Pro Commerce

I have no evidence

On a global scale, the Japanese Lower House election of the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan) is monumental.  The DPJ ousted the permanent party of Japan, the LDP, by 2 to 1.  

The few parts of the world that pay attention to Japan are all saying this is some voter frustration with economics.  

I don't buy that. The Japanese economy is picking up steam at the same pace as several other major industrial nations. The economy was visibly healthy in Tokyo earlier this year when I was there. This August change of government is an 8.7 on the Richter scale.

I would like to suggest, without a shred of evidence, that the 98% pacifist Japanese are in fact not cowards. 

No nation, even a nation of pacifists, can tolerate a Communist-tyrannical-deranged-dictator with nuclear weapons blithely firing missiles over their country without responding. The entire visible, verbal and elected class in Japan ignored the aggressive insanity in their airspace in May of this year.

I think this election is a response. Four months later.  

We Americans would never tolerate a comparable Communist-tyrannical-deranged-dictator with nuclear weapons firing a missile over the United States for the second time.  We would never countenence a government that would tolerate such behavior from Cuba even a first time.

Darwin and commerce

Darwin's contribution was not to advocate the evolution of the species, especially for humans.  That idea was old and had been debated for centuries before Darwin was born.

Darwin's great contribution was to offer a mechanism to explain the forces that generated evolution and to offer evidence to support his thesis. 

It was nearly fifty years before many scientists in the field of biology began to understand Darwin's contribution.  The initial debates about Darwin were based on the recognition among a few biologists that Darwin had presented a very good data base for evidence of evolution.  Only a few later began to grasp the idea of the forces involved (random variation and selection).

By the beginning of the 20th Century the idea of social Darwinism was entering the realm of public discussion.

My beloved readers can understand how wrong the idea of social Darwinism is by understanding that the mechanism 'survival of the fittest' is flat out a wrong idea and does not grow out of Darwin's theory or data.

The term survival of the fittest should correctly be survival of the fittingest.  A particular wasp species does not survive while others fail because of some abstract notion of being stronger, smarter or faster than other wasps...it survives because it uses the resources in its environment better; it eats something others reject, it smells worse, its smaller, it hides better...etc.  It fits the environment it inhabits better than another species.  It is the fittingest that survives.

If you figured out that idea yourself then you understand that Darwin's two forces, random variation and selection by survival form a powerful idea.

Hopefully, you can also begin to understand commerce.  Commerce is a human mechanism for generating human well-being. 

There are three components of commerce (trade, industry and clientry).  All three work on a variation/selection mechanism. 

* The variation is sometimes random (blind foolishness) but most often it is driven by whim, imagination, intelligence, copying others and determination.

* The selection is seldom death. Selection is most often learning to read the bookkeeping numbers; it is also reorganization, bankruptcy and failure.

Summary: the real Darwinian contribution took 50 years to be understood; variation and selection.  I hope the similar Phillips' commerce contribution doesn't take that long.

Obesity and market selection (food evolves)

The issue of obesity is a great challenge.  Not only is it important because a) bariatric obesity has morbidity and mortality costs for the whole society, b) it poses dangers to long term productivity, but c) because the problem is nearly impossible to describe. 

The Japanese* have no obesity while most other industrial people in the world do.  The only sub-populations in the US that are not getting obese are the yuppies and my gay friends**. Neither is a demographic group. They just don't eat much.

I have stumbled on my first hypothesis in the realm of obesity, largely based on my personal experience and listening to other people at Weight Watcher meetings.  The issue is craving. I think food is getting tastier (not better...tastier). Food evolves. 

There are four foods I have eaten all my life that I now crave.  Example: Skippy peanut butter.  This is a commercial product as opposed to an uncooked fruit or a steamed vegetable. I can eat nearly unlimited quantities of it.  Each of my four food cravings can put weight on me in a few days, plenty of weight in a week. I crave these four fattening foods and keep them out of the house.

So what is my hypothesis?  1) Most humans have a few very narrow food taste modalities that are impossible to resist, these modalities are nearly addictive. We call food addiction cravings. 2) There has been a massive increase in the number of commercial foods on the market since 1960 when imports opened world markets. This vast array of food products have moved their specific taste modalities in directions that emphasize specific customer craving.  The market is big enough to respond to small changes and the market has found individual cravings to satisfy.

