Pro Commerce

What is wrong with Lefties?

Ed Rothstein (the only civilized brain on the NYTimes staff) says it better than I do because he is calm and academic. He discusses a recent Laurie Anderson Lincoln Center performance piece.  Ms. Anderson claims her piece deals with “taboo subjects” — 'matters that, she affirms, people are afraid to speak out about'?

And what is this taboo truth?  It is the subject of how terrible war is.

Only a delusional Lefty, under the most self-dishonest conditions, could ever think that this is a taboo subject.  What is wrong with Lefties that they have to think they are an oppressed, brave minority speaking the truth when every single god damn one of them has the same identical, ignorant, unthinking, idiotic idea?  I hear this supposedly taboo idea every day on NPR, on mainstream media and in a dozen blogs and two dozen pieces of printed media.

How can something fastened with steel wires into the heart and stuffed surgically into the brain of every Lefty be a "taboo"?

Sorry to rant.  I just can't stomach this absurdity of Lefty taboo truth.  I've heard this whine for 50 years with Lefties claiming they can't get their ideas published because of capitalist media control. The reality is I never went a day without being inundated with their nonsense in print.

Open gates for Blacks

This blog is for the historians looking at this period. I think the gates of opportunity are still open to blacks in America, after they were first opened in 1964. 

I see jobs open, professional schools still seeking blacks, I see excellent teachers going out of their way to help black students and I see access to management in countless companies that I deal with.

The issue of open or closed gates is historically relevant because after the U.S. Civil War, the victorious North sent 2,000 bureaucrats into the Confederacy to open up schools, jobs, voting and government positions to former slaves.

Over the ensuing decades the South invented Jim Crow,and the Klu Klux Klan and re-suppressed the Blacks.  By the time (1912) Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was elected president he closed the final gate when he fired every black working for the U.S. Government (roughly 5,000 men).

The gates are open today, 144 years after the Civil War.

Cross country biker

I was sitting on Baker Beach in San Francisco and a guy wheeled his bike across the sand.  He asked me to take a photo of him with a wheel in the ocean and the GG Bridge in the background.  I did.

The guy claimed to have biked across the U.S. on back roads, 3,800 miles in 38 days. He had a gps on his handlebars.

I don't know if it was true.  The guy was about 30, very healthy and tanned.  He said he was going downtown to celebrate and stay in a good hotel.  Will hotels let you bring your bike to your room?

On a personal note, my brother and my sister-in-law just rode across Iowa last week.  I'm proud of them both.

Capital barrier

In economics the main factor in limiting competition and creating monopolies is a  capital barrier.  That means the cost of starting the business is very high, such is traditionally the case in mining, steel production and auto manufacturing. 

The reality is that capital is so abundant in the world that such problems never happen in established industries.  On the otherhand it may be a real problem in new industries.

I recently learned that the cost of running a search engine for the first time on the Internet costs over $100 million.

That whole issue was confirmed by Yahoo and then muted by Yahoo.  In this statement Yahoo says it takes hundreds of millions to run the first search. 

Yahoo has now made its basic total Internet alpha-sort, the costly capital barrier, available to developers for free.  The reason for this is that Microsoft bought Powerset, a San Francisco company that has the best search engine around, using Natural Language...meaning you can ask a question like 'where can I convert my car to natural gas?' and get an intelligent, pertinent answer.

Powerset is still in beta and was only able to buy the alpha-sort on Wikipedia in English. Try it.

Just as I write this, a new search engine itself has lowered the capital bar with a search bot that runs on fewer machines, covers more sites and looks great: cuill.co

Kneecapping

I have known of many flakes who take advantage of the San Francisco rent control laws to stay in their apartments for years without paying rent.  I won't list the techniques, they are available with any visit to the Rent Control Board.

When I hear this from a landlord or about a landlord I always wonder why the landlords don't take advantage of the poor law enforcement in San Francisco. San Francisco is a Wildwest lawless town. It seems to me that the solution under these outlaw circumstances is force. San Francisco is a City without a functioning Police force or a competent District Attorney.

A justifiably angry landlord could take advantage of our rampant lawlessness and lease the property to a person who will use force to remove the tenant.  No tenant is going to stay long once a tough guy has approached the tenant and said 'you have three days to get all your belongs out of your apartment'.  When the tenant phones the police, he (no shes in this field) will be told the police don't provide protection.  Without proof of the threat or the name of the person who made the threat, the District Attorney will do nothing.  The tenant will move out. 

