Pro Commerce

Make Gaza smaller

Since the Palestinians seem to lack logical skill, I recommend that the warfare Gaza is waging against Israel be used to teach the Palestinians some simple logic.

Israel should take one kilometer off of Northern Gaza each time Gaza begins warfare against Israel.  

As Gaza gets smaller and no Israeli lives are risked in the process, even Palestinians will understand the point.

The more Palestinians wage war, the less land they have.

Geothermal problems

In the past few days there has been a flurry of articles about the vast underground availability of geothermal energy.

This is a subject I know well.  I almost bought some drilling equipment because the area around San Francisco would allow geothermal wells at only a few hundred feet of depth.  I was thinking in terms of hot springs.  Due diligence saved my investment.

From the point of view of hot springs, I spent plenty of time checking on the issue in Japan. What comes out of the ground is so potent that the well pipes corrode and clog so badly they must be replaced every two years. Nothing has worked to stop the corrosion and clogging. Everything has been tried from gold lining the pipes to Teflon.

From a commercial point of view, the toxic outflow from the a geothermal well is expensive to dispose of. Even worse, the source of water that becomes steam in the underground magma, is never understood and for large commercial operations is never reliable. New wells have to be dug constantly just to find the combination of high water flow and magma.

Don’t take the current geothermal fantasy seriously.

Unemployment data over time

 

Unemployment data seems to have a different meaning to me

As I’ve explained in an earlier blog, no amount of unemployment is likely to have an election consequence because the excess unemployed are Democrats to begin with. They can't connect the Democrat's anti-commerce policies to their personal misery.

There are four factors that have not entered our thinking about unemployment.  All four reduce the amount of concern that thinking people should have on this issue.

First, most of my readers are educated or self-employed. The unemployment rate in our population is nil (under 2%, just people changing jobs).

Second, there is virtually no unemployment in rural areas because farming has become so incredibly profitable in the past few years and road building has taken up the slack from declining  residential home construction.

Third, since 1960 the proportion of families or family units that have two or more jobs has grown from nearly zero to almost half the population.  That allows a large part of our population to choose to stay out of the labor market.  That movement out of the working population has been happening to roughly 6,000,000 new people in the past three years.

Fourth,  Unemployment insurance is relatively high for a person who has another wage earner in a family unit. The high level of unemployment insurance may lead unemployment survey respondents to say they have been looking for a job when in fact the jobs they look for were not appropriate to their taste. For many people, a job is optional.

Since I hang out with mostly educated people and self-employed people these days I don't actually have a sense of the people who can’t find jobs. I do have sympathy for them except for the fact that nearly all are Democrats and vote to continue their unemployed status.

 

Mimimum wage and

My favorite economist has posted some recent data on the minimum wage. The summary is:

• The percentage of part-time workers paid at or below the minimum wage rose from 5 to 14 percent.
• The percentage of teenage workers paid at or below the minimum wage rose from 7 to 25 percent
• (comparing 2007 to 2010 with a rise from $5.15 to $7.25 at the beginning.)

This should tell you one thing very clearly: the minimum wage is keeping a large number of people, especially young people who comprise the bulk of the unemployed population, unemployed.

Don't count on the Democratic Congress or the Democratic president ( who has trouble with numbers to begin with) to change the minimum wage to improve employment conditions.

While we are on this subject, I was in San Francisco in the early 90s  when my clients could not hire any body because the labor market was so tight. Small businesses were often forced to hire employees who were relatives and retirees in those circumstances.

This is a reality again, it is pervasive among the businesses I currently deal with.  Yet the unemployment data for San Francisco registers 9% unemployment. Most businesses can not find people to fill job opennings.

I cannot explain this phenomenon.

Words in English

Time to stop arguing.

There is a new computer tool called a Google n-gram that surveys Google's million online books in English to find the frequency of occurrence of a word or words.

This is one example where I compare the word sympathy to the word compassion starting in 1850 and running to 1995.

The two words are different. Sympathy relates to someone who would be standing in our shoes or we in their shoes. And puppies and baby harp seals. Compassion deals with all forms of life for which we would not have sympathy, such as mosquitoes or vultures.

I set the n-gram to end in 1995. From many uses I have found the Google book sample to be weird from that point on.

I love the n-gram, I trust my readers will too.

Linear algebra and medical diagnosis

 

Don't worry, I'm not about to teach a math course.

I recently saw an article about a device to evaluate spots on the skin to determine whether they are melanoma. The device was ostensibly accurate to 95%. That is better than most human experts.

