Pro Commerce

Paper pipeline

Has everyone noticed that the paper pipeline to our front doors is getting smaller.  The pipe is the same size but the contents are beginning to just dribble in.

I still get a few bills and invoices in the paper pipeline, often copies of what I get online.  I almost never get informational personalized mail.  I get a few magazines.

The bulk of the material in the paper pipeline is advertising throw-aways.  It shouldn't surprise us that the U.S. Postal Service wants to shrink the size of the pipeline.  Go ahead, shrink it a lot.

What shape?

What is the shape of the debris after a space collision?   Two satellites collided sometime today, we don't have any details of relevance yet, including the direction they were approaching each other.

I want to know the shape of the debris cloud.  It must have some standard characteristics for two objects close in size.  Virtually everything rising above the orbit will return to the atmosphere and the same is true for everything shooting-off below.  Such objects will keep moving up or down until they form an ellipse with the earth at a perigee. 

Everything remaining in the orbit will spread out in some form of irregular expanding circle and will slowly form a very low density sphere around the earth.

Who, out there in blog land, actually knows what happens?

See the comment below for the answer to my questions.  Thank god I have such great readers.

Allen Temple Baptist applause

In 1971-2 Robert Gnaizda was the lawyer I used in bringing the first successful case of employment discrimination in America (not discrimination against me).  I put together the case, I found the plaintiffs and I provided the convincing inside data.

The successful settlement with the Bank of California provided for significant and measurable job access for women, blacks and Latinos to management, for specific jobs in the top 18 management slots and significant training funds for women and minorities.

Mr. Gnaizda took the Federal Court settlement and got every other major bank, Savings and Loans and major insurance companies to sign on to the same agreement. To this day, banking and insurance have the best records of minority employment.

Neither Mr. Gnaizda nor I have ever sought recognition for this major contribution to diversity in America and for 30 years we never got any.

A few years ago when Bob Gnaizda and I were doing research on the treatment of minorities by banks in maintaining a national 'no checking account list' of 5 million names we went to Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland to do interviews. Allen Temple is one of the largest black churches in America.

The reverend Alfred Smith, of Allen Temple, asked a lawyer in his congregation to do research on us.  The lawyer found the 1971-2 banking anti-discrimination case and explained its importance to Rev. Smith.

Rev. Smith told the parishioners of the church, on the Sunday when we were visiting, about our history in establishing the core American anti-discrimination employment law.

Bob and I got a five minute wild cheering standing ovation from thousands of blacks.  That was more than enough lifetime reward for both of us.

Use of time in science

In the previous blog I explained the scientific fraud being perpetrated at the California Academy of Science.

The most striking issue as I enter the building is the use of time on the East and West side of the building.

The East side of the building is dedicated to evolution and does a superb job of providing scientific evidence to support the theory of evolution by modification-and-survival of species. The prime evidence is that evolution leaves records over a 500 million year time span, as well as DNA. 

The dominant opposition to evolution by modification-and-survival is based on global time extending back only 5,700 years to Adam and Eve.  So the Academy establishes its argument by using the importance of long periods of time to support a scientific theory.

The West side of the building is the opposite. The West side is dedicated to propaganda that says human activity in the past 60 years is destroying the planet, driving thousands of earthly species to extinction and requires extreme personal behavioral change to save the planet from disastrous global warming. All relevant evidence is limited to 150 years.

The main scientific opposition to the Global Warming propaganda is based on long periods of time, back 750,000 years using Greenland ice core data.  But on the West side of the building time only goes back 150 years to support propaganda. 

(Note the right side of the chart covers 1 degree Fahrenheit.)

California Academy of Propaganda

I went to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.  The large exhibit on global warming is not science by any stretch of the imagination. 

The exhibit is pure unadulterated propaganda.  There is not one shred of science or data in the 1,400 square foot exhibit. No opportunity is missed to distort, exaggerate or fabricate the propaganda. 

Two examples: 1) while several hundred square feet are dedicated to proclaiming the demonic and horrific harm of releasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere only 1/4 square inch mentions nuclear power use in South Africa (photo on left). Mentions it.  No mention is made of using nuclear power as an alternative to carbon dioxide release.  Even died-in-the wool global scaring environmentalists are willing to discuss nuclear power.

