Random Thought Driving Home:
I hate when all my programmed radio stations are on commercial. Why does this always happen?
Say a radio station spends 25% of it's air time playing commercials. This sounds pretty conservative. It would mean that for every 45 minutes of music, it plays 15 minutes of commercials.
I have 6 pre-programmed stations. That means if the commercials were evenly spaced out, they would only ALL have commercials on .25 ^ 6 = 0.00024 = .02% of the time.
Say I spend an hour a day driving. Then only .014 hours, or 0.86 seconds, of that time should be of all pre-programmed stations on commercials.
I am pretty sure that more than a second per hour has all-commercials, leaving me with two possible interpretations:
1) I notice the all-commercials times a lot, and so over-estimate their prominence, OR
2) Radio stations are evil, and they all play commercials at the same time (say every o'clock and -thirty) on purpose, so that the listener HAS to listen to commercials.
....Evil radio stations.
Isn't it a matter of news being played at clear, easyly recognizable times like 00/30? Whoever wants to hear them fully WILL have to listen to at least few secounds of commercial; it seems like a common pattern to just switch it on some minuted beforehand so as not to spend extra attention to the exact time for switching on. For most people some commercials before news are an absolutely acceptable tradeoff.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.