Pro Commerce

Nitrogen

If there were a single gas to which we owe a great deal of homage, these days, it would be nitrogen.

Those of us in California are somewhat in debt to nitrogen for all of the vegetables that come packaged in nitrogen during the year, out of season and from long distances. Those of you in other states are particularly in-debt to nitrogen for all of the fresh greens, lettuces, artichokes, beans, peas and arugula. Those are all brought to us because of the inert nature of nitrogen gas that is used to replace the rapid decaying effects of oxygen in our atmosphere.

I am able to get fresh corn, much fresh fish and many other global products thanks to nitrogen in our packaging.

You may not be aware that most of this nitrogen packaging of fresh leaves and vegetables began successfully in the 1980s. I met the man who was responsible for bringing us the myriad packages of fresh greens on our shelves. He was working with the farms in Monterey County California.

Everyone understood the need to replace air with nitrogen in fresh storage systems. The problem was to find an inexpensive and effective plastic wrap.

Because nitrogen is a molecule that comes in pairs and is lighter than most of the oxygen in our environment it was escaping from most plastic containers. This gentleman, whose name I cannot recall nor Google, found plastic wrap, empirically, that would contain nitrogen gas for long periods of time.

We owe him and nitrogen a great debt of gratitude.

Base 60

The way I learned math, history and the history of numbers, it always gave great credit to the Greeks and the Arabs for our current mathematical and arithmetic systems.

I was taught that the Greeks gave us geometry and the Arabs gave us our system of integers.

Wrong. Wrong.

The Sumerians, 1000 years before the Greeks and 2000 years before the Arabs gave us the base 60 numeric system. Base 60 is the method that is used to calculate all angles. A 90° angle a 45° angle are based on 180° triangle and a 360° circle.

The Sumerians gave the Egyptians sufficient geometry to build the pyramids and pass this on to the Greeks.

The base 60 is also the source of everyone's time system: seconds, minutes and hours are based on the Sumerians contributions. They were passed along without recognition of their primary role in the world of math. They were passed along with a full understanding of the zero decimal integer and a modern system of numbers.

The Arabs did not create either our numeric system or our algebraic system. That came from a combination of Indians and Persians using the earlier Sumerian systems.

As a pilot, I land an airplane on runway 24right. 240 is Southwest on the 360 compass.

All praise to the Sumerians and our base 60 world.

 

Getting rid of hereditary classes

Have you thought about the problem of getting rid of hereditary classes?

I was forced to think about it having read Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai. It is an horrific tale of a brilliant and powerful woman who was imprisoned and tortured because she was a member  of the upper class in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Millions of people were killed and tens of millions had their lives distorted and mutilated in Mao's effort to turn the Chinese people against the hereditary elite. It was only the remaining elite that had not left the country for Hong Kong or Taiwan in 1948.

I realized that nearly as many people have been brutally killed by class warfare in France, Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia and many other places in the name of replacing the hereditary upper class. I think more people have been killed in this cause than for any other reason except warfare and epidemic.

The great tragedy is that it has not worked. Hereditary elites have always seemed to survive everywhere in the world except in the United States.

Therefore, for all people who care about human life, it is incumbent upon us to understand how the United States replaced its hereditary elite with meritocracy. We did not have to kill or mutilate anyone.

There were two forces that combined to eliminate our hereditary class. First was the military in WWII that promoted on the basis of merit. Initially college graduates were made officers. As the war went on, competence and bravery resulted in battlefield promotions to officer class. Additionally very open enrollment in public land grant universities created a meritocratic class of officers as well.

After the war, corporation's, which constituted a major force in America, began promoting former military officers into high management positions. By 1960, so many of the meritocratic Americans who had moved from the military officer class to corporate management were in charge of American corporations, that the previous corporate managers in the hereditary elite had been effectively replaced.

No other society, except Israel, seems to operate on this meritocratic military basis.

It is because of commerce, corporations, that are so deeply committed to meritocracy that I do not believe a new hereditary elite will emerge in America.

Nor do I believe that most other nations have any chance of replacing their hereditary elite effectively without the combination of the open military and the power of corporations.

Jerry Brown education funding

In the first chapter of my The Seven Laws of Money I mentioned a friend, Sid Wolinsky. Sid brought one of the most famous California education cases: Serrano vs Priest.

The case dealt with the need for equality of education funding throughout the state of California. When the case was begun in 1968 the wealthiest districts raised far more money than poorer urban districts because of property taxes.  

While the legislature made modest efforts to follow the California Supreme Court decision it was not wholehearted. In the intervening 40 years the inequality among districts as become as great as it was in 1968.

Gov. Jerry Brown is now proposing that state allocations to school districts take into consideration the need to equalize funding for poorer districts and even suppliment the funding in poor districts.

Legislators, because there are many, know that no one is going to be sanctioned by a court. Legislators therefore tend to ignore judicial rulings.

It is very brave of the governor to take this educational action. While I do not believe funding for schools has even a 5% outcome differential in educational consequences I still support the idea of greater efforts in poorer districts.

I made some phone calls that will help Gov. Brown's efforts.

Is Islamism causing our divide?

When the world became a battleground for the communist USSR versus America we slowly watched America take on a definition. America became a religious sanctuary 'under God' with a free market economic system. This all occurred within a decade of the global confrontation.

I keep wondering how the confrontation with Islamism is shaping America.

I believe it is the source of our current national divide. I have discussed this divide often. America is divided between those who consider government expansion and increased debt a threat to economic growth and commercial success.  And those who don’t.

This is a divide and it is firmly entrenched in our governments local, state and national.

How is it related to Islamism?

Islamism wants to create an ideal society in the image of the Koran.  That includes a government and religious entity combined in one called the Ummah.  The Ummah is a vast administrative system that enforces the morals of Islam. The system can be seen in Afghanistan under the Taliban and for half-century in Saudi Arabia.

How has America become divided in its reaction to Islamism and the implementation of an Ummah?

Half of our society considers this to not be a threat just as the same group of people (Lefties) denied that the USSR was a threat. Their group opposed the Vietnam War and strongly resisted a military build up against the USSR. Today the same group including president Obama has refused to use the words "War on Terror" to describe the current confrontation with Islamism.  The group considers the Islamic goal of improving people using the government to be the same as the Left’s own goals under the rubric of environmentalism and stopping global warming.

This Lefty half of our society sees no problem with the expansion of government, increase in debt that is associated with it and is not alarmed by increased regulations of daily life and business. It favors such expansion as morally necessary.

The other half of our society considers Islamism to be a threat to the core American values at home and in the many countries for which the United States has been serving as an example of freedom and religious coexistence. That half of our society (which includes me) considers the expansion of government a threat to both individuals and businesses and that the growing debt is onerous to commerce. That half of our society does not believe that global warming warrants extreme restrictions on individuals and businesses.

This appears to me to be the domestic outcome of a foreign threat.

To understand that I am not exaggerating consider a book that is pro-Ummah and pro-Sharia law by Sadakat Kadri that received rave reviews in the Lefty British Spectator and the Independent.

What is your reaction?

Urgent personnel matter

It was a girlfriend I lost who made this an issue for me.

A manager can be sitting with a pile of projects and items on his or her 'to do' list and a personal problem arrives.

Most managers know that items on the project and 'to do' lists on his desk will disappear or become insignificant if they are allowed to sit and wait.

That is not true of personnel matters. Most, if not all, personnel matters get worse over time. Over time can mean minutes or hours.

I learned from some very good managers that any personnel issue should be dealt with immediately. Not quickly, not promptly but immediately.  Robert comes into my office and says that the sales manager wants him to do something I have told him not to do.

I stop what I'm doing and immediately take Robert with me to the sales manager to discuss the issue. Both the sales manager and Robert have the potential for making the problem worse if I leave it to fester.

The reason I lost a girlfriend, a rather beautiful redhead, was that I got entangled in a personnel problem where I was working that had to be resolved immediately. I had promised to help her move some of her belongings at the same time. I phoned to explain my necessary delay but she had no idea why a personnel problem could be more important than she. She left me that day.

She became an example of a personnel problem that could not be postponed.

Apps vs large systems

There is a problem that I think is slowly being made amenable to improvement.

Most government agencies have had a disastrous history of adopting information technology. Computers.

