Pro Commerce

Not really statistics, its survey design

I often attribute the nature of my interest in data to my extensive background in statistics but the reality may be very different.

I had a mild cold and didn't want to pass it on.  So I thought about how easy it would be do do survey research to find out about the statistical reality of the communicability of colds. 

What I realized is that my bias toward data is really a bias toward survey design.  On the issue of measuring the contagiousness of colds I immediately designed a survey structure to get reliable answers to the question of when do you show the first symptoms of a cold and when are you contagious.

I looked at the CDC website on the issue and found that there are 200 viruses associated with the common cold and 35% are one family of rhinoviruses.  Symptoms occur 1 to 3 days after exposure and contagion is during the first 2 to 3 days with the symptoms present.  One obvious point for me was that using an anti-histamine would help me avoid spreading the viruses.

Hell, give me a good sample size, in the tens of thousands and the money to do the work and I'll give you exact data on colds, contagion and transmission mechanisms.  What crap we have now.  It is a disgrace.  Colds are very common, 4 to 6 per adult per year and very costly for the society.  We should know the exact vital details and get rid of this nusciance.

During the contagious, period after the symptoms appear, we should all wear disposable face masks....if that indeed is a factual matter.

Where are the genuine and competent medical researchers on this issue, where is the reliable survey data and why are the approriate funding sources ignoring this simple but economically important issue?

19th-20th Century changes in commerce

The history of commerce is a long way from being written.  Even an outline hardly exists.  We have no way to identify the first elements of Industrial Commerce. 

If you focus on labor you will get some cane sugar producers in the Carribean as the forerunners of Industrial commerce because labor was treated as low cost and replaceable.  If you focus on machine power you will get the production of fabrics and grains from windmills among the first.  If you focus on marketing you will choose chinaware from England.  There are historians who argue for the clock and for watch technology as the key elements in the introduction of Industrial Commerce.

It is also possible to focus on the legal environment and you will have to skip from the East India Company to the state chartered corporations in the mid 1800s in the U.S.

 The nineteenth Century saw many critical industrial innovations from the management structure that used engineers in railroads, to large scale bond financing, to the retail introduction of fixed price and sales registers to replace bargaining with a sole proprietor. 

Late in the nineteenth Century we get the first glimpses of management and orders of magnitude reductions in cost with Rockefellar's oil company and Carnegie's steel.  Both of these achievements were important because they established professional management and meritocratic promotion.  We also have to give credit to quality control and its influence on management at Dupont and later at General Motors.

I find one of the most interesting changes occured when the U.S. government dropped laws letting wholesalers set retail prices in 1959 and a tidal wave of imports that subsequently arrived in the early 1960s.

Ultimately I am most impressed with the recent creation of a market for buying and selling corporations that came with the first genuine conglomerate's.  This recent innovation seems to be one of the most significant developments in the past 50 years.  I identify IT&T as the first real conglomerate, run entirely by numbers at headquarters. The open market for buying and selling corporations has had a great impact on productivity.

The details of each of these innovations are fascinating and important.

Have I left out some obvious major element in the development of industrial commerce?

In praise of rewards

I would like to get the reaction of the most diehard Lefty you know, on the subject of Steven and Mitchell Rales two borthers who created the Danaher Corp(DHR).

These two brothers, when they were in there late thirties, early forties, a few years after getting BA's from "no-name colleges" got their start in their father's real estate business.  Their father Norman who grew up in a Manhattan Jewish Orphanage had built the real estate business himself.

One of the first companies they were involved with, Jacobs Vehicle Systems, was using the Japanese streamlined production system that used team work, cost reductions create by line employees and tight quality control. Seeing the startling results at Jacobs, the Rales brothers began using the Jacobs managers, buying similar production oriented companies and implimenting the same cost reduction, team work systems in the companies they bought.  They bought new companies with the earnings of the companies their were streamlining.

