Pro Commerce

History of the David

When I was a first-year undergraduate in college I took an art history course.

My mother already had an advanced degree in the field.  She had bought impressionist paintings in Paris in her younger years. Among her New York friends there were hundreds of valuable impressionist and post impressionist paintings that I saw often.

In the art history class we were constantly shown slides. When the instructor came to the slide of a woman in a window and said that it was painted by Jacques-Louis David I stood up and objected. I said that the painting of the woman in the window was significantly different from the other David paintings we were shown. The instructor told me to ‘F--- off’.

At my next vacation break, I went to Manhattan where I regularly stayed with my uncle and other relatives. On this first trip I went to the Metropolitan museum and went straight to the room that had only Davids in it. In the most prominent position there was the woman in the window with the name David  below.

I talked to several curators including the main curator and pointed out that this painting was not done by David. I was only 16 at the time. I bought half a dozen of the Met’s postcards that showed the same image with the name David on it.

That was the winter school break. When I got back to the Met for the following Spring break, 1956, the woman in the window was no longer on the wall. And six months after that the painting was in a new room with the correct artist identified:  Marie-Denise Villers.

Mormon position on gay marriage

I live in the gay community in San Francisco. The one conversation that I never have is tied up with the issue of polygamy. The Mormon Church considers the issue of gay marriage and marital tradition related to polygamy.

The gay community does not believe there is a connection.

The Mormon Church was found more than 175 years ago. At its founding, polygamy was an issue and has remained so to this day. The original Mormons who crossed  the Mississippi and moved to Salt Lake City did so to escape hostility to polygamy.

Beginning in the 1850s, after Salt Lake City was founded, and continuing until the 1900s there was an unending stream of novels portraying polygamy as horrific. These novels sold in large quantities in the Eastern United States.

By 1862 Congress passed the first anti-bigamy law. The law was not enforced in Utah. But the issue continued to grow. A new law was passed in 1882 by Congress that denied voting rights to anyone in a polygamous marriage. The Supreme Court upheld the law.

By the late 1800s the Mormon church dissolved and reformed on this single issue. The modern church that we know, LDS, bans polygamy.

But a very healthy Mormon Fundamentalist church exists throughout the Western North American continent. It becomes visible on occasion and always continues as a thorn in the side of the standard Mormon Church.

It really doesn’t matter whether the gay community believes that polygamy is unrelated to the issue of gay marriage the Mormon Church does and will continue to act on the basis of their 175 years of experience.

Why so many women Democrats?

I have an idea for a TV comedy series.

The idea would be similar to the Archie Bunker All in the Family series.

This time there would be a reversal of the role.  The family or associates would be ridiculing a woman who constantly brought home men whom she wanted to change. The woman would also be a political liberal.

The consequence would be a story in which comparisons were made with the woman’s dates and the liberal positions intended to change society. The woman’s desire to change a man and voting to change society would be on a continuum.

Of course the series should reverse the roles on a regular basis since men make a similar effort to create the perfect female partner. A plastic doll.

Success is coming

I have reproduced a cartoon from Parade magazine.

For me this is an announcement that I am on the route to success.

My theory of obesity is now moving into the realm of public acceptance. Let me explain.

The way that an idea moves from the realm of concept to popular understanding is as follows: first people must laugh at the idea, second people must denounce and debate the idea, third many people must treat the idea as their own and lastly the public begins to see the idea repeated often.

My theory of obesity is straightforward. Industrial food has evolved to the point where there are many foods (cereals, peanut butter, dressings, prepared dinners, frozen foods etc.) that are so appealing to a particular person that that person is unable to resist the food. The foods have evolved to match the specific uncontrollable tastes of specific people.

This cartoon is a joke about my theory. That means that my theory is on the way to popular recognition. We are all fortunate.

Ranked choice surprise

We need to put on the record for all people who follow politics that in two races in San Francisco and one in Oakland the use of ranked choice has led to an unexpected result.