 2) The whole exhibit is dedicated to scaring children into being barefoot, vegetarian enviro-nuts so no mention can be found anywhere of any global temperature history before 1950.

I was permitted to address a large class of 4th graders, because I had been talking to the staff docent and the class teacher.  I pointed to the map on the wall showing a large white spot.  I said that the ice covered island is named Greenland because in 1008CE, 1000 years ago, the settlers there were growing Midwestern American crops of wheat and rye.  England at the time grew Mediterranean crops.  A thousand years ago the average global temperature was higher than anyone expects the earth to get in the next 150 years.  That is all I needed to say to raise serious questions about the whole propaganda exhibit.

Just like the worst Nazi propaganda, the California Academy of Propaganda ridicules scientists who question the pure ideology of the exhibit.  (See bottom photo on the right of a cartoon which says it is too late to do more research on global warming).

Male-female IQ difference

Are males smarter or dumber than females?  It depends on how you normalize the IQ test.

Normalizing of IQ tests is what most people completely forget in discussions of male-female difference.

Men have an IQ test advantage in math and spatial relations, women have an advantage in written language.  In both cases the advantages are significant enough to result in measurable differences on an IQ test.

Consequently IQ testing is normalized for white males and females at 100*. The tests are set to make white males equal to females.  If the questions in all parts of the IQ test were held equal males would get higher scores than 100 resulting from a large number of math and spatial relations questions, vice versa for the results for females on language questions if language questions were dominant.

Just think, the female professors at Harvard drove out the president of Harvard over ignorance of this issue and gave him back to America as head of the Economic Council.  (Actually the issue was only about math scores at the extreme end of the statistical curve, 6 sigma.)

*Note the use of the term white.  If tests were normalized for ethnicity, whites would be inferior (averaging 90 IQ) to Japanese and whites would be superior to some others.

A reason for the meltdown

First the first.  The current financial meltdown is the first truly global human event.  Every country and nearly every person on the planet is to some extent touched by this meltdown.  Such a global event has never before happened and certainly not at the current magnitude.  The 1930-40 U.S. depression was only spread to a few European and Latin American countries, and was not a significant event for many. WWII and the Cold War had an effect on everyone but the effect was slow and imperceptible, not as immediate and palpable as the current financial meltdown.

Second, there were multiple causes to the current financial meltdown.  It was a perfect storm.  I have written a precis of the interaction of the efforts at creating financial safety using diversification, the insurance principle, which inadvertently spread the systemic danger around the globe and the efforts at making the price of financial companies more transparent. The combination caused a systemic failure. The U.S. Treasury made the situation worse by using the wrong correction tools.

The most compelling cause was not the failure of the housing market and sub-prime mortgages it was the introduction in 2007 of an accounting procedure called MTM, mark-to-market. 

The consequence was that the minor increase in late loan payments and the modest rise in mortgage defaults was wildly exaggerated by the number and types of instruments that were piggy-backing on the mortgage packages and because of the MTM requirement that excessive amounts of money be deducted from the profits of the financial institutions.  The combination of rapidly spreading exaggerations of mortgage loan losses and the falling profits of American financial institutions created a downward stock market spiral.  When the U.S. Treasury stepped in to buy financial stock, the dilution of the stock exaggerated the downward spiral.

Bank failure is automatic based on a capital ratio, most banks failed in 2008, and the Treasury tried to save the banks with cash.  It would have been wiser to change the ratio, or suspend it for a year. It is not too late to do so.

Summary: the combination of global diversification of investments and the American accounting procedure introduced in 2007, mark-to-market, created a systemic global financial failure.  The intervention of the U.S. Treasury made matters worse. 

Firing time

This may be a good time to lay-off staff.

I say that not because I want people laid-off but because I am always alarmed at the distressing cost of litigating unlawful termination cases.  In a time when your legal defense can be: a decline in sales, a vast number of lay-offs in your industry, or anything else to do with economic decline,  we all have good cover for lay-offs.

Laying off staff in good times may always be warranted because plenty of staff is excessive.  But the cost of litigating unlawful termination cases is always problematic.  On the other hand, periods of rising unemployment are the periods when plaintiffs lawyers know they have the least chance of winning an unlawful termination case.

