Pro Commerce

Simple motivation

In couple of weeks I am off to Tokyo for six weeks on my annual pilgrimage.  The first blog I will post will be on a fascinating book about the Whole Earth Catalog and its associated movement by Andrew Kirk.

I just have to point out at this moment that one of the greatest contributions of Stewart Brand, myself and others was to the environmental movement.  We changed it from Sierra Club conservation of land to personal responsibility in behavior and consumption. We appreciated technology and saw its positive potential from solar power to wind generation (and most recently nuclear power).  At the same time as we promoted the personal vision, there was an apocalyptic end of the world vision (not ours) that still prevails in the political landscape. 

For the Whole Earth movement, fear of the end of the earth can never be as strong a motivator as personal values and personal solutions that lead to recycling and saving resources for their own sake.  I have been a simple liver for forty years and have always been enchanted by the simple livers around me (Al Gore is not one of them).  None of them do it for fear of the end of the world, they do it for pure joy.  They bicycle for the exercise, fresh air and exhilaration. The personal-environmentalist's influence on others is the Whole Earth contribution to the environmental world, regardless of whether you believe in human caused-global warming or not.

Hecho en China

That phrase is on a lighting fixture I recently installed. It is Spanish for Made in China. I left the decal on for future archaeologists.  That should help the archaeologists identify the era of the lamp fixture.

Why? Because this fixture was sold at the most American of home fixtures stores Home Depot. The fixture could not have had such a label on it before 1996.

First, outsourcing of common American household fixtures to China barely dates back to 1990 when China began its rapid growth into the world of industrial exporting. 

Second, the creation of a domestic American market where the Spanish language was important to the people working in the household construction industry barely dates back to 1996 when significant immigration from Mexico became important. The market for products that have to speak to Spanish speakers only began its significant growth in the late 1990s.a

The combination of Spanish language and Chinese import for sale in America sets the earliest date at 1996.

I personally am happy to see 'Hecho in China.'  The source of this product and the construction workers who buy such products at Home Depot are what has kept our prices very low for more than a decade. Gracias.

Censorship and Fitna

All my life I had to listen to Lefties complain that the news Americans got was censored. Never very bright, what the Left was trying to say was that their Marxist view of the world, in its purist form, rarely made it into the mainstream media.  The Left always got its pure version published or spouted on radio but they wanted their message forced on larger audiences.

Today we never hear that chronic Lefty blather about censorship, thanks to the Internet.  Praise be the Internet. Anyone can get on the Internet and anyone (outside of China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and a few Arab states) can get any material they want. Nobody is forced to look at any part of the Internet and couldn't be.

What brings this up is that I saw Fitna, the anti-Koran video on Bookworm's site.  I knew when it was taken down from Liveleak later that the video would always be available to everyone, thanks to downloading. And it is. The site I'm linking you to has much lower quality than the original I saw but it is there.

Nothing for me to comment on.  The Torah and the Christian gospels have many belligerent statements and the same video could easily be made about the Judeo-Christian tradition.  So what?  The only element here is the cowardice of all the people afraid to speak out. And the reality of the threat we all face. Islam is the terror of our day.  It won't last forever but it will last throughout the life of my grandchildren.

Bernard Lewis, the 91 year old great Islamic scholar who lived through the original choice, is the source of my closing line about Arab and Persian Islam. This year we Americans get to vote for a choice of Churchill or Chamberlain.

The decline and fall

There are nearly one million Google entries for the precise words 'decline and fall.'  The three most famous books on the subject of civilizational decline and fall are by Edward Gibbon, Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler.  There are many books using this concept and applying it to the U.S.

I'll state the facts bluntly.  The notion of historic 'decline and fall' is misleading, irrelevant and virtual nonsense. It is a concept advanced by people who have a Euro-centric world view that is at its core  eschatological.  If one looks at the Roman Empire, Greece, Egypt, the early America's there are many examples of civilizations that rose and fell.

On the other hand China, Japan, India, Persia and a number of other civilizations are still with us after thousands of years, not to mention the one that disturbed Toynbee the most: Israel. These civilizations have had many ups and downs but they are still with us. They all made it into the industrial commercial world and are adapting.

