Pro Commerce

Beef bowl

The following excerpt was in a story in the Thursday 22nd Wall Street Journal: "Yoshinoya D&C Co., Japan's largest chain serving sliced beef over a bowl of rice, is one of U.S. beef's most outspoken supporters. Days after last month's discovery of the sick cow in Washington state, the 1,200-outlet chain held a news conference declaring that almost all of its beef is American, and that it will continue serving U.S. beef in Japan. Beef from Australia or Japan just doesn't taste as good in its "beef bowls," which cost a modest $2.60 per helping, the company says. So if the import ban continues and its beef supply runs out -- probably in the next few weeks -- it says it will have no choice but to stop selling its flagship beef bowls altogether.

"Switching to non-American beef "would just end up damaging our brand," declares Hisashi Ikegami, managing director at Yoshinoya. Grain-fed cows from the U.S. create just the right marbling in beef that is suitable for the restaurant's special soy and ginger sauce, the company says. While Australia has reported no cases of mad-cow disease, the company claims that grass-fed Australian cows have tougher meat that turns an unappetizing yellowish color when marinated in its sauce. The company serves U.S. beef in its 82 outlets in the U.S."

My relation to this story is that I eat at almost any Yoshinoya in sight in Tokyo if it is near lunch time. My favorite is next door to the Yoshinoya training center in Shinjuku.

Don't eat there

Possibly the worst meal in San Francisco. I ate at Kyoya three years ago and rated it the best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco. Now it is the worst of many kinds of restaurant.

Why do I say that? The service was bad. The waitperson went to two tables to hand out menus and take orders before she came to our four person table. We were seated before the other two tables. Everything she did was indifferent or inattentive. Of the four dishes, all were cold. Cold tempura tastes pretty bad, as does cold pork cutlet. The one dish that was too hard to eat, the salmon, we tried to send back. Had trouble getting anyone's attention. Finally got the maitre di who didn't know what to do. Got the waitress who took the plate back. A half hour later the salmon was returned, only a little better.

The kicker was that one of us ordered the January Fine Dining special which is $19 at all fine dining participating restaurants. Fraud. Nearly all the Kyoya dishes are under $19. So to raise the price they added $.20 worth of salad and $.25 worth of green tea ice cream.

I asked and was told the restaurant is now run by the Sheraton Palace Hotel that owns the location. The old Kyoya failed. The other good Japanese restaurant in North Beach failed five years ago even though the Japanese consulate did everything they could to support it.

Is the Castro Coffee nuts?

A very sweet and attractive young woman (Trina) spent four months and plenty of money getting Health and Fire department approval to open her mobile coffee shop on the back edge of the Chevron station in the heart of the Castro District. She was told by the Zoning department there should be no problem on the corner of Market, Castro and 17th.

Wrong. The neighborhood anti-coffee valkyries let her stay open two weeks and told the zoning police to shut her down. I read the arcane notice they sent her. Unintelligible except for the "close down", you have 15 days to appeal.

This isn't the first time. The local petty-bourgousie fought ferociously against Starbucks who outsmarted them by buying an existing Pasqua coffee shop. The anti-coffee valkyries have kept all but two tiny outlets from selling coffee. They were so powerful and perverse that they kept the new Fuzio's restaurant from even selling coffee, about six years ago, when Fuzio's opened. I ate lunch there yesterday and they still aren't allowed to sell coffee.

I don't actually know the lunatics involved in this anti-coffee assault but I know they are local merchants. Conviviality and community are something they hate.

Radio interviewing

The last blog made me think about Michael Krasny, a local San Francisco public radio interviewer and about Terry Gross. Both have been on the air for more than fifteen years, virtually 200 days a year.

What I've noticed is that neither of them seems to learn from their interviews. What they hear from the interviewee doesn't seem to sink in. They aren't learning.

The evidence comes when I've heard the second or third person on the same subject over a two year period and Michael and Terry ask the same questions and ignore the answers they learned from earlier shows. For example: Terry has been chewed out twice for observing that the women's rights movement started in the early 1960s. She was told by Germain Greer that she was wrong, but two years later, she observed the same thing and was corrected again.

Maybe it is a quality of a good interviewer to never learn, just interview each guest with a fresh innocence.

Social Thought transcripts

During the late 1980s and the early 1990s I produced a half hour public radio program called Social Thought. There are over two hundred very interesting programs. I never got a large and responsive audience, even though I was carried by 90 stations plus Armed Forces Radio.

