Not the Right Answer

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Nvdia’s honcho, Jensen Huang, thinks the administration’s export controls on chips is a failure. He claims all the controls have done is to galvanize[] Beijing to push ahead faster with its own artificial-intelligence technologies.

The local companies are very talented and very determined, and the export controls give them the spirit, energy and the government support to accelerate their development[.]

No doubt. That’s not the whole story, though. Forcing the PRC to spend its own resources on those developments rather than importing the latest and greatest, and then reverse engineering them, copying them, skipping development steps—freeloading off our expenditures—is good for us.

Aside from that, ever since the beginning of the Industrial Age, Western political, economic, and intellectual freedoms have powered Western innovation far ahead of anything dictatorships have been able to achieve, from Russia, the USSR, mainland China, pre-WWII Japan. That’s why they were at such pains to copy Western developments rather than developing their own. The copying was, for a long time, a major component of post-WWII Japan, too.

Rather than giving up on chip export control, we need to tighten them further to the point of cutting off chip exports to the PRC altogether, and we need to get Europe to do the same. There’s no reason to doubt the fundamental innovative superiority of the West so long as we preserve those political, economic, and intellectual freedoms and expand them by getting our governments out of the regulatory way. Free markets always will do better at enhancing our innovative prowess than centrally planned markets in the long run, and in the intermediate run, as well.

A Two-Edged…Coin

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A baby with a rare genetic disorder that’s often fatal has been cured, probably, by a newly developed targeted gene therapy.

Thanks to decades of research, gene sequencing rapidly identified KJ’s disorder.

An overnight success that was years in the making. Then there’s this:

Doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania medical school then raced to design a gene-editing therapy using CRISPR technology to correct the defective gene. …
This process ordinarily take[s] years, though doctors in collaboration with several biotech firms were able to do it within weeks. The Food and Drug Administration also rushed to approve the treatment.

Then the overnight part was itself rushed. We may be seeing the effects of rushing genetic- or RNA-centered therapies with the conflicting reports of a number of the Wuhan Virus mRNA-based vaccines. We’ll learn more about the efficacy of KJ’s gene-editing treatment over the course of his lifetime and whether other genetic-related disorders develop as he ages, particularly as his body passes through the hefty disruption of its hormonal development as it grows into adulthood.

My larger concern, though, is this. This sort of gene-editing to cure genetic diseases also can be harnessed to cure “ordinary” and “normal” genetic complements in efforts to develop “better” babies—stronger, smarter, immune to this or that, or just attempts to “improve” humans.

The disease-curing/preventing advantages of gene treatment are huge and well worth pursuing. But in parallel with that, there need to be serious and draconian controls put on the techniques in order to control (that genie is out of the molecular bottle; it won’t ever be perfectly controlled) and mitigate misuses of the technique—beginning with clear definitions of “misuses” and “better.”

Rome Said to Carthage

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Rome Said to Carthage

“You don’t need those weapons,” in prelude to the Third Punic War, which ended in the complete destruction of Carthage.

The People’s Republic of China objects to the US’ Golden Dome plans, a defense system in orbit, among other places, that would defend our nation against missile attack from any direction and from any source or launch site. PRC Foreign Minister Mao Ning gaslights that Golden Dome has a

strong offensive nature and violates the principle of peaceful use in the Outer Space Treaty[.]

He neglects to mention, though, the PRC’s overt military threats against the Republic of China and each of the nations rimming the South China Sea. Those threats, too, come against the backdrop of the PRC’s massive and rapid buildup of the PLA[1], a buildup that consists exclusively of offensive weapons. That buildup has achieved, so far,

  • four million men under arms
  • world’s largest navy
  • world’s largest coast guard
  • world’s largest naval militia
  • huge fishing fleet whose ships are designed for rapid arming
  • world’s largest submarine fleet
  • third largest, second most advanced (and steadily growing and improving) air force
  • arsenal of ballistic anti-ship missiles
  • nuclear capable theater ballistic missiles
  • large, growing ICBM fleet
  • global reach hypersonic missiles that when fully deployed will give it first strike capability
  • stated willingness to use its “ordinary” nuclear ICBMs in a first strike without concern for the destruction it would absorb from return strikes
    • Mao Zedong: “What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left.” That promise remains unretracted

Now, Beijing is saying to us, “You don’t need those weapons.”

[1] Cotton, Tom, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China

“Be Wary of Judicial Umpires”

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That’s the headline on Nate Silver’s Sunday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section.

He’s right, but I have that skepticism from a different angle.

Judges’ and Justices’ sole role—made explicit in our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, and Article III and by their oaths of office—is to apply the clauses of our Constitution and the statutes before them in any particular case as they are written. These are much more precisely defined than any umpire’s visual sighting of penumbral limits from his skewed perspective, which is all the perspective umpires have. The laws (and regulations) that come before judges and Justices are ambiguous, similarly metaphorically skewed? Then they are unconstitutionally vague and should be struck. Umpires don’t get to dismiss pitches that they only hazily see; they must make their guesses. Judges and Justices have that ability; they have no excuse for acting like umpires and not like judges and Justices.

Full stop.

There’s a Hint There

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John Bolton has a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he claims to be worried about the fate of the President’s National Security Council. I’ll leave aside the fact that his source is either a dishonest leaker or a voice in his head. This is what he buried toward the end of his piece:

Scowcroft’s model [of an NSC structure] bestowed a key advantage on the president: creating interagency staff who reached into bureaucratic depths gave him [the President] greater insight into potential agency agendas and disagreements before they rose to higher levels, thereby reducing the risks of confrontation and delay. A dramatically constrained NSC staff wouldn’t have such abilities.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to clean out the bureaucracies at those other agencies, eliminating agency agendas and the bureaucrats who push them, at the expense of the agenda of the White House for which they work.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to thin those agencies’ payrolls to shallow out those bureaucratic depths.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to install agency chiefs and deputies/assistants who would work with each other to resolve more of the disagreements, then consciously bring the remaining disagreements to the President for him to resolve—which is part of a President’s job.

No maybe, this time—it most assuredly would be better to fire those bureaucrats who would rather be confrontational than work as part of the team they were hired to be part of.