Pro Commerce

Good for science?

When the top science advisor to the president is an outright kook, (look at his history of kookiness) one has to wonder if this is good for science or bad.

My answer is a little surprising.  I see some bad and some good.  The bad is that really bright people will look at science and see that it is nothing more than left wing, Luddite theology. Really bright people will stay away from science and that is bad for commerce.

The good thing is that even the half wits who do go into science will be forced, in the countless bull sessions with friends and colleagues, to learn that real science is about falsifiable theories based on observations of measured constants.  They will learn in college and university to reject the crap that phony scientists are currently promoting as global warming.

This puts it together

This Rasmussen survey is worthy of careful study. It turns out that you get different survey results when you ask the public whether they favor capitalism/socialism or free market/more government regulation. 

The term capitalism just doesn't have a consistent or standard meaning to most Americans. As they get older they seem to have a more consistent understanding. Ignoring age, Americans are much more comfortable with the free market/government regulation distinction. 

Two realities stand out in this survey, for me.

(1) One is that Democrats are quite comfortable with the idea of socialism for America and concurrently favor more government regulation of business which to them is the same. Republicans and Independents aren't the least bit comfortable with socialism not even with the term socialism.

(2) Second, the system of capitalism is disliked (one out of three prefer socialism) by Americans under 30. The percentage drops dramatically as respondents age. 

This is should not be shocking. It says that colleges and universities are promoting socialism, which we all know.

To me it is sad that the young people graduate from college and don't understand that it is commerce that most Americans love and appreciate, that has created America. College students don't know this, they are the most brainwashed, they are overwhelmed by the anti-commerce academic retards who teach in colleges and universities.

That is what the data confirms for me.

AP is proof

This article is a follow on to the previous article about business destroyed by the Internet.  The outmoded AP newservice threatened one of their clients for using an AP video.  The AP lawyers neither knew that the business was one of their clients nor that the video was put online for public use.

Internet destruction

It is time to look at the industries that have been destroyed or severely damaged by the Internet, 15 years after it has gained some steam.

(1) The advertising business, on a straight line decline.  The shift to the Internet is a shift away from billboard and broadcast media.
(2) Newspapers and magazines, a few exceptions have kept their readership, the rest are a disaster.
(3) Brokerages.  The decline of Merrill Lynch hurt Bank of America and Smith Barney ruined Citibank.
(4)The long distance phone business, completely gone. 
(5) Many retailers, including auto dealerships.
(6) The CD business. 
(7) The DVD business, particularly hard hit porn DVDs.
(8) Travel agencies (we've forgotten what these were).

Perfect metaphor

I find these two photos of shoes designed and made by Puma to be the most perfect metaphor I've come across in many decades. 

The metaphor behind the photographs is: Running shoes with High heels. Or High heeled running shoes.

Some would like to call this an oxymoron, two word clusters that don't have meaning or have contradictory meaning when put together. However they are put together in the real world. These are running shoes with high heels.  They are sold in a Tokyo department store in tony Shibuya.

I don't find them to be oxymoronic because I find people everywhere going through life wearing such shoes everyday in the way they perceive their behavior.

Let's start with the idea of actually running in these shoes.  That is the first metaphor.

Running can't be done because the shape of the foot is too distorted when the shoes are worn to gain even as much speed as would be possible just walking in them. Trying to run could damage parts of the foot in a few hundred feet.

The metaphor for this first part is being prepared with equipment, desires, goals that are not suited to reality. It is what people do when they spend money for a new sport, skill or way of being.  They buy the equipment but have no idea that the equipment is inappropriate. People buy total ski outfits before their first lesson and nearly all of it is wrong for a beginner and for the skier they may be some day. The same is true for buying robes, zafus and incense to take up meditation...it will be all wrong.  Running shoes with high heels.

The majority of high school graduates expect to be millionaires. Most of them won't be because the expectations do not connect with the appropriate level of determination and perseverance. Many will opt for playing the lottery. Running shoes with high heels.