I am not talking about the standard Bogey-men: sugar, salt, butter or other fats.  Humans have had these foods and tastes for centuries, in abundance.  I'm talking about something else, something more interesting something more subtle.  I'm talking about new commercial products that evolved to either have, or omit, some ingredient that makes the particular food irresistible to some group of people. Evolved to focus on a taste modality that some people crave.

I'm talking about a range of narrow tastes that have evolved in the commercial food market either consciously or unconsciously as retail food products have shifted over the past 45 years to hone in on individual popular tastes. Skippy got me, something else may have gotten you.

Since I am not inclined toward conspiracy theories, I am inclined to think that market selection has been the driving force.  It is a morally neutral Darwinian selection process. People are buying more of the Skippy jars that they crave and Unilever product managers know the particular ingredients to increase or decrease to stimulate that craving.

Summary: Food evolves in the market. Commercial evolution occurs in our broad market; we get survival and expansion by selection. The market has created narrow specialized retail food ingredients (probably 50 or more) that have honed in on narrow segments of consumer cravings. Our individual taste cravings force the foods to evolve to suiteach of our peculiarities.

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Footnote: *The Japanese food practices need little explanation, most Japanese are still eating their traditional foods.  **Yuppies and my gay friends (yes, there is an overlap) are in groups where personal weight control is socially rewarded.

Talk radio

I have seen no articles about the power of talk radio on our public life. 

I did see the bimbo Lefty eruption early this year attacking Rush Limbaugh for something he didn't say, and I hear the mainstream media echo the Democratic party nonsense that the April Tea Protests and the August public outrage against the Democratic-party-health-care was the work of right wing extremists.  You can believe that if you believe that only the Left is ever dissatisfied with the government.

The reality that I see is that talk radio, which is primarily the entertaining Rush Limbaugh, augmented by half a dozen others, has become a powerful and deeply embedded force in our body politic.

The refusal of Rush Limbaugh et al to give more than tepid support to President Bush's alternative to Social Security, private accounts, made sure it would fail.

This was followed by the outrage that totally destroyed a bi-partisan and beautifully crafted immigration bill.  That was 100% the work of Rush Limbaugh et al .  The same immigration bill that President Obama brought back to Congress this session was dead on arrival and will be dead for a decade.

Now, most recently, the Democratic Party's health care bills have been totally defeated by talk radio.

If you don't listen to Rush Limbaugh you can't know two things:

1) Limbaugh is effective because he is consistently funny, light hearted and never self-righteous. Limbaugh is always accurate with a truck load of facts and data.

2) Left wing radio failed completely with the backing of $90 million because it lacked exactly what Rush Limbaugh offers.  The Left never analyzed, understood, comprehended or appreciated Limbaugh, they just started broadcasting with ideology and arrogance ...which didn't work, and never will.

Talk radio is a core fixture of American politics and Rush Limbaugh is the core of talk radio.  I wonder when this factoid is going to be widely appreciated?

Coffee cupping report

I tried five coffees, after listening to the five leading San Francisco micro-coffee-brewing experts.  Cupping is the professional way to taste coffee.  Brew it with 180 degree water in a Chemex or french press.  Put in a cup to smell, hot.  Let cool until sediment drops out and then taste lukewarm.  I don't like the flavor this way, I like it as hot espresso, but this is a fair way to make comparisons.

I tasted one blend and four estate grown, so called, single source coffees.  The two best, for my tongue, came from Costa Rica (Equator Estates montes de Oro, and 4 Barrel's Costa Rican) and the very best was brewed with a device like my AeroPress mentioned earlier.

Altitude matters, the specific farm matters, getting the beans to the U.S. fresh matters, and roasting counts a little, in these days of specialty brews all are roasted well.  1) Only buy what you can use in the 3 to 7 days after roasting.  2) Drink immediately after grinding.

For you anti-corporate Neanderthals, everyone is buying their own coffee farms whether its specialty brewers or MacDonald's.  (Starbucks isn't, yet.) All good coffee is fair trade (fair trade is $1 per pound) because high quality beans ($4 and up) require higher paid more meticulous workers.

After all this coffee tasting I decided that I needed a baseline of good coffee as a standard measure.  I went to Japantown and bought the UCC Original blend (from Japan).  It has always advertised a large component of Blue Mountain coffee which comes from Jamaica which is close to Costa Rica in climate but has smaller mountains.  UCC is just as good or better than the finest single estate coffee I tasted.

Soy milk trend

 The soy milk in coffee issue is one retailers should understand. 

