dbarkin53

i am a semi-retired journalist who lives in North Carolina. I write mostly now for Business North Carolina magazine. You can find out more about me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-barkin-a5a6274/

What could go wrong?

https://www.pilotonline.com/government/local/vp-nw-portsmouth-deputy-city-manager-lawsuit-20230202-a7yoqoft45ddzfepmzjxppcmoy-story.html I worked in Portsmouth, Va., 35 years ago as a journalist. Recently, they came up with the idea of distributing federal pandemic aid directly to citizens in the form of $500 Visa gift cards. $3 million worth of aid. So 6,000 gift cards. So basically like 6,000 $500 bills needed to be handled very […]

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The Fed’s frustration

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-20/whats-happening-in-the-world-economy-could-the-fed-boost-its-key-rate-to-9?cmpid=BBD022023_NEF&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=230220&utm_campaign=nef&sref=y5OnTMHX It is aggravating being a governor of the Federal Reserve. The only real lever you have to bring inflation down is monetary policy, and for a year, you have been jacking up interest rates, and inflation is still coming down very slowly and the consumer and the economy are running full tilt. Now if

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The risk section of Chinese 10-Ks

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-17/explainer-china-s-top-tech-banker-is-missing-here-s-what-that-means?sref=y5OnTMHX In American 10-K’s, US companies have to disclose risks, include many that are somewhat farfetched. I have never read an American 10-K risk section that said “Our CEO may do something to irritate the government and be whisked away and not seen for a while.” This is a problem for China. If you are

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Load management, whatever that is

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/35691143/silver-buy-load-management-being-nba-problem Consiider the following headline on ESPN.com Silver doesn’t ‘buy into’ load management being an NBA problem This is the first paragraph of the story: “SALT LAKE CITY — NBA commissioner Adam Silver pushed back on the notion that load management is a problem in today’s NBA, saying “I don’t buy into” the idea that

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War games

“For seven days, we conducted real-world, constructive operations inside the First Island Chain,” Col. Jeremy Winters, who commands MACG-38, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, based at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego, told an audience at a panel discussion on multi-domain operations and expeditionary kill webs. – USNI News That is a very interesting

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Fox has two problems

Fox News has a couple of problems, one is legal and the other reputational. Dominion, the voting machine company, is suing Fox for promoting conspiracy theories that the company’s machines stole the election from Donald Trump. The first problem Fox has is the classic problem for defendants in a defamation or libel case. People are

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Don’t like performance reviews

https://www.wsj.com/articles/og-mark-returns-at-meta-as-facebook-parent-gives-thousands-of-staff-subpar-reviews-56e648b4?st=mdgbz7rsa78r7e6&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink The WSJ has a story about Facebook giving a lot of people bad performance reviews. I spent 47 years getting and giving performance reviews. I didn’t like them. I don’t think they achieved much. They are time consuming. Often, with substandard employees, you will read about the same problems in years of reviews, and

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