Many adults behave like children playing doctor with a plastic kit; they get the degree or schooling but completely lack the experience, understanding or judgment to do the job. In many cases they have to start and run their own business, for which most people have no skills.  Running shoes with high heels.

This part of the metaphor, running shoes you can't run in, has countless uses.  I count on my readers to send them to me.  Feel free to use the photos.  I took them and own the copyright.

The second part of the metaphor is trying to be sophisticated by wearing high heels.  High heels made out of running shoes can never be sophisticated whether at an Olympic event or a Halloween party. Running shoes are the epitome of good health, heels are the epitome of upward social striving, to look better, look taller and especially to have more lovely legs than you really have. Runners are rewarded with good health and high speed.  High heelers are reward with marriage to a rich spouse, successful impression on other people about their superficiality and possibly upward social mobility. Or merely passing as a competent person when they aren't. High heel running shoes.

This metaphor occurs all the time.  People frequently think they are making a good or desirable impression and they can't see that the opposite is occurring. High heel running shoes.

Finding a job

I've hired many people in my life (fired a few too), had countless friends looking for jobs (have helped many) and never given advice on this matter unless asked.

I have two observations, virtually rules in my mind.  

1. If you have looked for a job and not gotten several good offers in a few months take any job you can, temporarily, including temp work. I'm serious, you could be the former assistant head of IT for an Internet start-up. Take a job at Starbucks or a local shoe boutique. Why? So you don't get depressed, obsessional or lose your work habits. No employer I know thinks badly of someone who takes a temporary job, many people never even mention it. 

2. My experience is that wherever you take a low level job you will be promoted immediately.  Merit is immediately recognizable and rewarded in business.  You may end up in another field of work that is more rewarding and more enjoyable.

Depression

I am impressed with the hundreds of brilliant people who are willing to give florid and luminous insights into the reasons for the current financial disaster.

I am impressed with their ignorance of economic history.

It wasn't until 1963 that Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz published their carefully researched master piece on the history of money that anyone knew that the wild swings in boom, bust, national depressions and inflation from 1850 to 1890 was due entirely to the volatile supply of gold and silver discoveries in that period. Tens of millions of lives tossed on the waves of the economy by forces they could never have fathomed.

Even today, 80 years after the beginning of the Great Depression we are still vigorously arguing about the sources, causes and policies that played a central role.  Just recently UCLA economist Lee Ohanian published original research showing that wages at the beginning of the the Great Depression were too high for the labor market and that Roosevelt pro-union policies aggravated the situation.  

Eat humble pie, eat humble black-crow pie with the feathers, all you experts on the current financial status.

P.S. Anna Schwartz is still alive.  If you want to see what she thinks about the current financial crisis check here.  She and I agree.  Nothing has worked in the financial world so far. Getting rid of mark to market is the best thing for financial organizations....it just happened. 

Nobody learned from communism

If you want to be depressed about the human condition, think about the complete absence of adult humans' ability to learn from experience.

Start with the Germans. One third of Germany fell under the control of a statist system while the remaining 2/3rds developed under a democratic pro commerce system.  Both started at the same point with the same German social values.

The statist system remained in place for a mere 45 years.  Yet within just a few years, East Germany became a backward, hungry, incompetent, lazy third-world society and remained that way for the entire 45 years.  When liberated from the statist shackles, East Germans remained disproportionately lazy, incompetent, third-worlders, sentimental for the old statist disaster.

It isn't just the East Germans who failed to learn the lesson of state control, it is all Germans.  To this day, 75% of the voters in Germany vote against the pro-commerce society they live in, that generated their wealth and prosperity and vote for statist-socialist, union dominated political parties.

It is not only the Germans, who live with the best example available of human statist failure.  The Spaniards, Persians, the Arab-Israelis, the South Koreans and the Finns all live with close-by examples or historic experience of statist ignominy. And they continue to support such values in the political parties in their own societies.

