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Lisa Scheer took this pic a few weeks ago in Key West.

A nice place to live, but would you want to visit? Questioning Greensboro's allure as a weekend destination (link via JR).

The Proximity really is a nice hotel, with a swell restaurant, too. If you like to play golf and you time your weekend to coincide with, say, the ACC Tournament or a concert act you particularly like, then I'd say the package as offered would be well worth a trip from DC.

Beyond that, I guess it depends on what you're looking for. GSO is very pretty in the spring and fall, and has some nice old neighborhoods. We've got a legit historical attraction that mixes in some natural beauty, and we're expecting to have a good museum opening, oh, any day now. And we've got our hidden gems. Lots of good food, too, for a wide range of tastes and budgets, including regional favorites.

Not a tourist mecca, to be sure, but if you can't amuse yourself here for a weekend you're not trying.

Pajamas Media folds blog-advertising network. Previously.

I wonder how much of the money paid out to bloggers came from ad sales, and how much came from the funding from investors, which by some reports reached $7 million. One less-famous name in the network was just starting to make an annualized $4K, which is not trivial but also not going to feed a family.

Opinion mags don't make money, so it's not really surprising that opinion blog nets have trouble doing it. I'm not sold on the PJTV model, either.

Alan Johnson, a Wall Street compensation consultant, said government involvement in pay decisions is "unsettling."

Privatizing profit and socializing risk is so 2008, but not everyone got the memo.

[A]ll over New York they are now complaining about their smaller bonuses, completely tone-deaf to how this sounds outside their Wall Street silos.

Nocera expects executive compensation to become an issue, too. The government should have a say as long as taxpayer money is involved, but ultimately these are cultural issues; shareholders and boards need to be more responsible.

"I feel like I got a doorman's tip, compared to what I got in previous years," said a 30-something investment banking associate at Citigroup's offices in Lower Manhattan.

People may not understand bonuses as a routine part of compensation. They do understand that Citigroup is living off their money.

Hagan votes for SCHIP expansion, which passes; co-sponsors amendment to reduce cigarette-tax increase, which does not pass.

"Less than a month into my service here in the U.S. Senate, I’m faced with a situation in which the health of millions of my state's children are at odds with a key industry in North Carolina. But Mr. President, ultimately, I have to vote on behalf of the 10 million low-income and disadvantaged children this bill helps."

Nothing up at Burr's blog about the vote. Hagan seems to have only the basic Senate webpage so far, with no blog or much of anything else.

Greensboro Daily Photo posts a, well, you can guess what they post, and how often.

But you have to spend some time at the site to appreciate their eclectic taste.

"Modern Washington takes for granted the exploitation of public service for private gain."

Can Obama do more than slow the revolving door? It's a huge challenge, and a long-term job that requires a shift in culture. Let's hope he's serious about it, and remind him that we are.

More statistical fun from Nate Silver. "The Republican conference is very very close, by the way, to being majority Southern. To the extent there are moderate voices in the conference, they are going to get drowned out. There is no possibility of revolt from the moderates; they don't have the ground forces."

Twitter and the future of journalism. I'd frame it more as the subset of journalism called news reporting, and I'd substitute "present" for "future."

One of the less-accurate headlines in recent memory was in last week's N&R: "New report shows state of local economy." As the article quickly explained, the report showed the state of the local economy in 2007. Valuable information, but badly out of date.

They should have saved the headline for today's grim employment numbers. Alamance and Rockingham are hurting, and Guilford is not that far behind them. We're way ahead of worse off than of the national average, with more to come. But our rich uncle says he'll send us a check.

Dude, here's your recession. It will pass, but it's going to do a lot of damage along the way.

Jungles reclaim cleared land. Looks good as a carbon sink, less good as habitat for old-growth forest species.

Krugman: Wimpy Dems ignoring healthcare program.

Strassel: Sneaky Dems plotting healthcare program.

"Just as taxpayers can't find out how the Treasury and the Federal Reserve used the first half of the bank bailout, Americans are often denied access to public records that provide details on how hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are spent in contracts."

Some of the examples in the article are unsurprising to anyone who covers IT.

