> Trump is being handed EOs that he doesn't have a clue about.
Probably like every president before him.
No president like CEOs can know everything about the organization they head. They are mostly the face and mouthpiece, and depend on chiefs and VPs to tell them what needs to be done according to the agenda that CEO or president has put forth.
Definitely, Biden certainly as well.
I would argue that this is mostly a modern thing. EOs were far less common in the past and I would argue that far younger presidents often were far more in control of their admin. At the very least, they understood the paper they were signing.
> You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority
You have to read into this line from the article:
> Congress directly authorized and funded CPB
He may not have the authority, but his influence over certain congress people and CPB board members can get the process moving.
Also, I have always wondered why CPB cannot just cut federal ties and become a sponsored non-profit?
During all shows you always hear or see that they are sponsored or have grants from major Fortune 500s, private families, and other institutions.
Also, whenever this defund topic comes up, CPB always says, "we receive very little from the fed, so our funding is not much and can be ignored." Well now is the time to put up and split from the US federal government officially.
> but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund
Sounds like a backdoor way to add a kill switch or censor filter to browsers from a central, unelected authority that does not respect the sovereignty and speech and media laws of the individual users' home countries.
No thanks, I'll take an open source, corporate controlled browser 10/10 times.
> I'm not exactly sure why I should find a corporate entity any less centralized or unelected or not respectful of rights than a government
Because corporate entities and government entities operate under radically different frameworks.
The domain of government is force. This isn't a bad thing, it is necessary. Government is the recognition that we, as human beings, can interact with each other in two fundamental ways: force or reason/diplomacy. That when reason/diplomacy is chosen life flourishes. People create, produce, trade, freely associate and basically build civilization. When force is chosen you get war, destruction, poverty, misery.
Government's primary role in society, in my opinion, is to remove the element of force from civil existence so that all interpersonal relations are consensual (there are edge cases - the parent/child relationship or the extremely ill etc. but I need to scope cap somewhere).
The concept of rights derives directly from this concept. They are the recognition that rational people can cooexist peacefully if certain aspects of the human experience are recognized and protected. Those aspects being that in order to survive as a human being your tools are reason and action; you need to be able to think freely and you need to be able to act in accordance with your rational judgements. The infringement of a person's rights is fundamentally interference in either the ability to think (freedom of expression / conscience) or the ability to act (freedom to own and acquire property, freedom to travel, freedom of association etc.)
This means that government's entire domain is force. It is the entity that gets to determine the rules around when the application of force is allowed. It is the entity that gets to step in when you and I can't agree on what the definition of "assault" is and one of us calls the cops.
Businesses ought to exist entirely outside of the domain of force. Business is what happens when you remove force from society and people are able to think, create, develop, produce and trade freely without gangs and thieves and thugs interfering.
Where things get blurry is when you marry government and business. But always remember that business operates under the rules that government creates. The more incentive there is for business to care about political policy, the more lobbyists and corporate interest groups you will create but that's the framework you're creating. Government forces it through laws. Business is just playing by the rules that you voted for.
Governments are elected every now and then by large sums of people as a package deal for handling a number of issues, and only one is in place. Products and companies exist in multiples and regardless of how big they are, they're still more targeted, and you the consumer get to choose directly and every day.
Paper is one of the things one should be least worried about.
We source chips from Canada because it's marginally cheaper to source it from there. It's not like the US doesn't have a ton of sources of wood pulp. Canada just has bigger cheaper sources (comparing like for like quality).
We also burn a lot of "less than ideal for paper" chips for energy rather than feed them into a paper mill, also for marginal cost per result reasons.
Wood chips suitable for paper pulp are also hugely elastic in the same way that recycled metal is. Huge volume is either directed into the supply chain or not based on marginal price. The people making every wood product are choosing what do with their waste based on chip prices and energy prices. Even your local tree service is choosing what to chip and where to dump based on economic conditions and balancing act between relative prices.
If you wanna be worried about something be worried about stuff we don't make much of in the US. Super high volume commodity widgets made from metal, all manner of electronics, etc, basically the kind of stuff where our only domestic capacity is super high dollar stuff to serve defense and aerospace.
It's probably true, because I think wood pulp for paper doesn't have rigid requirements on type of wood, or size, or strength. There are also alternative materials if we had to, like hemp. There's probably a dozen others; I wouldn't be surprised if grass trimmings could be turned into toilet paper.
The threat to lumber for building is a much greater concern because there aren't ready and price-comparable alternatives.
As we learned from COVID-19, manufacturers really don't like building new factories or even changing the tooling to support a different kind of product (such as commercial vs household toilet paper) for a short-lived surge in demand.
An antifragile solution would be learning to use a bidet.
> lacks accountability. It is insulated from ordinary congressional pressure because its funding comes from the Federal Reserve and not through the appropriations process.
Ok that makes sense. Why is CFB not overseen by the congress and is a separate agency without oversight?
> Why is CFB not overseen by the congress and is a separate agency without oversight?
The same reason the Fed itself isn't. Anything directly overseen by congress is or will quickly become inherently political.
Government functions better when some important aspects of it exist as much outside of politics as is possible. Of course the days of that being a thing are rapidly becoming a distant memory given the actions of the current administration in the US.
Russia did not opt to stop supplying them with gas. They cut themselves off at America's prompting.
The Germans couldn't be bothered to find out what parties were truly responsible for the blowing up of the NordStream pipelines, pipelines that the companies involved in were sanctioned by the US.
In fact, it did. Russia told, there was a broken turbine involved, but even after repairs didn't take it back. Later it said, the unfriendly behaviour (sanctions, because of the Ukraine invasion) was the cause of stopping gas delivery.
... and vaping. Though it's pretty strange to me to see people of all ages who seem pretty cool (like somebody really creative who runs a green/handmade clothing store and teaches classes in block printing and such) and then they take a hit of a vape in front of me and I think a little less of them.
(My Z son though will smoke a pipe occasionally, we watched the Russian version of Sherlock Holmes which made him carve an absurdly large pipe which I even took a few puffs of; my nicotine use is at the once yearly level, I'll share a ceremonial cigar and if I'm visiting a third world country I might get a pack of the local cigs)
Probably like every president before him.
No president like CEOs can know everything about the organization they head. They are mostly the face and mouthpiece, and depend on chiefs and VPs to tell them what needs to be done according to the agenda that CEO or president has put forth.