Most people who use soy milk in their coffee or use lactose free milk do so because they are lactose intolerant.  Nearly all Asians and Jews are lactose intolerant.  We get an upset stomach from lactose in milk, if we drink enough.  In San Francisco 55% of adults are lactose intolerant, in California 45%.  That, however, is not the main population that goes to white people's coffee shops.

I've watched for 15 years as more and more coffee shops have soy milk available.  I also see it spreading around the U.S. as coffee shops spread.

I only mention this for all you retailers.  What started as a tiny group of people asking for special treatment is now a group of customers who won't return if you ignore their needs.  This is retailing.  Notice customer preferences early and respond to them.  It can often be a trend.

Credit card fees and trade

I started shopping at a small neighborhood veggie store. I had been regularly spending about $20 a week for two months, always on my credit card as I do with all purchases. Finally the day came when my total purchases were under $10 and the owner pointed to the sign that says 'no credit card purchases under $10'.  I left my purchases on the counter and said 'thank you.'  This happens once a decade.

I used to think to myself 'how can a business turn away a $1,000 a year customer for a fraction of a dollar (3% credit card charge on of $9.99)'? 

Now it is a reminder of one of my contributions to human understanding of commerce.  There are three kinds of commerce, each with a different motivation.  There is trade, industry and clientry.  This veggie store is built on trade, the oldest form of commerce.  The object of trade is to made sufficient profit on EACH transaction to replace the merchandise and cover overhead.  This (Chinese) woman can never see me as a repeating customer or she would be rejecting her 2,000 year old finely honed cultural skills as a trader.

Industry is motivated by lowering costs, clientry is motivate by a desired lifetime relationship with the customer.  Both industry and clientry would see me as a desirable repeating customer.

Only in a trade business would there be a minimum fee.

As I've started saying: ' Thats reality, folks....a trader' 

Of course the veggie store owner signed a credit card contract not to have a minimum and someone will take the time to report her. 

Sandbox question

My wonderful readers know that I often refer to pacifism as a sandbox theory of the world.  It is not child-like it is childish.  It gets many people killed (Iraqi opponents to Saddam before GW. Bush stepped in, all the hard working freedom loving people in South Vietnam, countless North Koreans every day for 50 years, Israeli soldiers being hyper careful to avoid more pathetic nuts like Rachel C. ...etc). Pacifism kills.

I think about pacifism in the context of the newest most interesting store to open in San Francisco in a decade.  Opened in  San Francisco's Japantown, New People, is four floors of condensed Tokyo style.

Tokyo is the source of most aesthetic and style innovation on the planet, not Milan, London, Ikea nor Paris. I have seen nearly all of the new styles in Tokyo and reported on them in this blog.  What I missed is on this blog of a Tokyo business friend of mine.

What concerns me is that Japan has become the first truly pacifist nation in history (I always exclude the Shaka Kingdom in India because the King let his people be killed, we don't know how the people felt.) The Japanese are 96% pure unadulterated pacifists and they are oblivious to the nuclear armed murderous neighbors in North Korea.

The style in Tokyo and in the New People store is predominantly child-like, think interesting variations on Hello Kitty.  Are the Japanese wrapping themselves in a childlike world of oblivion?

I am always reluctant to connect popular culture to reality, but I have trouble ignoring this connection.

San Francisco jazz subsidies

Terry Teachout, a good writer and a first class thinker, showed the data that the audience for jazz has been steadily declining for decades (WSJ 8/9/09). He points out that jazz has moved from entertainment to a high art like opera, ballet and symphony.

So guess what?

The City of San Francisco has been pouring millions, tens of millions, of dollars into the New Fillmore jazz district for five years.  The whole effort is premised on the assumption that a jazz community with venues, restaurants and night clubs can be created with public money to bring commercial vitality to the Fillmore redevelopment district (vitality that was destroyed by redevelopment in the first place).

Can you see the hand writing on the wall?  I see failure or, at best, a modest little project, not worth the investment.

Poverty and billionaires

I face a never ending barrage of attacks on commerce based on the thesis that commerce has created a world with a great disparity of wealth.

In an earlier blog I concluded from hard data that: "For any nation that has industrial commerce, every million people in the workforce will have a 34% chance of producing no billionaires, a 34% chance of producing one billionaire, 22% chance of having two billionaires, 8% chance of three billionaires and 4% chance of 4 or more billionaires."  This is a Poisson distribution.

For any country to have wealth, other than just oil production, which invariably goes to the ruling class, the country must be fairly large and have an active commercial workforce. 

Poverty is the consequence of a country that is too small and that doesn't have a commercial workforce.

