Pro Commerce

Blogs July 16th to 30th

Its time to look at the home school model for public schools.

Is it time for the myth of Cesar Chavez to disappear?

Why aren't movie producers as publicly disgusting as Lefty movie actors?

We need to keep the wild financial world segregated from the stable commercial world.

Are we easily shaped into the people Lefties want us to be?

My definition of a Jew is pretty simple and has been recently verified.

N-g-er

 

The word in my blog title is one that black people use when there are no whites around.  The term, among blacks, describes a black person with bad behavior or criminal bent.

White people can not say this word, ever. Never. A very popular conservative radio broadcast figure, Dr. Laura, was actually removed from the air because of her use of the word. She used it simply to complain that black people can use it and white people can’t.

I want you my readers to say it out-loud, now.  I have one reason which is to show that the powers that elected the first affirmative action president (and the difficulty in replacing him in the next election) have to do with deep emotional issues related to American black slavery.  The same reasons we are uncomfortable saying that word out-loud.

The incumbent affirmative action president will be very difficult to dislodge.

Since we are on the subject of n-g-er,  I want to point out that a great deal of left wing picketing against police shooting a black has to do with our complete refusal to deal honestly with black issues.

From the police point of view a black person is automatically dangerous if he is between 13 and 35. Black men in this category commit five times the number of crimes as Americans from any other ethnic category.  A black male’s age range automatically signals a danger to the police unless the black male is wearing a suit, wearing a uniform, carrying a bass violin, or a tuba or walking with several elderly people.  

Moreover after a black person has been shot by the police, even by black police, the reaction of the black community is invariably one of denial.  It is usually suicide by cop.

Black male homicide victim rates are high and black male suicide rates are low but their combined rate is the same as for the rest of the American population.

That means that one way for a black male to commit suicide is to provoke the police in such a way that he will be shot and killed.   Suicide by cop is far more common than the black community or the public are willing to acknowledge.

When young black men behave dangerously in a public environment or provocatively, get out of the way. They may be seeking suicide by cop.

 

College research

 

On Saturdays, the Wall Street journal has a section on psychology. It is a serious embarrassment.

I tell any of my business clients who need research information about human behavior or consumer behavior to completely avoid any research that is based on using college students as the subjects.

I have been in the survey research field for nearly 50 years. I have never seen anything of use coming out of surveys or psychological experiments done on college student. None.

The reason is simple. College students are not representative of adult human beings. They continue to be children living away from home in an emotional cocoon.

If you want to know what grown-up children think or what their response to a stimulus will be, college students are a reasonable subject group.

The Wall Street Journal, serving businesspeople, should get rid of that page of crap.

 

Bellybutton bacteria

I’m always fascinated by the idea of cryogenic storage of humans.

It raises in my mind several serious questions about human beings that seem to be ignored by the people who take cryogenic human storage seriously.

The first problem I have is the brain. Is there any reason to believe that the brain could be able to store images and information for any period of time if it were not fully alive? People with a variety of dementia's including Alzheimer’s have the same brain but limited function.

The second problem also deals with the brain.  From my perspective the brain and the mind are separate.  I deduce this from observing conversation.  In a conversation with a very bright and well educated person the words we both use are longer and more complex and the same is true for the concepts in the conversation.  How can two brains generate so much more than one brain alone? The mind and brain are separate and both function together. But the mind will not be cryogenically frozen.

The third problem is the source of this blog: micro organisms. The human being depends on thousands of micro organisms in the mouth, nose, lungs, stomach, intestines and on the skin for digestion, for survival, for healing and protection from thousands of other micro organisms.

The latest discovery, which is somewhat hilarious, is that there are hundreds of completely new and previously unknown bacteria in the belly button.  What is their function? To eat the fuzz? Could we live without them? Will they survive cryogenic freezing?  

The concept of co-evolution seems highly relevant to humans and our microorganisms including viruses. Thinking over a long period  of time,  how will the co-evolutionary relationship we already have to our micro organisms, relate to the new micro organisms in the future defrosting era?

Neither of us will work.

What is a Jew?

