Category Archives: markets

Automobile Technology for Drivers

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Demetria Gallegos, for The Wall Street Journal, asked a number of readers what they liked and didn’t like about the technologies in the cars they drive. She didn’t ask me, so here are my Goods, Wants, and Needs Improvements, based on my years with my 2023 Ford Escape SEL. If I don’t mention something it’s either because I’m satisfied with it as far as it goes, or I missed it.

What I think is good:

  • GPS Navigation. I had this on an earlier Fusion Hybrid, but it couldn’t tell whether I was on a main highway or on that highway’s frontage road; apparently the system was based on maps built from satellite 10m postings. The nav system in my Escape is much more accurate, seemingly using the finally much more ubiquitous 1m postings.
  • The sound system. I have very good AM/FM selection and reception, and I have the capability of selecting, instead, a DVD player (up from a CD player in that Fusion) or my own playlists from a thumb drive.
  • Heated seats. Mrs Hines’ third son was not raised up to be cold.
  • I get cruise control on the left side of my steering wheel and limited sound system and cell phone control on the right side. Very limited driver display controls.

What I want:

  • A Head Up Display. Some cars have these, but they’re jokes. What I want is a HUD that gives me my current speed, fuel state, power left on my battery (for those vehicles—not my Escape—that are mild hybrids. Plug-ins are not a player in my book), time/miles to my destination, time/distance to my next turn point and direction of turn, if I’ve loaded a destination. These nav data are on my dashboard GPS display, but a HUD lets me keep my eyes on the road and traffic. Also for the HUD would be my range rate to the vehicle in front of me

What badly needs improvement:

  • Better HOTAS. I should have control over the driver displays that let me select what driver displays I want visible—display by display rather than the Ford-defined clusters that I get, and I want to be able to put my driver displays where I want them. I should have HUD display controls in my HOTAS, too.
  • Dashboard display that includes the GPS Nav. Get rid of the touch screen aspect, and give me back my buttons, rockers, and toggle switches. It’s not possible to work a touch screen control without taking my eyes off the road and the traffic; it’s a stroll in the park to work physical controls by touch
  • Route editing. I can pick and choose among software-generated routes to a destination—, no toll roads, fastest route, avoid construction. But it’s deucedly cumbersome to modify a route at the turn point level. Since I’m doing this while parked, this would be an exception to my no touch screen. Google maps lets me, on my laptop, modify a route by dragging a point on a route to another place on the map and get an adjusted route. Let me do that on the displayed nav route.
  • More intuitive, somewhat more conversational voice commands. I shouldn’t have to memorize a long list of arcane menu and word sequences, especially for those commands I might want to execute but I don’t use often enough to have memorized the incantation words.
  • Better collision warning. I don’t need to hear about an impending collision after it’s too late for me to react, or after the alleged collision has been resolved—a car in front of me that’s slowing to make a turn, with the collision warning going off as he’s halfway through his turn and I still haven’t closed on him appreciably. Alternatively, get rid of the collision warning system altogether.
  • Better backup camera markings. The route projection lines are…optimistic. The route projection lines take me wide of my actual route. On the other hand, the red bar of my red/yellow/green proximity bars when I’m backing toward an obstacle are pessimistic. In any event, nothing beats my Mark I Eyeball while I’m backing, or changing lanes, come to that.

No Government Bailout

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Not even by city governments, and not even for this.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors noted that

The New York Housing Conference, a nonprofit that promotes so-called affordable housing, warns in a new report that landlords will need $1 billion in government aid to avoid default. “A significant number of affordable housing buildings in New York City are experiencing operating deficits, where rents are not covering expenses,” the report says.

The buildings are publicly financed, and their costs are skyrocketing—costs ranging from insurance to maintenance to unpaid rents.

This is the problem with government paying for stuff, no matter how glitteringly wonderful the intent might seem.

The city government, the State government, the Federal government—none of them—should be forking over any more of the taxpayers’ money for this sort of thing. The best way to solve this kind of shortfall does not include throwing ever more money into the ever expanding maw of city resident dependency.

Instead, cut the buildings’ costs: get out of the way of rent collections, greatly reduce insurance regulations, property taxes (even public housing must pay these), zoning requirements. Lower sales taxes that drive up the cost of maintenance supplies. Let the market determine wage rates, not bureaucrats snug in their government job sinecures.

US Chip Export Restrictions

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They’re beginning to bite in the People’s Republic of China, according to “people familiar.”

Shortages of advanced semiconductors are so acute that the government has begun intervening in how the output of China’s largest contract chip maker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International, is distributed, according to people familiar with the matter. Chinese authorities are trying to give priority to the needs of tech conglomerate and national champion Huawei Technologies, which uses SMIC technology to make artificial-intelligence chips, the people said.

