Pro Commerce

Watch the mind

This blog is about neocons, improving husbands and Siegfried and Roy. What do these three categories have in common?

Mayor Gavin Newsom came to office five years ago with the intent of proving the core Lefty hypothesis: the only reason poor people are poor is because they lack money or access to good services.  So the newly inaugurated Mayor focused the power of his office on 1200 families in San Francisco's poorest neighborhood. He used the full power of his office on these 1200 families including every social service agency, several full time staffers in the mayor's office, every available local, state and federal program, every local community organization and funding from every major private foundation in San Francisco.

The article about this five year intensive campaign focused on the $4 million spent by local foundations but the actual dollars spent from staff time and San Francisco social and health services departments runs into the tens of millions of dollars.

The neocons are a group of former Lefties who worked in Washington D.C. on Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs.  They were earnest Lefties trying to eliminate poverty.  After running programs that spent billions of dollars in a hundred different programs, these are the few people who decided that money and government could not eliminate poverty...couldn't even reduce it...probably made conditions for blacks worse. The neocons created the modern conservative intellectual movement and are responsible for programs such as the 1996 End of Welfare. All the result of their self-honesty and open minds.

'Improving husbands' is the ideology of many young women.  It is the belief that with enough love and attention any man can be made into a suitable husband. (Of course some men believe this canard too.) Most divorces, most discussions on Dr. Phil and Oprah's TV programs are about the failure of this idea to work in reality.

Lastly, Siegfrid and Roy were two lion-tamers who entertained the Las Vegas public with the evidence that tigers, with proper training could be made as safe as domestic cats. Well domestic cats are often not too domesticated and the Siegfried and Roy tigers weren't either (I know that Siegfried has a trained-tiger defense of Roy's resulting near death and current rehab conditions).

What has all this got to do with Mayor Gavin Newsom?  It is about the mind of the standard Lefty which is unlike the open mind of the neocons, is much like the attitude of the romantic young women who believe that husbands can be improved and even more like Siegfried and Roy in their erroneous but perpetual believe that tigers can be safe companions. (That is Roy on the right with the amulets around his neck.)

The auditor of San Francisco, a uniquely honest and competent bureaucrat, respected by everyone I know, Harvey Rose, at the request of the private foundations, examined the results of fathomless money and effort put into helping 1200 poor families. Rose publish the results of his audit: nothing, nada, no improvement, no benefits.

Unlike the neocons, I doubt that a single San Francisco Lefty has learned any lesson from this pathetic venture.  Just like most naive young women who marry a man with the intent of improving him...the Lefties in the world just ignore their own experience.  Just like the white tiger that bit Roy Horn on the neck and skull, and doesn't notice anything different from the time before and after the biting, the poor 1200 in San Francisco haven't noticed anything different either.

The entire 20th Centrury from Hitler, to Stalin to Mao and Fidel is about trying to improve humans and humanity (maybe tigers too) and like the Great Society and Mayor Newsom's Lefty ideology...everyone of them has failed.  Like romantic girls looking for husbands to improve and Siegfried and Roy the Left never gives up regardless of the empirical evidence.

Bush gift

News flash. This is just to let you know that yesterday President Bush gave all of us a gift.  This is one of the many gifts he has planned for the remaining days of his administration.

The gift: TN visas are now good for three years and renewable for three years as opposed to the old one year visa term.

What this means is that any college graduate who is Mexican or Canadian can get a green card to work in the U.S. indefinitely.  This expands the size of the skilled market place for many American companies. 

A good step on the way to a rational policy that would give every post graduate U.S. degree holder an automatic green card.

Venomous feminism

You are right to think that the subject of venomous feminism should be about the feminazi's scurrilous and unremitting attacks on Gov. Palin.

But that is not what has lead me to write today's blog. What bothers me is the feminist venom that has been poured on Ted Hughes for forty-five years and continues to this day, a decade after he died.

Because Sylvia Plath was a beautiful and skilled young poet who graduated from the perfect college, Smith, (my mother was a Smithy) moved to England and married a poet and then committed suicide....she was the true exemplar of a perfect women tormented and destroyed by the great monstrous patriarchy.