Like all Jews I am occasionally asked ‘What is Jew’.  

My answer is that a Jew is a member of a nation, the first nation.

In many ways there is a similarity to being an American.  Being an America is to openly state a connection with the nation not a piece of land. Being American means being connected to other people who call themselves Americans and to revere a set of documents called the founding documents.  Anyone can be an American simply by studying the English language and passing tests on historical information.  

(I know this definition slights some lefties and some Reform Jews. Sorry.)

To understand the parallels, take a look at this article. A group of Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism 500 years ago but secretly remained Jews in their own mind.  

Now with the state of Israel having a land and a powerful Army to give it significance in the world as a traditional nation, the secret Jews have asked for recognition by Israel as Jews.  

The Chuetas of Palma de Majorca have been warmly accepted by Israel as fellow Jews. They are now fornally part of the nation of Jews.

Gay museum

 

In the heart of the San Francisco gay neighbor there is a new Gay Museum.  The cost of admission is five dollars.  That is $4.50 too much.  There is little or nothing in the museum of interest to human beings, a tourist or a museum curator.

First, the museum calls itself GLBT, Gay lesbian bi and transgender.  That is the basis for controversy immediately that is ignored.   In politically correct circles the initials LGBT are used.  A simple explanation of the Museum’s choice would be an introduction to a good subject.  Gays are roughly 5 times as many publicly visible citizens as lesbians and have long been subject to repression.

Openly gay men are still subject to capital punishment in much of the world.  Lesbians aren’t.  That subject and the Arab, Persian and much of the Muslim world that has capital punishment for gay sex is not in the Gay Museum.

There are many sexual communities that are repressed and ignored.  None of these are the subject of the Gay Museum.

There is no A or A or P or T or D.   Excluded are the large androgynous community, very large in some countries, the asexual community, the entire community of prostitution worldwide, no transsexuals (who are different from transgenders) and no focus on the sexual problems of the disability community.  

One of the letters in the GLBT is ignored, Bi, rightly so because it is not an oppressed minority.  God knows what bi is.  I was the first member of the American Bisexual League when I gave Maggie Rubinstein the first five dollar membership  in the organization and elected her president.

In summary,  this museum is as much a farce and unrelated to reality and museum subject matter as the African diaspora museum and a few others.

 

Medical justice

I not a mean person but the schadenfreude in me comes out when I see a person who is anti-commerce, making his people suffer, being forced to survive on the dregs of anti-commerce medicine.

I’m talking about Hugo Chavez who has painted himself into a ideological corner only to find he has cancer that would best be treated in one of the thriving modern pro-commerce societies.  Instead he has to go to Cuba a backwater of anti-commerce tyranny where medical care is 70 years behind the time.

I suspect that the Cuban tyrants who run the government have provided some up-to-date pro-commerce medicine for themselves and visiting tyrants but I doubt that it is close to first class.

Arabs have always had the same problem and until the last decade most Arab tyrants secretly went to Israel’s Hadassah Hospital for care.

All you have to do is be an anti-commerce tyrant and you can suffer the medical consequences.  

Tabula rasa

I seem to be reading a great deal of conservative thought dealing with the issue of how conservatives and lefties differ.

The prevailing discussion seems to suggest that conservatives prefer Hobbes’s view of the individual and lefties prefer Rousseau’s.  Rousseau’s was a tabula rasa view in which the society could strongly influence the desired social behavior for everyone.  We are born with a blank tablet.

Conservatives are oriented toward a human born as a crooked timber with the consequent need to create complex stable institutions to deal with a diverse society composed of many crooked timber’s.

There is an alternative position.  A combination of tabula rasa and crooked timber.  I call it the social thought model.

Social thought says that each of us belongs to myriad institutions at birth, including language, nationality, gender and many more. We join more institutions as we get older. Each of these institutions are built on tent pole ideas, images and metaphors.  Most institutions that shape us are quite rigid and not subject to central government change.  

With this view of humans, what I do is work on slow incremental changes in institutions.  No radical or revolutionary movements and no presumptions of evil or chaos that would break out by making modest changes.   

