Pro Commerce

Second sanitary revolution

We are still living in the first sanitary revolution.

It began in the 1840’s in upstate Massachusetts where small villages began separating their incoming fresh water from their outgoing sewage.  That immediately began increasing life span by reducing death rates.

That was a sanitation improvement that spread around the world and generated what became known as the population explosion. The explosion came to an end when the benefits of improved sanitation had been carried to the ends of the world.  

The second sanitary revolution is just beginning. Everyone in hospitals on staff is required to clean their hands multiple times of day, and sanitizers are now ubiquitous in medical environments. Apparently, according to my medical doctor son-in-law, the evidence is overwhelming that hand sanitizers significantly reduce negative medical outcomes in hospitals.

That being the case we should expect some extension of lifespan as a result, worldwide, maybe a year or two on average. The first sanitary revolution added roughly 30 years to the average lifespan.  

The Japanese are already the longest lived people on earth and they are also the cleanest.

Lefty ideology can kill you

Hugo Chavez went to hospital today for an emergency.  I wrote the following blog two months ago.

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I'm 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.  

Apple sues everybody

Before Steve Jobs left Apple the first time, when he was fired, he had already established the founders principle of: sue everybody.  Whatever anybody wants to say about Jobs, they should not ignore his lawsuit happy delirium.

Here is my story of his first major absurd unfounded lawsuit.

Back in the early 1970s I visited the mother lode of the modern computer.  It was Xerox Parc and the man who ran the operation was Bill English.  Bill and his wife Roberta were friends of mine.  

About 15 years ago I had dinner with Bill and Roberta.  At the time of the dinner there were the remnants of a 1988 lawsuit about computer desktop page design.  The suit was between Apple and Microsoft. The lawsuit was about 9 years old at the time. Apple claimed that Microsoft had copied the ‘look and feel’ of the home computer screen from Apple, which it had. The important truth was that Apple had copied the ‘look and feel’ from what Steve had seen at Xerox Park and Apple had somewhat of a license from Xerox.

At the dinner with the Englishes, Bill said he had just agreed to go on the board of Sun.  I knew most of the long history and I pointed out to him that he was the perfect person to bring an end to the law suit by getting Xerox to license the original material to Sun.  

Bill was the person who actually ran the shop (Xerox Park) that created the ‘look and feel’ and everyone in Silicon Valley knew it.  All Bill had to do, as a Sun Board of Directors member, was to say that he supported Sun getting rights to his work at Xerox Parc and that the lawsuit should be dropped.  It was.

Improve on reality

One of the most startling qualities of new technology is that it can improve on reality.

Certainly the first telescope had that quality as did early microscopes. The same is generally true of any new technology from submarines to chronometers. Life extending health practices and products obviously have this quality.

For me the smartphone is beginning to deliver many improvements on reality. When I am at a large airport I am usually in a segment or wing where I can only see part of the roster of arriving and departing flights. Now I have an app called Flightboard that allows me to look at all of the rosters over a three hour period at any airport.  It is just marvelous for knowing when a connecting flight has left its original airport as well as finding alternative flights on other airlines when my own flight is delayed or canceled.

Let me know some of the other elements that you are finding on your smart phone that improves on reality.

Nude legislation vs homeless

San Francisco has a new contribution to the daily laugh for the world.  Our city legislators are voting on a proposal to require nudists to stay out of restaurants and put a towel on a public bench before they sit down.

For about a year now, my neighborhood, the gay Castro, has had a small group of men, often in twos or threes, who walk around naked. On warm days ten of them will sit on a high traffic corner and wile away the hours. I have watched the public walk past this group.

About half the people walking by try to avert their eyes, a quarter take a picture and a quarter actually look.

I don’t have an opinion on what legislation is required if any. It doesn’t bother me. However there is one human behavior that I find totally offensive.

That is the smelly, filthy, homeless street people who come into my grocery stores, my coffee shops and ride on public buses. They are disgusting.  I would be 10 times more interested in having several thousand smelly, filthy, homeless regulated than wasting time regulating 10 nude men.

