Here’s an issue of Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” that illustrates my problems with technocracy, journalism, lawyers or maybe all three. Here’s how they introduce their resource, Mark Zaid:

To answer that, we called up MARK ZAID, a prominent national security attorney who has extensive experience dealing with claims around mishandling classified information.

But here are some of his responses:

Had you been in the White House on Nov. 2, the day the first batch of documents was discovered, what steps would you have taken?

I would not have revealed it at the time out of concern of influencing, unfairly and unduly, the elections.

and

Do we really care about the quality of the room? Isn’t the bigger question: What’s in the documents?

I’m not concerned about any of these blunders with respect to legal liability. The blunder pertains to public perception and undermining your credibility.

The problem I have with his answer is that he’s not answer the questions as a “national security attorney” but providing answers as a political operative or an advocate. They hypothetical “had you been…” gives him some cover but in this instance he has no client so answering as an advocate is improper. Attorneys are officers of the court and IMO he should have answered the questions accordingly.

Any ward heeler is equipped to answer the political questions. His intro confuses the issue.

“Technocracy” is supposed to be rule by experts. Being an expert in subject A does not automatically confer authority in subject B. That’s my problem with technocracy. In practice it’s not actually rule by experts but rule by specious authority.

As journalists, given their introduction, they should have limited their questions to those about national security rather than so many about politics.

And lawyers need to decide whether they’re officers of the court, experts, advocates, or political operatives. Pretty clearly they can’t be all of the above at the same time.

At the Wall Street Journal Amrith Ramkumar reports on a completely different style of carbon offset—carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). We may see an actual industry growing out of it:

Founded in 2009, Climeworks is effectively carrying out what trees do by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The process promises to store the carbon in the earth for thousands of years. The company makes money by removing the carbon on behalf of businesses that can claim they are becoming carbon neutral.

Microsoft, e-commerce company Shopify Inc. and payments firm Stripe Inc. have prepaid or agreed to pay hundreds of dollars per credit, each of which represents one metric ton of carbon removed. Other carbon credits tied to projects such as keeping trees standing have often been criticized because the projects often don’t reduce emissions as much as promised.

Companies pay a premium, sometimes paying hundreds of times as much as they do for basic credits, for the credits from Climeworks because there is more certainty they remove carbon from the atmosphere. The companies are also willing to pay more to help jump-start the industry, hoping that costs decline rapidly.

“This is an important inflection point in the development of direct-air capture,” said Stacy Kauk, Shopify’s head of sustainability. “It isn’t just science fiction. It’s reality.”

The promise of the technology has prompted established businesses such as Occidental Petroleum Corp. to develop their own direct-air capture strategies.

Climeworks operates one of the world’s only operational direct-air capture plants in Iceland, which is capable of removing about 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of about 800 passenger cars. Other removals to this point had been done using methods such as burying carbon-rich plant material underground.

We’ll see if salesmanship is outrunning engineering.

IMO this is a very promising technology for a score of reasons among them being it builds an industry, is scalable, and doesn’t have to be stuck in the Amazon rainforest or sub-Saharan Africa. I can imagine a dozen different ways of structuring the business.

Best of all it would allow us to distinguish between motives, separating those who truly want to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere from those who are just anti-technology or, worse, anti-human.

Now for a pair of interrelated posts. Here’s the first. You know those carbon offset programs? As should surprise very few most are phonies. Patrick Greenfield reports at The Guardian:

The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading provider and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation.

The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

“Forest carbon offsets” are an idea which sound good in theory but founder on practical application. Practically by definition they’re far away and lack disinterested oversight.

I found this piece by Jordan Halvorsen at Medium thought-provoking. The author opens with a shout-out to “Schramm’s Law” and ends with a plea for venture capital to refocus its attentions.

Are you aware of the single most important contributor to a nation’s economic growth? It’s not the size of its established companies or the level of foreign investment. It’s the number of startups that grow to a billion dollars in revenue within 20 years. This is known as Schramm’s Law, named after Carl Schramm, the former President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

What thoughts did it provoke? My first thought was that, although I agree that entrepeneurship is vitally important, I think Schramm’s Law has it backwards. It is an observable phenomenon that large companies actively seek to stamp out upstarts, using every force at their disposal. There are a number of things they can do, almost none of them having anything to do with having a better product at a lower price.

One of them is by acquisition: buy them. That removes the threat. Frequently, the acquisition is followed by discontinuing the competing product. I first became aware of an emerging Underpants Gnome-like business plan almost 40 years ago:

1. Start a company
2. ?
3. Get acquired by Microsoft

I actually had a couple of those as clients.