In fifteen years the stock of the Rales' parent company went from under $10 to over $75 and a value of $20 billion.  The company, Danaher Corp, still has 600 operating subsidiaries and has overhauled many others that were spun off.  The most amazing evidence of the efficiency of the Rales' operation is that their current 40,000 employees are governed by a tiny headquarters staff of 40 people.

These two fellows have streamlined hundreds of companies, drastically reduced the costs of tools, medical equipment and instruments in the world for the benefit of everyone.  Their reward...they are both in the one hundred wealthiest Americans.  Isn't that a fair reward that only a commercial society, like America, could generate?

Both Steven and Mitchell are prominent art collectors and well known philanthropists, which is irrelevant to me.

Goodbye Columbus

I've recently been reading reviews that place Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus in the top ranks of fiction in the 20th Century.  It gets this high rating for dealing honestly with Jewish and Black issues of the time (1959).  I think that is Lefty bullshit.  The book is a series of short stories with Jewish characters who are pathetic schlemiels.  A "schlemiel" is Woody Allen, a gutless, cowardly overgrown four year old.  The blacks in the book in no way resemble the blacks I knew well at the time.

The lead story is about Marxist social class differences, written just at the end of class differences in America, although class lingered much longer in New England.  The story takes place in New Jersey, the title refers to the college in Columbus attended by the brother of the central female figure.

I have a connection to the lead story. I was at the U. of Chicago in 1957 living in apartment off campus with two roommates (roughly 53rd and Kimbark). My girl friend was a Roman Catholic from a very strict family.  We were having sex regularly as we had been for more than a year.  She was 18 and living at home.  Her mother found a diaphragm in my girl friend's dresser drawer and when she got home she was kicked out of the house. I had to go pick her up and, without going in the house, help her move out.  The fact that she was having unmarried sex was bad enough, but having it with a Jew was grounds for expulsion from the family. 

The mother and the diaphragm became a part of the story Goodbye Columbus. It got there because the roommate who replaced me was Philip Roth, a graduate student at the U. of Chicago who wrote his short story about that subject in 1958.

Bulletin alert

All my reading life I have been paying attention to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists cover which has a Doomsday Clock that is now set for 5 minutes to midnight.  The furthest the minute hand has been from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991.

As a teenager, the goddamn clock generated fear and panic in my innocent life.  Especially since I respected scientists most of whom were at the U. of Chicago where the Bulletin was published and where I was a student.

So how reliable has this clock been?

Not one bit reliable.  Scientists, as measured by this magazine, have not a scintilla of common sense or understanding of how the world works.

The reality is that no nuclear war was possible for the first fifteen years of the Bulletin.  Only the U.S. had the bomber capacity to successfully deliver bombs to the USSR and the U.S. was not and is not a military provocateur. By the mid 1960's both the U.S. and the USSR had doomsday capacities but a very good hot-line system was put in place to prevent a nuclear doomsday.  Since then nothing has changed.  Nothing.

Now these pathetic pedants are listing N. Korea and Iran as global nuclear threats along with climate change. 

Once again they are loony. North Korea can never launch even one nuclear missile without it being destroyed on take-off because their rocket site is on the Japan Sea.  The same is true of Iran.  As Jacques Chirac said of Iran, 'their nuclear missile couldn't get 200 meters in the air before Iran was destroyed.'  The possibility exists that North Korea and Iran could export nuclear weapons, or non-state users could get their hands on them.  That probability has not been calculated and it is not an immediate threat that anyone is estimating.

To consider climate change as anything related to Doomsday is the height of absurdity.  Humans have adapted for thousands of years to far greater climate changes than are expected in the coming century.  The world of commerce provides humans with greater tools for climate accommodation than humans ever had in the past (Commerce evaporated the Y2K doomsday computer scenario).  We might be growing coffee in the Sierra and wine in British Columbia...so what?

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is a badge of shame for the world of science.  Hopefully some group of scientists will publicly announce their disdain for the shameful rag.

Greatest moral injustice

Where is Peter Singer when we need him? The man who claims to have a secular, Martian view of morals has missed the biggest of all moral issues.