What is wrong with our legislators?  Beggars destroy jobs in San Francisco. Smelly homeless make many public transit riders sick and unwilling to ride public transit.............  but the trivial problem of naked men has risen to the top of the pile for Democratic Party regulation.

Depressed

Today I began the morning depressed. I listened to the following excerpt of the Bibi speech at the UN.

I was reminded that we live in the Fourth Reich. An entire world organization and most of Europe is determined to wipe we remaining Jews off the map. This movement includes much of Latin America.

Additionally, nearly a third of all Americans and far more Canadians are anti-commerce and live in contempt of our modern world. Increasingly more of them are joining the Fourth Reich.

In San Francisco more than three quarters of the population are anti-commerce and openly spout their hatred of Target, Walmart, Starbucks, Wall Street etc. It is no joke when I say San Francisco has seven lovely hills and one mountain of hate.

I do not conflate Jew hate and anti-commerce carelessly.  They grow out of the same soil.

Little or none of this will change in my remaining life time.

However, as the photo in this blog shows, I went to IKEA in the afternoon. The people in the Emeryville IKEA rarely speak English. They are the diversity that makes America so exceptional and great. They are happily shopping and enjoying life. Most would rather die than give up modern commerce....... if they could see that they were making such a choice.

I am reminded that we will win. Pro-commerce will prevail.  It is impossible to stamp out the love of commerce. In just the last 25 years most of the world, India and China,  have joined the realm of pro commerce. I am further reminded that our president who is vehemently anti-commerce was never able to pass any global warming legislation nor any tax increases.

The people who were merrily shopping at IKEA, fulfilling their dreams, designing their own lives with Swedish-Chinese goods and finding happiness in commerce are my hope.

 

Who is Obama?

 

Disclaimer. I am not paranoid I’m not a conspiracy theorist. In fact I consider most theories of conspiracy to come from people who have no idea how politics or institutions work.

On the other hand I have dealt with many businesses and organizations that were CIA funded or CIA run. I dealt with them before the information had become public, so I have a feel for what they were like.

The Claremont Review of Books has a review of several Obama histories. His rise from Indonesian student at age 8 to scholarships at the most elite Hawaiian school and subsequent admission to Occidental and Columbia with no academic record available..... is a source of curiosity.

The striking elements about Obama’s family raise many serious CIA related questions.

President Obama was raised by his grandparents Stanley and Madelyn Dunham.  Madelyn, with no background publicly available anywhere was made VP at the Bank of Hawaii in the escrow department, handling a major CIA account, immediately upon her arrival in Hawaii. Stanley is photographed in Beirut at an elite language school in the early 50’s and in the company of two naval officers when they greeted Obama senior at the airport on his arrival at the East-West Center. a school supported by the Asia Foundation which I personally know was heavily funded by the CIA. Obama’s mother, Ann, married an Indonesian student at the same East-West Center and went  with him to Indonesia at the time of a major three-year overthrow of the Suharto government.  Her husband participated in the overthrow.

I just wanted you, my beloved readers, to know that you know something that is not  general public knowledge but may someday be relevant.

 

Green jobs

The idea of green jobs is not really an idea; it has been a fantasy or a long time.

I have been involved in the alternative energy and related fields since the late 1960s including wind generators, small hydroelectric generators and countless hippie solutions for living off the grid.

Frankly we tried just about everything in the 1970’s. Until you have heard a noisy wind generator on the next hill wake you up in the morning, until you have taken a luke warm shower from a black water tank, until you have looked at the pay back data for a solar panel,  invested in special solar reactive windows or looked at a dozen hightech energy producing devices and battery patents, you haven’t explored green jobs

At this point, 40 years later, very little profitability has been found in the green tech world, or the clean tech world. Everything that works at all has been improved to the point where it is almost marketable. ‘Almost’ means it needs government subsidies.  

The obvious shortcomings remain the obvious shortcomings. Solar and wind need storage and we don’t have it. All sources of energy must be transmitted because virtually none of it is inherently decentralized and efficient.

