Pro Commerce

It won't happen

More than a dozen years ago I interviewed Henry Aaron at the Democrat oriented Brookings Institute in Washington D.C.. Mr. Aaron was at the time the most knowledgeable expert on health care and public policy. 

Now with more than twenty years of hands-on policy experience Mr. Aaron explains why we will never have a national health plan and why we will get very little change of any sort in the future. Here is a pithy exerpt:

"The U.S. political system is exquisitely structured to frustrate action on large and controversial matters on which there is not overwhelming agreement. Party discipline is an oxymoron. Congressional committee chairmen can and do block action that the majority of their party embraces. The political composition of the two houses of Congress requires that to get majorities, both large and small states, despite their often conflicting interests, must make common cause. Senate rules require super-majority support for any controversial action. And all elected officials persistently obey the political corollary of the Hippocratic oath: Do not be seen to do obvious harm."

Mental illness

I have recently had to deal with a friend with severe depression. Kind, sincere and wonderful as the helping professionals are, I see little positive effect.  I have known a number of close friends with severe mental problems from paranoia, sociopathy, depression, psychopathic breaks, bi-polar disorder and several other problems. My only encounter with this field is through my friends.

I doubt that the mental health profession actually uses good rational thinking.  I wrote in one of my Mental Snack books in 1987 that the personality recreates itself every day when we wake up.  I pointed out that all thousand-year-old institutions use early morning meditation to change personality.  The contemporary helping profession seems to be missing that obvious observation, otherwise therapy sessions would start at 5am.
 
The most intelligent mental health worker I ever encountered was the expert on paranoia, Ronald K. Siegel, research professor, UCLA School of Medicine. (His book is Whispers)  I titled my interview with him: Paranoia Can Be Found in Everyone in Various Degrees and It Is Communicable Like Coughing and Scratching.  Siegel's main finding is that paranoia is the by-product of a secretion from the base of the brain. 

I observe the same bio-physical process in nearly every mentally troubled person I know. What I observe is that this secretion is usually perceived by the mind as fear. However, the fear gets interpreted in many forms as: paranoia, sociopathy, depression, psychopathic breaks and bi-polar disorders.

I have no idea what is going on in the field, but if I were in the field I would certainly be looking for a nearly universal bio-physical source of fear.

Of course we live in a "fear" culture as opposed to a "shame" culture so I would look at bio-physical patterns in the brain that are reinforced as we grow up.

Dalai's family

When a Lefty asks whether I support George W. Bush I have recently started replying "Of course, the Dalai Lama considers President Bush  family."

I love this response because it creates cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a mental model I have used since my early days in marketing research in the early 1960s.  First discovered in marketing research by Jack Brehm in 1955,  when he found that buyers often looked at ads and sales material about a product they had already bought for days or weeks after they bought the product. Brehm showed that buyers were still convincing themselves that they had made the right choice...sort of fending off the lingering doubts they had before they made the purchase.

A few years later, Leon Festinger showed with experiments that for any concept in our mental array of concepts any existing or any new concept that we encounter that puts the two concepts in conflict, forces us to compare the two conflicting concepts and adjust both of them appropriately. 

So if someone you love and admire (like the Dalai Lama) becomes close friends (or 'family') of someone you hate (George W. Bush) you must adjust your attitude toward one or both of them.

So I asked a Lefty friend, Bruce, what he thought of the Dalai Lama saying publicly, after having spent much time over several years with President Bush, that he and Bush were like family?  Bruce, who had earlier expressed admiration for the Dalai Lama said "the Dalai Lama must be a fool." 

Two more common ways to handle the problem in terms of cognitive dissonance would be for a Lefty to say "I didn't know that" and forget the matter right away, in spite of having read it several times. Or, to say "Bush is so deceitful and cunning he is taking advantage of the Dalai Lama."

Try it yourself.  The Dalai Lama and President Bush actually do like and respect each other, they are close friends.

England

I have often said that England is most anti-Semitic country in Europe.  Jews have been leaving steadily for twenty years.

Melanie Phillips (I wish I could claim she is a relative) has written a comprehensive article summarizing the extent and depth of British anti-Semitism and it is daunting.

Silence

I was recently at a dinner party where a friend and I were both drinking toasts to the evident American victory in Iraq, a fact that is becoming more visible to more people every day.