Another strategy is to sic the government on them. There are all sorts of ways to do that ranging from patents to strategic regulation.

Quite to the contrary I think that you can measure the decadence of an economy based on the role of billion dollar companies in it.

The second thought that occurred to me was to wonder how long has “Schramm’s Law” been promulgated? Based on Google and Bing I see no references to it prior to 2007 and the early references aren’t very helpful. I found no evidence that Carl Schramm had ever made such a pronouncement. Could it be just an evocation, a distillation? I’d sure like to see some quantitative measures of the number of companies that meet the criteria. I suspect it’s a post-Tech Bubble thing.

Based on this Wall Street Journal article here are the layoffs that have been announced so far in 2023:

Other major employers, e.g. McDonalds, have announced layoffs in unspecified numbers.

Some of those numbers may seem small but the tech sector is a lot smaller than you might think with as much attention as it receives. I think that the sector is getting a double whammy between the layoffs and the burgeoning effect of low-code/no-code. When you consider that a very large percentage of those in our colleges and unis pursuing STEM degrees are either studying computer sciences or life sciences, the ripple effects could be significant.

Hal Scott and John Gulliver ask a very good question in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Why didn’t the Securities and Exchange Commission stop crypto exchange FTX?

In 2008, after Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was revealed, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox promptly initiated an internal investigation into the commission’s failures to uncover the fraud. Gary Gensler, the current chairman, has so far failed to do the same. Madoff’s evasion of applicable SEC regulations was a surprise. FTX’s state of nonregulation was the reddest of flags. Madoff was largely cheating rich sophisticated investors. FTX’s retail investors were left helpless.

Congress should begin by asking a very basic question: Why wasn’t FTX subject to any SEC regulation and enforcement? Mr. Gensler has said the laws governing the securities industry provide the SEC with the legal authority to regulate crypto exchanges and to bring enforcement actions against them for fraud. The SEC’s view, as reflected in its recent civil actions against FTX executives, is that FTX was trading securities, specifically tokens, or crypto issued by the company itself.

If the SEC has the authority to regulate crypto exchanges, it should have done so long before now. The SEC could have simply prohibited U.S. customer assets from being held by unregulated crypto exchanges. Instead, as we have written in these pages, the SEC’s only action made the problem worse by blocking banks and brokers from taking custody of crypto assets.

and here’s what looks to me like a smoking gun:

Congress also needs to investigate the missed opportunities to catch the alleged fraud. Mr. Gensler and his staff met with Mr. Bankman-Fried and FTX executives repeatedly in the months preceding FTX’s failure. Those meetings were reportedly focused on providing FTX with a regulatory license as a securities exchange, apparently without probing their operations at the same time.

In early 2022, the SEC also sent FTX inquiries related to its handling of customer assets—the heart of the alleged fraud—but these inquiries clearly didn’t lead to an enforcement action. What was FTX’s response to these inquiries? Did the SEC follow up? Congress needs to investigate all SEC meetings and communications with Mr. Bankman-Fried and his staff.

Their call for an investigation should be music to the incoming Congress’s ears since they’re already showing signs of being Investigations R Us. IMO there are more fundamental questions. What is the purpose of the SEC? What is it actually doing? Do we need a federal agency to accomplish what they’re actually doing?

In the past I have posted numerous times on how the SEC is chronically unable to satisfy its notional responsibilities which are to protect investors for a simple reason: regulatory capture. I have also proposed strategies for addressing that although I have no illusion that any of them will ever be adopted. The SEC is too cushy a gig in its present form.

They already have the authority and the mandate. What they lack are will and direction.

There’s an old wisecrack that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is a pattern. At the Wall Street Journal Harriet Torry reports that U. S. retail sales declined 1.1% in December:

Retail sales, a measure of purchases at stores, restaurants and online, declined a seasonally adjusted 1.1% in December from the prior month, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That was the biggest monthly decline in a year and marked the second consecutive month of falling sales. November retail sales were revised lower, to a 1% decline, marking a soft close to the holiday shopping season.

The decline in retail spending late last year adds to signs that the U.S. economy is slowing. Hiring and wage growth eased in December, U.S. commerce with the rest of the world declined significantly in November, and existing-home sales have fallen for 10 straight months.

The economy is cooling as the Federal Reserve pushes up interest rates to combat inflation. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal this month expect higher interest rates to tip the U.S. economy into a recession in the coming year.

“The lag impact of elevated inflation weighs heavily on U.S. households, it’s very clear that the median American consumer is still reeling from the loss of wages in inflation-adjusted terms,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US LLP. “We’re moving towards what I would expect to be a mild recession in 2023,” he added.