I have been thinking about putting the best of the tapes, probably 180 of them, in MP3 format. I will do that when satellite radio becomes widely available and the size of the audience will justify such an arcane program.

At the urging of a friend, in the meantime, I have made a list of the 21 transcripts of the Social Thought tapes that are available. The transcripts range from Joyce Appleby to Laura Nader to Aaron Wildavsky.

Ruth Kadish

About three years ago the San Francisco Airport Commission put the following note in their minutes:
"Mr. John Martin, Airport Director said that Ruth Kadish was the first woman to be appointed to the Airport Commission, serving from 1976 to 1984. She was President from 1979 to 1980. She played a lead role in establishing the Airport's Exhibition Program which became a model for airports around the world."

There is only one error in this entry. Ruth Kadish didn't play a lead role in establishing the program; the program was 100% Ruth's idea and she fought very hard against overwhelming odds to create the airport arts program.

What Ruth created was an entire terminal wing that has its own art director and a rotating show. What Ruth Kadish invented was the most seen art gallery on the planet, with millions of visitors every year. That is why Ruth's idea was copied all over the world and is the envy of gallery administrators everywhere.

Ruth is a forty-year-friend of mine. The concourse art gallery is one of her many contributions to the world; she made dozens more and is still making them.

A lesson in taxes

Dan Weintraub (a favorite columnist of mine) published some numbers in The Sacramento Bee January 18th. The numbers are startling and teach a lesson that few of the relevant people will learn.

In 2000 there were 44,000 Californians who reported earning over $1 million. Their total reported earnings were $172 billion and they paid State taxes of $15 billion.

In 2001 the numbers shrunk. There were 29,000 Californians who reported earning over $1 million. Their total reported earnings were $95 billion and they paid State taxes of $8 billion.

In 2002 the numbers shrunk still further. There were 25,000 Californians who reported earning over $1 million. Their total reported earnings were $75 billion and they paid State taxes of $6 billion.

You've heard about the large deficit California is facing and the fact that we recalled Governor Davis less than six months after he was elected to a second term. Governor Davis and the Democrat controlled legislature had spent all the money that came in in 2000 and didn't cut back spending as the revenues fell.

Our new governor has put a measure on the March ballot that is intended to keep this type of "spend whatever you get" from happening again. We know that cutting back government spending hurts vulnerable people.

What is the lesson that few of the relevant people will not learn? When the rich thrive, we all benefit. The people who won't learn this lesson are the class-warfare-Democrats.

The new governor has also focused his policy platform on creating more rich tax payers in California.

San Francisco vignette

I ride the 33 Stanyan Bus which goes from San Francisco General Hospital, in the heart of the blue collar Mission district, across the city at mid-latitudes, through the gay Castro district, over high income Twin Peaks and then north through the Haight Ashbury to California Pacific Medical Center near the rich Presidio neighborhood. From poor to rich and back; crossing the Bart system that goes to most of the Bay Area.

There is an ethnic pattern to the 33 bus. Latinas commute to jobs as household workers on Twin Peaks. Philippinas commute to jobs in the hospitals at both ends. White men and (a few) women in suits go from Twin Peaks to jobs downtown and take Bart out of the city.

Explain the deficit issue

My earlier blog about the MoveOn commercial on the Super Bowl and the crummy economics underlying the spot has generated several questions. The following is my ineffectual response:

It is surprising that the inability of the Federal government to pass on a deficit is not easily understood, even though it is technically required of nearly all college graduates.

My live-in partner didn't know it and could barely understand my explanation. That may be because I taught econ.

I'll try again. The deficit of the Federal government is a transfer payment, just like social security.

Nearly two trillion was collected in taxes last year and more than two trillion was spent by the federal government. The difference between the two numbers was actually a third-of-a-trillion dollars; the deficit. The third-of-a-trillion was financed by increasing the outstanding amount of government bonds from 2.9 trillion to 3.1 trillion, an increase of two-tenths of a trillion dollars. The additional bonds were bought by pensions, money market funds and insurance companies; all with our money. (That's why it is a transfer payment).

The interest we pay on this total debt of 3.1 trillion dollars is about 7% of the federal government receipts. The current Bush deficit has increased this interest amount by seven-tenths-of-one percent. Less than a penny per tax dollar collected.

When 7% of our taxes are going to interest on the national debt it is not alarming to me. The highest in my lifetime was 1996 when interest on the national debt was 17% of total taxes collected. That did crimp our spending style.

