NEW YORK (AP) — The decline in wagon and buggy sales is accelerating as the industry continues to struggle with consumer defections to the automobile. Buggy sales have been declining since the early 1900s, but the drop has accelerated in recent years. Still, some wagon makers and buggy builders are actually increasing their retail prices. “In the face of declining sales, our strategy is to charge more for our product,” said Josiah Shepard, president of U.S. Wagon Manufacturing Co. “We plan to rehire some of the craftsman we laid off last year. This will allow us to build a better buggy, and we feel consumers will pay extra for this heightened quality.”

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The thing is, this exchange is not taking place in a vacuum — it comes after what (for me at least) is a nearly *fifteen year long* conversation on this subject. I started writing for the Web in 1994 while I was still working for a daily newspaper and left that paper a year later because, it seemed to me then, the writing was on the wall.

So if you sense some level of exasperation it does not come out of the blue. “Communicating in this new world” isn’t a new thing for me, and by now, it really shouldn’t be a new thing for anyone who thinks of himself as a professional communicator of one stripe or another.

If you have “never physically been in a room with anyone who thinks the patient isn’t already dead” that seems pretty remarkable to me. I feel like I’ve been encountering them — and having a mostly civil but yes, often exasperating — dialogue with them for years.