If he doesn't then one broken knee cap will get him to move out and the police and the DA will still do nothing.

What I don't understand is why landlords don't do this more often. Criminals get away with theft to their hearts content in San Francisco. Why don't we hear more about kneecapping...a time honored outlaw tactic? 

I've never had trouble with my tenants.  Probably because I pick them carefully. I once chased a tenant's noisy boyfriend out of the apartment but he was a coward and left with no trouble.

Anti-commerce

In an earlier blog where I advocated buying products with Pro Commerce inscribed on them, one of my readers responded with the comment that I should have matching products with Anti-Commerce on them.

Many years ago I wrote an article attacking myself, since no one else had bothered to do it.  Now is the time to write the anti-commerce position.

Anti-commerce manifesto: 

I don't like change.  I want a community around me that is stable, supportive and accepts me the way I am. 

I support labor unions because they are strong opponents of change and they encourage businesses to act like monopolies. Unions keep market change from destabilizing the world I live in.

I oppose any form of trade, domestic or international, because it means jobs change, people have to move, people have to change who they are to compete in the new markets. I want tariffs that protect me and my friends from any pressure to change.

While I like gimmicks and technological toys I hate the ever changing horizon of new technologies that I have to learn like email, faxes, cell phones with cameras, digital TV etc...that means I have to adapt. Technology keeps changing the cozy world I live in. 

I support environmentalism because it wants the world to be simpler, more in tune with nature. Environmentalism opposes everything that expands the modern world. I agree with that. To me hard work in a modern office is undesirable and unpleasant and should be banned.

I want people around me who I can feel comfortable with who know me and recognize me on the street.  We don't need more migrants from other parts of the country, we don't need people from other countries working here.  We don't need bigger cites, bigger buildings or changes in the way we do things.

I want the government to promote equality.  I see no reason anyone should be richer than I am, and no reason why I should ever fear being poor.  If I don't want to work or can't find the work I want to do, the government should help me out.  That includes making sure I have the best medical care, as fine as everyone else's, for free.

The government is my friend, it keeps change from happening and should provide comfort for me in any area where I need it.  I want to be appreciated for who I am not on what I do. I don't want to be judged and I don't want to have to judge others. Meritocracy is just another form of social judgment and I abhor it.

Stalinist art

I went to a public conversation with photographer Edward Burtynsky sponsored by Stewart Brand's Long Now 10,000 year clock foundation. 

Most of the talk concerned how to create photographic prints that would last 10,000 years.  Burtnysky's solution is a method called carbon transfer made with ground stone.

Then Burtynsky showed three examples of color slides of the kind of curating he was thinking about for our current era. Two by Vid Ingelvics and Marcus Schubert and one of his own. 

This three person show was like seeing Soviet Socialist Realism in 1953 under Stalin.  It was pure ideological vacuousness.  But this is 2008 and the vacuous ideology is an anti-commerce synthesis of Ludditism, Marxism and Eco-Armaggedonism.  Ingelvics showed ordinary household items (stoves, dish washing soap) with no brand names, just boring boxes. At a time when there are 40,000 esthetic brand name product lines and one interesting Japanese chain with No Brand, he ignores the real world of commerce. Schubert is most concerned about imperialism and the terrible fact that there are rich and poor people on the same planet.  Burtynsky is mainly concerned that we are on the brink of destroying the natural world and the Chinese are using slaves to create cheap products.

It was is an anti-commerce synthesis of Ludditism, Marxism and Eco-Armaggedonism.

Looking at the world from the next century, not 10,000 years, I would say that in the second great world conquest of the Vikings (the 1st was in 900 CE about trade) from 1800 forward, based on industrial commerce, a small band of anti-commerce ideologs survived into the 21st Century and held a very transitory believe in global warming and other Armageddon religious views that didn't survive two decades.

The Luddites also worshiped the still photograph at a time when moving images were replacing them.

Management

 I'm waiting for the honest management book that starts off: 'management is wonderful and emotionally rewarding if you have the pay and recognition of a manager and no employees'.

There can be no book or course on management.  I've taught such courses and studied the issues in more than a thousand businesses.  There is only one reality:  people learn management from working under managers.  You are a good or bad manager depending on whether you ever worked under a good manager or not.