Because this is the federal government, the only level of government that cannot pass on debt to future generations, you can see that the amount of interest that is paid on the debt is not related to any deficit, it is related much more to market interest rates. A fall of interest rates from the current 4.1% to 3.9% would mean we pay nothing for Bush's 2003 deficit. A rise of interest rates to 4.6% would mean we pay one percent more of our national budget on interest for all current and past deficits.

Fundamentally, the interest rate in the bond market determines what we pay for all the past debts or deficits since the founding of the nation 215 years ago. It has little or nothing to do with the amount of the debts in any period or any administration.

Our country is so wealthy and growing so fast that past debts and deficits disappear into insignificance. The current deficit is larger than the total federal budget in the year (1978) that the Sony Walkman was introduced, Annie Hall won best movie and the Eagles got the Grammy for Hotel California.

Worse than all that, the government never really has to sell bonds to pay for a deficit. It can inflate the currency (that is basically what happens if the government doesn't issue bonds).

I demanded that my students understand what I just said. Obviously it doesn't make much sense. But all economists agree on it.

Lakisha?

Why do American blacks often give their children ebonic names? Names like Lakisha and Jamal.

We have two studies relating to the matter. Both studies were published by a group that gets 100% of my respect, the NBER. One, was written by Fryers and Leavitt. Leavitt also gets 100% of my respect based on superb previous economic research. The title of the first study is: The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names. The second, a paper by other writers, is entitled Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?.

The first study shows that ebonic names do not result in different earnings over the thirty-year lifespan of the names in the study. The second study shows that employers, given ebonic names on resumes, will discriminate against ebonic names. The two studies are not contradictory because resumes are not the essential ingredient in earnings for blacks in the labor market.

My question is why use ebonic names at all, a practice that began about 1970?

My answer is based on my experience with hippies and Hasidim. The hippies used names like Starchild and Moonbeam. Hasidim use names like Israel and Abimellech.

Child naming has little to do with the actual child. It has to do with the parents’ view of the world and the future of the world. There seem to be three components: a desire for the parents to use the child’s name to secure the parent’s membership in an identity group. When your child is named Starchild, you are a hippy. When your child’s name is Lakisha, you are showing pride in being black.

Second, you are expressing a defiance of the mainstream. You are fully aware that a name is like a tattoo and you are defiantly standing by your decision to use the name.

Third, you believe that your identity group has a long and vigorous future. You are certain enough of your identity group’s future that you are raising your child to be a member of it.

The third reason is good news for those of us who worked in the civil rights movement. The more Lakishas and Jamals the more evidence that blacks are positively viewing their futures. As they actually succeed, they will assimilate and the child naming will become more conventional.

Move On

A friend sent an email urging me: “To watch the ad that CBS won't air and sign the petition to CBS to run these ads ….:http://www.moveon.org/cbs/ad/.The ad, by MoveOn, was intended for the Super Bowl.

I looked at the ad. It is about children working in industrial jobs with a tag line saying that George Bush’s tax deficits will cause this to happen.

The ad is based on a piece of economic nonsense. That future generations bear the burden of current federal deficits. Econ. 101 explains the issue. I do not bear the burden of any past federal deficits. The interest payments on the National Debt go to current bondholders. I have plenty of bonds in my name in money market funds, insurance and pensions. The current bonds pay the current me and others. No administration in the past has passed on their deficits to anyone. The government can't borrow from the future.

Moreover, running an ad based on economic nonsense does not contribute to democratic dialog. We don’t need any more malice than we already have. I thank CBS for censoring nonsense. Consumer fraud is objectionable and so is this policy fraud.

Then there is the issue of streaking, running naked in front of a crowd. Streaking is done presumably for attention and ego. The streaker is supposed to be brave, trying to outrun the censorious security force.

My guess is that 98% of the Super Bowl viewers are in total disagreement with MoveOn.org, a group of moderate Troskyites. Running the MovOn ad on the Super Bowl is allowing MoveOn to be political streakers. CBS can decide whether political streakers add to the game or detract. That is their call.

I won, We won

Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility that serves Northern California, awarded its top seventeen executives $83 million in bonuses, December 31st, for having stayed with the company during a three year bankruptcy process.

The executives had been awarded $22 million early in the proceedings to, presumably, induce them to stay during the bankruptcy proceedings. ( A reasonable person might ask "What other company would try to hire away an executive who drove a company into bankruptcy in the first place?"