From the earliest efforts to use computers in the IRS and the military, the results have been high cost overruns, static systems that are too rigid to be broadly useful and complete failed projects. Governments face this inherent problem. They are governed themselves by compromises within existing power forces. Power is never static or stable. Therefore the demands for computer systems are constantly in flux and difficult to impliment.

The same is true, to a slightly lesser extent, in all bureaucracies.

The term app has recently migrated from meaning a specific but distinct function of a large computer system to referring to specific functions on a mobile computer.

It is this distinct creation of mobile apps with their own language that run on a separate operating system and obtain data from an Internet database that seems to me will offer greater access to computerization from government agencies and other bureaucracies.

Because writing specific variations on a large computer system is very costly and maintaining those variations is even more costly it strikes me that having these apps as standalone separate functions will make larger computer systems more functional.

I have only dealt with this issue with a few of my clients and while looking at a seventh revision for Marketing Without Advertising.

Please feel free to enlighten me.

One man makes a mess for everybody

Every time I mail a book or take off my shoes at the airport I am reminded of a shocking modern reality. One perverse man can effect the behavior of hundreds of millions of other people for decades.

Since Ted Kaczynski used the mail system to send bombs to innocent people whom he targeted because of their contributions to modernity, the post office has a limit of 13 ounces for the weight of packages put in mailboxes. I must take books, being mailed, to a human being at my local post office.

Kaczynski in his malice toward the modern world has had a genuine impact on the lives of hundreds of millions. A trivial influence. A negative influence. But the man had a perverse effect. Curse you Ted Kaczynski. Curse those postal officials who think that a 13 ounce limit is a meaningful deterrent to mail bombs.

We all take off our shoes in the United States when we are flying. (A recent exemption has been made for children and old people.) The hundreds of millions of people who take off their shoes, boots, high heels and Birkenstocks every day owe this ritual to Richard Reid who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight with chemicals in his heel.

Reid failed but our lives have been impacted. It is a trivial impact. It is a negative impact. But one man had a perverse effect nevertheless.

Curse you Richard Reid. Curse all those people in the airline security business who think taking off our shoes reduces the chances of a bomb on an airplane.

The Japanese airplane security system does not require anyone to take off their shoes.

Texas accent

I used to take American dignitaries to meet important institutional leaders in Japan. Among the dignitaries were occasional members of Congress. Among the leaders in Japan, whom they met, were often department heads including the national banks and treasury.

This is not the point at which to explain that the Japanese bureaucracies are famous for keeping the number of employees to a minimum. The same is true in Sweden. The Japanese agency that manages all of the national parks has five men running it.

At one point, the agency that most American dignitaries wanted to visit was MITI the successful agency that directed the investment into massive computers and computer components.  Later as this agency was perceived to have made mistakes, the name was changed.

At the time, I brought dignitaries to meet the head of MITI.  He was the most impressive of any Japanese they ever met. There are three reasons. He had the most gorgeous secretary anyone can imagine. She brought everyone tea and was dressed elegantly. He would occasionally open his drawer and pull out a very fancy bottle of scotch with small shot glasses for his guests.  All of this impressed the visiting dignitaries but nothing compared with the fact that he spoke English with a Texas accent.

I later found other foreigners who send their children to learn English in Texas.

It is my observation that Americans view a Texas accent as the most American of all accents.

It is my guess that this particular accent has gained prominence from decades of airplane pilots who spoke with the Texas accent.

Current moral system

I have my own moral system. In the previous blog I discussed morality and commerce. The morality I have in mind is clearly my own. I would argue that each person has her own moral system. I would further argue that these separate moral systems are common to our general American moral system.

Within the American moral system there are many explicit separate moral systems. I do not think the divergence is very great, or we could not sit on juries together as readily as we do.

I do not think that our moral system is directly connected to our religious heritage. It is distinctly American.

Let me suggest what this moral system is.

We Americans have morals built around a simple proposition: a child is born with the right to fully develop his or her best qualities, skills and talents. Society must have a parallel moral system that supports this simple proposition.

This is why we so fervently support meritocracy. We are outraged that anyone should benefit from their family birth. Hereditary advantages are viewed as offensive. We fervently support learning opportunity equally for everyone. We fervently believe in scholarships and subsidies for the talented.

We abhor and punish insider trading that keeps legitimate people out of the loop. We abhor people, products and services that mislead individuals. Those individuals have a right to the best knowledge and skills to develop their own lives.

I do not need to go further. I think most of my readers will agree that these are fundamental American moral precepts. They are much more important and universal than issues of monogamy, church attendance or charitable giving.

As far as I can tell there is no particular book or article that summarizes the American moral system that I have just outlined. The closest I know is Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity.

It is also evident that American morals, because they support everything that enhances the individual's opportunities to develop their full capacity, includes environments that promote diversity as a moral value, meritocracy and openness. The values that help commerce to thrive.

Amoral or moral?

I did two earlier blogs on the moral values of commerce. Here and here.

My son and a few friends immediately reminded me that I have been a champion of the amoral quality of commerce for decades. So why am I now talking about the moral values of commerce?

It is a good and legitimate question.

Commerce is absolutely amoral as a system. I will sell you my goods and services whether you are the Archangel Michael or Mephistopheles, a hospice nurse or a teenage drug dealer.

On the other hand the values that promote commerce are indeed moral.  Diversity, meritocracy and openness are what promote commerce and they are moral values.

Commerce itself operates as an amoral system and its output is amoral.  But the values that are promoted by commerce are moral.

This unusual combination is more understandable in the realm of technology. When a bridge is built it is just as helpful to a wheelchair-bound invalid as it is to an enemy tank. Amoral. On the other hand technology encourages reliable recordkeeping, innovation, mathematics, openness, meritocracy and pragmatism. All are moral values.

Since I use the term moral in an unfamiliar way, I also raised many hackles. I am clearly not talking about morals as traditional church attendance, family stability, sexual abstinence nor am I talking about monogamy in marriage.

I also made the mistake in one of the earlier blogs of suggesting that 'openness' is a biblical value. It is not. The relevant commandment is “thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”  That is a good translation of the Hebrew. It is only relevant in a judicial system. It says nothing about lying within a family or dishonesty in a commercial transaction. It dealt only with a judicial system not interpersonal relations.

The next blog discusses what I believe to be the current system of morality.

Industrial medicine

For more than 50 years I have been following the evolution of medicine and wondered how it would be industrialized.

Industrialization means technological focus, marketing focus and dramatic cost reduction.

In medicine it has long been assumed that gigantic employers of doctors such as Group Health and Kaiser were the model. This kind of mechanism does not seem to have reduced costs and increasingly I see Kaiser outsourcing many of its functions.

This outsourcing is a clue to the emergence of the industrialization of medicine.

Industrialization seems to be taking hold in the form of focusing on organs and bodily systems.

The most successful business seems to be standalone dialysis entities. These are now national. The same is true for endoscopy and pathology. Most testing including large MRI and CAT scans are becoming standalone operations. In dentistry, surgical procedures and orthodontia are often standalone businesses.

Increasingly this is true for a wide range of complex treatments including various forms of cancer, heart disease and childhood disabilities.

I would expect this industrialization process to continue despite the imposition of socialized medicine on the United States.

It is hard for most people to understand that innovation in medicine is driven by commerce at both the pharmaceutical, medical appliance and day-to-day operations of medicine levels. Commerce is the source of this innovation. I think it will survive the stupidity of national socialized medicine.

Democrats, enchanted by their ideological fantasies fail to see that commerce is the source of medical innovation. It would be cruel for me to say it but I often think that every Democrat should be forced to live with the medicine and dentistry of 1820.

The real San Francisco

I recently read a book, the Season of the Witch by David Talbot. I don't recommend it.  The book purports to cover San Francisco from 1960 to 1990. It covers the hippie period, the assassination of the Mayor and a supervisor and Jim Joneses Temple.

The timeline is somewhat accurate, the details somewhat less and the insight is insignificant. Just what you expect from journalism.

I was sufficiently offended to write my own piece about San Francisco. I put it in my blog only because you might be interested. It is long. I have separated the bulk of the piece below the line.