Don't blame commerce. Face reality and live with it.

Why big pharma?

Big pharma usually refers to Pfizer, Glaxo, Hoffman, Sanofi, Novartis, AstraZenica and Merck. 

Why are pharmaceuticals sold in the U.S. so commonly produced by these companies and is it harmful to innovation to have only seven big companies?

My answer is that it doesn't matter what oligopoly theory suggests, the reality is that innovation is only possible in the current environment because these companies are big. 

There are two reasons for the concentration of big corporations: 1) pharmaceutical (and physical devices like stents and body replacement products) are usually developed by small firms, small laboratories and start-up companies. None of these small entities can survive the perpetual lawsuits that invariable destroy the innovative companies. Malpractice  lawsuits against manufacturers are common and successful.  So, they sell out to or merge with a bigger company to survive the lawsuits.

2) the cost of bringing a pharmaceutical or medical device to market via the FDA are so high that no small company can afford it. So,they sell out to or merge with a bigger company to survive the FDA testing process.

That is just the current reality.  

5 point harness consequences

If you have a baby at a hospital, you won't be allowed to leave unless the new born is strapped into a five point harness. 

The 5 points are two around the waist, two over the shoulder and one under the crotch. The new born will remain, by law, in most of America, in just such a harness in a car until about age 5.

For about twenty years I have been wondering about the societal consequences of the 5 point harness.  

STOP READING HERE IF YOU ARE A PRUDE.

Now I have seen some evidence about one consequence: kids use the crotch part of the harness to rub and wiggle against for masturbating.

My sample is small, roughly ten kids over ten years.  How widespread this is, I don't know. What the effects on adulthood will be, I don't know.  I have been watching carefully and will give you a report in ten years if I'm alive.

I don't see movies I reject

I am frequently encouraged by good friends to see movies or go to plays that we both know are Lefty Fundamentalist rants. A film example is Food Inc. 

I don't go, these days.  Why?

My friends are implicitly suggesting that my positions would be changed if I heard the rant that they enjoyed.

My own view of the matter is that I have heard the gist of these arguments for my entire life and particular details are not significant enough to change the core issues.

To me, these arguments are part of a general argument that I call Dickens-Marx.  Dickens-Marx is an ideology that developed in the 19th Century as a rebuke to the earliest manifestations of industrial commerce. The argument is irrelevant today.

It is an argument that is very similar to the 14th Century argument about the corporeality of angels, the validity of the Trinity, the Virgin birth and the existence of the Limbo.  The argument is similar to the 16th Century debate about free will.  The 17th Century debates about man in the state of nature, the 18th century arguments about the immortal soul and reincarnation, the 19th Century debates on human evolution.

Frankly, I have little or no interest in these arguments.  None of them were based on testing by reference to empirical evidence.  There isn't a shred of empirical evidence to support the Lefty ideology of Dickens-Marx... why waste time. So the Left hates big corporations.  (It would be better if they didn't use a phone, never use the Internet, never fly, rent a car, stay in a hotel, go shopping for food or buy clothing.)

From an emotional vantage point, metaphorically, I live with rainbows in the bright sun, commerce is the source of health, vitality, wealth and personal authenticity. The stodgy old arguments and Dickens-Marx rants are storm clouds that support emotional depression....

The storm clouds come and go if you let them.

Up-date

 * Nearly a year ago I wrote about the need for the S.F. Police and many other agencies to provide for texting access since texting usage passed phoning usage quite awhile ago.  It is about to happen for the S.F. police in the next few months.

* There is a fascinating new visually based search engine that is fun to use and searches deeply into the Internet archives. Spezify.com.

* The whole 'CO2 causes global warming' connection has been demolished with satellite radiation data from MIT.

* The fastest growing costs of U.S. healthcare are preemies and organ transplants.  Let someone tell me how to stop those two.

Airlines fund for fat-poor

Twice I've had to sit next to a person on a plane, in coach, where the person couldn't possibly fit in their seat. 

I felt sorry for the person and I was particularly unhappy with the airlines for not solving this problem.

One time, I got up, sat in an up-grade seat.  When the steward told me to go back to my original seat I challenged the steward to fit into the space left for me to sit in.  He found me another seat.

Individual solutions are not satisfactory.  I believe the airlines need to get together and work out a solution.

The problem I see is not defining who is too fat for a coach seat, but dealing with airline personnel who will not enforce any rule that makes a fat person pay for two seats.  Airline people know that many fat people are poor and could not afford a second seat. Sympathy for hardship is a valid moral reason.

