Tag Archives: markets

A Change in Tone?

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Recall the start of President Donald Trump’s response to the People’s Republic of China’s economic conflict with us, when he began imposing tariffs on PRC goods over their continued theft of American companies’ intellectual property.

Vice President Wang warned US business chieftains there would be corporate casualties. President Xi told others that Beijing would “punch back” at the US.

Now we’re getting sweet words.

Liu He, President Xi Jinping’s economic-policy chief, told visiting American business representatives that US companies’ China operations won’t be targeted in Beijing’s trade-brawl counterattacks. “We won’t allow retribution against foreign companies,” Mr Liu said[.]

We promise.

Sure.

No, this is not a change in tone.  It’s smoke-blowing and just a change in tactics.  The PRC still is requiring foreign companies—especially American companies—to take on a majority partner as a condition of doing business in the PRC.  Sure, the government is making noises about only requiring a minority partner (49% ownership), but they’ve enacted nothing.

The PRC still is requiring foreign companies—especially American companies—to install backdoors in their operating system software and their software products so the government can enter and poke around to its heart’s content.

The PRC still is hacking into American businesses and our government facilities to steal our companies’ and government’s secrets.

On the other hand, that last may indicate that the change in tone is serious.  The PRC may have gained enough confidence in its hacking chops that it doesn’t feel the need to demand the surrender of our secrets; it may be confident that it can steal them at will.

Either way, there’s no reason to take Liu at his word.  Actions matter.

Nike

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Nike makes shoes, among other things.  It also has chosen to use Colin Kaepernick in its new Just Do It campaign.  You recall Kaepernick: ex-49er quarterback who’s the instigator and leader of the NFL players’ campaign of contempt for our national anthem and our flag and of insult for the generations of our veterans who’ve fought, been maimed, and died for our freedom, including these players’ right to be stupid and to engage in contemptible and insulting behavior.

But wait—aren’t the players protesting police brutality, discrimination, and other social injustices?  That’s certainly their claim.  However, if their claim were accurate, they’d protest police brutality, discrimination, and other social injustices instead of attacking our anthem, flag, and veterans.  They’d also go into the neighborhoods where these things are occurring and actively help the locals, as many of the players who aren’t behaving so contemptibly and insultingly are doing.

Further, even if that had been their message at the outset, it’s clear that their message has been not understood that way by much, if not most, of their audience.  They would, then, clarify by changing their message delivery in order to have their message better understood.  Instead, the players have continued their delivery unchanged in the slightest.  From that, it’s clear that either their message never was what they claimed it to be, and they’ve been attacking these symbols and defenders all along, or they’ve walked away from their message and now are simply engaged in a toddler’s ego trip of out-stubborning those who disagree with them.

The players know all of this; in particular, Kaepernick knows all of this; and Nike knows all of this.  Yet,

Nike has said it “opposes discrimination of any type and has a longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion.”

Too bad that doesn’t apply to our anthem, our flag, or our veterans.

I’ve bought my last Nike product.  I’m Just Doing It.

Trust Us

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It seems that Alphabet and Mastercard have hooked up: Mastercard seems to have agreed to share its customers’ shopping habits with Alphabet’s Google in return for Google’s separately accumulated data on those same customers.  The subhead on Bloomberg‘s piece is instructive:

Google found the perfect way to link online ads to store purchases: credit card data

The hookup is this:

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the US. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

And that Mastercard freely sold.

Who knew the deal had been done?  Almost nobody, especially including the owners (morally if not legally) of those data.

[M]ost of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

Then this:

[T]he deal, which has not been previously reported, could raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb.

Gee.  Ya think?

It also raises the broader privacy concern of how much personal that data primary collectors, like credit card companies, are busily peddling to the Googles of the world behind our backs.

A carefully anonymous Google spokeswoman offered this:

Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information.  We do not have access to any personal information from our partners’ credit and debit cards, nor do we share any personal information with our partners.

Trust us.  Trust us both.

Sure.

Governance by the Left

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It’s only light bulbs, so who cares?  The Know Betters of the EU care, and the subhead on the Deutsche Welle article at the link says it all.

The sale of halogen lightbulbs is being banned across the EU, as LEDs are touted as greener alternatives. Advocates insist the move will save consumers money in the long run and lead to lower carbon emissions.

If that were true, then LEDs would have no trouble competing in a free market and supplanting halogens quite rapidly and freely.

However.

Ordinary citizens are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted to make the correct decisions.  Irmela Colaco, Energy Efficiency Project Leader for the German environmental group BUND:

It’s high time that the planet and consumers were protected from these power guzzlers[.]

Because consumers are just slack-jawed idiots who cannot protect themselves—or who cannot be trusted to protect themselves in the right way.

This is the Europe our own Leftists want us to emulate.

On Keeping the Senate Informed

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…to the level Senators deem appropriate.  In a Wall Street Journal article about the fate of the newly negotiated trade agreement between the US and Mexico, there was this plaint from one Senator among others:

Lawmakers from both parties have complained that the Trump administration has broken with precedent by not regularly briefing with Capitol Hill and leaving them largely in the dark about crucial details of the negotiations. “Who knows what’s happening,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R, TN), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, with a shrug.

That’s all to the good. You guys leak like a sieve, not out of carelessness, but deliberately for personal political gain. And those leaks also often blow up negotiations in progress. But your leaks are more important.

Now the thing will be submitted to you, and you’ll have all the time you need to study it and vote it up or down.

Get over yourselves.