Pro Commerce

Postive sign

I went to a great public discussion last night in San Francisco at the large Reform Temple Emanuel with four neocon Jews: Dennis Prager, John Podhoretz, Mona Charen, and Michael Medved.

A good description of the discussion is on Bookworm Room, one of my favorite blog writers. What is most surprising is that in Spring of 2002 I went to the first neocon Jewish talk that Dennis Prager gave in San Francisco and he (and I) was so surprised to see 100 Jews in the room that he asked permission to take a photo of the crowd for the historic record.

It is five years later and the crowd was now 400, with 350 applauding the speakers enthusiastically.  That feels awfully good to me.

Two faces

I've known three people who have had facial surgery near the midline of their face.  In each case the surgeon warned the patient that the midline is a critical point of facial recognition and the surgery had to be done very carefully.

It turns out that facial recognition is based on comparing the two sides of the face.  It is the differences between the two sides, as seen at the midline that is the most powerful factor in identifying a face.

The photo above shows two faces each one made from the mirror image of the other half.

Algorithm

The Arab world takes credit for much of algebra and higher mathematics.  I have pointed out in that past that Arabs have made a small or negligible contribution to the rational world.

Both the word and the notion of algebra comes from the work of Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī who was a mathematician and translator.  He is al-Khwārizmī because he came from the town of Khwārizmī which was in Uzbekistan.  Al-Khwārizmī was a Persian who worked in Bagdhad, a great center of learning. 

Al-Khwārizmī's great contribution was the translation of a Hindu book into Arabic in the 9th Century.  The book was translated into Latin in the 13th Century giving the European world the Latin number, the decimal place, most of algebra and the term we use today: algorithm.

A bizarre case where the Indians shaped our rational world and a Persian translator in an Arab land gets undue credit.

Spineless editor

Would you read an explanation by an adult who tells you why he lied to you for a second time? 

My answer is 'Yes' if the editor promptly admitted the lie, deeply and genuinely apologized AND demonstrated that out of remorse he had made significant changes in the editorial policies, procedures and editorial management.

If the editor took tens of thousands of words to explain how he inadvertently lied to you and tried very hard in his wordy explanation to prove to himself that it was a reasonable error.....would you read the explanation?  Would you allow an adult like the man on the right in your home?

The spineless editor, the moral reprobate who chose the second option is Franklin Foer of The New Republic. Foer published anonymous lies about the American Army in Iraq and about American soldiers in combat in his magazine. The story Foer published is referred to on the Internet as the Scott Beauchamp scurrilous fiction.  Foer has finally written his explanation of why he published the fictitious piece as battle front factual reporting.  Foer's explanation is a piece of spineless buggery that appears in the latest New Republic.

I read it only to pass on the report to you. It was really hard to read tens of thousands of words by a liar who only knows how to try and cover-up his lie with intellectual slight-of-hand.  The New Republic is disgusting.

Andy Grove

Andy Grove, former longtime CEO of Intel, recently suggested that it is worthwhile for big corporations to enter new fields to bring innovation.  He particularly encourages GE to get into the auto business and build an electric car.

I'm with you Andy.  This is a powerful and innovative idea.  It recognizes a fact that Japanese business long ago realized, that often entry into a new market requires large capital, extensive management experience and good distribution channels.

In Japan almost all new innovation is brought to market by the marketing departments of existing large corporations.  Virtually any employee suggestion that can be manufactured will be brought to market. Once it is on the selves, the market determines whether customers want it or not.  No costly start-ups, no venture capitalists and no multi-year market built-outs.

Andy Grove clearly  recognizes that the narrow American categories of industry and products leads to incompetence and stultified bureaucracy. We need more large innovate corporations trying their hand in new industries.

 

Shoppers Christmas

The photo on the right is a construction made of shopping carts in the form of a Christmas tree.  You can find it in the courtyard of Peet's in Santa Monica on Main Street in the early semi-rational-Gehry building.

I like the construction because it goes to the heart of my kind of Christmas...shopping and gift giving: commerce.

I have always felt that the Christian-feigned interest in Christmas and the preposterous claim to Christmas as a Christian festival were offensive.  There is simply no connection between the birth of Jesus of Nazareth and the Winter Yule celebration.  The Christmas tree, Santa Claus,  candles, wreaths and nearly all the associated artifacts are clearly part of a Northern European mid-winter festival. 

Fortunately, with surround sound music of the mid-winter season, less than 20% of it is Christian.

Back to the photo.  Three cheers for this iconic image. A Christmas tree made of shopping carts.

Being Santa Monica, I'm surprised this structure was permitted. While it is anti-religious, a point the natives would approve, it takes away good shopping carts from the perpetually indulged 'homeless.' (A point made by my friend Gary.)