Great management failure

One of the main contributing causes to the 08-09 fiscal collapse is the major shift in management in America. The companies that are thriving have a different management than the ones that are failing.

Next week I will discuss the businesses and industries rendered obsolete by the Internet.  In this blog I want to point out the three significant improvements in management that can be found in thriving businesses such as Amazon, WalMart, Netflix and MacDonalds but not found at any auto company or newspaper.

1. Good management these days is based on mandatory written personnel reviews with stated goals and objectives, at all levels of employment from top to bottom.  Such reviews can range from a minimum of two per year to a 360 review where other employees, than a boss, participate in the review.

2. All managers are comfortable using the Internet to stay in touch and to interact.  There are countless iconoclastic habits developed for using high connectivity (never on Sunday, never in meetings etc) but the connectivity exists.

3. Nearly all managers use computer tools to carry on business whether Excel spread sheets, inventory reports, or daily financial controls.

My list is neither exhaustive nor precise, but it is a good approximation of what I have personally seen.

 

The absence of these three managerial tools is common in the dying segments of American business and present in the vital segments. 

Young management

The next blog will be about the great managerial failure of the past decade.  This is about complaints I have heard from my consulting friends in Japan and Northern Europe.

My overseas consulting friends are complaining that they are having to deal with stodgy old managers who have no imagination and don't understand the new business technologies that are shaping their markets. 

The reality is that this is the consequence of many big established companies dominating the marketplace.  In the U.S. I work with many old establish companies and top management is always old, intransigent and ill-informed.

It is the incessant rise of new companies in America that provides technological and marketing innovation. Regardless of bestselling books that suggest otherwise.

I have no inherent appreciation of young managers, they can be good or bad depending on what kind of company they learned management in.  But youth does provide some advantages in dealing with most big-spending trend-driven markets.

Congress and the Internet?

This is just a question.  It seems that President Obama and Congress have opened Pandora's Box in the intelligence-interrogation world.  An anti-Bush, anti-Republican witch hunt may be in the offing. 

My question is: if you were a career intelligence officer, called before a Congressional committee ready to destroy your career, would you use the Internet to destroy your agency and members of Congress with revelations on the Internet that couldn't be stopped?

Just a question that may be relevant now that the Internet exists and can't be stopped the way traditional media could have been in the past.

Moral part of Africa

The moral part of Africa is East Africa, Kenya, Ruanda, Congo, Tanzania etc.  West Africa is non-moral, Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, etc.

How do I know?  When I was in graduate school, one paying job I had was reading all pre-1850 books on Africa, about 180 books, and making notes for use in the first book on African economic history.

I learned a great deal about Africa.

By non-moral I mean, like, Bre'r Rabbit. Bre'r Rabbit stories came from all over West Africa, where he was a dwarf antelope not a rabbit.  In every story Bre'r Rabbit out smarts Bre'r Bear or Bre'r Fox.  That process of winning and ending a story by cunning and trickery is non-moral. 

Ghana is one of the most stable and productive countries in Africa. I believe there is a connection.

Nearly all American slaves came from West Africa and are today Black-singing-Baptists.  If you ever go to a real Black hallelujah church you'll find  West African values.  The minister is a loquacious interlocutor for the congregation in speaking to God.  Like Bre'r Rabbit his message is: 'my congregation does what they have to do to get along, but, praise God, they are good people'.

East Africa is where Islam and non-Baptist Christianity have thrived.

Public trash cans

Trash cans for public use have nearly disappeared in America.  The few remaining are mostly screen mesh.  

We now have to take off our shoes and empty our pockets to board a commercial airliner, sign-in to every large building most of which have guards and pay for airline tickets with a credit card.  This made some sense when we had the Bush international War on Terror that was keeping our Department of Defense and Homeland Security busy...with a continual domestic threat level orange.