The notion of a civilizational rise, decline and fall is, as I said, misleading, irrelevant and virtual nonsense.  None of the historic examples I just cited can be used as evidence of decline and fall.  There is no reason to believe such a concept applies to the U.S. unless it is wishful thinking on the part of people who wish us ill.

Veggie triumph

Since I am closely associated with a pioneering high-end vegetarian restaurant, I want to point out an historically important article.

The New York Times published Frank Bruni's search for the best new American restaurants and put Ubuntu, in the town of Napa, as the number two choice.

I consider this historic because vegetarian food has not previously reached the level of cuisine that it is capable of reaching.  I've had extraordinary vegetarian meals in the home temple of the Soto Zen sect in Japan, Eiheiji. Those meals were at the utter peak of human cuisine.

While I am not a vegetarian by any one's definition, I find the most exquisite food with the most imagination is always vegetarian.  When I am eating out and evaluating the quality of a chef I always judge by the chef's handling of vegetables.  It seems to me that the best test of skill, creativity and profound taste is the ability to prepare, cook, combine and present vegetables.

I plan to go to Ubuntu in the near future. It is listed in Open Table.

Footnote: A vegetarian restaurant has higher food and prep costs to total revenue (34%) than a meat or fish restaurant (24%) because it takes no effort to throw a slab of meat or fish on the grill.

Partial book review (3rd) and final

Walter Mead's God and Gold  makes a stunningly original point.  Mead argues that Avram was the father of history and history is necessary for the Enlightenment and the subsequent creation of industrial commerce.  Avram became Abraham when God made him the father of many peoples including God's chosen people.

Hence forth, after Abraham, the sequence of events that impacted a society became more than just a random or cyclical pattern, it became a moral sequence of events.  A connected sequence of events as they relate to a society, is what we call history.  Enlightenment, science, Protestantism, Adam Smith and Hegel are all derived from the core Abrahamic  tradition that looks at a social sequence of events as important: 'historic'.

I haven't said anything about Mead's overall book so far in my three reviews.  The reason is that Mead is a brilliant historian, with an unfortunate legacy of ideological blindness.  The poor guy is an original thinker wrapped up in Lefty straight-jacket.  The book sets the intelligent reader up for an understanding that the Anglo world is Puritanical and has long expected the end of every major war to bring warfare to an end.  Thus the creation of the League of Nations and the unfortunate United Nations.  We can see the idealism of the United Nations with its static world view of 1947 in the selection of Security Council members, still the same 60 years later.

We readers hope that Mead will follow up his introduction.    

He doesn't. Mead wimps out with cliches and cowardly notions of negotiation from power and bully pulpit trite talk.  Mead's lefty brain is stuck in the 19th Century, thinking that Superpower America can act like England and get smaller nation to struggle with each other by playing them off with minor shifts in support.

Mead has no idea that nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles have changed the world; he is blissfully unaware that they exist. Mead has no sense that the enemies of the United States, especially if they are tyrannical governments with little concern for their own people, can directly kill millions of Americans and our allies with virtual impunity.  America can not wipe North Korea,Libya or Iran off the map just because we lose a million Americans in a nuclear attack.   

Playing nations off against each other is outmoded and dangerous for a Superpower.  It is a suicidal invitation to disaster.

Partial book review (2)

Walter Mead's book God and Gold gives the best history of democracy and commerce that I have seen from a major publisher.

He does an excellent job of showing the origins of democracy in the Dutch Republic during the Protestant reformation in the late 1500s and the dramatic creation of the first international industrial commercial society, with stocks, bonds, national banking, taxation and insurance. 

Mead understands that all of this Dutch genius was transferred to England when the Dutch army conquered England in 1688 and installed William of Orange and Mary as King and Queen.

What has always baffled me is the subsequent rise of England and the decline of Holland.  Mead answers that puzzle.  England is an island that doesn't need to divert its military to defense against invading neighbors.  Holland is not. England could  devote all resources to its navy, while Holland needed domestic protection from France and Austria.