My interests are in improving democracy, market mechanisms and human understanding of the human world.  No need  for me to support the idea of evil nor for me to promote government proscriptions.

 

Catching up to me

I recently got an e-mail asking me to pressure my state legislators to pass a bill creating a state bank.  

The argument is that the recent financial crash has left small businesses without loans. State banks would be able to make small local loans.

This is a case of the public catching up to me and in fact many economists are beginning to suggest that the financial crisis was different than a business slow down. A financial crisis is a separate function that massively impacts the world of business: negatively.  It doesn’t need to.

I have argued that finance must be separated from commerce because finance is a volatile world that cannot be stabilized or suppressed.  It must be disconnected from the commercial world.

My recommendation is the creation of an FLIC to guarantee loans at banks and some other commercial  lenders.  The federal loan insurance would make sure that  local business lines of credit are not reduced because the bank lost money in Argentina.

The proposal that came in my e-mail for a state bank to make small business loans just happens to be nonsense. A bad idea.

We had state banks before the Civil War and they had no illustrious record. The ability of any government agency to make small business loans doesn’t exist. The Small Business Administration and its minority component are a complete farce.  The SBA only make loans to government agency facades and ghetto hustlers.

When everyone catches up with me, we will have an FLIC that will disconnect financial volatility from commerce.

Finding her future

A young woman, Jesse Langley, wrote to me and asked to write a blog. I gave her subject matter and this is what she wrote.  It is relevant to my subject so I am publishing it:

'After I graduated college, I had a hard time finding a job. The time was 2009. Jobs were scarce and my education was, possibly, too general. Not a whole lot of employers need full time writers and the ones that did were looking for ones that had more out-of-school experience. I was left with no other option but retail.

'IThough I worked in retail, I still had a good amount of contacts from school. Facebook gave me a great way to keep in touch with them and they were able to give me some ideas on what they did in order to get where they were today. If there is one thing that I can suggest to you, it would be to maintain the connections that you make in school or work. They can and often will give you help if you ask. Wouldn’t you want to help your connections if they asked?

'So what I did was post on my social media sites (Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin) this message: Just graduated college, but I’m having a hard time finding a job. Anyone have any suggestions? I was happy with the response rate.

'One of my friends suggested going back to school. He told me he was toying with the idea of online education and that he had been looking into getting his IT degree. He was always interested in computers, but I knew that that wouldn’t be the degree for me. But I didn’t dismiss the idea entirely. If I was to go back to school for a more specialized degree, I might have a better chance at finding a job. But that wasn’t the only response I received.

'Another one of my friends strongly encouraged me to take this time to get to know myself better. He said that he had been laid off from his job a while ago and afterwards he decided that he really “wanted to figure out what he wanted to do with his life and pursue it whole-heartedly.” Right now he is working with his hands selling birdhouses and such. He hasn’t made a lot of business yet, but he is a lot happier with his work than he was when he was working for someone else.

'Another of my friends who had the same degree told me to market myself. He said that there were “plenty of writing jobs, you just had to know where to look” and also how to create a place for people to find you. He had become a freelance writer and started his own website to help find more jobs. He said he was doing a decent amount of daily work, but not a whole lot yet. He was visiting freelancewritinggigs.com and craigslist and messaging people who needed articles written and edited.

'It’s been a while since I posted that update on my sites. Right now I’ve been working at my retail job part-time and freelancing for the rest of my time. I haven’t quite drummed up enough business to straight up quit yet, but I am beginning to make some money. I’m also working on creating a website and contributing often to one of my friend’s blogs. All in all I think I agree with all of their suggestions. I have been using my free time to figure out who I am as well as market my freelance vocation. I haven’t decided whether I’ll go back to school yet, but it’s always a good option later.'

Mamet offering

I read David Mamet’s book (Secret-Knowledge) and do not recommend  it for a broad audience because it relies heavily on literary allusions ( I like that because I had a classic University education.)

Mamet offered two interesting points that I will remember.  First, he said he was a brain-dead lefty until age 60 because he had never heard the other position in his life.  