It doesn't make much sense for the Obama adminstration's new Overseas Contingency Operation that keeps the same departments busy. What does Overseas Contingency have to do with the changes we have to make to our own lives?

Am I missing something other than revenge politics?

Dying to see

Karl Rove said in early February that the first national security actions of the Obama administration make the United States less safe.  

Now, three months later, with Obama's release of secret interrogation legal memos, two past CIA directors have concurred with Rove. 

Obama rushed over to the CIA to tell the employees he hadn't just broken a core American code that put CIA lives at stake just for Obama's chance to bash a previous administration.  But, he has.

If these three men, and most CIA employees, are right.... and the Obama national security team is wrong, Americans will die finding out.  Doesn't sound like a good trade-off to me. We die if Obama is wrong. 

I have too many friends and family scattered around the U.S.and the world to welcome this opportunity to see who is right.

Did commerce fail?

In the past year the global economy has suffered a severe financial shock (50% decline in asset value in 6 months), all the world has lost jobs and much of the world has experienced economic shock.

Is that a commentary on the moral or social validity of commerce?  

While I am a pro commerce advocate my answer would be the same in any year from 1996 (when I first began to formulate my conceptions) to 2009 (the great financial crisis): commerce is the only honest, meritocratic, open, diversity welcoming system known to man.  There is no alternative. There is no moral or social alternative to compare with commerce. I would add, that currency and currency related commercial elements have long been in the hands of governments and governments learn slowly. Banking and other elements of finance are antiquated, undeveloped and perpetually pathetic.  They will be for a long time.

I know what we need in a financial system (see an earlier blog) and someday our governments will learn what I know and the financial follies will abate. The same is true for many other elements outside of commerce such as wars, pandemics and hysteria.  They will come and go and commerce will keep on developing and expanding independently.

I didn't vote

I didn't vote for president in November 2000.  I couldn't see enough difference between Bush and Gore.

By August of 2001 I realized that I had been wrong, I had made a serious mistake.  I heard and then read George W. Bush's August speech on stem cell research and recognized that this was the most moral, decent, deeply-human man to have occupied the White House in my lifetime. I also ordered a copy of the government printing office document he commissioned on the subject. President Bush had listened to the great minds of our day debate the subject and came down on the right side.

As you will see from reading this Charles Krauthammer article, nothing good can be said about President Obama's repugnant stand of the same subject.  In fact, Krauthammer is too polite. He ignores the current president's moral rot, political viciousness and aberrant arrogance in announcing the Obama position on stem cell research.

Goody-goodies

Have you noticed that some people always want to obey laws and always want laws to obey?  They will stop for a stop-sign in the desert, even with no visible cars for ten miles. We generally call these people goody-goodies.  I'm not one of them.

Conversely there are a group of people who like to deliberately antagonize goody-goodies.  These are the trouble makers in school and the popular kids on the play ground. (Of course, the goody-goodies may not notice it.)

The rapid rise of American's who don't believe in human-caused-global-warming as reported in both the Rasmussen and Gallup polls is dividing the goody-goody Americans from the rest of us, just as it long ago divided Old-Europe (which is all goody-goody self righteous) from America.

While I'm happy to see more Americans come to their senses, after ten years with no global warming, I am actually concerned because this anti-goody-goody understanding will lead to frustration.  Frustration with goody-goody ideas of global warming may mean people will deliberately flush the toilet twice, buy brighter light bulbs and leave them on, drive bigger gas guzzling cars and throw their compost into the main trash.

The enviro's are probably leading us to throw out all their eco-ideas because their biggest one (global warming) is absurd.

The commercial failure barrier

I'm not talking about the question of failure of commerce in this blog, that is the next blog. I'm talking about the positive importance of failure to commerce.

America is the most failure ridden country on the planet. Good.  We start, build and fail ten or twenty times for every time we succeed. Those are the odds for new businesses, for bands, for records, for movies, for theatrical productions for new products.  We fail, fail and fail and we get up, dust ourselves off and try again.