In San Francisco, in 2006, we were not allowed to have the smell of chocolate chip cookies wafting from bus shelters because it would offend the homeless.  Santa Monica can't be outdone in absurdity by San Francisco.

Infrastructure

We tend to forget how complex and pervasive is our infrastructure. 

This photo captures much of our infrastructure.  At the top is a radio transmitting and receiving antenna that handles municipal services including fire, police, ambulance, taxis and other emergency services. In the photo is a street, which is an obvious part of the infrastructure.  On each side of the steep street are gutters to handle rain runoff.  At the top of  the dedicated 40 foot tall wooden poles are the electric power lines, in threes, that carry 12000 volts of power. The voltage is stepped down by transformers on the smaller 30 ft poles to 240 volts that are carried to homes and apartments.  On the same lower power poles are telephone lines; on these particular poles are fiber optic lines that carry DSL and phone circuits.  There are also copper lines that carry DSL and telephone voice. The same poles have coaxial lines that carry cable.  On a few roofs you can see satellite TV receiving dishes.

The street is also an intersection so we see the street lights that are part of a traffic infrastructure along with the street signs. The red box on a red pole close to the camera is an old fashioned fire alarm box that still works.

The infrastructure that is not visible are the water pipes, the methane pipes and the sewers that carry away the waste water and the rain.

Doesn't kindle

The new reader from Amazon, called a Kindle, doesn't kindle my fire.  I don't think Jeff Bezos understands book readers.

The first evidence of that is that you can look up a book on Amazon and then click on the author to find other books by the same author.  What you get when you click on the author's name is every author of the same name.  If it is Issac Singer, you will get the correct list of books, plus all the biographies and hagiographies mixed in.  If the name is Robert Black you will get a dozen books by people other than the author you are interested in.  Bezos clearly never hear of Books-in-Print which doesn't have the Amazon chaos problem. In Books-in-Print each author is shown with all the books he/she has written in one place.

Back to the latest Bezos failure to understand readers.

I have a Sony Reader and I love it, as a technical tool. I download doc and pdf files to read when traveling.

Bezos has made three additions: wi-fi, a mini-keyboard and 90,0000 books at $10 each.  The key-board is irrelevant.  Sony had one on earlier models and dropped it.  The wi-fi is a trivial improvement. The 90,000 books at $10 each is the problem.

A serious reader, someone who reads more than throw-away novels, needs access to several million books.  Such access is called a library. Books in a library are either free or have some annual cost (like driving to the library). Serious readers get a large percentage of the books they read from a library, a small percentage from friends and review copies and a still smaller percentage by purchasing them.

The Amazon Kindle, has a $10 fee per book, a very limited list and a proprietary format...so it doesn't deal with serious readers.  Too bad.

Air business

There are many names for the type of business that we carry on in the United States: information industry, knowledge industry, service industry etc.  But none of those names convey the reality which is that most of what we buy and sell is air.  I call the main product of America the air business.

How much of the contemporary American GDP is air business?

A refined definition is that an air business is any business where less than 5% of the final retail price is a physical product.  A movie is air business, nearly everything that runs on a computer is air business and so are nearly all services without physical products, such as manicures, massage, medicine, education, finance, government, the arts, architecture, consulting and the media. Businesses that are not air are restaurants, agriculture, retail stores, the automotive industry and the airlines, they are physical businesses.

A rough guess, looking through the components of our GDP leads me to the estimate that 60% of our GDP is made of air business.  So we pay roughly $8.5 trillion a year for air and earn $8.5 trillion for offering our fellow citizens and people of the world air.

Annapolis and Iran

I don't claim any unique access to international affairs.  I have had experience in that domain and I have been right about 50% of the time in understanding a sequence of public events that are not explained or are covered-up.  I find out by following up years later by asking knowledgeable people to explain what really happened.

Two items strike me on the current horizon as misreported.  The first is the Israeli bombing of Syria and the second is the goal and outcome of Annapolis.

First, I suspect that the Israeli attack on a low priority target deep inside Syria that required flying over a small part of Turkey was correctly described by Syria as the destruction of an insignificant empty building.  I suspect the purpose of the raid was straightforward in the run up to Annapolis and the election in Lebanon as a reminder that Israel has the ability to circumvent Syrian and Iranian air defenses without serious risk to Israel. I also believe that the raid was coordinated with Turkey and the U.S. because Turkey has good air defenses (U.S. and Israeli sourced)  and because the U.S. airborne radar planes constantly monitor Syrian airspace.