The technological future of green is trivial unless you believe in global warming. The way to know this for certain is to look at Jennifer Rubin's summary or to look at the current direction of Kleiner Perkins, the lead high-tech investment firm.. A Kleiner Perkins chief, John Doerr, has cried publicly about global warming and begged everyone on his knees to help him support green tech. But his firm has decided to ignore the field and focus on the Internet again.

I’m sure that one out of 200, green tech or clean tech ventures will succeed in reaching breakeven but there is no way of guessing which might be that one. Any other use of the money would generate ten times more jobs.

Old person's smell

The Japanese seem to have a genius for taste and smell. It is the Japanese who taught us that there are five tastes, not just sweet, bitter, sour and salty but also the full body taste of umami.

What justifies this post is that the Japanese have come up with a new sense and a potential problem for many of us.

There is a distinct old peoples’ smell. Here is the article. The article does not say when this smell is first apparent nor what it is.  

Since I am definitely in the old person category I will have to buy some of the relevant curative products for rectifying this problem the next time I am in Japan.

Food truck and restaurant

It is almost impossible to go from running one restaurant to running two restaurants.

The reason is that the person who manages the first restaurant will have to start and manage the second restaurant. Few if any people have the skill to manage two separate operations. Certainly not small business startup types.  In order to do this one must be able to have a full-time manager in the first restaurant. That requires either significant capital or a very large operation to begin with ( more than 150 seats).  

It is easier to start two new restaurants (total of three) because the manager of the first can then hire three separate managers and justify his own overhead.

However there is an interesting way around this and that is to use a food truck as the temporary second restaurant. This not only allows the restauranteur to find better locations for the second restaurant it also allows the restauranteur to train a chef and operator in a simple operation without a complex menu.

From the vantage point of the truck and its operator it is a straightforward matter to open a new restaurant and put the truck operator in as the manager
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Perception of hostility to business

 

Let me state at the outset that I don’t think opinion has much to do with commerce.

The University of Michigan's measure of consumer attitudes is totally useless. It correlates with no known behavior.

The daily explanations of why the stock market has gone one way or the other based on business attitude is preposterous. I have shown press statements from the stock market floor made to explain movements in the market (‘stocks moved strongly because of expected EPA regulations’) to people, covering up the dates, and everyone accepted the preposterous explanations even for movements in the opposite direction. General directions of opinion do not move the market. The market can move up or down after a Chinese press release or a new Middle Eastern war or a massive disaster.

CEO projections are equally useless.  Individual corporations are so numerous and lack intercommunication, that it is unreasonable to think they share opinions about markets and sub market directions.

On the otherhand there are two reasons to think market perceptions are important. One is Deirdre McCloskey’s explanation of the rise of industrial commerce because of the growing acceptance of commerce as a respectable way of life in a few countries.

The second is my own data.  I participated in the greatest flowering of small business in the San Francisco Bay Area (see the Briarpatch) that occurred because hippies were so optimistic about the future they wanted to create the businesses of the future. Their optimism was the driving force for new businesses. I succeeded in doing the same thing in Sweden and the Pacific Northwest where optimism was prevalent.  I made an effort but failed to do the same thing in England and France where conditions were negative.  

The question comes up because we in the United States are a driving global economic force and we are in a severe long-term recession that is spreading widely. We also have the most publicly outspoken anti-business president and we have the most publicly outspoken anti-business Democratic party in American history.  (‘Our problems are caused by millionaires, billionaires, hedge fund managers,Wall Street, executive jet owners and Republicans trying to rein in government spending’)

Are the two things connected? Might they only be connected because we had a financial crisis that drastically altered the commercial landscape so that capital is in the hands of very large corporations and unavailable to small startups?

It is possible that business perceptions in these unique circumstances both by large corporations holding the cash and small startups seeing a grim intrusive governmental future, might have negative commercial effects.

 

Rush to the left?

Have you noticed, over the past decade, a rush to the Left?  