Failure, or more accurately, willingness to fail, is at the core of American dynamism.  No other country has it (certainly not Japan or old Europe).  No other country is even close. Willingness to fail was part of the force that lead men and families to leave the East Coast and populate this vast country.  They took risks, they failed and they moved on.

When I spend time in other parts of the world it becomes obvious, that despite our many problems, we are unique in our acceptance of failure. Americans can fail without expecting opprobrium, punishment, ostracism or for that matter, like modern divorce we each learn to accept the pain of failure and know that people around us seldom assign blame or attach a stigma. Having closed a start-up is not a bad thing.  It usually means a person has learned a pragmatic lesson or two.

When you read all the crap about economic development for the third world, astronomic financial give-aways, preposterous development policies the one thing you'll never see, never hear, that one thing is the creation of a culture that accepts commercial failure.

The reason America is the economic engine of the world, the reason we produce industries, technologies and markets that all the dependent industrial economies copy is because we are accepting of failure.  It is also why our trains, subways, police barely work and why our cities are so dirty.

NBER should close

Several decades ago the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) established a criteria for defining 'recessions'.  They claimed a recession was 2 sequential quarters with zero or negative GDP growth.  

Last year, this bastion of failed ideas (see my earlier homage to Wesley Mitchell) announced after two quarters of GDP growth, the first and second quarter of 2008, that a recession had begun in December 2007.

Lets change the rules when we want to says the NBER.  Lets say three strikes/four balls is too many, now it is two strikes and three balls. 

I know the economic model the NBER has been using, with lead, concurrent and lag indicators, and it is not a viable theory, it is empiric observation of past events. Nice but not meaningful. 

I say the NBER doesn't have a viable role in our economy and should be closed. 

Improvement in India

Those of us who think about the origins, roots and successes of industrial commerce are always asking questions, always learning.  There is no clear and unambiguous answer to any of these questions and because the planet is so dominated by anti-commercial dialog there is little intelligent discussion going on.

Joyce Appleby has made an effort to think about the elements surrounding the founding of industrial commerce.  She argues that the openness of diverse Protestant countries, Holland and England, was necessary to supplant the stasis of traditional pre-industrial societies.  I support that.

In the mid 1990s I was invited to teach a business class in India to retired Indian military men (young men).  The course was about improvement.  It was understood by the school where I taught that the god Ganesh, (the dancing elephant) the god of improvement was a necessary god for Indians to invoke to create an industrial society. To start new businesses.

Most of my students really had never internalized the idea of improvement in everyday life.  While they used automobiles, phones and myriad technologies they still viewed the world and life as part of a cycle.  Life was all little forward technology to be followed by a period of backwardness and tradition.   

It will be difficult for India to accept long term improvement as an idea more powerful than cycles.  Europe only took three hundred years to replace the stasis of church values and 'things were better in the past'. Northern Europe is at most half way there, Southern Europe is still stuck in the past. India will take longer.  America started fresh without those encrusted ideas that still hold Europe back.

In big pain

I was out of the country when I got a root-canal infection of unimaginable pain.  I couldn't think much about blogging but as the pain killers and the anti-biotics kicked in, after half a day, I started to think about the anti-commerce world.

Looking Backward was a novel by Edward Bellamy, a Leftist fantasy published in 1888. It dealt with a young man, Julian West, who fell asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000 to find the USA has become a socialist utopia. Looking Backward sold more than 1 million copies. More than 160 "Bellamy" clubs were created to propagate the ideas in this book. The effort was successful around the planet. The socialist fantasy is still alive with statists (Leftists) through out the world.

The basic fallacy of statist-Lefty thinking is embodied in Bellamy's book.  Stop the world where it is and redistribute everything fairly to those people who need support and to those who deserve it. Nearly everyone will be better off. 

