Monthly Archives: February 2020

A Good Start

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But it’s only a start. The Trump administration is working with companies including Microsoft, Dell, and AT&T to develop 5G software in an attempt to break Huawei’s current dominance of the 5G market and to supplant it.

The plan would build on efforts by some US telecom and technology companies to agree on common engineering standards that would allow 5G software developers to run code atop machines that come from nearly any hardware manufacturer.

Software isn’t the only source or solution, though; we need to push hardware development, too. It’s too easy to bury malware in hardware’s ROM/PROM/EPROM chips; Huawei’s hardware will need to be excised as well.

Partially Right

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India has decided that the way out of its current economic doldrum is to cut its tax rates.

Oh, and to raise its government spending, too.

On Saturday the government unveiled a long list of measures to energize consumption and investment. It lowered income taxes and some corporate taxes and pledged more investment in infrastructure, rural development, education and health care.
To accommodate the spending, India decided to miss its own budget-deficit target.

Cutting taxes almost always is good—only almost because a government does need a minimum level of revenue in order to accomplish the goals set for it by the citizens employing it. Cutting taxes—and even given that threshold, there’s room for major cuts in India—leaves more money in the hands of private citizens. Those citizens will more accurately spend their money because their spending is tailored to their needs and wants; it’s not spending on one-size-fits-all goals or government-determined goals.

On the flip side, India needs to cut spending to fit within the revenues generated from those lower taxes, not increase it. Deficit spending only increases overall national debt. That national debt always and everywhere represents higher taxes.  Those higher taxes either will come as explicit taxes designed to raise revenues for paying the debt or as inflation to devalue the debt.

Beyond that, government spending competes with the spending of those private citizens and their enterprises for goods and services and the resources needed to produce them. That only reduces the resources available to the private economy, and it drives up prices, not just for those resources, but for the competed-for goods and services, also.

Doing that will drive economic activity, which will yield a net increase in revenues to the government within those lowered tax rates. That increase revenue will enable the government to spend more on infrastructure, rural development, education, and health care—the goals the Indian government claims.

An Election Foul-Up

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The Iowa Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate caucus, allegedly held last Monday, did not release any results until shortly after 1600 Tuesday–and then only partial results, only from 62% of the precincts into which Party has divided Iowa’s 99 counties. The caucus is a Party-run affair, not a State-run affair, so this failure is entirely that of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

But the failure is more than just the incompetence of Party IT folks, whether on Party’s payroll or contractor(s) hired by Party. The caucus results that were supposed to be collected by an app seem not to have been, and that app is the product of a company calling itself Shadow. The app has been a complete waste of money, for a host of reasons, including lack of training for the end users and—which I surmise from the empirical results—a decision to dispense with actual testing before going operational with the thing.

As I say, though, this extends far beyond IT incompetence.  Mandy McClure, Iowa Democratic Party Communications Director, had this:

The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.

I have to ask: what’s different between this year’s “paper trail” and past years’ that prevents these guys from going manual and reporting off their current paper trail?

Adinn Mann, a caucus captain in Story County, had this:

We weren’t set up for everyone to have to use the phone, it sounds like.

Wow.

Some folks are saying that this debacle is the result of an incompetently done election rigging effort targeting Bernie Sanders.

Joe Biden’s campaign management has written a letter to the IPD decrying Party’s decision to release only partial results and dribble out the rest, along with the poor performance generally, and demanding

an opportunity to respond [to IDP’s explanation], before any official results are released

which looks like a desire to massage the results before they’re released.

Others are wondering how Party can be expected to run a national health care system—or any other system more complex than a half-dozen folks sitting around a living room, if it can’t run a single-state caucus that it had run for decades prior.

The present performance—in just one State, yet—isn’t doing much to dispel such conspiracy theories.

It’ll be interesting to see what software, if any, the other caucus-only States (Nevada, Hawaii, Maine, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Washington, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Wyoming) use. Seven of these caucuses occur on Super Tuesday; that adds considerable…interest.

Update: Corrected what it was that Biden’s campaign was responding to with its letter.

Updated update: Iowa’s caucus result determination is still in progress. They’ve made it all the way to 71%, though.

The Whining and Smearing Will Continue

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House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R, CA) says that after President Donald Trump is acquitted of all impeachment charges, the Progressive-Democrats’ baying won’t let up.

I just can’t imagine that [House Intelligence Committee Chairman] Adam Schiff, after three and a half years of this nonsense, and [House Judiciary Committee Chairman] Jerry Nadler are not going to continue this. Right? They are going to go back and subpoena [ex-National Security Adviser] John Bolton.

True, and they’ll do more. They’ll also be subpoenaing their favorite White House denizens, Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo, Robert Blair, Michael Duffey, and anyone else they can think in order to keep the calumnies coming.

They’ll do more than that.

Congressmen Al Green (D, TX) and Maxine Waters (D, CA) have promised as much in the last couple of months with their commitment to introduce new Articles of Impeachment if the Senate votes wrong.

Other members of the House Progressive-Democratic Party caucus, like Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), have promised as much in the last couple of months with their commitment to have more general “investigative” hearings if the Senate votes the wrong way. These will be the vehicles for commanding Mulvaney, Pompeo, Blair, Duffey, et al., to submit themselves.

The nature of that hanging-on also has been made clear. House Judiciary Committee Chairman and Impeachment Trial House Manager Jerry Nadler (D, NY) said during the trial that any Republican voting against the Progressive-Democrats’ case would be dishonest and participating in a coverup. He’ll continue against any dishonestly disputatious House Republicans.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman and Impeachment Trial House Manager Adam Schiff (D, CA) proclaimed, during his trial summation, that the Trump defense team had been misleading, misrepresenting, and lying to the Senate about the facts of the case. He’ll continue against any dishonestly disputatious House Republicans.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) said Republicans would be cowards if they didn’t vote in favor of witnesses, and when the Senate voted against hearing the demanded witnesses, he said they had been cowardly.  He went on to suggest that the 2020 elections now would be rigged to guarantee a Trump reelection. He’ll continue to beat that drum whenever he sees a camera or a microphone.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) said last fall that President Donald Trump was an illegitimate President, and she announced after the Senate’s witness vote that no vote for acquittal would be legitimate. She’ll yell that out at every opportunity.

Sadly for our nation, Nunes is right. The Progressive-Democrats won’t let go, no more than they’ve let go of their loss in 2016.

Unifying

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Ex-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says current Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) isn’t a unifier for the Progressive-Democratic Party. Clinton complained to Emily Tisch Sussman that

Unfortunately his campaign and his principal supporters were just very difficult and—really, constantly—not just attacking me but my supporters[.]

However.

Did Clinton unify the Progressive-Democratic Party? No, not with the shenanigans she and Party elite (possibly separately from her) pulled to block Sanders’ ascent in the 2015-2016 campaign season and the shenanigans being pulled now to block Sanders’ evident success—not least of which is the DNC changing the debate rules right before the next debate to enable an Evil 1%-er to buy his way onto the debate stage after he’s made a point, ever since he entered the race, of telling voters in early primary States that they’re just too trivial to matter.

Nor did Clinton unify the nation after she’d seized Party’s nomination in 2016—she moved actively to divide it.

Clinton is in no position to talk.

Of course Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) doesn’t help Sanders’ case with her booing of Clinton (her weak walk-back notwithstanding).