Mead also adds to the general understanding of the relationship between the emergence of industrial commerce and religion, beyond Max Weber, by comparing Catholic and Protestant on the basis of anti-status-quo.  The comparison stands up.  The Roman Catholic, top-down world was anti-democracy and forcefully pro-status quo. Protestantism wasn't, which made room for industrial commerce.

We forget, as Mead points out, Protestants including Puritans were as violent and disruptive as modern day Islamic suicide murderers.

Partial book review (1)

I read Walter Russell Mead's book God and Gold very carefully.  I learned a great deal and will share some of his more useful observations and comments before talking about the book as a whole.

Mead has made a nominal but convenient improvement on Mancur Olson's thesis. Olson was the first to understand that commerce thrives in the middle between too weak a government where laws and contracts can't be enforced and too strong a government where el presidente's brother takes your business.  Mead calls this in-the-middle state: Goldilocks. 

I like the simplification but Mead doesn't give due credit to Olson. He doesn't give Olson any credit. 

Mead starts off his book in a cute way. He apologizes for what he is about to say.  That 'America is the sole global super power and must behave that way'.  Then he apologizes for having said it.

Obama's speech

I agree that the Obama speech in Pennsylvania was a masterpiece and is of historic importance.

I have one caveat and two observations for future historians.

First the caveat.  It was a great speech up to the point, about 70% through where he says:  "Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change."

From that point on, Obama becomes a standard "brain-dead liberal" as David Mamet calls them.

The first observation is that 'the chickens have come home to roost' for Barack Obama.  What do I mean?

I have been saying for a long time that the black church and black leaders have disowned the great black accomplishments in our society in recent times.  We have many great Americans who are black: Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Colin Powell, Condi Rice and many more. When a black holds conservative views he or she is no longer black. The black community has created a terrible political correctness  that defines 'black' as Lefty and rejects all other public positions.

Obama is banned from pointing to these great black achievers and America's justifiable pride.  Poor guy.

Moreover, Obama's grandmother, a civil rights fighter was frightened by a black man on the street.  Black leaders' dishonesty on this point is beyond the pale.  I'd cross the street if I saw three blacks dressed as hoodies in the 12-25 age range, but not three black police officers, three blacks dressed in business clothes, three black women over 25 or one black mother pushing a baby carriage.  No stereotype here just black leaders ignoring the high probability of young black male criminality.

These are the 'chicken coming home to roost' that have unfortunately hurt Barack Obama. If he could have ended his speech on the paragraph that I quote above, he would be among the truly great Americans.  But he can't because the black community would disown him as they have other great black Americans.

The second observation is that the remaining 30% of his speech was a plea for an historically dead lefty liberalism.

The Left fails to understand that America is one of the most compassionate nations in the world and has achieved great social access for the physically handicapped, the mentally handicapped and the educationally impaired of all ethnicities.  We give many times more to charity than any society ever thought possible. 

We have tried vigorously and intently to cure poverty, improve our poorest schools and provide health care for the most needy.  We have tried for forty years.  We have failed for one of two reason: either it can't be done or nobody knows how.  Until that sad truth sinks into the brain-dead liberal head, we can not escape the anger of the Left.

We can improve health care a little, with many of the ideas that John McCain has put forth.  But it must be cautious improvements because American medicine is the driving force of dynamic change in medicine and health care and has been for the entire 20th Century.  We can not give up the dynamics for a status quo. 

We can improve education, but we don't know how.  More money, the mantra of teacher's unions, is pure nonsense as proven by the Hawaiian schools with most dollars per student in the world. We just don't know how to upgrade our low achieving students. Integration simply didn't work.

Summary: A great speech up to the point where Obama was forced into parroting the historically outmoded liberal ideology where the sad bigotry of the black community has forced him to stand.

Real science

I personally don't have much respect for science because too much of 'science' is fatuous nonsense and science has been politicized for much of its history. On the other hand technology is the genius of human accomplishment in the empirical world. 

Thanks to Thomas Kuhn I understand that good science is falsifiable and someday, when most scientist understand Kuhn's definition, science will be a more rational and respectable term.

Thanks to Niels Bohr I came to learn that all the theories of science are really explanations for the details of constants.  Theory is used to explain constants. Constants are found by the methods of technology.

Even Galileo's success at measuring the gravitational constant was the result of an engineering accomplishment (a slanted, marked board).