I have, in an earlier blog, come to the realization that we humans are participating in the greatest moral outrage that any person or religion can conceive.

Plant life comprises 90% of the biomass of our planet and gets one third of one percent of the atmosphere to breathe (CO2).  Humans and animal life comprise roughly 10% of the earth's biomass and we get 21% of the atmosphere to breathe (oxygen).  Truly a greater injustice has never been comprehended.

Picture a few humans, squirrels and birds in a great Sequoia forest.  Those majestic, ancient trees only have one third of one percent of the atmosphere to support their lives, while the greedy selfish humans and other animals ignore, squander and wallow in their immense share of 21% of the atmosphere. Such disregard for life is unfathomable.

How can people complain about American hegemony of the planet and capitalist imperialism and the rich-poor divide?  We insignificant, recently evolved humans and other animals are wastrels, taking an horrific share of the atmosphere for ourselves and leaving the most pathetic beggars' crumbs for the hard working, kind and generous plants of the planet that feed us as plankton and nourish our crops as top soil.

Justice requires that we breathe harder, that we do everything in our power to increase the plant life's share of the atmosphere by tens, even hundreds of times what they get now.

Justice!  Stand up and be counted! Animals of the world exercise, breathe more, burn everything you can find.  CO2 for our loyal friends the plants.

More Charles Antell

I long ago became the site that comes up first on Google for people remembering a hair pomade called Charles Antell Formula #9.

The photos on the right and left continue to be part of the subject (click to enlarge).  My first blog, in 2005, was an endorsement of the product and that resulted in one reader sending me a sample of this fifty-five year old product. I wanted to test the product and possibly re-introduce it to the market.

After a series of accidents I finally found a way to get the sample analyzed along with a control substance of lanolin.  The original TV infomercial said the product was pure lanolin.

You will have to check the final product evaluation blog to get the two big surprises.

The photos were sent by Ron Heberlee who has a site with photos of old Phoenix.  Thanks Ron.

Trucking down and up

Trucking volume and revenues in the U.S. are down for the second year in a row and the decline is significant although this article doesn't give us the real numbers. What is going on?

I'll assume that trucking volume is actually down since trucking stocks are down. The data on railroad shipments are definitely up.  The economy is up and final destination retail sales are up. What is happening to trucking?

I can see three likely reasons.  First, price.  Because of the dramatic rise in oil prices which effects trucking much more than rail, some trucking business moved over to rail. 

Second, the continued increase in merchandise from China, which means more merchandise is entering the port of LA-Long Beach rather than moving by truck from any other port or any U.S. factory.  This means a reduction in trucking because rails are the main carriers out of LA-Long Beach; so much so that a new rail line is being completed across the U.S. from LA on the Southern route.

Lastly, the Wal-Martization of American distribution as more businesses copy Wal-Mart and improve their warehousing and transshipping systems.  Inventories per retail sale have been going down.

To summarize: while trucking is going down, efficiency is going up.  Three more cheers for commerce.

Thomas Kuhn

One of the leading thinkers of our time, a philosopher of science, was well known for developing the concept of paradigm change.  He was Thomas Kuhn.  Kuhn was less well known for saying that science only changes its main way of thinking when each generation of scientists who hold the old ideas, die off.

The thesis that I now espouse and that Kuhn trumpeted, that people don't change once they reach adulthood has other implications too.  One is that a great deal of emphasis should be placed on travel, experimentation, learning and varieties of experience for young people between the ages of 16 and 24.

Shape their minds before the concrete hardens.

Fear of CO2

I want historians to know how extensive the current climate hysteria is.  I have hundreds of friends with whom I am in regular contact. It is sad to say that I don't personally know any plankton or cyanobacteria.

Of my friends only three are actually able to read the data and know that global warming consists in a small warming of the atmosphere, probably temporary, probably caused by solar activity and of no consequence. I have half a dozen friends who automatically distrust the hysteria because they hear the phrase "all scientists agree" and another half dozen who think global warming is just a Lefty political position. That leaves 95% of the humans, I personally know, who believe the hysterical escatological foreboding future.