  I am particularly sensitive to that today because I went to a lavish San Francisco birthday, where a very outspoken conservative friend of mine explained to a pro-Castro lefty woman how the Democrats killed millions of people by refusing to fund the strong South Vietnamese army in 1974 and ‘75.  While my friend talked I looked at the face of the lefty as she encountered new historic material for the first time in her life. I watched her face: it showed a startled reaction.

From now on I will make a greater effort to help lefties see the other side. There might be another David Mamet out there.

Second, Mamet made the wonderful observation that movie stars are forever kissing the asses of lefty tyrants and American enemies fromJane Fonda to Sean Penn. They are emotionally limited people who see themselves as heroes.

Mamet points out that such absurd behavior is rare among producers and directors because they live in the real world of budgets, deadlines and unions.

Nitrous and android

Nitrous is nitrous oxide. Commonly called laughing gas. I get it four times a year when I have my teeth cleaned.

Android is the system for smart phones that was created by Google for use as an operating platform. Very successful.

I always suspect that programmers use drugs on occasion to help them get through mind-numbing programming chores.  

It was purely by accident, while waiting for the nitrous to have its full effect in the hygenist's chair, that I started using my android phone. Long after the world had become a drug distorted fantasy I was still able to use my android phone. 'Far out.'

From this I conclude that many of the programmers as well as some of the people creating apps do their final testing of a consumer interface while on recreational drugs.

That's why the programs can be used while the user is on drugs.

Cesar Chavez?

How will we get rid of the name and the myth of Cesar Chavez? 

Nearly anyone who dealt with Mr. Chavez will tell you that he was unreliable, self-righteous, unconcerned about his union members and only interested in his role as a martyr for an imaginary working class.

Everything Cesar Chavez did was harmful to the farmers he dealt with and the farmworkers he claimed to represent as well as the future of the union he led.

The current governor of California, Jerry Brown, two weeks ago, vetoed a bill to help the remnants of Chavez’s union.  30 years ago Brown had worked hard to help Chavez and ended up strongly disliking the man for his dishonesty, self-centeredness and rigidity.

Because Mexican-Americans had begun to exert political power in California at the time of his death they were able to elevate Mr. Chavez to near sainthood.  This also occurred because Mexican Americans have not created genuine heroes during the past century of immigration.

When and how does a phony hero get demoted?  It will clearly start with some books and exposés from people close to him.

‘Back in the day’

One of my friends loves the phrase back in the day.  He uses it simply to refer to some imaginary ideal period in his late youth. Some time in the fairly recent past.

I mentioned this for two reasons. One, historians and linguists will note that this phrase has just reached my ears.  Two, I love the phrase because it is so vague and sentimental, almost maudlin.

When one says back in the day one has the wonderful ability to give an aura of charm and affection to some earlier period.  It has great potential use in irony and humor.

It may have originated with some pop songs in the mid-1990's.

Radical school model

The way that science and sex are taught in the public schools has led me to think about a radical alternative model of education.

'Sex education' is not sex education it is anti-sex education.  I needn’t expand on this for anyone who has ever taken a school sex education class.  Sex education answers no questions that honest students have about sex and provides terrifying anti-sex propaganda.

What passes for science is even worse.  Every class from kindergarten on is about global warming.  What could be greater nonsense and anti-science?  To promote an ideological-religious propaganda, that exists without any data, as science can make sure students are hostile to the basic idea of science: falsifiability and testing projections. The smart students will avoid theology that passes for science.

My radical educational model is based on only two points.  The first point is that homeschooling has been astoundingly successful.  Homeschooling meets established statewide educational norms, homeschoolers act together jointly in many locations and on many subjects, and homeschooled students have been disproportionately successful in college entrance data.

The second point is that in contemporary society with computers, Wikipedia, and hundreds of educational programs online that are superior to most classrooms, we only need to teach reading and math in schools.  Those are the two subjects tested nationally anyway.  They seem to be exempt from most ideological and religious teachings.

Such a school system would only require a few hours a week of teaching and could provide many forms of fairly free and semi structured time for other activities.  