Now is the time to do it.  Join the crowd.

Hey, note to all you lobbyists, legislators and do gooders who think you are helping workers by creating special protected classes of workers (seniors, gays and minorities): you are making them more vulnerable to firing in down-turns and less likely to be hired in the first place.

Oxymorons of ecology

*Solar panel - snow.  Snow is hard on solar panels.  It is hard to remove, panels are often in awkward places and many areas have snow cover for many months.  When snow it is not directly on the panels it makes a good reflector.

*Bio-diesel - cold. Cold weather in most of the temperate zone will solidify bio-diesel.  Not helpful to be running a vehicle on bio- diesel in cold weather.

*Wind power - storage.  Wind power is an off and on again power source in most of the geographies that haven't already been developed for wind power.  Off and on again means storage and storage remains a problem for any volatile power source.

*Tidal power - maintenance.  The biggest drawback for ocean tides is that seawater is terribly corrosive of every known human tool, attracts underwater mollusks and is usually hard to retrieve from underwater.

*Economies of scale - transmission.  Many ecological power sources can benefit from economies of scale such as solar power in a desert, wind power in a canyon and tidal power at entrances to bays. However, transmission of electric power is subject to dramatic and costly losses of power.

Twitter

I've been posting this blog on Twitter for more than a week.  It works.  If you are on Twitter you can get a feed by clicking on the link at the bottom of the left hand column of this blog.  Twitter is emerging as something, I don't know what.  I don't have the time to follow more than a few people.

A friend yesterday said she won't use Facebook because 'I stay in touch with friends who matter, the rest are not inadvertently left behind.'

Music to dine by

I ate at a wonderful South Indian restaurant recently.  It was lunch, the restaurant was nearly empty but the music was loud and had little connection to India....more like German techno.  I asked the servers about the music and they all said the music was driving them nuts.  I talked to the two managers who were there and one owner.  They said it was due to the other owner who loved making the play list for the music.

This is a white tablecloth high end, high quality restaurant.  In general I would say music is barely appropriate; maybe softly, maybe in the evening to get the young crowd talking louder, but barely.  I know many flash in the pan hot hot hot restaurants have plenty of music and have it loud.  Flash-in-the-pan is the operative term.

My business experience is that such restaurants can't last very long for three reasons.  (1) Any specific form of music always appeals to a specific market; you are not likely to get customers outside that market. (2) The hot hot hot restaurant can't expect to be hot for long and the music will have offended or discouraged the other markets that might have come in after the hot-hot has died down. (3) One hell of a lot of paying diners avoid loud music and many avoid any kind of music they don't like.

I think music is a very limited and dangerous business draw.

Learning about reality

After putting together the list of the top global 100 companies in 1960 I came to realize this would be a good exercise for every liberal arts student in America (so they could have some connection to reality) and every MBA student. (See the blog below.)

First, it raises the question of why any one company should be considered one continuous company over time.  There is no clear answer.  My answer is: 'If the same piece of stock ownership certificate in 1960 entitled you to ownership at a future date, it is the same company.'

Second, how has American business changed?  In 1960 the big companies were autos, steel, oil and aircraft and there were many of each.  That has changed; there are only few of each of the old companies and completely new fields dominate the top 100 including retail, electronics and finance.

Third, what happened to some of the giants of America: Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, National Dairy Products, Continental Can, United Aircraft, Cities Service, American Stores and Anderson Clayton?

Fragile as tulips

The one overriding objection I hear to my Pro Commerce position is 'What about the big global companies Aren't they an awful danger?

What the doubter is suggesting is that somehow big companies are bad. Global bigness is bad.

My response is that big companies are being vilified because of some 19th Century ideology.  The truth is that big companies are fragile and ephemeral.  They come and go, much faster than tin can despots like Mao, Stalin, Castro, Chavez, Ho Chi Min and Kim Jong-il.

Here is a list of the top 100 global companies in 1960* and in 2008. Only eleven companies are on both lists.  Another only has the same name (AT&T is not the same continuous company) and two of the eleven are about to collapse (Ford, GM). Three from the 2008 list are already out of business (Citigroup, Bank of Scotland and Merrill Lynch).