This is clearly an empirical machine. As I wrote in a blog in 2007, we cannot expect government funding for empirical machines that can diagnose disease.

However we can expect the commercial market to be flooded with such machines, thank goodness for commerce.

The way the machines work is to use linear algebra. Linear algebra consists of a matrix, with columns and rows. The math allows the columns  to be compressed to one column, and the one column to be compressed to one number.  If the rows are some measure of the skin spot and the columns some ranking of melanoma risk based on biopsies, then each final compressed number is a probability of melanoma.

A large sample of such compressed numbers can be compared to the real world, by a machine, and the machine will give a probability that a spot on the skin is a melanoma.

Three cheers for linear algebra and three cheers for empirical machines for medical diagnosis.

 

Containers

 

I recently saw an exhibition of container built homes and commercial spaces. The exhibition was in an architectural gallery.

It reminded me that I had bought two 20 foot shipping containers in 1977.  I used one for storage and the other I cut a window on one long side and used tatami to make a floor for a tea house. While the container was in a large parking lot, I nevertheless created a very elegant garden at the entrance to the tea house.

I invited dozens of friends, and served tea for many hours in the early evening.

I had originally bought the shipping containers with the intention of building a hippie village on a series of barges in the San Francisco bay. I found on the positive side that there were lots underwater near the shore that could be bought. On the negative side the Coast Guard had no intention of letting a hippie village grow on the bay.

I neglected the containers and a few years later gave them to the parking lot owner. I have never told anyone why I lost interest in the containers.

The parking lot and containers were near a heavily black public housing neighborhood. One day I found the tea house container had been broken into and a few things stolen. There was pile of shit on one tatami.  

When a policeman came around to take a report he looked at the mess and said "that is very common, some burglars are shitters, they poop in the excitement of the burglary."

 

Third world tours

The issue of tours and their low-quality came out recently among my friends.  My friends had taken for granted that tours would be interesting.  Sorry, most tourists are not interesting people.

Of course there are superb tours available, everywhere, including walking tours in most urban areas.

I wrote a blog about eight years ago on the first interesting urban tour that I created and the subsequent flowering of the urban educational tour business.

The city of San Francisco has gotten far more interesting than it was in 1972 when I started the first interesting urban commercial tour. Part of this is because the city has become more interesting in retail as a byproduct of the hippie business explosion (also part of my creation) and the increased diversity in immigration.

The city has also become more interesting because the occupations that attract young people: HTML, design, Internet, games are all more demanding of creativity than the traditional financial and services occupations from an earlier era.

Tours should be getting more interesting.

 

Clubs and social climbing

 

My 38 year old daughter keeps asking me what happened to the social responsibility that seemed to prevail in generations that are older than she.

My explanation is twofold. First the core ingredients of social participation, a first step to social responsibility, were the political skills generated by social clubs in America. Something that makes the United States unique and was well documented by deTocqueville.

In the 1890s virtually every man was a member of one or more clubs and most women were members of at least one. By the 1950s this had declined to the point where a small percentage of either men or women were members of clubs. By clubs I mean Elks, Masonic orders, Odd Fellows or Junior League.

By the late 1960s, when I was in business, joining a club was of no importance. Therefore the training tools for social participation and active social responsibility were virtually gone.

This movement away from clubs should not overlook the simultaneous fact that women had previously been central to political social action and were entering the labor force in large numbers.

I hope I do not have to explain how membership in organizations generated political skills. These organizations were very hierarchical. People moved from being a door guard to president via 20 steps. In each step they learned how that office functioned and how to work with other people.

So where did the necessity to join the club disappear?

It is my thesis, that the disappearance of the hereditary upper class, by the end of the 1950's, removed a major driving force in middleclass club membership.

It was obvious to everyone that the hereditary upper class gained its power by its many interlocking exclusive clubs.

When the hereditary upper class disappeared, the mimicking behavior of the rest of society dropped the requirement for ordinary people to join clubs.

A two-step process. One.... clubs gave us political skills for expressing social responsibility. Two.. clubs were no longer aspirationally important when the clubish hereditary elite disappeared.

 

SFO enviros

When the cloud cover in San Francisco gets too thick, the air traffic flow gets slowed down and flight delays become very extensive. The delays are especially painful for all the people sitting on the floor at San Francisco airport.

This self induced misery is completely unnecessary. I wish there were a way to tell every person at the San Francisco airport and waiting in airports around the world that this delay is caused by environmentalists.

