I don’t usually comment much about the politics of states other than my own but I consider this a post about the state of journalism rather than one about New York. I was struck by the contrasting treatments of Andrew Cuomo, who’s been accused of a number of transgressions including his stonewalling of inquiries about his handling of COVID-19, particularly in the early days, sexual harassment, and bullying. The editors of the Washington Post are critical of him:

IMAGINE THIS scenario. The chief executive officer of a company is alone in the office with a much younger woman who works for him. He asks about her sex life. Has she ever had sex with older men and does age make a difference in romantic relationships? The woman is unsettled by what she sees as a sexual advance and reports it. It’s hard to imagine that, in a well-run company, that executive wouldn’t be asked to resign — or be fired on the spot — for his behavior.

Should the standard be lower for those who hold public office and the public trust? That is the central question that must be addressed in the developing scandal over allegations that New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) sexually harassed two women — Lindsey Boylan and Charlotte Bennett — who used to work for him. The allegations come as Mr. Cuomo is also under fire over the state’s response to coronavirus cases in nursing homes and whether nursing home deaths were underreported to avoid federal scrutiny.

The question we should be asking is not just what would happen to a CEO but what how would he have been treated if he were a Republican? The editors of the NYT are comparatively silent on the matter—ironic in that it was the NYT that broke the story of the governor’s harassments.

Why the different treatments? I think that the Times being in New York has something to do with it. The governor remains in a position to make life difficult for them and, consequently, self-preservation dictates a light touch. Additionally, the NYT is significantly more partisan than the WaPo and, well, Mr. Cuomo is a Democrat. The Kerenskyite posture presently being taken also motivates maintaining a light touch.

I don’t know the truth of the matter but I do think that the governor’s responses, essentially, hoocoodanode, don’t hold water. Since returning to the corporate world I have been compelled to sit through annual training sessions (what used to be called “sensitivity training”). If Mr. Cuomo’s participation in similar sessions is not mandatory, I can only say it’s good to be king.

The key point here is that as with many other similar prominent men everybody knew. The NYT should be ashamed of itself as should the New York Democratic leadership.

I found this post at The War Zone by Joseph Trevithick about Lockheed-Martin’s “Speed Racer” project fascinating:

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works advanced projects bureau has officially revealed the design of its secretive Speed Racer air vehicle. The missile-shaped unmanned system is ostensibly intended to serve as an experiment in digital engineering techniques, but has the potential to be the basis for future swarming drones and low-cost cruise missiles.

Steve Trimble, Aviation Week’s defense editor and friend of The War Zone, was first to report on the new information about Speed Racer. He was also able to confirm that a computer-generated segment in a video Lockheed Martin had released ahead of the Air Force Associations’ 2021 Virtual Aerospace Warfare Symposium, which wrapped up yesterday, did indeed depict this air vehicle. The company similarly acknowledged that a rendering it released last year was also of Speed Racer.

both for its subject matter and its opacity. I’ll try to clear up some of the opacity.

“Skunk Works” is a reference to a newspaper comic strip that has been defunct for almost 50 years. It has come to refer to any free-wheeling laboratory.

“Speed Racer” is a reference to a Japanese anime and manga franchise that is more than 50 years old.

I did read L’il Abner (the comic strip). I did not watch Speed Racer.

As to the project itself, “Speed Racer” appears to be a proof-of-concept and, as far as I can tell, the concept they’re trying to prove has less to do with the specific craft being designed than with the rapid application developmental approach being used to design it. Whether that’s a worthwhile activity I can’t actually say but it certainly looks as though those involved are having fun doing it.

This morning I read a post at Fast Company that’s sure to raise some hackles. Its subject was the 100 most over-compensated CEOs:

In 2019, the average top CEO’s pay increased 14% from 2018 to $21.3 million. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, earned $280,621,552 in total compensation—more than 1,000 times the income of a median company employee.

Pichai tops the new list of “100 Most Overpaid CEOs,” the seventh annual report published by As You Sow, a nonprofit promoting corporate social responsibility through shareholder advocacy. The report, subtitled “Are Fund Managers Asleep at the Wheel?” finds that, while shareholder opposition to this excess is growing, many of the biggest financial fiduciaries still did not vote against excessive CEO pay in last year’s annual shareholder meetings.