The solution is a joint airline fund to pay for extra seating for poor-fat people.  The definition of poor is simple: anyone receiving AFDC, welfare, section 8 housing or food stamps.  Making and maintaining such a list is just as easy to create and maintain as are the 'no fly' lists.

When any fat person who is being denied a seat unless he buys additional space can prove eligibility for the poor-fat fund, he will get the subsidy that will benefit the rest of us.

I'll support any plan that lets me have all the seating space I paid for.

I don't believe a word

I have seriously mislead my readers.  I have given you false information.  I apologize. Please accept my humble apology, please.

For the past five years I have been using data from the CRU Climate Research Unit in East Anglia England. The data reaches back to 1850 and is posted monthly from around the world. This is the same data used by the UN Global warming scientists and nearly everyone else who is in this field. I have been a strong advocate of using data to come to conclusions about global warming. The conclusion I came to was that there was a modest warming between 1975 and 1995, but none for the previous 120 years and none for the 14 years since then.

Let me make a separate but relevant statement, based on 50 years of doing statistical and survey research and being a court certified expert witness in survey research: if you can't see the raw data, it is phony.  I'll stand by that statement with a loaded gun to my head.

Now, put my three previous paragraphs together and you'll see what has made me apologize to you.  The people who run CRU not only refuse to make their raw data public for examination, but they publicly admit that much of it is lost.

I can only draw one conclusion: there is not now and never was a global warming period.  The whole thing is a fabricated lie.

Once again, I apologize for ever having sent my readers to a website that is completely phony.

P.S The other data about global temperature, from satellites since 1977 and from the ocean since 2000, do not support the CRU data.  If you read this paragraph from the CRU website you will know these people are lying, lying, lying.  No honest person ever wrote anything like this (pure obfuscation):

"Why are values slightly different when I download an updated file a year later?"

All the files on this page (except Absolute) will be updated on a monthly basis to include the latest month within about four weeks of its completion. Updating includes not just data for the last month but the addition of any late reports for up to approximately the last two years. In addition to this the method of variance adjustment (used for CRUTEM3v and HadCRUT3v) works on the anomalous temperatures relative to the underlying trend on an approximate 30-year timescale. Estimating this trend requires estimation of grid-box temperatures for years before the start of each record and after the end. With the addition of subsequent years, the underlying trend will alter slightly, changing the variance-adjusted values. Effects will be greatest on the last year of the record, but an influence can be evident for the last three to four years. Full details of the variance adjustment procedure are given in Jones et al. (2001). Approximately yearly, the optimally averaged values will also be updated to take account of such additional past information"

Craig's list (premium erotic)

In May, Craig's list, after pressure from many police departments and a few Attorneys General announced that it would no longer take ads that were used for prostitution.

Sorry Craig, that is the wrong solution.  Puritans will never be satisfied because prostitution will always find a way to get on your listings, just as massage parlors always find a way to charge extra for sex.

The simple solution is to charge for all dating, relationship and sexual ads.  The price doesn't have to be high, $1 a month will work.  The whole point is to get the Puritan censors off your back. Puritans don't consider anything that people pay to get into, to be the equivalent of street prostitution or publicly offensive.

Got it?  Put up a monetary wall and you can forget about the Puritan problem.

Debit card fails

I haven't paid attention to debit cards for 40 years.  When I helped found Mastercard I was a strong opponent of debit cards and my arguments and persuasion were successful in keeping them off the market for decades after I left banking.

Now we have to deal with the problems I foresaw so clearly.

- Many auto rental companies won't let you use a debit card unless they are given advance notice so they can do a credit check (unnecessary cost).  Auto rentals were the back bone of the early adoption of universal credit cards.

- Ordinary credit card shoppers are now endlessly badgered 'is that credit or debit?'. Frankly that is offensive.

  - When a debit card is stolen it means several days without money in the checking account and bounced checks. The money gets replaced and the OD charges reversed but it is often a nightmare, especially for low balance customers.

- Anyone who can get a debit card can get a 'limited value' credit card and not have to get a credit check for auto rentals or airline tickets.

The bankers who were pushing for debit cards, when I was a banker, hated the idea of credit cards because they didn't believe anything but cash was moral. To them, a debit card was just a plastic check, which it is. It was almost acceptable to them. Really.

Long after I left banking, the banker morality is finally getting its revenge.

Just a few inches of pleasure

In the high end hotels I've been in lately where a shower and tub are combined, it is common to find the shower rod is curved outward a few inches in the middle so there is a feeling of much more room at shoulder height.  Not true at less expensive hotels.