I was personally outraged at this most recent $83 million surprise announcement. I had given expert testimony in June, last year, when the same company was requesting an increase in gas and electric rates, that this company (PG&E) was hiding data about their executive compensation. The company vehemently, under oath, denied my testimony.

So I wrote and filed a new declaration, a few weeks ago, repeating my charge that PG&E had hidden the relevant data on their executive compensation. I considered this grounds for re-opening the gas and electric rate case.

The regulatory body, California Public Utility Commission, on the basis of my filing, has agreed to re-open the hearings that relate to the ridiculous and secret $83 million executive bonus award.

Robert Rubin

There is a quote from Robert Rubin that impressed me.

“As I think back over the years, I have been guided by four principles for decision making. First, the only certainty is that there is no certainty. Second, every decision, as a consequence, is a matter of weighing probabilities. Third, despite uncertainty we must decide and we must act. And lastly, we need to judge decisions not only on the results, but on how they were made.”

This quote is in a book by Derrick Niederman and David Boyum, What the Numbers Say; Broadway Books 2003. The book is excellent at helping readers to think quantitatively.

Unfortunately I don’t think quantitative thinking can be taught. I was a teaching assistant in college in statistics, but didn’t learn how to love numbers and probability until I worked five days a week in marketing research for many years. Then I loved it, and still do. It is the way my mind works now. Give me numbers first. If you don’t, I will create my own numbers.

My reading of the Rubin quote is that a probabilistic view of the world is necessary for effective people of action. We must review all our decisions to see where they went right or wrong and how we can revise our view of the world to accommodate our experience.

Wealthy Simple Liver

I have recently encountered a rich recent widow, who is anxious about her money. She didn't ask me for financial advice as people have been doing for decades. Thank goodness. Many people know that I ran a multi-million dollar portfolio for Glide Methodist Church from 1971 to 1982 and earned a net annual return over 20% per year.

Giving advice on investment has always been impossible for me because I believe the advisor has a moral responsibility for the certain investment failures that will occur. One out of three investors, over several decades, will be better off putting their money in a savings account. Most advisors ignore their responsibility for the failures that come from their advice.

The main problem with spouses or heirs who didn't earn the money in the first place, is terrible anxiety about losing their money.

I realized that there is a reasonable course for my anxious widow and others in a similar position. One, pay off the house or buy a condo if you aren't good at home repairs. Two, buy enough long term bonds, including inflation adjusted government bonds, to generate sufficient interest pay-outs to cover all housing costs and enough to live on. Three, invest the rest any way that seems interesting.

Then do number four: Live as simply as possible and put the savings back into your investment portfolio. You will never have to worry, your anxiety will go away in a short time and you will be happier as a simple liver.

I wrote a book called Simple Living Investments for Old Age (from Amazon) which is about other aspects of simple living.

Bariatric

This is a word used in hospital settings. It refers to people who are grossly overweight. People who need four male nurses to lift them on to a gurney.

Bariatric comes from the bar in barometer. Weight. It is an increasing physical problem for medical workers everywhere in America.

America divided?

“America is a divided nation!” “George Bush has divided the country!” I hear and see statements like this regularly on radio and in newspapers.

The United States is not a divided country. We are more unified than at anytime in the past forty years.

Two things are needed to understand why we are more unified than anytime in the past forty years. One is an understanding of survey research and the other is the factual data in Alan Wolfe’s, One Nation After All, Viking Press, 1998.

I’ve been a survey researcher for nearly forty years. I’ve done many long open-ended interviews. I’ve also designed hundreds of structured questionnaires and pre-tested them. Virtually no item about which you can ask a question has a simple answer. All answers are on a long and complex continuum.

I once ran a standard monthly survey of branch service quality for Bank of America. We had hundreds of thousands of responses per month. Every once in awhile I would wake up in the morning and wonder if people were reading the one page questionnaire with a different meaning than I intended. Did some people reverse the meaning of “bank” and “branch”? I would cross-tab answers and I always found tens of thousands of people who were answering a different question than I was probing for.

Think about it. If the data says 60% of people prefer chocolate and 40% prefer vanilla when forced to choose, does that tell you that people are divided on this taste issue? No. There are other popular flavors, there are changes of taste based on the temperature and the setting; there is context; a fancy restaurant offering sorbet or a county fair. And, plenty of people like both chocolate and vanilla equally. There is a complex continuum of answers to the simplest question.

