I found this piece from Reuters on the potential security vulnerabilities of the “Internet of Things” (IoT) grimly amusing:

BOSTON (AP) — Researchers at a cybersecurity firm say they have identified vulnerabilities in software widely used by millions of connected devices — flaws that could be exploited by hackers to penetrate business and home computer networks and disrupt them.

There is no evidence of any intrusions that made use of these vulnerabilities. But their existence in data-communications software central to internet-connected devices prompted the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to flag the issue in an advisory.

Potentially affected devices from an estimated 150 manufacturers range from networked thermometers to “smart” plugs and printers to office routers and healthcare appliances to components of industrial control systems, the cybersecurity firm Forescout Technologies said in a report released Tuesday. Most affected are consumer devices including remote-controlled temperature sensors and cameras, it said.

I’ve been warning of these security threats off and on for the last 15 years. I would be more convinced of the prudence of the IoT if

1. The consumer benefits were clearer. AFAICT most of the benefits are to the vendors rather than to consumers.
2. I had greater confidence that the manufacturers and vendors of connected devices were more conscientious about security risks.

I’ll suggest what I’ve proposed before: strict liability. And the burden of proof should be on suppliers rather than on consumers, i.e. suppliers should be required to prove that their devices are secure rather than consumers being required to prove that they were hacked.

The IoT always reminds me of the late John Glenn’s old wisecrack: “I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts — all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract” except that it’s in our homes.

In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston comes out in support of including relief for state and local governments in future COVID-19 relief packages:

Right now, without emergency relief, millions of Americans face the termination of their unemployment benefits. Small businesses that have exhausted the loans they received through the Paycheck Protection Program will be forced to close. Renters and homeowners who can’t make their monthly payments face eviction. And state and local officials will be compelled to slash support for the public services on which their constituents depend. In these circumstances, assistance to states and localities should not be controversial.

I think that some of his reasoning is specious. For example:

Reduced state and local revenue slowed the recovery from the 2007-09 recession, and the Federal Reserve chairman isn’t alone in fearing that it could happen again.

He’s right that revenue decreased. That’s documented here by the Census Bureau. But the same source also says that spending by state and local governments increased. See also this finding from Brookings:

When government spending increases but taxes decrease in response to a contraction you would expect that to support increased economic activity, i.e. more growth not less. At least that’s what Keynes taught. What happened? My answer is that how the money was spent satisfied political goals rather than economic ones. As President Obama put it, how was he to know there were no “shovel-ready projects”? It was largely used to increase public employee pay and payrolls rather than to promote economic growth and much of it was lost to deadweight loss.

There are conditions under which I could support additional money for state and local governments. For example, dribble the money out over time and make it conditional on freezing public employee pay (in all forms including pension payouts). It would need to be closely monitored and enforced with clawback provisions. Money is fungible. Giving money to state and local governments should not be a strategy for monetizing state and local profligacy to accomplish political objectives. Or to line the pockets of state and local elected officials and their donors.

In her column at the Washington Post Leana Wen identifies two scenarios that could “derail vaccination efforts”. The two scenarios she identifies are the known side effects and the attribution of deaths from other causes to the vaccine. Her proposed mitigation for these is openness:

It must be made clear from the outset that side effects are normal and expected. Downplaying them can only backfire. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses — a primer and booster shot — and someone who experiences an unpleasant side effect after the first shot may not return for the second. It’s important to hear from people such as Froehlich and Yamane about what they went through and why they remain huge proponents of the vaccine. Those receiving vaccines also must be advised on home care (for example, take Tylenol or ibuprofen for fevers and aches); otherwise, many may go to the ER and further strain an overtaxed health-care system.

To be clear, my nightmare scenario isn’t the side effects themselves, but rather the misinformation about them that could dissuade people from getting vaccinated.

and

Let’s say that someone receives a vaccine and then — unrelated to it — succumbs to a heart attack. Heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the United States, and the individual may have had long-standing conditions that led to the tragic outcome. Still, the time course could raise questions. What happens if several people have heart attacks in the days after they receive a vaccine — how does one prove that the vaccine was not the cause?

