.
But such two-birds-in-one-stone approach usually doesn’t work. First of all, have you ever tried to kill two birds with one stone? It’s hard enough to get one of them. If you try for two, you’ll hit nothing but air.

It reminds me of the trying to get the ultimate smart phone that will be a good phone, mp3 player, mini internet computer, camera etc. Some may argue that the I-Phone does a pretty good job of some if not all of these things. But if you really want to take good pictures, you get a digital camera. If you really want a good phone, you want something that’s not tied to AT&T network, and so on.

And if you really want to spend money to create jobs, you need programs designed to do just that, i.e. the old make work programs, where all the money is spent hiring people, and making up something for them to do quickly. The private sector really isn’t the vehicle for that. Companies don’t want to just put people to work. They want to make money, or do something that will make money in the future. And if that doesn’t create the most jobs right away, then the money won’t get there, no matter how many complicated safeguards you put up.

No, if the government wants to create jobs and put people the work, it should try to do it itself and leave the private sector out of it, for the most part. Some jobs will be created. They will do things that will be absolutely meaningless in making a profit, but may create some nice things that private business doesn’t care too much: free health care to the poor, some shelters for the homeless, fixing up a few parks, clearing some trails, publishing some creative works that will never make any publisher any money. This might may result in a social good or maybe a lot of waste, a lot of “make work.” But at least it wouldn’t cost so much for each job. More people will be getting a regular pay check which they can spend. And maybe that black picture of the United States might lighten up a bit.

You want to make work? That’s what government does best, to many a conservative chagrin. The private sector ain’t interested. They want to make money.

Government should stop relying on private enterprise to do what it wants to do. Stop trying to hitch a ride on the back of business. If you want to do something right, you just have to do it yourself.

MY VISIT TO THE OTHER SIDE

2009-11-20T14:53:32.000Z

I visited the Other Side, and now I know why newspapers are struggling…and why New Hampshire Business Review changed its name to NHBR and started NHBR Network.

The Other Side for any reporter is public relations. Yes, in my day job I’m still a reporter of NHBR, but at night I masquerade as an actor for the Community Players of Concord. And this year, given my years in the media and the Players lack of publicity director, I stepped in to take on that role. I was soon trying to sell our first two productions: Tom Sawyer and Godspell
( I wouldn’t be doing my volunteer job if I didn’t tell you that Godspell is playing this weekend (Nov. 20-22) Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Click here for detail and tickets).

Now once upon a time, the Concord Monitor automatically plastered whatever production by this 82 year old theater company came up with across the front page of the weekend section, complete with a huge color photo. This guaranteed a decent crowd for Thursday night. No longer (and as a result, no more Thursday nights). The Monitor did some surveys and found that people aren’t so much interest in local stuff. They drive. So these days Monitor readers get enticing articles about things happening all over the state, which makes producing local theater more challenging then ever.

Selling it is, is also a major challenge. It’s not enough that a local group of people are putting on an amazing show. It has to be marketed like a package, the way museums market blockbuster exhibits. It has to be an EVENT. Tom Sawyer morphed into the centennial of Mark Twain’s death, with a marathon reading of the book in the Concord Public Library.. In Godspell it was a coming together of the religious and theatrical community, with a discussion group on Jesus in Theater and Film (Saturday, November 21 at 2 pm at the Audi. Free with refreshments!)
Reaching out to churches was also an alternative marketing strategy, given the uncertainty of media coverage.

Now, I’m not about to go on and on about the lack of local coverage as the reason behind the decline of local newspapers. I think that has something to do with it, but the larger reason is that there are other ways that advertisers can target their audiences….seemingly better ways.
Just as for years we counted on the local paper to cover us, the Players put nearly all of its limited advertising dollars to buy ads in local papers. But this year, we tried doing something else. We started advertising on Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

We still advertised in the Monitor: close to $700 in fact, but this time we diverted about $250 to the internet ads. In the Monitor we put a $1 off coupon, if someone brought it in the box office. After three newspaper advertisement, only two people submitted coupons
On the internet however we paid by the click. So that $250 resulted in more than 350 clicks. And these were clicks by people who lived in our market area, and who had an interest in either religion, or theater or gospel music. And they all clicked on an ad that read something like this:

• Get Godspell Tickets Here
See it in Concord NH, this weekend
Only $14-$17. Good seats going fast
www.communityplayersofconcord.org

When they click on the ad, it takes them directly to our website, where they just have to click buy tickets, and then they can pick out a seat and give a credit card number.