Alan Wolfe did hundreds of long open-ended interviews with a well-selected sample of Americans. We are a unified people. In 1998, most people believed in a god who was largely a “higher power.” We went to church for our children’s edification. We want immigration but we want immigrants to assimilate. We are accepting of gay friends but gay marriage doesn’t make sense to us. We don’t want people to be on welfare but we believe in supporting select needy people. On dozens of traditional and moral issues we are in stunning agreement.

Since 9/11, I would say we are even more unified than we were in 1998. I think that this is highly visible in recent elections and will continue to be.

Good riddance Gephardt

Hate monger: From 1979 to 1991 Dick Gephardt ran a Japan-bashing campaign every January thru March. 1991 was the last year, but not by Gephardt's choice. He couldn't do it in January 1992 because opinion polls in Japan indicated the electorate was about to vote out the LD Party that was loyal to America. Gephardt would have made things worse. Neverthelss, the LDP had ruled for 40 years and lost that year. By 1992 the U.S. had a new president who wouldn't allow the bashing and by 1994 the Republicans gained control of Congress and Gephardt was a nobody.

Hypocrite: Among Gephardt's Japan-bashing demands were that Japan accept American cigarettes, American caustic soda plants on the Japanese coastline, and gas-guzzling Cadillacs. This is the same man who demanded that all free trade agreements include strong environmental protection sections.

What's with Parmalat?

Parmalat is the same story as Vivendi. The European scam.

Take a cash cow and clothe it with Pradas and Armanis. Parmalat really was a cow, an Italian dairy company. Vivendi was a French water/sewer company. Use the cash cow, add fancy clothes, aristocratic airs and fast talk by top management to get bankers and financiers to think you are on a successful acquisition spree. Jiggle the books by a few billion Euros and become the European version of America's Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and a few others.

Part of this story is to snicker at the Europeans who are so perennially snooty about Americans. At least Enron and WorldCom were hi-tech scams.

HP gets its due

HP deserves credit for good recourse. I have been a fanatic about good recourse for thirty years. Long time readers of this blog will remember several battles I've described to get decent recourse. So credit is due to HP.

I found that my old HP scanner (4470) doesn't work on my new Mac OS 10 system. I checked the website which says there is no upgrade and there never will be. I emailed HP. A machine emailed back saying I would get a phone call.

HP phoned and Jason told me they were sending a new model scanner (rebuilt 4670) with warranty and asked me to send the old one back.

The rule of thumb is that an angry customer tells ten people and a happy customer tells three. I hope this blog changes that ratio. "HP, you deserve a medal for first rate recourse."

Is San Francisco Dead?

Jan Morris on San Francisco in the recent Financial Times talking about an anti-America demonstration: "...somehow the event lacked flair. It was as though San Francisco were trying to reprise old songs, remembering the words well enough, but not getting the melodies quite right.

"Whatever the cause, whether it be circumstantial or temperamental, historical or environmental, I agree with that old wisecrack. Behind the beauty of this city there does lie, to my mind, something flat and pallid, even empty. It glows - God how it glows at sunset, when the shadows meet the sea! - but it no longer flames."

Morris's position, that San Francisco is dead or dying, is going to be a regular reprise of this blog. I seriously wonder about the issue myself.

(I love the photo above because it is a fantasy montage, just like the romantic image of the City.)

In the past two weeks I have met three middle-class friends who work out-of-town, have a house or apartment in San Francisco, and come here for weekends. This is anecdotal evidence that we have become, as one of them calls it, "an amusement park" -- a tourist toyland with homeless beggars.

This city has definitely become "precious" like Carmel. San Francisco is precious in our own way, sentimental about our beloved homeless, melancholy about the old anti-Vietnam War protests and downright preservationist about any building that has no business viability.

The politics of this precious city are effectively destroying commerce in the name of protecting the poor and vulnerable.

Unfortunately commerce doesn't see the world in the same way Lefty Fundamentalists do. Requiring a minimum wage of $9 and health insurance for domestic partners for all businesses with City contracts doesn't make San Francisco an appealing business town. Suing Bank of America over half a percent interest rate on a City bank account drove Bank of America to North Carolina (ask former CEO David Coulter who made the decision). Imposing a $8.75 minimum wage on all San Francisco businesses (19,000 are affected) is not hospitable.

Not surprisingly, thousands of the lowest paid workers are losing their jobs. The good intentions of the Lefties are only hurting the most vulnerable people and the future of the middle-class that remain in the city.

What went wrong?

What went wrong in San Francisco.