To me this hysteria is properly called a Fear of CO2. 

If I had friends in the plant kingdom, the plankton, the bacteria in top soil, and all the plants that view CO2 as the source of life... I would be surrounded with happiness; I know that 90% of the world, by mass, welcomes an increase in CO2 rather than fears it.

My plant friends might also complain that animals get 21% of the atmosphere to breathe while all the non-animal world has to share one third of one percent of the atmosphere.   To put it another way.  Animals have run to the 21 yard line on a football field, while plants are stuck on the 12 inch line.

Fear of CO2 has got to be hysterical.  What is to fear when 90% of the life on the planet is happy about more CO2.

Never learn 2

I have a prominent friend who is in Israel visiting for the first time.  She writes back reporting the many amazing ways she is being treated like a Queen and how she is being exposed to the incredible genius and open heartedness of Israel.

I am in terrible pain as I read her reports. 

My friend is a Lefty Fundamentalist and I read about the humanity she is encountering and the deep felt compassion she experiences in Israel.  Yet she will come back to continue her activities that support Palestinians who teach their children to kill the very Israeli's who treated her so warmly; my friend will continue to go to rallies where open hatred of Israel is the norm, where kindness is owed to Arabs who swear the destruction of every Jew in Israel, where her friends at every cocktail party on the Upper West-side of New York spew hatred upon the President who has been the best friend of Israel in 2,200 years, and where she will vote for the only party that lets its members shout for the blood of the Jews, people like Jimmy Carter, Wesley Clark, Michael Moore, Cynthia McKinney etc.

My friend who was so moved in Israel to constantly run into brave people who lost children, husbands and family to Arab murders, still likes Bill Clinton. Clinton, a close friend of Adolph Arafat, who told Israelis, two years after the Second Intifada had killed hundreds of bus riders and coffee shop patrons to "be patient with the Palestinians."

Never learn

The real tragedy for me is being unable to internalize my realization that virtually nobody changes after they reach adulthood.

Thus I call attention to a fact of life that has been growing more evident every year, that evangelical Christians are the best friends that Israel has.  Maybe one of my readers knows a Lefty Jewish adult who has an open mind.  Among thousands of readers, that is possible. Tell them about this.

The Jerusalem Post reports that a Canadian parliamentary group is joining an international group of evangelical parliamentarians who support Israel.  Christian evangelicals have been friends of Israel for 170 years. 

People like Bill Maher, the stand-up comedian and misanthrope, can only be considered ignorant when they say things like 'I don't support Republicans or conservatives because the evangelicals who support Israel can't be trusted.'  Hey, Bill, there is much more reason to distrust Lefties and Lefty Jews.

Rabbi Laura

For some reason I am most often in the car during the hours when Dr. Laura is on the air. 

I first started listening to Dr. Laura because I couldn't believe that anyone could give advice with such certainty and no shades of grey.  It took months to figure out the two principles involved: (1) Dr. Laura has a clear hierarchy of values and (2) Dr. Laura doesn't care if the callers don't understand what she is saying, because she is talking to the radio audience.

I rapidly understood Dr. Laura's hierarchy of values.  First comes the child, from pre-birth to adulthood.  The child needs as much love, support and attention as it is possible to give.  Having a married mother is of next priority with the mother staying at home to take care of the child, children.  Having a father to support the child and provide a male role model is third.  All else, that supports these values follows deductively. 

Now I listen to Dr. Laura for another reason.  Once you understand that she hangs up on listeners who don't pay attention to her or where she has communicated her message and has nothing more to say, then you understand the drama of the show.  I've never hear Dr. Laura be cruel or uncaring to a person in need.  On the otherhand she is not romantic, sentimental or squishy.

What I listen for is the endless parallels to her way of solving halachic problems.  The past 630 generations of rabbis have had the same hierarchy of values to adhere to as Dr. Laura. I am constantly amazed that Dr. Laura uses halachic solutions to the problems she encounters.  I suspect she has been getting a steady diet of halachic studies.