Now, not everybody bought a ticket…but not everybody who sees the Monitor ad will go to the show. In Internet advertising, there is the equivalent of newspaper circulation. They are called unique impressions…and our ad have about 80,000 of them, more than our local papers circulation And in the case of the Monitor, we are reaching people who don’t care about religion and theater, whereas with Internet advertising you can target your reader.

Finally it’s a lot harder for the reader of a newspaper ad to take action….action at least that you can measure. For someone to click a coupon, it means they have to stop what they are doing, find a scissors and tear apart what they are reading and remember to bring it in. Whereas all an Internet browsers have to do is click on the ad that brings them directly to your web page (where they can go one step further and buy a ticket). That’s partly the reason that the Players has only a few coupons and hundreds of clicks.

Of course, you know a clipped coupon at the box office means a sold ticket…and a click on your website does not have that certainty. But if your ad is specific enough with words like “Get tickets here” you can conclude that a good percentage actually is clicking on the site with at least the thought of buying a ticket. Even if only 10 percent actually do so, 30 is a lot more tickets than 3.
This is why dollars are fleeing print media for the Internet. It seems as if you get ten times the results by spending as third as much. More astute member of profession on this network may point to studies about whether that is actually true (and I hope they do in the comment section) but appearances count for more than reality in this business.

New Hampshire Business Review – as does most of the print media – realize this, of course, and that is why they are shifting more and more resources into the Internet. It’s why I spend as much time writing for our daily web page NHBR.com as the print product and why I am writing this blog.

The problem however is that the advertising dollars don’t follow us as much as we like. They are going to sites like Google and Facebook where the vast amount of Internet traffic is. The paradox is that much of what people are searching for actually comes from newspapers and other media for free, which is why papers are now struggling with the idea of paid internet content. However, as we all know, papers who have tried to do that have found a drastic drop in readership, and they risk becoming irrelevant. And nothing is more deadly to a media outlet.

Meanwhile the advertising dollars keep on coming into Google because there is a lots of other media willing share content for nothing.

I don’t pretend to have a solution to this. But my brief foray into publicity made me realize what the print media is up against, and how important it is forit to develop online products.

Comments anyone?

TRASH TALKIN’ BLOGGER BRAGS or RECYCLING A 10-YEAR-OLD RANT

2009-10-28T13:31:29.000Z

It is not very often that a journalist gets to say I told you so, but this blog gives me bragging rights.

A decade ago, I wrote an op-ed piece for the Concord Monitor saying that state capital’s recycling rate was a disgrace: at 2.73 percent (based on 1997 figures), the lowest rate of any city in the state. At the time, Concord picked up trash for free and would charge to pick up recyclables. Dover, which did it the other way around, recycled and composted 54 percent.

Concord, the home of the state Department of Environmental Services, and the state headquarter of a slew of environmental and conservation groups, should have been setting an example. Instead, it was dragging the state down.

There was some talk on local radio at the time, but nothing happened. For one, we were locked into a sweet deal with our incinerator in which we got off cheap as the host community. In other words, since we were willing to breathe our trash, we don’t have to pay as much to throw it away. Recycling it would be still cheaper, but it would have necessitated a second pick up that would outweigh the savings.

Our entire attitude was backward! I nearly shouted. Instead of subsidizing reuse, we were subsidizing waste. The “second pick up", should be garbage, not recyclables, I argued in subsequent articles and letters. That’s the one that residents should pay for! Such pay-as-you-throw policies cause a dramatic increase in recycling rates everywhere it is used. Pay as you throw didn’t just make environmental sense, it saved economic cents, and dollars.

But people said that trash is a city service that residents shouldn’t have to pay for.