San Francisco was built by railroad and construction barons 140 years ago. They ran the town until 1980 when the only remaining railroad company, Southern Pacific, dissolved into a land company based in Chicago. Bechtel, the only remaining giant construction company, became global in the same year and lost interest in the local scene. There was no power elite left.

During the same 140 years the other early settlers to San Francisco, the lost gold-rush-souls whose politics was anarcho-syndicalism, were always controlled with a velvet glove by the railroad/construction power elite. The railroad/construction political control was usually sub-rosa, except during the 1930s union general strikes when brute power was used publicly.

The anarcho-syndicalists would have gained control in 1980, when the power elite evaporated, except that the murder of City Hall by Dan White, a district-elected City Councilman, terrified the citizenry. The voters got rid of the district elections. For the 15 years from 1980 to 1995, the city had no poltical cap on the loonies, and no district elections, just a frightened citizenry.

The fear wore off, and today, with district-elections back in place, we are governed by the romantic-sentimental vestiges of the anarcho-syndicalists. For 140 years they have hated commerce.

History of industry

I was looking through the summer files that I wrote in Tokyo. One of the striking pictures in the file was the image on the right. This product is a health drink and the poster was in a subway. I think that the Japanese have a metaphoric relationship between health and fish that we don't know about. But it is still a cute image to us Americans.

The second image is more relevant. It is the reason I was looking through my files. I wrote a draft history of industrial commerce and I wanted to work on it in the next few months. I'll let you look at the draft for two reasons. One, it is a good excuse to show you the image on the right. These are Japanese middle school students working in a school-owned rice field, in the middle of Tokyo. Training in rice field maintenance is considered by the Japanese to be like Brits' view of training in sports: it is a fundamental, pre-management skill tool.

In my history of industrial commerce, I find rice field and similar maintenance practices to be the root of management skills that later lead to industrial structures.

Two, the reason I'm willing to make public a draft version of an historical piece is that I realized that I'm not an historian but that may make me a more appropriate person to write history. The prominent historians: Edwa,rd Gibbon, R. H. Tawney, Arnold Toynbee, Eric Hobswain, Ferdinand Braudel, and Howard Zinn were all ideologs. The last three were outrageous ideologs of the Marxist persuasion.

I don't have to compare myself with any of these men, most of whom wrote thousands of pages to prove their pre-conceived politics. Their value to us is that they dug up new material.

The great historical accomplishment of our day is Jonathan Israel, an American, who learned Dutch and has, with his language skills, created a vital resource base for historians.

Guilt by Association

Guilt by association has a bad name because it was an epithet that old style left liberals threw at Senator Joe McCarthy for clustering a group of people together who had only met at a party or lecture. Of course many people were guilty because their association was a working association. For others the association was a passing event.

There is a potential new meaning on the horizon where association means correlation and a unique connection. The following paragraph makes the point. It comes from Daniel Henninger's column in the Jan.16, 2004 Wall street Journal.

Henninger is talking about former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's new book. O'Neill was trying to distance himself from the book on TV. Henninger explains why O'Neill should distance himself:

"Amazon.com's remarkable software has the ability to herd together like-minded readers and point them at each other. It reveals that the book Mr. O'Neill says isn't his is being bought by people who've also purchased "The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception" by David Corn; "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth" by Joe Conason; "The Clinton Wars" by Sidney Blumenthal; and "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush" by Kevin Phillips. Among the multitude of apparently unanticipated consequences Mr. O'Neill is just now discovering, falling in among this group must be the one that hurts the most."

If you missed the point, O'Neill's book is being bought by people in the Hate Bush crowd, implicating O'Neill's book as a Hate Bush tirade.

I checked my own books and they are correlated on Amazon with other books that I consider "reasonable". Creating a new category reasonable by association

Governor's victory lap

Our new Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, can take a victory lap.

He has done, or set in motion, everything he promised the electorate. He has done it in roughly two months. Awesome.

I am not an expert in elective politics, my experience is limited. I was a legislative aide in Sacramento, I've run several campaigns and worked on many others. I founded a group called Research in Politics and did political surveys for twenty years.

My observation is that Arnold delivered on his promise to eliminate the California Car tax (for want of a better name), and presented a budget that doesn't raise taxes. He set a deadline for the legislature to reform the odious Workers Compensation system.

What will happen is that the Governor must campaign for a bond measure on the ballot in March that will assure the "no new taxes" pledge. A victory on the bond measure will guarantee that the legislature will pass the Workers Compensation reform that he demanded and the legislature will give him the budget he wants by mid-summer.

