Apple has once again kowtowed to the demands of an enemy nation government: the People’s Republic of China instructed Apple to remove some of the world’s most popular chat messaging apps from its app store in the country. The offending apps include Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads and Signal and Telegram.
Apple promptly and meekly complied.
An anonymous Apple spokesman rationalized the obedience:
We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree[.]
There are concerns that a bill under consideration in the House, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, goes too far in protecting us Americans from 4th Amendment violations by the government at the expense of our counterintelligence capabilities.
The bill…would ban the government from buying information on Americans from data brokers. This would include many things in the cloud of digital exhaust most Americans leave behind online, from information on the websites they visit to credit-card information, health information, and political opinions.
Worse, goes the argument, the bill
Our DoD’s failure with battlefield drones (as opposed to large surveillance and targeted raid drones) is shamefully demonstrated by a small US drone builder and Ukraine’s position on and need for actual, small, battle-capable drones.
Most small drones from US startups have failed to perform in combat, dashing companies’ hopes that a badge of being battle-tested would bring the startups sales and attention. It is also bad news for the Pentagon, which needs a reliable supply of thousands of small, unmanned aircraft.
One aspect of the American problem stems from too much dependence on DoD specifications.
…of the racist and sexist bigotry of the Biden administration.
The Biden administration’s Department of Agriculture has begun making disaster relief funding contingent on the race and sex of the disaster sufferer.
[T]he Biden administration has taken roughly $25 billion in disaster and pandemic aid approved by Congress for farmers in eight programs and devised a system to make awards based on race, gender, or other “socially disadvantaged” traits.
Texas farmers have filed suit to block this USDA move, noting that the
The subheadline of a Wall Street Journal editorial concerning Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s pushing Ukraine to stop hitting inside Russia, particularly Russia’s oil refineries, says it al.
The White House fears attacks on refineries inside Russia could raise global prices.
In the body of the editorial:
…the Biden Administration had urged Ukraine to halt its campaign targeting Russian refineries and warned that “the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation.”
Ford has said that it will delay the rollout of its wholly battery-powered three-row electric vehicles, its new model SUVs, from 2025 to 2027. That’s not because of development or production problems, either.
The additional time will allow for the consumer market for three-row EVs to further develop and enable Ford to take advantage of emerging battery technology, with the goal to provide customers increased durability and better value.
“Allowing the consumer market to develop further”—in other words, consumers don’t want these battery SUVs, and Ford isn’t intent on producing and not selling them, until customers actually want them. Which they don’t, never minding Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s æther-borne claim to the contrary.
The Wall Street Journal is speculating on when the Fed might start lowering its benchmark interest rates, speculating further that the Fed might be worrying about whether it’s time and whether leaving its rates where they are might spark a recession. (I was one of those worrying about a recession starting up over the last year or year-and-a-half, and still, but maybe the Fed’s worry is as overblown as mine.)
Early in the article, the WSJ has this:
The central bank will keep its benchmark interest-rate target at a range of 5.25% to 5.5%, a 23-year high….
The People’s Republic of China wants our technology and hardware out of that nation in its drive for self-sufficiency.
The 2022 Chinese government directive expands a drive that is muscling US technology out of the country—an effort some refer to as “Delete A,” for Delete America.
Document 79 was so sensitive that high-ranking officials and executives were only shown the order and weren’t allowed to make copies, people familiar with the matter said. It requires state-owned companies in finance, energy and other sectors to replace foreign software in their IT systems by 2027.
A Wall Street Journal Finance writer wrote an article bragging about how all the subscriptions he had that he canceled pays for his lease on a Tesla Model Y. The key takeaway for me was the vast number of subscriptions this Finance writer had accumulated. This screen shot shows the large number of subscriptions that he canceled (or in the case of SiriusXM, the price cut that he negotiated):
And he still has all of these sucking money.
We still have Disney+, Hulu, Max, the language-learning service Duolingo and, of course, Spotify. We get three print newspapers delivered and many more digital news subscriptions.
As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it in their editorial last Tuesday, nothing is stopping the
Securities and Exchange Commission and prosecutors from finding [regulatory] meaning in statutory penumbras.
Now the SEC is manufacturing a rule based on nothing but the æther in SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s mind. Gensler has hailed into court a pharmaceutical company employee for the “insider trading” crime of trading in options on the stock shares of another pharmaceutical company, a company about which the man had no insider information at all. Not a whit.