Ranked choice is the mechanism that both of these communities and many others have chosen in order to avoid the costs of runoff elections.

A ranked choice ballot shows all the names of candidates for a specific office with three columns after their name. The voter is instructed to select their first choice and their second choice and third.

When the voting is tallied, the candidates that have the lowest number of votes have their their second and third votes distributed to the rest.  The process proceeds until all of the second and third votes of the lowest ranked candidates have been distributed.

In the previous elections, I have seen, the candidate who got the most first votes was the final victor.  Two elections in San Francisco for supervisor and one for the Mayor’s race in Oakland that did not occur.  Another person on the list of ranked choice ended up with the most votes.

Now that rank choice is understood as an unstable system new tactics will emerge.

I will of course watch this with great interest but no concerns.  At some point the populace will learn that selection by voting does not generate representatives. To be truly representative, legislatures must be selected at random from a population.  Just like survey reseach.

In the case of a mayor or other administrator the final choice should be from a  group such as the Board of Supervisors or other legislative body.

Railroad tracks

I was never a pacifists not even for a moment.

Back in the old days, 1987, one pacifist got his legs chopped off at the knee and brain damage from lying on the tracks in front of a working railroad engine outside the Concord Naval Weapons Station.

The following week there was a large demonstration at the same location and the Rev. Jessie Jackson gave a rousing speech to the crowd.

I was in attendance, at the very back of the crowd. The crowd was riled up, truly an understatement. The crowd was so angry that it proceeded to tear up the railroad tracks.

I joined the crowd.  What had happened was that a single student from UC Berkeley had brought a large wrench and had loosened the connection between two connecting rails. Once the track itself was loose the crowd around the track began pushing it back and forth. The track broke at the end where it was no longer bolted to the next rail.

As the crowd proceeded to shake and then remove a segment of track one at a time another part of the crowd began pulling up the ties. The crowd was very neat and stacked the ties in piles and stacked the rails in piles equally neatly.

What is truly astonishing is that a group of human beings, probably no more than 20 at a time, can pull off railroad rails; and five or six people can pull up a railroad tie.

A crowd of several hundred was able to remove half a mile of track and neatly stack it.

I have never forgotten the physical power of a crowd.

Swim meets

I frequently attend swim meets for young people between ages nine and 18.

The most striking observation of these meets is the rarity of black teenage swimmers.

There are very few circumstances where many states and many high schools are represented that the population is so lacking in blacks.

The reason is very clear. Black families and black parents are making little or no effort to teach their children to swim.

The data suggests a form of racial prejudice that indictes black leaders, the NAACP, the Urban League and black schools.  These groups are murdering young black males.

Forget gangs, forget crime, forget prisons.  Gangs, crime and prisons only find black involvement at five times the population average.

Accidental drowning of black males in their teens occurs at more than 12 times the national average for whites.

Does that data stun you at all?

Evil rock

The photo on the right is one of the United States mint.  It is located in San Francisco, built on a particular out cropping of rock. The selection of this rock outcropping originally had to do with a formal protection for the mint.  Hard to dig under.

The rock outcropping is one of seven in San Francisco that is made of serpentine. Serpentine is a beautiful green rock with many minerals.  Interesting plants grow on it.

Two projects are underway in the photograph. On the right-hand side you can see that the rock area underneath the mint has been covered with a fabric and plants are growing through the fabric. On the left-hand side of the rock under the mint the entire face of the rock is being covered with Gunite or some similar cement facing.

It turns out that serpentine has some small percentage of asbestos in it. There is not a shred of evidence that the asbestos in the serpentine could possibly do any harm. In fact there are many small towns that are built on or near similar outcroppings. At no point has anyone ever shown population problems related to asbestos.

It does appear that we have a case of environmentalism gone mad, completely mad..

Race card loses

I have called many cultural changes in our society accurately.