I haven’t.   After 9/11 I noticed a rapid movement to the Right as people realized that the anti-Vietnam War pacifism of the Left was dysfunctional. Many moved to the Right.

I also noticed that when Obama became president many Jews quickly abandoned the anti-Israel Left. They continue doing so.

When the Democratic Party acted like Saddam Hussein in passing health care legislation by one party fiat, I saw further movement to the Right.

In addition to these three historic events that moved Americans to the Right, there has been an intellectual vigor on the Right that has attracted many people. The most prominent example is David Mamet.

Rush to the Left? No. Steady movement to the Right, Yes.

 

Nonprofit boom times

If you run a nonprofit organization, now is the time to think about expanding your facilities or buying new facilities.

Property prices are at an all time low and interest rates are virtually zero. There is plenty of federal funding for nonprofit loans.  What you need is to have a stable donation base. If you do, start expanding and buying property.

You might ask what nonprofits ( in some areas they are called not for profits ) have to do with pro-commerce.  The answer is simple. Businesses can organize themselves in many ways from cooperative, sole proprietor, partnership, corporation to nonprofit. The term non-profit is merely a technical and tax based description of an organizational form.

Nonprofits are sometimes the appropriate form for an organization. Such an organization is subject to the same issues in the market as any other organization.

Nonprofits have a slight disadvantage over other forms in their inability to get loans on their net revenue and their further inability to generate equity or reward employees with ownership.

Contemporary subjects

I read a fairly wide range of Internet blogs and news analysis.

So far I have not seen a simple analysis of NY9, the victory of Republican christian Turner over Democrat Jew Weprin.  (The ‘Jew’ part comes from Jennifer Rubin of the Wapo.)

The Westside of Manhattan prefers a non-Jewish friend of Israel over a Jew associated with president Obama’s Jew hatred.

Am I exaggerating Obama’s attitude as ‘hatred’?  No.  It is identical to Jimmy Carter’s, which is undeniable.  For Obama, Jerusalem is an Arab capitol.  For Obama the Jews who died to protect all Jews in 1967 are irrelevant; they died in vain.

The lesson from the Westside of Manhattan is a messgae for all Reform Jews and other Jews for whom Israel is not important: you are not the kind of person who should be valued.  Your Jewish identity is irrelevant when you won't stand with 6 million Jews who are in the middle of an Arab Hell.

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While we are on the subject of Obama and his anti-Jew foreign-policy it is worth noting that Turkey has declared war on Israel.  The announcement that Turkey will use military power to break the Gaza embargo is precisely a declaration of war.

Our cajone-less U.S.President should declare that Turkey is no longer a member of NATO and will be replaced by Israel, a far better ally and a  potentially more useful military contributor. Further the U.S. Mediterrainean fleet should be sent to the coast of Israel immediately.

But cajone-less Obama is not George W Bush.

Next election surge?

 

This is a good time to begin looking at the Tea Party for next year.

The Tea Party is already the most extraordinary political development in American history. When Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats passed major national legislation without a single vote by the Republican Party they did it with an improper use of a budget procedure.

The Tea Party was a grass roots pro-democracy reaction.

The Tea Party has been extraordinary; first, in its ability to be cohesive for a year and a half and win a major congressional election and second, for its understanding that a third-party, or a movement with political leaders, was inappropriate in contemporary America.

So far the Tea Party goals of reversing the Democrat anti-democratic legislation has not been accomplished. That will require a surge of voters in 2012, more than 3 ½ years after the initial movement began. The surge will need to be in both the Senate and the presidential election to succeed.

Such an event, a successful grassroots movement, maintained for 3 ½ years, will move this extraordinary democratic phenomenon to a level that is unimaginable in the entire course of human events.

 

Best blogs Sept 1st to 15th

Where did the Republicans go for the past 50 years? I have the answer. It also explains why there are occasional Republican victories when the Democrats seriously botch everything. It also suggests a new direction in American politics as Republicans develop popular issues.

