Business Magazines and the Battle Between the NFB and the ACB
My primary business magazines are starting to lose my interest. Thankfully, a profile of the fight between the two leading advocacy groups for the blind over the size of dollar bills in this week’s FORTUNE magazine was enough to grab my attention while supervising my 4-year-old’s bath.
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Written by randomfool on January 17th, 2007 with
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My primary business magazines are starting to lose my interest. Longtime favorite BusinessWeek has recently jumped the shark in my opinion due to a misguided attempt at becoming a lifestyle magazine. If I want to read about wines or the “executive life” I will read…uh…well I don’t read about stuff like that which is why I subscribe to BusinessWeek and not to GQ or Men’s Health in the first place. (I used to subscribe to Men’s Health but my wife used to refer to my backlog stack of unread issues as my gay porn collection so I canceled it–that and because I have no chance of ever looking like anyone in that magazine regardless of whether I read it and no matter how hard I work out.) I used to covet the arrival of each week’s BusinessWeek sometimes spending 15 minutes just reading the contents page to plan my reading of all of the articles I was interested in. Now, I can get through an entire issue while supervising bath time for our kids. It’s a bummer because it used to be like reading a summary of the week’s issues of the Wall Street Journal and it’s lost that in recent years. Backup choice, FORTUNE (did you know that if you reference their magazine, you are supposed to use all caps–I’m serious, it’s true) is inconsistent. The feature articles are very good, if the topic interests me, but the rest of it is filled with stupid graphics pages desgined to be, I think, funny. On the recommendation of a friend (and to support his daughter’s Girl Scout troop), I subscribed recently to Business 2.0. I have received one issue so far and I’m not ready to give up BusinessWeek or FORTUNE yet.
Anyway, despite my overall complaints, I still read my business magazines because (a) I am kind of a junkie so even if with low grade smack, a high is still a high and (b) I am able to converse at least on a basic level about many industries at cocktail parties on those few occasions when I go to such events and (c) I occasionally find interesting articles hidden among the lame graphical features, advertising supplements trying to convince me to move my business to Ohio and “executive life” articles.
The funniest of them all is an article in the most recent issue of FORTUNE (which I got through quickly because most of the magazine was devoted to a feature on The 100 Best Companies to Work For in which I had no interest) entitled The Blind Undercutting the Blind (the article has a different title online, New U.S. Bills: Blind Justice?). So, there are apparently two advocacy groups that represent blind people: the American Council of the Blind (”ACB”) and the National Federation of the Blind (”NFB”). NFB claims to have about 50,000 members while ACB claims to have about 40,000 members. But they don’t see eye-to-eye about the blind agenda! Some judge has ruled recently that “…our currency violates the federal Rehabilitation Act because the various denominations are not readily distinguishable by blind people.” Moreover, the ACB and NFB are odds over whether this ruling is good or not for their constituents. The ACB was the plaintiff in the case and the NFC, citing concerns that people will think less of the blind if we try to help them out by changing the money, is supporting the Treasury Department’s appeal of the case. There are a number of things that strike me as funny and/or sad about this story:
- It is estimated to cost about $215-228 million to make the plates and other such stuff to create new bills in various sizes. That’s not a lot of money but, come on, we’re talking about 90,000 people in the two organizations plus the cost does not take into account the cost of implementing the change in banks, casinos, vending machines, etc. I don’t know how many blind people there are but can’t we figure out something that is cheaper that still allows blind people to transact in cash?
- Isn’t there something kind of funny and sad about the fact that these two organizations can’t agree on a way to address issues for blind people without suing and opposing each other. I guess being blind or sighted is not necessarily related to common sense.
- Only the federal government would impose a law like the Rehabilitation Act (whatever that is) which could be interpreted by one of its employees, a judge, to require us to change our money so the blind can use it. Haven’t the blind been figuring it out for as long as we have had our money? What is that like at least 100 years?
- Apparently we are the only country that uses paper money and that is not at least considering some kind of change or accommodation for the blind. I guess that leaves us as the sole survivor on the island of common sense…at least until the NFB and ACB duke it out in court, wasting even more of our tax dollars. What a joke.
Written by randomfool on January 17th, 2007 with
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Read more articles on General Folly and Companies & Products I Can't Stand and Business.