I am calling this one right now: when someone calls you or your group racist they are insulting themselves.

T his is a major change in our society. For more than 50 years calling someone a racist has been pejorative. It is no longer. The caller is now the loser.

I noticed the change sometime last summer but it has just reached my consciousness. The Left has been calling the Tea Party racist for two years.  Since the Tea Party knows that this is false it has destroyed the claim of racism in the minds of the American middle class.

I have actually heard the change in tone on radio talk shows ranging from Dr. Laura to Rush. There is a distinct sensitivity that people who call others racist are themselves malicious.

This is a significant change in our society.  We will find the charge of racism to have lost nearly all its power thanks to the careless use of the term by people like Jesse Jackson, Rev. Sharpton, the mainstream media and the NAACP.

To some extent it may also be relevant that the president is called a "black" by most people and the black community lends creedence with its support of him by 90%.

The possible relation between the president and the demise of the charge of  racism comes from the fact that the president spent 20 years in a racist church with Rev. Wright.  The President's current role as Jew hater-in-chief suggests that the Rev. Wright's anti-white anti-Jew racism is comfortable for the president. 

Anti-white anti-Jew, blacks have no credibility calling whites racist. They have been an import part in negating the word racist.

Peculiar behavior

I have a list of the worst Americans.

T he list begins with Benedict Arnold. It includes president John Tyler who became a member of the Confederate Congress. It includes John Wilkes Booth and several assassins up to Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

The list includes former president Jimmy Carter a man who is somewhere between pure evil and deranged by his virulent Jew hate.

The list now includes Nancy Pelosi.  Congresswoman Pelosi has earned her place on the list of worst Americans for having created a great deal of misery for a large percentage of Americans.  She generated massive unemployment as a result of her trillion dollar stimulus package which directly harmed the American economy. She is also on the list for her passage of a health care bill, using extralegal tactics, that earned the opposition of the majority of American’s and who consequently rose up to throw out the Pelosi Congress.

Ms. Pelosi added to her offensive behavior with a third action, a bank and finance reform bill that made sure job creators would do nothing to improve employment.

What is peculiar, is that Congresswoman Pelosi’s automatic position on the worst Americans list resulted in her effort to cover up her own disgraceful behavior. She forced Democrats in a lame duck Congress to make her minority speaker.

Do you follow the logic?

Pelosi knows she is one of the worst Americans.  In order to keep her reputation from immediately resulting in her being burned in effigy she convinced her fellow Democrats to give her an honor.

It is a case of a monster losing at trial and having a pro-monster demonstration outside the courthouse.

Key to new strategy

Everyone who thinks about military strategy will have to take note of the fact that Israel now has a missile shield defense it has decided to moth ball.  No more active missile shield.

In the world of strategy this is extremely important.

What the Israelis seem to be saying, with this act, is that a missile shield will lead to undesirable defensive behavior.

True military strategy must be aggressive and willing to use preemptive strikes. By the time a defensive shield is necessary the military will have probably lost.

The mental disposition toward defensive strategy is inherently harmful. Israel is saying that only preemptive thinking is valid in the military world.

Whatever Israel does must be taken seriously by all military thinkers. Israel is years, sometimes light years, ahead of all other armies.

Do-gooders screwed

Do-gooders are screwing do-gooders.

In San Francisco the Salvation Army is reporting a significant, 20%, decline in contributions over the past year and a half. Two other similar organizations have not experienced the same decline in donations.

The reason is simple, the Salvation Army is particularly noted for accepting toys and clothes for children. The toys and clothes where cleaned and resold.

New federal regulations ban the sale of secondhand toys. The ban on secondhand toys was the consequence of some Chinese lead problem of insignificant magnitude, and wild overreaction.

I always love to see environmental do-gooders screwing other social do-gooders and poor people all at once. Exactly what we have in this case.

Do-gooders creating havoc and the poor bearing the brunt.  As usual.