The feminist world and the myriad college classes in Women's Studies have never stopped pillorying Ted Hughes, her husband, for leaving Sylvia with two children and taking up with another woman.

Two problems with this feminist scourge: (1) Its not true. Hughes didn't leave Sylvia, she drove him out; he didn't take up with another woman either.* (2) Hughes was much the greater poet, maybe the greatest 20th Century English poet (in my opinion) and consequently several generations of women poets have been discouraged from appreciating his great poetry. 

The painful part of this venomous feminism and the part that moves me to write is Hughes' book Birthday Letters. I pick up his book occasionally, I have two copies. I can't read his poems about his love for Sylvia, the pain of his loss at her death and the bitterness of the feminist world he faced after she died.... without tears pouring out of my eyes.  Read his poems and see what I'm writing about.

(*A close and reliable friend has corrected me: "He did have an affair while married to Sylvia, he did leave her because of the affair, and he then married his mistress, who later also committed suicide the same way Sylvia did."...my apologies to all.)

Proposition 11 in California

The Phillips approach to legislative apportionment.

Californians have been trying for more than a decade to find a politically acceptable system for designing legislative districts.  The districts for the California legislature and for Congress must each be equal in number of residents based on the coming 2010 Census.  No approach has yet to garner a majority of California voters.  Right now the problem is that the Democrats have far more elected representatives than they have Democratic voters in the state.

Proposition 11 is the Phillips solution.  I recommend it.  My readers know I am too old to continue being humble.  The apportionment solution is to put five randomly chosen Republicans, five randomly chosen Democrats and four randomly chosen Independents on a committee and have the 14 randomly chosen committee members design the voting districts.

What is my connection to this?  In the mid 1970's I wrote an article for the CoEvolution Quarterly proposing random selection as a vital democratic notion.  No one is on record as having made such a proposal before me.  I wrote several op-eds and a book on the subject (the book is online here).  So it is rightly my solution for democratic processes.

Humility requires that I let you know that the Athenians had a legislature called the Boule which was randomly selected from among the legal citizens and the monthly president of the Boule was randomly selected.  The Boule lasted 200 years.  The motive for a random City Council in Athens was a little different than my reason.  No Greek trusted any other Greek for anything.  Random was the best solution for universal distrust.

I favor random selection for democratic processes because it is the best theoretical representation of the group being represented. 

Strange typing at Google

I was typing my regular blog on Goggle Documents when out came the following sentence:

ot gnineppah si tahw em llet uoY
.elif tnemucod elggoG ym
.yadot sdarawkcab gnipyt si tI 

Translation: You tell me what is happening to my Google document file. It is typing backwards today.

The only solution I could find for this strange problem was to shut down the computer and reboot. 

Is there anyone among my blog readers who knows what happened?

Autodesk art

I read about an interesting art gallery in San Francisco in the Wall Street Journal, a fount of local surprise information. The gallery is operated by Autodesk and can be found in their corporate entrance area on the second floor at 1 Market St.

I recommend this gallery to anyone who has a curiosity coefficient of 7 or more.  A curiosity coefficient of zero is a person who works as a trust officer in a bank, a curiosity coefficient of 1 is a person who wonders what celebrity will be on Oprah today.  A person with a curiosity coefficient of 10 wants to know what happens to water at exactly 31.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

I went to the gallery and immediately found it has very limited visiting hours.  It is open to the public only on the first Wednesday of the month from 1 to 5pm.  Nevertheless since the WSJ didn't give the hours, I was kindly escorted around the gallery by the curator.

The photo on the right shows two exhibits. One in the distance is a camera that can be moved around a scene and will show the perspective of that scene on a computer screen.  The other, closer to the camera, is an elegant surf board milled out of a driftwood log.  The surf board is hollow.

All the exhibits were modeled and built on Autodesk graphic programs.

Downtown San Francisco

The local lefty Public Radio station has been interviewing a sample of businesses that say they are about to close, 'businesses is so bad in San Francisco'.  (All the businesses interviewed that I personally know are: incompetent, sloppy, boobs.) The lefty press has been screaming Depression for 11 months.(In the print world it sure looks that way.)

The photo on the upper right is in Union Square (downtown) at 3PM on the last Sunday in October.  I see more shoppers here than I've ever seen.  There are more people here than are here the last week of August  before Labor Day and the week before Xmas.

