Tag Archives: markets

Shutting Down Research

Posted on by
Reply

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want serious research into his advertising targeting to be done.

Facebook is demanding that a New York University research project cease collecting data about its political-ad-targeting practices….
The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched last month by the university’s engineering school that has recruited more than 6,500 volunteers to use a specially designed browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows them.

In particular,

Scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a permissible means of collecting information from us….

Facebook says (Zuckerberg says; it’s his company, and he retains controlling interest) that it already maintains an advertisement database that contains information such as who paid for an ad, when it ran and the geographic location of people who saw it, but the company does not maintain—in that database—data concerning its targeting methods. NYU wants those targeting data, too, including data on what political ads ran in which state and political race, what ads are targeted to what audiences, and how those ads are funded.

Zuckerberg doesn’t want those usages and techniques exposed.

His bottom line: “Don’t you dare scrape the data we scrape from our users and tell the world what the data are that we scrape, how much of it we scrape, how we use it, how we charge others for the sale or use of those data.”

Defense of the Republic of China

Posted on by
Reply

Paul Wolfowitz had a thought on that last Tuesday. His opening paragraph laid out his thesis.

Beijing has been making a show of hostility toward Taiwan. Last week China released footage of “real combat” it conducted last month in Taiwanese airspace. A Chinese invasion would present the greatest threat to global peace in a generation. The US would confront an agonizing dilemma: risk an armed clash between two nuclear superpowers or abandon a free people to communist tyranny. But there’s an alternative—deter the threat by committing to oppose it, by force if necessary.

I’d be a bit more blunt.

It would be good to remind the PRC of who has vastly more nuclear warheads than the other, who has the better cyberwar capability, and how little the US depends on river dams—or a single dam—for its food supply.

It also would be good to stage our own demonstrations, real rather than virtual, throughout the East and South China Seas and in the Taiwan strait and to increase and accelerate arms sales to the Republic of China.

Joe Biden, however, is the epitome of an Asian nation being of little strategic value, of a commitment to use military force in [RoC] would be ill-advised and impracticable, and whose prevailing mood… [is] not to interfere—after all, the PRC, Biden insists, is not a serious competitor; the nation isn’t a “patch on our jeans.”

The EU and the US’ Tariffs

Posted on by
Reply

Valdis Dombrovskis, European Commissioner for Trade, is demanding that we remove our WTO-sanctioned punitive tariffs on EU products, or he’ll start a trade/tariff war with us.

He isn’t even trying to be serious about trade. Leave aside the fact that the current tariffs have been explicitly approved by the WTO, and Dombrovskis’ own duplicity:

Of course, if the US is not withdrawing their tariffs we have no choice but to then introduce our tariffs[.]

Because it’s entirely appropriate for the EU to retaliate against WTO-approved punitive tariffs.

Consider, instead, the larger picture.

Trump has offered the EU, on more than one occasion, a completely tariff-free trade regime. The EU has refused even to discuss the matter.

Dombrovskis has this bit of cynicism, too:

But in any case, we will be engaging…and trying to bring the US administration back within the framework of multilateralism[.]

He—and the EU government for which he works—refuse the multilateralism of that no-tariff trade regime we’ve offered to the EU and each of its multilateral constituent member nations for which the EU governance speaks.

Alternatives

Posted on by
Reply

In an op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal centered on the foolishness of “sustainable” investing, Burton Malkiel had this remark:

The most effective way to reduce an economy’s carbon intensity is to change the economic incentive to pollute.

Not at all. The most effective way to reduce an economy’s carbon intensity—even assuming that’s a useful thing to do—is to provide viable alternatives to carbon intensity. So far, all the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party is willing to offer is punishment for carbon intensity.

All that does is punish the successful because the less successful don’t or can’t keep up or do better.

Insufficient

Posted on by
Reply

Recall that Oracle and ByteDance have a proposal on the table for Oracle to take a minority partnership position in ByteDance’s TikTok.  In response to objections to that, some

Trump administration officials are looking to give American investors a majority share of the company that will take over the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok[.]

Senators Marco Rubio (R, FL), Rick Scott (R, FL), Thom Tillis (R, NC), Roger Wicker (R, MI), Dan Sullivan (R, AK), and John Cornyn (R, TX), object to that, too.

Any deal between an American company and ByteDance must ensure that TikTok’s US operations, data, and algorithms are entirely outside the control of ByteDance or any Chinese-state directed actors, including any entity that can be compelled by Chinese law to turn over or access US consumer data.

The Senators are absolutely correct. Any fraction of ownership by a People’s Republic of China company that’s greater than zero is too much; giving, as it would, the PRC’s intelligence community access to all the data TikTok scoops up from the individuals and businesses that use it.