Does unemployment affect elections?

As pointed out in an earlier blog I am baffled by the constant political and journalistic pretense that unemployment somehow affects elections.

Whatever the mechanism, it is invisible. The unemployed themselves are disproportionately Democratics. Democrats, to whatever extent they are able to vote. Nothing about more unemployed people is likely to produce more or less Democratic voters.

So who is directly affected by unemployment?  Family and friends? These are also most likely Democrats unlikely to be the key power voters. Power voters are the independents.

It is possible that small business owners who see a decline in business may make some connection to the unemployment rate. They might be influenced by the level of unemployment but I don’t see the connection if they want less unemployment. They wouldn’t vote Democrat. If they are self-employed they are already most likely Republican.

So where is the connection between unemployment levels and political behavior?

Real city

In a recent article I read  by Roger Scruton, he excoriates the environmental movement for its love of nature over humans.

However in the article he uses urban areas as an example of positive human institutions and argues the need for more attention to urban areas.

Unfortunately his image of urban areas includes many elements of suppressed human vitality. He has a strong distaste for billboards, signage and gaudy displays of many sorts.

Sorry Roger, the most exciting city I know is Tokyo. Tokyo is helter-skelter chaos; visually, architecturally and certainly in terms of exotic signage. The cities closest to imitating Tokyo in excitement are Shanghai and Hong Kong two other cities with visual chaos.

Roger you are too influenced by milquetoast village sentimentality very much in vogue in places like Palo Alto and Princeton. These are not cities with great vitality they are bland suburban accommodations to Puritan life.

Good lawyer

One of my readers wrote a lovely e-mail explaining that he values my opinion and as a law student he would like to know if there is any part of the legal profession that is good for commerce.

My general view of the legal system in our society is that it exists because we are so egalitarian.

In a highly structured hierarchical society the legal system is minimal because everyone knows that the person higher up in the hierarchy will win a legal case.

Therefore the main function of the law is to resolve conflict among equals.  In this sense, any pro-commerce society must find some way to compensate for the inequality generated in the marketplace.  A pro-commerce society needs a disproportionate, probably an excess amount of legal squabbling.

To use a football metaphor more referees are needed when the teams are fairly equal. Referees have little to do when one team is excessively powerful.

In thinking about a legal career that would be generally positive for commerce, I can only find one; that would be immigration law.

I have only known one competent immigration lawyer and she was immediately put on the bench. The reason immigration law is so vital is because the United States needs hundreds of thousands of new qualified immigrants every year and we are not getting them. It is not just the written law, it is fighting to get through the available slots.

Immigration lawyers could handle thousands of such cases and would be of enormous benefit to commerce.

If you can think of some other form of legal practice that is pro-commerce let me know. I have not stopped thinking about the subject but I have not found any other forms of law that are unambiguously pro-commerce.

Best blogs November 1st to 15th

We are in for an era of ridiculous electric cars more ridiculous alternative energy sources (excluding natural gas). I just saw an article making it clear that China is not following the same absurd energy path we are on.

Don’t waste your time on the movie Inside Job.  The premise is false and the solutions are ones I have discussed many times

Despite the Federal Reserve printing money and the world being angry at us, the consequence will be minimal.  It is merely a mistake for our economy which will actually grow based on the profitability of many large companies.

Do you wonder where the stimulus money went? I checked the San Francisco data and 100% of the stimulus money was used to pay employee pensions.

VCs are third rate losers

VC stands for venture capitalists.

I am at a slight advantage, possibly a disadvantage because I have known many VCs and several of the most famous VCs.

Most writers and journalists think of the VCs as an important part of Silicon Valley in creating the early computer and in the Internet days. I beg to differ. They are too dumb.