The endless re-measurement of constants is the source of new theories in science (not the running of climate models on computers).  The measurement of the eccentricities of the moons of Jupiter led to Newton's great equations.  Science history is replete with such measurements, including Michelson-Morley's proof that the ether theory is not a useful theory.

Well low and behold all the satellites that whiz past the earth on their journeys elsewhere have unexpected orbits when measured to the millionth part.  (I can't find the reference article) That variation is like the variations that led to Einstein's models.  We can expect some new scientific theories when these new orbital eccentricities are explored. 

The empiric world is always just beyond our grasp.

Shedding blood

I love hearing the local extremist radio station KPFA from the hate-and-vomit capital of America, Berkeley.  KPFA news broadcasts from Gaza and can go for a half hour decrying the massacres the Israelis are carrying out on children and old women.  Everyone interviewed seems to translate into the same statement that the Israelis kill children and old women because they are occupiers and oppressors.

This is a powerful reminder; not that these Arabs are idiots for failing to see what they do to cause the Israeli reaction, but because nearly all people believe that they are right and the enemy is wrong.

The law of warfare, based on several thousand years, is that wars end when enough blood has been shed and the loser knows there is nothing more to do.  Most recently, the Germans and Japanese only surrendered when millions of their civilians had been killed, and not before then.

So why don't the Israelis kill a quarter of the Palestinian population and put an end to the 100 year war?  Every military man in history would have done that.

The answer is that the Israelis are bound by some moral code that requires them to protect the thousands of spies they have among the Palestinians.  Therefore we get a war where spies permit Israelis to single out terrorists and terrorist leaders for execution while leaving most of the hate filled population untouched.

I don't think the current strategy is working.

Never get that great meal again

It has been my experience over more than 40 years, that among the numerous women I have lived with that when one of them cooked a particularly great meal and I suggested that they remember and serve it again......that they never did.

Of course it could be me.  But I've heard this complaint from other men and women.

I also notice I do the same thing.  I seldom cook from recipes and so when someone loves what I cook, comments glowingly on the food, I am delighted with the immediate response but seldom make a note to repeat the success.

Maybe the goal in cooking is immediate pleasure, not running a successful restaurant.

Terrorist Church

I woke up this morning wondering if the term Terrorist Church had gotten into Google yet.  It has, with one reference.

So I want to add this second reference and make the subject clear.  I am talking about Barack Obama's church in Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ with Jeremiah Wright as the pastor (he probably hasn't left just as S.F. Glide's Cecil Williams hasn't ever really retired).

One has to ask how a terrorist church in Chicago differs from a terrorist mosque in Gaza.  Since Jeremiah Wright claims the Christian Gospels authorize 'God damn America', I see only a minor difference. The difference is that we aren't getting black suicide bombers showing up at Marshall Field or Macys.  The reason for the absence of suicide bombers is primarily that the black community has a taboo on suicide, a taboo that reaches back to Africa.

Wright took over a United Churches of Christ congregation and turned it into a black terrorist venue.  This wasn't too hard to do considering the UCC theology.  I've known many UCC ministers and they claim a theology that is very liberal (meaning non-judgmental) and anarchistic.  I suspect that only a good librarian who can find the obscure source of two words in a 1740 Hungarian poem could find the theological roots of UCC. Whatever theology there is is nearly invisible.

A church without structure or theology (UCC) is a good home for a black charismatic terrorist preacher.

TV at the 1952 convention

The 1952 political conventions were the first ones covered by TV for a national audience. 

Up to that point political party conventions were controlled by big city bosses from Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Boston and a few Southern states.  Since 1952 the party bosses and their machines have largely disappeared.

I would suggest that TV has two qualities that brought about this change.  First, TV can not show political negotiation of the type that bosses and their machines prior to 1952 carried out, in an entertaining fashion.   That meant that states that already had political primaries became increasingly important in conventions and more states opted for primaries.

Second, TV, with its advertising vehicle offered a more effective way for candidates to reach voters than the old publicly embarrassing bribe machines.

So, a technology, TV fed into American's distaste for back room bosses and boss based city machines.  We got, in its place, big time billion dollar campaigns and elections that begin two years before election day.