At least we're finally going to do something about it. Oh, wait. "Obama’s pledges to cut waste mimic promises of previous presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton."

I'll kind of miss him.

25 Random Things About Me:

1. I am unlikely to write lists on Facebook, even if tagged politely (repeat 24 times).

But I have learned some interesting stuff about my friends.

"The Iraqi government said it plans to force security firm Blackwater Worldwide to exit the country in a move that could shift the fortunes of the private security industry and will cause the U.S. State Department to figure out alternatives to protect diplomats at its biggest embassy." More here.

Tech blogging can get uglier than you might think. I feel bad for Arrington, being stalked and spat upon is no joke, but I'm not sure some of the folks he's blaming deserve it.

Applied Rationality on the spending and stimulus bill: "As the legislation moves into the Senate, leaders there should look to trim some of the extras from the immediate portions of the bill and should strip out altogether new commitments beyond FY 2010. These other portions of the bill deserve more scrutiny and can be addressed later when we have more information about the effectiveness of the initial spending, the state of the economy, and other possible problems that we may confront."

Krugman disagrees on the post 2010 stuff: "So yes, lags in fiscal policy can be a problem — but they’re much less of a problem in the current context than the econ principles books might lead you to think."

I'd settle for some longer-horizon projects and less add-on spending, but I don't think that's how the sausage gets made.

That was exciting. Hansbrough covering Douglas was deliberate, apparently. This could have been a special team with Ginyard and Zeller, now they may be the third-best team in the conference. Raycom's production values are not ACC-worthy, or maybe they just ran out of light bulbs at FSU; at least we didn't have to listen to Dookie V.

The problem with mark-to-market accounting is that it doesn't allow companies to say their junk assets are worth a lot of money, says Bob Rubin.

Meanwhile: "A functioning financial system requires solvent banks." After that, clear as mud.

Shuler for Senate rumblings reach DC. He was one of a handful of Democrats to vote no on the big spending and stimulus bill.

Brandeis plans to sell the collection of its Rose Art Museum in the face of a financial crisis. Makes me glad that the Weatherspoon's art is owned by a separate foundation and out of reach of state bureaucrats.

The True Cost of Credit. Not in terms of blowing up the global economy, in terms of buying stuff. No wonder the financial companies push the cards so hard.

More here: "In total, the credit card fees charged to businesses cost consumers about $50,000,000,000 / year (by way of higher prices)."

N&R working on a system to increase and rationalize linking out to other news sources. Smart.

Five tips for surviving the breakdown of society. The advice on the mohawk seems good.

Nate Silver parses some Gallup numbers that look great for Democrats and decides they look merely good for Democrats. Seems to me an awful lot depends on how well things go in the next few years.

"NC has the 9th highest teen pregnancy rate, and last year 20,000 teen girls became pregnant. That’s one teen pregnancy every 26 minutes. It is time that the people running our schools stop preaching abstinence, and start giving us good, accurate information about sexual health."

People may never agree on the legality or morality of abortion, but finding ways to keep kids from getting pregnant in the first place seems like a reasonable place to work together.

"An estimated 135 to 150 people turned out last night at Studio B at the initial meeting of Sustainable Greensboro." That's impressive (item dated 1/28/09).

SG should use its blog for this kind of news -- easier to update and link.

UPDATE: More here, including a higher headcount estimate.

"There's economic advantage to being perceived as sustainable. Greensboro has an opportunity to be a leader rather than a follower. There's really no reason why Greensboro can’t be mentioned in the same breath with Seattle and Portland."

Greensboro and Guilford County are promising hold-the-line budgets, with spending cuts and no tax increases.

I wonder how much contingency planning they're doing in case revenues fall short of projections.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the change promised by Barack Obama during his presidential campaign means he must apologize for U.S. "crimes" against Iran, including American support for a 1953 coup in the country and the backing of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.

More here. I'm no expert on diplomatic language and the importance of apologies, expressions of regret, and so on, and clearly Ahmadinejad is not the voice of reason, but at the least it would be useful for Americans to recognize that we've had a heavy hand in the region and Khomeini did just come out of the blue.

RFMD eats inventory, throws up.