In Concord, water usage is a municipal service. But no one would dream of saying that the person who maintains a swimming pool and runs the sprinkler system when it’s raining should have to pay the same as someone who uses shower water to flush their toilet.

No, water is a precious resource that we have to conserve. We don’t have an unlimited supply of fresh drinking water. People should pay for what they use.

Guess what? We don’t have an unlimited supply of landfill space. Our air can only take so much carbon before we destroy the planet. And the regulations to slow down the pollution cost a lot of money. So when I bothered to take my recyclables down to the city recycling center, I was paying through the nose for some idiot down the street who just tossed them out in the curb.

Well, I gave up on my pay-as-you-throw kick. But other people took up the idea, thanks partly to the fact that our sweet incinerator deal was coming to an end and our tipping fees were about to skyrocket. First, Concord instituted free curb side pick up for recyclables. And last year – thanks to the vision and tenacity of Mayor Jim Bouley (who incidentally, I voted against on principle because I didn’t think a lobbyist should be in charge of city) pushed it through.

People had to pay $2 to buy a purple bag to throw away their trash. Free recycling pickup of blue and green binds however went from every other week to once a week. People said that no one would obey it, that trash would be thrown out into the streets, or on their neighbor’s lawn. But none of this happened. Instead, we had a flowering of purple, blue and green. And not nearly as much purple as expected.

The suspicious wanted to know, where was all our trash going to?. I can speak for my family. We already recycled, but now we recycled in earnest. Every toilet paper tube went was flatted with the cardboard. Paper bags in most rooms. A compost can next to the sink. Mow the leaves onto the grass. And no, please don’t give me a plastic bag for one toothbrush. And you can keep the receipt. Trash was the exception, not the rule.

And here we have the result.

In its first three months, trash was cut in half. In one year, recycling went up 75 percent, a greater increase than anyone anticipated (except of course, yours truly.) The program didn’t cost money. It saved money, though the final figures aren’t in on how much it saved.

Ten years later, it finally happened.

I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.

Pay as you throw. Pay as you throw. Pay as you throw.

Other cities and towns: Get with the program!

A Buffet Book Blog

2009-10-20T19:09:11.000Z

What can you do? Warren Buffet -- the richest man in the world, is a god darn liberal--going way back. He opposed the war in Vietnam and bankrolled Eugene McCarthy peace candidacy.. He thought stock options should be expensed. He favored the infamous “death tax” believing inherited wealth is wrong. He supports abortion rights throughout the globe. Obama said he would make a good Secretary of Treasury, for God sakes.

Some people say he is a traitor to his class.

Alice Schroeder, a Wall Street analyst, takes a good long look at Buffet in her 960-page (with footnotes, an index and pictures) book,

The Snowball, Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, a biography that came out at the end of the year and I finally finished last week. I don’t say a good hard look because Schroeder clearly admires Buffet, almost in times to infatuation (and sometimes to exasperation), but this idolatry gives her extensive access, and Buffet gives his views on everything in italics – mostly unchallenged -- throughout the tomb. Buffet allegedly he said he wanted the least flattering version of himself. I believe that this was the least flattering that Schroeder could pull off.
Given that, this is an insightful book. You get a feel for Buffet, who started amassing his wealth when he was six years old, selling packs of chewing gum. At 10, he was hawking peanuts at college football games and picking up used golf balls that they found in the muck. Inspired by the book One Thousand Ways to Make $1000, Buffet bought his first three shares of stock in 1942, at the age of 12. He made more than his teachers with his paper route money,
.
But two of his money making schemes were the most telling:

*Picking up beer soaked second and third place tickets thrown away at the horse races. Ignorant gamblers -- watching too many movies where almost-winners tossed their losing tickets into the air in frustration -- didn’t realize that second and third place tickets was worth something. Buffet did, and got something for nothing by picking them off the floor
.
Buffet also got a friend to fix discarded pinball machines, putting them in a barbershop, and splitting the take. Again, Buffet turned trash into something useful, and made a buck out of it
.
Buffet spent of his life taken discarded and undervalued stocks, troubled companies, fixing them up, cashing them in, and making a buck out of it. Even Berkshire Hathaway, his flagship company, started out as a dying textile factory.