Our governor is virtually free to do what he wants. Campaign, shmooze, charm the electorate, help elect President Bush. He is free to have fun. He will probably do something to let history record him as a great man.

Free Trade debate

Paul Craig Roberts has raised, an interesting question: does free trade theory fall apart when capital flows freely internationally and laborers in another country can be direct employees via the phone and the Internet?

The main source of free trade theory in economics comes from David Ricardo who developed the idea of comparative advantage. I was once an economist and I would have to answer that Roberts is right, Ricardo's model doesn't work anymore.

I am no longer an economist. I now view the world as a commercial researcher. Commerce doesn't have a theory.

My view is that free trade is good, based on the evidence. The primary evidence is that commerce is a positive sum game. We don't see any country gaining at the expense of another. The worst we see is that one country's growth may be relatively slower while other countries get richer under free trade. I have friends all over the world so it easy for me to view their improved circumstances with delight.

My second observation is that industrial commerce is continually lowering costs. The consequence is that in a market that is very broad, say the world, the people who raise their productivity, maintain their incomes while finding their costs going down. That means we see rising income where productivity is rising.

Economics has to deal with two ridiculous variables: (x) and (t). Different economists use different letters. (x) is technology and (t) is human capital, usually meaning education in its broadest sense. Neither (x) nor (t) are measurable directly, they are residuals left over in the equation that shows capital steady and income growing.

I don't have to worry about measuring technology or education. Technology is an intimate part of commerce and its primary function is to lower cost. Technology is ubiquitous. It spreads as fast as it can. So technological development benefits everyone by lowering everyones costs.

Education is nearly the opposite of technology, it is localized. Education doesn't spread readily and is it highly correlated with national boundaries.

Education seems to be the ground work for technology. It benefits commerce but the best education doesn't automatically improve the conditions of commerce.

The major element that determines national productivity and consequently national wealth is outside the domain of economics. Commerce thrives where commerce is most appreciated, most encouraged and experiences the least restraint.

Free trade fits into this picture because it reduces the restraint on commerce.

Business Zen founder dies

A close and wonderful friend of mine died a few weeks ago. I wish to commemorate Angel Stoyanof on this site because of his contribution to business zen.

Angel may have been the inventor of business zen but he never took credit for it.

Angel and I have served on the Board of Greens Restaurant for several years. Greens' largest shareholder is San Francisco Zen Center.

Angel's teaching was straight forward. When fellow board members and staff got embroiled in personnel issues, emotional positions, moral questions or incidental subjects, Angel would always remind us to "just pay attention to business."

Zen teaches us to pay attention to washing dishes when we are washing dishes, to pay attention to pouring tea when we are pouring tea. Angel taught us a new lesson.

My understanding of Angel's teaching is: Business is an empirical tool for perceiving the world, just as our six senses, just as science and technology are. Zen teaches us to use all six senses to focus on the immediate world we are living in. Total focus is the most we can hope to comprehend. When we pay attention to business, that means we focus on the financial issues, we focus on customers and we focus on costs.

That is the most we can hope to comprehend.

Enforce the 1st Amendment

How can we get someone to sue a public university for violation of the 1st Amendment?

The Constitutional issue is that Lefty Fundamentalist are openly and aggressively teaching their religion in classrooms.

The main fact is easy to establish. Public universities have openly-confessed Lefty Fundamentalists on their faculties. These people preach, daily in thousands of classrooms, from a proud and explicit Lefty Fundamentalist position.

The legal issue that needs to be established in court is that Lefty Fundamentalism is a religion in the Common Law meaning of the term religion.

I would start my argument with statements from a dozen prominent intellectuals over that past fifty years who identify the strong Lefty position as secular religion.

I would then present a group of expert witnesses on psychology to testify that the chorus of Lefty Fundamentalist are displaying religious fanaticism when they say "President Bush is stupid" "President Bush is evil," "This administration is a conspiracy to make rich people richer," "We have class warfare in America", "Anything an American administration run by Republicans does, is wrong".

I would bring in survey research expert witnesses to testify that millions of Lefty Fundamentalists hold to a strict catechism of more than a dozen theological tenets. Examples of such religious tenets are: equality of income is a human ideal; global commerce is exploitive of workers; people would not be poor if they were given enough financial assistance; and corporations are generally malevolent.

My final argument would rest on a presentation of a video of Senator Paul Wellstone's funeral. It was a slam dunk secular religious event celebrating Lefty Fundamentalism.