CEO Bob Bruggeworth (annotation by EC.C staff):

Our December 2008 quarterly results reflect a challenging macroeconomic environment¹ that muted consumer activity² and triggered aggressive cuts in inventory across the supply chain...our customers struggled to determine real normalized demand in an effort to calibrate their actual sourcing requirements³.

...For RFMD the impact of end market softness was compounded by excess inventories of components and sub assemblies at our customers⁴. These inventories had been built in support of expected growth in the December quarter that failed to materialize⁵.

As a result, component shipments where disproportionately impacted as excess component inventories had to be consumed by a lower than planned demand.⁶

1 The economy sucks
2 Nobody is buying cell phones
3 Cell-phone makers quit buying parts from us
4 So the parts we made really piled up
5 We thought someone would start buying, but nobody did
6 So we got stuck with a bunch of parts.

Previously: Hope you sold at $87 per share.

I read Rabbit, Run a long time ago, and I've read a fair amount of Updike's criticism and some short stories over the years in the New Yorker, but overall I'm pretty Updike-deficient. Maybe in honor of his death I'll read the four Rabbit books.

"You'll get higher pledges if you auction the right to be the one to fire the publisher." A comment at Let's Buy a Newspaper, a site run by somebody's future boss. The idea is that newspapers are cheap and getting cheaper, so let's pool our meager funds, and, well, buy one.

Thnx to ER for the pointer.

UPDATE: We won't lack for staff.

CBO projects that, in the absence of any changes in fiscal policy, economic activity will contract more sharply in 2009 than it did in 2008 and the economy will grow at only a moderate pace in 2010. Under that projection, the shortfall in the nation's output relative to its potential would be the largest—in terms of both length and depth— since the Depression of the 1930s. Lost output would represent nearly 7 percent of the estimated potential output in both 2009 and 2010—amounting to about $1 trillion in each year—and almost 5 percent of the potential in 2011...The unemployment rate increased by more than 2 percentage points last year, reaching 7.2 percent, and is projected to peak at above 9 percent early next year.

Well, that's not very cheerful. Unless you compare it to this.

I wonder if Phil Gramm thinks things are bad yet?

"What's so mind-boggling about this is that it commits one of the most basic fallacies in economics — interpreting an accounting identity as a behavioral relationship."

Oh, snap.

Krugman goes wonkishly medieval on some Chicago economists.

Send Rover right over.

It's a poser for the new guy: "President Obama previously criticized the Bush executive-privilege claims. But presidents have a history of guarding the principle of executive privilege, even when it is claimed by a predecessor of a different political stripe."

I'm sure it will be illuminating to hear Rove say "I do not recall" a few dozen times. Good thing Congress doesn't have anything else on its plate.

The Coase Theorem and its limitations in downtown Greensboro, or why the negotiations about a new building on South Elm don't bring everyone to the table. (Link to Leyden's interesting blog via Applied Rationality.)

In one of his first interviews since taking office, President Barack Obama struck a conciliatory tone toward the Islamic world...His remarks [...] signaled a shift — in style and manner at least — from the Bush administration, offering a dialogue with Iran and what he depicted as a new readiness to listen rather than dictate...

...Shortly after the interview, an explosion on the Israel-Gaza border on Tuesday killed an Israeli soldier. A Palestinian farmer was shot dead, according to Palestinian witnesses, in retaliatory gunfire.

More here.

"[F]inancial institutions clearly relied on Uncle Sam’s largess when they agreed to authorize 2008 incentive compensation packages." A critique of bonus culture.

More here:

About 79 percent of Wall Street employees responding to an online poll this month said they received a bonus for 2008, more than the 66 percent who expected to get a reward in October...

Of the people who said they received a bonus, 46 percent said it was higher than last year...Still, 46 percent of people responding to the poll said they were dissatisfied with their bonus.

Previously. Thain says his seven-figure office renovations were necessary from a style point of view.

Until recently, Orlov identified the readers of his book, and of a blog he maintains, Club Orlov, as belonging to one of three basic cultural categories: "back-to-the-land types," "peak oilers," and all-around Cassandras, or doomers. But in the past few months, he has acquired a fourth audience, composed of financial professionals, who have been bolstering his "gut feeling that the United States is bankrupt."