There are ways to anticipate and mitigate this concern. In advance of mass vaccinations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can provide baseline numbers for expected illness and death among nursing home residents. If, say, 50 people in a given time period would be predicted to die of heart disease, that provides statistical context for interpreting individual tragedies. In addition, every possible adverse event must be investigated immediately, with full transparency and complete rationale provided to the public. Otherwise, disinformation will fill the void.

I’d like to propose a few others, none of which can be mitigated proactively by openness. First, what is being proposed is that two or even three orders of magnitude more people will have been inoculated over the next several weeks than have participated in the clinical trials. Using the rule of thumb employed in such things that is actually quite likely to reveal side effects that did not appear during the trials. It could be among a small number of those being inoculated or a larger number. We just have no way of knowing.

Second, even if the virus itself was not a weapon of war, which I believe is a reasonable conclusion, that active disinformation campaigns associated with the vaccination will be deployed by Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and who knows what other countries is practically a certainty. There may also be domestic politically-inspired disinformation campaigns. With 20% of people getting most of their news from social media which is practically synonymous with saying that they can’t tell a reliable source from an unreliable one, it’s hard to see how openness can mitigate this particular risk.

Third, both Moderna and Pfizer may be overstating their abilities to deliver the vaccine in quantity. They have multiple reasons for doing so including goosing their stock prices and warding off competitors. That’s something else we have just no way of knowing.

And then there are the unknown unknowns. Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines employ mRNA, a novel approach with which we’ve had very little experience. I point these things out not to discourage people from getting inoculated or to throw cold water on the process but in the hope of ensuring that we all have a realistic assessment of the issues.

Here’s one question I have for Ms. Wen. Why do 40% of physicians and 60% of nurses say they don’t plan to take the vaccine? If openness is the solution, wouldn’t you expect the best-informed to be less reluctant to get inoculated?

At The National, the UAE’s captive media outlet, Raghida Dergham cautions the incoming Biden Administration that, however pragmatic President Joe Biden might be, the Iranian mullahs are ideologues:

Apart from rolling back some of the gains made by the current administration and reducing the leverage America currently has over Iran, the Biden team must also remember that it will be dealing with a regime that is ideologically driven like few others around the world.

Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that there is little possibility of a “grand bargain” between the US and Iran. This is not due to a lack of American desire to push for it, but because hostility towards the US increases the Iranian regime’s credibility in the eyes of its supporters. “Continued conflict with the United States is far less of an existential threat to Iran than a rapprochement,” Mr Sadjadpour pointed out.

Tom Fletcher, who currently serves as the principal of Hertford College at Oxford University, also ruled out the possibility of a grand bargain – although he said that could actually work in America’s favour. “It’s better that we pick out one [issue] that we might potentially be able to get done and then hopefully create the climate for the rest,” he said, essentially echoing Mr Biden’s strategy.

concluding

Ultimately, though, the final say may not rest with a Biden administration but with the Iranian regime, especially its hardline faction led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In truth, the instincts of Iran’s leaders will be to not deviate from the dominant ideology of the regime since its establishment more than four decades ago.

And if the Biden team hopes it can help reform the regime, it will be disappointed. The reason is simple: Iran is a country that has essentially been hijacked by a group of expansionist-minded ideologues who are supported by, as Mr Sadjadpour described them, “radicals willing to go out and fight and kill for the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

I would add a further word of caution. Each of Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia is trying to position itself as speaking for 1 billion Muslims worldwide. This despite the reality that there are more Muslims in either Indonesia or India than in all of those countries combined. As the U. S. tries to cultivate relations with all of those countries it should keep in mind that there can be only one.

At City Journal Erica Sandberg catalogues a list of affronts by elected officials in California which are raising the hackles of at least a certain portion of the population of the Golden State. It includes those by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, city supervisors, and district attorneys. It’s pretty clear that the restrictions “for thee, but not for me” attitude displayed are not isolated examples.

The following videos also tell a story:

I by no means endorse the attitudes expressed in those videos but I believe in good government and it’s pretty clear that California does not have it.

