Category Archives: politics

Why Do the Workaround?

Posted on by
Reply

NVIDIA Corp is busily looking for ways to circumvent newly enacted rules barring export of computer chips and chip technology to the People’s Republic of China.

Nvidia Corp has begun offering an alternative to a high-end chip hit with US export restrictions to customers in China, after the new rules threatened to cost the American company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Nvidia said the new graphics-processing chip, branded the A800, meets US restrictions on chips that can be exported to China under new rules rolled out last month. The chip went into production in the third quarter, the company said.

On the other hand,

According to a memo Nvidia sent to its channel distributors last Thursday, the A800 has the same computational performance but a narrower interconnect bandwidth, the capacity of a chip to send and receive data from other chips, crucial for training large-scale AI models or building supercomputers.

It’s not the data rates, though, that matter; it’s the computational techniques and the technology used to implement those techniques that are important.

NVIDIA claims,

The A800 meets the US government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.

This is disingenuous. The chip can be reverse-engineered to learn how the computational techniques are achieved. Indeed, simply programming the chip—accepting, arguendo, NVIDIA’s claim about programmability—would be a useless enterprise when the goal is to gain the technology itself.

It’s true enough that it takes some little time to relocate manufacturing/assembly sites and to move supply chains. However, why should NVIDIA or any American company, especially our technology-based companies, do business with any PRC company beyond a—adjusted apace—period of transition away from that nation?

Why would an American company be so willing to transfer, or risk transferring, American technology to an enemy nation by doing business with that nation or any business domiciled in it?

Ranked Choice Voting

Posted on by
Reply

In a Sunday letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, a correspondent had this, in part, in supporting Alaska’s ranked choice voting system:

In Alaska’s old system, like the current one in Pennsylvania, the general-election candidates are decided in partisan primaries by a small number of extreme voters.

This is a disingenuous rationale for RCV. No one kept the rest of the partisan primary voters from coming out to vote, in Alaska, Pennsylvania, or any other State. In actuality, those stay-at-homes cast their votes by abstention. The outcomes are their choice as much as they are the choice of those who cared enough to come out and vote.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) won her primary contest against a long-standing incumbent by collecting the majority of a very small number of primary votes cast. She then won her seat in the House by collecting the majority of an almost as small number of general election votes cast.

RCV does nothing to correct that laziness.

A Good Start

Posted on by
Reply

But a prerequisite needs to be added. Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R, WA) is pushing legislation to beef up law enforcement and law enforcement agencies.

She said Republicans have introduced the Commitment to America plan that includes boosting the ranks of law enforcement by 200,000 more officers with bonuses and hiring incentives.

The perquisite is that the monies proposed under this legislation should be available only to those jurisdictions that do not have (not will promise to rescind) policies that include things like cashless bail, routine charge reduction to levels that would get cashless bail eligibility, decriminalization of drugs, reduced jurisdiction funding for law enforcement agencies, and the like.

Absent that caveat, too many jurisdictions will simply misuse the funds, applying them to other purposes.

Anti-Democratic

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden claims he’s worried about anti-democratic forces in play in today’s American politics.

We must vote knowing who we have been and what we’re at risk of becoming. We must vote knowing what’s at stake and not just the policy of the moment—but institutions that have held us together, as we’ve sought a more perfect union, are also at stake.

Here’s one of those democratic institutions that’s at risk even after the just-completed elections—from Biden and his National Labor Relations Board:

[The] National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced it would start the process rescind a 2020 rule implemented to protect workers’ right to vote on removing union representation.

The institution of company employees isn’t to be allowed to exercise—by voting in particular—their right to not join a union or their right to vote to decertify an existing union.

Never mind two central facts.

According to NLRB data, among petitions filed to hold elections to install or remove a union, a unionized private-sector worker was more than twice as likely to attempt to decertify union representation than a nonunion worker was to unionize….

And

[A] pro-union group, The Worker Power Coalition, argues the “surge in worker organizing is the largest in more than 50 years,” and the data shows a 53% increase in union representation petitions….

That’s democracy in the workplace in action. That’s democracy that the Hero of Democracy in the White House wants to destroy.