Believe your eyes.

Obama impact?

A friend in S.F. lives in an upscale area on the border of Western Addition, a mostly black redevelopment district. My friend, who is a close observer, says that, every day, recently far more older middle-class blacks are taking leisurely confident walks into the upscale neighborhood than ever did before.

Is this confident walking practice an Obama effect?

The photo is the new convivial space in the heart of the Western Addition's new jazz locale. (It is near a nice set of new businesses and the jazz scene is upgrading the area very fast.)

San Francisco restaurant standards

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a law prohibiting restaurants in San Francisco from serving obese customers high calorie meals.  Obese is being defined as a BMI of 30 or more; restaurant employees are empowered to make estimates.  High calorie is defined as a total meal of 800 calories or more including wine and drinks.  If the 800 calorie limit is reached before dessert is served the restaurant may not serve the dessert. The proposed legislation specifies several other points in the ordering of food where the customer is to be restrained from ordering.

The legislation also imposes modest fines for the expected situation where a person at a table who is not obese is clearly ordering an extra portion for the obese fellow customer.

The proposed legislation does not include food delivery services such as pizza and Chinese take-out because of the difficulty in identifying the ultimate consuming customer. This matter will be address in future legislation.

The precedent for these food restrictions are based on similar existing restrictions on serving alcohol to drunks in a bar.  The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is acting in the best health interests of San Franciscans and visitors to San Francisco. Obesity is the cause of many health maladies and San Francisco has an interest in this regulation because San Francisco pays the costs of health care for a significant proportion of its population.

As regular readers of my blog will know, I am opposed to nanny state regulations of this kind.  I further worry that offering this tongue-in-cheek fantasy proposal will lead to an actual proposal of this sort. Humor is not a natural endowment of most San Francisco elected officials, nor is common sense.

Divided country?

Are people angrier at each other in this campaign than usual?  Damned right they are.

This country has become increasingly divided for the past fifteen years and the current political campaign increases the division.  It is worth remembering what we are divided about.

The Left is furious about the rise of an alternative view of the world.  I won't go into it here because I have written endlessly on the subject.  The Left had a forty year monopoly on the basic American storyline.  With the failure of the Great Society, the dispersion of the hippies into the countryside, the emergence of widely read alternative intellectuals (think Victor Davis Hansen) and giant talk radio audiences (think Rush Limbaugh) the monopoly came to an end. The Right is clear, coherent and verbal....the Lefty monopoly has painfully ended.

That is plenty to be angry about.  It is like being left by your lover for another person when you were sure you were the only person in your lover's life.

The Right is furious about the incessant and malicious mistreatment of their ideas and candidates by the vast media, globally, and by the entire world of academics.  The Left barely notices this discrepancy and usually denies it.

That is plenty to be angry about.  When everything you say or do is blasted, disfigured, distorted and denied by all TV channels but one and all print media but one...you can feel unfairly put upon.

Money issue now?

"What about my savings, my portfolio?" That is a question I am getting frequently now, especially after my last blog about gone, gone gone.

Answer: start over fresh.  Keep your existing devalued portfolio and hope it grows over time.  Start a brand new conservative savings account with earnings and dividends from your current portfolio and add your future savings.  That is my answer. Start over, just like everyone else who has their eyes open.

When we really lie

I did a crude (maybe cruel is the right word) experiment on voter registration a few years ago. 

I had a row of desks set up at the entry to a meeting of ordinary San Franciscans.  There were nearly 400 people who attended this somewhat political meeting.  At the desks were voter registrars.

As attendees for the meeting arrived, only one entrance, I had a group of trained workers make sure that every person who entered was asked if he/she was registered to vote. If not, they were directed to the registration table.

Only three out of 400 registered.  Based on San Francisco registration data, that means nearly 100 people lied about being registered (25%) when in fact they weren't.  (I could have been more methodical and gotten every-one's name and address and verified the data, but I had no available staff or money to do that.)

So it turns out many people will lie if asked straight-out face to face 'are you registered to vote?'

The money is gone

People ask me what happened to all the money that was represented in the global stock markets ($15-20 trillion).  Answer: Its gone, gone gone.

