Shock. Hor­ror. The Chi­nese used sex to infil­trate and spy on Nvidia. Who’d have thought that pos­si­ble? Apart from any­body who’s ever read a spy thriller or mem­oir, that is.

For those with more refined tastes, the tech­nique is referred to in said books as “a hon­ey trap.”
So how did it come to pass that those whose job in real­i­ty is to sniff out spies, seem to have sat back and watched it all play out. Maybe they were play­ing a longer game, although that seems more like­ly to be giv­ing cred­it to adults, when actu­al­ly the chil­dren were in charge.
Or, as the Wash­ing­ton Post summed it up: “The saga spot­lights big gaps in America’s chip export con­trols and the exces­sive dis­cre­tion U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cials have over whether to seal them.”
No doubt there will be more than enough inves­ti­ga­tions, hear­ings and good jour­nal­ism (yes, I hon­est­ly believe that evi­dence to the con­trary notwith­stand­ing, it still exists) to enlight­en and even­tu­al­ly bore, every­one not direct­ly con­nect­ed to or involved in the — no pun intend­ed — affair.  What’s less clear is why the poten­tial spy trap liai­son seems to be shar­ing equal billing with infi­deli­ty involv­ing employ­ees whose posi­tions in Nvidia can rea­son­ably be con­sid­ered as being con­sent­ing adults.Apart from the fact that an entre­pre­neur with the genius to cre­ate what is billed as the world’s rich­est com­pa­ny didn’t have enough sense to recog­nise the well-known adage “don’t get laid where you get paid” (or, in Jensen Huang’s case, do the pay­ing,) why that’s a sur­prise to adults, does class as a minor mystery.But then, when the news broke, alleged adults man­aged to pan­ic and wipe out some $470 bil­lion in the mar­ket val­ue of Nvidia in two days.
That it’s already been large­ly recov­ered and the finan­cial pun­dits have moved on from their blood-rush pan­ic of an apoc­a­lypse for the world of AI chips, and the stock  mar­ket boom they fuel with­ers, are proof, if any was need­ed, of the dearth of adults in the niche where progress and self-worth are mea­sured by extreme and no-end-in-sight profit.

                 WHAT REALLY IS IN A NAME

The les­son is that the time for accept­ing that a silk purse real­ly can­not be made from a sow’s ear, and s*** by any oth­er name still smells foul, is well past.
Exam­ple One is the recur­rent, and thus by def­i­n­i­tion lazy, group­ing of Huang, Zucker­berg, Alt­man , Musk, Bezos  et al under the jol­ly umbrel­la of “the tech bros”.
It makes them sound more like a hap­py band of friends-for-life frat boys, when in prac­tice they are rapa­cious, large­ly unprin­ci­pled, ego­tis­tic cut­throats, seem­ing­ly total­ly dis­con­nect­ed from the real­i­ties of life as most of us live it.
They have, with­out doubt, cre­at­ed prod­ucts and sys­tems that can make the world a bet­ter place.
But their idea of fair treat­ment in exchange, is free reign to ignore mal­con­tents (that being the rest of us) who want guardrails, speed lim­its, stop signs, com­mon sense and decen­cy to pro­tect children.
The “bros” are as resent­ful as teenagers being giv­en a cur­few when it comes to demands for envi­ron­men­tal protection.
Accord­ing to some esti­mates, the tech indus­try share of glob­al car­bon emis­sions “…will increase as much as five­fold from 2020 to 2030” which would amount to them “churn­ing out more than half the cli­mate pol­lu­tion cre­at­ed by glob­al avi­a­tion or ship­ping.”
Elon Musk, whose pub­lic per­sona devel­op­ment seems stuck at the still bat­tling acne stage, dis­missed blow­ing half a bil­lion dol­lars back­ing los­ing Repub­li­can can­di­dates in the mid-terms by quip­ping his “elec­tion-inter­fer­ing space lasers” had failed, and “data cen­ters in space look­ing pret­ty appeal­ing right now,”
Accord­ing to its own fig­ures, “Amazon’s absolute car­bon emis­sions increased 16% in 2025”, cour­tesy  of adding more data cen­ter capac­i­ty than any oth­er com­pa­ny globally.
We, the great unwashed the “bros” glee­ful­ly exploit, aren’t,  it seems, will­ing or able to embrace boy­cotting what they offer. There is, how­ev­er, an alter­na­tive; treat them as teenagers in need of boundaries.
Ignore their protestations.
Do not accept their apolo­gies or expla­na­tions for griev­ous and dan­ger­ous errors they were will­ing to risk in the name of profit.Afford them sym­bol­ic “ground­ed for a month” ver­sions of pun­ish­ment with bar­rages of e‑mails, texts, per­sis­tent phone calls, ral­lies, and any­thing else you can con­jure with­in the bounds of legality.
Then add to it by mak­ing clear to the politi­cians they own, that tak­ing mon­ey from the “bros” will cost, not win votes.
How much good it will do is an open ques­tion, but a lit­tle adult super­vi­sion and parental dis­ci­pline is def­i­nite­ly in order.
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