Pro Commerce

Social thought

For nine years I ran a national public radio weekly interview program called Social Thought.   Social thought is based on one premise: all institutions are structured around a tent pole idea, image, metaphor or concept.  Example: the tent pole idea for the free market is premised on the Invisible Hand.

Therefore it shouldn't surprise you that I believe Jim Jones had to be a fanatic Lefty to create a mass suicide and that Deepak Chopra had to be a new age woo-woo to blame America for the recent Mumbai terrorists?

The tent pole idea of fanatic Lefties is: there is a great oppressor. This is evident in the standard Lefty terms: imperialism, ruling class, income inequality, victims of poverty, Cheney is a war criminal, America is a fascist state....etc  This Lefty view can easily shade into paranoia as it did with Jim Jones and his followers. It has many times in the past and it will again in the future result in paranoid tragedy with other charismatic Lefties. Jones' follower's died to avoid the imagined torture of the great oppressor.

The tent pole idea of new age woo-woos is: I create the world I live in with my dreams, goals and determination.  Look at the standard terms of woo-woos: affirmations, you are what you eat, we are the change we have been waiting for, think good thoughts, believe in yourself, don't listen to negativity.....etc. This solipsistic view can also shade into paranoia as it did with Deepak Chopra.  A powerful government, like America, that isn't bringing sunshine and goodness to the poor oppressed Muslims of India must be the cause of Muslim terrorism. Indian Muslims need to think good thoughts to behave well. America keeps Indian Muslims from thinking good thoughts.

We lived to see it

The short term notes the Treasury issues, called bills, dipped into the negative rates on Tuesday.  That means that the Treasury was selling pieces of paper that when held for one month paid exactly zero interest.  These bills usually sell for $1,000 apiece and on Tuesday they became negative when investors were paying $1,010 to buy them.....meaning investors were paying $10 to get a zero interest $1,000 safe investment.

Investors see the financial world as so dangerous and risky that they are paying the U.S. Treasury to take their money for a month and keep it safe. There was four times as much money bidding on the bills as there were bills on the market.

I knew this happened in the 1930s with savings accounts in Swiss banks where savers were PAYING up to 4% to keep their money in the Swiss banks.

It is happening here and now.  We lived to see it.

Not eating organic

The NYTimes had this article that refers to another article with this excerpt:

This fall, researchers from the University of Copenhagen reported on a two-year experiment in which they grew carrots, kale, peas, potatoes and apples using both organic and conventional growing methods. The researchers found that the growing methods made no difference in the nutrients in the crops or the levels of nutrients retained by rats that ate them, according to the study, published in The Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

I couldn't find the original Journal article, maybe you can. 

I have worked on many organic projects including consulting with the bug advisers to organic farmers.

The only two foods I get that are organic are spinach and avocados.  I buy these two organics because the acceptable level of pesticides for these crops was set back when few people ate raw spinach and even fewer ate more than one avocado a month.

Use and abuse kids

I find it morally objectionable to use kids in a demonstration.  I make no distinction between kids in a demonstration for school funding or for killing foreigners. When I see kids I know the demonstration is being run by morally demented adults.

The reason for using kids is to generate sympathy for the cause.  But only fools think the kids actually support the cause.  Kids are there because they are chattel.  Just like dogs do what their owners want because the dogs want food, kids are equally dependent.  Kids are chattel and using them in a demonstration is a reminder to the kids and the viewers of the demonstration, unless they are pedophiles, that kids are chattel.

It may be cute to bring children to a demonstration and give them signs to carry but it is child abuse carried out by morally deficient adults.  Whether kids learn something from being in the demonstration  is secondary.  They learn something when the adult lets them get bitten by a rabid dog too.

Marketing 3.0 nonsense

The Wall Street Journal (11/29) ran a piece of hype about marketing 3.0 by Tom Hayes and Michael Malone. The two claim that the new networked web (My Space, Facebook etc) is a revolutionary marketing tool.  In their complete ignorance they throw Youtube into the networking category. The networking component of Youtube is the insignificant part.

The marketing advice the two give:

(1) 'from loyalty to attention'. Nobody edited these guys.  They mean get attention first then loyalty. Get attention by paying people to read your boring ads.
(2) 'from crowds to clouds.' They mean turn heavy traffic into producers for your product by having the site visitors offer suggestions, ads, designs and research.
(3) 'from memes to bemes.'  Bemes are memes that are corporate directed and passed on from potential consumers to their friends.