That is the sad truth.  Live with it.  If you want to be a good manager, work for one.  Otherwise, let someone else be the manager.

Banking

One of my readers asked me to re-write the Wikipedia entry on banking several years ago.  My reader knew I knew more about banking than most people writing for Wikipedia.  When I looked at the banking entry I found the first sentence described the Federal Reserve Bank.  I knew that idiots were involved and relied on my personal policy of spending only 4 hours of my total life on idiots.  Nearly the entire 4 hours is already used up.

I looked at the current Wikipedia entry and it is not bad.  It doesn't answer any of the questions ordinary people ask but technically it is sound.

The most common questions I get asked are does the bank I choose make a difference?  Are banks safe? What kind of account should I have?

Each of these requires a careful personalized response.  For example: if you travel, Citibank used to be a good choice because you can withdraw from their ATMs in local currency.  Now they charge too much (3-4% per transaction), so the issue is more complex.  If you are going to want a business loan you need to know the branch manager; on the other hand a big bank may have specialist lenders in your field. 

We need an interactive site to answer these questions, and the site needs to be updated regularly.

Failures

There are two failures I want to talk about.  The first is the failure of American intellectuals to admit they were wrong about Mel Gibson's movie Passion of Christ.

American intellectuals of all persuasions and religious orientations were certain that the deliberately anti-Semitic nature of Gibson's 2004 movie and his unwillingness to change the most inciteful parts would encourage and stimulate anti-Semitic behavior.

The Gibson movie was seen by roughly one hundred million people worldwide and there was no increase in anti-Semitic acts.

I am not surprised that American intellectuals never examined nor apologized for their error. Intellectuals rarely have any degree of self honesty.  Nevertheless I still read what they write.

The second failure is the failure of the movie to generate any acts of anti-Semitism.

The failure of the movie to elicit a behavioral response is something I have often seen and no one I know seems to understand or remember.  Movies almost never generate actionable behavior, whether good or bad.  Movies just don't have that power.

Gibson is a bigoted Catholic  asshole, which is evident in the lawsuit by his co-writer on the Passion movie, nevertheless he only made money on his movie, he didn't get the world to join him in hating the Jews, the way he wanted.

Gay marriage and class

In 1960 it was unthinkable.  In 1960 'gay marriage' was an oxymoron.  The gay movement hadn't come out of the closet and the idea of a lesbian was still a joke that was mentioned in a Tom Lehrer song.

I want to suggest that the issue of gay marriage is related to the end of the elite class in America and its slow disappearance in the other North Sea countries where the idea of gay marriage is prominent.

I suspect that the idea of marriage between a man and woman has been important in the past for the protection of an hereditary class.  Bastard is an idea that disappeared about the same time that the elite class was disappearing around 1960, and the same time that divorce became a public sport.

The elite class needed strongly sanctioned marriage to limit the number of recognized and supported offspring, which in turn helped protect and pass along all the identifiers of class. 

Property ownership and financial inheritance matters were of lesser concern to society than to the elite class because many more people had wealth than just the elite top class.

By simply mentioning the societies that have well established and long enduring social structures and noticing that they still consider gay marriage an oxymoron I will rest my case:  Japan, China, Taiwan, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

Gay marriage is still an oxymoron where there is an enduring hereditary class system.

E-book prices

Frankly I like my Sony Reader (similar to the Amazon Kindle) for reading on airplanes and for taking on vacations when I have several large, hardcover books to read.

 On the other hand because of three serious short comings I think the price of ebooks is too high.

Shortcomings:

(1) When I like a book I pass it along to my friends.  Since virtually none of my friends have Sony Readers or Kindles, I can't. 

(2) When I have a physical book on my shelf, it is much easier to remember that I have read it and I am much more able to remember the subject and look up segments that I want to remember. ( I often order films from Netflix that I forgot that I saw already.)

(3) When reading a book with references, bibliographies and extensive footnotes, an eReader is absolute crap.  There is no easy way to follow a footnote quickly and get back to where you were reading.  The equivalent of keeping your thumb on a page.

That makes downloading an ebook worth about $5.00 to me, not the $10 current price.