It would cost a fraction of current publc education system and students could be given time for whatever subject matter was important to their parents.

Such an environment could also be easily kept violence free, the biggest problem of urban schools.

National debt

The debt ceiling has become a highly political issue this year because most of Congress was elected to reduce government expenditures and significantly reduce annual deficits.

The political threats surrounding the debt ceiling are mean-spirited theatrics, particularly by the president who lied and said he might have to withhold checks to Social Security recipients and other pensioners. That is not a possible scenario, it was a mean-spirited lie.

The only thing the president would have to do, if Congress fails to raise the debt limit is (1) announce that there will be one hundred percent coverage of all interest payments on bonds and all bonds will be redeemed in full. Global markets will be calmed. (2) announce that all federal employees, excluding military and critical occupations, earning over $80,000 a year will receive temporary government coupons for 10% of their salary until the issue of the debt ceiling is settled.

There are several reasons we have such a stunning  annual deficit, equal to 10% of the current national debt.  First is that the financial crisis of 2008 was allowed to impact lending in the commercial world which made reasonable economic growth impossible. I have recommended many alternatives including the creation of an FLIC.  

Secondly the Pelosi-Reid Keynesian stimulus package drained millions of jobs out of  the economy. Seriously retarding growth.

And now there is conclusive data to show that high debt to GDP ratio that we have is harmful to growth.  

Inadequate economic and tax revenue growth has been half the reason for our large deficits. Part of that inadequacy we now know is due to the ratio of high annual deficits to GDP in the past two years.

The rest of the reasons for inadequate economic growth remain to be discovered.  I suspect a hostile Democratic government plays some role.

Blogs July 1st to 15th

Simple living today is not the same issue as it has been for Quakers and Bohemians in the past. It is now important to distinguish fixed costs from variable costs.

There may be a way to slowly get rid of the home mortgage interest deduction on income tax.  A politically viable approach.

The 10,000 year clock may not be a great idea. Whether it is or not in the Wired article, it is an example of not giving credit to the most important creator.

The anti-trust attacks on Google and Microsoft are evidence that the antitrust laws are meaningless and probably have always been.

If we ever have real jet backpacks they will have to look like the one I have drawn.

Thomas Kuhn and death

I have been reading and hearing many explanations of the reasons the Left continues to exist.  

How can anyone vote Democrat after every central government in the 20th century failed or created misery for its subjects?  Even the mild European examples of powerful central government continue every day to show what a disaster expansive central government is.

I think we may be ignoring the obvious.  People do not learn from experience after the age of 22, many have been baptized as eco-Marxist-ideologues before that age and they will never change.  Those generations must die off before their Lefty ideology disappears.

Example: even though alcohol prohibition in the United States was a failure for more than a decade after it was implemented nationally,  many states continued to have prohibition and it continued to be the primary voting issue for many people 35 years after the national failure was evident.

I invoked Thomas Kuhn in the blog title because Kuhn pointed out that similar patterns were evident in science.  New paradigms did not become dominant until the believers in the old paradigms died out.  ( Kuhn was not the first to say this but he brought the subject to life again in the 1960s).

We just have to wait till the Left dies.  Facts aren't at issue.

Selling luxury goods

A friend of mine tried to create a website to sell high-end jewelry.  

Despite sound financing, a good staff and a well designed site with reasonable discount prices, the business failed.

I simply want to add my speculation on the failure of this website.  I think that luxury goods have two marketing elements.

One element of luxury goods, that is not subject to much debate, is that their luxury aura must be recognizable in order to establish appropriate status. A real Rolex must be clearly real.

The second, which is the reason the luxury retail website failed, is that luxury goods buyers enjoy diffidence and behavioral status actions that live salespeople offer the buyer.  An implicit and explicit message: “Golly you must be rich to waste so much money on this.”

That seems to me to be the reason a luxury retail website, that was perfect in all respects, would fail.

Real jet back-pack

I keep coming back to this subject because I don’t see much recognition of the problem.

I have created an image of what a real jet back-pack would have to look like if I one were ever created.

