• 80% OF ROBOCALLS COME FROM FAKE NUMBERS, and answering or not “has no effect on how many more you’ll receive.” Based on a one-year study of over 1.5 million calls on 66K phone lines by researchers at No. Carolina State University, the main types of “annoying, illegal & fraudulent calls used fake or short-lived numbers to deceive victims and make it much more difficult to prosecute. Most related to student loans, health insurance, Google business listings, general financial fraud, and a social security scam. Some impersonated government agencies with messages in English & Mandarin, targeting vulnerable populations including immigrants & seniors, and threatened victims with ‘dire consequences’…many also used Covid-19 as a premise to defraud people.”  Thank you technology!   [THE CONVERSATION – 9/10/20]
  • ‘KPI’ – KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS – ARE TODAY’S FASHIONABLE MECHANISM for ‘measuring’ the degree of success in achieving business strategy results: in growth, revenues, profits, efficiency, personnel or other resource utilization. Targets can be short or long-term, focused on units sold/ hours billed/ processes/ procedures/ behaviors/ whatever, but in all cases utilizing metrics of some type to analyze and manage most effectively. Focus is predominantly on what the Company is ‘getting’ from the current manner of execution, but often ignores the ‘two-way-street’ dimension that customers, co-workers, employees or vendors are also measuring the degree to which their expectations get met. “KPI are only partial measures of something. Any set is incomplete. The word ‘indicator’ gives that away.” DCG have decades of experience in helping businesses achieve optimum productivity, profitability & stability. Call us for courtesy consultation in this area[HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW – 9/14/20]
  • BEYOND LUNACY: As political ‘leaders’ campaigning for national office and elected legislators continue at best “ambiguous about defunding law enforcement, and continue to regard BLM as a valuable political ally fighting racial inequality even though it has revealed itself proudly as a white-hating Marxist urban terrorist organization,” our national Media – protected by ‘free’ speech of any kind without responsibility for reality-based reporting or liability for blatant misreporting – has become “some new form of farce noire, a nightmare of outright idiocy, part slapstick and part horror, playing on a gigantic stage. No society can tolerate this for long.”  [AMERICAN GREATNESS – 9/9/20]
  • THE OBJECTIVE OF DCG REPORTS IS providing our clients & friends with awareness of global perspective on issues of potential relevance, not as a forecaster and CERTAINLY not as a prophet of Doom. Having said that, some evolving perspective does merit special concern, like: “We must treat the coronavirus pandemic as a full dress rehearsal of what is to come. Experts say that Covid-19 almost certainly arose naturally, rather than being bio-engineered,** but that doesn’t mean the next won’t involve a deadly virus deliberately engineered by an adversary human terrorist… A technology revolution in genetic sequencing which now allows editing of individual genes – rearranging them at will and giving control over a process that has taken nature thousands of years – has become extremely cheap and relatively simple. Mail-Order DNA even allowed researchers to revive an extinct relative of the smallpox virus… If you’re deliberately trying to create a pathogen that is deadly, spreads easily, and that we don’t have appropriate public health measures to mitigate, then that thing is amongst the most dangerous things on the planet.” [**The Chinese virologist originally investigating the Wuhan lab, whose research was confiscated and subsequently escaped to the U.S. vehemently disagrees, and has published her finding that the virus “was created in a lab setting.”]   [FOREIGN POLICY via NEOSCOPE – 11/11/20]
  • THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK :    Tax deductible travel and meal expenses per diem increase to $368 beginning next month, for travel to ‘high cost localities’; other cities (listed at IRS notice 70-71) are limited to $263.