Daily Archives: 21 October 2024

A Subsidy

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It may be that the People’s Republic of China will start subsidizing mainland Chinese families who have more than one child, to the tune of 800 yuan per child for a family’s second and third children per month. Is that a little, or a lot?

The PRC’s 2024 per capita GDP in nominal terms is a bit over $13,000, which works out to 92,300 yuan, or 7,700 yuan per month. Those 800 yuan are roughly $113.

Using data from just before the Wuhan Virus Situation, per capita household electricity consumption was some 750 kilowatt-hours per month. That consumption cost $0.083 per kilowatt-hour; that works out to roughly 425 yuan per month.

Food consumption cost mainland Chinese roughly $270, or 1,915 yuan per month for a family of three, rising (in a naïve estimate) to $360 per month, or 2,555 yuan for a family upsized to four.

In those broad strokes, it seems that electricity and food consume that subsidy before getting to housing, which already is badly under water, for all that the housing industry may be—may be—turning around.

Given the decision of mainland Chinese families not to have more than one child, even after the murderously enforced one-child edict was lifted, this likely won’t increase family size in the PRC. And that’s separate from the editors’ note that child subsidies have never worked anywhere.

One More Reason

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For Israel to not trust the Biden-Harris administration.

The United States is investigating the unauthorized release of classified documents detailing Israel’s planned attack against Iran, The Associated Press reported.
The documents, attributed to the US Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, note that Israel was still moving military assets in place to conduct a military strike in response to Iran’s blistering ballistic missile attack on Oct. 1. ….
The documents, which are marked Top Secret, were posted to the Telegram messaging app last week and first reported by CNN and Axios.

Supposedly, the Biden-Harris is investigating the leak, including how the data were obtained.

…whether it was an intentional leak by a member of the US intelligence community or by another method, like a hack….

Either way, this administration cannot be trusted with anyone’s secrets.

If the leak came from the administration’s intelligence community—I’m particularly suspicious, on the basis of no data whatsoever, of the NSA—that leaker should spend the rest of his life in prison, and this is would be yet another example of why the intelligence community needs a deep- and wide-reaching reform along with removal of managers from the mid-level on up to the political appointees, along with the cancelation of their security clearances once they’re no longer in government employ.

If the leak was the result of a hack job, it would be yet another demonstration of this administration’s disdain for matters relating to cyber security.

Hopefully, though, the Israelis already have learned the level of trustworthiness of this administration, and they shared false flag information in the expectation that Biden-Harris’ minions would leak them, or that they’d be hacked, and therewith mislead Iran regarding Israel’s actual plans.