The problem to overcome, is that every foot upwards in the air is a new layer of air often going in a different direction at a different speed.  Just look at a tree any time of the day; the leaves and branches are going different directions.

Therefore, a jet back-pack would have to have sensors in every direction above and below the device.  You would have to have a very low center of gravity, and the capability of moving the whole device in three dimensions to offset the multiple layers of wind.

When you see a jet back-pack image similar to the one I have created,  it might be real and functional.  Otherwise it is a disaster waiting to happen. 

Boredom

I read a review by Joseph Epstein of two books on the subject of boredom.

I haven’t talked or thought about boredom in a long time.  There are two reasons.  

First, and least important, I have made a living as a thinker for 40 years.  That means that any time I might theoretically be bored, I use that time to work on problems that I am thinking about.

Second, and much more important, in the early 1970s I was introduced to Zen Buddhism and week-long Zen sittings.  That showed me that there is plenty to do when there is nothing to do.

I look, smell, listen and feel.  There is so much happening around me that I cannot be bored in any environment, even if I have to sit still for long periods.

I consider it sad that there is boredom in the world.  A little training can eliminate it.

Don’t report to work

The unions for San Francisco's bus and rail drivers, years ago, got a contract condition allowing employees to have four days a year where they don’t have to show up, phone in or bring an excuse.

I have concluded that that provision is the most harmful employment element ever imagined.

The reason is simple.  If you can fail to come to work and not notify anyone nor give any reason, it means one thing.  One thing: you are an insignificant and irrelevant employee.

I cannot imagine how anybody can work in a condition where they are considered insignificant and irrelevant.

San Francisco’s bus and rail services are totally incompetent.  I think that single provision makes certain that nobody takes their job seriously.

Can you think of any other union clause that could do more harm to a work environment?

Basic anti-trust

I was recently excoriating the antitrust laws, at morning cofee, because of the absurdity of attacking Google.  If a different search engine that is preferred by users comes along we would see the same phenomenon that we saw with Facebook wiping out MySpace.

The modern anti-trust absurdity is evident in the Microsoft case.  Antitrust people tried to keep Microsoft from bundling Internet Explorer in its Windows packages.  The antitrust folks failed.  So now,  Microsoft earns less than $10 a year on millions of Internet Explorer browsers and has to pay more than $50 million a year to maintain and update it.  It is in real competition to Firefox, both offered for free.  All those Justice Department people aren’t really so smart.

And then we have the antitrust geniuses in the EU.  They have simply created money for lawyers.  Not a single large Internet company has come out of Europe because of the effective antitrust laws.  On the contrary,  the EU is a wasteland of Internet creativity.

Is Microsoft a monopolist?  If so, how to explain its failure in TV, gaming, set top boxes, music, smart phones,the cloud, databases and many other programming innovations?

Explanantion: it is not a monopoly.

That modern anti-trust absurdity led me to question the original arguments for the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts created at the turn of the 20th century.   The laws were first applied harshly against Standard Oil for cutting prices and buying up competitors. Standard Oil was broken up into five companies.  

Each of the five segments of the company later became dominant in the oil industry.  

The antitrust goofballs ignored the most important near-monopoly that was growing at the time, AT&T.  

AT&T was broken up 70 years later and re-formed itself within 20 years.

All of that,  led me to wonder about the economic arguments for antitrust.  Economists argue that there are natural monopolies.  Only one dam on a river, one pipe to a house, and one electric wire.

That turned out to be an incompetent argument. My house has nearly a dozen wires coming to it.  That includes data lines, cable lines and several power lines (and a few old lines never removed).  There are also six radio signals connecting my utility and telecom devices to nearby towers.  I could also have satellite connections if I wished.  Where is the natural monopoly?

I now see that economists are wrong about natural monopolies. There is no such thing as a real monopoly unless the government creates it.

10,000 year clock

There was a recent article in Wired magazine that talked about Jeff Bezos’ 10,000 year clock. He has given $42 million to have it built in the Texas hills.

The same article goes into great length about half a dozen others involved in the project including Danny Hillis the designer of the clock.

