Tag Archives: political economy

The CDC and Its Proposed Corrections

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Dr Marty Makary is on the right track in his op-ed regarding CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s supposed mea culpa and claimed plans for corrective action in the future. His suggestions for corrective action include

  • stop pushing boosters on teenagers
  • ask colleges to remove their booster mandates
  • ask the Philadelphia school district to remove masks on students
  • tell the government-funded Head Start program to stop requiring all children ages 2 and up to wear masks
  • acknowledge that the Pfizer COVID vaccine for babies and toddlers was recommended by the agency even though the clinical trial found no statistically significant efficacy
  • apologize for being complicit in the human rights violation that was the banning of Americans to visit their dying loved ones in the hospital for most of the pandemic

Those are all fine actions, but they’re inadequate by themselves and mostly empty chit-chat: they do nothing to force the CDC to follow actual science and not the science rumor of the day. They do nothing to make the CDC be transparent about the science they claim to be following by publishing the raw data underlying CDC claims and “recommendations” and identifying the sources of those data and the researcher(s) and research institution(s) that collected those data.

In the end, though, such steps are for the CDC’s personnel replacements to take, after the incumbents have been terminated, from Walensky on down. Neither she nor hers can be trusted to do anything substantive in the way of corrective action.

Logistics Matters…

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…far beyond the process of getting soldiers and consumables to a battlefield and to the battlers.

In the aftermath of Germany’s—and much of Europe’s—considered decision to make themselves dependent on Russian natural gas and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s equally considered decision to limit and cut off natural gas supplies to Europe to try to coerce behaviors acceptable to Putin, Germany, et al., are (re)discovering the need for better logistics and logistical execution.  The lessons are available to the US, too, if the government is willing to learn.

Europe’s energy crisis has unleashed a global battle over natural-gas tankers….

And [emphasis added]

European countries ramped up their purchases of liquefied natural gas from the US, Qatar, and other sources this year as Russia cut supplies to the continent. They are competing with peers in South Korea and Japan—where gas demand has surged during a heat wave—for a finite amount of supply ferried by a limited number of vessels.

LNG-capable tankers are long-lead items that take specialized equipment to keep the natural gas cooled and under pressure. They’re also expensive, hence the interest in only limited inventories of such ships—they’re expensive even simply to have, if they’re just sitting around in port unused.

It’s not just the complexity of the ships, though, that contribute to the present long-lead times.

Shipmakers in South Korea, the world’s biggest producer of LNG tankers, don’t have free capacity for new orders until 2027[.]

However, the wonders of Europe have known for some time that they needed more LNG tankers.

LNG and the tankers that carry the fuel were in high demand even before the conflict, as extreme weather curtailed hydropower, and many economies sought to ditch coal to reduce carbon emissions.

The complexity of these logistics is further illustrated by this little fillip: the price of steel is rapidly rising, an accelerated increase driven by demand from a broad reach of needs in addition to simply making boats.

The lessons for the US?

The need for more natural gas (and oil) production, more flexible production, better and expanded distribution grids to refiners, and in the present context, expansion of port facilities able to convert natural gas to liquid natural gas and then to transfer that LNG to LNG-capable tankers.

And maybe build some of our own LNG tankers. And get rid of the Jones Act.

She’s Right

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But for the wrong reasons.

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says billions of dollars in upgrades are needed to the power grid in the US to prepare for widespread electric vehicle adoption.

If that’s the spur needed to get the upgrades started and seriously underway, then cool. However, our power grid badly needs upgrade and strengthening in its own right. It’s old, near capacity under normal draw, and highly fragile—as the California portion of the grid demonstrates continually, and as the Texas grid demonstrated a couple of winters ago.

Indeed, nothing has been done since the Northeast blackout of 2003—which itself was a geographic repeat of the blackout of 1965. The proximate causes of these actually were quite trivial, but the fragility of the grid was demonstrated by how fast and far the effects spread: throughout the American northeast (and deep into Canada, which illustrates, also, international implications for strengthening, or continuing to ignore, the decrepit state of our grid).

It’s a national security matter, too, beyond the economic aspects of security.

We also need to drop some dimes (though not as many as might seem) on hardening all of our power grids (plural: not only electricity, but grids distributing natural gas and oil from the well through refiners to end users) against EMP attacks—which needn’t be nuclear weapon-originated, or even large, but merely carefully targeted—and against being software-hacked, as the Russians did when they shut down Colonial Pipeline.

Export Controls Regarding the PRC

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It has come to light that we really don’t have any serious export controls covering technology-related exports to the People’s Republic of China.

Of the US’s total $125 billion in exports to China in 2020, officials required a license for less than half a percent, Commerce Department data shows. Of that fraction, the agency approved 94%, or 2,652, applications for technology exports to China. The figures omit applications “returned without action,” meaning their outcomes were uncertain.
The result: the US continues to send to China an array of semiconductors, aerospace components, artificial-intelligence technology, and other items that could be used to advance Beijing’s military interests.

Why is this being allowed to occur?

Some warn tighter restrictions on US tech sales to China will backfire because allies such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea will step in to fill the void. For export restrictions to be effective, “we need our allies to have the same controls,” said Kevin Wolf, a senior Commerce official during the Obama administration, while testifying on Capitol Hill last year. “It is that simple and logical.”

That would be silly if it weren’t, at bottom, rankly defeatist. We shouldn’t be waiting around on putting curbs on technology transfers to an enemy nation. Instead of looking for consensus first, we need to act, to lead, to let the consensus build as we go, and to give our allies something to follow and a consensus to join. After all, if we don’t care enough to do, there’s no reason anyone else should care enough to do.

Beside that, if we stop exporting our technology to the PRC and our putative allies step in to fill the gap, at least we’ll be stopping our own transfers, and our allies’ technologies, for the most part, aren’t as good as ours. The PRC would be getting second best, continuing to trail us, and that would be to the good for our security.

Government Spending on Fast Internet Service

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The Federal government has a $42+ billion program for expanding broadband Internet access to Americans who don’t currently have that access. In a rare application of sense, the law has an entry criterion:

The broadband plan, part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden last November, stipulates that money to improve service can’t be doled out until the Federal Communications Commission completes new maps showing where homes and businesses lack fast service.

Like I said, an application of sense. But there’s one more little fillip that’s necessary. That’s the need to define “fast Service.” Absent that, the maps won’t necessarily be useful.

Such a definition is needed because Internet speed is constantly increasing as the underlying technology is constantly improving. We’ve gone, after all, in just three decades, from 300baud dial-up access to the Internet at the start to today’s 100s of gigabit/sec access, and that’s getting faster as 5G access spreads and subsequent xG accesses are developed.

What’s the speed for which the FCC’s maps are required to indicate the need on the part of those of us who don’t currently have it? Will that be a static requirement, or will the speed be required to increase along with the general population’s access speed?