Sometimes, when we have a 10-20% dip in the equities market, a large part of the money has moved into some other investment like real estate, commodities or bonds.

That is not the case when we have a 40% drop in the global financial markets.  Some money went into U.S. treasuries which is why the dollar is so strong.  But the rest is gone....gone.

If you see the world through my Pro Commerce eyes you will know that it will take a long time to replace the money lost.  The commercial world has to generate the new net revenue and people have to save it.  Global commerce generates about $60 trillion a year and a small part of that can go to new savings.

In Japan where the commercial engine has been driven by external sales, the strong yen will be a serious barrier to future external sales. Japan could be in for long term trouble.

Start a new savings account.

Velcro index

The last two times I offered a contribution to the realm of psychology was in the 1980's.  One contribution suggested that the quality we call personality is recreated every day as we wake-up (daily ontogeny). That is the reason early morning meditation is common and why early morning psycho-therapy would be effective if it were ever used. 

The other contribution was my list of eight dichotomies.  I found eight points on which American populations can be divided neatly into two groups that do not overlap; example: people who travel with heavy baggage versus people who travel with light baggage. No one in-between.

 My latest is the velcro index.  This is a 0 to 10 index of how tightly one person attaches to other people. Zero and one are pathological or genetic as in the case of a psychopath who has no attachment to other humans and autism where attachment is difficult and infrequent.  A score of ten is occasionally pathological as in the case of a woman who won't leave a brutal husband after many beatings.

I chose the image of velcro because a small piece of velcro can stick to a large piece.  Attachments can be asymmetrical.

I find the velcro index important because we live in a world where some form of attachment is very important to creating and sustaining family relations. Many families are dysfunctional and comprise an important reality in American social life. Too low a velcro score and the family finds no reason to exist, too high a velcro score and infighting and competition become a threat to family equanimity.

The employment environment is another pervasive element in modern life where interpersonal attachment is significant. The relationship of a boss to a subaltern can be one thing while relations to peers is another. People, who are close friends sometimes must be fired or treated with candor.  Conversely, good behavior may be required towards a person who is personally unlikable. The velcro index is clearly relevant to failure, survival or success in a job.

I suspect that the velcro index is formed very early in life and in this regard it retains a lifelong impact that makes it important.

What is the relevance of my velcro model?

Some psychological postulates thrive others don't.  Most writers, playwrights, commentators and novelists have advanced psychological models; it is only when big theories (Freud, Adler, Jung, Skinner etc.) come along and generate followers that psychological models thrive.

So far I don't have a big theory, so I offer a few humble observations.  However, one of my great philosophic heroes, Paul Feyerabend didn't believe there is such as a thing a big theory, just lists of small reliable observations.

Tech plateau redacted

Earlier this month I wrote a blog suggesting that we have reached a plateau in the telecom -tech world.

One interesting comment suggested that I am not "open in the face of the unknown".

I propose another alternative: I have looked at dozens of technologies and found dozens of plateaus.

Let me illustrate.

* The modern single engine private plane reached the peak of its design, safety and control elements in 1937 and remains virtually unchanged to this day.
* The standard model automobile with automatic transmission and electric starter is unchanged since 1947 (from the point of view of drivers there has been significant improvement in tires).
* The modern motorcycle was on the road by the mid 1930s and remains unchanged (disk brakes have been a modest safety improvement and off-road bikes can do many interesting tricks).
* Black and white TV remained unchanged for 15 years and color TV remained unchanged for 45 years until flat screen DTV came along.
* The 35mm camera saw virtually no changes from the beginning to the end of its life, almost a century.
* The only change in the land line telephone from 1930 to today was the addition of digital dialing and the invisible implementation of digital circuits.
* The home stereo system remained static from 1962 to 1995. Many audiophiles still prefer the systems of that earlier era.
* The Walkman with the Philips cassette inside it were standard from 1972 to 2004.

The list of tech plateaus is long.  I have left off the light bulb, the wall switch, most hand tools and kitchen implements.

Tech plateaus are the rule not the exception.

A good source for thinking about this subject is Thomas J. Hughes who has several books on the subject including How to Think about Technology and Culture.

