California has the highest pump-price of gasoline in the nation now. That raises some related questions in my pea brain:
What’s the per centage of all-electric vehicles in California’s government car and truck fleet (no one is producing serious electric/hybrid heavy equipment)?
What’s the per centage of hybrid vehicles in their fleet?
I suspect there are more than zero in each category: what’s the carbon footprint of the energy used to charge those vehicles’ batteries?
Stephanie Armour noted that Obamacare premiums are expected to be lower in 2020 than they are this year, and she wondered whether that means Obamacare is working, or if there remain problems to be fixed.
The drop doesn’t address the core problem with Obamacare: it’s a government welfare program that mandates coverages at prices independent of the risk being transferred.
Falling premiums? They’re still much too high, as are deductibles (which Armour completely omitted from her article), especially when compared to what would be the case in a free market, and they’re for coverages that aren’t, generally, needed, to boot.
To the extent subsidies are legitimate and truly needed to help offset [excessively high] premium costs, those just as easily can be paid in conjunction with policies bought through employers or privately in a free market.
Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) want so ban new leases for oil and gas drilling offshore and on Federal lands, and she wants to ban fracking altogether. This assault on our national energy underpinnings would have far-reaching negative outcomes.
Think how such price increases for basic transportation and such job losses would hammer “the little guy” that Warren pretends to so want to protect from Evil Big Business.
And some far-reaching positive outcomes: for Canada, Russia, and OPEC.
Here is a core part of Warren’s foreign policy.
This is demonstrated in the lead paragraph of a recent Wall Street Journal article.
Chief executives are taking vocal stands on issues like gun control, climate change, and immigration, but global affairs bring a different complexity and calculation, especially for companies doing business in China*.
After all,
In the aftermath of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s now-deleted tweet, the National Basketball Association has found the consequences of even implicitly criticizing Chinese policy can be swift and sizable.
Not to pick on the NBA in particular (although its behavior has been especially public, cowardly, and so reprehensible), Apple and Alphabet, among lots of others, also have sacrificed principle for company “security” in the PRC, while favoring yuan, also, over principle.
No, taking principled positions don’t get complexified by the environment in which they’re taken. The fundamental tenets of ethics, of morality, are universal and constant; the only adjustments are in the manner of their implementation. There’s nothing at all complex about that. Company personnel are either principled, ethical, moral, or they are not. These are not matters of situation or convenience.
And this:
Executives have to thread a needle when a company’s commercial and financial interests clash with the CEO’s personal values and the cultural values of an enterprise and its home country, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a leadership expert at the Yale School of Management. “One of the rarely discussed downsides of globalization is you get caught in those crosscurrents,” he said.
Those “cross-currents” are irrelevant. Either the CEO or the enterprise have principles worth standing by and sacrificing for, or the CEO or the enterprise have no principles. It’s that simple.
Another misunderstanding is this one by Paul Argenti, Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Professor of Corporate Communication:
The job of a CEO is not to save the world or make the world safe for democracy[.]
No, but it is a core part of his job to be, at all times and in all circumstances, ethical, moral, and not hypocritical. An example of business’ glaring hypocrisy: the Business Roundtable. That group is carefully and with deliberation silent on the NBA’s, et al., meek acquiescence to the PRC’s tyrants.
One last misunderstanding, this one by Rick Wartzman, Drucker Institute’s Director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society [paraphrased by WSJ]:
The fracas sparked by ephemeral statements can distract from more substantive questions of social responsibility[.]
And
“What concerns me is whether statements, while important, become a substitute for the more meaningful work around what it means to be a responsible company and take care of all your stakeholders[.]”
Again, no. The only way such things can distract is if the statement maker chooses to be distracted. Staying focused on the business of the company in such a circumstance may be hard to do, but being hard means it’s eminently possible.
*The WSJ, like most of the NLMSM, refers to the People’s Republic of China as though it were the one and only. They ignore the nation just across a narrow straight from the mainland, the Republic of China that sits on the island of Taiwan.
Attorney General William Barr has taken up ex-FBI Director James Comey’s battle for government backdoors into private citizens’ encrypted private messages. Apple MFWIC Tim Cook won a similar fight regarding iPhone passwords and a demand that government should be allowed backdoors into those, and Comey’s FBI was shown to have been dissembling about that difficulty by the speed with which a contractor the FBI hired successfully broke into an iPhone the FBI had confiscated.
Now Barr has broadened the fight, demanding Facebook give Government backdoors into Facebook’s planned rollout of encryption for its messaging services. He wants Facebook, too, to hold off on its rollout until Government is satisfied it has such backdoors. Barr’s cynically misleading plaint includes this tearjerker:
Companies cannot operate with impunity where lives and the safety of our children is at stake, and if Mr Zuckerberg really has a credible plan to protect Facebook’s more than two billion users it’s time he let us know what it is[.]
Zuckerberg has been quite clear on what it is. It’s facilitating private citizens’ ability to encrypt their private messages on Facebook’s platform. Many of whom live in outright tryannies, others of whom live in so-far free nations, but whose government officials want to be able to pierce the protections of enforceable privacy at will.
The concern that bad guys, terrorists as well as common criminals, will take advantage of such encryption to evade government law enforcement facilities is entirely valid. Two things about that, though. First is Ben Franklin’s remark about the relationship between safety and security.
The other is for law enforcement to do better with their own IT skills and with their own human policing skills. Just as the FBI did in cracking that iPhone after Apple refused to give break-in assistance to Government.