San Francisco can be described as a personal crucible and the eccentric wild West. Most people come to San Francisco in their early 20s to find their identity. Most people who grow up and go school in the city, leave.

How did San Francisco become this way?  What have been the consequences?

All institutions are heavily shaped by their founders and their founding circumstances.  San Francisco was a sandy, marshy peninsula with regular sandstorms, no permanent native tribes and one grizzly bear who patrolled the entire area. The first settlers were Spanish explorer-monks, who opened a church in the center of the sandy peninsula near fresh water,  and a Spanish military contingent that built a fort on the north shore to protect the entrance to the bay.

The few pre-gold rush settlers on the north-east bay harbor side established a few small businesses and lodgings. The first restaurant was a French bistro on what is now Kearny Street, near Sacramento Street.  The restaurant had a Chinese chef. Chinatown has grown from that one location.

The vast explosion of the city came in the 1850s in the gold rush. The primary cities of settlement were in other parts of the Bay, particularly Petaluma. San Francisco became a belated destination for business people who arrived to provide resources and entertainment for the prosperous returning gold seekers registering their claims. Most of the early business people came from New Orleans.

Decentralized local government

We don't seem to have any idea of what our government is like. We have no idea how different it is from every other government on the planet. It is not taught in schools or universities.

I became highly aware of this when I first started showing Japanese and European dignitaries around the Bay Area.

Whenever we saw some unusual event such as a boat accidentally discharging sewage into the Bay my visitors would ask why the authorities didn't stop that behavior.

I had to explain that the authorities consisted of six different unrelated but overlapping agencies. There were local police closest to the boat. There were the local prosecutors in a separate agency.  There were several police agencies at the maritime level and at the regional level. There were specific agencies that covered only the Bay.  There were other agencies at various levels local, regional and state concerned with pollution.

To put it simply 'no one is in charge'.

This is because America was settled by frontiersman who created government on an ad hoc basis. We did not have a King who was expanding his empire and expanding his control. These were independent and autonomous people. When they needed water they formed a water district.  When they needed fire protection they formed a fire protection district. The same was true for judicial entities and schools. Over time some of these were consolidated but only a few.

America, uniquely in the world is a multilayered highly centralized system of governance.

In my opinion, this is one of the reasons we have so much commerce and innovation. No one is watching to stop the outlaws who create innovation in society.

Smell of 1820

Are you sensitive to smell? Do you avoid sitting near a bathroom in a restaurant because it would disturb your dining? Can you smell a person who smokes when they walk past you?

If the answer to these questions is 'yes', you should be very grateful to be living in the modern era. You should be grateful to commerce that has created the modern era.

As recently as the 1980s in the United States and still today in much of the world a cigar smoker can enjoy a good cigar in a restaurant, hotel room or in a taxi. Buses had their diesel exhausts at tire level.

That is trivial compared to the smell left on the street by horses as recently as the 1930s. In urban areas there were still horse drawn vehicles and police patrols on horseback.

From the 1920s, on back in time, the majority of the population did not bathe regularly (certainly not the English or French) and drank so much alcohol to cover up medical pain problems that it was very easily detected.

I picked the title of this blog as 1820 because that is the earliest time at which commerce became industrial and began to improve the lives of ordinary people. In most urban areas of the United States and Europe that time predates the separation of sewers from street side and from fresh water intake.

Until late in the 1800s, horses and other animals lived in homes including urban homes.

If you want to know what everyday life, all day every day, smelled like for an ordinary person you need to stand next to a modern homeless person. Homeless people have a combined smell of their individual excrement's. To get the smell of 1820 precisely you need to occasionally add the smell of perfume that was used to cover up bodily and horse manure smell.

If smell bothers you you should seriously give thought to any of your long-held Luddite or anti-commercial political values. You could well be living in an 1820 environment that the Left so romantically aspires to.

I should definitely note that some societies were very clean in 1820 and have been for millennia. Primarily those derived from the original cluster of tribes around Lake Baikal.  The Japanese, Turks, Hungarians and Finns.

Common sense about Christopher Dorner

I make no claim to have a broad perspective on the news media. I read the Wall Street Journal and an occasional online local paper and a few blogs including some news collections. I get many articles by email from friends. I don't see mainstream media or Fox News. I fall asleep with the news on TV, on occasion, but the first 15 min. are always murder, fires and mayhem.

It is possible that the news somewhere made some very obvious common sense comments about Christopher Dorner. I didn't see it.

What is most obvious from reading his manifesto is that a modicum of human understanding can explain his behavior.

Christopher Dorner was a person who liked rules and regulations and wanted the world to be strictly governed on a good versus evil basis. Rules are to be obeyed and good people follow the rules. Dorner was very comfortable in a military environment where rules and authority are the universal norm.

It is this very kind of rule based person who most commonly becomes a policeman. You can tell by his fervid devotion to military and police acronyms in his manifesto that he was very comfortable in that rule-based world.

In simple language, Chris Dorner was a goody-goody who wanted to know the rules and wanted to follow them.

In the LAPD, Chris found corruption left and right. As the kind of person who always pointed out what was right and proper, he clearly became a thorn in the side of LAPD management. They set him up in a phony kangaroo trial and kicked him out.

So where does a goody-goody former policeman and former military person turn for solace. Some turn to alcohol and drugs.  Not this straight laced cheerful fellow.  He turned to all of the trusted figures in his media milieu.  He listed the people he trusted: Chris Anderson, Anderson Cooper, Jon Stewart, Piers Morgan, the leaders of the Democratic Party including Pres. Obama and the whole cohort of Lefty movie celebrities.

Are these people, that populate the Leftist world, in agreement on any subject?

Yes they are. For more than 30 years, the lead story every six months has been about how white police forces have been killing innocent black men out of pure racism. 30 years of this unending stream of mainstream media lead stories. Never once was the story found to be true and the outcome publicized in the media with an apology. The current U.S. President, Obama, even jumped into a parallel headline about a white volunteer guard killing an innocent young black Treyvon Martin.

Chris Dorner's mind was filled with this racist media crap. The anger of a disillusioned goody-goody was easily channel into this racist line of thought. He started killing the people the media had found guilty for him.

Of course there is no discussion of this common sense trajectory from goody-goody to disappointment, to racist revenge.

The media is so culpable and so dishonest that it cannot discuss the obvious.

Commercial hate grows

To my great surprise I have seen greater hostility to commerce in the past decade than I saw in earlier decades.

The hippies loved business and started more new businesses than had ever been seen in America before. They had no hostility to large companies unless the companies produced war matériel.

Somehow over the past 20 years there has been growing hostility to commerce. Often in the guise of hatred toward large corporations. Walmart hatred has been growing steadily. It grew largely because rural people need Walmart and understood it as a successor to Sears and Roebuck. On the otherhand urban areas have promoted hatred of Walmart encouraged by unions. Increasingly the same has been true for hatred of Target, chain restaurants and Starbucks.  In the 1980s the hostility was limited to Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Now we have a president who regularly excoriates big business, the financial world and Wall Street. He is vehemently intent on imposing regulations on business and making government investment the prime source of capital formation. Every effort has been made to forestall trade expansion. The man is hostile to commerce and his hostility has found a receptive audience in the American academe, media and urban youth.

Despite this period of growing anti-commercial hostility, now represented by Democratic-union control of every city in America, many quiet commercial entities have been growing like weeds. Craigslist has become an important source of interpersonal trade as have other similar online sites. Most large cities have dynamic and growing secondhand clothing businesses. The secondary market for all sorts of products from phones to flea markets has been seeing a steady rise.

Somehow the hostility toward commerce ignores these jubilant person to person weeds.

Commerce and governance

In the previous two blogs I have discussed the moral attributes of commerce that allow it to thrive. I have not discussed governance.

The reason I have not discussed governance in the context of commerce as a moral system is that I have not seen a clear connection.

I know that many of my readers believe that it is the Democratic quality of our country, the USA, and our constitutional structure that makes us such a successful commercial society.

My problem is that I see so many counter examples on the planet. I see thriving commerce in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Denmark, Israel, the English-speaking countries and Holland.

Singapore has a democracy in only a limited form. It is run by a small family that hides behind the screen of democracy. But most laws and contracts are enforceable in court's.