More agencies like police

I said before, most people have no idea how law enforcement agencies work.  The main tool, the most effective tool that law enforcement uses is the telephone.

Most sources of information on 'who committed the crime' come in from anonymous phone tips. Most is a weak term.  I would guess that 85% of all leads come in from anonymous phone calls.

For a safer society we need two major additions to the anonymous phone line. 

(1) We need an anonymous email and text line that is widely published. Hey, lets keep up with the technology, even it we are ten years late.

(2)We need to radically expand the number of agencies that use anonymous tip lines. In California we need anonymous tip lines for reporting violations of disability blue car parking signs, driving without a driver's license and Workers Compensation scofflaws.  Those three I know don't have anonymous tip lines nor the staff to handle them and there must be many more.

Freedom of E. Europe sex may be similar to hippies

I've long thought about the reason hippy woman became so horny and available for sex, for the fifteen years from 1965 to 1980. I've believed that it had to do with demographics. (Women of the relevant age cohorts outnumbered the men by nearly two to one.)

I now think that was not the reason. 

In the 1990s after the fall of the Iron Curtain, I saw what happened to women.  In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union when the yoke of Lefty tyranny fell, woman swarmed all over Europe, Japan and the rest of the world offering sex for sale.  Sex was also free and abundant to nearly any visiting man in the former Soviet zone.

I saw hippy female sex behavior in E. Europe, without any hippy values.

Now I think the hippy world saw their (our) world as a radical birth of freedom, a wild escape from the straight-jacketed hypocrisy of the 1950s.  I now see a parallel in the hippy sexual liberation to what happened with the fall of the USSR.

Sexual abandon comes from real and perceived freedom not from demographics.

Is authority disappearing?

I hear from teachers, doctors and other professionals that their word is increasingly doubted.

Teachers say that students often question what they say with 'I checked on Google (or Wikipedia) and it didn't say that.'  Doctors say that patients come in to tell them what ailment they have and what pharmaceutical should be prescribed.  Other professionals repeat the same story.

Has authority disappeared or migrated to self researched Internet answers?

Obviously there are many negatives to this form of evaporating authority since expertise and professionalism offer the positive quality of experience, deeper core understanding and a broader perspective.

But maybe we all should be able to defend our authority.

The power of TV commercials

California has an initiative on the coming Nov. 4th ballot that says marriage is only between a man and a woman.  It is proposition #8.

Two weeks ago Prop 8 was going to be defeated according to the reliable Field poll by 55% No to 38 Yes.  Then two ads began running.  One vote yes ad showed Mayor Gavin Newsom yelling at Howard Dean levels that gay marriage could never be stopped.  The ad made the point visually that 2nd graders would be taught that men can marry men if Prop 8 doesn't pass.  The second ad made the 2nd grader point even more graphically and more strongly. Now the Yes vote leads the No vote 47 to 44 in a less reliable poll. An abrupt reversal.

The Vote No on Prop 8 has had the most incompetent ads I can recall seeing in a long time.  Just words flashing across the screen about fairness.  Using TV to display words is like a dancer sitting on the edge of the stage to talk to the audience.....wrong use of the medium. The war of the ads has been lost to the Yes on Prop 8.

However, the underlying message of the Yes on Prop 8 may be a powerful argument that will sway Californians. If Prop 8 passes in California I think we have a multi-generational issue on our hands like abortion and alcohol.  The Yes ads argue that people who oppose gay marriage will have the issue forced on them via their children.  That rings many Puritanical alarm bells.

If Prop 8 passes I predict that we will have a new and very divisive long term cultural issue on our hands.

Sewage art

The citizens of San Francisco get to vote on a ballot initiative which recommends that the Board of Supervisors name our main sewage treatment plant the George W. Bush Sewage Treatment Plant.

The drunken team of Leftwing hate mongers that dreamed up this political scheme clearly know nothing about sewage treatment.  This would honor our wonderful President. I believe he deserves this as a beginning while he is in office, to be followed up over the next 100 years with thousands of schools, highways, ships and airports named after him.

 The facility in these photos is a modern state of the art, multi-billion dollar treatment facility.  The two photos on this blog give you an idea of the beauty of the place. 