Each person should know that their personal distress and discomfort and delay are caused by environmentalists.

How?

The environmentalists have absolutely prohibited any land-fill in the San Francisco Bay for any purposes what so ever. Every so often an official committee is appointed to examine the reason San Francisco airport is in such a hopeless mess. And such a drag on the local economy.

The answer is always that the environmental community will not permit any airport expansion into the bay to create one more runway.  

When the cloud cover is heavy, airplanes must be spread further apart for safe landings. With a new runway more airplanes could be landed simultaneously. In fact the cloud layer would not slow down traffic at all.

Even an offer to replace the amount of landfill needed for one more runway with four times as much new Bay surface is not acceptable to environmentalists.  The extra land would come from commercial salt evaporation pond's and existing farmland on the Bay.  No trade.  No change.

I wish all those people could know their misery is created by environmentalists.

Belltown

There is a section of Seattle that was once a boring space used by nondescript businesses. That was followed by a wave of homeless on the street (1st Ave).

The area is near downtown and was slowly converted by tall condos, coffee shops, boutiques, furniture stores and upscale restaurants into a chic neighborhood.

Then the typical Lefty civil servants in Seattle, with the all-knowing wisdom of the Left, decided that the homeless and chic could coexist so they increased the number of public housing units and homeless-mentally-ill units in the area.

Two years ago the area was thriving. Today the area is dead and the chic restaurants have moved to the new chic areas.

The recent modest downturn in business in Seattle seemed to have had an impact on that tiny market of people who think a neighborhood filled with crazies is chic.

The small segment stopped going to Belltown and the neighborhood is now, again, mostly empty stores.

Data on business perceptions

I wrote an earlier blog on the relationship between business perceptions and the GDP.

I concluded that it was possible in an extreme situation, such as the 2008 financial crash, for a synchronization of perceptions to have a negative effect on the economy.

I definitely believe that the level of optimism in a society can have a positive effect on the economy and new business generation.

It turns out there is a set of data to correlate economic volatility to policy uncertainty. Although the data were created in order to support the thesis, the data is very impressive. I wrote this blog to make note of that database.

I also want to make my own point that I think real phenomenon in the world of commerce are far more important than perceptions ever can be.

Lefty dreams

I have seen a surprising number of articles and blogs by Lefties who think the Wall Street protesters are somehow an antidote to the Tea Party.

There are only two minor problems. First, the Tea Party was made up of mature Americans outraged about a core democratic idea.... that Congress had acted in a totally undemocratic despotic mode, that needed correction.  The Wall Street protesters on the other hand are the byproduct of President Obama whining for three months that he and the Democratic Party had not caused the current recession, blaming everything on everybody, including Wall Street.  The protesters are post adolescents angry at everything American. They express no core American values.  Just Jacobin hate, as I have pointed out before.

Second, the Tea Party was so distributed nationally that they brought more than 100 sympathizers to Congress in 2010, a year and a half after the Tea Party became active.

The Wall Street protesters are more likely to meet the fate of their peers, the Seattle WTO protesters. The Seattle group had the support of millions of dollars of Left organizing money, six months to organize, and the presence of 30,000 union members to join them on the streets.

History shows no impact of the Seattle WTO protests. No one elected to anything. Forgotten and irrelevant.

(Photo of Seattle downtown "occupiers".)

Seattle green loser

 

I was just in Seattle and learned about the August referendum.

For a decade, the waterfront freeway, which is an earthquake hazard has been debated. It was resolved in the form of a $2 billion tunnel, most of which will be paid for by the state and federal government.

The Seattle Mayor, Mike McGinn, has been trying to stop this consensus tunnel for several years. He is a Sierra Club green fanatic. His reason for opposition to the tunnel seems to be entirely an anti-car, pro-bike position.

The mayor put a referendum on the ballot for August 16th to stop the tunnel entirely.

While Seattle is among the most green towns on the planet the vote results were shocking. 58% of the voters supported the tunnel.

This gives me a positive feeling.  

The green voters of the greenest city are still rational. Hopefully in the future they will see how often green dreams are barriers to commerce and boots on the necks of the under class.

 

NYTimes and Jobs

The New York Times recently had a Reagan problem.

The New York Times hated President Reagan. When Reagan, died all of America went into mourning for a week. The New York Times was stuck with its own mean spirited position versus the American sentiment. The Times solve the problem by giving Reagan reduced coverage on the front page and wrote mixed descriptions of his history in its more in-depth series.