Japan is a society in which laws and contracts do not take precedence over common sense, tradition or social values. The democracy exists inside a very traditional hierarchical structure.

Denmark and Holland are very egalitarian societies with a King or Queen and a long tradition without constitutions.

The English speaking countries, other than USA, have stronger centralized governments without the protection of the Bill of Rights or built-in structural checks and balances.

It is not clear to me that any particular form of governance is inherently best for commerce. China is thriving despite awesome central controls, a highly structured family priority and little openness. India is showing significant commercial growth despite an absence of honesty or functional day to day diversity cross class lines.

Commerce thrives on the moral attributes of diversity, meritocracy and openness but it is not clear what form of governance supports these best.

Commerce is moral

In the previous blog I outlined the three elements that make commerce a moral system. These three elements when present will make commerce thrive, when absent will suppress commerce.

Why is diversity a moral attribute?

In the moral system that my readers and I inhabit the ultimate moral criteria is whether individuals are able to develop their unique capabilities in the most effective and complete manner.

In a system that values diversity we have to have mechanisms that protect a very wide range of values attitudes and behaviors. Here in San Francisco we can have an extreme range of behaviors that are tolerated in a way that would be impossible in Isfahan.

A black man in drag can walk on the street with two Asian women one of whom is wearing a bathing suit with tattoos. That is actually mild for San Francisco. It is also only a reference to external attributes. Genius and weirdness are also tolerated in a diverse society.

Meritocracy is also a moral attribute in our system of values.  It is only in a society where individual uniqueness can be recognized and appreciated, a meritocratic society, that the uniqueness of individuals has a chance to be triumphant.

Openness is a traditional moral value. It is biblical. It is important because secrecy and dishonesty that can be covered by secrecy are the source of a great deal of social malice and bad moral behavior.

Commerce, because the attributes that make it thrive are moral, is a moral system.

Why no understanding of pro commerce

I have been trying to promote the idea of pro-commerce for roughly 15  years.  I see very little evidence of success. Few of my readers and still fewer of my friends and family know what I am talking about.

The reason is quite simple. I have been exposed to business experiences for 50 years that are not accessible to most people. Maybe not to anyone else. I was a banker, a corporate treasurer, an entrepreneur many times over, a consultant to well over 1000 businesses where I saw the most intimate functions of the business and I have consulted businesses in very backward Third World countries and at the top of the corporate pyramid.

That is the source of my observations but each observation can be confirmed by looking around our own environment once we are looking with the correct hypothesis.

First, there are three types of commerce: trade (a local flower store), where the goal is to make a sufficient margin on each sale to continue the business, industrial where the goal is to reduce costs by technology, marketing or other forms of efficiency and finally clientry (a trust lawyer) where the goal is to generate and maintain a lifetime relationship.

By distinguishing these three, the activity of business can be better understood.

Commerce is a moral enterprise. It rewards three moral attributes. The first is diversity. A society that is diverse in every way, the way, Bell Labs was, the way, Google is, is a society that will help commerce thrive. The opposite is a homogeneous society as one finds in the Arab world.

Second is meritocracy. This is a deep moral attribute. It means hiring, using and working with the most skilled and appropriate person available. It is the opposite of nepotism or family favoritism or old boy cronyism.  

Finally, openness which includes honesty as a moral attribute. Any society that is highly secretive or deceptive on an interpersonal basis will have a terrible time promoting commerce.

Just looking at the world around you and looking at various nations will support my pro-commerce observations.   

Romeo and Juliet

My granddaughter was writing a high school essay on Romeo and Juliet. I offered my observation.

The story of Romeo and Juliet is stuck in the pre-industrial commercial era. It was very common prior to the industrial countries emergence 150 years ago for family feuds to be the dominant element on the social landscapes.

We have escaped the world of family feuds. Most of the planet is still in that tragic era.

Commerce requires of us that we are convivial in dealing with retail employees and most importantly that we are convivial in our dealings with fellow employees in our work environment. Commerce makes us much more decent people.

Because commerce rewards meritocracy it simultaneously must suppress family feuds of the Romeo and Juliet model.

While the modern version of Romeo and Juliet is West Side Story, where ethnicity keeps the couple apart, America has very little of that inter ethnic, inter racial antagonism thanks to commerce.

I read manifestos

There is a left-wing theory that an occasional act by an individual will fall on a fertile field of popular distress and grow into a revolution. This theory has propelled hundreds and maybe thousands of revolutionary acts. This theory can be found elucidated in many writings.

As a consequence I always read manifestos. The manifesto is the act of a revolutionary who believes that his writings and often his actions will lead to the desired popular uprising and revolution.

The first manifesto that I'm aware of was by Karl Marx published in 1848. It was a global call to the proletariat to shake off their chains and rebel against capitalism.

That manifesto has wrung like a bell through 150 years.  It is connected to many revolutions and revolutionaries. I read it.

In the past few decades, a well educated bomber from Idaho wrote a manifesto that fell on deaf ears in an era of social upheaval.  Ted Kaczynski was a Leftist railing against technology and modernity. His ideas came out of the hippy-Black Panther firmament. The press never summarized his manifesto. I read it and put it online.

Two years ago, Anders Breivik, a well educated Norwegian released a manifesto as he bombed a government building and slaughtered an island of innocent left-wing teenagers. He was convinced that his rant against modernity especially against the Islamic movement into Europe would find fertile ground for rebellion. Again, the press never summarized his manifesto and it fell on deaf ears. I read it.

Once again an educated revolutionary has written a manifesto. This is Chris Dorner's manifesto. I read it. I recommend you read it. This version is uncensored of the names (censorship is common on most published versions.)

While the mainstream media has portrayed Dorner as a disillusioned crackpot with good military and police training, that is way off the mark.

Dorner is a dyed in the wool strong Lefty. He is in love with the Lefty media gurus. He praises every Lefty leader and openly supports every Lefty cause and grievance.

Much of what he writes rings true especially his disillusionment with the racism in the Los Angeles police department. He makes a very strong case that racism remains a powerful force against blacks. He also cites Bill Cosby who suggests that blacks should not be self-destructive.  Dorner is out to kill his enemies. He knows how.

He knows he will be killed on sight by the LAPD. Therefore his manifesto, while overly long, should be taken very seriously as a death bed confession.

I believe, as I have suggested in two earlier blogs (the second one refers to the first one), that we are in a period in America that is susceptible to a civil war because we are deeply divided.

I had expected the suburban gun owners who are the targets of the Democratic Party, the President  and the mainstream media to be the first to fire their weapons.

I am wrong. If indeed this is the beginning of the second civil war it is the mainstream media and the Left that has fired the first shot. It is Christopher Dorner.

So far, no one has agreed with me on the likelihood that we are on fertile ground for a civil war. I certainly hope I am very wrong.

I know that the longer Christopher Dorner is out killing successfully he will be garnering stronger support and becoming the hero of a Lefty radical movement.

Open books

A newspaper I was recently reading described the value of open books and several Internet and software companies that use it. Open books refers to posting of all employee wages and all internal financial data for employees... occasionally for the public.

From its earliest date, I have been a strong advocate of open books. It is part of transparency and I have advocated jt in my published business books. I posted the internal financial data for the non-profit I managed near the front door.

In order to have open books it is necessary to start the business that way. I have found great resistance to letting everyone in a company know employee wages after the business is running. The same is true for financial statements at the point where management has become accustomed to keeping the knowledge to themselves.

There are many reasons why open books make a more efficient and productive business.

First, there is always a potential in most businesses for interpersonal jealousy, antagonism and time wasted in discussions about wages. This disappears when all wage material is open to everyone in the company.

Second, as various departments come to understand the functions of other departments and see the core data, they are much more able to cooperate and be supportive. When manufacturing knows the details of sales everyone benefits.

Third, the managerial milieu becomes significantly more cooperative and friendly in an open books environment. Employee turnover is reduced, management skills are elevated and output is measurably improved.

When starting a business a commitment to open books is a positive element improving the chances of success.

Alternative to witness protection

Homicide is rapidly increasing in many areas. In Oakland homicide is back to levels more than 20 years ago when it was the highest in its history. That is also true in other black cities and neighborhoods, DC, Detroit, Chicago, and New Orleans.

There is one simple reason. There is one solution that I can suggest.