The world of investing – according to Buffet – was very simple. Find the real value of something. Divide it by the number of shares. Buy it below that price. Sell it when it reaches or exceeds it true value, to buy another undervalued company.

It was easier said then done. But Buffet, even though he was the son of a congressman – so extremely right wing that he alienated Republican Party in the days of Roosevelt – was a self made man. Although he viewed himself as a winner of the lottery because he didn’t grow up in some third world country without the opportunities that he took advantage of here, Bufffet did not build his wealth on the fortune amassed by his forefathers. Indeed, Buffet hated inherited wealth so much that he was extremely stingy (give the fact that he was a multi-billionaire) with his own children, though he started to ease up on this as he got older. That is why he could never buy into the rabid hatred of the inheritance tax.

And, unlike most of the rich and the famous at the end of their live, Buffet put most of his money in foundation bearing his family name (though several exist) but instead handed it over the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The close connection between the first and second richest (depending on what year it is) men in the world is just one of the fascinating items in this book. Buffet, hadn’t even touched a mouse (without fur on it) before he met the king of Microsoft, and afterward used computers primarily to play bridge. Buffet never put money into software, or hardware for that matter. Indeed the book open with the Oracle from Nebraska prediction -- to wide derision in July of 1999 at the height of the high tech bubble -- that vastly over inflated stocks would burst. (An enraptured Schroeder makes it seem like it was when Babe Ruth pointed to the very spot in the bleachers where he was about to slug the ball)

Yet Gates and Buffett were two nerds of a kind. Both felt more comfortable around numbers then people, yet had a knack for building companies based on loyalty that comes from good people skills. Both were obsessed with money. Both stuck with their field of expertise.
For Buffett, this included undervalued companies that he understood (with a few exceptions here and there), particularly in the insurance field. What Buffet like about insurance companies was the float: the fact that companies put billions of dollars in reserves that they had to invest. In other words, make money wiith other people’s money.

And here New Hampshire readers will enjoy lengthy potions of the book concerning Jack Byrne, the retired insurance executive who founded White Mountains Insurance Group, out of Hanover, NH. (Berkshire Hathaway had a big piece of it, but pulled out shortly after Byrne retired.)
Byrne for his part, could hardly stop talking about Buffet when I interviewed him on June of 2006. He was amazed at billionaires ability to read reams of financial statements, and to pay attention to every small detail including the footnotes.

But in the end Buffet started to value other things besides money. Buffet couldn’t bear to go to his friend Katherine Graham (the former editor of the Washington Post) deathbed after she collapsed at his own annual confab) because he couldn’t deal with real and painful emotions. Yet he forced himself and tended to his dying wife. He ended up learning to actually talk to his children. And when asked by college students about his missed opportunities, it was not this stock or not, but not giving more time to his family.

No wonder these wishy-washy liberals fall all over him.

.

THIS OLD HOUSE, WASTED

2009-10-09T16:26:36.000Z

THIS OLD HOUSE

After my aunt’s funeral I went to look at the Long Island house in which I grew up. It would have been the first time I saw it in three years, when my now 94 year old father moved out.

It was the right place, but the wrong house.

Someone paid $400,000 for that house, which my dad had purchased for $5000 after World War II. My Dad had built the garage. He had built my bedroom, as well as his own. A master gardener, he had turned the front yard into a display of his green thumb.

My parents burned their mortgage when they paid it off.

Then that someone proceeded to tear it down and build another one, bigger and from a appraisers standpoint, probably better.

Shrug it off as sentimental panging for childhood.

But then again, how much time and money was spent? What was done with all of the old house: now junk to be burned and recycled? How much resources were used to improve the neighborhood? Is this economic growth? It may make economic cents, but does it make economic sense?