Adding to your portfolio

My son is using the portfolio I described in an earlier blog and he immediately raised the question about what to do with additions to the portfolio in the future when the different parts of the portfolio grow at different rates.  How do you add more?  Do you apportion the new funds based on the initial starting position or do you make an adjustment?

Much thinking, some research and a few phone calls to experts resulted in this conclusion:  Annually the ratios in the portfolio should be recalculated if any are off by 5 points or more.  For example, if the non-Asian part of the portfolio went from 15% to 20%, the whole portfolio should be adjusted.  New additions to the portfolio are made on the current year's percentage distribution.

The logic of this approach is based on trying to keep the portfolio balanced in proportion to the growth rates of various parts of the commercial world.  It is a "go with the winners" tactic that will conform the portfolio to economic growth over the long run.

We also considered the wide range of ways that index funds are weighted and the changes that occur over time.  The conclusion is that all successful debates on index weighting will be reflected in the indexes that are already in the portfolio.

Pocket change and gasho

There are two quirks of behavior that I have added in recent years and both seem to garner comments from my friends.

One is that I don't carry change.  One less object in my pocket.  One less object to pay attention to. When I get change from my rare cash purchase,  it is sorted into quarters, which we seniors use for buses in San Francisco, and the rest goes into a pot.  I charge virtually everything on a credit card, and local parking meters now take a prepaid card.  Motorcycle parking requires change so I have taped a dime to the motorcycle key chain.

The other: When an ambulance or a fire engine goes by with sirens on I bow and gasho. Gasho is hands palm together.  Ambulance drivers, paramedics and fire-people are all risking their lives everyday for humanity, complete strangers.  If there was ever a profession of saints that warranted our appreciation, it is these three groups.

I find much to complain about the way fire-people run their public service, but nothing negates the compassion of their behavior.   

Rorty #1

A friend recently accused me of hyperbole for calling Richard Rorty the #1 philosopher of our era. I'll stick by my characterization.  Many philosophers have said Rorty is not a philosopher; that is because Rorty says philosophy can not seek truth. How can we seek truth if there is no "fundamental notion" of truth.

The same was said about Clifford Geertz as an anthropologist because he said anthropology can not collect scientific data; anthropology will at best be a "thick description" of another culture.

I love Rorty for his self-honesty, if nothing else.  But he also speaks to the philosophical understanding of our time. Rorty is a modern relativist.

Rorty says there is a commonality to all truths, 2x2=4, e=mc2, Michelangelo, Merce Cunningham, Tolstoy, Moby Dick, Ecclesiastes and Darwin.  But their shared commonality is the only meaning of "truth".

Everything we perceive is created by dialog among living people;our dialog is bolstered by the passed on traditions of our own culture's previous dialogs. We perceive based on our era, our peers, our geography, our society, our language and every aspect of our context.  How else could we perceive anything?

Rorty is an admitted "romantic" and he therefore has Lefty tendencies.  I'm not the least romantic, so I have commercial tendencies and I am anti-Lefty.

Rorty looks to Dewey to understand dialog.  To Dewey dialog is inherently democratic and thrives on openness, transparency and diversity of opinion.

My contribution to understanding dialog is the recognition that there is great value of including financial numbers in dialog.  Financial numbers create a basis for broader, common and more substantial dialog when carried out among people who understand financial numbers. 

Business people appear to be more comfortable with each other, more effective in operating in the empiric world and more socially successful.  The reason is their common language of financial numbers.

Foreign redux

I have made it clear in earlier blogs that national growth, formerly called "development" is attributable to one source: industrial exports.  Industry generates the necessary conditions for a growing economy: meritocracy, honesty and the reduction in costs that come from open markets.

From a global perspective, economic growth comes from industrial nations outsourcing their employment and moving factories overseas to whatever Third World countries want them and will protect them.

What isn't obvious to most people and certainly not to people who have never traveled in the Third World is that many societies don't want to change.