Why not?

At my home, where I found no curved shower rods long enough, I just moved the straight rod out further a few inches getting the same effect.

Every hotel and motel should try this if they combine the shower and tub.

I'm thinking about

This is just to let you know in advance what I'm thinking about. 

It may take a few weeks to generate some decent answers and a blog.

Why do all cities vote Democratic?  There are no exceptions. 

There are statistical mistakes where the county data is reported instead of the city data: examples such as San Diego, Salt Lake City, Dallas and Phoenix.  Otherwise the largest towns that don't vote Democratic are Columbus Ohio and Vancouver, Washington.

Tactical decision

In case you didn't notice, the American Jewish leadership made a tactical decision to attack President Obama for giving the Medal of Freedom award to an open Jew-hater, Mary Robinson.

It was a tactical decision, because Jewish leaders decided to only point out one award winner when in fact there were two.  Bishop Tutu hates Jews just as much and just as publicly as Mary Robinson.  Moreover, Bishop Tutu has expressed his hatred of Israel so strongly that he is persona non grata in Israel.

Bishop Tutu was not allowed to land at Ben Gurion airport, last year, on his way to Gaza to spread his hate to other neo-Nazis around the world.

Just to hit harder

I just want to hit the next blog point a little harder.

The point is that Lefty ideas and policies hurt the needy first most and hardest.

The photo on the right is a Whole Foods Market next to a $.99 store in Los Angeles.

The people in West LA will never see the Lefty moral conflict because they just give money to Lefty causes to promote themselves and meet other 'Lifestyle Lefties' at parties. I doubt that any of them have any moral compass at all.

The fact remains.  The Lefty world of Whole Foods is in moral conflict with the needy, aged and the underclass.

The Left hurts the needy first and most

The Left always hurts the needy first and hurts the needy the most. Five obvious examples from the current world.

1. Progressive taxes hurt the needy the most.   As is evident in California where modestly progressive state income taxes have resulted in 110,000 people paying 55% of the income tax so that we get extreme volatility in tax receipts to the State. Consequently payments to the needy go up rapidly in good times and go down painfully in bad times.  Only the needy are hurt by the progressive tax idea.

2. Environmentalism hits the needy every day in every way.  Used cars are penalized heavily for minor exhaust matters that are insignificant in overall pollution.  Most environmental money goes to distant forests and deserts, never to cleanup urban empty lots in low income neighborhoods.  Solar utilities radically raise the cost of electricity to needy and aged urban dwellers who pay a larger proportion of their income for utilities. The environmentalist favorite, the ethanol debacle, raised the price of corn and consequently the cost of milk by $1.00 per gallon (corn prices went down but milk never did). The new immigrants, unemployed and needy are heavy users of milk for children.

3. Food activists promote organic high cost farming and legally penalize the rapidly growing output of conventional farming that lowers the cost of all food, especially meat. The Whole Foods model of food and farming is an insolent slap in the face to the needy underclass.

4. Animal rights people openly insult black women who wear furs to church, raise the price of poultry and pork with state laws restricting animal production and attack lab animals designed to end disease problems most common to needy, disabled and elderly. 

5. Lefty hostility to chain stores means that Target and WalMart are kept out of low income urban areas that would reduce a needy family's costs by several thousand dollars a year and provide jobs in high unemployment areas.

Do you get the message?  The Left is really bad for the needy ...the exact opposite of the Lefts' self-righteous academic, trustifarian, union propaganda.

Two centuries of failure

In the 19th Century America there were hundreds of experiments with communal living.

The list is endless, these are the ones I know: Amana, Onieda, dozens of Shaker communes, the Rappites, Brook Farm, Ephrata, New Harmony, House of David, Point Loma, Temple Home, Zoarites, Moaravians, Bethel Colony, Aurora, Kaweah, Joyful, Alturia, Winters Island, Koreshan Unity, Kastania (for you who live up in Petaluma) ....

Nearly all of them failed.  The few, like the Amish and Mennonites, that survived did so because of strong religious structures, not really communal groups.

After a century of failure with people voluntarily living communally, the obvious solution in the 20th Century was forced communal living with death as the punishment for trying to leave. 

That was the great experiment of the 20th Century.  All the government enforced communal projects of the 20th Century had iron curtains around them, or deserts or oceans: the USSR, China, Cuba, North Vietnam and North Korea.  They all failed too.