The reason is simple.  Black gang memebers are killing other black gang members and accidental bystanders. No black citizens are willing to identify the killers because they themselves will be killed.

No witnesses, no success in taking killers off the street.

My solution is to allow video testimony in court if the witness is killed before the trial.

The TV testimony would have to include cross examination in order to meet the requirements of the fifth amendment to our Constitution.

The Constitution did not consider the problem of gangs killing witnesses.  Juries should also be informed before the video that the witness was killed before the trial.

This proposal will not initially be welcomed by witnesses.  But over time as its effectiveness becomes obvious and well known it should result in a dramatic increase in the number of witnesses and the decline in black homicide.  

It may work where witness protection programs don't.  Witness protection is generally nonsense because few ordinary people want to start a new anonymous life.

Auto fatalities

Of course we know that automobiles are made safer with seatbelts, airbags and improved structure.

Is it possible we are wrong?

What we see in any dramatic test with a dummy in the car is that these safety improvements protect the dummy. Is that a valid test of the real world.

I have one piece of data that suggests the real world is not like the one we see with crash test dummies.

Japan has had a relatively stable automobile fatality rate for the past few decades. In roughly 1993 Japan went from a country where seatbelts were only required on highways as of December 1992 to a country where seatbelts were required at all times in all front seats in January 1993. The Japanese did as they were told. 100%.

There is no positive evidence to draw in auto fatalities as a result of seatbelts.

This is what leads me to make another suggestion. Here is another chart that shows auto fatality by age. It is clear that people under 35 have a much higher auto fatality rate while driving. Under 20, the situation is even worse.

Hypothesis: while safety devices definitely work, the reality is that making driving more difficult  for young drivers is far more important in reducing auto fatalities.

In Japan, a drivers license requires many hours of training and at least three hours of driving in the drivers test.

The greatest drop in U.S. automobile fatalities occurred in the past three years. A drop of nearly 25%. This is due entirely to severe state restrictions on teenage drivers.

It may be that drivers' habits are more related to safety issues than auto technology.

Their life is screwed up

More than half a century ago I learned a bitter lesson.

If you can see a serious impending problem in someone else's life, shut up.

If your friend is about to marry a con artist,  your good friend’s wife is cheating on him or a teenager you know is having unprotected sex, keep your mouth shut.

The first story is one that I learned about.  A good friend of mine, with whom I commuted daily to graduate school, became engaged to a handsome young man. When I met the man I found that he claimed to be working at a job in a field that I knew very well. I doubted his veracity.

Since I knew his boss as a friend, I phoned to see if this young man was indeed working at the job in that field. The answer was ‘No’. He had been telling my female friend that he was saving his money for their wedding while they lived on her money.

In good faith, I told my female friend about the reality, that her fiancé did not have the job he claimed to have. She never spoke to me again. And she never spoke to one of our close mutual friends again.

I keep my mouth shut these days and have for the previous 50 years, when someone else's life is about to be screwed up by something I know about.

I doubt that Ann Landers or Dear Abby would give the same advice. I learned a harsh lesson which I will not forget.

Mexico and China

A few years ago I wrote a blog about Chinese manufacturers in Mexico putting the made in China label on products in Spanish.  These were Chinese products partially made in Mexico.

A decade before that I had a client in the Imperial Valley that bordered on Mexico and I encouraged my client to become a shipping and assembly center for the products made in Mexicali (just the other side of the border) for distribution in the United States. It was a very big business at the time. My client followed my advice.

Today that Mexican border business has become gigantic.

There are two reasons. First the level of technological competence of the workers in Mexico on the American border has become first rate. Mexican graduate schools are turning out top-flight engineers and business managers. In large numbers.

Second, the prices of Mexican labor are equal to or less than the current Chinese labor market.

The consequence is that more Chinese companies are moving their production to the Mexican border.

Just so you know. We can now outsource to a country on our border. We are doing it in increasing volume.

Business and politics-unhealthy

I have many simple business rules. This is a blog about one such rule:

Business is about business... it should avoid any politics.

This does not mean businesses should not lobby or try to influence legislation or fight political battles in the courts. This does not mean that owners or leaders of business should avoid politics and political issues. That is an ad hoc matter.

What it means is illustrated in the following story.

Four years ago, in San Francisco, the local Board of Supervisors introduced a tax on all local businesses that required them to either pay into a city health care fund or provide roughly $2 per employee per hour payment for health insurance. The Restaurant Association set up a trust fund for medical insurance. The two dollars was paid into the fund and employees could submit bills for payment. Rarely do the employee medical expenses equal the amount of money in the fund, they are always much less.

Nearly all the large restaurants in the city during the first year of the new health requirement added a few percentage points to the customer bill. These ranged from 2% to 5% and in some cases it was a dollar amount like two dollars. Always mentioned on the menu.

On the face of it, this restaurant behavior was absurd.  When taxes on business are raised it is rare to see a gas station or a supermarket or department store add the new taxes as a supplemental charge. But the Restaurant Association was angry and felt they could educate the public by listing this new charge on every restaurant bill.

Over the four-year period the politicians forced a few changes on the restaurants. They prohibited the wording “health charge”. Restaurants responded with “mandated charges”.

Last month, the City Attorney, running for higher office, announced that all restaurants could only apply a surcharge if all the money went to employee health care. He also announced penalties that will put any restaurant out of business.

What happened is businesses tried to get into the world of politics to educate the public. The public, San Franciscans, don't give a shit about the restaurants plight and never responded. The politicians who are anti-business, mean-spirited and vengeful are getting even with the restaurant businesses.

Back to my original observation: businesses should stay out of politics. Just raise your prices to accommodate or move.

Blind flying

Single engine plane pilots can sit around and exchange stories with the same alacrity as fishermen. It is something both groups excel at.

Often when such pilots sit around and exchange stories the subject of the 1999 crash of
John F Kennedy Jr's plane comes up.  

Most pilots concur with the NTSB findings that Kennedy was flying a plane more powerful than he was used to into a cloud bank at night over water and became disoriented. We discuss whether there is any appropriate pilot training that could have avoided such tragic mishaps.

I am aware of how I learned to avoid this problem. It came decades after I had my pilots license.

I was taking off in a single engine plane from Oakland Airport with a cloud cover at roughly 1800 feet. The mountains to the north east of Oakland rise to about 2200 feet. The weather data indicated that clouds were less than 2000 feet thick. The top of the cloud cover should have been about 3,800 feet, well above the small mountain range.

I did something quite illegal as a pilot with only a license to fly in fully visual environments. I decided to circle and climb through the clouds. This was not a problem until I had climbed more than 3500 feet and was still in a cloud.

I realized at that point that my sense of direction including up and down was completely useless. I could only rely on the instruments in front of me.

I kept climbing and by the time I was at 5500 feet above the ground I was seriously doubting my brain, my butt and my instrument's. I tried not to show my distress to my passenger.

Fortunately for me, I came out of the clouds at 6000 feet. The cloud was a single giant funnel that was more than 2000 feet above the surrounding completely flat cloud layer.

I was very happy to see the blue sky.  I learned a horrendous lesson about how important it is to trust your instruments more than your physical perceptions.

A sad lesson that John Kennedy Jr. had not been fortunate enough to experience in survivable conditions.

Autism and population changes

Since the beginning of the 1990’s there has been a steep rise in childhood autism, ADD and ADHD.

This has also been associated with a series of erroneous explanations and improper correlations. Many explanations have been advanced for this rise in childhood anomalies including childhood inoculations, a widely accepted piece of nonsense. TV has been blamed as has obesity and corn syrup.

When a population anomaly of this sort begins to appear a logical mind is forced to examine something other than direct correlations.

The problem must be systemic. And because it is specifically a problem in America the systemic issues to be examined should be American and should be connected to practices in widespread use in America. They should be connected to childhood but not necessarily.

I can think of more than half a dozen changes in our society in the 1980s that could have a very strong impact on children in the 1990s and later.

Let us start with the five point infant harness that is required for all infants leaving hospitals after birth. The infants are actually kept in harnesses in vehicles and in the backseat until nearly 10 years old.  (The fifth strap, in the crotch, is used by all small children I have observed, for masturbation.)