However, there’s another possibility. Retail sales declined in December 2021, too:

but not in 2020.

1.1% if a pretty big decrease, considerably bigger than in 2021. I hope it’s not a pattern. It might be the “new normal”. How significant is this? The U. S. economy is highly dependent on retail sales. Too dependent in my opinion but that’s a separate issue.

So far this morning I’ve seen two Washington Post columns, a Washington Post editorial, and a Wall Street Journal column all calling for an escalation of the war in Ukraine so I guess that’s the prevailing wisdom. Here are some snippets from William Galston’s WSJ column:

For months, Western countries have rebuffed urgent Ukrainian requests to send heavy tanks, such as the American M1 Abrams, the German Leopard and the British Challenger 2. Now the wall of resistance is crumbling. The British government has said that it will send 14 Challenger 2s to Ukraine, and the Poles have announced that they intend to send 14 Leopards—if Germany, which must authorize these transfers, consents.

But the real action is in Washington and Berlin. Last week Laura Cooper, a deputy assistant defense secretary, said that “we absolutely agree that Ukraine does need tanks.” Still, the U.S. has declined to provide the Abrams, citing fuel and maintenance issues. Published reports suggest that the U.S. has about 4,800 of these weapons, including more than 400 freed up by the Marine Corps’ decision to transform its war-fighting strategy. Surely we can spare some to help Ukraine break through Russian lines. It is hard to see a more important and urgent use for them.

and

Along with tanks, Ukraine needs weapons that can counter Russia’s bombardment from the air. The deadly attack on Dnipro last week showed that Russia is prepared to use heavy, inaccurate ballistic missiles armed with 2,000-pound warheads against Ukrainian civilians in large cities. Only the most advanced antimissile systems can protect against these weapons.

Last month the Biden administration agreed to include one battery of the Patriot missile system as part of the latest package of aid to Ukraine. This is a good start, but it isn’t enough. According to a report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the U.S. military has 16 Patriot battalions with a total of 50 batteries. No doubt some batteries are out of service for repairs or other reasons. Still, the U.S. can send Ukraine more than one battery, and it should do so as fast as possible. It will take time to train Ukrainians on this system, though they have proved to be quick studies. At the same time, NATO should endorse Warsaw’s request that two German Patriot batteries designated for Poland be sent to Ukraine instead.

Is this the right thing at the right time? The Russians are saying that they’re encountering an increasing number of NATO troops in Ukraine, presumably a consequence of casualties among the Ukrainians. That has prompted French anthropologist Emanuel Todd to declaim that “World War II has already begun”.

Update

More calls for escalation: Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic, Jed Babbin in The American Spectator, Jacob Heilbrunn in The National Interest.

Over the period of the last 150 years the annual rainfall in Paso Robles, north of Santa Barbara in California, has varied from 5 inches per year to 30 inches per year. If there’s a pattern, it’s a complex one. Last year they got about 7 inches. They’ve been getting quite a bit of rain this month but not in unheard of amounts. The editors of the Wall Street Journal say that California has a water management problem:

California’s political leaders are obsessed with climate, so why don’t they prepare for droughts or deluges? The atmospheric rivers that are sweeping the parched Golden State should be a cause for relief, but they’ve instead given way to catastrophic floods and enormous water waste.

Scientists last fall forecast another warm and dry winter following three of California’s driest years on record. Yet storms this winter have already dropped tens of trillions of gallons of water across the state and more than a dozen feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Alas, little of the storm runoff is getting captured.

One problem is the state’s lack of investment in public works, especially storage and flood control. Drought has recurred throughout California history, punctuated by wet winters like this one. Two seven-year droughts that started in the late 1920s and 1940s spurred the construction of a massive system of canals, dams and reservoirs.

But few large water projects have been built since the birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1970s. Species protections for salmon and the three-inch smelt limit how much water can be pumped south through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which receives runoff from rivers in the North and the Sierra mountains.

The amount of water surging into the Delta on Friday could have filled a reservoir the size of Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy almost every 24 hours. Instead, nearly 95% of the Delta’s storm water this year has flushed into the Pacific Ocean. Such waste occurs whenever there’s a deluge and is why some reservoirs south of the Delta remain low despite the storms.

California isn’t unique in this regard but, as is not unusual, the split personality that afflicts many Americans is present in particularly exaggerated form in California. On the one hand they’d like the state to remain as wild as it’s always been. On the other they don’t like it when the wildness is inconvenient as it has been this rainy season.

There’s an old wisecrack. Sure California has four seasons: fire, flood, mud, and drought. With a small population that wasn’t so bad but now California’s population is huge.