I have gone to visit several times.  One year I went to see an advanced tertiary biological treatment plant experiment with a whole range of plants and animals used to carry out the final cleaning operation.  In a tank at the very end were hundreds of fish, large and small swimming merrily about in the clean drinkable water.

I was impressed.

Great pleasure

One of the great pleasures of being a pilot is taking friends with me when I fly.

I've recently taken several friends flying who are professional photographers.  One of the worlds' great (you judge for yourself) is Dennis Urbiztondo.  Dennis is fun, funny, solid and a good businessman.  It is his photography you can judge.  Especially if you love the image of San Francisco.  Here is the result of last weeks flying with Dennis.

Dennis loved 45 degree banks so he could make shots like the one on the right.  I now call it a Dennis maneuver.

It is hard to believe the photography was done through a plastic window from the back seat.

You'll enjoy the photos on Dennis's site including the plane and the great variety of graphic concepts that Dennis uses to capture the city.  I particularly love the ones with the street pattern as the grid and several that show the variety of ways to view a dense downtown.

S.F. building costs

I spent a few weeks asking contractors about building costs in San Francisco.  I had usually heard numbers like $200-$250 per square foot.  When I actually asked contractors who are building new construction from the ground up, I was quite surprised.

I'm told by four contractors, who's current work I checked out, that the correct number for new construction on a house starting with an empty lot is $500. 

We can now calculate than empty 100 x 25 foot lot in most of San Francisco costs close to $1 million and building a house on it, for say 3 bedrooms at 3,500 square feet, will now cost $1.75 million without the borrowed carrying costs and architectural fees.   As a consequence any ordinary 3 bedroom house in San Francisco should be worth $3 million.

Most of the houses in San Francisco are underpriced based on this replacement cost.

Shear steel boxes

I assume my readers are a curious lot.  Otherwise why would they read this blog.  I try not to be political and I try not to be sexually titillating.

The photo on the right is for the curious of the world and the people who are not contractors in the S.F. Bay Area. 

The metal sheets in between some of the 2x4 studs are actually steel boxes.  The boxes are rigid, about 1/4 to 3/8th inch thick steel plate.  They replace steel beams in this house. The beams would be required for structural support in this earthquake territory.

The steel boxes act as shear walls and the number of them needed to hold up a house is easy to look up in an engineering table. They keep a wall from twisting and torquing.

I like it.

Almost

The Paulson-Bush bail-out plan, as it is being applied to banks, was almost a good idea.  They screwed it up because they think in free market terms not in Pro Commerce terms.  They screwed it up by buying non-voting bank stock and planning to sell it in a few years. That may be some sort of free market policy but it is bad policy for pro commerce. The government should own a few commercial banks and have voting stock for good pro commerce policy.

This is a good place to explain the difference between free market and pro commerce.

Free market is a vague term with no rigor and no meaning.  The closest it comes to having a meaning is the metaphor of an open food market where everyone sets their own prices and there are no serious barriers to entry. Buyers can walk around and look at all the prices if they are posted.

Of course no such laissez faire market ever exists or existed.  We demand quality and health standards for our open market food, for the health and cleanliness of the people who work in the market and for the physical environment. We need laws and a judicial system to protect us from violence or threats in the market and especially from myriad forms of market fraud.  We need fire protection.  We need a stable currency and a reliable credit system. We need laws and enforcement to maintain behavior civil.  The list of minimum requirements to maintain a functioning on-going open food market is very long and the metaphor of an open food market being something with minimum government intrusion is mythical. The metaphor of a free market is an illusory concept and has no rigor or empirical basis.

The term free market is also used as an imaginary reference point on a line where one end is the free market and the other end is total government control (prison).  I don't reject this model because it is obviously abstract and used mostly for rhetorical argument.

Pro commerce, on the other hand is a substantial concept that is based on the empiric world.  A policy or behavior is pro commerce if it enhances commercial activity as measured in number of firms and net revenue.  A policy is anti-commerce if it inhibits commercial activity.

The relevance to the current U.S. federal government purchase of private bank stock is that the purchase of bank stock was done by Paulson-Bush solely to inject reserves into the banking loan/deposit/reserve ratio.