Our lives crossed

On Sunday September 16th 2001 I received an email from an Egyptian immigrant (Assam Elmagoop) who had several months earlier, joined my North Beach coffee group. The Egyptian immigrant blamed the United States for the murder of nearly 3,000 civilians that we had all seen on television the previous Tuesday. He argued that the murder was not terrorism but justifiable retribution for American foreign policy.

The same day, Barack Obama's close friend and minister in Chicago, Jeremiah Wright was screaming the same thing to his congregation. Wright explained the murder of American civilians as the consequence of white American foreign policy, it was he said "chickens coming home to roost."

I acted immediately Monday morning the 17th and told Elmagoop to either retract his email or leave the coffee group.  He wouldn't. I lost two friend in the coffee group who sided with Elmagoop, one who had been a close friend and adviser for 25 years. I stood up to moral outrage and lost my close friend and adviser.

Barack Obama waited seven years, after September 16th, until the heat of a presidential campaign to call his minister friend's outrageous attack morally unacceptable. Obama still hasn't rejected his friend Jeremiah Wright who has made many other horrific declamations.

Our paths crossed and I feel my actions were morally superior to Barack Obama.  I think the American people are joining me.

Buddhist electoral choice

In Buddhism there are many concepts of a Bodhisattva.  To me a Bodhisattva is a person who has reached enlightenment and chooses to remain among the living to help the rest of us also achieve enlightenment.  There is some parallel to Christian saints.

Let me be the first to suggest that John McCain will be the first presidential candidate who is clearly a Bodhisattva.  We have Bodhisattvas all around us. 

I often point out that fireman and ambulance workers risk their lives every day to save the life of strangers.  They are Bodhisattva as are the people who work in emergency rooms and on contagious wards.

The evidence that John McCain is a Bodhisattva can be seen in his primary role as a mediator, the leading mediator, in the U.S. Senate, the incredible and bottomless honesty that is known to everyone around him, and his willingness to get angry (but never stay angry) despite the American publics' dislike of people who show anger.

McCain probably became a Bodhisattva during the six years of torture he suffered in North Vietnam.  When one has endured suffering and torture, one either becomes insane, bitter or enlightened.  Jesus acted as a Bodhisattva when he said, 'forgive them, they don't know what they have done' when he purportedly had nails in his hands and feet. McCain became the Bodhisattva.

The origin of the word penitentiary comes from the religious believe that prison could make a sinful criminal become a penitent,  deeply religious humble person.

 

Recession?

Only three months ago I went out on the limb and said we will have no more recessions. I defined a recession these days as a full year with zero growth of GNP or negative GNP.

Now we are being inundated with experts of every shade and color saying we are in a recession and some are calling it a deep and severe recession.

First, there is a real decline in home building and the prices of housing in the U.S. and a few other countries.

Second, there is a global decline in financial markets, in many cases a decline of 20-40% since last July.

Neither of these is a recession.  The home building and selling market is important but it is not the core of the U.S. industrial juggernaut. The financial market can be a critical source of economic growth, but in and of itself it is not a source of economic strength.

Frankly, I don't see anything close to a recession.  I see a financial panic of global proportions, for reasons I have yet to identify.

The sky is not falling Mr. (Chicken) Little.

Someone has to say it

Barry Obama is misleading Americans about black churches.

First, his church, Trinity United, and nearly all other black churches are charismatic.  Charismatic means that the church is built around the founding preacher.  These are not churches built around theology, synods or diocese.  Barry's church is built around his preacher.  The new Trinity preacher is unlikely to keep his church running with the current membership for long. Trinity United Church is the church of Jeremiah Wright.

Second, hatred of whites and America is not the foundation for most black churches.  I've been to dozens of black churches over many decades, the music is the magnetic draw for me as well as the loving congregations.  I've never heard an anti-American anti-white hate sermon.  How could I?  I'd never go back.

I've gone to the biggest black church in Oakland, Allen Temple Baptist Church and know the founder, Alfred J. Smith.  The church  gave me a standing five minute ovation for my work in black activities. The church is built on love, personal connection to Jesus and support for all the congregants. This sure as hell is not Jeremiah Wright's church.