What this extensive article ignores, is the central role of Stewart Brand, founder of the Long Now Foundation that is building the clock.  Stewart is either the mother or the father of this entire project along with Danny Hillis.  

Stewart is now suffering from what I have suffered from for decades: give enough other people credit for their contributions and your central role will be forgotten,

My role in the 10,000 year clock is negative.  From the beginning Stewart’s idea was to get people thinking in long historic terms. Stewart’s interests are all related to conservation.

My response to Stewart when we began talking about this was that the Egyptians built pyramids, very much like Stewart’s clock and nobody knows what the pyramids were about.  

I wrote about this in an earlier blog.

On the other hand, some of the slaves who helped build some of the pyramids created a culture out of their sect that believed in one God, and those people have completely changed history. To this day we know their story about Egypt, the slaves and their own history of escape. (See Exodus).

The lesson for me is to build human institutions not physical objects.

In another blog I have discussed the structures at Ise in Japan that combines both institution (Jews) and physical object (Pyramid).  A shrine rebuilt on the same spot every 20 years in identical form for more than 1,600 years of recorded history.

Prof.Palin

If you want to be disgusted, read the Wikipedia entry on Paul Revere which is thoroughly footnoted.  Then read the Google entries about Sarah Palin’s comments on Paul Revere’s ride.

The vast media, with virtually no exceptions, doesn’t know their American history at all. Even worse, historians didn’t step forward to correct the media.  That is a disgraceful statement about historians.

Sarah Palin was entirely right, in every word, and wouldn’t back down.  Paul Revere was captured and interrogated on his midnight ride. He said to the British Army just what Sarah claimed: the rebels were well armed, could not be disarmed, and would win.

Of course, as I have pointed out in an earlier blog the people who make up the media are a self-selected group of immoral leftists who would never think of correcting their own slanderous, defamatory, and caluminous attacks on Sarah Palin.

America's greatest historian wrote a book on Paul Revere's Ride (David Hackett Fischer).

Home mortgage interest fixed

It is no secret that our country must reduce the federal government annual deficit.

I have policy approach which I have recommended in the past.  My recommendation is that when costs are at historic low points that is the time to impose taxes.  When gasoline is low, tax is placed on the increase in the gasoline price, and the tax remains after the price drops again.

I now have a recommendation, that we put a cap on interest rate deductions on housing.  At a low point now, where many home loans are below 4%,  it is time to cap the housing interest rate deduction at 4%.  As the housing market returns to a growth phase and interest rates climb, the new interest rates over 4% will not be deductible for the portion over 4%.

Simple, much easier to pass this legislation than any gross removal of the deduction. This change that will generate significant amounts of tax revenue.

Simple living - not

 
Recently I have been seeing a great deal of simple living advice as well as 'save money' 'live on less' advice.  This often occurs when the economy is weak.

There are two problems with this advice.  One is that it is commonly: use all of the soap, save rubber bands and wrapping paper and turn off lights.  The other is that it is a version of the old Quaker advice: borrow, buy used, repair or do without.

Over many years I have counselled wealthy people who were trying to cut their expenses.  I have also counselled a large group, two family-earners, with incomes of a quarter million or more who can’t save a penny.

I have never found a successful form of simple living advice.  People love their status and consider any cuts in expenses to be undercutting their status.

However I will tell you what I tell them about how to live on considerately less.

Focus on your fixed costs.  Like any business, people first focus on their variable costs and are able to employ reason and emotional control over variable costs.

Fixed costs are hard to cut and they are where thinking and reasoning won't go.  Fixed costs for a typical family include: cars, fuel, insurance, housing, credit card minimums and associated interest, income taxes, medical coverage, dental coverage, housecleaning and sometimes flower arrangement and gardeners.

There are always ways to reduce fixed costs.  Just getting a more fuel efficient car or one that requires a lower auto insurance rating, can save many times as much money as using up soap. saving rubber bands and turning off lights.  Many times the savings.  The same is true of all other fixed costs.

In the late 1990's I wrote a summary of my best thinking on simple living.  If you're wild about this subject, here it is.

