Monthly Archives: September 2022

Russia is Not a State Sponsor of Terror

Posted on by
Reply

Or at least President Joe Biden (D) is too timid to say so out loud, or officially, which would bring a round of additional sanctions against Russia.

Biden, asked by a reporter on Monday if he would blacklist Russia as a terrorist state, said simply, “no,” after months of non-committal answers from senior officials.

Biden expanded on that the next day, through his Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre:

She said the designation would hamper aid delivery to parts of war-ravaged Ukraine or prevent aid groups and companies from taking part in a deal brokered by the United Nations and Türkiye to ship badly needed grain from Ukraine’s blockaded ports.
“It would also undercut our unprecedented multilateral [coalition] that has been so effective to holding Putin accountable and could also undermine our ability to support Ukraine” in negotiations, she told reporters.

In other words, Biden is afraid of what Putin might do in response to such a designation. Or worse, Biden is afraid of his own imaginings of what Putin might do.

Windfall Taxes

Posted on by
Reply

With rising (finally) interest rates in Europe, European governments are starting to hatch what they’re pleased to call windfall tax plans.

European banks have started to reap higher profits from rising interest rates—and governments are already starting to clamp down on them.
In Spain, the government has laid out plans to tax lenders on their rising income and use the money to alleviate higher living costs for the population. Hungary has imposed a similar measure, and the Czech Republic, where inflation is above 17%, is also considering such a move. In Poland, where mortgages carry variable rates that are quickly rising, the government placed a moratorium on repayments to help borrowers.

Nor is this tax hatch limited to banks.

In other areas too, European governments are acting quickly when judging companies to be earning abnormally large profits. The UK has said it would introduce a windfall tax on energy companies, and Spain is imposing a similar levy as well as the new tax on banks.

Usw.

As usual, I have questions.

Define “windfall.” No glittering generalities, what constitutes a windfall profit, and based on what economic theory?

When does a windfall profit stop being windfall and becomes the normal level of profit? Again, no glittering generalities; be specific.

Related to that: discriminate between the new, reasonably steady state level of profit and “excess profit.” To do this discrimination it is, of course, necessary to define “excess profit,” with that definition devoid of glittering generalities and supported by clearly identified economic theory.

Back to windfall profit becoming the normal profit level. Does that recognition necessarily mean the prior “windfall” assessment was mistaken? If so, would that mean that the money collected as windfall taxes were mistakenly collected and a refund owed?

And finally, how many politicians will confront those questions? How many of those actually will offer concrete, measurable answers?

Will the West Proceed?

Posted on by
Reply

In the face of the Group of Seven Club’s moves to impose a price cap on Russian crude exports globally, Russian President Vladimir Putin now threatens

to curtail the export of grain from Ukraine and said Moscow was ready to extend its rationing of natural-gas exports and cut off oil and refined products if the West went ahead….

And

Mr Putin said Wednesday that Russia had contractual obligations on energy deliveries but would reconsider them if a price cap were imposed.
“We simply will not fulfill [our contracts]. In general, we will not deliver anything if it contradicts our interests,” he told an audience of officials and business leaders. “We will not deliver gas, nor oil, nor coal, nor heating fuel. We will not deliver anything.”

This would result in temporary near-term pain for the West, to be sure, with winter a few months away. But it would result in permanent and disastrous pain for Russia.

Near-term for the West: that winter (which so far looks to be relatively mild, but weather forecasts…), and tight supplies of natural gas being squirreled away, along with iffy potentials for bringing recently shut down nuclear power plants back on line and keeping others scheduled for closure on line.

Temporary: Europe can find other sources of natural gas, oil, and coal (including, regarding the first two, plussing up North Sea production and building additional pipelines) for their power production plants and move away from Russian sources altogether and permanently. Especially if the West can get President Joe Biden (D) out of the way of American oil and natural gas production and export.