Can most people draw a simple conclusion from two centuries of failure?  Most people can't.

Why trust Fundamentalist Christians?

The majority of American Jews don't trust the pro-Israel support of conservative Christians.

That is not true for the overwhelming majority of Israelis who see, everyday, that conservative Christians (not Roman Catholics) are their best allies in the world. There are major Fundamentalist Christian organization with millions of supporters who continually pressure Congress on behalf of Israel and are many times more influential than any Jewish or Israeli lobby (real or imagined).

I have no genuine idea why American Jews are so wrong.  They are confused by centuries of Catholic Christian and Lutheran pogroms.  They have also endured centuries of proselytizing.

What they don't know are that:

-1) Protestant Christians were the first Zionists.  Mormons went to Palestine in the 1840s.  German Protestant Templars went in the 1860s as Zionist settlers.  This is 25 years before Herzl even thought about Zionism.

-2) Protestant Christians refer to Israel as the 'holy land' and they mean it.  What could make a better friend than someone who really loves your country?

-3) The greatest friend the Jews have ever had in 2,500 years of our history is an Evangelical Christian who publicly committed America to support Israel under all circumstances. That is G.W Bush.  Compare G.W. Bush to the current president who, this week, is giving American Medals of Freedom to two people who publicly hate Jews and Israel. The current president who chose an open hater of Israel to be his national security adviser. Who has spent six months telling Israel to sterilize the people in many towns and cities in Israel so they won't have children (it is called the Obama no-natural-growth plan)... while telling the terrorist Palestinians they will have everything they want with no effort.

You do have to wonder how long and how many dead Jews it will take for American Jews to change their anti-fundamentalist Christian views.

Is he doomed?

Does a City employee who says something publicly that shows intelligence immediately get fired?

Michael Cohen says that San Francisco attracts high tech workers with things like Burning Man, naked runners in the Bay to Breakers and impromptu concerts in the parks.

How long will he last in his job?

Where we stand today

Friends still keep calling for my advice and views on the economy and investment.  I've said here in earlier blogs:
 

1) business cycles are a thing of the past because our economy is too diverse and we are too big relative to the rest of the world,

2) what we experienced over the past year was a modest downturn, probably a slight drop in annual GDP with a large rise in unemployment because of fifteen years of productivity growth that made many jobs obsolete,

3) the financial downturn (not the economy) was serious and extraordinary and we have no idea what caused it and we may not know for years or decades, (maybe it was Eliot Spitzer picking on Hank Greenberg)

4) the economic and financial downturns ended in mid-February without any stimulus or government bailouts,

5) some business segments, such as the Internet, never had a  slow-down. Everything to do with low cost Chinese imports has been thriving,

6) a media supported 'depression hysteria' overwhelmed the country and still does,

7) since March there has been a boom on the West-coast (Vancouver, Seattle, S.F. and Peninsula, South LA and West LA),

8) everything we ever knew about financial investing was wrong...completely wrong, portfolio diversity doesn't work.

9) San Francisco, these days, is a boom-town extraordinaire.

  Today we are well into a boom in the West-coast areas listed above, including the Denver plateau because China is an economic powerhouse and so is the Internet.

Farmers continue to do very well because of the 20 year productivity boom in farming. 

The rest of the country is suffering from irrelevant outmoded government policies offering life-support for dead industries and static unemployed populations. Move those workers, tear down every remaining tariff barrier and give citizenship to every foreign grad student in the U.S. and to most other foreign visitors who have long term jobs here. Even the depressed areas could pick up.

All around us are failing

If you are convinced that newspapers are all failing that is because you are reading a Lefty slanted failing newspaper or hearing from their sycophantic friends on radio and TV.

It is simply not true.

The Wall Street Journal is prospering.  Most importantly the two Philip Anschutz papers in Washington D.C. and San Francisco, the Examiners, seem to be doing well.  The Examiner is wholly owned so there is no data on profits.  Today (an Examiner article by Will Reisman which is not yet online) reports that the S.F. Examiner is expanding to new offices and expanding staff by 25%.  The Examiner is also placing ads for reporters and writers.

That suggests that the Examiner model of a newspaper is working: tabloid size, superb local news and investigative journalism that is not Marxist oriented, the comfortable use of numbers, charts and tables (the kind that modern business people like) and the paper is paid for with advertising especially in local suburban editions.

Animal learning

Awhile back I did a blog on the long history of Reform Judaisms' century of indifference to the murder of fellow Jews and the nearly open hostility toward Israel to this day. My friend Lisa wrote to ask me why this happens. 

