Re: QED & Marshall McLuhan & the cash-strapped Packers

At 10:07 AM 6/8/99 -0700, Kelly Ford wrote:
>
>2. Below is a basic news article I happened to read this morning.  To
>assist my understanding of the needs of those represented by folks
>advocating for images and such please explain:
>
>A. how this story should be conveyed accurately in images or the symbol
>system you are talking about.  Suppose this story were to be put online at
>the Peepo site.

>B. How this story should be written or encoded for folks with cognitive
>disorders or learning disabilities.

This is one I really wish we could interest Ed Tufte from Yale in.  How to
convey time series of cash flows concisely and visually.  It is needed to
combat the consumer confusion which has been a downside of credit
deregulation.

You have to understand that this is not a very simple story.  There has
been a change in the pattern of payouts to players.  A shift which means
that the team pays the player more of their lifetime earnings up front when
signed, and proportionately less spread over the period that they are
actually playing.  This has upset the financial picture for the team which
is a balance of aggregate in-flows, out-flows and capital resources.  The
change in the pattern of player personnel outlays has put a squeeze on
capital resources which has not had time to re-equilibrate.  There are
several levels of abstraction required to tell this story.  But I think
that one can create the concept of eras and sea changes between eras by
changing the dress of the people populating the diagrams, and multiyear
sports contracts can be evoked by creating a timeline with repeated cycles
of natural seasons with sports seasons stuck in in the right places.


So anyway, I see two graphics to construct.  One builds the concept of the
pattern of payments bound into a multiyear contract, and an epochal (was
changing to is) change in the typical shape of that curve.  The second has
to do with the liquidity of the business organization as a buffer or cache
or reservoir caught between two flows that are not all that easy to
control.   And the surge protector is pretty low because there has been a
big surge due to picture number one.

[I just offered one design for a pictorial representation, because I do
believe that pictures can capture the plot without a lot of help from
words.  The cognitive stuff of second-order differences such as increased
front-loading I think is intrinsic to finance and this story.  If that is
someone's problem, all I think they will grasp is the sour face on the
photo of the officer of the club.]

Al

Received on Tuesday, 8 June 1999 18:10:28 UTC