Have you heard of self-hating blacks?  The answer is probably 'no'. I examine the reason there are so many self-hating Jews and so few self-hating blacks.

The metaphor of a car and a tree. Did the tree cause the accident? This is an important metaphor at a time when the Republicans in Congress are not being obstreperous, they are merely standing by the ironclad rules they were sent to Washington to enforce.

Obama did a good job for blacks. He does not get credit for the two massive efforts he made to protect and create jobs for the black community.

Penny auctions are an online invention.  A truly fascinating and innovative new way of pricing and selling has evolved on the Internet.

We need a conference to examine the history of commerce, particularly how it grew to be the dominant force in the world: human and otherwise.

Seniors and lawsuit centers

 

I am turning out to be a fanatic on the issue of mistreating seniors and the disabled.

It wasn’t until President Obama declared that seniors and the disabled might not get their checks in the mail after August 2, 2011 that I realized what a mean person he is. This mistreatment of seniors and disabled means a great deal to me.

I watch seniors being manipulated, tormented and defrauded on a regular basis. Customarily they are cheated by telephone salespeople. But they are also cheated in countless other ways on a daily basis as their faculties and acuity decline.

If the AARP were managed by decent human beings or even semi-decent human beings, several million dollars would be allocated to opening law offices in California Texas and Florida to pursue the criminals who prey on the elderly and disabled.

Bringing civil lawsuits against this criminal pack would generate sufficient revenue, after two years of effort, to make such law offices self sufficient. Court settlements and decisions would be generous.

This would attract other lawyers to the practice of suing the people who prey on the elderly and disabled. Over time it might even get the legally responsible city and state attorneys to do their jobs in this realm.

 

Its time

It’s time for a conference on the history of commerce.

When I wrote my first full book on this subject: Gods of Commerce in 1997 I looked around and found no one else had recognized the incredible promise and cornucopia produced by commerce and modernity.

When I wrote my second full book on the subject: Commerce, and began this blog in 2003, I looked around and found one person who came close to understanding the subject matter. Joyce Appleby, a professor of history who had written a book on the influence of Adam Smith on the founding documents of the US.

I got to know Dr. Appleby and we discussed the loneliness of the field. I encouraged her to write a book on the history of commerce.  She did. When it started it had a heavy Marxist overtone.  By the time it was cleared by her businessman son it was well balanced.

As an emerita history professor from UCLA and former president of the American Historical Association she would be an important member of a conference on the history of commerce

The second relevant person I learned about last year, when his book on the history of commerce was published, is Matt Ridley. A brilliant book that fully understands the role of commerce on the planet. Ridley writes for the  Saturday Wall Street Journal and is a professor in England.

The most recent person I learned about from a blog reader.  Deirdre McCloskey, has published a book on the core attitudes that create commerce. She has developed these ideas over several decades but they are most visible and complete in her recent book.

Each of these people would disagree on several key points but a discussion would be exciting and brilliant.

The Milken Institute encourages and produces such discussions in Santa Monica.

If any of my readers have a contact at the Milken Institute, please feel free to encourage such a modest conference.

Where did Republicans go?

I consider this a significant blog.  

At a recent Republican picnic I was forced to think about the fact that in 1964 San Francisco there were many Republican officeholders at every level of government and the same was true for the state of California.  Over the intervening 45 years the situation has radically changed. There is not a single Republican officeholders in San Francisco and very few in California.  

Why?

I think there is one reason. The hereditary elite in the United States disappeared sometime around 1960 as I have explained in an earlier blog. The hereditary elite and the corporations and institutions they controlled were able to act as a moderating influence on the body politic up to that point. Private social clubs mattered.

The demise of the hereditary elite left a power vacuum that was filled by the default position in the body politic of the second half of the 20th century. The default position was unions, youthful rebellion and socialism-light.  After the Dixiecrat’s were chased out of the Democratic party that left the Democratic Party as the home of unions, youthful rebellion and socialism-light.

From that day to this the majority party has really been the Democratic party. It has been defeated only when the general public was offended by issues of poor governance.