The best proof that VCs are not so important and that VCs have no specific positive contributions to entrepreneurial commerce comes from the following:

The major investment these days by VCs is in green tech. Green tech is a fantasy world with nothing but losers. It is premised on the discredited notion of human caused global warming. Nearly every VC in Silicon Valley has put a large part of its money into green tech..... proof that these people are followers not creative thinkers. The major source of future energy will obviously be natural gas making all green tech investments a waste of money or at most a short term investment of no consequence.

The VCs I have known were of average intelligence or less. Except for their arrogance there is nothing that would distinguish them.  They are simply not good businesspeople nor do they have insight into any industry. They often are on boards of directors and get inside information before the rest of us but this insider information rarely permits long-term investment because it is undigested and often frivolous.

Secrets of TV success

I have often said that popular culture does not reflect the politics of the era. On the other hand TV shows, especially successful ones, tend to reflect some of the cultural issues of the day. Movies over long periods of time do reflect social conditions.

Western movies reflect industrial society, (Jane Tompkins' West of Everything). Fugitive, a stereotypical action movie, reflects white-collar society.

Two of the most successful TV comedies, one having run for at least nine years, is Two and Half Men and the other is Big Bang Theory.

I think that part of the reason for the success of these two, is that each one deals with a perplexing moral question of our time in American society.  

Two and a Half Men deals with a central question related to sexual freedom. Virtually every moral conundrum of sexual freedom is acted out on their program. As it is acted out other characters comment on the failures we see and worry about.  We see the commentary from the the social and moral perspective of a young man, from the perspectives of several women, one a wise but lusty housecleaner the other a cougar. Virtually every week is concerned with the moral and social problems of a sexually free society.

Big Bang Theory follows the interactions of four geeks and on occasion, their interaction with a confident but sweet neighbor, Penny. Occasionaly other women including parents act as foils.

I think the cultural issue that Big Bang Theory is struggling with on our behalf is the fact that geeks in our society can now be successful in the financial world (sometimes before they are old enough to drink legally). What we have is a comedy based on laughing at the very people who do not understand why we laugh but who know that their world has become very important to us. A sympathetic revenge of the nerds.

Popular culture is struggling with these two issues and they are so important that when put into a comedic model they become the leading TV shows.

The additional fact that these shows are performed in front of a live audience make sure that the comedy and improvisation are first rate.

Wrong again

I was wrong again last summer when I prophesied a perfect storm in the November California election. I expected the Tea Party wave to coincide with a reaction to a Federal Court overturning a California anti-gay marriage law.

Exactly the opposite happened.  There was a counter-wave in California that totally supported all Democratic party candidates. It was not a real Democratic Party wave because the Party was opposed to a redistricting initiative that succeeded overwhelmingly.

I have not seen a good analysis of what happened in the California election. From following polling I see that something happened the month before the election but I have no idea what that something was. As the issues becomes clearer and the dynamics more understandable I will report back to my obviously tolerant readers.

Victory parade

The Giants victory in the World Series led to a spectacular victory parade in San Francisco. Part of the parade was festooned with confetti.

I don’t remember the last parade in San Francisco where confetti was used. The city has not celebrated anything of this sort for a long time.

I may have been the last person to organize such an event. At the end of Pres. Eisenhower’s term in office the city arranged a victory parade down Montgomery Street and I was the person who organized the confetti.

I have no idea where the person who organized the confetti this year got their instructions. The key instruction is to identify the buildings where the windows can be opened on the second and third floor and where all of the other floors can be controlled. That pretty much defines a four block area of Montgomery Street.

I had to deliver bales of confetti to the second and third floors of 15 or more buildings back then. We next had to carefully shred confetti bales to make sure there were no clumps that would fall on the street. Nothing could be thrown from the windows on or above the fourth floor because even a small object that was not confetti could hurt people.

Even a confetti parade has to be well organized.

The stimulus money: found

Have you wondered what happened to the three quarters of a $trillion in stimulus funds over the past two years?

I am able to look at San Francisco’s use of the funds and you should not be surprised at what I found.