The Yelp mess

Yelp has made a mess in San Francisco.  The S.F. Chronicle ran a piece about the imperious way that Yelp has been removing business listings because other businesses have written positive referrals. 

Sheer stupidity.  Small business people appreciate other small businesses more than ordinary people and they understand the value of recommendations, so they help each other.  That is honesty that only a bureaucratic incompetent could fail to recognize.

Most Internet companies are started and run by managerial incompetents.  You only learn management by working for a good manager and these bimbos have never had a job before.

According to the S.F. Chronicle a law suit is on the way, but that is irrelevant.  Thousands of people sued Pay Pal for the same type of business malpractice and it had no effect.  The suits take too long, only the lawyers make money and Peter Thiel and his crooked partners sold the company to eBay for $billions long before the lawsuit got to court.

Yelp has plenty of money and will not waste time responding to a law suit.

The best strategy for the small businesses involved is get together and agree to have each person and their friends send a comment to every blog, every website, that could possibly be relevant to the subject of Yelp.

Not only will that keep a big staff at Yelp busy, it will cost Yelp money and will destroy their reputation in less than three months.

Quantcast.com

For my fellow bloggers.  If you don't already know about it, the high quality commercial measurement tool for blog viewership data is Quantcast. There is a free version for checking your own site.

None of the blog sites I am familiar with have reliable data, certainly not my own Typepad.  If you are thinking of buying listings on an Internet site or are already doing it and want reliable data, Quantcast is your source.

 Looking at my own data I find that 50% of my readers are outside the U.S. That is impressive. So is my readership of 45,000 per month in peak months.

Based on my estimate of 1 person per 1000 having an open mind, I estimate that nearly 10% of the open minded English readers in the world read my blog.

You've got to be open minded to read this blog.

Second candidate with courage

For the moment we have a second presidential candidate with courage. 

Senator Barack Obama has publicly said that the black community needs to support fathers raising children, two parent families and emphasizing education.  That is a public position of great courage.  Obama already knows he is out on a limb with Blacks and Lefties.  Jesse Jackson has already attacked him. 

Every black who has had the courage to say the same thing, or demonstrate the truth of the statement, has had their blackness removed by the Left.  Among the born blacks who are now white we have Bill Cosby, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, General Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.  Good company from my point of view.

We should expect a measurable drop in the crime rate in the next decade as a result of Senator Obama's statements.  Crime has been a disproportionately Black occupation of choice.

In case you were surprised to hear Jesse J use the 'N' word, you haven't spent much time in the Black community. Blacks call each other 'n_gg_ ' about 50 times an hour.  It means being black and adhering to the victimized underclass mentality.

Order products

You can order products with Pro Commerce on them from Cafe Press.  I recently updated the clock with a different version of the logo, having lived with a lesser version for six months.  The new one is OK but slightly off-center.  I have tried all the other products at the site as have a few of my friends.  They are all high quality.

Why would any intelligent person buy a product with Pro Commerce on it?  They wouldn't.

But a super intelligent, open minded person might.  I have been right about many subjects far ahead of the rest of the population, sometimes decades as in the case of random legislatures. As early as 1963 I wrote my U.C. Berkeley economics masters thesis on the reasons the U.S. Post Office should be sold (the thesis was rejected for ideological reasons). The U.S. Postal service was spun off less than a decade later.

I know I am right about Pro Commerce/Anti-Commerce being the core perspectives of the American worldview half a century from now. 

That is why you, as a super intelligent open minded person, would get a few Cafe Press-Pro Commerce products and hold them.

We have valuable future collectors items on the market right now. You may have to hld them for fifty years.

The Pelosi syndrome

Alex asked me why the press seems to have found that things are really bad in Silicon Valley.  Venture capitalists are purportedly afraid to invest money and start-ups are having trouble getting money.

 The reality is exactly the opposite.  Silicon Valley and Internet San Francisco are both searching desperately for more skilled workers to hire for the $125,000 starting jobs with 60 hours of work required. No one is having trouble getting 2nd and 3rd round funding. The Internet is running at boiling hot levels in a global market and the frothy boom is focused in SF and Silicon Valley.

Press headlines scream 29% drop in Bay Area housing prices while my real estate friends are selling houses to over-bidders every where they look.  The reality is that the houses that drove the boom are booming while the side-effect-houses that are in AK47 neighborhoods are still priced above where the market should be.