Richard Nixon was elected in reaction to blacks burning down our cities and hippies flaunting their pubic hairs. Ronald Reagan was elected in reaction to the flaccid presidency, wild inflation and humiliating foreign policy of Jimmy Carter. The Congressional upheaval of 1994 was a reaction to socialized medicine (as we now know since it was repeated in 2010.)  George W Bush, a clean-cut fellow, was a reaction to Bill Clinton’s wandering genitals.

I believe the Republican party is in a long period of re-creation in which it will have to develop clear ideas that are consistent with the basic American sentiment. Few ideas that I have heard so far have a strong ring.  The free market is not understood, but strong central government has failed everywhere in the 20th Century.  The founding American documents continue to be what holds America together and what gives America it’s special status but this is a very abstract notion. Reducing the size of government is good rhetoric but has not happened so far in our history.

In my humble opinion, such a state of affairs (strong politics based on solid ideas) will not occur until the Republican Party and the conservative world are able to state that their distinction from the Democrats is a pure pro-commerce politics.

In the meantime, we are all in for a period of weak political identity. (Weak political identity means strong interpersonal fighting.) Democrats are stuck with ideas that failed in the 20th Century and Republicans are stuck without powerful new visions.

Nancy and Barbara on jobs

 

The Nancy I am referring to is Nancy Pelosi the Democratic Congressional spokesperson. The Barbara is Barbara Lee the black extremist who shapes Pelosi’s thinking.

Both made the claim that the use of coops would be a significant source of new jobs in America.

This tells me two things. First the Democratic Party is hostile to business (always been true) and very uncomfortable recognizing that business is the only source of new jobs.

Second, the Democratic Party and these two spokespeople for Democratic ideas know nothing about business. To think that one form of business, corporation or partnership, sole proprietor, nonprofit or coop would be better at generating jobs is pure ignorance.

There are several forms of coop.  Producer’s coop, consumer coop and worker’s coop.  I have worked with all three kinds.

Producer’s coops have been successful in agriculture but most convert to the corporate form as they become more successful. The conversion is simply to deal with ownership and capital issues.

Consumer coops almost always fail outside of the retail food industry. I have seen a dozen fail in fields from auto repair to accounting.  The book-clothing Coop at Harvard still exists but nobody knows what its real structure is.

Worker’s co-ops also tend to be in the retail food industry and do not have a very successful history. That is because the good managers and occasional innovators tend to leave. Retail workers' coops seldom survive major transitions in their industry. The competent people and the innovators have left.

In some coops there is a surplus of workers at below market pay which may be what leads the Democratic spokespeople to think that coops can help create jobs. But on a scale larger than a few thousand workers the issue is only sensible to someone smoking too much cannibus.

 

Penny auctions

The Wall Street Journal had a wonderful article describing the modern penny auctions that are appearing online.

I merely want to point out that the penny auction is a new development in pricing that is only possible on the new online world.

In a penny auction an object is placed on the auction block and each successive bid that raises the price by one penny requires the bidder to pay the full auction price to that point. So that a $200 object that goes to the winning bidder at $9 may have had all of the bidders pay as much as $700 in total.

This is a great pricing scheme. Before the Internet the closest similar pricing scheme was the modern raffle where each person in the market buys a very low price tickets for a single chance at winning the high priced prize.

Credit scoring

I couldn’t find any Google history for credit scoring.  Thus I will give myself more credit than I probably deserve.

Around 1964, when I was involved in starting the Bank of America’s first marketing research department I chose to work on the Bankamericard. The predecessor of the modern Visa.

I became the in-house expert on Bankamericard and was approached by an economist in the bank who was asked to do something about reducing the losses on Bankamericard.   (I can’t remember his name.)

Together we used the new IBM 360 computer that the bank had which still used punch card input. We took two files of cards that included all credit application information. We put the pile of deadbeats in one category and the people with good credit payment history in a second category. (Note: the dead beat loss at the time was under 1%. That would be considered wonderful in modern credit card banking.)