There were half-dozen Lefties at the dinner party.  The most striking response to our joy was absolute silence.

My hypothesis is that Lefties don't know what their PC response to any political matter is until they get it from Doonesbury.

Homeless on food

Weird blog headline "homeless on food."  However, that is precisely my concern.

One of the useful but minor contributions of the hippies and their food coops was the invention (or re-invention) of the open barrel of foods. The open barrels and bins contained a wide assortment of foods and candies...commonly nuts, herbs, coffees, teas, beans and other bulk items.

The hippy model of open barrels and bins was copied in nearly all major food chains and some small part of it survives. 

Why did the barrel and bin model shrink to near invisibility?  Homeless. 

Many shoppers started to realize that homeless people put their filthy hands into the bins to steal food.  Ordinary shoppers are driven away by any thought of touching what the homeless touch.  Goodbye good idea.
 
I repeat here what I have said elsewhere on a related homeless issue: Each visible homeless person costs the city of San Francisco $200,000 per year in lost tourist revenue.

The figure is easy to calculate.  One-third of S.F. tourists say the homeless are the thing they least like about their visit to S.F.  Tourist destinations without homeless (Disney World and Disney Land) get 4 times the number of visitors that San Francisco gets. 

Each new tourist would bring $350 and a 10% increase in tourists is $200,000 per visible homeless person (assuming only 1,500 of our 5,000 homeless are visible to tourists).

Regardless of what we waste already to maintain homeless in San Francisco we automatically lose $200,000 per year per visible homeless person in tourist revenue.

How do we tolerate that?

Mind commerce connection

This cartoon is too funny to me to let my readers miss it.

While commerce has the stunning quality of being to our lives like water is to the lives of fish, nevertheless we don't have gills that make us more or less suited to living immersed in commerce.

The type of yoga that would make us more adept at living in the world of commerce would train us to a) manage and be managed, b) keep gazillions of price comparisons in our heads at one time, c) help us be tolerant of every form of human diversity, d) train us to accept the world in only empirical terms and most importantly of all e) improve our bookkeeping skills.

Bookkeeping is the grammar of commerce, money-pricing is the language.

Management

We are reading about the possible break-up of CitiCorp, Countrywide Bank, Barry Diller's Internet holdings and many more.

My point, made here regularly and made in my book Commerce, is that management of industrial commerce and management of clientric commerce are so different that the two can not be handled effectively together. Most corporations combine these two separate forms of business.

Industrial commerce is driven by cost reduction and clientric commerce is driven by lifetime client relations.  Airlines need to be broken up the way Air Canada has been broken up; industrial commerce in one part, client services in the other part.  Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers need to be broken into manufacturing and service components.

Merrill Lynch not only needs to be broken up it will be broken up.  The client service component of brokerage, accounting, trading, arbitrage, insurance and traditional fund management are clientric commerce...aimed at lifetime relations with the client. The high risk investment banking, hedge-fund, mergers and acquisition and tax sheltering is aimed at profit from cost control, risk dispersion, economies of scale and one-time speculation...industrial commerce. Those are two separate forms of management.

The talk about the extreme difficulty in finding good CEO's is off base. The problem is nobody can handle two different forms of management.  There are abundant managers who can handle one form of management either industrial or clientric; but not both.

Why my money is on Google

The Wall Street Journal (10/17) article by Rebecca Dana and Stephanie Kang reports on TV advertising viewership. The data come from Nielsen.

Roughly 10% of TV viewers change channels or leave the room during a commercial.  For the one out of five that bothered to get a TV recording system (Tivo or DVR), twice as many, 20%, avoid the commercials.

Advertisers read those numbers and say "look at the high percentage of people who watch our ads."  I look at those numbers and say, if 20% of the audience walked out of a play, a performance or a lecture it would be the end of that event.

In general, we "tolerate" advertising, because it has no relevance to us and occasionally is funny. 

What Google offers is not advertising, it is listing.  The Google listings are unobtrusive and are attempting to be about subjects and products that are related to our immediate interests.  They are a version of Yellow Page listing, just more ubiquitous.

My money is on Google regardless of whether management understands the business they are in.