We are in the 11th month of a press proclaimed recession but the GNP and retail sales are still rising despite oil at prices 4 times the 2004 base and the dollar 30% lower.

I call this the Pelosi syndrome.  The syndrome is named after the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who has been speaker for 18 months and hasn't passed even one of the 20 bills she promised to pass and never got one of her own committees to hear her promised 'impeach Bush' bill.  She promised to end the war by pulling out.  Instead we won the war with more troops. During the same time President Bush has gotten 15 major bills passed in the same 18 month period; two of his bills were on the Democrats most-hated-bills list (surveillance and expansion of the middle eastern wars).  Pelosi is herself a total failure so she publicly calls the President a 'total failure'.
(Photo is Nancy with her close friend Cindy Sheehan.)

The press is in the same Pelosi syndrome boat.  The press and publishing industries are total failures.  The press and publishing industries are crashing at a 12% decline rate every year and nearly everyone any journalist knows has been fired.  So obviously the world must be crashing too, including the digital Silicon Valley world.

The Pelosi syndrome explains a lot.  When you and yours are failing miserably the simple explanation is that the successful important people around you are having a problem. (Sounds like the reasoning of an alcoholic, doesn't it?)

Random Legislature

In 1985, Ernest Callenbach and I published a book called A Citizen Legislature.  This is to let you know that it is being republished next month by the British publisher Imprint Academic.

The original is online where we put it after we sold out the 5,000 original copies.  The new book has a wonderful preface by Keith Sutherland, a Stanford University Professor, who makes it clear that our original book is at the core of modern political science curricula about democracy.

Ernest (Chick) and I, in the original book proposed selecting legislators randomly from the population, just as juries are selected (or the way they are supposed to be selected).  I had written an op-ed in 1979 with Robert Gnaizda, published about five years earlier in the LA Times, where Sutherland first saw it, and in a 1975 article in the Co-Evolution Quarterly.

Robert Gnaizda influenced me and Ernest to offer the idea that the House be randomly selected while the Senate remain the same, in order to offer a comparison.

Over the decades since then I have a new, different and original idea about the value of keeping the Senate elected the way it is.

I now believe that a citizen legislature is inadequate to represent all of society's interests.  The interests of corporations, business, government and the great diversity of other institutions, including foreign entities that are not individuals need to be represented in the legislature. In many ways they are represented in the current money based electoral process.

We need a legislative body to represent all the non-individual entities in our society, in addition to citizens, qua citizens.

Gay marriage and class

In 1960 it was unthinkable.  In 1960 'gay marriage' was an oxymoron.  The gay movement hadn't come out of the closet and the idea of a lesbian was still a joke that was mentioned in a Tom Lehrer song.

I want to suggest that the issue of gay marriage is related to the end of the elite class in America and its slow disappearance in the other North Sea countries where the idea of gay marriage is prominent.

I suspect that the idea of marriage between a recognized man and woman has been important in the past for the protection of an hereditary class.  Bastard is an idea that disappeared about the same time that the elite class was disappearing around 1960, and the same time that divorce became a public sport.

The elite class needed strongly sanctioned marriage to limit the number of recognized and supported offspring, which in turn help protect and pass along all the identifiers of class. 

Property ownership and financial inheritance matters were of lesser concern because many more people had wealth than just the elite top class.

By simply mentioning the societies that have well established and long enduring social structures and noticing that they still consider gay marriage an oxymoron I will rest my case:  Japan, China, Taiwan, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Mexico. 

Sustaining heterosexual marriage is an inherited class issue.

Catching on

Way back, in a book I published in 1987 called Mental Snacks (chapter 15), I advanced a model of sociology called social sorting.

I looked in the entire sociology field to see if anyone else had ever developed this simple and obvious model.  I found nothing.

The model is simple.  People are constantly sorting themselves in and out of groups.  The mechanism is (1) the flag, (2) the screen and (3) the overflow.  The flag is the attribute of the group that is known and appealing. For your local PTA it is just the name that is appealing if you are a parent.  For Hans Art auto repair shop it can be a complex of word of mouth comments that combine to form the flag that attracts you.

The screen is what keeps you out or lets you in. The screen can be negligible such as registering with a political party, or simply voting for it in a general election, or very complex such as getting hired for a corporate treasurer's job or getting into Mills College.