To put it another way, of the top hundred global companies today, among these ferocious demonic monsters, only eleven will still exist when today's 20 year-olds are retiring.  Big global corporations are best compared to orchids, delicate hot house plants. They come and go, mostly go.

Fear of big global companies is not a rational fear. Better to fear today's tyrants who have real lethal power and will get more lethal power as nuclear weapons proliferate.

*I compiled this list and put it on the Internet for the first time; I also put the pure U.S. list online.

Israel and the next century

This Michael Totten piece is exquisite.  I particularly like it because after my last visit to Israel I came back saying the same thing.  The Israeli's don't want anything to do with the Palestinians or any other Arabs.  They are willing to wait 100 years before they will expect any improvement.

How long before my blog counts?

How long does it take for something in my blog to make it to the Wall Street Journal? Most of my material is original, but that doesn't ever prove a connection.

The answer seems to be eight months.  In May of last year I wrote a blog specifically about the perfect two sided coin of Bush hate and Obama messianism.  Peter Berkowitz just got his op-ed piece (subscription required) on the same topic published. 

I speculated on the nature of group hysteria and suggested we can't know the cause, but this two head coin is a key observation.  Berkowitz suggests the two headed coin is the byproduct of irresponsible journalism and Lefty control of academia.

I don't know the answer but I do know that Lefty hate is fueled less by academia and journalists and fueled more by the unspoken fact that (1) the anti-Left has better arguments, (2) there are now channels of public communication that never existed before and (3) there is a deep American appreciation of the anti-Left position. Those are the unspoken source of Lefty venom.

Old joke

I just remembered an old joke from the late 1950s. A man delivering manure arrives at an estate and knocks on the door.  A butler answers.  The delivery man announces himself 'I'm Mr Rabbit with a delivery for Mr. Turtle'.

The butler responds arrogantly with an English accent: 'He is not available. Mr Tur-tle, is down by the well'.

Response: 'Please tell him Mr Rab-bit is here with s-hit'.

What strikes me about this joke is that it is based on a frustration with 'class'.  The joke must have disappeared with the disappearance of the hereditary upper class in America in 1960.

Traitor

Am I a traitor to the Pro Commerce cause?  I actually welcome the Democrats wet dream package of government stimulus.  Why?

First it is not a big deal.  A mixture of tax cuts and digging holes that comes to a trillion dollars isn't much in an economy that can grow by that much in a good year. It will come too late to help the economy and the worst is that it will mean slower growth in the next two years and inflation at some point.  It might help the rest of the world.

Now why I like the Democrat wet dream spending. 

We have just been through a decade when most people were working hard to keep up with expenses.  Many people I know have struggled. Almost nobody had it easy.  We went through the espresso period of hard driving determination with long hours and employment anxiety.  Sure, many people got rich and lived like Poobahs riding elephants. Now it is time for everyone to ride on donkeys.

I lived through the period following Lyndon Johnson's wild spending spree called the Great Society 1968-1978. The government poured money into the economy.  I lived through that period.  It was wonderful. 

Virtually nobody had to work, living was easy, rent was affordable, housing was cheap, and part time jobs were so abundant no one ever gave working a second thought. 

I hope government money sloshing around can bring back some of those lazy, easy, good times.

Footnote: Few people in the world have the talent of middleclass whites for getting free money out of the government.  In hippie days, the Ecology Center in S.F. had close to a dozen Job Subsidy workers (paind entirely by the government). Every dime of other income came from the government for supervison, accounting and training.

Looks bad

I read nothing, these days, but scare material about the domestic economy. The reality is that this is a recession which may be over by summer.  Meaning unemployment will still be high but the GDP will start growing.

The really scary part is the international economy.  What does it mean when five nations are so bankrupt they can only borrow from the International Monetary Fund (Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Bulgaria and Romania) and several more are near bankruptcy (Mexico, Greece, Spain and Argentina). Several dangerous nations are near collapse because of low oil prices: Russia, Iran and Venezuela.

It is was a time like this, in the 1930s that dangerous new tyrants emerged to attack their neighbors, such as Hitler and other tyrants went crazy and killed millions of their own people. That is worrisome.