I think of Bellamy as I recover from my horrible pain because it highlights the core intellectual failure of the statist/Lefties. They don't understand that a pro commerce world is dynamic and always a positive sum (there is no finite pot to divide up).  The modern Bellamyites (Pelosi, Reid, NYTimes etc) want to take what we have today and divide it up more fairly, that includes medical care, wealth, mortgages and domestic jobs.

Had we divided the wealth of America in 1887 as Bellamy and his followers advocated, our medical system would be pretty much the way it was then.  

American dentistry barely got underway until 1910, American medicine not until 1935 and pharmaceuticals not until even later.  The American open-market/pro commerce environment created modern medicine, pain killers, anti-biotics, dentistry. 

America, the only non-nationalized health-care system in the world for the past century, still leads the world in all these fields.  No communist country ever contributed to medical or dental progress and few national health care systems have contributed much if anything significant.  Tooth pain was not ever going to be fixed by more government. 

So if you want to stop the American world today, and divide it up fairly, and continue being a statist/Lefty... you are condemning my grandchildren to live without the improvements on the horizon of modernity. Sort of a 2050 version of Cuba. I can only wish upon you the pain I suffered with my root canal inflammation before the medicines of modernity kicked-in.  

Actually,I retract that.  You are probably just going along with the mindless crowd because you are a nice guy, I only wish you one-tenth the pain and only for a few hours not half a day.

Wool from 1710 to 1983

The fabric guilds and the hereditary landowners in England successfully put up tariff barriers to protect their wool industry in the early 1700s. These barriers endured for centuries. 

The original goal was to keep out cotton from India.  Cotton inner clothes feel better than wool.  The barriers didn't ultimately keep out New Zealand wool which was much finer at a fraction the cost.

I was called in as a consultant in 1983 to help a small struggling wool producer in Western England.  They did everything I recommended in opening the dieing, carding and weaving process to artisan clothing designers...but it was irrelevant.  The wool was still too coarse and uncomfortable even for tobacco smelling academic jackets.  

Finally I got the firm to invite in furniture designers and manufacturers to learn the open process and shape their own output...alas, the product sold well.

The alternative to guilds and tariff barriers, even after 250 years, is and was always better business practices and a little imagination.

American commercial problems

When I think about modern commerce and asked myself, honestly, about the current and future problems of the American global engine of commerce I come up with three serious problems.

1. The most recent and most serious is the absence of a stable financial system.  I have outlined the structure of such a system in several earlier blogs.  First we need a guaranteed deposit account for any amount of money (including laundered money), and guaranteed loans that can not be reduced unless the underlying asset declines in value. A stable global currency is now taken for granted.

2. The inherent absurdity of the American immigration system means long-term decline in economic vitality.  One to four million skilled adult immigrants should be allowed into the US every year on a 4 year probation-to-citizenship basis and every post-graduate foreign student in America should be given a green card.  Immigrants are the commercial blood stream of America and always has been. 

3. Our political system needs serious and immediate repair.  The core problem (other than unrepresentativeness) is political parties.  California had no political parties in State government from 1920 to 1960 and was the best run most prosperous state in the Union.  When political parties returned the state went straight downhill to the bottom in ten years.  Just like Cuba under Castro, East Europe under Stalin and Venezuela under Chavez.

Fix these three problems, or just the last one, and America can be a driving global engine for another century.

My Monroe and Von Neuman

I have a 1960s model Monroe calculating machine in my office. Inside is an electric motor that drives a large number of cams and gears.  It does multiplication and division.  Rather slow on division and dividison is the main reason it occasionally freezes.

There was a recent discussion with a friend who had seen the nearly complete mock-up of a Babbage calculator in London. Friend, Carol, was told that the Babbage difference engine was the first modern computer.  I have recently read somewhere that John von Neuman is credited as the father of modern programming.  I have checked into all of this with my mathematical prowess (actually it is a lack of fear) and I have come up with the following:

A calculator based on gears dates back to Greek times or earlier.  It was a hand cranked set of bronze gears and showed a post Copernican understanding of astronomy. It calculated the four year dates of the Olympics and the erratic eclipses. 