Our book Marketing Without Advertising, written in 1982 and now in the 6th edition was saying something much more fundamental quite awhile ago. 

* People make positive recommendations to their friends about products and services when the product or service is well above ordinary standards and when they know the product or service will remain that way when their friends try it.
* The medium can be email, face to face, notes, twitter, a networking site or anything else. People also diss products and services with even greater emotion and frequency when they are poorly treated.
* A recommendation only counts when the recommender is trusted in the subject matter of the recommendation (a fan of Miley Cyrus doesn't count for much when making a recommendation on string quartet performances).
* All the rest is about knowing how to deliver top quality and how to let the customer know that they bought top quality.

Scavenging

The story of Mervyns department store's demise is sad to read.  The store was always low end, and never got the market right.  It was bought and expanded by Target but still never got the market right. 

One of the ways a retailer dies is the way Mervyns died.  When the business didn't seem to have a future, having been run by several top flight retail experts, the first scavengers swooped in.  The first were three private equity funds (meaning individuals with a bundle of scavenging money). One, Cerberus, is scavenging Chrysler right now, counting on a government bailout. 

The private equity gang put all the Mervyns real estate into a separate company and re-wrote the leases with Mervyns. The new leases were designed to put Mervyns out of business so the real estate empire could rent to new higher paying tenants that would survive, or allow the real estate to be sold.

One of the scavengers bought out the others and then took the remaining cash out of Mervyns. Putting Mervyns in bankruptcy. Very sad for all the employees, especially the long-termers who hung on to the very end.

The final scavenger is visible in the photo on the left.  When a store goes out of business, it is common to bring in a concessionaire who sells carpets and oil paintings.  These are always specialized vultures who sell $10 items for $200 and are happy to get the down-payment from the low end high volume foot traffic of a dying store.

Crosslooping

I was very pleased with the service I got from the crosslooping system.

I read about the service in the Wall Street Journal months ago in the Walter Mossberg column.  I have a computer (I actually have several) that finally got so slow it wasn't worth turning on.  I signed up for crossloop and downloaded the program to my suffocating computer. I also looked at crossloops list of techie providers.

I then contacted Nick Lockard who is listed as the geek that Mossberg used.  Nick immediately had access to my computer and I watched the cursor fly around the screen opening and closing files.  After a few phone calls while he worked on my computer, he had removed one of the worst viruses imaginable (a virus that tracks my keystrokes and reports them to a demon) cleaned-up everything, installed an anti-virus program and charged me $90.  All done on my computer, without my touching it, including the payment (and we talked to each other on my phone). 

The old computer runs fine now, faster than my much newer one.

Cleaning up

This photo is a man steam cleaning the sidewalk in the Castro district.  There are many other places in San Francisco that now have this service. 

The service is paid for by the local business development district.  The business development district is a small geographic tax area that taxes local businesses and provides special services to the district, like cleaning, security, rousting bums and installing aesthetic infrastructure.  In San Francisco, the uses of the tax funds are severely limited in what they can be used for.

I first saw the business development district in Portland when Portland did such a spectacular job of revitalizing its old downtown around 1990.  I understand the business development district may have been used earlier in New York around the 5th Ave Public Library.

Happiness is contagious

You certainly saw the news report that happiness is contagious. 

So I had to look at the original study to see if it was reliable.  The database is the second generation of the Framingham study.  The definition of happiness that was used is:

We took happiness to consist of positive emotions and used a conventional measure. We focused on individuals who were assessed with the Center for Epidemiological Studies depression scale (CES-D) in 1983-2003.... To measure happiness, we use four items from the CES-D in which people were asked how often they experienced certain feelings during the previous week: "I felt hopeful about the future," "I was happy," "I enjoyed life," "I felt that I was just as good as other people." This subcomponent of the CES-D has been shown to be a valid instrument for measuring positive affect,39 40 41 and it has been taken as interchangeable with the concept of happiness.42 43 We defined "happy" as a perfect score on all four questions, but we obtain similar results if we treat happiness as a linear 0-12 scale that sums answers to all four questions...We performed confirmatory factor analysis and found that responses to these four questions were highly correlated with one another and therefore could be treated as additive measures of a single "happiness" scale...

You have my imprimatur, the results are reliable. Cautionary note not carried by the press reports: happiness does not spread at the office, based on the findings.

I have coffee every morning with a happy group of people.  It is an enduring source of happiness for me.