Of the three quarters of $1 trillion in government stimulus one quarter went to invisible subsidies of mortgages, tax credits for children, tax credits for college expenses and extension of our unemployment insurance. Of the remaining half the bulk was simply written in the form of money given to state and local government’s.

So I looked at the quarter of $1 billion given to San Francisco over a two-year period. What I found was that the stimulus money came with a long list of projects to be funded. What I saw in the results was that none of the departments that were supposed to receive money showed any increase in their budget in either last year or the previous year. In fact many departments that were to receive funding showed decreases in their operating budgets.

What happened is that the entire quarter of $1 billion was used to close the budget deficit. The budget deficit was caused by rapidly rising employee pensions.

The stimulus money generated in Washington that came to San Francisco was used entirely to subsidize the pensions of city employees.

Does anybody wonder why the stimulus did not generate new jobs?

I have not dealt with the issue of how stimulus funds may have created a persistent unemployment society but I will deal with that in future blogs.

Almost sentimental

The photo on the right is a popular Mexican restaurant in the San Francisco Mission district called La Taqueria.

For me this is sentimental. The owner of this restaurant sought my advice about 1975 a few years after he opened to wild aclaim. He was worried because an imitator was opening next door.

My advice to him was to ignore the new competitor who would only pick up people who were impatient with La Taqueria's long lines and willing to accept an inferior product.

I advised him to maintain the quality of his restaurant which was extraordinarily successful for four reasons: - one it was very clean - two it was open and spacious - three it was bright and - four the food was made from fresh ingredients of high-quality.  Don’t change even one element of that list.  

Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed in 36 years.

I told him that many developers would come and ask him to open a restaurant in their new development. I told him that many people in the franchise business would try to get him to franchise his restaurant idea. I told him to ignore these approaches and to maintain the high quality of his restaurant and he would be generating the maximum profit with the minimum stress in his life, for a long time.

I had no idea that my advice would be good for more than 36 years.

QE2 and the mess

I know my readers have heard about QE2. This is the second Federal Reserve attempt to bring down interest rates. The entire process is ludicrous because we have the Japanese example of failure. At the beginning of the 1990’s Japan suffered from a real estate bubble and followed the preposterous Keynesian advice of Paul Krugman. Japan had a zero growth and zero interest rate pattern for the next 20 years until now. Japan is still in the same 20 year old morass, today.

It is hard to understand why the Democrats in Congress and the Federal Reserve cannot look at that twenty-year experience and see that we are facing the same outcome. Aside from this absurdity of policy, let us look at what is actually happening that is not perverse.

The federal government is much like a water pump in a fish tank.  Every year the water circulating pump  processes about one quarter of the water tank and leaks about 40% of what it processes (the government has a multiplier of 0.6). Forty percent of one quarter of the water is 10% of the water in the tank...totally lost. The government actually takes 10% of economic activity out of the economy every year.

During the past two years, with the stimulus package (a multiplier of zero) the government lost roughly another 10% of the water in the fish tank. That is a two year loss of 30% of the water in the tank.

For the fish tank to have the same amount of water requires that about 10% new water be added annually. (15% per year for the past two years).The new water comes from innovation, export and start up businesses. For the amount of water in the tank to increase that requires more innovation, more export and more start up businesses.

Three issues have kept the amount of new water added to the tank from growing above the normal level.  First the financial bubble was corrected with a failed strategy and the banking industry was taken out of the lending business (banks only invest in safe Treasuries at this point). That affects about 20% of the economy which is now growing only based on its internally generated profits. Secondly the federal government introduced tons of uncertainty producing programs: national healthcare and bankers reform which significantly reduced the amount of innovation investment in the society. Three, a rapid shift in the location of economic growth and skills has occurred in the past decade and the labor market has been slow to adapt.

Unemployment is insignificant in the whole picture. With roughly 110,000,000 people working, 20 million additional people in government, the 10 million above normal unemployment is trivial and irrelevant.  The unemployed subtract very little in the way of resources.