Long-term pain for Putin: he needs a minimum of $70-$80 oil in order to pay for his war against Ukraine—replacing equipment combat losses, providing food, fuel, ammunition, and other consumables for his surviving forces—along with the rest of his economy, which is almost entirely extractive, which potentiates his long-term vulnerability.

Permanent: he’ll have lost permanently his Western markets, leaving him with selling into the People’s Republic of China—and President Xi Jining will be forcing his own purchase price on Putin, a price made the firmer by the PRC’s own current economic strait. Further, those sales will require PRC assistance to develop: new Siberian oil and natural gas wells and pipelines (presently nearly non-existent) to deliver well output to the PRC. All of which will exacerbate Russia’s subordination to the PRC.

Aside: it’s true that Putin has markets in India and Turkey, but with Turkey, drastic as that nation’s needs are, its economy is too small to take up much of Putin’s oil. India has too ready access to too many alternative markets to be taken for much of a ride by Putin.

The salient question is whether the West has the stomach for what it takes to achieve victory. The jury is still out on that. Especially given who’s the nominal leader of the West.

Surveillance State, Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

Another one from New York. It seems that US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s Stand for America PAC, a 501(c)(4) organization with a legally protected list of donors has had that list released by the NY AG’s Charities Bureau to Politico, which then proceeded to publish that list.

The Charities Bureau is an arm of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ (the same one who “consulted” with then-FBI Director James Comey to suppress any hint of investigation of Hillary Clinton’s classified email handling ‘way back in 2016) Attorney General office.

Never mind that the leak was illegal. Never mind that the Supreme Court in Prosperity Foundation v Bonta—just a year ago—had ruled that the California AG’s blanket demand that all charities disclose donor information was unconstitutional.

Letitia James, a Progressive-Democrat through and through, cares not a fig for any law that’s inconvenient to her. She’s going to collect non-Progressive-Democrat data and release it whenever she takes a notion to.

Location Apps on Smartphones

Posted on by
Reply

A techy article about the wonders of location apps in our smartphones—if “properly shared”—in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye. The author’s piece centered on the alleged benefits of automatically sharing your personal location data with a selected audience (usually family members) and the app providers’ directions for how to achieve “proper sharing,” supposedly limiting the location sharing to that selected audience.

The author missed the larger problem, though: the intrinsic lack of security on those apps, especially given the historical disdain for personal information security on the part of some of those providers.

I won’t share my location, ever. It wasn’t necessary before such apps became available, and it isn’t necessary today. My smartphone has a—wait for it—telephone app that I can use to check in with and/or check on the ones about whom I care.

The location data in these apps simply aren’t as secure as the touters make them out to be. Data that are held anywhere but on my personal devices are vulnerable to exposure, whether by “mistake”—last week’s IRS release of tax records (which is all too routine for this government agency) comes to mind—or programming mistakes, or cloud or providers’ servers being hacked, or the receivers’ devices being hacked, or location history being vulnerable to government information demands, or….

Location data that aren’t in the cloud or on those other servers and that aren’t being transmitted to a supposedly limited audience aren’t available to exposure.

Along those lines, a commenter in the comment thread for that article had this:

I checked FindMy to see if my wife was lost coming to an appointment at the bank (she was). The banker gasped, “Does she know you’re tracking her?” Her reaction? “It’s a sign of a secure marriage.”
She once missed where I-26 turns and followed the connector straight ahead into downtown Columbia, SC. I was able to guide her through town back to I-26 by a convenient route. I had been tracking her anticipating that very thing.
Very useful app, but one has to be careful with it.

Leaving aside the Banker’s intrusion into a family matter having nothing to do with the family business being conducted, I had this reaction:

Before location apps were available, my wife had a similar missed-turn-now-lost experience trying to get to a location in a large city in Texas hours away from the large city in Texas in which we live, and where I still was.
Her solution? She exercised the telephone app that happened be on her smartphone and called me. I brought up the map function on my laptop, and from her description of the landmarks she was seeing, I quickly located her and then talked her back onto her route. She finished her trip with no further trouble.

Telephone apps. What will Big Tech think of next?