Tag Archives: political economy

A Promising Technology

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An alternative to GPS-positioning and navigation—which is increasingly vulnerable to jamming and spoofing—is nearing operational capability, having already begun real world testing. Instead of receiving signals from satellites, this system is as self-contained as inertial navigation systems, but without the dependency on gyroscopes, which drift over relatively short periods of time. Instead, the system uses the varying degrees of magnetization ubiquitous in the earth’s crust. And it doesn’t even send out signals to measure that magnetization—I did say it was self-contained.

Inside SandboxAQ’s device, essentially a small black box, a laser fires a photon at an electron, forcing it to absorb that photon. When the laser turns off, that electron goes back to its ground state, and releases the photon. As the photon is released, it gives off a unique signature based on the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at that particular location.
Every square meter of the world has a unique magnetic signature based on the specific way charged iron particles in the Earth’s molten core magnetize the minerals in its crust. SandboxAQ’s device tracks that signature, feeds it into an AI algorithm that runs on a single GPU, compares the signature to existing magnetic signature maps, and returns an exact location.

Exact location: the system currently is capable of matching, every time, the FAA’s commercial navigation requirement of specifying location to within 2 nautical miles. The system can get within a quarter of a nautical mile about two-thirds of the time.

The system already seems capable, in the defense arena, of sensing submarines and tunnels. For targeting over enemy territory, though, greater precision will be required. The question here, in my peabrain, isn’t whether such pinpoint accuracy can be achieved (there’s no doubt that it can), but how we will get magnetic crust mapping inside, say, Russia or the People’s Republic of China.

I suspect satellites can get those maps.

Sometimes…

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A letter-writer, a founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology, wrote in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday’s Letters section decrying the proposed funding reductions for the CDC and NIH.

Americans’ distrust of science isn’t merely leading to lower vaccination rates for such preventable diseases as measles; it’s also fueling shortsighted proposals to scale back public-health programs that save lives and taxpayer dollars[.]

It’s not so much that as it is that government bureaucrats who happen to have medical (or other science) degrees can’t be trusted. These worthies—Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are only the most famous examples—have shown themselves more interested in political ideology than actual science.

The letter-writer added this:

Proposed appropriations aside, $11 billion in cuts in early 2025 to already cash-strapped state and local health departments are leading to layoffs and cancelled data-infrastructure upgrades that hamper their ability to keep their communities safe.

This has nothing to do with funding cuts in “proposed appropriations.” If States are losing personnel and equipment upgrades, that’s entirely due to the spending decisions of those States—their governing politicians clearly consider other matters more important than the medical weal of the citizens they pretend to represent.

The letter-writer closed with a quote from former CDC Director Thomas Frieden, as though the remark is somehow dispositive:

You don’t improve things by destroying them, you improve them by improving them.

That’s often, even usually, true. However, sometimes the only way to improve the product a failed institution is supposed to produce is to remove the failed institution and replace it completely.

Uncertainty?

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A Wall Street Journal article centered on one American company’s claimed uncertainty regarding adjusting its supply chain to no longer be in the People’s Republic of China cited this:

American Outdoor Brands spent months coming up with a plan to minimize the pain of tariffs. Now it is stuck waiting to see where to go.
Most of American Outdoor Brands’ products, which range from fishing tools to hunting gear and pizza ovens, come from China. Executives were prepared to reposition the company’s supply chain ahead of July 9, when the so-called reciprocal tariffs were set to take effect, betting that it could move quickly to reduce any pain points once the new levies kicked in.
But President Trump’s decision last week to extend the deadline for trade deal negotiations to August 1 has prolonged the uncertainty for many companies. That means American Outdoor Brands’ supply-chain reshuffling plan remains on ice.

Why? Where’s the uncertainty? These companies—not just American Outdoor Brands—still know they need to move their supply chains out of the PRC. At worst, they just have more time in which to do so.

American Outdoor Brands’ CFO Andy Fulmer:

We’re very comfortable that we’ve done all the upfront work on where we’d go by product category. We’re just kind of waiting for those firm rates to come out.

Stop dithering, then, and execute. The likely range of tariffs already is well-known, and they’re unlikely to be raised in the face of intransigence; they’ll just go into effect on the deadline, or be delayed again.

In the meantime, there are a myriad other places from which to source intermediate components and—in American Outdoor Brands’ and others similarly situated—final products. Bangladesh, comes to mind, as does Jordan. And manufacturing-experienced Vietnam, Republic of Korea, Japan, Philippines. It would be easy enough in those latter cases to contractually require components not come from the PRC directly or indirectly.

Even move the supply chains to…the United States.

A Tax False Premise

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A letter writer in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section offered an alternative to the provider tax so many States assess. The provider tax is a tax States levy on hospitals that, in the depths of the scam, the States use to get a larger allocation of Federal fund transfers into their Medicaid programs, which then reimburse those hospitals for their provider tax remittances to the State.

The letter writer suggests

If states collected taxes from other sources, channeled the revenue into their Medicaid programs and continued to provide the same services, they would be entitled to the same federal matching as they are today. Nothing would need to change.

The false premise from which this letter writer proceeds is this: the need for those tax dollars in the first place is not at all established. On the contrary: Medicaid is a State-run program and its payouts are entirely controlled by that State. As such, each State’s Medicaid program should be funded entirely and exclusively by the citizens of that State. There is no need for the Federal government to transfer the tax remittals of the citizens of any other State (much less all of them) to any State for its Medicaid program.

Indeed, were each State to retain those tax dollars rather than sending them to the Federal government, the citizens of each State would be better able to fund their State’s Medicaid program.

No, It Won’t

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This time, it’s an op-ed writer in The Wall Street Journal who is making misleading claims. In his piece regarding the likelihood of wealth flight from a Zohran Mamdani-run New York City, their subheadline reads

The state will lose wealthy taxpayers, and the federal government will have to cough up more aid.

The opinion-writer ties the weal of our nation to the weal of New York, and the article fails utterly on the false premise of a necessary Federal bailout.

No, the Federal government will not have to cough up more aid. New York’s political machinations, including its drumbeat attacks on successful Americans and on businesses domiciled there, would be coming to a head under a socialist Mamdani city administration, and that outcome is solely that New York State’s responsibility.

The good citizens of States running from Maine through New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, Wyoming, Nevada, on to California, Alaska, and Hawaii have absolutely no obligation to bail out a fiscally and regulatorily irresponsible New York City or State. The Federal government has no business forcing the rest of the nation’s citizens to do so.

The other side of the matter: only if New York—city and State—are left to stew in their own fetid spending, taxing, and regulation messes will either have any chance of mending its ways. In that way, the weal of the nation is impacted by the weal of New York State: a healthy State, not dependent of Federal funding, would be an unalloyed good for our nation.