The New York Times had the same problem again with Steve Jobs. Even though Jobs had a liberal political bent he was mostly a conservative-hippie. His greatest offense, from the vantage point of the New York Times was his astounding success in business and the outpouring of grief by the American people.

You can see in this cover page of the New York Times how it handled its internal political conflict.

It matched the Jobs subject, which was full headlines throughout America, with the Obama generated business hating post adolescent crowd down on Wall Street.

Are the two subjects comparable?  The post adolescent business haters will have as much effect on history as the Seattle WTO protesters. None.

So the New York Times, with no perspective on history, blinded by its Lefty ideology, tries to diminish the importance of the first great hero of American business, with a story about post adolescent crybabies.

 

Cheney on SCUDs

Back when Sean Penn's friend, Saddam Hussein, was firing SCUD missiles at Israel during the first Gulf War, when Israel was not attacking Iraq, I was quite upset.

The United States gave Israel several batteries of Patriot missiles. Many of the Patriot missiles intercepted the SCUDs but most didn't.

I attributed the problem to the low quality of the Patriots. I was wrong.

In Dick Cheney's book In My Time he explains the problem. The Russian produced SCUDs were so poorly made that they fell apart during their descent and there was no way to intercept the many falling parts.  

That also explains the problem that Israel had with the Hezbollah rockets and the need for shelters.

Dick Cheney explains that the U.S. Army, very reluctantly, diverted resources to attack the SCUD launch sites and mobile launchers to keep Israel out of the war. We all knew at the time, that the coalition, which included Arab nations, would not tolerate Israel in the coalition.

 

Best blogs Oct. 2nd to 15th

I finally have proof that my two theories about why all city dwellers are Democrats and why nearly all such cities are incompetent.  Here is the proof.

This blog was one of the first in English to point out that Occupy Wall Street was president Obama's personal creation in his class war.

Japan is finally getting an anti-nuclear power movement of grassroots democratic proportions.

Extremely important observation: No national government in history has ever reduced its size except after a war. Governments are completely incompetent institutions.

I have finally identified the culture that is the source of modern commerce.

If you think that future cities will be more like Shanghai and Singapore, you are a winner. This is an important point to understand.

 

Businessweek and Left

I used to read Businessweek and finally gave it up in frustration.

There is a new version of Businessweek published by Bloomberg. I received my second sample copy a few days ago. I read the editorial and looked at a few articles.

The magazine still has the same failing. It pretends to be a business magazine with a Leftist bent.

That is sheer nonsense and creates cognitive dissonance.

Commerce is about meritocracy, free trade and the creative-destruction of markets. The Left is about unions, tariff barriers, government that grows forever and endless arrays of regulation on business.

Again, commerce and the Left are inherent cases of oil and water. Clearly the people who bought Businessweek don't understand this problem.

The Wall Street Journal has no such preposterous marriage of a competent cornucopia of business and the inefficient, seniority-based malice of government.

 

Business center

 

There was a time when shopping centers were the center of social life. That remains true in much of America.

There are now two individual businesses that also act as social centers.

This became evident to me earlier this year when the San Francisco Castro district was denied a permit for a new Trader Joe’s. The Castro district reached its peak as a gay social center about four or five years ago. It could have regained that importance with a local Trader Joe's. The reason is straightforward. The Castro district lost many gay residents as they moved to other areas of the city for lower rents and other conveniences. These emigrants would have returned on a regular basis and supported other local businesses had there been a Trader Joe's.

The same is true for the Apple stores. These are social centers and magnets for any neighborhood.  Walk past an Apple Store at any hour of the day.... look at the crowd. The Apple Store is a community center and people find ways and reasons to visit it.

From clusters of stores, shopping centers, being social centers we now have individual stores as social center's.

 

Future losers

 

When I think about the Left as exemplified by Obama's fans, the young rebels on Wall Street, who have no idea what they are complaining about, I think a little bit about the future.

For the past century and a half, the Left has argued that an Engels cycle of historic synthesis would bring the triumph of communism.  The Left are the angry heirs of Jacobin tyrannical fratricide.

The Engels theory was wrong and killed millions who live under those theoretically produced tyrannies.

If we just think 25 years into the future we can ask the simple question: will our world see more Shanghai's, Singapore's and Bangalore's or will we see more Havanas, Pyongyang's or Caracases?

The answer is pretty obvious. Those people who see more Havanas than Shanghai's are the losers.