Nobody fixes a camera any more. Throw it out for the latest model. Same with the computer I’m typing on. Why should I stick with an XP when I can jump Vistas though Windows Seven to heaven?
And what about the car I am driving, a regular 2000 Plymouth Voyager clunker, the one with over 150,000 miles on it, that I could have traded in for $4500, curtesy of Uncle Sam. It would have helped the economy and the environment to send a perfectly good car to a junkyard. Sure it would have made economic sense for me, if I had gotten it together to do so before I spent a couple of grand replacing the transmission. But does it help the environment to build a car that still has a few more years left in it or to dispose of all the parts that can’t be sold for scrap?

Can a throwaway society really remain competitive with societies that reuse every thing they have? This old house seemed to be stable, and didn’t raise such questions. This new house will only last as long as the latest fashion, and raises too many.

I’m now living in a house that was built during the Civil War, with a foundation of stone. I hope we can say the same for our nation.

RAIL WAIL and RAIL

2009-10-02T09:18:03.000Z

The latest glitch in New Hampshire getting commuter rail, because of this endless dispute between Pam Am and the state makes me want to wail.
See High-speed rail project sidetracked. Also see my article Rail effort gains more momentum
But the comments about subsidies make me want to rail.
Let’s say for the sake of blogger rules of engagement that we will have to subsidize rail. So what? We subsidized our highway system, at least at the beginning. Let’s take everything out of the state and local road budgets that doesn’t come from tolls and the gas tax. Let’s use those only those funding sources to pay for state police to clear the mess from our highways on a daily basis. Let the price of oil reflect the military cost to protect it. Then you’ll see the true price of driving drive drivers to the rail station.
Of course rail won’t have enough ridership to break even. This is classic chicken with the egg that you have with any new infrastructure. When we put in new highways there were enough people to pay the tolls because we were paving rural areas. But planners with a few ounces of brains figured that the population was going to grow and the area would get denser, particularly if those highways go in. Therefore we borrowed billions of dollars, and threw in all sorts of subsidizes to build those roads. Now we have the population to support highways galore, and the amount we actually subsidize has gone down.
That is what is so maddening! Why can't we do the same thing for rail. Of course New Hampshire is relatively rural, but that is changing, as evidence by those very clogged highways. And that change is going to continue. And soon the southern end of NH is going to be like any other suburb of Boston. Can you imagine Long Island without rail? Can you imagine Brookline, MA without commuter rail? Then how can you imagine Nashua without it, when Nashua will be the Brookline of tomorrow?
New Hampshire isn’t this rural backwater or idealized town hall paradise and hasn’t been for at least a century. We can’t look at the current state of traffic and see if that’s enough to supports highway and rail. We need to think ahead. Let’s prepare for the future rather than fight it.

NHBR Network. Welcome to the new world.

2009-09-25T12:09:14.000Z

The NHBR Network page was stagnant on the screen at our booth at the Tri-City Expo in Manchester Thursday, because we couldn’t get an internet connection. Frozen like a newspaper page, or a painting at the museum.

Yet the Network represents something that is fluid, that you can interact with, that you can meet people through. Writing used to be like this, only all so slow. One slide at a time.. On paper. You read it. You responded in a letter. You wrote letters to all your friends. You waited for them to write back.

And while most of NHBR readers still get their business information that way, it is becoming the shrinking majority. That is why papers are struggling and reporters are being laid off. This hasn’t happened at NHBR. We are pretty lean to begin with and have weathered the economic storm better than most. And we, like most businesses, have learned to adapt, and adopt the new technology..

We put out an electric daily newspaper now. Every day a different story, that not only goes on our web page, but is broadcast with today’s business news into thousands of mail boxes. People can respond to articles in an instant. Others can respond to their responds seconds later.

And now there is NHBR Network, where the readers can chat with each other, just like people used to do standing in front of that picture, in the museum, or as people did outside our booth at Tri-City Expo. You can go into that picture now, walk around in it, start painting your own little section: a corner for that trade organization, a blog over here, a Health Care forum over there, a three dimensional kaleidoscope, with no one controlling it, growing, just organically forming, overflowing, sucking in those who happened to be walking by.

Is this an improvement? But it is where the world – and therefore we – are heading.

Congratulations NHBR Network! You have just entered that brave new world.