Summary
The Fed has made a mistake; nothing can be done about that; however alternative sources of finance will slowly emerge as large corporations start putting their money back into productivity.  Profitability has been strong for the past two years and I would expect that the next two years will show significance growth in the economy.

The best investments will be in Internet and telecom related businesses. That is where productivity is growing most rapidly.

2011 will start roughly where 2008 started out.

Guy Fawkes day

Guy Fawkes is the man who tried to blow up Parliament in 1605 when James I was king.  Fawkes was a Roman Catholic and the king was a Protestant. For 400 years England has celebrated the memory of Guy Fawkes much the way, Americans celebrate Halloween.

Guy Fawkes is hung in effigy and treated as an evil figure.

It seems to me that we Americans should consider treating the attempt to destroy our country by the Islamic jihadists on September 11, 2001 in the same way as the Brits treat Guy Fawkes. The similarities between the religious battles of the two eras and the intent to destroy an important symbol suggests the parallels.

A little more

In the last blog I mentioned the convenience of having portable electronic equipment at a time when our light rail system is not functioning.  There is something much more important about computers and our light rail. Overall the municipal San Francisco transportation system is terribly managed.

Our transportation system is a total failure on on-time arrival and on the availability of vehicles that are not full.  The system is well below normal transportation expectations.

However because we now have a computer network that lets the riders know when the next vehicle is going to arrive I hear virtually no complaints about our public transport system.  We know the next vehicle arrival on our phones and at most bus stops.

Simple understanding and knowledge of the schedule allows each person to solve their own timing problem and the system can be as dysfunctional as it is without disturbing or alarming the public.

The transportation system is never on time but it is predictable because of computer systems that track the vehicles. The computer network has made discomfort with the system much less significant.

Stuck underground

San Francisco has a semi-light rail system with a semi-underground system.  I was stuck underground between stations for about 20 minutes last week.

The most interesting lesson for me, about this event, was that passengers simply pulled out their iPhones or iPods or equivalent and started to entertain themselves.

Three cheers for the modern electronic portable entertainment devices

Communal living

Young human beings seem to have an enormous desire to support communal living. Many young people want to live with others or retire with others so that they can have the necessary support, necessary stimulus that we as social animals seem to need.

The big problem is us.  Human beings are very uncomfortable living in communal environments. We are very fussy about the level of cleanliness we will tolerate in the bathroom: is it too clean for others.  It is the same with the refrigerator: sometimes it is too clean, sometimes not clean enough. Then there is noise and smells.  All powerful issues.

The hippies learned that it is not easy, much less feasible, for people to live together for long periods. Despite astounding economic benefits.

Therefore our desire to live communally as opposed to our ability to live communally is continually in conflict.

Inside job?

The title of the movie is a clue to its stupidity (Inside Job).  If you go to films looking for intelligent analysis and intellectual challenge, you probably go to the zoo to understand animal behavior.

I don’t review movies but in this case one of my closest long-term friends is the person who carries the story line in this movie.  He is accurately quoted in all but one case.  His quote is out of context and is used to exaggerate his pre-knowledge of the financial crisis.

Foreknowledge of the 2008 financial disaster was nonexistent. Treating it as an inside job is the work of paranoids.

After I saw the movie with my friend I knew I would be asked to comment. I had no intention of doing so because the film goes nowhere except to convince viewers that business is driven by greed and government regulation is impossible.

My answer to the question of how I felt about the film was simple: I have proposed solutions for both issues: the corporate greed and the government’s failure to regulate.

Most people walk out of the theater depressed. Corporate greed will always be with us.  It is a trivial issue because, as I proposed in an earlier blog the government can set up four or five formats for rewarding executives and corporations can be forced to choose among these formats.  Such an approach will simultaneously make the executive compensation process public and make sure companies only reward performance.