The wooden clocks of 1600 are descendants of the Greek calculator, after all clocks added 60 minutes to total one hour, and 24 hours to total a new day.  Clocks, within one hundred years, added lunar and celestial indicators.  The Monroe in my office is a direct descendant of the Greek calculator, with an electric motor added.

What Babbage did was to add a mechanism to a Greek style calculator to input the data for the calculator.  Babbage also separated the results wheels from the main machine as well as the separate internal calculating steps. The separate programmable machine was not new, it already existed in the Jacquard loom from 30 years earlier than Babbage's machine.  The Jacquard loom uses punch cards (wooden slats) to control the colors and pattern woven on a fabric being made in a machine operated loom. The Jacquard was based on earlier 1720s designs.

Much as I appreciate von Neuman and Babbage (both Jews), von Neuman's brilliant math is only a contribution to computer programming.  Programming evolved from purely technical advances in designing electronic computers. Writing a program to control a program is an idea that is just as logical as a yardstick replacing a tape measure. 

Make public predictions

In 1974 I had a client, a surfer/skate boarder, who was among the first to print witty comments on white t-shirts.  He did it with serigraph, (silk screening).

It was a successful and growing business.  

I suggested he keep his eyes open for the next fad to make into a business.  I didn't think many people would buy t-shirts with something bold written on them, and certainly wouldn't buy more than one.  

Three things about that prediction. Printing on t-shirts replaced serigraph.  I have friends with 50 slogan t-shirts in their drawer.  T-shirts are still popular more than 35 years later.

The consequence of my 1974 public prediction is that I never stop thinking about why people buy and wear 'statement' t-shirts.  The reasons people do it, also never stops changing. T-shirts are ubiquitous for me and a permanent source of intellectual stimulation.

 

More friends

More of my friends are reading my blog, possibly because I now have it as a line item at the bottom of my emails.

This first issue is that one of my children who seldom looked before now comments.  I have to take anything my children say seriously and occasionally make revisions.

The second issue is that some of my good friends who are Lefties in San Francisco now call me to task on issues that matter to them.  So, not only do I have to remember blogs I wrote awhile back, but I have to humbly expand on what I said. In person I am much more polite than I am in many blogs.

The third and most difficult issue is my friends overseas particularly close friends in Japan and Sweden.  The Japanese have no idea who or what Jews are, they barely know the history of the Jews, much less Israel.  They swallow the Jew hating pap the global media (CNN. BBC) spew out daily and have no idea that another position exists.  They are also deeply pacifist, so any country except Japan, that defends itself (from anyone but North Korea) is evil.

The Swedes are the worst problem.  They are all so nice, along with the Norwegians, Brits and French, and have no sense that they consider Jew hate to be their birthright.  To an American growing up, we might throw a flat rock on a pond to watch it skip a few times. To a European growing up, with few exceptions, reading about Jews being killed by Arabs is the same as a football team being defeated in a match...just life.

I had no idea this would be a consequence of a blog read globally. 

Taste follows function

This blog title 'taste follows function' is a play on a design slogan: form follows function.  The phrase 'form follows function' is also off base.  The correct phrase should be 'Form follows function in a pro commerce society.'  Until 1950 nearly all the people in the world sat on something other than a chair.  Think Africa, Arabia, Japan, ordinary people in China and Latin America.  Only the vast distribution of chairs by industrial commerce brought chairs to most of the world.  The chair is an obvious form following function but for most of history it didn't exist.

Taste follows function is a phrase that comes from remembering a Japanese dinner in which I ate every part of a fresh water eel (thanks Ken) bit by bit.  Crispy broiled tail, crispy broiled fins and head, a choice selection of crispy innards, the main flesh and lightly roasted liver.