I encourage you to read the Council for Economic Development’s open letter to President-elect Biden (PDF). Here’s a snippet:

While it is still too early to understand the long-lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the future economy, we have learned several important lessons that should serve as the foundation for our fiscal policy response:

• Federal stimulus is needed for recovery, and the level and composition of that stimulus is of enormous consequence to the pace and direction of the economy;
• The pandemic’s continued spread will stall or slow the economic recovery, and burden especially low-income workers and communities of color;
• The pace of the labor market recovery is generally slowing and employment could take several years to recover;
• The pandemic is devastating to small business, the US economy’s growth engine.
• The post-pandemic labor force will be smaller, and the supply of productive capital will be reduced;
• An economically rejuvenated China will further challenge US interests and US-China trade policy;
• The US debt burden is growing exponentially;
• We will not return to the economy of January 2020; for example, many businesses are predicting more workers will continue to work remotely, and our society—our work and home lives—will be much more integrated with technology.

They have a significant number of recommendations, varying from sound to fantastical. If you’re not familiar with the CED, it’s quite a venerable organization, founded in 1942 and associated with the transition from a peace-time economy to a war economy and then back again at the conclusion of World War II. It’s had quite a few notables connected with it over the years.

I think I’d state my operating principles a bit differently than the CED has. For example, while I think that relief is necessary, stimulus is nonsensical as long as state and local officials are shutting down their jurisdictions, ostensibly to slow the spread of COVID-19.

I also think that educating the neediest kids for whom in-person education is most useful is a high enough priority that it is deserving of a certain level of risk and cannot be put off forever. Anyone in child development will tell you that there are certain skills which if not acquired early enough will never actually be acquired at all.

I would ask them one question. Which of the items on their wish list are actually within the province of the federal government and which are matters for state and local governments? If you don’t think state and local governments will push back on an overreaching federal government, you haven’t been paying attention.

I think that Daron Acemoglu is fantasizing in his latest piece at Project Syndicate:

During the two most recent global crises – the 2008 financial collapse and today’s pandemic – the Communist Party of China quickly adjusted the country’s political economy in response to changing circumstances, thereby solidifying its grip on power. Because countries that do not want to toe the US line now routinely turn to China for inspiration and, often, material support, what could be more natural than China emerging as one of the two poles of global power?

In fact, a bipolar world would be deeply unstable. Its emergence would heighten the risk of violent conflict (according to the logic of the Thucydides Trap), and its consolidation would make solutions to global problems wholly dependent on the national interests of the two reigning powers. Three of the biggest challenges facing humanity would either be ignored or made worse.

The challenges to which he refers are Big Technology, advocacy for human rights and democracy, and climate change. Basically, his argument is that all three issues would receive “short shrift” in a bipolar world of the U. S. and China. Here’s what he proposes:

All of these problems would be more likely to be addressed in a world with two additional poles, represented by the European Union and a consortium of emerging economies, perhaps within a new organization – an “E10” – comprising Mexico, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, South Africa, and others. Such a quadripolar world would be less conducive to a new cold war, and it would bring more diverse voices to global governance.

I think he has a couple of basic misconceptions. The first misconception is that he’s confusing Europe and the European Union. Europe is composed of 44 countries, each with its own foreign policy, economy, military, culture, traditions, history, and most with their own languages. The European Union on the other hand is a sort of shadow government for 27 of those countries. The countries of Europe don’t speak with a single voice—they have as many rivalries and conflicts as they do commonalities. Germany is the economic powerhouse of Europe but it doesn’t speak for Europe. As we should have learned by now, Germany speaks for Germany. The Germans won’t do anything they perceive as hurting Germany regardless of the implications for the rest of Europe.

And his E10? He’s trying to bring the band back togetheR—it’s basically the old non-aligned movement, just as irrelevant now as it was when it was initially formed 60 years ago in opposition to the United States and the Soviet Union. The only thing those countries have in common is that they don’t want to take directions from Washington or Beijing. Or from Moscow, Berlin, or Brussels for that matter. I suppose I should be grimly amused at the prospect of Turkey, which seems to fancy itself as the new caliphate and India, with its rising Hindu nationalism in conflict with also having the third largest Muslim population in the world, agreeing on anything. The countries of his E10 can’t even agree on what basic human rights are and he expects them to be the standard bearer for universal human rights?

