Author Archives: eehines

Western Battery-Car Adoption Anxiety

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The Wall Street Journal ran an article centered on how “western anxiety about Chinese EVs could prove self-defeating,” with a subheadline that summarized the thesis:

The US and Europe risk slowing electric-vehicle adoption by excluding Chinese suppliers from subsidies and raising tariffs

I have a hard time seeing the downside to slowing battery car adoption. Leave aside the tremendous drain that charging all those battery cars (assuming widespread adoption) would have on our already near or at capacity electric power grid and generating capacity for that grid.

Battery cars are tremendously polluting and damaging to our environment, from dirt in the ground to end-of-life battery disposal. Mining the metals—lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and on and on, metals that are used in far greater quantity in battery cars than in gasoline- diesel- or natural gas-powered vehicles—is extremely damaging, both from the toxicity of the metals themselves and from the toxicity of the tailings from the mining operations.

Processing those metals into battery-car-usable components is intensely energy demanding (have I mentioned the strains on anyone’s electricity grid?).

Disposing of those so-far unrecyclable dead batteries at their end of life is enormously polluting as they leach out of even the most well-kept landfills.

The risk is that the West cuts off its nose to spite its face. Slow down the shift to EVs too much to build local supply chains and give domestic manufacturers time to adapt, and Chinese technology might simply pull farther ahead….

Meh.

The technologies involved are useful, they should be pursued apace, and the supply chain problems need to be worked for a host of different reasons. However, it’s a Good Thing that battery cars are not being rapidly incorporated into our transportation systems.

A Karen Sues a Company

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So, what else is new? Not this one; it just happened to catch my eye. A Florida Karen, Cynthia Kelly, is suing Hershey’s over its Reese’s labeling, which Kelly claims is misleading advertising. The image below is the cause of her ire and the center of her (proposed class-action) suit:

She would not have purchased the candy had she known there was not actually ap face carved into the item. Given the image, she plainly expected, also, that there would already be a bite taken out of the item. Why would she buy a candy that had already been partly eaten?

This is the depth of the…foolishness…to which so many Precious Ones and outright lawfare gold diggers have stooped.

Protecting Your Cell Phone “from a banking threat”

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Kurt Knutsson has a Fox News article centered on protecting Android cell phones from malware that bypasses Android’s Restricted Setting Feature to steal, among other things, a user’s banking app PIN. It’s well worth reading and taking appropriate action, given that so many users have so many have banking (and other) access apps on their cells.

However.

Knutsson missed, in his article, the larger solution, or perhaps he deliberately elided it given how easy it is to use a cell phone—Android or other—to do things besides make and receive telephone calls or to exchange text messages.

What he missed is that that convenience comes with a very large cost, and that it’s an unavoidable cost given the ubiquitous presence of thieves in the world, including the virtual world of the Internet. The unavoidability of that cost stems directly from the fact that the contest between security and hacking past security is a permanent arms race in which security is, of necessity, reactive and not proactive. The hackers always have the first-user advantage, and that advantage lasts until security catches up—a gap that may be short or long but is always present.

The solution the Knutsson missed? Don’t have those banking (and other) access apps on your cell in the first place. At least, don’t go beyond social media apps—Facebook, Instagram, et al. (as if these are must haves)—at all. What’s not on a cell phone cannot be hacked by a cell phone hacker.

It’s certainly true that a laptop or PC is subject to the same vulnerabilities, but there’s no reason to extend and expand the reach of those vulnerabilities.

“Very Contentious Issue”

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Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has vetoed the SAFE Act, which would have barred biological males from women’s sports and protected Ohio’s children from mutilation in the form of sex hormone…treatments…and related sex change surgeries until those children reached 18 years old. DeWine had had this bill on his desk since 15 December, yet he waited until the last moment to veto it.

DeWine called the debate over transgender youth a “very contentious issue….”

Riley Gaines was direct on the matter during those two weeks:

He hasn’t signed it yet. He has 2 more days to sign before it becomes law without his signature. Why the hesitation, [Governor DeWine]?

No—there was, and is, nothing contentious at all in moving to protect children. There’s nothing contentious at all in moving to protect women’s sports and the women who compete in them. Contention exists only in the minds of extremists on the Left and of cowards in public office.

Riley Gaines is right: of what was Mike DeWine so terrified?

Or was he just putting his political position at the top of the Ohio heap ahead of the safety and welfare of Ohio’s children and women athletes?

It’s embarrassing that DeWine is a member of the Republican Party.

A UN Official…

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…gets one right.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, through organs of his administration, is moving to expand Title IX’s definition of sex and sexual discrimination to include “gender identity” and to bar schools, colleges, and universities from banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.

Even an agency of the UN sees this as…foolish.

Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls:

I share the concern expressed by women and girl athletes and women sports associations, as well as women and girls on sports scholarships, that the proposed Title IX rule changes would have detrimental effects on the participation of biological women and girls in sports, including by denying them the opportunity to compete fairly, resulting in the loss of athletic and scholarship opportunities[.]
More importantly, it would lead to the loss of privacy, an increased risk of physical injury, heightened exposure to sexual harassment and voyeurism, as well as a more frequent and accumulated psychological distress due to the loss of privacy and fair and equal sporting and academic opportunities[.]

Right on all counts. A better solution, and it is a problem that wants a solution, even as the Biden administration refuses even to consider the alternative, would be to modify Title IX to create a transgender section and separate transgender athletic programs.