Ben McGrath's article is behind the New Yorker paywall (the online version for subscribers is encased in a horrible pdf-like "digital reader" that made me wish for the end of the world) but it's worth seeking out, whether you see it as prophecy or paranoia porn.

Kunstler is a star of the story, blithely excusing his failed Y2K predictions as the next apocalypse looms. Taleb makes an appearance. McGrath invokes Malthus and Ehrlich for balance, but mostly lets the people tell their tales.

Times bounces fact-challenged columnist Kristol, who lands at the Post.

Post op-ed is run by alleged uber-liberal Fred Hiatt.

The Forbes list is a head-scratcher, although I guess that's not such a head-scratcher itself. Very New York/DC pundit-centric, and dated, too. Kurt Andersen? Uh, Spy was funny for a while, in the '80s. Maureen Dowd is only slightly less anachronistic. Chris Matthews, I believe, appears on a television program. Friedman is as loathed by liberals as Hiatt. Huffington? Really?

I'd have put Josh Marshall in the top five, and Atrios somehwere on the list.

Dr. Wharton passes along an email from the City (emphasis mine):

At Wednesday night's City Council meeting, the Council voted to ask the State Legislature to reinstate the protest petition for residents of Greensboro. Separately, Council asked the Neighborhood Congress, the League of Women Voters, and TREBIC to try to reach an agreement on changes that could make both sides comfortable with the legislation, specifically in the percentage of nearby property owners required to trigger the supermajority vote. If that agreement is reached by February 3, it will be submitted as a local bill along with the request to reinstate the protest petition in Greensboro.

So: the City is asking for the restoration of protest petition rights.

It may also ask for changes in the existing law, if a compromise can be reached.

I thought that was evident from the staff comment during the meeting, but it's good to have it cleared up.

From a memo sent today to News & Record employees from publisher Robin Saul (emphasis mine):

Even though we anticipated these tough times and budgeted for these poor market conditions, the actual performance of our revenues has been worse than expected...

...Beginning in February the News & Record, and all Landmark Publishing newspapers, will require all full-time and part-time employees with benefits to be scheduled for five (5) unpaid days off during the year. At the News & Record these days will be scheduled one day per month through the end of June 2009. The first day will be President's Day, Monday, February 16, with the remaining four days to be announced shortly. Vacation days cannot be used for these days since our intent is to reduce payroll expense.

To minimize inconveniences and confusion for our customers and employees, the News & Record will notify the public we are "closed for business" on these five designated days. We will publish a newspaper and online products on all of these days; therefore, those employees required to work (and those employees regularly scheduled to be off on that day) will have their unpaid day scheduled for a different time during that same payroll period.

We have also decided to enact a wage freeze for the rest of this year, effective immediately. Employees who are promoted or who take on significantly larger responsibilities in a restructuring may be considered for more pay, since we need to work more efficiently in a leaner organizational structure.

It will be interesting to dust off the chart in this post at the end of the year. I'd like the investment-industry economists to be right, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Peeance and freeance: "Swat, a Delaware-size chunk of territory with 1.3 million residents and a rich cultural history, is part of Pakistan proper, within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the capital.

"After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under Taliban control, marking the militants' farthest advance eastward into Pakistan’s so-called settled areas."

A skeptical take on the resurgence of nuclear power. Seems to me that some of the problems with supply chain and economics would ameliorate as the industry returned to operating at scale. France shows that standardization can work, but it takes political will to do it. The German non-nuclear model sounds appealing.

What really happened in the protest petition vote?

All hell should break loose if the result is anything other than what Barber suggests it should be, which is what staff said clearly at the meeting: "[T]he council supports restoring protest petitions as written into state law. And that changes to the existing law will be made only if they are agreed upon in negotiations between the building industry and the neighborhoods."

What a sloppy way to run a City Council.

Charlotte fancied itself a rival to New York as a banking center. Now it looks like DC is in the game. I wonder what the losses would be in North Carolina if NCNB NationsBank Bank Of America shares get wiped out.

Big changes coming in state emissions laws.

We know that Obama is failing horribly in two ways: he's exactly like Bush, and he's a radical freak. This would be an example of the latter.