The overflow is what one experiences once one is in the group.  It can be an immediate rejection, such as one would find after joining the KKK and discovering that no one appreciated that both your parents are black, or it could be slow, such as working at a job for three years and not getting a promotion. You may never leave the institution, so there is no overflow.

I clearly point out that people often move to and leave geographical locations based on social sorting.

Finally this theory has been publicly noticed.  Terry Teachout mentions his description of it in a 2001 essay and mentions it again in the July-Aug 2008 Commentary.  He also says that David Brooks noticed it. (The term is also used in the title of a 2002 British book). Both Teachout and Brooks are talking about people moving to geographic locales where their politics is inline with others.

It took only 14+ years for my sociology model to get picked up by other thinkers. Not long.

Academic language

I still continually encounter evidence of Lefty propaganda as a dominant theme in academia.  The latest was a report on campaign contributions to Obama and McCain.  Nine to one for Obama from academics.

That suggests to me that academia continues to have a language requirement for students that is not French, Spanish, Russian, German or Chinese.  It is a recent, 19th Century, language often referred to as Marxism but more accurately described as gobblygook.

It was impossible in my days at U.C. Berkeley to get a graduate degree in economics unless you spoke and understood gobblygook.  That appears to still be an important requirement for academic advancement.

What is power?

I have spent decades studying and thinking about the question: what is power?  I haven't seen anything constructive on the subject and only recently have had an even slightly useful idea.

Here it is.  Power is a zero sum game that resembles trade. Zero sum because in the end, politics is the reallocation of existing resources. Rarely the creation of new resources. Trade is of course positive sum.

The currency of exchange is commonly called a 'chit'.  As in 'I'm calling in my chits', 'Now you owe me one', and 'I can call in a few chits on this one'.

People using power accumulate power by offering services ('favors') to other people, by having the implied ability to offer services to other people and by spending chits by asking for services (favors) from other people. 

There is a revenue of generating chits and expenses of spending chits.

A great deal of power means that the ability to issue chits is great and the number of chits that can be demanded is great.  The converse it true.

Does that trade and currency model ring a bell with anyone else?

American religion

One of the dominant myths of the Left is that religion in America is populated with a large group of Pentecostals, fundamentalists and evangelicals who are political activists for conservative social movements and the Republican party.

This is flat out wrong.  When a leading Lefty French thinker, Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL to any educated French person) came to the United States on behalf of the Atlantic magazine to look at America from the perspective of Tocqueville he was particularly interested in the religious right.  He did a thorough job and was excommunicated from the American Left. The Left hated his findings and excoriated him in the New York Times and the New Yorker.  He found no such thing as the religious right.  It doesn't exist.

 What BHL found was precisely what the Pew Forum national survey found: Americans have little or no attachment to the theology or teachings of any religion.  Americans overwhelmingly believe that all religions are pretty equal. Americans have a preference for denominations that are not mainstream (because the mainstream is so politically identified with the political Left). 

To Americans, religion is to promote family ties, to educate children about morals and to gather with other morally like-minded people.

That's it.  The few religious sects that are prominent in social-conservative political circles are insignificant in number and importance.  Look at the facts.  If you have an open mind, you can easily see the reality.

Success in America

This blog title has a double meaning, as you will see from reading it.

In my 1974 book (with co-author Salli Rasberry) The Seven Laws of Money, I announced the 1st law of money: Do it.  Money will come when you are doing the right thing. The book was owned or read by hundreds of thousands of baby boomers.  It had been circulated in mimeograph form to hundreds of businesses and churches all over America for a year before Random House published it.

Rasberry and I went to the Library of Congress before the book was published to see if anyone had ever touched on any of the themes in the book.  Except for a 1904 childrens book about rabbits and money, no one every came close.

All of this leads to the theme: we were the first people in the English language to understand and appreciate the basic theme of success in the world: doing what you love for a living.  It rang a bell for hippies but the rest of the world hardly noticed our message.

Thirty three years later I know that our message has been deeply absorbed by our fellow Americans.