So what does that leave for foreign aid to do, if it has little or nothing to do with economic growth? 

The U.S. should consider using its foreign aid solely for social benefit.  I suggest that we build small medical clinics in 70 countries with on-going training for the medical practitioners and supplying medical equipment. This doesn't compete with local commerce.

This is not a new idea in the realm of development, Fidel Castro has been doing it successfully.  With the resources of U.S. foreign aid, there would be an enormous impact...hopefully positive and ameliorative.

Harvard 19th Century

Today's announcement that the new president of Harvard comes from a background of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences makes it clear that Harvard is not a university in the top rank of American Universities.  At this moment, I can't think of another university that is.  Maybe that is the reality, that the top rank doesn't exist anymore in academia. 

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard is a cesspool of 19th Century ideology.  They now run Harvard. The term University is inappropriate when applied to such a disgusting council.  There are some good faculty members at Harvard, but they are few and far between.  That same statement  is accurate for a dozen "schools of post 12th grade studies."

I foresaw this development two years ago long before the Larry Summers scandal.

Google got it wrong

Google and the market have it wrong.  Wrong what?  Google and the market fail to understand what business Google is in.

Google is not in the advertising business, Google is in the listing business.  This is a distinction that Salli Rasberry and I made in our 1984 Marketing Without Advertising 1st edition, and ever since then.  The book is based on a hands-on-business course I taught from 1978 to 1984, of the same name. (The book will soon be out in the 6th edition.)

Advertising is (as Salli says) dog shit on the sidewalk.  It is put where you don't want to see it and you have to go out of your way to step over it.  Ibid: most people don't like advertising except for the occasional humorous ad. Shit with a little warning flag stuck in it.

Listing is putting relevant information where the prospective customer is looking for it.  The best example is the Yellow Pages.  The listing can be any size, shape or quality...the relevant part of the description is that a listing is in the location where a prospective customer is looking for it.

With the correct understanding of the business Google is in, listing, the market will understand that Google, last month at $500 per share will have a share value in a few years of close to ten times the current price.  (Notice, I believe my own public statements and I own many shares of Google.)

How do I get my future share price estimate?  The current price is 60 times earnings; it should remain at that level.  Earnings are based on revenue of $9 billion last year, more than half, $5 billion from the U.S.  The total national ad market in the U.S. is $160 billion the local ad market is $90 billion.  My conservative guess is that because Google is so much more accurate as a listing service than any ad medium, Google will get 20% of the national ad market and 40% of the local ad market for a revenue of $68 billion plus growth over five years to about $80 billion.

Disregarding any foreign revenue growth, which I know nothing about, that will create revenue nearly ten times the current revenue with a comparable share price regardless of what stupidity Google can create in massive personnel hiring or share dilution.

Arranged marriage?

This blog was suggested in part by Alex G.  Arranged marriage has been a source of stability in family and child rearing in two societies that I know, India and Japan.  In Japan, a society that I have studied intensely for thirty years, arranged marriage is still the norm, despite protestations from teenage girls and many married couples who claim theirs is a "love marriage." Divorce is insignificant.

Scratch the surface of nearly any Japanese "love marriage" and you will find that the parents on both sides helped the two "lovers" to meet each other.  Sometimes they were encouraged to join the same ski club, to go to a specific coffee shop or visit the same resort.

Is America lining itself up for the American version of arranged marriage?  First, the traditional form of arranged marriage is based on matching two people who have personality attributes that will generate marital satisfaction and stability both economic and emotional.

Why is arranged marriage coming to America? Because I get more and more reports of people who met their mate on a computer matching service.  This strikes me as a rapidly growing trend.  The matching services are pathetic at making good matches at this point, but there is nothing standing in the way of improved algorithms to match people. Moreover, as the matching gets better so will the willingness of participants to spend more hours providing information and volunteering more crucial and more vital private information to make the match more successful.

With a few qualifications (see below) I think we are on the way to arranged marriage in America.