A GIFTED RANT

2009-09-22T17:02:49.000Z

After listening to Laura Knoy’s recent radio show (http://www.nhpr.org/node/27017)
on NHPR (not to be confused by our beloved NHBR) featuring advocates of continued spending on “gifted” education, I had to either call in and scream, or shut it off. Given that my “gifted” kid is scheduled to babysit for her (probably also gifted) kids tomorrow, I figured I better turn the dial.
Now I have three kids…one was in Special Ed, one is straight down the middle average academically (though she would be gifted if she didn’t “forget" or "lose" a lot of her homework) and one -- said babysitter -- who was student of the year twice at middle school and is about to take the high school by storm. I wasn’t so bad myself when I was in school. (No comment about how gifted I am nowadays.)
Let me tell you this: neither the former I, the current she, nor any gifted kids from here on in, needed any extra help. If they were/are/will be really gifted, they would smart enough to find it on their own. I took creative writing classes during the summer. She gets math workbooks and reads Hugo over the summer. Such kids have most teachers – starved for bright students who want to learn – eating out of their hands. They are smart enough to figure out alternative assignments, or do interesting work on their own, for free, no extra cost to the taxpayers, thank you. Why waste money throwing it at these kids?
First of all, those gifted kids who are having problems are either not that gifted (but their parents want them to be) or they have emotional problems that need to be dealt with, but not with additional advanced academic programs. They need a social worker, not a physics teacher.
Secondly, most well adjusted gifted kids need to mix with ordinary mortals, because they have to deal with them the rest of their lives, and to succeed they need to learn now to relate to them, not segregated themselves with other smart asses.
Thirdly, what is so bad about being bored?. Kids need to learn how to be bored. Anything worth doing requires putting up with boring tasks. Investigative reporting requires combing through records that would put you to sleep. Scientists have deal with tons of meaningless data before stumbling on their great discovery. Even great novelists have to deal with STARING AT BLANK PAGE and forcing themselves to work. Protecting kids from boredom is like shielding them from every germ. When it eventually hits them, they won’t have any resistance. Same with kids who are constantly “stimulated” because they may get bored and OMG, act out. Maybe even face the same consequences as everybody else.
Thirdly, there are already enough tracked programs in most schools, advanced math, AP English, and so on. Who needs to institutionalize this even further by setting up a “gifted” program (and pay teachers twice as much for the “special skills” to teach students who are really smart and love to learn)?
Fourth, with special education …for kids who really DO need help…eating up the cost of education., and on the other sides gifted kids soaking up other resources, what will be left for the kids in the middle: i.e. your workforce of the future. Maybe some of those kids would be gifted, if you just didn’t siphon off scarce education resources in every direction.
So no more talk about gifted programs. Well unless you reply to this blog……

Hey insurance companies, can't take the heat?

2009-07-15T13:00:41.000Z

It is rather amusing that private insurers is so concerned that the government will offer its own health plan, and that untold millions of customers will forsake them.
To join what? Socialized medicine?
This is the very same bureaucratic inefficient, controlling big bad government that can’t hold a candle to the private sector, right?
Why should private insurers be afraid?
They have been offering low premiums for years.
They keep medical cost down, so that everybody can afford it.
They efficiently make sure that you get care, and that doctors get paid adequately and on time.
They never tell patients what doctors they can go to, or what treatments they can get. They never interfere with a doctor’s relationship with their patient.
They never deny you the care you need.
No one would want to leave such a great system! People love their private insurance! They are loyal to their insurance company.
You think the government can compete with that? Government is inherently inefficient, restrictive and impersonal. Consumers wouldn’t choose that, would they? If private insurers can’t compete with that, they deserve the to go the way of General Motors, and be taken over by the government anyway.
If businesses were afraid to compete with government, Federal Express would be whining about shutting down the Postal Service, private campgrounds would want to get rid of the state and federal parks and Dartmouth College would be clamoring that they can’t hack it because state supported schools like University of New Hampshire.
Come on now. This is American, the land of competition. If the government thinks it can do a better job….
Bring them on!