And Again, a Reason

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This time, it’s the People’s Republic of China’s decision to block Softbank‘s acquisition of the robotics unit of ABB. As the news writers correctly noted,

By barring the SoftBank deal, Beijing is sending a message that it doesn’t want the expertise and technology ABB has developed in China to help its rivals—especially one based in US ally Japan, which has been in a diplomatic war of words with China over Taiwan.

The PRC has no trouble stealing non-PRC business’ intellectual property, but it objects to intellectual know-how developed by a non-PRC business while it was operating inside that nation being repatriated and used or licensed elsewhere. This is, at best, cynically disingenuous. This is the nation pushing anti-trust excuses for blocking deals moving hard to maintain its own monopoly, here over robotics.

Just as I suggested in a nearby post about another example of PRC disingenuous obstructionism, Softbank and ABB should do the deal, regardless of the PRC’s position, and simply stop doing business with any business domiciled in the PRC and stop doing any other business within the PRC. That would render the PRC’s intransigence wholly irrelevant, it would strongly benefit the two companies’ shareholders and customers, and their example would encourage others to take similar steps.

Still Another Reason

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Still another reason to stop doing business with or inside the People’s Republic of China.

Beijing’s antitrust regulator has yet to sign off on a proposed $53 billion merger between miners Anglo American and Teck Resources that was first announced over a year ago.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation, or SAMR, is the only regulator globally out of a total of nine that hasn’t approved the deal.

The PRC, through its SAMR, isn’t objecting to the deal on anti-trust grounds. That nation just wants special consideration for itself for the copper output that would result.

Anglo American and Teck Resources should go through with the merger absent PRC approval and simply stop doing any business with PRC businesses or within the PRC, which would render that nation’s lack of merger approval irrelevant.

Blaming Trump for the Erasure of the Republican Party?

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In most of the post-election analyses going on, a major theme is that it’s all Trump’s fault. Typical of that is the house editorial in the WSJ.

True to form, President Trump [R] is already blaming everyone else, but he is the main architect of this rout. He’ll say the Senate didn’t break the filibuster or pass his Save America Act. But neither would have saved the GOP this year, even if there had been enough votes to do either. He’ll blame Karl Rove and Texas Senator John Cornyn [R] for the shocking defeats in the Lone Star State, but failed Senate candidate Ken Paxton was his man—and his choice helped bring down Governor Greg Abbott [R] too.

The editors aren’t far wrong as far as they went, but they cast their analysis too narrowly.

Trump’s late season campaign rallies that were all “Yay me,” instead of touting the particular candidate and pushing to get out the vote for him/her, also were counterproductive.

Major contributing factors, though, were the Republicans’ Chaos Caucus in the House that blocked too many of the party’s priorities and the Establishment Republicans in the Senate (not only Thune) who were too timid to force on-the-record votes or otherwise actually to fight for the party’s priorities.

And too many of the candidates themselves, who kept arguing how wonderful our economy is on the national level (and it is), but who didn’t talk directly to their constituents about how they would help, explicitly, those constituents, most of whom weren’t experiencing any of that national wonderfulness at their local grocery stores, local gas pumps, or their local utility bills.

Republicans, if they’re to have any chance of recovery, will need to stop playing at the obstreperous loyal opposition and act like they deserve to be in charge. That will require more than just greater internal unity than the Chaos Caucus has been interested in. It will require, also, vastly overhauling what they use for their communications game and talk often and freely to their constituents—not at them—about those constituents’ problems independently of national conditions, and each Republican needs to lose his fear of specifics and talk to his constituents about what policies he’ll fight for that particularly address those problems.

Republicans also need to learn from the Progressive-Democrats and load up their own saps and use them. Not to smear and lie; leave those to the Progressive-Democrats, instead to call out their specific opponents and identify, with facts and specific outcomes, the emptiness of those opponents’ words and promises and those opponents’ policy failures.

Negligence

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A wave of hacks that involves spoiling food by getting into Internet-connected refrigerators and freezers and turning the temperatures up to as high as 120oF has run across Europe in the last few weeks.

The hackers—whose identities and motives remain unknown—had found a way to take control of internet-based computers that supermarket chains and refrigeration firms use to oversee the systems, cybersecurity researchers said. In some cases, hackers appeared to target systems with outdated software.

Leave aside the foolishness of connecting these devices to the Internet in the first place, no matter the convenience of doing so. (How convenient is it for a supermarket to toss whole freezers-full of food because the food was spoiled by those hacks?) Given that companies are going to do so, there are obvious steps that can be taken to minimize this threat.

France’s cybersecurity agency issued an alert about refrigeration-system controllers made by Danfoss, a Danish maker of refrigeration equipment, and US-based Copeland. The agency warned that the controllers were prone to being hacked and urged users to bolster their security or remove them from the internet.

Indeed. Find another controller company if these two (for instance) are too slow to update and patch their software.

And this, especially:

The default administrator password for the Danfoss controller is set to “12345,” according to documentation on the manufacturer’s website. If a supermarket chain or its refrigeration contractor didn’t change the password, that would create a gaping security hole.

That’s no knock on Danfoss. Of course any company producing this kind of device must deliver it with an easily discerned password so that the user can gain entry and set up its network security parameters. The first thing the installer should do, before connecting the device to the Internet, is change that password to a strong password that includes upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. Not doing that simple step isn’t just lazy; it’s appallingly negligent. (Aside to individual readers: have you changed the password on your WiFi device in your home’s network that connects you to the Internet away from the manufacturer’s default? On your TV? Your refrigerator?)

For a business to not take even these minimal network security steps isn’t just negligence. I claim it’s criminal in its magnitude. IT types and company CEOs and equivalents who tolerate these failures need to be held criminally as well as personally civilly liable. And yes, that includes the Mom-and-Pops, who in the aggregate form much of the backbone of an economy’s food distribution infrastructure.

Other distribution infrastructures in an economy—electricity, fuel, water—similarly have no excuses for not securing their networks from this sort of hacking.

Wealth Redistribution as a Condition for Doing Business

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The Progressive-Democrat Abigail Spanberger ran as a centrist moderate for, and won, the governorship of Virginia. Then, in typical Progressive-Democrat duplicity, she began governing from the Far Left. (In truth, it’s also understandable and predictable, since the Far Left has become the Party’s center.) Spanberger’s latest example is her demand for NextEra and Dominion Energy to agree to redistribute their wealth as a condition for approving their proposed merger. The one is the world’s largest solar and wind producer and the other is a major electricity utility, and their merger would provide large synergies while spurring innovation.

Spanberger’s conditions:

  • freeze residential base electric rates for six years,
  • provide ratepayers a $29 monthly “credit” for four years
  • agree not to cut off customers who don’t pay their bills “due to financial hardship,” however that is defined
  • provide discounted rates to customers with electric vehicles and heat pumps
  • remove the cap on the state’s net-metering program

These, of course, eliminate those synergies of combination by forcing the new company to pay out all of those otherwise realizable cost reductions to those entities favored by the Progressive-Democrat, instead of committing those cost reductions to innovation and real future benefits to customers.

There is an obvious solution to Spanberger’s extremist demands: NextEra and Dominion should go through with the merger and go out from Virginia altogether. Since Spanberger isn’t serious about business in Virginia, there’s no reason for businesses to be serious about Virginia.