(Qualifications: the couple matching algorithms will have to be based on very large samples and incorporate some of my own notions of personality dichotomies).

The future

I mentioned in an earlier blog that the future of industrial economic growth will come from outsourcing by American, European and Japanese companies.

Here is the table that shows the favored nations for American outsourcing. Mexico is not on the list and it should be. However, the remaining countries that should become the hot third world growth prospects are: Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Chile and Brazil.

(Click to enlarge.  Source Wall Street Journal)

Poisson

I can't help it, I'm a statistician and I have spent my adult life with data and tables.

In an earlier blog I presented a table of the number of billionaires per million workers for twenty three countries. 

I've kept the table on the desk near me and done further calculations.  It turns out that the number of billionaires per million workers is a perfect Poisson distribution.  Simeon-Denis Poisson, a brilliant French mathematician, published this distribution in 1832.  The Poisson deals with rare events like the number of billionaires per million workers.

I'm afraid we have something close to a law of nature: For any nation that has industrial commerce, every million people in the workforce will have a 34% chance of producing no billionaires, a 34% chance of producing one billionaire, 22% chance of having two billionaires, 8% chance of three billionaires and 4% chance of 4 or more billionaires.

Live with it folks.

Future good

I took this photo of Gandhi at the San Francisco Ferry Terminal at sunset.  The image is intended to suggest the sunset of Gandhi's influence on the world.  It is not that Gandhi's personal non-violence is in itself offensive, it is the pacifist theology behind it that has wrought harm to millions of people and tens of millions of minds.

Fortunately, there are a number of books in the production process that explain what a failure pacificism is as a theology and political movement. Just two points for my readers.  (1) At the beginning of WWII when England was about to be defeated by Hitler, Gandhi told Churchill that unless India was promised independence after the war, Gandhi would lead an insurrection that would drain England to the bone.  If that is how pacifism works, I fail to see any decent morals in it, as practiced by its leader. (2) Before Kosovo was invaded it was the best trained and most successful peace movement in the history of the world.  Pristina was 100% operated by pacifists.  All the Albanian pacifists (90% of the population) were driven out of the country in the Serb invasion and were only able to return home after the American led bombing of Belgrade.

Future bad

These statues, on the right, were donated to the San Francisco Port Authority by Burning Man.  Look closely.  I think this is absolute crap. I love welding but this is a disgrace.

I have seen good art come out of Burning Man but this is not it.  I hope this piece of juvenile esthetic gets removed and I hope we never see any other donations from Burning Man of this low quality.  (Click on the image to enlarge.)

Pain & monkeys

I have recently gone through my current list of friends to estimate the number who have been affected by reality in the past twenty-thirty years.  The measure is simple: do they still hate Nixon, oppose the Vietnam War and believe humans are bringing about the end of the world? Of course you know that the name Nixon is now Bush, Vietnam is now Iraq and the Apocalypse is the Greenhouse. Other than the names, nothing has changed for 90% of my friends.

That causes me much pain. 

Could I have picked more friends who were alive and responsive to the world like the tiny minority I ended up with? 

As I've pondered this question, I'm forced to answer "no."  The reason relates to an old acquaintance of mine, Lyall Watson, who promoted the idea of the 100th monkey in his 1979 book Lifetide.

After the New Age magical nonsense about the 100th monkey died down, it turned out that the new technique the monkeys had learned (washing dirty potatoes in the river) was only learned by the young monkeys, never by adults.

That seems to be the lesson: most of my friends are hard-wired to never learn anything new about the world after they reach adulthood. 

That reality is even more painful than the observation I began with.  But it accounts for the reason people keep their hair, make-up and clothing style the same the rest of their lives.

Parrots

A few years back there was a documentary made about the parrots of Telegraph Hill.  I wrote a blog about it, pointing out that the theme was close to my heart: a simple living hippy (Mark Bittner) being converted to a 1099 lifestyle by a woman (Judy Irving) who was great at raising foundation money for her film.