Can we put together a 1st Amendment lawsuit?

Long Range Planning

The Denver airport is roughly 30 miles from the city, more from downtown.

The explanation for this distance is long range planning.

In the 1960s when the airport was conceived, the plan was to make Denver Airport a western hub for supersonic aircraft (Concorde). The plan was for supersonic planes from Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan to land at the Denver airport far from residential areas where the noise would not be a problem. Then Denver would serve as the jumping off point for flights to Los Angeles, San Francisco and the mid-west.

This suggests that long range planning, over a thirty year period, has some problems.

More on Noe Valley

I wrote a blog about the closing of the Noe Valley Organic grocery. Last night I walked down the street and found that five stores on the same side of the block have closed in the past three months.

I can't assume that all the stores closed as a direct consequence of the closing of the grocery. But I can be confident that the decline in foot traffic would have pushed a weak business over the edge into the abyss of failure.

(This comes at a time, year end, when the California Workers Compensation Insurance is about to rise 30-45% in one year. Before the rise in rates, the California Workers Comp insurance was already the highest in the nation. Every business must have this insurance. Businesses are failing fast as a result of the high cost. Our recalled Gov. Davis shucked an' jived about reform of Workers Compensation. Fortunately, Gov. Arnold will do his best to actually fix it.)

I'm not surprised that Lefty Fundamentalist attitudes toward business, in Sacramento and Noe Valley are bad for business.

Commerce is both resilient and fragile. Businesses will come back to Noe Valley, commerce is resilient. Any one business is a fragile enterprise and easily destroyed by a multitude of cumulative minor forces. Especially a decline in foot traffic or a change in the magnet stores in the surroundings.

Noe Valley is a neighborhood that fought against a cellphone antenna on top of a community church. The only church that supports local artists. The church had planned to use the monthly antenna fees to support the arts. This is the neighborhood that fought ferociously against Starbucks and Walgreens. Time has shown them both to be major neighborhood attractions.

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My blog on sex talk by characters in Sex in the City has drawn much comment. I was wrong. It turns out, from the written responses and the many young friends I finally queried, that raunchy talk is fairly common among real women in their twenties.

San Francisco Vision

The photo is an apartment building in North Beach, San Francisco. The lower left window has a woman hanging out her laundry. The lower right window is open and has a chicken in a cage, getting morning fresh air. There are three interesting elements.

One reflects the benefit of ethnic ghettoes and another being in San Francisco. This building is now in a predominantly Chinese neighborhood (forty years ago it was an Italian neighborhood and the neighborhood association couldn’t stop it from changing). The Chinese neighbors don't phone the health inspector to complain about the chicken.

Second, San Francisco is friendly to diversity (relatively speaking, since I know the history of Chinese in San Francisco). A few years ago the animal protectionists demanded that live animals be forbidden for sale in Chinatown. They got laughed at. The Chinese are not subject to harrassment because of their cultural practices.

Third, the woman in the photo is hanging out a few pair of woman’s underpants. They are often in these windows. I have no idea what this is about.

In the whole country of Japan, over thirty years, where people customarily hang out their clothes in the sun, I have never seen woman’s underwear. I consider the Japanese the most sexually active people on the planet. Maybe they are more sensitive to the visual properties of underwear. Come to think of it, Japan is the only place I’ve seen used woman’s underpants for sale. (Used man’s underclothes are for sale in the Castro District).

Spam, Salmon and NY Review

* In an earlier blog I suggested that new anti-spam laws might reduce spam by 10%. I see no reduction as of now.

* The Environmental Working Group came out today with an hysterical claim that farmed salmon was so filled with toxins that we should only eat one meal of farmed salmon per month. I eat about eight meals of salmon a month. The FDA explained the problem with the EWG study. They tested the salmon in raw fish with the skin on. Sushi chefs don't use farmed salmon and I personally don't eat the skin of my favorite Chilean farmed salmon nor do I eat it raw.

The EWG had a plus in my book until this hysterical press release. Last thing they did was to put up a website that listed farm subsidy payments by recipients zip codes. In my zip code, in the heart of San Francisco on the side of Twin Peaks, there were 13 people receiving farm subsidies worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Their website embarrassed the Senate but a bigger farm subsidy bill passed easily.

* An earlier December 7th blog was a strong letter cancelling my subscription to the New York Review of Books. The refund check came today. Fast work on their part. Potent letter from me.