A pro commerce policy position would suggest that we have a few major commercial banks, completely guaranteed by the federal government, capable of accepting deposits and making loans, with all transactions entirely transparent.  The reason we need such a solid, secure and transparent bank is that businesses, a core part of commerce, can function more efficiently (1) if the currency they use is stable, (2) if there are no-risk-deposits available and (3) there can be loans that (3a) can't be called-in and (3b) remain available as long as the risk remains unchanged.  The commercial world does not need nor want spontaneous, exogenous variation in the core financial functions of the business.  Commerce is risky enough without adding unwarranted, unnecessary additional financial risk.

The empirical evidence supporting the commercial need for financial stability is long, detailed and persuasive. We are slowly moving on a multi-centuries long path to having a stable financial system.

We have only taken one tiny step in the right direction in the current financial event.

Not smart meters

The photo on the right is a so called Smartmeter installed at my house last month.

The smart part of the meter is the grey box on the top front that generates a radio signal that tells the meter reader what the meter reads without having to look at it.  I don't know the distance away from the meter that the meter reader can stand and still receive the signal, but it is irrelevant until the signal can be sent to a phone or electric line and be read at a central location.  Reducing the meter reader time is insignificant compared to eliminating the meter reader.

But that is not why the Smartmeter is not smart. That function can probably be added later. Look at the back of the grey reader attachment and look at the location of the in-flow gas pipe 3inches behind it on the left side. Only a few inches left to apply a wrench.  In most old meters, this is a tight spot, almost too tight to get a wrench in.  The installer worked an extra hour and swore loudly while trying to use a big wrench in such a small space.

I hope a real graduate in design had nothing  to do with this monstrosity of installation design.

American toilet fetish

I have two examples of the strange fetish Americans have about toilets.  One is the reaction to new environmental toilets.  My friend Sim Van Der Ryn published a book The Toilet Papers with dozens of brilliant toilet designs and examples, many on the market at the time, 1978.

I used several of the toilets in Sim's book and loved them.  My favorite was a nice 4 watt toilet that could be installed anywhere there was electricity, no plumbing.  It turned all the waste from a family of four into a cup of dust per week, with no smell. Amazing.

Not one innovative ecological toilet ever developed a market, not even among fanatic enviros.

Two, I have long had a Japanese spray butt-cleaning toilet.  I've had dozens of parties over the years and have offered to demonstrate the toilet to hundreds of people.  Not one per one-hundred guests has ever used the spray part of the toilet.

So what is the American toilet fetish?  The fetish is 'Don't change my toilet, don't change anything about it.'

Hamilton gets his wish

After more than 200 years Alexander Hamilton gets his wish.  Hamilton, from the beginning of our country, wanted a national bank, a real deposit and lending bank owned by the government, not just a central bank, like the Bank of England.

Hamilton is finally getting his wish.  The treasury is going to be buying stock in one or more large U.S. commercial banks in the coming weeks.  There will then be real banks with loans and deposits regulated directly by the Treasury and the bank will be fully guaranteed. A safe haven in the future for commerce.

In case you don't know our history, Thomas Jefferson and subsequently the Democratic Party have opposed intelligent banking and commerce from the very beginning of the country until last week (the Democrats passed the bill allowing Treasury to buy bank stock.).

Why Krugman?

Friends immediately, today, started asking me why Paul Krugman got a Nobel prize in economics. The economics committee is not vehemently anti-American like the Nobel Peace prize committee. The answer is that he did good research and published the findings in a book called Geography and Trade.  The work was done more than twenty years ago. The book was not seminal but it was important at the time.

I interviewed Krugman about his economic work shortly after the book came out in the early 1990s.  Krugman did the dirty work of figuring out why industries tend to cluster where they start..think Silicon Valley.  He used much older industries, rugs and carpets, for his research.  The reason for clustering is simple: trained labor stays where the jobs are and so does intelligent capital. 

A country with a gigantic market, like the U.S., has a great advantage because we only have one geographic industrial center (for any industry).  Europe has tiny markets and a duplicate industry in each separate country.

Since he did his research Krugman has become a disgrace.  He advised Japan on its down turn giving Keynesian advice that made matters worse and he never admitted his stupid errors.  Then he became a party hack, writing for the NYTimes and getting most of his material from a comic strip...Doonesbury.