There are three flocks of parrots in San Francisco.  One nests next door to my house on its periodic rounds.  Another, apparently, stops near the Embarcadero as shown in this photo with school kids visiting them close-up.  Click to enlarge.

Translations

There is a word whose translation gives me trouble.  The word comes from the Arabic, "hudna" which is translated as "truce."

But the meaning has nothing to do with the English conception of truce, otherwise why would the current Gaza Hamas "hudna" include a daily barrage of missiles fired at Israeli towns?  Hudna appears to mean both a rebuilding of supplies and no cessation of attacks on non-Moslems. Or just a flat out lie.

Any Arabic speakers who want to join in on this one?

Youtube

 I couldn't resist trying out Youtube.  I had two short videos I made in the late 1990s that I put up. One is about a six sided mirror I made.  The idea was to create an object that reflected sound just the way a mirror reflects light. The video is amateurish so please be tolerant of my poor video skills. I've also thought about a gravity mirror but haven't done anything with that image.

The second video is a short but real story told by empty chairs in a conference room.  Not well made but cute.

Michael Doyle

I just received word that an old friend of thirty years, Michael Doyle, died at home in San Francisco.  The wake is this weekend.

When I first met Michael I was working on San Francisco public education and he was finishing up the research and writing of a book that became a significant force in modern commerce: How to Make Meetings Work (co-authored with David Strauss). We were in the same building.

Michael was a warm, kind and generous man.  His contribution to commerce was immense (Bio 1, Bio 2).  Few meetings in America are conducted without using the elements that Michael introduced in his book and his training company from "facilitator" to "public note taker."  It is hard for us to remember the pre-Michael Doyle era, when meetings were run on an authoritarian model, largely based on experience with Roberts Rules of Order...a legacy of Congressional political structure.

Michael transformed the way businesses work and significantly enhanced the creative potential in any group by giving voice to the "seldom heard voices" that are important to group vitality.

Michael worked with Arthur Anderson when the computer consulting section was out-earning the CPA section. The problem was never resolved and the competition within the company led to confused ethics and its ultimate demise in the Enron scandal.

Michael was comfortable with CEOs and was effective in his role of working with top management. He spent much of his life trying to migrate his brilliant discoveries about running meetings to the meeting room computer world. 

I will miss Michael and so will everyone who knew him. The world of commerce will some day honor Michael Doyle with the appreciation he deserves for a major and pervasive contribution.

Organic

The January 16th edition of the Wall Street Journal had an article on buying organics.  The article is summarized in the following recommendations: Buy organic when you buy

"Apples, peaches, bell peppers, strawberries, imported grapes, spinach, lettuce, potatoes, carrots: Conventional versions have higher levels of pesticides than other produce, although still well within safe limits.

Milk and dairy products: Free of the growth hormones that are given to conventionally raised cows. Meat and poultry: Free of growth hormones and antibiotics.

Baby food: Free of pesticide residues found in vegetables and fruits.

… and foods you eat a lot of."

I worked in this field for many years and I generally concur. While pesticides are usually washed off, many of the fruits and veggies listed are not commonly washed with soap at home. You can do that and buy non-organic.

There are three exceptions I would note.  Fuji apples have the least pesticide and are organic because they were created specifically for the Japanese pro-organic market. Just buy Fujis when you want apples.

Strawberries.  Don't buy frozen strawberries.  When picked they go straight into the frozen slurry without washing at all.

Spinach.  Only get organic spinach.  The levels for pesticide use on spinach were set when Americans ate very little spinach and almost never ate it fresh.  Pesticide use on spinach is just too high for contemporary usage.

Commerce creates optimists

Have you noticed that most self-employed people and people who have created their own businesses are positive?

Commerce requires a self-honest evaluation of the world.  A good business person must notice trends in order to make good investments and satisfy customers.  That requires optimism. 

Being self-honest about trends and patterns in the society around us means seeing reality, seeing opportunity, seeing positive directions and having enough confidence in one's own views to take action.  Business people also see negative trends. But the key element in their perspective is to see both negative and positive trends over time.