Then, more importantly, in the 1980s it became criminal to punish a child by spanking. That was a major change in child rearing.

Children were increasingly part of a female head of household family without a father present.

Pregnant mothers were heavily admonished against drinking alcohol of any sort during pregnancy.

The list goes on and on and it includes a wide range of new games, new technologies and new eating patterns for the 1980s and 1990s.

Any attempt to explain the rise of autism, ADD and ADHD without reference to these many changes and many more.......... is poor logic and foolish.

Sidwell Friends

Slight problem. Maybe it is cognitive dissonance. Seeing one set of values connected to a contradictory set of values creates dissonance.

President Obama's two daughters (and president Clinton's one daughter ) are students at Sidwell Friends school. The word Friends should alert you to the problem of this attendance with heavily armed Secret Service personnel at the school daily.

Here is a school called a Friends school, where the headmaster is a Quaker and half the board of directors are Quakers.  Quaker values are fully committed to pacifism.

How does the school reconcile its deep commitment to Quakerism and pacifism and allow bureaucrats walking around the campus loaded to the gills with lethal weapons?

I see some dissonance, I see some incongruity and most of all I see some Quaker hypocrisy of the first-order.

So presidents want their children to have a good education and it turns out that a good education means a pacifist environment in DC.

I don't think the solution should be to impose on Quakers with heavy armaments every day. I'm rather surprised the Quakers who advocate aggressive pacifism are so hypocritical on this issue.

Ashes to Israel, business?

I started wondering the other day about having my ashes scattered in Israel. It isn't that I am old, it is that I am taking heart medications to stay alive.

In truth, I intend to be cremated by the Neptune Society, but my ashes should go to Japan and Israel. Specifically to the most crowded part of Shinjuku in Tokyo and the beaches of Tel Aviv.

When I looked up the issue of burial or ashes in Israel I found that there is a significant industry in that field. Many Jews want to be buried where their ancestors lived and were buried. Maintaining a 3000 year old tradition.

I will be cremated so all the costs of shipping a body are irrelevant. I actually have friends and clients in Israel so making business arrangements is equally irrelevant.

However, there must be a vast number of Christians for whom scattering ashes in the holy land would be appealing. I see no business oriented in that direction.

It shouldn't be difficult to set up such business. It would consist mostly of listings in relevant Christian pro-Israel media.

I have a long history of having started businesses, nearly all of which have failed. This idea is free to anyone.

Loser generation

Almost everyone I know including some of my family are members of the loser generation.

A loser is someone who believes in and has oriented his life around an idea or ideology that has failed. An idea or ideology that is flat out wrong. Such an idea or ideology was that the earth was flat, that the universe circled the earth, that scurvy could not be cured with limes, that large quantities of vitamin C can prevent cancer etc.

Today's loser is the person who doesn't realize the lesson of the 20th century.

Half of the world's population and half the world's populated area has rejected the idea and ideology that government planning can generate prosperity and avoid starvation.

Russia, India and China have all suffered from starvation and poverty while following a government policy of income equality and anti-capitalist central planning.  

These populations have come to realize that supporting commerce and helping commerce to thrive is the only way to have food abundance and a life of freedom and opportunity.  Commerce is the only means to a society where individuals get to fulfill their unique destinies.

That is the lesson that has not sunk in to the Left wing and Democratic Party of the United States.  The Left and the Democrats are still pro-income equality and anti-capitalist. They are in the last century supporting equality of income over commerce. Despite overwhelming evidence they still  wish to replace an open market in healthcare with a government mandated system. The Left is still willing to sacrifice markets, trade and commerce for illusions of harmful CO2.

Losers are all around us. Sadly.

Obese are not the majority

A short while back an old friend of mine Michael Jacobson at the Center for Pestering Americans about pseudoscience (CSPI) announced that the Cheesecake Factory has the two or three highest caloric items of any chain restaurant.

The response from the Cheesecake Factory was that they are in business to serve people not to sermonize their customers. Many of their customers put the extra food in containers to take home, others share the dishes but most importantly the Cheesecake Factory has a supplemental menu (that I always use) made up of dishes under 500 cal.

All of this is what led me to think about the way a minority is running the food industry in America with complete disregard for everyone else.

What are the facts on obesity?

Obesity is defined as a body mass index, BMI, of 30 or more. Using that definition when applied to the entire American population from age 5 on, the obese minority is less than 30% of the population.

So what does a BMI of 30 or more mean?

My personal view is heavily biased because I have always weighed between 175 and 190 and  been 5'7"to 5'8". That puts me on the borderline of obese and definitely in the category of overweight. Nonsense. I am athletic and agile and have always been comfortable with my weight. Until age 45 I could eat anything and not gain weight.

A system that defines the ordinary American adult male of 5’10” as obese when their weight is over 205 pounds has problems itself.  The average woman at 5’5” is defined as obese at 180 pounds. Heavy maybe, zaftig? possibly. Obese.. no way.

The whole point of this blog is that the food fascists who are determined to define the correct foods for America are creating their agenda with a farcical definition of obese and they are lecturing the vast majority of us, more than two thirds, on what we must eat.

There is something rather sickening from the food tyranny that we are living under these days.

U.S. productive?

I know that the current administration is very anti-commerce and is doing everything possible to screw things up, deliberately. The increase in capital gains and dividend taxes will probably have very harmful effects on our output.

The Democrats complete disinterest in international trade is a strong anti-commerce pill.

Nevertheless, unless this barren period of anti-capitalism lasts more than four years, the United States will recover.

The reason is that the United States is a uniquely productive state on the planet. On the planet. Japan has some unique innovation. Israel is second only to the United States in innovation.

The innovation in the United States is a result of the death of all our habits of heart that are listed at the top of this blog. We accept diversity in every form (many of our fools think diversity is skin color alone), we are intolerant of any system that rejects merit which is why labor unions have been shrinking for 60 years, and lastly we favor markets over government planning.  

On the planet, we are unique in having the level of diversity that we have in the United States. Part of this is because we got rid of our hereditary class which is also connected to our habit of heart in supporting meritocracy. Our greatest institutions, from Bell Labs to Google are overrun with immigrants and weirdos. That is diversity in the eyes of commerce.

Most importantly, we have on the West Coast and a few other isolated spots a very weak and inept social structure. There is very little social hierarchy and very extensive horizontal social mixing.  You will see couples on the street made-up of every combination of ethnic, social and national origin.

None of these elements are found in any other society. These elements are a source of American productivity and there is very little the anti-capitalist Democratic Party can do to destroy it on a large scale.

Chicken redemption

When I first set up housekeeping after the Army and before my first child was born, the main meats that we ate were beef, in its many forms from hamburger to brisket, and pork.

It was very rare that we ate any form of chicken or turkey. The same for fish even though I was living in San Francisco.

There has been a radical change in America's eating habits.

Today, the most common food on the table is chicken. Almost any other meat is less common and beef has become a rarity for many. (There is a current resurgence of hamberger and steak restaurants.) Turkey is also very common but I am not a fan.

This redemption of chicken has not occurred because of fat, cholesterol and heart attacks. This redemption of chicken has not occurred in the Midwest where beef and pork are still dominant on everyday tables.

Chicken has grown to its central role on the coasts because the chicken has grown significantly larger and cheaper.  Thanks to the of genius technology in animal husbandry.

Just pointing it out.  Commerce is always disruptive.

Cleft palate and commerce

A friend at coffee this morning was discussing the problems of dentistry in 1840. Any tooth pain was likely to result in an extraction using alcohol as the sedative.

Dental problems were the least of the problems of that era. Children were commonly born with cleft palates, with one leg shorter than the other or cripple.  There were many common physical problems including limited vision, scoliosis, severe pock marks on the face and a wide range of visible deformities.

What is most significant to me is that people with most of these problems were relegated to the status of outcast or at best demeaning work.

It was extremely rare, maybe one in 1000 cases, where the true qualities and virtues of these individuals were allowed to develop and shine.

It is the extraordinary genius of our commercial era that gives people the opportunity to develop their unique talents and capabilities.

It is also the fact that commercial development over the past 150 years has allowed medical technology and surgery to evolve, enter the marketplace and be available to promote the modern man.

Boeing engineers

One of my friends was the psychologist on the team of Boeing engineers that designed the 707 727 737 and 747.