As for the issue of government incompetence in regulating finance, the answer is that it is not possible for government to regulate finance. Consequently we need to separate the world of finance from the world commerce.  I have dealt with that in earlier blogs by showing that we could create a bank or banks that have loans that will not be called at the time banks are in financial trouble.  A loan insurance protection agency, like the FDIC is needed, the FLIC.  That would disconnect the financial system from the commercial system.

The film is paranoid nonsense. There are simple solutions to by-pass the harm of future financial crisis.  You do not have to go home from the film cynical and angry.

Best from Oct. 16 to Oct. 31st

I have made the sad observation that most people are stuck with the worldview and the ideology they had when they were 23.  However I have a new perspective on life.  These people with open minds after age 23 are so rare and beautiful that I now think of them as butterflies who emerged from a chrysalis.

Three interesting ideas appear in the Wall Street Journal. - Tea Party ignorance in the media comes from lack of U.S. history education.  - We have a Protestant view of Karma that differenciates the Left and Right.  - Urban human diversity is a source of social and economic vigor.

Carlos Slim champions the absurdity of giving money away.

The Irish peace process is not what the Nobel Peace Prize or US State Department thinks it was.

The overwhelming majority of unemployed Americans are Democrats. Fortunately most don’t vote. Unfortunately those who do vote don’t understand the Democrat source of their unemployment.

Electric cars and nuclear energy?

The popular media these days is recommending electric cars and nuclear energy as the sources of clean energy.

There is only one problem with each one of these. The problem with electric cars is that the electric battery is probably the least efficient possible physical form of energy storage.  Gasoline, oil and natural gas are 5 to 10 times more efficient in delivering energy per pound or per cubic foot.

Nuclear energy even when subsidize is roughly $.16 per kilowatt hour compared to natural gas which is four cents per kilowatt hour. Therefore nuclear power makes exactly no sense.

The article that got me started thinking about this subject was written by Amory Lovins, probably the most celebrated and beloved environmentalist.

How did we get into this morass of subsidized electric cars and subsidized nuclear power?  The answer is that environmentalists don’t really have the ability to use common sense. They also feel that it is more effective to try and change the world using the government as manager than it is using a market.

There would be few or no electric cars if left to the market and the market has already made its position clear on nuclear power: it doesn’t have much future certainly not in an era of abundant natural gas.

Early computers

This is really a blog about Henry Dakin. Henry was a wonderful, kind, gentleman. You can find his obituary here.

What brings Henry to mind in a blog is that my second book, Honest Business, co-written with Sally Rasberry, was done in Henry Dakin’s home.

I have nothing but fine things to say about Henry. He was the rare trust fund child who used his money directly on projects that were important to him and he was involved in each project. If someone with a trust fund wants an example of how to be useful in the world and wishes to remain humble, Henry is the example.

The unpleasant memory, that is in exact contrast to the wonderful memory of Henry, is my memory of the computers that we humans used in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I am thinking particularly of the semi-portable Kaypro we used at Henry's home.

The typing program of that era before Word or WordPerfect was a line editor.  With a line editor,if you wanted to make a correction you had to go back to the exact line and then you had to put in parentheses the word you wanted to correct with the incorrect spelling and next to that the correct spelling for the correct word. It was slow and arduous.

The worst problem in those days was that you, as the writer, had to save whatever you had written to a floppy disk based on some memory of when you should be saving. It was hardf to remember to save.  This often meant we would lose a paragraph sometimes an entire page if we forgot to save.

We must give thanks and appreciation not just to Henry, but also to the wonderful generosity a few people who had the intelligence to improve word programs so that you could use a cursor to go to the words or phrases that needed correction and particularly to the person who came up with a regular spontaneous “save” function. Thank you.

Ironically one of the people who worked for Henry in his laboratory was Capt. Crunch, (aka John Draper). John was one of the people who developed the original WordPerfect program.  Also a friend of mine. Another reason to thank Henry.