Dear Abby got it wrong

This is a recent Dear Abby column:

WOMAN WHO'S A REAL CATCH HAS TROUBLE FINDING ANGLERS

DEAR ABBY: Call me confident, but I know I am a real catch. But for the life of me, I can't get a date with the "right" kind of guy.

Abby, I am beautiful inside and out. I was raised in a great family with good morals, I'm kind to everyone, I've got a killer personality, great sense of humor, an inspiring attitude, and the glass is always half-full.

This may seem cocky, but my two problems with men are: I seem to attract creeps, and the kind of men I deserve don't think they've got a shot in hell, so they don't ask me out.

Most of the dates and relationships I've had have happened because I asked the other person out. I've been in two major relationships with very attractive, bright men, and I'd like to experience that again.

I'm so sick of meeting creeps! I really want someone in my league. I've been told a thousand times that I'm gorgeous, stunning, or asked why I'm not modeling. Yesterday someone called me Miss America. I'm well-read and in tune with the arts, smart and funny. Where are the male equivalents? -- DATELESS 23-YEAR-OLD

DEAR DATELESS: They died of altitude sickness, trying to climb the pedestal you have placed yourself on. You have described your obvious selling points, but what about the quality of your character? Are you nice to people who don't want anything from you? Are you giving? Sensitive? Can you compromise? Are you interested in other people?

Perfection does not exist in anyone. And the sooner you become less preoccupied with your own perfection, the more likely it is that you'll meet your male "equivalent."

------------------------------

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Abby, I'll let you in on a male secret. Dateless is actually a great catch but she will never understand the problem by asking you or any other woman.  Dateless is in the category of "really beautiful" women.  Most women don't understand that that category of women get "really different" treatment.

Most appealing, competent, intelligent men will avoid "really beautiful" women because they know they will be turned down.  Really beautiful women spend their entire lives fighting off men, so only the most persistent, aggressive and most obsessive men will pursue them.

The correct advice for Dateless would be: pick the man you want, virtually any man, then you approach him. He won't believe his good luck, so you'll have to convince him you are not a hooker and not crazy.  But when you pursue him, with just a little effort, you will find him to be wonderful, loyal and everything he appears to be.

I know many beautiful and smart women in their 40s and 50s who never figured this out.

Five hundred years of corn rows

I wonder how a woman must feel if she is having a Latina hairdresser create a head full of corn rows.

The reason I ask is that some Latinas five hundred years ago did the same thing to prepare the young girl in this photo who was sacrificed on the top of a mountain in the Andes to propitiate the gods of corn. (Notice her hair).

The young girl was given some coca leaves and a warm shawl and left to sleep and die in a small cold mountain-top cave. 

Freezing to death in one's sleep appears to me to be a painless form of death.  Corn rows, on the other-hand frighten me.

Fred Harte type subsidy

Fred's birth name was Fred Herz but he didn't like being considered a Jew so he changed his name.  Fred was a 100% Marxist, he sounded just like Noam Chimpsky.  They both read from the same bible.

Fred was my maternal uncle and a wonderfully sweet guy. Fred was single all his life.  He made millions by letting his Harvard roommate, a stock broker and investor invest his money.  Phil Strauss (later a partner in Neuberger Burman) made millions for Fred.  The money meant nothing to Fred who lived 40 years in the same tiny rent controlled apartment on East 96th St. in New York without a car.

Fred loved the weekly National Guardian founded in 1948, a Marxist newspaper with national circulation, published in New York.  Fred did menial work for the Guardian in the circulation department and kept the circulation files under his lock and key.  Which was appropriate because beginning in the mid-1950s Fred became the sole financial supporter of the National Guardian.

Nobody who worked for the paper knew that Fred was the sole financial supporter.  The paper would put on an annual fund raising theater event for a nominal few dollars donation. The piddling $1,000 take was supplemented by Fred putting in $200 thousand in cash.  So nobody knew that Fred was the sole supporter.

With Fred's secret subsidy the paper lasted until Fred died in the early 1990's.  It died with Fred.

The Fred Harte Type Subsidy continues in publishing.  The Nation, New Republic, Mother Jones, New Criterion and most other political magazines get a Fred Harte Type Subsidy to survive.  So does the S.F. Chronicle, The New Yorker and soon the New York Times.