I have eaten the livers of eel, cow, chicken, duck, goose and shark.  What is the result?  My observation that they all taste nearly the same.  Hence I conclude that because the liver has much the same function in all these species, taste follows function.  Livers taste like livers from specie that evolved 200 million years ago and 20 thousand years ago.

The guild mentality

Unions grew out of guilds. So did many professional organizations such as the doctors, actors, writers and dental associations. Their single goal is stasis: 'Don't change anything'.

Those of us who are pro commerce have a deep memory that in the infancy of industrial commerce, guilds were our strong and vigorous opponents.  Guilds in England and Holland in the early-1700s, at the beginning of industrial commerce,  were opposed to free trade, wanted stiff tariff barriers, wanted fixed low interest rates, wanted prices controlled by the government and wanted any termination of employment to be banned.

They still do, 300 years latrer, every single day, and with every new Congress.  

The precursors of guilds, that anti-date industrial commerce by several thousand years, create a permanent social force in opposition to nearly everything that has created the modern world, including health and sanitation. Just so you know who your friends are, the opponents of the modern world, health and sanitation, are: guilds, unions, academic elites, hereditary upper classes, most churches and the Left. 

By the way, I have one exception to unions.  Policeman's unions are necessary to protect the police from the rabid Lefty police-hatred that never seems to subside and always assumes that criminals shooting at police are innocent victims when the police return fire.  Just like Lefties attitudes towards Israel.

Green tech

I don't dismiss Green tech.  It can be a meaningful concept if it results in lowering industrial costs or increasing the productivity of currently used resources.

That is what commerce is all about...reducing costs and increasing the productivity of existing resources.  Call it anything you want...purple tech.  Reducing energy use is always welcome for the same output, shipping electricity from the East Coast to the West Coast at peak West Coast consumption times of the day on a new grid would be great.

On the other hand anything Green that increases costs such as cap and trade, reducing CO2 to avoid eschatological global disasters makes no sense at all.  The society that puts hand cuffs on its own industrial productivity will suffer a relative loss of life, liberty and the happiness of its citizens.

Can't recommend

I was about to recommend an over-the-counter treatment for colds.  I had looked into the medical study data of zinc treatment for colds, rhinoviruses, several years ago and found that only zinc acetate had a measurable positive effect, the two other forms of zinc had no effect.  The product I have used for the past year, along with my partner, has had a positive effect; it is produced by Matrixx Inititative Corp.  

The problem for me, in recommending this product, is that the bottle and the website never say what the dosage of zinc acetate is in the soluble pills.  They don't say anywhere.  On the bottle it also says Vitamin C and Homeopathic.

Vitamin C is not listed as an active ingredient, but if it is active it can destroy the zinc acetate.  

The leading homeopathic company in the world has been my client and I have visited their production facility.  Homeopathic on a bottle can mean a closed container of zinc was waved over a vat of water that water was later used to make the pill. It can mean one molecule per bottle of 45 pills. Or it could mean much more zinc but homeopathic purists would consider that a less effective treatment.

Don't buy Matrixx stock, they are swindlers.  I favor more active FDA rules on over-the-counter remedies.  Buyer beware.  No useful product information on the bottle or the website. Buyer beware of Matrixx Corp.

Economic hysteria

If I mentioned the names of the corporations you would wonder what is going on.  I've had three meals, in one week, with business consultants to major corporations headquartered in the U.S., Germany and Japan. Major.

Their clients are using the current politico-econo period to lay off tens of thousands of employees while their real net earnings are climbing.  This is the perfect time to cut back on 'deadwood' employees who can't use the Internet, don't show any promise or are in parts of the industry that are declining and outmoded.

You should wonder.

Not to my surprise (to my concurrence) my meal time guests say the current 'depression' that politico's and journalists are hysterical about is a minor recession. These consultants are people who see the world from commanding heights. 

Of course unemployment is growing and will be high for another year.  Major shifts have occurred in the economy, which I will write about next week. Dramatic shifts in business displace capital, workers and are an integral part of the creative/destruction of commerce.