Say the report is accurate, the mythical nature of the source notwithstanding. What is the PRC doing about it besides allocating domestic production from the center?

Up against restrictions, some semiconductor companies such as Shanghai-based MetaX are designing chips on older, more available technology, bundling two or more smaller chips together to compensate for more limited computing power. Bundling strategies at Chinese companies have resulted in electricity-guzzling data centers, prompting multiple local governments to start subsidizing their power bills, people familiar with the matter said.

And they smuggle American chips that have been banned from export to the PRC. The PRC also will solve its data center energy problem.

The correct answer to this, though, is not to remove the export restrictions. The correct answer is to do our own workarounds of this type, learn the details of the PRC’s workarounds, and learn how the PRC solves its own data center energy shortage problems at the same time we work out solutions to our own data center energy shortage problems. Doing that would better prepare us for future such shortages, and it would enable us to better target restrictions on American goods, not just chips, headed for the PRC, whether directly or via third (and fourth) party nations.

Interesting Idea

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This one from President Donald Trump (R), who has one on occasion.

I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over[.]

The idea wants study to identify any hidden implications, good or bad. It also wants a couple of criteria attached. One is a means test for eligibility for the payments. The Federal Poverty Guidelines do a good job of locating the threshold for poverty. Anyone or any family with income above the poverty guideline is, by definition, not living in poverty, and so should be ineligible.

The other criterion is a sunset clause. The subsidies, even as direct payments to the individuals, should have a hard expiration date beyond which they end, irrevocably (or as nearly so as a Congress can make a statute, which frankly isn’t much). The duration of the payments should be only long enough to allow the individual and family make their own budgetary adjustments, plus what might be called an engineering slop cushion—perhaps six months.

All in all, though, this is a good initial consideration.

A Mixed Message

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President Donald Trump’s (R) tariff program is before the Supreme Court (oral arguments were heard last Wednesday), it appears to be in trouble, and I claim it’s due to his mixed messaging to us in the public.

I have long argued, especially during Trump II’s tariff implementations, that there are two purposes for tariffs, and so two kinds of tariffs. One kind is protectionist tariffs, tariffs implemented to protect domestic industries, especially those in their nascent stages and those that are national security critical. Protectionist tariffs are, in the main, badly mistaken for a variety of reasons; although, an argument can be made that protectionism related to national security is a cost of national security that must be paid if we’re to remain free as a nation.

The other kind of tariff is that used as a foreign policy tool, tariffs applied in order to persuade another nation or bloc of nations to desist from their unfair trade practices, viz., dumping product at below cost, unfair subsidies of their own domestic industries, withholding export of products critical to the importing nation’s economy or national security, or other policies to which the tariffing nation might object.

Trump has been busily touting both the revenue raised by all of his tariffs, of both kinds, while also insisting that they’re necessary foreign policy tools intended to get other nations to leave off their unfair trade practices, to “stop ripping off America,” and to mend their ways on other matters.

Which brings me to the present article by The Wall Street Journal‘s Greg Ip.

Lawyers often stretch the facts to make their case, but even so, this was quite the howler from US Solicitor General John Sauer in defense of President Trump’s tariffs at the Supreme Court on Wednesday: “They are not revenue-raising tariffs.”

Ip, with that lede, stripped his Sauer sentence of its context. The rest of what Sauer was saying is that their purpose, as a foreign policy tool, is to persuade the targeted nations to change their ways. That these foreign policy tools also happen to produce money is deeply secondary. Ip later acknowledged that, but not until deep into his piece. Sauer again, originally:

“The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental. The tariffs would be most effective, so to speak, if no person ever paid them,” because they would have achieved their goal of changing another country’s behavior, or diverting all American purchases away from imports to domestic goods[.]

And that’s the problem with Trump’s rhetoric here. He’s made no distinction in his program between tariffs as protectionism and revenue-raising, the latter which is a Congressional prerogative and not Executive, and tariffs as foreign tools, which is an Executive prerogative and not Congressional.

This is a milieu where Trump’s studied vagueness in his rhetoric may well backfire. Keeping adversaries suitably confused as to our intentions through ambiguity can be highly useful. However, American law, and so our courts—especially our Supreme Court—deal in clearly stated specifics within each case that comes before them. Vague, especially, internally conflicting, speech is properly disdained by judges and Justices.

Trump’s contaminating his use of tariffs as foreign policy tools with his use of tariffs as protectionist policy may well produce the elimination of his tariff program in toto. That would be to our nation’s economic ill, and to our nation’s national security detriment.