Punish Berkeley

Next week the Berkeley City Council will vote on a demand to bring war crime charges against a professor (John Yoo) at the University of California Boalt Hall Law School. The proposal comes from the city's Peace and Justice Commission. Yoo, as a government employee, gave his written opinions on constitutional issues.

It is time for several jurisdictions (any township or county) in the United States to pass a law that calls on the local sheriff to bound over for trial any member of the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission and any member of the Berkeley City Council who supports the Peace and Justice Commission who happens to pass through their town or county.

The law will try these miscreants for open and willful incitement to violate the 1st Amendment.

The activists of Berkeley try to use the weight of government to enforce their radical ideology, it is time to give these do-good wimps a taste of their own medicine.

Not good sense at City Hall

I said two blogs back that somebody in the San Francisco Mayor's office had shown good sense in dealing with Yelp Day. 

I was wrong...terribly wrong.  Such good sense could never prevail. The idiot in the Mayor's office, Matthew Goudeau, who pulled the plug on Yelp Day didn't do it because of Yelp's bad business reputation. He did it because of his own moral incompetence.

Goudeau pulled Yelp Day because Yelp did the right thing. Gay bigots were writing nasty reviews of businesses they had never visited; businesses owned by people who had given funds to support the anti-gay marriage electoral initiative. Yelp did the sensible business thing and pulled the politically vindictive reviews written by moral reprobates.

Goudeau pulled Yelp Day for a morally disgraceful reason...when Yelp did the right thing.

Tattoos and bravery

Has anyone else noticed that tattoos were once a sign of macho? They are no longer.

Tattoos, thirty years ago, were worn mostly by sailors, Marines and occasionally professional soldiers.  Ex-cons also had tattoos, cheap ones created with ball point pen blue and easily distinguished. The tattoo was usually associated with manliness, bravery and macho.

Today, tattoos are mostly associated with young, defiant, pro-Lefties....the Che Guevara look.  Since I consider Lefties to be mostly pacifists, wimps un-patriotic and never willing to serve their country in anyway...I notice that tattoos have migrated from macho to coward in a mere 30 years.

Am I wrong?  Do you know some young tattooed people who joined the military, police or rural fire department?

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

Some people do not understand what I say here.  Of course the military continues to get tattoos as brothers at arms. 

But peaceniks and anti-everything Lefties do too.  A migration to cowardice does not mean the original group has abandoned their use.  The message is always different.

Here is a recent image.

Good sense, hard to believe

Somebody at San Francisco City Hall has some good sense. The mayor's aide, Alfredo Pedroza, promised the PR lady from Yelp, Stephanie Ichinose, that the mayor would proclaim yesterday Yelp Day. (Yelp is a website for local customer reviews of local businesses.)

Stephanie screwed up and complained to everyone who would listen.

I say, somebody in the mayor's office has their hand on the pulse of the City.  Based on a blog I wrote in July about the serious damage Yelp is doing to local businesses and the horrible scam they are running Yelp Day would be a big embarrassment for the mayor.  The mayor doesn't need anymore embarrassments. 

I have 32 active comments on that Yelp blog filled with complaints.

CORRECTION: This blog is all wrong. See the correction here.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is the first vegetarian restaurant I've seen that has gotten national attention (top new 2008 restaurants in the U.S. in the NYTimes).

In my mind and based on operating the top major veggie restaurant in America, it is much harder to prepare a first class veggie dinner than it is to throw fish or meat on the grill.  I know the prep work is much greater and more costly.  Good veggies are harder to do than any other class of foods.

I enjoyed Ubuntu, which is on a quiet street in the quaint town of Napa.  Ubuntu is great.  The food is imaginative and deeply satisfying.  The decor is contemporary, quirky and interesting. The final dish-creation-kitchen is open. The prep work must be somewhere else.

Lastly, there is a yoga studio upstairs that opens into the restaurant so we luncheon dinners see gorgeous, sweaty bodies with yoga mats walking in and out, occasionally stopping at the bar for a drink.

The photo shows some interesting sculpture and one convivial-table for singles, a common sight in hot new restaurants.

Fine burgers

 This blog has two points.  One is that the idea of marketing niches is powerful the second is that Do-good thinking is particularly harmful to low income citizens.

How are these related?  I ate at a hamburger restaurant in Daly City (the town that is on the South Border of San Francisco. The restaurant, BurgerMeister, is a sit down hamburger joint.  The menu is the same as McDonald's, maybe less variety of dishes and more beef per burger.  The BurgerMeister marketing niche is to provide table service by good young waiters for hamburgers and fries. Nothing more.