Recently Rush Limbaugh, the radio host with the largest radio audience in the world (over 20 million regular listeners) to his 15 hour a week show dealt with the theme of 'success'.  Limbaugh defined success in life as 'doing what you love for a living'. To prove that he knows the theme that Rasberry and I first introduced to the world Limbaugh says: most people do the hobby they love when they retire...success is making a living from what you love all your life.  He goes further to prove he understands it: some people consider success making a specific sum of money or making a lot of money.  That can't be success because when you set a goal it is often too easy to reach it...when you merely want to make a lot of money you quickly find that there are thousands of people who are richer than you.

Rush Limbaugh is a great showman, deeply in touch with his audience.  He would never have described success this way if it didn't resonate with his audience.  Americans understand this meaning of 'success'.

Rasberry and I have succeeded in shaping the American view of what is meaningful in life.  One hell of an accomplishment.

Sneak preview of news story

This is my insider announcement that the San Francisco Chronicle is preparing an article to attack restaurants that post a 'notice of surcharge' on their menu and put the money in an HRA.

Surcharge? HRA?

Announcing a surcharge on the menu is one way of dealing with the new City law that requires all businesses, including restaurants, to provide their employees $1.76 per hour (for very small firms the amount is a little less) of medical insurance coverage.  The surcharge is usually 4% and is listed on the menu of many popular restaurants.

The HRA (Health Reimbursement Arrangement) is a trust fund set up with the $1.76 per hour that can be drawn out every quarter for medical expenses by any employee.  It is an alternative to giving the money to the City and saying goodbye to it.  It is also helpful to the more than 50% of employees who don't live in San Francisco, and the majority of wait-staff that earn too much to be eligible for the City health care plan.  The regular City run plan only covers a tiny 3% of employees who work in S.F.

The Chronicle seems to think the right thing to do is screw all employees who live outside the City and all who live in the City who earn too much to be covered by the City Health Plan. The Chronicle disapproves of HRAs. That is their nutty Lefty reason for calling their investigation an expose.

The problem of hereditary class

The last thing Thomas Jefferson wrote was "the palpable truth (is), that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.” 

Jefferson was speaking theoretically and he was speaking before industrial commerce changed the world. He was saying that god didn't create the hereditary top social classes, humans did. 

Only in America has society, inadvertently, unconsciously thrown off the 'favored few (born) booted and spurred'.

Therein lies the problem.  On most of the planet, the hereditary elite still rule their worlds.  The society underneath these elites have a well stored up antagonism to the hereditary elite, made more egregious and antagonistic by the living example of America. They also have a justifiable antagonism toward business and corporations that unwittingly perpetuate this hereditary elite.  I say unwittingly because business would do better if the hereditary elites didn't self perpetuate in top management, but business survives with these less-than-competent people around.

So the justifiable hostility towards the hereditary elites in the world, is misdirected at hostility toward commerce because commerce doesn't by itself destroy the hereditary elite system and blithely permits it to survive.

Global hostility to business is often the face mask of hostility towards the disgraceful hereditary elite.

America's top class disappeared

As long as one doesn't understand that America's top social class was hereditary it will be impossible to understand that it disappeared in 1960 and even harder to understand why it disappeared.

Many, if not most, people think the top social class is based on wealth.  Not so.  The wealthiest corporate Americans are invited to Herb Allen's annual soiree in Sun Valley every year.  None of them come from the old hereditary classes, including the hereditary class that built Sun Valley...the Harriman's.

Corporations are terrible places to find jobs for the friends of wealthy corporate Americans (unlike the old days when the elite got top jobs for the children of their peers).  It does happen, but it doesn't last long because merit or lack of it are very quickly apparent.  Merit is what commerce is about. The old top elite class always provided jobs for the children of other hereditary class members, regardless of merit, just as they still do in England, France and most of the rest of Europe.

The moneyed top people of America get little or no benefit from their high income status.  In the old class structure everyone high-up in their field knew everyone else via clubs, schools, marriage and endless society gatherings.  Today, the top people don't know any of their top peers.

Members of the top economic cohort in America don't know each other.  In Lerner, Nagai, Rothman's book American Elites they reported on their survey of the top 150 people in 12 fields..law, media, corporations, government, military, religion etc.  Not only didn't these leaders in their fields come from elite schools, the vast majority of them came from blue collar or middle class families.  When shown a list of the other leaders, say the top media people looking at the list of the top financial people, they rarely knew each other...rarely.

They are simply not a part of any class...not a coherent class, not any class.