The biggest black church in Los Angeles is the West Angeles Church of God in Christ.  The founder and leader is Charles Blake.  President George W. Bush has been a guest of the church and was warmly received by the huge congregation.  No white hatred there, no blaming big business, the War in Iraq or any other screed of oppression.

I think Barack just became Barry (his high school name). Barack is the stage name of a black-white savior.  Barry is a good actor and ambitious traditional politician. Obama made the Democratic nomination either impossible or a position of certain defeat.

Everyone is right.  The black issue is very deep.  We didn't celebrate the 100th anniversary of the end of the Civil War in 1964 and we won't celebrate the 150th anniversary in 2014.  This issue won't go away.

Internet fraud

If you ever put photos on 'your' Yahoo website, YOU'VE BEEN SCREWED BY YAHOO.

Yahoo sold your photos (and mine) to Flickr.  That wasn't fraud by itself.

Flickr will now charge you and me an annual fee just to see our own photos, if they number over 200.

  That is not the worst, Flickr will only let us download OUR OWN photos one at a time from the Flickr site.

The fraud is to take OUR photos and make them virtually inaccessible (taking photos down one at a time is absurd, in my opinion) and charge us to see our own photos if we haven't the time to remove them from the Flickr site.

I put Yahoo and Flickr in the Hall of Consumer Fraud Disgrace, along with the other Internet company that was already in the Hall, Fandango   (Fandango sold my credit card number to some sham group that started billing me $9.99 a month for god-knows-what.)

I am in the process of closing all my Yahoo accounts and I will let Flickr keep all my photos except for the dozen I like best and will spend the time to download.

Mea culpa

  I really feel awful about breaking my lifetime rule of never giving investment advice.  I wrote a blog more than a year ago recommending a globally diversified ETF (exchange traded funds) index investment strategy.

Since last August (2007), this has been nonsense advice because all the markets of the world have moved in  sync, as if they are just one market. They have all gone down.  So there is no global diversity.

The math was simple.  It is the Law of Large numbers. If you take ten bags of pebbles from a pebble beach, the average of the ten bags' pebble size will be nearly exactly the same as the average size of the pebbles on the beach.  The underlying assumption of the Law of Large numbers is that the variation from pebble to pebble is independent, they are not identical to start with.

Since August last year it is clear that neither the global markets nor the stocks listed on those markets are independent.  They all move in sync.  They are all connected to each other by some gigantic investment organism. I have no idea at this time what the 'gigantic investment organism' is.  The consequence is that all stocks in the world are virtually one stock.

There can be no mathematically rational investment strategy in this environment.  Mea culpa. I apologize for my investment recommendation. Don't follow it because of me.  Fortunately, those people who bought my portfolio at the time I recommended it (Dec. 2006-Jan-2007) have lost less than 3% as of today.

Comedians

I suspect that every generation feels it is blessed with an abundance of good comedians.

I feel that way about the current era. We have the slapstick greats of Will Ferrill and Jim Carey,  We have the versatility of Robin Williams, Chris Rock and Will Smith. I love Richard Pryor and Cameron Diaz.

There are others I have left off either because they are too new to know if they really have a sense of comedy, or just read good scripts, or because they are currently locked into a single character or, for a large group, their humor is based on a package of cheap political jokes. 

Political comedians don't weather very well if you start looking at 1950s videos; the political jokes seldom make sense.

We are blessed with all the non-political great comedians.

City scape

A city is commerce.  That is what creates a city and what provides its core vitality.  Commerce is the cityscape.

The photo on the right is part of the living city and when I see it, it reminds me about the nature of commerce.

Tower records was created by a client of mine in the mid-1970's in response to the wild hippy love of music and particularly their intense love affair with rock. Tower was a large successful chain created from the commercial expression of that hippy passion. This store is a physical representation of a commercial event.

The passion for music doesn't seem to have died down, considering what I see and hear on American Idol.  But the delivery of music is now changing.  The Ipod is the delivery vehicle of choice and the main source of Ipod contents is the Internet.

This store is no longer relevant to the commerce of music for today's technology and taste.

What will be next?