Free business idea

I thought the following was a brilliant and original Internet idea: Buy gift certificates online and print them out at home.

I was going to give the idea away since I don't have the time nor inclination to start a new business.  Turns out there are several companies already in the field.  I picked out one as an example.

Now you know that you can get a gift certificate and print it out on your computer good at hundreds of stores, probably thousands before long.

6th Amendment kills blacks

How do these words in our Constitution kill blacks?

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

Answer: because in most daylight gang killings of blacks, a rising statistic in major American cities, everyone around the scene of the murder knows who the killers are but refuse to testify because they will have to confront the killer as a witness.  Confronting the killer is directly derived from the right to to be confronted with the witnesses against him.

In the closed circles of the black ghetto, being an eye witness means the witness will either be killed before the trial or a family member will be kidnapped to keep the witness from testifying. Ghetto gang friends of the killer make sure that witnesses don't live to testify (or have family members kidnapped to keep the witness from testifying).

I repeat: the 6th Amendment kills blacks. Thousands of blacks are killed in America every year, because there is no witness to send the killers to prison.

How could this be solved?  We need State legislation that requires a video be made of any witness's testimony in a felony charge. Abiding by the Constitution the accused killer would be present in a window separated room, with counsel. The video testimony can then be used in court if the witness is killed or any member of his family is kidnapped.

Further, to make sure this works, if there is a murder of the witness or kidnapping of a family member, the tape will be used as evidence and the jury can be told the facts of the witness murder/kidnapping part of the case along with showing the video.

Since a jury will send anyone accused of murdering a witness to prison, after watching such a video, it only needs to happen once, be approved by the U.S. Supreme Court and every witness in the black community will feel safe to come forward to put the killers in their community in prison. The black community will have eye witnesses who can't be intimidated.

What do you say?  When will a State legislature require videos of witnesses and allow use of the video in court if the eye witness is harmed? Will the Supreme Court, one day say that a video under these circumstances meets the 6th Amendment protection.

What if?

What if financial indicators were rational projections of the 3-5 year commercial horizon?  In this case we are looking at the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is, in 2008, moving as a proxy for nearly all the financial markets on the globe.

 I see the chart from the WSJ on the right as evidence to suggest that financial indicators are rational projections of the 3-5 year commercial future. 

The DJIA was very volatile in the 1970s.  Was the financial market projecting the 3-5 year commercial future?  Yes it was. 

In the real commercial world Japan was moving rapidly toward productive dominance in the global marketplace (think autos and electronics) while America was racked by low productivity and a labor market filled with pot smoking lazy hippies.  The financial market volatility was particularly shaped by the Arab conspiracy (OPEC) to raise oil prices while the Arab oil producers observed the US as racked by total incompetence in the political realm. The U.S. had just won a war in Vietnam and turned the victory into surrender. The U.S. allowed inflation to run wild while rationing oil. (Japan did the opposite, deflating the yen and avoiding inflation). The U.S. showed its total incompetence by letting a tiny 3rd world country, Iran, capture the American Embassy in Tehran and did nothing in response (the little Carter military escapade was a farce to make matters worse).

The stock market of the 1970s accurately forecast the commercial environment of the period. It did not exaggerate the commercial reality.

As my readers know, I believe the current fall of the DJIA and the world financial markets are accurately reflecting the commercial reality of the next 3-5 years. First the decline began in August 2007, this was no panic, it was a steady expansion of the number of people who understand the 3-5 year commercial reality.  Second, it accelerated when the price of oil passed $100 a barrel, good evidence that business people expect trouble in the center of oil production...the Straits of Hormuz.  Lastly the financial markets reached a panic stage when the U.S. government focused on the wrong object, residential housing prices.

The real 3-5 year commercial future, to me, is Iran getting nuclear weapons for its long range missiles along with other irrational states doing the same thing.  Commerce has no future when a single weapon deployed by a small group of men can wipe out trillions of dollars of investment, at their whim.  Any major city, and most of the Arabian peninsula are locations with trillions of dollars of investment (investment includes skilled workers).  Worst of all, because of radioactivity, rebuilding can not occur in a reasonable time frame (and skilled workers would be dead).

That is what I see in the 2008 chart of the DJIA.