He said that this team was the most extraordinary group of engineers he had met in his lifetime and was doubtful that future airplanes could have the superb engineering that he saw.

I have no idea whether his observation and prediction was accurate. I have worked on airplane engineering and I have some idea of the complexity in such extraordinary engineering feats.

I have also noticed that extraordinary engineering feats come out of very small groups of engineers who are at the top of their fields. Such as spaceship and rocket design, aircraft, computers and biotech. These fields keep changing and the brilliant people keep moving on. You don't see such genius in engineering in old fields such as railroads, public transit or even automobiles (except for the Toyota hybrid).

Certainly the complexity of an airplane system and the extraordinary stresses that an airplane encounters suggests a very high level of engineering competence. Such competence may not be widely available to any industry. Certainly no bureaucracy could build a modern airliner.

To my surprise

I published a blog (Living at ground zero) a few days ago focusing on my hypothesis that we are approaching the second Civil War.

I was surprised to find that the readers who wrote in comments had no sense of what the possible new Civil War is about.

I had better explain it.

Americans are deeply divided on several issues that are closely intertwined.

Republicans, conservatives and the Tea Party are convinced that government expansion has reached the limits at which a free commercial society can operate successfully. They, we, believe that the country has seen serious economic decline as a result of expansion of government employment, government debt and regulatory restrictions.  The economic future looks grim.

This alone would be a political division but would not generate civil war like feelings.

On top of this there is a sense that the Democratic Party and the president have absolutely no regard for constitutional limits on their power.

* The Congress already passed a health care bill that the public opposed. Congress used unprecedented manipulative tactics.

* The president never hesitated to make Labor Board appointments that the Senate opposed.

* The president has directed his regulatory agencies to vastly expand their commercial inhibiting regulations without any congressional support.

The Democratic Party is pursuing, with complete unwillingness to admit any dispute, shackles and onerous restraints on American commerce in the belief that the planet is warming at a dangerous rate caused by humans in their daily activity.

Lastly, the president and his political minions have unhesitatingly insulted the opposition party and refused any bipartisan negotiation in the interests of the country. A precedent unseen in America since 1862.

All of  this, with the exception of one media outlet, has massive media support. The vast mainstream media has condoned and enthusiastically supported most of this Leftist behavior at a time when more than half of Americans disagree.  The public hears virtually no major media criticism of the dangerous behavior they observe. This onesided argument is inflamatory.

This sense that America is being betrayed by its major institutions and by a president who represents a small part of the public is the source of one side of the civil dispute.

The other side, the Democratic Left, has felt that they are the dominant mainstream of America.  They are entirely right in their historic mission to civilize America. They are furious that there is opposition to their rational and humane goals. They vilify those who don’t believe in greater income equality and support for the under class.

That is the basis for our imminent civil dispute.  

That may be enough to bring angry guerrillas into the Castro District of San Francisco ready to fire on anyone they see.  They feel the way John Brown did in 1859 at Harpers Ferry.  You know the name John Brown because his moral outrage became the marching song of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Richard Nixon

There is an extremely sympathetic historical revision going on. Many of the great qualities of Richard Nixon are being remembered.

While I have no appetite for Pat Buchanan his praise of Richard Nixon in this article is accurate and warranted.

I knew Richard Nixon in the early 60s and worked on his campaign for governor of California. I spent many hours with him at work and late in the evening in his hotel room.

Nixon had many amazing qualities. First, many of his allies and friends were gay. He didn't notice and didn't care.

Second he worked incredibly hard for very long hours and was a genuinely warm person when you had time to sit down and talk to him about politics, the subject of his greatest interest.

He was generous with me in making suggestions and discussing issues. He was humble and loved history.  

I always found him to be exceptionally honest and concerned about the people around him.

I think that any historical revisionism that elevates Richard Nixon to the level of a 20th century great man will be fully justified.

Home technology

My girlfriend has been recently looking at some of her ancestor's biographies.

What is most striking is that the women were working in the home because there was so much work that had to be done earlier in the last century.

I set to wondering what were the main technological changes that brought women out of the home and into the commercial realm.

The washer and dryer are usually singled out as critical tools. I do not dispute that because laundry constituted a large household function usually done by women.

I would like to add to that the introduction of polyester in the late 40s early 50s because that eliminated the enormous task of ironing. I remember mangel irons which were used to iron shirts and slacks.

Lastly, there was an entire packaging revolution in the food industry that brought us frozen foods, frozen dinners and fresh fruits and vegetables from neighboring regions and countries.

The food Revolution played an important role in allowing women in the household to prepare meals quickly and efficiently.

This blog is merely to add to our history polyester and the food preservation technologies that allowed women to participate directly in the world of commerce.

Living in ground zero

In the previous blog I have suggested that we are living in a dangerous era. The president of the United States and his minions are creating the most divisive environment in our country since the last Civil War. I say the last Civil War because so much of the current administration is moving us toward a second Civil War.

If we are unable to head off this calamitous social destruction it will be warfare between the suburbs and the agricultural states versus the big cities, particularly on the coasts.

During the last Civil War there were many people on both sides who did not concur with the predominant values of the area in which they lived.  Not just the slaves in the South but a good percentage of the southern urban population did not support slavery or the Confederate efforts to protect it.  Many in the North opposed slavery but were uncomfortable freeing the slaves.

During the coming Civil War the same will be true. People like me will be living in the urban areas that will be attacked by the rural and suburban population.

As I think about this scenario, I realize that I live in ground zero. San Francisco is considered the most radical Left wing city in America even though nearby Marin, Berkeley and Santa Cruz are more extreme. Within San Francisco I live in the most perceived Lefty neighborhood.  The gay Castro district.

If such an imaginary Civil War II occurs, guerrilla squads will come to the center of the Castro and start firing on people.

The most defensive act I could take would be to put on my military clothes. When I was in the Army Reserves during the hippie era we were always assured by our officers that the military would never be used to put down civil uprisings. I think that would still be true.

I know this sounds a little paranoid, maybe very paranoid, but I say it with the intent of suggesting this as a possibility not stating it as fact.

Reading Cultural Revolution

I have been reading Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai.  It is so disturbing to me that I have to put it down regularly and come back to read more a week later.

Mrs. Cheng is a brilliant writer, an extraordinary woman of power and grace who writes about her life as the wife of a diplomat and as a plenipotentiary for Shell oil company in China before the 1966 cultural Revolution.  

Her house and belongings were ransacked, confiscated and great pieces of art were destroyed before Mrs. Cheng was imprisoned in a hellhole.

Reading the chants of the young Red Guards marching through the streets of Shanghai is alarming. Urged on by Mao Tse Tung they were chanting their hatred of capitalism and the capitalist class. They destroyed as much of the history and culture of China as they could. They promoted starvation, ignorance and hatred. These were the messages that the great Socialist Revolution was bringing to the proletariat.

Every chant every banner reminded me of the president of the United States. Our divisive president has expressed his hatred for 'hedge fund managers, Wall Street, bankers' and the entire capitalist class whom he says 'does not pay its fair share of taxes'. This president generated a filthy, smelly and incompetent protest movement (Occupy Wall Street) made up of the same young people that Mao appealled to in his anti-capitalist campaign.  Plus Obama got the homeless to join him along with every elected Democrat in the country.

It is hard to comprehend the evil that socialism and anti-capitalist hatred has generated in the world and the number of innocent people who have been tortured, mutilated and murdered in the name of this ideology. So far Americans are not being killed by this ideology.

I consider myself among the few who are working to counter this evil. The answer is pro-commerce.

Good places to launder money

A friend was speculating about two restaurants next door to each other where one was full and the other was always empty. He suggested that the empty one was laundering money.

Sorry, a restaurant is not a good business for laundering money.  The reason is simple: for every dollar of revenue that a restaurant shows on its books there must be a comparable $.75 or more in cost of goods and labor. The IRS can check those numbers easily.

Laundering money has a bad name. I am strongly in favor of legalizing laundering money.

If you make your money illegally you want some way to be able to spend it. If you buy a fancy house or several fancy cars with cash and cannot show an income source for that cash and a US tax return, you will go to jail.