We ran a linear regression on each pile of  punch card credit data. The result was two equations that allowed us to create a scoring system that was highly predictive of bad credit behavior.

It was immediately implemented at Bankamericard and to my knowledge spread to the rest of the world.

As I recall there were two variables that stood out. People with bad credit seldom reported a telephone number (probably hiding from creditors) and seldom filled out the credit application in full (probably not expecting to get credit).

Many people have strong aversions to credit scoring.  The hostility is probably justified. On the other hand, there were not enough people in the labor force to check all credit applications that the modern credit card generated.

Obama and black jobs

I hear many complaints in the black community that this affirmative action president is not doing anything for the black community.

I beg to differ.

The first two things Obama did, upon taking office, were to save the American auto industry jobs and pensions and to pass a gigantic stimulus bill that went entirely to local governments.

What is seldom discussed is that the auto unions were the major employers in all black communities where they are situated.

What is never discussed is that the local government is the largest employer of blacks in black communities.

I cannot find data to confirm either of my statements, but I am fairly confident they are accurate.

In that case, the first thing Obama did was to create jobs in the black community.

The several acts he could have taken to create more jobs for blacks are not available to a Democrat: lowering the minimum wage, increasing international trade and significantly reducing licensing requirements for low level skills like hairdressers and healthcare assistants.

Good behavior is punished

 

The current agency that is responsible for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is suing Bank of America and a dozen other banks for misleading Fanny and Freddy on mortgages that they sold.

The problem is that Bank of America did the federal government a colossal favor when a former Savings and Loan and a brokerage were about to go under because of their horrible mortgage practices and Bank of America agreed to buy them both.

Bank of America was forced to take Countrywide and Merrill Lynch under great pressure from the Federal Reserve and the other banking agencies.  So those mortgage portfolios are now under B of A’s wing.

There was a long standing practice in banking, dating back to World War II. Large banks were always expected to buy or absorb smaller failing banks to protect the depositors and the FDIC.

This long history of good behavior in helping federal agencies is now being punished.  

Every banker is watching. Don’t expect them to be cooperative and bail out failed banks in the future.

 

Traveling Jewish Theater

 

This small theater group, from the S.F. Bay Area, is closing after 35 years. I take this as a good sign.

When the TJT was beginning my father and I were strong supporters. I believe my father was influenced in becoming a rabbi because he played a lead role in the Dybbuk when he was a student at UC Berkeley.  I loved the Dybbuk. He loved Jewish and YIddush theater.

We saw, in the first few plays of the TJT, the elements of mystical Jewish theater that makes the Dybukk such a powerful play.  

By the third or fourth play the TJT was performing plays that were based on self-hating Jewish views of the world. Their audiences were the people in the United States and Europe who believe that the problem with Palestinians is that Jews are not accommodating enough. Like blacks were never accomodating enough to the KKK.

The good news about the failure of the TJT to survive is that, hopefully, the community of self-hating Jews is getting smaller.  It may be getting smaller as more people understand the inherent, but tragic, unwavering Jew hatred by Jews.

 

The car and the tree

I have been listening to the US president and the White House regularly decrying the refusal of Tea Party members of Congress to accept tax increases.

The White House party line is that the members of Congress are uncooperative, highly partisan, children who are unwilling to consider compromise in the interests of the country.

Since the Tea Party members were elected to shrink government and not raise taxes there is no reason for the vitriolic White House language. Except to blame others for their incompetence.

That is the reason for my blog title. What we have is a car driving into a tree and the driver of the car ( Democrats) blaming the tree.

Self-hating blacks

There are only a few self hating blacks. There are millions of self hating Jews.

It is rare for a black person to wish ill upon other blacks. Many blacks would be happy to assimilate if their skin color were lighter.  The most prominent such person was Michael Jackson.

The reason I bring it up is because a simple analogy can explain why there are millions of self hating Jews, nearly all are affiliated with the Reform Jewish movement or not affiliated at all, and few such blacks.