The original BurgerMeister is near me, serving an upscale yuppie academic neighborhood. Photo above right.  The branch I ate in is on the lower left.  BurgerMeister is a good idea and well run.  It is growing into a large chain.

 

The do-gooder connection?  The do-gooder Board of Supervisors, at the urging of many do-gooder neighborhood activists have been steadily banning chain stores from San Francisco.  That means, that as Burgermeister grows and becomes a bigger chain, it can't open a new test restaurant in San Francisco and will most certainly move its headquarters out of the city to stay in touch with its customers. Do-gooders just drive away business with the do-gooder desire to have quaint neighborhoods, that slowly die.

Worst of all, forcing business to move to neighboring towns forces low income people to drive out of town to shop for the low prices offered at Target, Home Depot, Ikea, Costco (only one overcrowded store allowed in S.F.), Trader Joe's (several new stores have been rejected because they are so crowded), Walmart and a dozen other retailers who have low prices.

San Francisco do-gooders clearly punish low income residents. The few that are left.

Book review 2

I only read part of it, the book was too incoherent for me to read more than a dozen chapters.  The chapters are not called chapters they are called suras.  The book, the Quran, can be bought on Amazon or read online since several translations are not protected by copyright.

In the parts I read there were several abridged stories, many from traditional Torah portions, including a rather distorted version of the Adam and Eve story that you already know.  Other Torah characters are mentioned in the Quran as well but often under conditions that are hard to connect to the original stories or the contexts most Westerners will recognize.

I see no clear pattern in the organization of the suras, each seems to stand on its own. You can read one of the short ones here: 

The Flame

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

 Perdition overtake both hands of Abu Lahab, and he will perish.
 His wealth and what he earns will not avail him.
 He shall soon burn in fire that flames,
And his wife, the bearer of fuel,
Upon her neck a halter of strongly twisted rope.

Since I have read the Torah and its accompanying books a number of times, and I have read the Christian gospels several times I can make a comparison.  The Quran, like the other two collections of diverse writings have no meaning standing alone; they are truly incoherent to a 21st Century English speaker. 

I know the context and history of the Torah and the Gospels so I know how to handle the obscure writing. At least I can read them and pretend there is a coherence.

I barely know the context or history of the Quran so I can only see it as a mass of disconnected words, parables, stories and aphorisms.

None of this should be surprising.  The same holy text connects such diverse people as the Chileans, Portuguese, Greeks and Poles.  The Quran connects Turks, Yemenis, Persians, Bangladeshis and Buluchastanis. Wildly different people, same texts.

What all three religious texts have in common is their focus on a single god who is all powerful, who rewards and punishes humans and nations, and who seems to be directly involved in human moral affairs.

I have also read original Buddhist sutras. In comparison, the sutras are equally arcane and convoluted but since they are trying to express ideas rather than advocate for a single all-powerful god, they make more sense to the casual reader.

I read the Quran because of the current open ended war between a few hundred million Muslims and the non-Muslin world.  Having read what I read I am no more able to understand the current war than I was before I did my reading. Of course the same would have been true if I were a non-believer in 1490 Spain and I had read parts of the Christian gospels.

Book review 1

The book is The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine a professor at U.C. Berkeley.   You can read the entire introduction which is a perfect summary of the book and its thesis. Go to this page and click on "from front matter."

The thesis is one that I have often made. The Jew's role in the medieval world suited them for the last century (20th). Jews lived as lowly merchants, lenders, cosmopolitans, traders with literary skills; people with an intense focus on education, law and debate. The Jews helped create the commercial world they have thrived in.  The commercial world became the modern world.  Jews have benefited from modernity as well as been the victims of mass murder and perennial hatred.

What Slezkine doesn't discuss, because he develops his thesis in the first dozen pages then goes off on an irrelevant tangent about the Slavic world (his academic specialty), is the comfortable role Jews find in democracy.

Jews did not give us democracy, the Vikings did. They did it indirectly in conquering the North Sea land masses and directly via the Dutch Republic.  The Jews have fit comfortably into democracies because that is how they ruled themselves during the 2000 year Diaspora.  Every synagogue and temple was a mini-autonomous democracy. 

When Jews were under pressure from outsiders (or in the case of New York City at the beginning of the 20th Century when they were being blamed for the high immigrant crime rate) Jews formed a Beit Din.  The Beit Din is a legislative body that includes the commercially powerful and the community leadership to create and execute policy.

When Jews finally re-founded our Israel we automatically created a democracy.