Yet Another Reason…

…to stop doing business in or with the People’s Republic of China.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission is implementing changes to its rules governing publicly offered securities investment funds. These rules include requiring foreign-owned fund managers such as BlackRock and Fidelity to create Communist Party cells when operating in China.

And

In January 2021, HSBC executive Noel Quinn was unable to confirm to the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee that the bank had no party cells in its branches in Hong Kong and the mainland.

His own bank, and he doesn’t know how tied it is to the Chinese Communist Party.

The CSRC’s rules dovetail nicely with the PRC’s national intelligence law that requires companies operating inside the PRC to collect and deliver whatever intelligence information the intelligence community wishes (and companies domiciled in the PRC to go outside the nation to collect that information and deliver it).

It’s just not worth the national security risk to do any business with or within the PRC.

Excuses

On the matter of the disagreement between Elon Musk and Twitter over whether the former must buy the latter or the latter has failed to provide the data needed—for instance, to assess the level of bots doing Twitter’s tweeting—to properly assess the value of the purchase target, “data scientists” claim that the number of fake and spam accounts

isn’t easy to objectively determine.

And

Coming up with a precise, objective, and authoritative number of fake or spam accounts, where hundreds of millions of tweets are posted daily, is an impractical task.

It’s hard, so it’s impractical? And hiding behind the vagaries of “precise” (how precise? Five 9s precise? “Close enough” to illustrate the general magnitude of the number?)?

This is just “expert” fee seeking. “Not easy” means possible. It’s time for the obstructionists to stop obstructing, to stop manufacturing excuses, and to get to work.