I agree with Bill Scher’s observation in a piece at RealClearPolitics that the compromise bill is, in fact, the way Washington is supposed to work. I wish I were as optimistic as he that Mitch McConnell will actually be willing to work with the incoming Biden Administration:

The Senate majority leader was known for obstructing Barack Obama’s agenda as much as he could, and many observers assume he’ll pursue the same strategy during Biden’s presidency if he keeps control of the upper chamber. But McConnell seems to be aware that being known as a relentless obstructionist is not a great look. Last week, in giving tribute to his retiring friend Sen. Lamar Alexander, McConnell said, “Lamar’s career has also confirmed that ‘conservative governance’ is not a contradiction in terms. There are genuine public goods it is the government’s job to secure: public roads, public lands, public education, certain aspects of public health.”

McConnell will always be a tough nut to crack. In Barack Obama’s new memoir, he recalls Biden trying to convince McConnell to support a bill on the merits, and hearing back, “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.” But to the extent McConnell is driven by partisanship, he can be moved to compromise when he perceives that obstruction hurts his party. Case in point: The Kentucky senator has never been one for government shutdowns.

Whether a bipartisan, moderate “gang” can exert enough pressure on him to set aside conservative opposition and bring compromise legislation to the Senate floor remains to be seen. The moderates should not assume that all it will take is their mere presence. Not everyone automatically assumes that just because a proposed solution is bipartisan means that it is sufficient to the task at hand. They will need to vocally build a case that their ideas occupy the reasonable center, so any resistance can be painted as unreasonable.

The senators in the “gang” have either just been re-elected or don’t need to worry about running for a while but the House members will undoubtedly face stiff primary challenges.

The question is whether Mitch McConnell will be purely obstructionist or whether, as Mr. Scher suggests, he is persuadable? The other alternative is that the Republicans will lose the Senate races in Georgia and Sen. McConnell will be relegated to minority leader and, consequently, largely irrelevant.

Two of the members of the group of nine senators and Congressmen who’ve scrambled to put together a compromise between the House’s and the Senate’s relief bills, Sen. Mark Warner and Sen. Susan Collins, have taken to the pages of the Washington Post to encourage the adoption of their bill:

Despite a broad consensus that more relief is desperately needed, for months congressional leaders and the White House have been trapped on a merry-go-round of negotiations that have led only to one stalemate after another. Millions of struggling families watched as Washington dysfunction hijacked a debate with their lives and livelihoods at stake.

We’re proud to work across the aisle to solve the most pressing issues facing our nation, even though it has subjected us both at times to criticism from people in our own parties who would rather smear the other side than get things done. At a moment like this, with millions of Americans getting sick or losing their jobs, we felt the stakes were simply too high to allow partisan warfare to prevent us from delivering relief to the people of Maine, Virginia and all of America.

So we began quietly reaching out to like-minded colleagues to explore ways to break the partisan logjam among party leaders. Out of the public eye and off TV, we worked for two weeks over Zoom and socially distanced pizza dinners to negotiate a compromise on emergency funding that senators from both parties could find a way to support. The result is a bipartisan $908 billion relief framework that, if passed, would help Americans at least get through the next four months as vaccine manufacturing and distribution ramp up. The process, too, can serve as a template for progress on other difficult but vital issues in our closely divided Senate.

These are the most moderate members of the Senate and House, vilified by members of their own parties as DINOs and RINOs. Unfortunately, when the next election time rolls around they’ll be opposed by more partisan and more extreme members of their own party in the primaries, big ticket donors will prefer those more partisan and extreme candidates, gerrymandering will foster them, and in the next general election voters will have forgotten who cared more about getting something done than about partisan advantage and line up to vote for the regular Republican or Democratic candidates whoever that might be. It’s not the electorate that’s more polarized but the party leaderships. Contrary to the opinions of some we’re not getting the government we deserve but the government the party leaderships will allow us to have as they pursue their own parochial interests.