America had a top social class

America had a top social class from our national inception until 1960.  It is truly tragic that this fact is virtually unknown.  It is worse than tragic, it is a disgrace to all of academia.

When I grew up there was a top social class that had membership in select clubs in every major city.  Non-members of the top class were not permitted entry to the clubs.  The members of this top class had books with listings of all the other members of the class. The books were called the 'blue books' or the 'social registry', you can see a copy here. (I have written about this before).  All members of the top class knew their peers or knew how to reach their peers...these social registries had home addresses and phone numbers.  The social registers were published from the founding of the country to 1960.  Membership of the top social class was hereditary.

Entry to this top class was open to newly wealthy families, known as nouveau riche, after one generation if the next generation followed the proper code of behavior which included debutant balls, proper schools and colleges, proper military service, correct occupation and acceptance in the proper clubs.

What is class?

Class is something that 95% of Americans don't understand at all. Yet it is one of the most important global forces acting on humans.

Class dates back to the the cloudy mist of human social formation.  The first emperor kings surrounded themselves with a class of people who were loyal to them. Together, this comprised the top social class. The people in this top class were invariably family members or members of families associated with the paramount ruling figure.  The ruler and the coterie of close associates were the top social class in virtually all societies that were based on agriculture. (There were a few exceptional societies such as the Vikings.)

This coterie of the select at the top of society were nearly always members of their class by birth.  This top social class was an inherited class.  The inherited top class still exists nearly everywhere in the world today.  The most blatant exception is the U.S.

There is an inherited top class in England today, where I've spent plenty of time and France as well (it remains in the British colonies including Canada).  In both England and France members of the top class are usually taller than the rest of the society; this class has myriad privileges in clubs, entrance to top schools and priority in government and corporate positions. The same is true in nearly every society I know including the rest of Europe, Russia, Latin America and India.  The societies that have great social mobility and weak social class are Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Israel and Japan.  I  don't know about several others such as Finland and Mongolia. Arab and Persian societies are tribal with one tribe at the top for long periods.  China is built on extended families with one on the top.

There is no theory of social class necessary other than one that recognizes the top inherited social class.  Most hierarchical national social structures below the top are culturally specific such as India's. Some hierarchical social structures below the top are volatile to a degree, such as Poland's and some are unstable over long periods such as Burma's.

No, no, no

I could hardly believe what I was reading in the year 2008.  The title of the Businessweek article was Your Lifestyle May Hurt Your Credit ...Lenders may be monitoring your bar tab or marriage counseling bill—which could be costly for consumers.

The article then proceeded to say that credit checking companies were looking at credit card purchases at: "tire and retreading shops, massage parlors, bars, billiard halls, and marriage counseling offices."  The article said clearly that the author considered this to be an invasion of privacy.

So what got my hackles up?

Remember I was a key organizer of MasterCard.  The creation of MasterCard came about three years after I had done the in-house marketing research on Bankamericard (later renamed and reorganized as Visa). That was 1964.

My research determined that credit card purchases at tire shops, hair dressers, bars and massage parlors were nearly always associated with credit card defaults.  The reason was obvious.  These were the places that were handling stolen goods and other criminal related transactions. 

So a credit card user would have his or her card used at one of these enterprises and then split the money with the business and default on the card payment.  These kinds of businesses were associated with the resale of stolen tires, prostitution and some drug transactions. Bankamericard took away all the credit card privileges from businesses that were in this category and stopped card use of people who were using the cards at these places.  That was 1964. 

The same scam is obviously still going on in 2008.  It has nothing to do with invasion of privacy.  It has everything to do with credit card scams.

Calling Noah

In preparing the last global temperature blog I went back and read much of the Hadley Center material, including a paper on the rise of global sea level.

The data set goes back a century. The range of estimates, based on the rudimentary amount of data available, is from a decline in the global sea level of 7 inches over the past 100 years due to absorption of sea water into the Antarctic ice sheet, to a rise of 16 inches.  Based on actual shoreline measurements the range is from 4 inches to 8 inches.

The article suggests that the strongest evidence for a rise in global sea level is for a rise of 6 inches over the past hundred years. 

All projections of future sea level changes are based on the changes (whatever they were) over the past hundred years. We could have a declining sea level or a modestly rising one of a foot or more.

Help, call Noah, the world is coming to an end.  Thank goodness I live more than 2,000 inches above sea level in San Francisco.