Hyphenated businesses

This is a photo of a bicycle shop with a coffee house in the front. 

An old lover of mine Catherine C. always refused to eat in hyphenated restaurants. She meant Chinese-American, Indian-Chinese, Filipino-American and Peruvian-Spanish as examples.  She was right.  I never had a good meal in a hyphenated restaurant. I don't know why Catherine's rule works, food itself is always a mix of ethnicities in its preparation and presentation.

But Catherine's hyphenated rule applies to most other businesses for a good reason.  The bicycle shop with a coffee house can't last very long. While there are people who can have coffee while their bicycle is being repaired, that is a small, even tiny, segment of a bicycle shop's business.

The problem with putting two businesses together for any long period is that each business has clients with different needs.  Those differences will grow over time. The initial value of lowering mutual rent will be over ridden by the needs of loyal customers as time goes by.

In the bicycle-coffee combination, the bicycle person's love of bicycles and the high mark-up on the kind of bikes that loyal customers like will create a need for much more display space.  And bicycle shops, with new bikes, smell like rubber tires.  Not like coffee.

The coffee shop, as it ages, will find its loyal customers want more pastry, more take-out service, more coffee bean sales, more Starbucks-like weird coffee drinks with the associated equipment, a different seating spatial arrangement with more high viewing seats and a few party tables, and possibly local live music.  The bike shop 'environmental aura' will be less relevant; the good design, service and smell will matter more.

Urban life

Everyone seems to love the urbanity of Paris and Amsterdam.  I can add to that Tokyo and Tel Aviv.  The Castro neighborhood here in San Francisco has some of the elements that create a genuine urban environment.

The photo on the right exemplifies one element: flowers.  I love flowers on the street that make smell a useful urban sidewalk sense. There are four flower shops in the Castro.  Not nearly enough but a good start.

Another element in the Castro District is public art by local artists.  The window on the left is near Market on Sanchez.  The artist changes the window at least monthly and it is always interesting.  The artist lives in the space behind the window.

Protection

Without commenting on the way poor neighborhoods stay poor (in many meanings of the word) because of crime, I've noticed a significant step forward in this regard.

Standard folding iron gates that usually protect storefronts in bad neighborhoods are commonly ugly and bad for business.   They yell out 'danger.' But they are necessary to protect the business.  Windows etched with battery acid or broken are very expensive to replace and equally expensive in loss of customers when not replaced.

The photo on the right shows a wonderful solution.  The protective wall is steel mail painted black.  It protects beautifully and to my eye it is esthetically pleasing.

The real news behind the news

The media world and blogs are having enough fun with Eliot Spitzer without my help.

I have two minor observations.  One, the glee with which the Wall Street Journal and its readers are enjoying is fun to watch.  For them, a tyrant gets his justified come-up-ance.

Two, Nick Kristof (NYTimes) tells us that: "The governor buttonholed me because he wanted credit for passage of a tough state law against sex trafficking. Frankly, he deserves credit, for the law took the innovative step of cracking down on johns by increasing penalties."

That makes Spitzer a hypocrite who is hoist on his own petard.  I like that.

Contempt for hypocrisy was the driving force with the Hippies who resented their parents 3 martinis a day and conventionality on sex, aesthetics, music and social behavior.

My contribution to this discussion deals with call girls and prostitution.  My experience comes from helping Margo St. James start and run Coyote, the first prostitutes union in America.  Margo, bless her, gives me full credit.

I wrote about prostitution in a blog in August 2005.  I said: "The relevant data you may need to know about prostitution is that the classic sex research findings breakdown revenue earned in different types of prostitution into 90% call girls, 5% bordellos and 5% hookers (hookers are prostitutes who work on the street)."

The actual number of prostitutes breaks down to 25% call girls, 10% bordellos, 65% street hookers.

In the Spitzer case, Kristen, Ashley Alexander Dupre, (she had a MySpace page this morning which has since been hijacked by hundreds of people using her name and photo) was employed in a modern bordello.  Despite what the media say, Kristen worked for a bordello, she is not a call girl. Bordellos are usually run by a man and a woman.  In this case by Mark Brener and Cecil Suwal.