I know the answer but it has little to do with Reform Jews if has to do with all humans and probably all animals.

From my vantage point, human learning begins with a maximum potential at birth, let us say 100%, and declines steadily until it reaches nearly zero at roughly age 23.  This appears to me to be so strong and so universal that it may be biological.

What does this mean?  First, the slope of the curve can go from 100% down to zero in some humans in 4 years. Second, in nearly everyone else, we really never learn anything new after age 23.

I am at a computer typing but I can already hear a loud scream from my readers: 'nobody ever learns anything new after age 23, are you nuts?'  Maybe I am nuts but my observation is based on pure observation of trying to find new learning in anybody for half a century of looking. 

Now there is an important distinction to make here; the capacity to add or subtract data from our mind, memory or experience pool is wide open.  New data can be added to existing learning structures indefinitely.  If you can multiply every number from 1 to 10 by the time you are 23 you can learn to do the same for numbers 11 to 20.  But if real and imaginary numbers made no sense before 23, then they never will.

So for Lisa, people who learned about the world and their relation to other Jews (especially the weird ones who dress in black coats and fur hats) before age 23 from their Reform teachers, then they are uncomfortable that such weird Jews exist and that attitude never changes.  The same is true for all world views.

My friends on hearing this are usually stunned but when they regain their senses they always ask: 'what about you Michael?'

The observation, painful as it is, applies to me.  I had vast experiential learning before age 23, ranging from college at 15 to Kibbutz life, active campaign politics and professional research work for pay.  My learning mode, formed and never changed, was a very open empirical model.  I have the potential for vast amounts of new data, but no new learning modes. I admit it.  I can not learn new material from theological tracts or a guru. New languages and musical instruments are nearly inaccessible to me.

One friend asked the challenging question of whether people could even learn sex after 23.  My sample of women is large and my answer is, sadly, no!  Women who developed sexual attitudes in Catholic school, if they didn't bust out of that sexual mold early on, remained in that cool state after age 23.

The only strong proof of my thesis comes from the 100th monkey work in Japan.  When monkeys in one part of the country were first given potatoes, straight from the ground, they learned to wash potatoes in a river before eating. The technique spread throughout the island, rapidly.  Researchers went back years later, and checked the data. On second examination they found that only young monkeys had learned the new techniques, old monkeys ate the potatoes with dirt on them for the rest of their lives.

Summary: we start with a 100% opportunity to learn about the world but get completely closed by age 23.

Japanese cars

In looking at the photos and land plot maps from the 1920s to the 1970s of small towns, I saw the explosion and then the disappearance of auto related businesses.

As recently at 1970 a small town would have one fifth of the store fronts related to auto sales and services.  Tire sales, auto sales, gasoline stations with repair shops, stand alone repair shops, insurance, auto finance offices, auto parts stores, glass and upholstery stores. Plus the trucking businesses that served all the auto related stores.

By the mid 1970s the stores and offices started to disappear.  Today, I would estimate that less than one 10th of the small town main street businesses are related to autos.

This change is due partially to improved tires but mostly due to the high quality of Japanese cars. The invisible but powerful march of Toyota and Honda across the U.S. left a large swath of open store fronts and vacant offices on main street that formerly serviced poorly design autos.

Weird issue of compassion

One of the strange things for me, as a motorcycle rider from California, in Iowa, is seeing all the bike riders on the highways without helmets.

This is about the helmet laws that are in force in many states, but not in Iowa nor any of the other states in a swath that stretches from Idaho to Florida.

Most states passed the law requiring DOT approved helmets on motorcycle riders, ten to twenty years ago.  The political pressure, to pass the laws, came from trauma room medical personnel and families of riders who were lost due to motorcycle head trauma.  Definitely a case of public compassion, maybe not a perfect law because riders were forced to do what they didn’t want to do.

A few years later, the states with high proportions of motorcycle riders, faced the political pressure to overturn the helmet laws and they did.  This time the trauma room medical personnel made little effort to keep the helmet laws on the books.

Why?  Because, by then the trauma group realized that an important source of human organs (heart, liver, kidney, cornea etc..) had been removed by the helmet laws.  Motorcycle head trauma victims are a good source of transplant organs.  Motorcycle head traumas occur at about 10 times the rate from auto collisions.

The compassionate conclusion at the time was: ‘if motorcycle riders insist on dying and becoming transplant donors, on behalf of the recipients, we’ll just have to accept that.'

As I said, weird compassion.’