Unfair fair use scam

A few weeks ago I got an email from Stanley Rowin a photographer in Boston who claimed that I had to stop using the photograph posted here or pay him money.  I replied that he didn't understand the nature of the fair use doctrine in copyright law.

What he says or does doesn't matter.  This blog today is fully, unquestionably, within the fair use clause because I am discussing this specific photo.

The earlier use was also protected by fair use legal history for three reasons that other bloggers should know. First, I generate no revenue from this photo.  If I did, I would probably have to get the owner's permission if I could find out who the owner was (the logo on the photo was never visible to me). Second, the subject of the blog dealt specifically with the image of Thomas Kuhn in the photo.  The photo was not used gratuitously, scandalously or carelessly.  The subject in the photo was the subject of the blog.

And third and most importantly, the photo came from a published magazine (Scientific American) and was authorized by Thomas Kuhn as a suitable representation of him to be used in public.  Which is precisely what I did.

Since this particular photo is on dozens of sites scanned by Google, which is where I got it, and dozens more scanned by other search engines, I suspect that Mr. Rowin has a big job ahead of him if he is trying to get payment from all of them. If he assumes that most users of Google images don't understand fair use, he may be anticipating a lot of money that isn't there.

The owner of this blogsite, Six Apart, demanded that I remove the photo.  No discussion, no legal issue...just a computer generated letter saying 'do it.'  I don't have the time to fight this issue and I don't have a dog in this fight (as Karl Rove used to say) so I caved and I'm not proud of it. You can see the disputed photo here.

S.F. mayor

The Castro District annual raucous Halloween Party last night was successfully canceled and 300,000 people stayed away. 

I must give credit to a good leader, our supervisor Bevan Dufty and the police force that is very skilled in crowd related issues.

For good measure, the photo on the right shows a porta-potty that was provided for the non-party by Chicken John Rinaldi, the Burning Man candidate for mayor.  Chicken John is only one of many colorful candidates in this year's race where the incumbent will win hands-down.

The mayor wins hands-down thanks to the mayor's accidental good fortune in granting marriages to gays in his first month in office and winning the hearts of the iconoclastic voters.

Fran Peavey and anti-semitism

Have you ever had to disown a close friend?

I did and it was heart wrenching.  I am reminded of it because I got a notice for a meeting of the 9/11 neocons, a group organized in the S.F. Bay Area by the wonderful Cinnamon Stillwell.  9/11 didn't change my politics, but I love the name she created. The date is what brought the issue to mind.

The event of 2001 on September 11th cost me four coffee friends but had little effect on my politics. On the Sunday following 9/11 a new member of the weekday coffee group in North Beach, an Egyptian immigrant, Assam Elmagoop, who was a standard Egyptian anti-Semite of little consequence, sent out an email that accused the U.S. of carrying out terrorism around the world and he explained in his email that the hairless-Arab's airline-passenger-bombing of the U.S. was an understandable consequence.  The four former coffee friends sided with the anti-American email sent by the Egyptian immigrant.

My politics were not changed by the hairless-Arab attack on 9/11. The biggest change in my politics had come a year earlier when Palestinian murders began targeting Israeli citizens on buses, in coffee houses and while eating pizza on the mall. It was what the Palestinians call the Second Intifada that aroused my animosity toward Middle Eastern Arabs. The need to deal with that growing problem was evident to me a year before 2001.

One of the consequences of my change in attitude was a decreased tolerance for anti-Israel anti-Semitism.  I had to disown a longtime close friend, Fran Peavey, because she was clearly an anti-Semite and because she was a public figure in the peace movement.  I came to realize that public figures who are anti-Semites don't deserve to keep their venom secret.  The whole affair is on record on my website. 

One effect of the online notice was to slow down Ms. Peavey's funding for a year or two until she called me for a mediation.  One of her funders was slightly a Jew, John Steiner, in Denver who was unhappy with my online posting.  The mediation went nowhere but I changed my posting and got Ms. Peavey to write her side of the issue.

Readers of this blog know I have no tolerance for anti-Semites and I use the OECD definition of an anti-Semite.  The OECD determined in a major pan-European conference that any one who holds Israel to higher standards than other nations in an anti-Semite.  (That sure includes Mearsheimer and Walt who never write books or articles about non-Israeli lobby groups in Washington D.C.)