Picture the following conversation in 1920: ‘We colored folk are the ones who are provoking good Southerners into joining the Ku Klux Klan. We should change our behavior and the Klan will leave us alone.’

What blacks would have to do to get the KKK to leave them alone would be for men walking on the street to look down when whites pass, for black men to never look at or associate with white women and for black women to be sexually subservient to white men.

You can see why there are very few self hating blacks. They clearly understand that accommodating white racism would accomplish nothing.

Jews on the other hand have many self hating coeval’s because they have a naïve view that all people are good at heart. Therefore the only reason Arabs hate Jews so much and have spent a century trying to kill them all is obviously because the Jews won’t change their behavior to accommodate Arabs.

 

Restaurants adjust to customers

 

In some ways this commercial observation, in the headline, is humorous.

I have been a consultant to many restaurants and been heavily involved in several. What I have observed is that restaurant menus and food changes often depend on the incoming flow of customers.  

One of the sad examples was a restaurant in North Beach, San Francisco, that opened to glowing reviews and, in my personal opinion, had a wonderful menu and exciting food.  Over time, I watched the chef pay attention to the food that was left on the plate as it returned to the kitchen.  The consequence was that the restaurant went straight downhill for a year until it was no longer a top destination restaurant.

What was happening was that people who were customers with refined taste buds would come to the restaurant with some of their friends and tourists would also go to restaurant because of the good reviews.  The people with refined tastes that could appreciate the chef's great work were only about one out of 10 or  one out of 15 people. The chef was looking at all of the plates, with unfinished food, that the non-appreciative people were leaving behind.  The chef was inadvertently targeting his food at the wrong audience. He dropped all of the interesting food, such as asparagus, artichokes, fried olives and esoteric sauces.

He ended up with only tourists and people with macaroni-n-cheese tastes. For those people pizza is sufficient and the restaurant could not compete with the successful pizzerias in the neighborhood.

Most top-flight restaurants pay attention to the chef’s palate and ignore customers who don’t appreciate it.

Other restaurants adjust to their customers and can put themselves on a downhill path.

 

Secrets of hacking

A few weeks ago I heard master hacker Kevin Mitnick on the radio talking about his hacking secrets.

I know that most of what he said is in fact the core of effective hacking. I was a friend of Capt. Crunch, John Draper, in the early 70’s and stayed in touch with him well into the 90’s.

Crunch was the most famous phone freak of his day and later transferred his skills to designing computer software.

I spent many hours listening to Crunch describe his exploits including many hacks into the FBI and the police who were constantly hounding him.  Crunch called most of his technology ‘social engineering’. A phrase also used by Mitnick. The reason is that much of the time he had to get access to telephone lines or computers by phoning someone in a key position and getting the information needed for access.

"Mary, this is Jim in accounting.  I know (your boss) Sam is on vacation, but before he left he said you would have the current password for his travel accounts.  Was it 45446?"  " No, its 45422."

That is precisely what Kevin Mitnick was suggesting is the secret to hacking.

 

Blogs Aug 16th to 31st

In this blog I try to identify the source of anger found on the left side of the political spectrum. I believe I am successful and have found the source more than 200 years ago.

This is one of the most important recent blogs.  I suggest that our society begin recognizing the importance and the fundamental contributions of business people in creating our contemporary society. I specifically cite a need for a public monument to San Francisco's greatest business people.

A quick review of the history of commerce and the way history is always the result of the current world view looking backwards.

A series of blogs that examine specific developments in the history of commerce that had significant impact in developing our contemporary cornucopia.  I begin with the cash register, a vital element in retail sales. Next is the commercialization of oil and its byproducts. 

The end of the 1950s saw two important changes in America. One was the end of manufacturer's price controls the other was changes to the immigration laws.

The answering machine in the late 70s, the rapid growth of UPS and FedEx and the widespread expansion of containerized cargo at the same time all reduced costs and stimulated commerce and new business startups.... wildly.

In the face of these bewildering and rapidly developing commercial stimuli, there are major parts of the world where nothing happens. I suggest a reason.