Second, I suspect that Annapolis was an historic success of major proportions. Nearly every Arab country attended.  This in itself was a first and required a major realignment of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Countries. What we are striving for, and may now have, is an incipient version of NATO among Sunni Arabs.  The new collective alliance is anti-Iran and can be accurately described as a herd with the U.S. as the Alpha male.

Winning in Iraq and the creation of a long-term U.S. base has made the U.S. the dominant power in the Mediterranean and Middle East with Israel as the second in command. 

This Israeli raid and the Annapolis gathering are both unambiguous to the Arab world where power and hierarchy are all that matters.

Incipient Westcoast literary world

There was an incipient Westcoast literary world in the early days of the Whole Earth Catalog.  All around me were salons, seminars, writers, literary lunches and the products of this literary activity: journals, books and magazines.  I even helped put on a celebration of the vast literary scene with the first Friends of Books and Comics gathering at the Hall of Flowers in Spring 1973.

The scene remains but became much more subdued by the end of the 1980s.  The vitality of the 1970s centered around the hippy leadership, Stewart Brand, Dick Baker Roshi and a dozen others. 

The same thing killed the exciting Westcoast literary scene that killed the hippy revolution: the inability of participants to maintain friendships over time in an individualistic, slightly competitive gender environment, with no hierarchy nor long-term established institutions.

 

Bhutan and traditional culture

I long ago stopped listening to the whining of the people who bemoan the loss of languages.  A language is lost when it no longer has a use among living people.  Hebrew is alive and well, while having not been used as a spoken language for thousands of years.  Classic Latin is spoken in the hallowed halls of the Vatican. There are many more examples.

The King of Bhutan and the Dalai Lama are striving to figure out how their respective cultures can be preserved in the face of modernity.

May I suggest a way to preserve your culture in the face of modernity?  Do what Japan did, fully embrace modernity, send your best students to the best foreign universities, build infrastructure and modern education, learn from everyone.  Japan today is a fully modern culture, but since it sought out and adapted the modern commercial world on its own terms from the 1860's to the 1920's, Japan never lost its traditional culture.  Everything that was traditional Japan is still available in all the arts, fabrics, designs, language, music, crafts knowledge and social values.   

Attempting to keep modernity out of the society is the sure road to failure: examples are abundant from Cuba under Castro, Spain in the 1930s to the 70s, North Korea under the Kims, India under socialism to Iran under the Ayatollah.  All failed at both keeping modernity out and maintaining a vital traditional culture. Commerce arrived and tradition is weaker in those tyrannical countries than it is in Japan.

 

Statistical branching

Late last year Netflix offered $1 million to anyone or any group that could improve their ‘matching algorithm‘.  The Netflix ‘matching algorithm’ suggests films that you would like based on previous films that you have rated.

I looked into joining this competition for two reasons: 1) I've been thinking about this subject for a long time and this was a good chance to test my thinking; 2) this is a core question in marketing and human networking. 'Matching' is a common subject friends talk to each other about....finding movies in common, finding songs and food.

Please think about the issue for a moment.  If a machine can ask you a few questions and then know your tastes and interests to the point where the machine is accurate 19 out of 20 times in the future, wouldn't you be stunned?  Wouldn't you be willing to let that machine make nearly all minor decisions for you? Would it be fair to say that that machine has a good understanding of how your mind works? My answer is 'Yes.'

Netflix pays $50,000 every quarter to participants in the contest based on the progress they have made.

I didn't join the contest after I looked at the size of the test files that are used in building and testing the algorithms. The files would barely fit on my computer and all the math programs I have would find processing almost impossible.

The latest winner of the $50,000 progress award is a team at AT&T.  Congratulations.

If you aren't a statistician you are unlikely to know that AT&T Labs, formerly Bell Labs, was the home of most statistical inventions in the past 50 years.  I look forward to seeing the product of this contest, it will be important for all of us. 

This contest is also a lesson, a lesson that can not be repeated too often...human beings will do more in a mildly competitive environment than any other way. A mildly competitive environment is precisely what commerce is all about.  (Please don't write me about commerce being like blood lust or warfare, it isn't.  Commerce is sports-like with striving as the mode of competition.)

America won the war in Iraq part II

Most people are beginning to understand this reality about our wonderful American victory in Iraq.  But the truly ignorant Left frequently replies that 'now we can leave Iraq.'

I do not toss around a phrase like 'truly ignorant' lightly.  How else to tell someone that after we win a war, we stick around for a long time.

We still have military bases in Cuba, Panama and the Philippines and those were based on wars we won in the 19th Century. Most people can list the bases left over from victories in the 20th Century from Germany, Japan, Okinawa to Korea. We also have bases in England, Ireland, Greenland, Canada and Diego Garcia all former war time allies.

We will be in Iraq and Afghanistan for centuries.