Tag Archives: regulation

A Step

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The Securities and Exchange Commission is thinking about requiring publicly traded companies “promptly” to report data breaches and other significant cybersecurity incidents; “promptly” meaning within four days. Targeted companies, further, would be required to provide periodic updates about previous incidents and to report when a series of previously undisclosed, individually immaterial cybersecurity events has become material in the aggregate.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler:

Cybersecurity incidents, unfortunately, happen a lot. Thus, investors increasingly seek information about cybersecurity risks, which can affect their investment decisions and returns.

Good to see Captain Sort of Obvious is more or less on top of this. There’s more to it, though, than just investment decisions.

Hacking our businesses aren’t only detrimental to the targeted companies. They’re far too often deliberate, coordinated attacks across industries, and so are threats to our national security. The attacks, even if done in isolation from each other by independently acting criminals (which is what hackers are), far too often aggregate into a threat to our national security.

Requiring reporting within four days is an improvement over the current weeks to months of delay. However, at the speed with which a hack attack can proceed through networks and across the Internet to other networks—especially with the cloud so ubiquitously in the middle—it’s necessary for the attacked business to report the fact of the attack immediately, not some convenient period of time later.

The rule should be expanded, too; although the expansion I suggest would be beyond the SEC’s ken, and so it would need to be enacted by Congress: private companies should be required to report such attacks, also, and just as promptly.

Energy Independence

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Let’s say, arguendo, that the Biden-Harris administration is sincere in its desire to switch America over, entirely, to renewable energy sources. Let’s say, also arguendo, that that’s even a good idea. Former Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke had some thoughts that bear on the execution of these premises:

The first two years of the Trump administration, we went from 8.3 million barrels a day [and] declining in just two years to 12.5 million barrels a day, the world’s largest exporter of energy. And it just wasn’t fossil fuels, it was across the board. So fast-forward now; we have Russia and we should immediately ban Russian oil [the Biden-Harris administration finally got around to doing this last Tuesday, albeit with an unspecified effective as of date].

However, the Biden-Harris administration still is begging OPEC to increase its oil output, now talking seriously about lifting sanctions on Iran so as to buy Iranian oil, and adding to that going to Venezuela to “negotiate” for oil from that nation. This is because we no longer have the ability to control our own energy pricing through our own domestic oil and gas production. Paradoxically, Biden-Harris has attacked our fossil fuel industry with greater zeal than it has shown against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

All of that is in the name of getting us off fossil fuels and onto “green,” renewable energy sources as quickly as domestic fossil fuels can be eliminated, regardless of the cost to us Americans, financially and politically around the world, and regardless of the current inability of wind and solar to deliver reliable energy, much less in the amounts our economy needs.

Here’s an alternative path to that golden chalice.

Biden-Harris should take the Federal government out of the way of our fossil fuel production industry—oil, natural gas, and yes, coal—and let us produce all of that energy that the market can bear. That will let us return to energy independence.

Biden-Harris acolytes always point to the 9,000, or so, oil leases that oil producers already own and aren’t exploiting. Biden-Harris acolytes, along with Biden-Harris himself, carefully ignore the fact that those leases require exploration and development of actual oil locations and that the Biden-Harris administration is sitting on existing permit applications to do that and refusing to accept (or slow walking, which functionally the same) new permit applications. Biden-Harris acolytes, along with Biden-Harris himself, also carefully ignore the usurious royalties Biden-Harris has decided to charge on new extractions–new oil and gas drilling/fracking. Biden-Harris acolytes, along with Biden-Harris himself, also carefully ignore the administration blocks on pipelines–and blocks on the separate permits needed to transport oil and gas via those pipelines (and via train in the case of oil)–and on storage facilities so that oil and gas can be delivered to refineries, and they carefully ignore the time required to obtain rights of way for those pipelines even were on permitted [sic] to be built.

Oil and natural gas producers also are wary of the Biden-Harris administration’s fickle performance with regard to its fossil fuel regulating regime and are hesitant to commit the several millions of dollars that are required up front just to get started when that fickleness is too likely to block an effort after those millions have been committed.

Letting our nation return to energy independence will, tautologically, make us not dependent on other nations for our energy—not our enemies, not our allies, not our friends.

That will put us—our free market economy and its private enterprises—back in control of our energy production. That production control would extend to production from all sources, including renewable (and nuclear, which can be quasi-renewable) sources.