The modern bordello doesn't have a premise; its operates by having the customer contact a central number and then the customer is assigned a meeting place when the money has been received by the bordello operater.  Kristen's bordello operated in NY, DC, Paris and Miami.

Call girls earn about $275,000 per year.  Kristen probably earned less than half of that. 

The way the call girl business works is very different from the bordello.  Call girls are independent contractors linked in a network. It starts when a man who uses call girls introduces a friend to one of them.  If the original client and the new client are trustworthy, the call girl introduces the new man to other call girls who might interest him.  Payment is in cash.  The entire network is based on a chain of mutual trust of call girls who know each other and reliable clients who get passed around.

Call girls are virtually never arrested.  They are usually attractive, sometimes beautiful, always strong and independent.  From what I can tell they usually marry a rich man by the time they are 30.

I estimate the total revenue from prostitution in America, based on the rare insight in San Francisco, is $25 billion.  Again 90% is paid to call girls.  The bordellos with which Spitzer was involved generate $2.5 billion a year in revenue.

Getting around

There is a wonderful David Mamet article in the Village Voice that is getting wide coverage.

I highly recommend it and a comment on it by one of my favorite blogs, Bookworm Room.

The Mamet piece is long, delightful and convincing on why he is no longer a brain-dead liberal.  It is worth your time no matter your politics.  Bookworm Room's addition is also delightful.  They are both good writers and a pleasure to read.  Still you have to have the twenty minutes it takes to read both.

Empirical evidence for me

Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana's 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year......until the Indiana Legislature put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

Indiana's change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

"I've never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this," says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.

(Please see a brilliant comment on this blog below by Bill Starr)

Bart change

If you love taking BART to the SFO airport as much as I do then you need to know about a change in BART routing.  I find BART to be cheap, reliable, fairly clean and convenient for SFO. Recently there was a slight improvement.

BART now has specific trains that go only to the SFO airport and don't go further to Millbrae.  Similarly their are trains to Millbrae that don't go to SFO airport. Be forewarned. Don't assume the Millbrae train stops at SFO.  It doesn't.

This change was not in effect when I last went to SFO on Thanksgiving and I can't find the press release announcing it.  Now you know, if you didn't already.

BART is a very good transit system for America.  When compared to Tokyo, of course, it is well below mediocre.

A white report on blacks

I spent 11 years working in a black oriented church (Glide Memorial) where I worked closely with many ordinary black street people, including bums (especially when I built Drunk Park on 6th and Minna) and several black professional peers.

What always surprised me, though it shouldn't have, is that blacks of all stations (not Africans or blacks born outside the U.S.) had gigantic holes in their knowledge of how the white world works.

While the black street person's knowledge of political ways and often technology was usually accurate, their knowledge of business, finance, civil legal and academic worlds was spotty, often inaccurate and sometimes imaginary.

To find a black who didn't know how businesses uses credit scores, how commercial leases work, the elements of bookkeeping, tax laws on dividends or how to buy stock in a foreign company was much more common than in the white community.

Two reasons for this. About one third of all urban blacks arrived from the South in the 1950-60s, many of the rest came during WWII.  So all issues of urban life are fairly new because the assimilation into urban middle-class has been slow over the past sixty years for blacks.

Also, if you don't live in a predominantly white community, you don't know what it is that you don't know about the white world.  Instead you get reinforced in your views and experiences by other black people who also lack such experience.

Next time you have trouble with a black person, as with all people, be polite consider first that you may be at fault, but secondly, remember that assimilation has been slow and the black person may not know what is customary in the white world.

Political friends

I've had political friends all my life.  By that I mean legislators, elected administrators including mayors, senators and governors, political appointees, cabinet heads and sheriffs. Considering the long years I've been active in many communities and many countries and considering the wide range of my activities, the next sentence will be surprising.  I have had dinner, dates and spent many hours with political friends but never once have I used my access to a political friend for any personal or business purpose.  Never.

Why?  Because the people who need to use political influence are usually involved in real estate, real estate development, construction or a field directly related to government regulatory activity. That has not been me. Most people can find little or no use for their personal relations with politicians.

Conversely, I could never be in politics because the friends you have are almost exclusively people who want to use you.