Tag Archives: markets

The PRC Wants Us Out Of There

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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.

This is something we should be doing regarding PRC products in the US. Their surveillance cameras on US military bases, which our Pentagon procurement agents actively bought demonstrates the danger here, as does PRC espionage equipment on the ship-to-shore cranes in our ports are demonstrating today.

I agree with the PRC’s move. We should be out of the PRC, and that includes us no longer using PRC facilities to build stuff or the components for stuff. We need to relocate all of our PRC usages to other, non-enemy nations.

Beyond that, we need to stop importing PRC products altogether.

Subscriptions

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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.

It’s certainly true that a finance writer could easily need all those news outlet subscriptions, but who has that many extraneous subscriptions? Especially subscriptions to which, as this writer freely admitted in his article, they don’t even listen to or watch for weeks, months, on end.

My wife and I have an online subscription to the WSJ, a two-line subscription to Verizon for our cell phones, and a Spectrum cable subscription that provides us with our TV (no premium cable channels; it’s not quite the most basic bundle, but it’s pretty bare bones), Internet, and landline. There is a double potful of online news outlets to which we can link, for free, through our browser, and there are libraries in the nearby, also. And books. We read those for entertainment, edification, and straight up education. We read them in print version: those libraries, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and online booksellers.

We’ve thought about cutting the landline out of our cable subscription, but it’s proved too useful as a honeytrap for all the spam calls that come rolling in. As it happens, we have an answering machine capability on our landline phone that plays any messages being left as they’re being left. On those rare occasions when we recognize the voice and are interested in talking to the person, we can go ahead and pick up.

Oh, and he had this in his brag about having saved enough to cover the cost of his car:

…the cost [of his Model Y] dropped to $53 for a car we desperately needed.

He might have desperately needed a car, but he only desperately wanted the Tesla.

Another Reason to Rescind Chevron Defense

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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.

Gensler, however, in plumbing the depths of his shadowy æther, has claimed to have found something in a penumbra of Federal law and Court decisions regarding insider trading. The man he’s charging knew from an employee-broadcast email from his company’s CEO that his company might be about to be acquired by another company—not the company in which our man did his trading.

Poof—Gensler has waved his hands and conjured an insider trading beef centered on no insider trading information at all. As the WSJ noted,

Federal law doesn’t explicitly ban trading on confidential information. But courts have said that insiders defraud companies by “misappropriating” private information for personal gain.

It’s in the phantasmal penumbra of “private information” that Gensler has conjured his offense: private information in one company (not even that private, it was a company-wide email that revealed the potential for an acquisition of the employee’s company) casts a shadow over other, Gensler-unspecified, companies, and so brings those other companies into the reach of one company’s allegedly private information.

And this, regarding those chimeric penumbras[1] of which too many of our courts still claim to see:

If something is in a penumbral region, it is not in the text.  If it is not in the text, it does not exist ….  If it does not exist, a judge cannot rule on it.  If in the end, all a judge can do after carefully reading the text is go more than a toe’s dip into its shadows for meaning, then he must not go in: he must rule a lack of governing statute or strike the statute for vagueness, and in either event return the matter to the political branches.

And this, from Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in denying a 2014 cert petition in Whitman v US [emphasis in the original]:

Only the legislature may define crimes and fix punishments. Congress cannot, through ambiguity, effectively leave that function to the courts—much less to the administrative bureaucracy[.]

Now the Supreme Court must overrule the SEC outright, which would be much easier to do were it to also—or already have by the time this case reaches it—rescinded the Chevron Defense foolishness which subordinates, by Constitutional design, the coequal Judiciary not just to the Executive, but to Executive subordinate branches led by political appointees and peopled by unknown and faceless bureaucrats.

[1] Hines, Eric, A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law

India vs PRC

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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece comparing the People’s Republic of China’s economic future with India’s. In the second paragraph (the semi-lede?), there’s this:

The country’s population surpassed China’s last year. More than half of Indians are under 25.

A couple of graphs from the CIA World Factbook put the two nation’s population structures in sharp relief, and at this stage of the two nations’ economic development, those structures are their future.

This is the structure of India’s population (scroll down a skosh):

This is the structure of the PRC’s population (again, scroll a tad):

India’s population of new workers is growing, so the nation’s economic capacity is capable of growing. The PRC’s population of new workers is shrinking. Not only is the PRC incapable of growing very much, economically, it’s becoming and will continue to become increasingly difficult to support its old folks, even as that portion of the nation’s population continues to grow.

You’ve Formed Your Opinion on EVs. Now Let Me Change It.

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That’s the headline on Dan Neil’s Wall Street Journal paeon to the battery-powered car. In his piece, he acknowledges the past and current shortcomings of Electric Vehicles, but he lays those off to car company marketing rather than to actual performance.

My mind isn’t as made up as Neil’s headline implies; nevertheless, challenge accepted.

I drove a Ford Fusion Hybrid for a number of years, and it was a fine car. However, the battery price premium was enormous, and the reduction in trunk capacity to make room for the battery was just as enormous.

I replaced it with an ICE Fusion, and that car was just as peppy and responsive as the Hybrid (peppiness and responsiveness was one of Neil’s touts regarding battery-powered cars), and I had decent trunk capacity.

I’d get a Hybrid again, were the battery premium actually to come down decently.

I won’t buy a purely battery-powered car until a number of criteria are met:

  • the battery has to be chargeable to a 400-mile range in the same minimal time that I can fill my ICE gasoline tank to a 400-mile range
  • the battery premium must come down. The 14% reduction Neil claims is from a hugely high price
  • the battery’s lifetime must be at least as many years as I drive my cars, and as many miles
  • the battery must stop suffering so significantly from cold temperatures. The battery in my ICE that powers my car’s starter motor also suffers, but it only needs to crank the engine. If needs be, I can get a jump start. The EV’s battery is its motive source, and that motor can’t be jump-started; its power source must be “refueled”
  • the battery must be disposable/recyclable with far less environmental damage done or risk of damage done than is the case today

EV prices are coming down, as Neil claims? Show that after EV subsidies are stopped, and EV buyers pay actual market prices. No one should have to pay tax money because someone else bought an EV.