The report calculates how much CEOs should have earned in 2019 based on total shareholder return over the past five years, and then calculates the surplus pay they received; for instance, the report suggests that 95% of Pichai’s salary (a total of $266,698,263) was excessive. It found that, in Alphabet’s case, the CEO-to-employee pay ratio was 1,085:1; The Walt Disney Co.’s, ranked fifth, was 911:1; and The Kraft Heinz Co.’s, in sixth place, was 1,034:1.

The source of the hackles-raising will, I have little doubt, be who the heck are they to decide who’s over-compensated?

I think that both points are worthwhile and the underlying question is why are these people paid so much? I think it can be attributed to several factors including the dominance of funds in investing nowadays and increasing stock value rather than expanding enterprise value as a business strategy. As long as the stock continues to increase in value, fund managers have little incentive to complain about over-compensated CEOs.

You might be interested in looking at Mark P. Mills’s post on modern industrial policy at Manhattan Institute. It’s lengthy and mostly devoted to a single insight—there isn’t as much of a bright line between manufacturing and services as there used to be:

First: for several years, there has been an ongoing fusion of services within and around manufacturing enterprises. As a result, the official data that are the foundation for commentary and public-policy proposals misconstrue economic reality: many jobs and economic activities categorized as “services” are, in fact, part of “industry.” This fusion is no small matter. Across a wide range of industries, research shows that services account for 30%–90% of the value of manufacturing output. The majority of these services are not clerical, back-office tasks; they involve every aspect of the production ecosystem. Some 40%–90% of those services are performed by outsourced—but not necessarily offshored—providers. Overall, some significant share, perhaps 20%–50%, of the economic and labor activity involved in manufacturing is now being erroneously counted under “services.”

My contribution to his insight is that will only increase over time. Additive manufacturing is itself manufacturing-as-a-service.

I would articulate it a bit differently. There’s “primary production”, e.g. agriculture, mining, lumbering, making iron and steel, manufacturing widgets, etc., and there’s “secondary production”—accounting, advertising, sales, and most of the other things that are done in a modern economy. Nowadays some important secondary production barely existed a dozen years ago or didn’t exist at all, e.g. web services, managing social media presence. These are among the fastest-growing sectors today.

A major difference between primary and secondary production is that primary production tends to be a lot more labor-intensive than secondary. Much of secondary production employs very few people at all. A substantial distinction is that secondary production tends not to emit carbon or pollute the environment in the way primary production does.

Should we conclude from those differences that we should be emphasizing secondary production and de-emphasizing primary production? It would be nice to think so but there are major risks incurred in that strategy as we have learned in the last year including becoming dependent for vital goods on other, not necessarily friendly countries.

My view is that we need much, much more primary production here in the U. S. but we also need to manage it a lot better. That will both create the much-celebrated “good jobs” and be more environmentally sound than what we’re doing.

There are a few stories being commented on today. For example, progressives are beginning to figure out that they can’t just push their agenda through the conference because there aren’t enough of them to do it. It’s not just intransigent Republicans. It’s Senate Democrats who disagree with them. It’s the Senate parliamentarian doing her job.

But mostly Donald Trump is sucking all of the air out of the room again via his appearance at CPAC (an event to which I pay no attention). When will media outlets figure out that the way to increase his influence is to devote so much of their attention to him? That’s how he secured the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2016. It’s how he got elected while spending a fraction of the money the Clinton campaign did.

Cover? Yes. But then move on.

I recognize the media are on the horns of a dilemma. They capture more eyeballs when they devote all of their time to Trump. Just say “No”.

At a piece republished at RealClearWorld Phillip Orchard makes a rather disquieting observation:

If Beijing is ever going to make good on its threats of a full embargo, it may be better off doing so sooner rather than later. Supply chain diversification efforts by outside powers have been picking up steam, putting Chinese leverage on a long-term downward trend. There are a half dozen or so processing projects in the works in the U.S. alone, including a Pentagon-backed heavy rare earths separation facility in Texas involving Lynas that received final approval in January. There’s also been a flood of money into recycling and stockpiling projects, as well as into research on more environmentally friendly refining processes. Japan has already proved that such efforts can be successful; its cooperation with Australia has reduced its dependence on China by more than a third. Whereas in the past China has often been able to shut down these kinds of diversification efforts by flooding the market, soaring global demand for rare earths and rising strategic impetus to subsidize non-Chinese supply chains are likely to make operations outside China more financially viable going forward.