That will generate the time and prosperity that then will let us develop the technologies needed to get reliable renewable energy in the industrial quantities we need, without the worsening pollution and expanding carbon footprint (assuming, once again arguendo, that that’s a bad thing) inherent in current production abilities, at a pace that we can afford, and at prices we Americans can afford to pay.

Either There’s a Deadline, or There Isn’t

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Amazon is pushing the FTC to fish or cut bait (because this is a family blog) regarding Amazon’s proposal to acquire MGM:

Amazon recently certified to the FTC that it had provided all the information requested by antitrust investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. That certification triggered a ticking clock for the FTC that expires in mid-March, the people said. If the commission doesn’t file a legal challenge before the deadline, Amazon could be free to consummate the deal.

However.

The FTC currently has also the authority to unwind mergers and acquisitions after the fact, and to continue investigations pursuant to such post hoc disassemblies even after their nominal clock regarding the merger/acquisition has expired.

That authority means there’s no real deadline, and the government can continue to interfere with private enterprise whenever they take the notion to.

The deadline is a good one, and it should be transformed into a real one: if the FTC does not rule on the matter (itself a questionable government authority, but that’s for another discussion) by a time certain, then the merger/acquisition should go forward unfettered, and the FTC should be required to sit down and shut up. If there’s a real problem with the merger/acquisition, well, we have already on the books perfectly serviceable anti-trust tools.

There’s just no reason for Government to dither and stall on any merger/acquisition or to continue to harass after the fact.

Business and Climate Risk

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The Securities and Exchange Commission wants information from our businesses

about their climate risks as it gears up to propose new disclosure requirements on the topic.

In particular (so far):

The SEC requested information from the companies [43 or more US public companies] about significant risks related to climate change. The risks ranged from physical effects such as severe weather to litigation and regulatory compliance costs.

However, the only real risks American businesses face from the claimed climate situation are two. One is from Government regulations as Government men and women overreact to claims of dire climate evolution. Examples of this risk are that litigation and regulatory compliance cost bit and this:

The Biden administration and the SEC under Chairman Gary Gensler have made combating climate change and nudging investors to deploy more capital toward greener businesses a priority.

The other risk is from Government men and women using claims of dire consequences of climate evolution to expand bureaucratic power. The SEC’s demands for “climate risk decision-making” data preparatory to issuing related disclosure regulations is an example of this.

Ending Secret Laboratories

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Dr Marty Makary, Islet Transplant Surgery Chief and Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wants to do away with them, and he wants to start with the CDC’s. I think he doesn’t go far enough.

Despite housing treasure troves of critical COVID data on vaccines and on natural immunity, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only been releasing slivers of data that support its own scientific dogma.

And, closing his op-ed,

The CDC has a pattern of hoarding data in order to cherry-pick the findings it likes and then publish them in its own journal, called MMWR [Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report].

The CDC’s—CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s—rationale for this utter dishonesty is that us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to understand the data if they were released for our perusal. Here’s Kristen Nordlund, CDC Health Communication Specialist [Aside: be sure to crook your pinky finger when you read that. Most such positions are “Press Secretary.” Nordlund’s title is an indication of just how self-importantly precious the CDC is, in addition to the agency’s fundamental dishonesty]:

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted[.]

Makary also says,

If I were advising President Joe Biden [D], I would tell him that the CDC needs to restore the public trust by making all CDC data available in real-time for researchers around the country to access and to study.

The problem in the CDC’s case is that the dishonesty extends far beyond the agency’s laboratories and personages making the editorial [sic] decisions on what information to withhold from a dull and uncomprehending populace. I often call for a broad removal of an organization’s top management, sometimes extending the call into middle management.

It isn’t possible for the CDC to have trust in it restored, even with that broad personnel turnover. All of the data in the CDC’s databases need to be released immediately, certainly. However, merely releasing the data would leave the dishonest bureaucrats managing the agency and doing the “work” in it in place. The CDC’s cancer of dishonesty has broadly metastasized far beyond Stage IV. The dishonesty is terminal, and the CDC needs to be disbanded altogether—not merely have its budget zeroed out; the Center must be completely removed from the Federal government—and all of its personnel returned to the private sector, not reassigned elsewhere in government.

If the nation truly needs a medical agency for managing the (medical) diseases extant in our nation or that enter it, such a facility must be built anew, from the ground up.