Monthly Archives: August 2022

Rearranging the Furniture

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CDC Director Rochelle Walensky now claims she’s going to reorganize the CDC after saying that her agency did not reliably meet expectations during the course of the Wuhan Virus Situation.

The changes will include elevating the laboratory division to report to the CDC’s director and restructuring the communications office….

Because the CDC needs to do a better job of selling its claims. And this bit:

shift the CDC’s culture from highly academic to focus more on preparedness and response

And

Dr Walensky also wants additional funding and more authority for the CDC on matters including mandating data collection from states….

There it is. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s go-to solution for all of our ails—more government funding and more government power.

No.

Aside from the interest in being better at the agency’s used car salesman patter, the wasteful increase in taxpayer money coming her way, and the dangerous increase in government power, mechanically, this is just a cosmetic rearrangement of the furniture. The CDC needs reorganization, but it needs to be seriously reorganized.

There’ll be no culture change so long as the personnel of the current culture remain. Any reorg must begin with personnel, not a change of office symbols. That beginning, then, must be the termination, for reasons ranging from cause to what the military refers to as the good of the service, of the agency’s managers, from Walensky and her staff through her deputies and their staffs on down through (not to) middle management.

Every single one of them needs to go. And then Walensky’s replacement as Director, before any additional hiring occurs, needs to justify in concrete and measurable terms, line by line and position by position, why the personnel slot for that proposed new hire needs to exist.

Only with that change in personnel and that streamlining can the CDC become an efficient and effective organization and an organization us American citizens can trust.

Export Controls Regarding the PRC

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It has come to light that we really don’t have any serious export controls covering technology-related exports to the People’s Republic of China.

Of the US’s total $125 billion in exports to China in 2020, officials required a license for less than half a percent, Commerce Department data shows. Of that fraction, the agency approved 94%, or 2,652, applications for technology exports to China. The figures omit applications “returned without action,” meaning their outcomes were uncertain.
The result: the US continues to send to China an array of semiconductors, aerospace components, artificial-intelligence technology, and other items that could be used to advance Beijing’s military interests.

Why is this being allowed to occur?

Some warn tighter restrictions on US tech sales to China will backfire because allies such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea will step in to fill the void. For export restrictions to be effective, “we need our allies to have the same controls,” said Kevin Wolf, a senior Commerce official during the Obama administration, while testifying on Capitol Hill last year. “It is that simple and logical.”

That would be silly if it weren’t, at bottom, rankly defeatist. We shouldn’t be waiting around on putting curbs on technology transfers to an enemy nation. Instead of looking for consensus first, we need to act, to lead, to let the consensus build as we go, and to give our allies something to follow and a consensus to join. After all, if we don’t care enough to do, there’s no reason anyone else should care enough to do.

Beside that, if we stop exporting our technology to the PRC and our putative allies step in to fill the gap, at least we’ll be stopping our own transfers, and our allies’ technologies, for the most part, aren’t as good as ours. The PRC would be getting second best, continuing to trail us, and that would be to the good for our security.

Government Spending on Fast Internet Service

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The Federal government has a $42+ billion program for expanding broadband Internet access to Americans who don’t currently have that access. In a rare application of sense, the law has an entry criterion:

The broadband plan, part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden last November, stipulates that money to improve service can’t be doled out until the Federal Communications Commission completes new maps showing where homes and businesses lack fast service.

Like I said, an application of sense. But there’s one more little fillip that’s necessary. That’s the need to define “fast Service.” Absent that, the maps won’t necessarily be useful.

Such a definition is needed because Internet speed is constantly increasing as the underlying technology is constantly improving. We’ve gone, after all, in just three decades, from 300baud dial-up access to the Internet at the start to today’s 100s of gigabit/sec access, and that’s getting faster as 5G access spreads and subsequent xG accesses are developed.

What’s the speed for which the FCC’s maps are required to indicate the need on the part of those of us who don’t currently have it? Will that be a static requirement, or will the speed be required to increase along with the general population’s access speed?

An Interesting Exercise

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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced that Chicagoans can look forward to her planned bump in their property taxes of 2.5%, effective next year.

Maybe the increase is warranted, maybe it isn’t. Here’s the exercise. Lightfoot needs to release, for each of the prior five years, detailed line-item allocations of budgeted property tax collections and the production schedule for each of those allocated-for items.

In parallel with that and for each of those same five years, she needs to release detailed line-item actual expenditures, supported by receipts for each expenditure, for every step of the supply/expense chain from allocation through intermediate purchases/expenses—including identifying intermediate and final suppliers, wages suppliers paid for production of each item at that stage of the chain, the services and hard goods bought, the date of each purchase, the date of actual delivery of each purchase—through to final allocated-for product delivery and the date of that final delivery. For those projects not yet completed and those items not yet finally delivered, she needs to release the originally scheduled dates, their current status, and concrete, measurable reason(s) for the delay, if any.

The exercise, also, would be as informative as it would be interesting.

Trump’s “Chaotic exit from White House”

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That’s opening of the subheadline of a Wall Street Journal article concerning former President Donald Trump’s (R) last days in office. One remark jumped out at me, though, from a former aide.

If you only start packing with two days left to go, you’re just running low on time. And if he’s the one just throwing things in boxes, who knows what could happen?

Aside from the foolishness of assuming Trump was the one doing the packing, this is a canonical example politicians and bureaucrats (and pressmen) being unable to understand moving at the speed of business rather than at the speed of politics. A hectic departure, most probably, but there’s no reason to believe chaotic. Not by a businessman.

A former Trump aide, though? Trump isn’t perfect; his White House staff and the Executive Branch agencies for which he was responsible for staffing consisted of hundreds of persons, if not thousands. Nor has Trump been perfect in his selections—see his initial choice for Attorney General and his choice for FBI Director for a couple of his more famous personnel mistakes.

What’s the basis for claiming chaos out of hecticality? Besides the claimants’ (assuming this unidentified source actually exists) confusion, I mean.