Today China has vertical control of rare earths production. It doesn’t just mine the ores, it produces the equipment for refining them, it refines them, and distributes the rare earth metals. But that’s changing rapidly.

35 years ago the U. S. was the major source of rare earths. What happened? A combination of Chinese subsidies and misplaced American environmental controls resulted in our becoming dependent on a strategic rival for materials vital to our defense posture. If the Chinese choose to exploit their control over rare earths, it will be disruptive to say the least.

Continuing on a related subject, if the journalists of the “upper class media” (as Scott Alexander deemed them) are willing to be anything other than party operatives, why aren’t they complaining about the House Democrats’ moves towards censorship as Glenn Greenwald is?

Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.

Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday announced a February 24 hearing, convened by one of its sub-committees, entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” Claiming that “the spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a tangible and destabilizing threat,” the Committee argues: “Some broadcasters’ and cable networks’ increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.”

No, private companies aren’t subject to the same restrictions as the government (“Congress shall make no law…”) but when they do so because they’re impelled to do so by Congressional bullying it is a violation of the Constitution.

I think we’ve reached a pretty terrible situation when freedom of the press is merely instrumental to promoting specific views.

The only observation I can make about Steven Taylor’s remarks at Outside the Beltway about our present lack of representativeness in the federal government is that there’s very little wrong with our present system that can’t be cured by substantially increasing the number of states and decreasing the size of Congressional districts and increasing the number of representatives. Capping the size of a Congressional district at, say, 100,000 people being represented would mean a House with about 3,300 members. How can two senators adequately represent the interests of a single state with a population ten times the size of entire United States in 1790. There were 26 senators than.

Divvying up states and increasing the size of the senate would require a constitutional amendment but increasing the size of the House could be done by ordinary legislation.

I think that Maureen Dowd is shutting the barn door after the horses have already run out in her New York Times column expressing concern that journalists increasingly see themselves as partisan operatives rather than impartial reporters of the facts:

When I went to the Vanity Fair Oscar party with A.G. Sulzberger in 2017, movie stars rushed up to thank him for fighting President Trump. Over and over again, he explained that it was not the mission of The New York Times to be part of the resistance. Rather, he said, the paper would be straight and combat lies with the truth.

As the Trump years went on and the outrages piled up, with the renegade president making it clear that he would not be bound by decency or legality, the left declared it a national emergency and acted as though all journalistic objectivity should be suspended. Some thought that the media should ignore Trump’s news conferences and tweets and that the only legitimate interview with Trump was one where you stabbed him in the eye with a salad fork.

Many reporters offered sharp opinions, the kind not seen before in covering a president. The tango between Trump and the media — his most passionate relationship — was as poisonous as it was profitable. For reporters, who hadn’t been this chic since Ben Bradlee battled Richard Nixon, fat cable, book and movie contracts flooded in. CNN was on “Breaking News” for four years straight, thanks to Trump’s dark genius at topping himself with outlandish narratives.

Lines were blurred that would inevitably need to snap back when normality was restored.

Some of the new assertiveness was good and should continue. After many years when I had to comb the thesaurus to find a synonym for “liar” to use about Dick Cheney, The Times finally allowed us to call high-ranking politicians who lied, liars. Thank you, Donald Trump!

But the press, bathed in constant adulation and better remuneration, will have a tough adjustment. A whole generation of journalists was reared in the caldera that was Trump’s briefing room.

I think she’s missing a lot. For one thing it didn’t start with Trump. It goes back at least 90 years, to Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. Nixon received much closer scrutiny that Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. Reagan receive closer scrutiny than Carter. George W. Bush and Donald Trump received closer scrutiny than either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

Look, I think that Donald Trump is a shmuck, unworthy to be president, but, unlike many Democrats to this day, I think he won the 2016 election fair and square. Shmuck or not he was president but most journalists continued to justify their own partisan blinders because he was a shmuck.

We’ll see whether today’s journalists will be able to make her “tough adjustment”. I don’t believe they will, preferring to see themselves as party operatives. The present Kerenskyite position the media has taken over the last year in which white supremacists are a threat to the republic while left anarchists who are as bad if not worse go largely unreported does not bode well for such an adjustment. Such views are likely to have the same consequences today as they had for Kerensky.