What Are They Going to Do?

Cut us off?

The chairman of Huawei Technologies Co warned the US to expect countermeasures from the Chinese government if it further restricts the technology giant’s access to suppliers….
Eric Xu, Huawei’s chairman, said he believes Beijing would respond with restrictions of its own on American companies operating in China if the US.

In addition to the draconian restrictions already inflicted on American companies—and other nations’ companies—operating in the People’s Republic of China. These restrictions include demands for government-controlled backdoors into companies’ operating software and transfer of companies’ technologies to domestic partner companies—which are required for most foreign companies in order to operate in the PRC.

With the PRC’s threat to cut us off from needed medicines, intermediate medical chemicals, and medical equipment, and the PRC’s recent attempt to restrict access to rare earth elements, it’s become clear that our manufacturers—and Europe’s, come to that—need to revamp their supply chains to vastly reduce their dependence on PRC intermediaries and suppliers, if not eliminate that dependency altogether.

Xu’s threat only emphasizes that need.

Death Panels or Triage?

A New York City hospital has explicitly instructed its ER doctors to “withhold futile intubations” and that they have the sole discretion for that decision and the decision to use a ventilator on any particular patient.

What draws my attention to this order is that ER doctors have always had triage authority in their decisions regarding use of limited resources when potentially lethally injured or sick patients arrive in numbers that could overwhelm those resources.  New York State’s triage guidelines, in particular, were established in 2015.

What are this hospital’s administrators hinting at?