Tag Archives: responsibilities

Close in Spirit

Posted on by
Reply

…but wide of the mark. Wide of the target itself, even. In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section, a letter-writer offered this on the matter of student loan debt:

The solution is to hold academic institutions accountable. If they want government to give my money to their students, they need to prove the value of their product. Set parameters: an 80% graduation rate in five years, and the ability to secure a job at a reasonable salary one year postgraduation. Failure results in withdrawal of federal money available to future students until parameters are met.

It’s entirely appropriate to hold the colleges and universities individually responsible for their product: students taught, successfully or not, for one or more years along with graduated students. But the writer’s suggestion still wants far more government intervention than is warranted.

Let the free market solve the puzzle, and here is where legitimate government intervention would be appropriate. Information is key. Require the colleges and universities to publish their dropout rates by number of years in school, graduation rates by major, and both the median and mean annual incomes, again by major, of graduated students five years after graduation.

One more path for government intervention: require the colleges and universities to be the primary lender to the student or to co-sign as borrower on the loan to their students. As part of the loan or co-signed loan document, require the borrowing student to answer the income survey.

A final act of government intervention: let the borrowing student discharge his student loan debt through personal bankruptcy, as with any other personal debt, and then deal with the economic and reputational consequences of that bankruptcy.

With this, there would be no need for government to lend to students or to guarantee any loans to students. Thus, a final final act of government intervention: government should withdraw entirely from the student loan industry.

“The Leak” and Its Fall Impact

Posted on by
Reply

Short, and too the point. Assume the leaked Supreme Court Decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which seems to overturn Roe v Wade, is substantially the decision the Court will release in its June batch of opinion releases.

The hue and cry that’s occurring now from both sides of the question is the hue and cry that would have occurred in June following the Court’s release of its official opinion. That hue and cry will be very much watered down by this week’s leak reaction, to the point that I don’t see the reaction to the official opinion having much steam left for the summer and fall mid-term campaigns or for the fall elections.

That leads me to two possibilities for the leak. One is that the liberal Justice staff leaker, if that’s who it was, made a tactical blunder with his leak. He virtually eliminated the reaction the official release would have generated, a reaction much closer to the election and so much more likely to have an impact.

The other possibility is that the conservative Justice staff leaker, if that’s who it was, successfully defanged the reaction by stimulating it too early in the season to have much impact.

A clue regarding who the leaker is can be collected from the reactions to the leak. The Left, and especially the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, all are focused strictly on the putative outcome of the Court’s decision; they wholly ignore the fact of the leak. Here’s a canonical example of that disdain from the head of the Progressive-Democratic Party, President Joe Biden (D):

Not a syllable—not a minim—of concern or comment regarding the illegality of the leak. Indeed, this President’s sole critical caveat, the only thing about which he cares, is whether the leak actually reflects the upcoming ruling.

On the other hand, Conservatives and the Conservative and Republican politicians, while not ignoring the putative decision, strongly emphasize the leak and its illegality.

One side ignores the illegality of the matter; the other side decries the leak for its law-breaking nature. That’s strongly indicative of who the leaker is.

Logistics

Posted on by
2

Junior officers study tactics, so the military saw goes, while senior officers study strategy, and general officers study logistics.

Then there’s this.

Military spending is set to rise, with the Biden administration requesting $773 billion for the Pentagon’s next financial year, but the military is still running short of some weapons widely used in Ukraine.
Defense-company executives say they are ready to increase production of most weapons, but some experts say the Pentagon has only just begun issuing new contracts that would be required to replace some of the weaponry sent overseas.
“Industry really can’t do a lot until they have their contracts in hand,” said Bill Greenwalt, a former Pentagon official who managed the military’s industrial policy and is now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “We are still in that limbo phase.”
The Pentagon has sent more than $3.7 billion worth of military goods from existing stockpiles to Ukraine since the February 24 invasion, from heavy artillery and tactical drones, to shoulder-fired Stingers and Javelins. But so far, the Pentagon has issued only one new contract, for Puma drones. A Pentagon official last week said the military was working to get others issued soon.

Apparently, no one in DoD, from SecDef Lloyd Austin—who used to be one of those general officers—on down, studies logistics.

Count Me Unsympathetic

Posted on by
Reply

As the US and our allies ramp up sanctions against Russia over that nation’s invasion of Ukraine, companies facing ransomware attacks think their ability to resolve the attacks is being complexified. Ed McNicholas, Co-Leader of Ropes & Gray LLP’s Data, Privacy & Cybersecurity Practice, has articulated the whine, as cited by the WSJ:

[E]nsuring that ransomware payments aren’t going to sanctioned Russian entities has gotten “much harder” recently.
“The overlap of the rise of ransomware and then these pervasive sanctions against Russia has created quite a firestorm in terms of the ability to pay ransoms,” he said.

No. It’s actually not that hard. These companies need to cut out the firestorm nonsense, and stop encouraging further ransomware attacks on themselves and on other businesses by paying the hackers for their crimes. It’s perfectly straightforward. Don’t make the payments at all.

Instead, do the near-term hard, but intermediate- and long-term high payoff work of taking corporate security seriously: fill the security gaps—both electronic and human—that allow the ransomware attacks to go forward, and learn how to counterattack to eliminate the attackers (not only the attacks), both through court channels and through electronic/virtual pathways.

Coveware Inc CEO Bill Siegel, as cited by the WSJ:

[C]ompanies should be proactive about beefing up their security and run tabletop exercises to try to avoid being caught off guard by an attack.
“Most companies approach this risk for the very first time when the incident happens,” he said.

That last is not just unacceptable, that’s willful negligence, and it should get the companies’ CEOs, COOs, CIOs, and their deputies fired for cause.

Negotiating With Terrorists

Posted on by
Reply

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked by Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) whether the [Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps] has been asked to stop plotting assassinations. Blinken answered:

…one of the strong messages we send to them [Iranian negotiators] is they need to stop targeting our people…and they said they know what they would need to do to address this problem.

Cruz also asked whether it is the case that

the IRGC is actively trying to murder former senior officials of the US.

Blinken:

…there is an ongoing threat against American officials both present and past.

Ongoing, after the “strong messages” have been “sent.” Plainly, Iran has a different view of what the problem is and what they would need to do to address it than has Cruz. Blinken appears oblivious to the difference.

This is what Biden-Harris is begging to “negotiate” with from the kiddie table in Vienna and who he has doing the begging negotiating.