Now you have my best advice, feel free to ignore it.

Same place

In 1992, a group of bicycle riders began organizing a bicycle ride from downtown San Francisco on the last Friday of the month.

The spokesperson for this group, Chris Carlsson, called the group ‘critical mass’. Like Chris, the original people were anarchists. The group would ride together, often in a mass of thousands, all over the city in the streets, to the consternation of commuters and law enforcement. Intentionally.  Over time, law enforcement learned to cooperate with critical mass.

Similar groups emerged the world over.

I have a rule, that is not uniquely mine: highways are built where there were streets, streets were built where there were roads and roads are built where there were foot paths.

Critical mass, San Francisco, was built on an earlier, late 70s early 80s, practice of evening rollerskating adventures that occurred after work.  The roller parties included thousands  of people skating on the streets of San Francisco.  These earlier pioneers were all up-right middle-class working professionals and white-collar staff.  They never bothered the police or commuters.

Gov’ts from the ground up

Over the years I have given many tours to visiting dignitaries from other countries.

I almost always have to explain the strange structure of our governments.

The subject will typically arise when I explained how an oil spill is handled in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are roughly a dozen agencies that are partially responsible and have to cooperate.  

There are nine counties bordering the Bay, each with its own legal entities, there are conservation districts, there are water districts, there are sewage districts, there is the Coast Guard, and there are several nonprofit legal entities concerned with pollution as well as a few federal and state agencies.  Why do we have such a mess from the the foreign visitor's point of view?

The American governmental system is one that grew up from the ground. Nearly the entire country was settled by an arriving population.  That population had no over weaning controller.  Each small community had to create its government from the ground up.  Literally, they each had to create a water district, fire districts, police districts, education districts, sewage, road, municipal districts, counties and state governments.

In most of the world, there was a hierarchy of tribes or clans, with a sovereign at the top.  As more government duties came into play, the sovereign created the government entities, usually in a structure under him.

In British conquered domains, such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand the British sovereign created much of the pyramidal  government structure.

Such was not the case in the US, where the political umbilical cord was severed before most of the country was settled.

There are probably a few other countries that have a similar history of ground up government.  I just can’t think of any at the moment.

SIC codes outmoded

The Standard Industrial Classification system was introduced in 1937, at a time when the society was overwhelmingly industrial with many large businesses and bureaucracies.  At the time a 4 digit code was more than sufficient to describe all American jobs.

I would guess that there were less than 3000 identifiable job categories at that time.

Fifty years later, when four digits was insufficient the codes renamed in 1997 (NAICS) were given six digits.  I doubt that there will actually be any need for the additional digits.

What has happened in the past few decades,  is that jobs that are classifiable into codes have disappeared.  We no longer live in an industrial or bureaucratic world.  Industry and bureaucracy have both reached their limits and are recognizably inefficient.

The Japanese car manufacturers are the ones who brought this to our attention by showing us that teams of workers could produce products much faster and more reliably than production lines.  Workers in teams could not fit into job codes.

In the current world, outside the small number of jobs covered by unions and governments, 11% of the workforce, very few people have definable codifiable jobs.  Even a retail salesperson is frequently expected to do stocking, maintenence and ordering jobs; as is a retail McDonald’s food server.

Nearly everyone else does a job based on cooperation with others, interchangeable work, or contracting which includes a great deal of management.

Goodbye industrial codes and industrial jobs.

Blogs June 16 to June 30th

Two blogs focus on the way people self-select themselves into their life choices.

One blog compares prisoners and academics,  the other looks at journalists and politicians.  The homogeneity of each of these four groups follows from their self-selection.

We have the first affirmative action president.  I believe he will be more difficult to defeat in an election next year than most of my peers.  Maybe a woman could do it.

There is an inherent moral value to diversity in addition to a pro-commerce value.  Suburbs are the contra-example

There is a simple metric to know whether the person you are talking to or reading is anti-Jew.  A simple metric. They ask about 'criticism of Israel'.

Just a wild thought. Polygamy might be a way to increase population growth if that is what your nation wants.