If you want the fancy house and the fancy cars you must find a way to pay federal and state income tax. That is called laundering money.

The best way to launder money is to have a business where the gross revenues have little or no relationship to costs..... then pay yourself high profits and your friends very high salaries.  Such is the case for a music hall where the money can pour in the front door and the costs do not go up proportionately. 

The ideal business is one where you can have large gross revenues or capital gains with little or no expenses. Our restaurant is a terrible source of money laundering.

An art gallery is a good example for money laundering because the cost of the art cannot be known by the IRS for certain. I have told a story about this in an earlier blog. A similar example would be rebuilding a burned-out house. You pay the workers with illegal cash and the sell the finished building for capital gains. Pay your taxes. You have laundered your money.

There are many other examples but you get the idea.

Hippies and wine

I was in a restaurant last night. Every table had ordered at least one bottle of wine.

I am wondering what contributions the hippies made to this ubiquitous phenomenon.

In the early 1960s, before wine became the drink of choice for dinner, it was common to see adults with hard alcohol, beer and coffee. Wine was very rare and bottled water even more rare.  I think hippies played a role in the wine. The yuppies brought us bottled water.

While I vividly remember in the 60s that hippies drank gallon jars of cheap mountain red wine, I am not certain that this was the source of popular growth of wine with dinner.

Hippies drank mountain red wine much of the time when they were doing marijuana and often during dinner.

The problem with my memory is that by the early 1970s I had friends investing in small specialized wineries. Often buying land and growing specialized grapes. They saw the rapid growth in wine consumption. But I'm not sure that what they were watching were the hippies.

California arrogance

If you don't live in California, you are not aware of how snide and vicious Californians are toward you.

We have a gastronomic fantasy called "eat local." This means that the food that everyone eats should grown locally (within 100 miles) all year round, and served fresh from the farm.

Most gastronomic imbeciles, my friends, continue to violate this notion a dozen times a day. We do not grow good black pepper, good coffee, good tea, bananas, corn or wheat in California. Most of the year we do not grow fruits such as blueberries or cranberries in California. Most of the fruits and vegetables in our grocery stores, including whole foods, come from Mexico, Chile, Australia and other southern hemisphere countries between October and March.

When I was working with organic grocery stores in Oklahoma City in the 1970s the only fresh vegetables they had in winter were root vegetables, potatoes, beets, yams and onions. Now they have the same vast selection year-round as California when they go to Walmart.

If most of the people in the United States had to eat local foods year-round they would be eating the same foods that Abraham Lincoln ate all of his life. The same foods that Confederate soldiers were served all year long.

Environmental foodies really do want human beings to suffer and live in an imaginary past.

More climate nonsense

This is a very sad blog.  The National Atmospheric and Oceanographic institution as well as the National Weather Service are corrupt. They are as corrupt as I discovered the East Anglia global climate reporting group to be.

You will recall how offended I was to discover that the East Anglia academics were going back and changing earlier data to make it conform to their political ideology. I had some of the earlier data and could not believe my eyes as they changed the data and gave a stupid convoluted explanation of their reasons.

It now turns out that my own government is doing the same stupid convoluted political nonsense.

This all began as I looked into the statement that 2012 was the hottest year in the continental United States on record.

First of all, this disclosure was perverted because it did not include Alaska which is 17% of the landmass of the US. When Alaskan data is put back into the totals, the 2012 year was not the highest.

Second, the number that is given for the highest temperature of the past century and a half is based on an average of daily highs and lows. That is not an average. If you took the average of the tallest and shortest people to walk into a coffee shop in one day you would not have the average height of the people in that coffee shop. You would be better off averaging the height of every 10th person. Height is skewed. The year 2012 was also the year of warmer than trend nights.

Third in the very document from which the press release was compressed the statement is made that "the United States has experienced warming trend equal to .06°F per century". That is 6/100 of 1°F. Most mercury thermometers are not accurate beyond 0.9°F.  This anti-global warming fact was not included in the press release from our government agencies.

Lastly, our weather agencies are going back in history to correct the data. According to their absolutely convoluted statement they have divided the United States into a grid pattern and are creating averages for each grid. They are removing data that gives too much information for any one grid and extrapolating for any grid that lacks data.

I spent my professional lifetime looking at data and can state empirically that you have more reliable data when you don't try to create missing numbers.

One reason given for removing data is that urban areas create heat islands. Presumably urbanization increases air temperature. This may or may not be true. I looked at the data for 140 years of Salt Lake City which went from desert to sprawling city and found no change whatsoever in the temperature over that period.

What heat island has been proven?

All in all our government is dishonest with climate data and scientists and those associated with scientists are tragically corrupt bunch.

Applauding a strike

At Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes show recently there was strong audience applause that disturbed me.

Lost Landscapes is a synthesis of old film footage of San Francisco combined with many short snippets of home movies, over the past century. The audience was San Franciscans interested in the city's visual history. What we saw was only section 7 of seven completed segments so far.

What disturbed me was the audience applause for a segment of footage about a longshoreman's strike in 1938. The audience was applauding this horrible nightmare. The longshoreman's unions with their very strict work rules and overwhelming wage and benefits, completely drove the middle class, working man, out of San Francisco and created this current milieu of extreme Lefty dilettantes and trust fund heirs.

Unions have done everything possible to destroy this city. What survives and thrives here is all outside the realm of the poisonous unions. The pathetic audience, made up mostly of Internet geeks and their friends, have completely rejected unions in their own lives. While unions have destroyed the city government, the municipal Railroad and the public school system, these buffoons are applauding the very institution that they reject in their own lives.

The reason unions make such hash of everything they are involved in is because of their anti-merit system which can never be functional, imaginative, competent or alive.

Do you think I am too harsh on unions?  Or maybe not harsh enough?

Economists agree with me

The University of Chicago business school has a panel of 40 prominent economists who periodically answer questions. It is a wonderful sample of economists and gives a very reliable measure of economic thought.

Recently the panel of economists was asked whether “The federal government would make the average U.S. citizen better off by using policies that directly focus more on increasing small business growth than growth of economic output overall.”  The answer was: 73% said ‘no’.

I would also say emphatically ‘no’.  I have worked with well over 1000 small businesses.

The problem is that there is nothing in particular in federal government policy that stands in the way of successful a small business. Individual locales have very hostile policies toward small business and many zoning regulations are detrimental to small business but these are not federal issues.

Most small business people do not pay federal taxes on their income until the business is successful. So federal taxation is not automatically a problem.

Regulations are a perennial problem for small businesses but the main issue is that the small business doesn't have the time, resources or professional services to cope with these regulations that larger businesses can afford. It is hard to identify all of these regulations, tens of thousands, and modify them for small business.

The national associations of small businesses are a farce. So are small business lending and support organizations inside the federal government.

I would hate to see any of these absurd bureaucracies used as advisors on small business issues.

In summary, the federal government cannot do anything to help small businesses. Anything that could be done would help all commerce to thrive and that is a tall order of business.

What helps commerce thrive is the subject of this blog. Major issues concern expanding international trade, reducing the power of unions and standardizing many commerce related legal issues across the entire American continent.

Two good tests

We are living through two important commercial tests. One just passed.

The first test was of the hypothesis that the stock market effectively discounts future news.

Since the election of Barack Obama it has been clear that January 1 constituted a significant date for the stock market. The fiscal cliff would have meant a serious and almost certain recession.

The price of the stock market should have reflected the anxiety about the fiscal cliff and after the cliff issue was largely resolved the stock market should again have reflected the relief from the uncertainty.

We now know that the stock market does not discount future news. It showed virtually no change before January 1. There was no greater volatility there was no greater upward or downward movement than for the previous 9 1/2 months. After the January 1 fiscal cliff issue was resolved the market only went up a few percentage points.

The stock market does not discount future news.

We are now living in the second test.

United States has dramatically increased the taxes on dividends and capital gains. Dramatically.  This should result in a change of investment behavior in the United States. There should be a decline of some types of investment and  a movement to other types of investments. We shall see.

There was also an increase in the income tax rates. It will be harder to determine the extent of this effect on our society but it is also a test and we shall see the effects over a few years, particularly in states where the federal rate is added on to a high state rate.

Fun? Not if you have to pay more taxes and can’t figure out how to avoid it.