Hi there this is Frank Ramono from WhatTheyThink.com. Two things on the agenda today. I got my Verizon bill, phone bill, came in a window envelope, first-class mail, inside was a three-page bill plus an insert. Now the insert was only four pages, its a little folder, pretty simple. Its four color by the way, but the only place you really see the four colors in this little area up here; the rest of it appears to be mostly black and red. So they paid for four color, well at least on one side; not on the other side from what I can see. Although on the other side you got red, you got blue, you’ve got black.

What was interesting to me was and I understand how this works. This comes off of the roll-fed digital machine. This is preprinted stock, red has been printed in advance then they imprint the black as it goes through the digital machine, then when it gets over to the Pitney Bowes or Bowie Howell inserter, it takes this, folds it, takes one of these from a hoper, usually three of them are there, puts it all together, sticks it in the envelope, seals the envelope, puts it into the mail stream. Very nice system.

But then I look at the back and I say look at all this space. Look you got all this white space on the back of the third page and all this white space on the back of the second page. Could you not have taken this and in some well designed way, taken this information and put it there. Because you know I read this, this is my bill. I want to make sure that someone didn’t use my phone and call Afghanistan. And then there were all kinds of little notes that they put on this stuff. Well they can integrate that in other ways. So there’s a lot to be said for the trans-promo idea on saving a lot of the cost problems with this kind of stuff.

Now I pay the bill electronically. Theoretically I don’t even need this and I remember checking a box that says, “don’t send it to me”. but they sent it to me and they sent it to me probably because they wanted me to receive this. That this was more important then this because this was already taken care of in terms of paying the bills.

This is an old story but then that’s the way I operate. You know that they had problems printing the $100. The American $100 note has significant number of security features built into it. So many security features that not only will counterfeiters have difficulty printing it; the government itself has difficulty printing it. It’s a very complex process and so they’re faced with a $110 billion in unusable bills and I love this, a quote from one of the officials, ‘There is something drastically wrong here”. Yes there is definitely something wrong there. And by the way, there’s a significant portion of the $100 bills in circulation, each one costs about .12 cents to make, not all of them are bad but the problem is to go through all of them and sort out the good from the bad but it takes something they said 20 years to do it; I don’t know that part. There’s a lot of people unemployed so why not just put them to work, you know, sorting through $100 bills, and when they’re done, you know, they can keep a few of them.

The quote at the end of this is so priceless: “The Fed is so very unhappy and the view of engraving and printing is taking a beating unnecessarily but somebody has to pay for this”. Yes, somebody has to pay for it and you know who that’s going to be; us, the American taxpayer. And that’s my opinion.

This brings me back to a point I’ve been making for some period of time and that is...