They are simply losers to the future.

We who appreciate commerce and are supportive of commerce are the winners of history.

 

(photo: man at airport with NYTimes)

NCIS awards

You may already know that one TV program, NCIS, is by far the most successful TV program on the planet, based on viewership and gross revenue, over the past eight years.

You may also have put together two related facts. 

*NCIS has received virtually no prestigious drama or other important TV awards.

*NCIS is a program that glorifies the American military, a military police unit, and incidentally NCIS has a star (Ziva) who's backstory places her with the Israeli Mossad, in a positive light.

To put it simplistically: if you are conservative and have pro-conservative values as a TV producer you may make a fortune but never expect media elites to appreciate anything you do.

Things may be changing with the great national pride in Steve Jobs and before that Ronald Reagan.

 

Fibonacci

The subject of the last blog is related to comments and e-mails from my 'Old friend Charlie'.

Charlie has asked why I do not consider the origins of commerce to be located in Venice four centuries earlier (than the Dutch Republic) at the time of Fibonacci.

While Venice was indeed the capital of commerce for several centuries before and after 1250, and was definitely the origin point of double entry bookkeeping and bank deposit receipts, I do not consider these to have been the major (sine qua non) inventions of modern commerce.

Old friend Charlie points out that Fibonacci published the first book to explain multiplication in Venice. The book was widely distributed throughout Europe.

It may surprise my readers to know that even today there is little agreement about how we multiply. Of course, most of us use a calculator, but we still do some form of multiplication in our heads to verify the orders of magnitude. Most of us do not use the simplistic multiplication table that we learned in school nor do we use the complex addition system necessary for multiplying large numbers.  I personally use a few patterns such as 4, 7 and 12 squared, to multiply large numbers.

Fibonacci's book offered several alternatives for multiplication. Multiplication was indeed necessary for commerce. You could not calculate interest without it. Nor could most bills of lading be useful without it.

I do not under estimate the importance of Fibonacci and Venice to commerce but I feel that the institutions related to tax collection, bonds, corporations and equity markets are so vital for long distance and diverse commerce that they must be given priority. Additionally we see an explosion of commerce from Holland that is not evident in the Mediterranean around Venice.

Frisian origins of commerce

A few people spend a great deal of time thinking about the origins of commerce. I am one.

I have a place and a people that I suggest are the origins of commerce.

There was a significant explosion of commerce that began in the 1600's in the Dutch Republic and it transferred major institutions to England when Holland conquered England in 1687.

It remains important that modern commerce appears first in Holland, England, Denmark and northern Germany, and to this day these people (and their colonies) remain the major outcroppings of modern commerce.

Interestingly, all of these peoples come from one group of people who were recognizable in the Roman times as Frisians. For those of you who know history the Angles and Saxons who conquered England were Frisians. To this day the English language is most closely related to Frisian.  (Beowolf is a story of Frisians.)

I simply want to advance the thesis that the Frisian culture is the original culture of commerce for reasons that remain unknown to me. The actual explosion of modern commerce did not occur until the invention of many institutions in the Dutch Republic such as bonds, equity markets, global insurance, transferable partnerships, corporations and civil servants to collect taxes. But the inventors were Frisians.

Here is my thesis: the Frisians are the original culture of modern commerce.

Noisy boom boxes

The other day I heard a loud rap song coming from a car 50 feet away. Several of my friends commented on the offensive behavior of the car and driver.

So what is this about?

I can go back to my experience in the 1960s and early 1970's.

For nearly a decade, young black males and a few whites and Latino males walked around the street with boom boxes, large plastic devices to play radio music and tapes.  Usually at 90 decibels.  It seemed rude and mannerless.

Along came a miracle. The Sony tape player, about the size of a box of English cigarettes. Within less than a year noisy boom boxes disappeared and little earbuds appeared on the black males.

I would conclude from this 1970's transition that the boom boxes and the hundred dollar Sony players were simply a display of cool.

That is probably what is happening, now, with loud cars blaring music.

Never reduced the size of government

Just a simple question. Just a question that could reorient your world.

Has there ever been a national government in the world, in world history, that has reduced its expenditures except after a war?

I've asked many knowledgeable friends and everyone says there has never been such a government.

How is it possible that an institution as pervasive in the world for as long as recorded history, national government, has never reduced its expenditures?

I know that state governments are sometimes forced to reduce expenditures, for short periods, in rare instances.  They find every way to avoid reducing the size of government. They put people on reduced hours, they have workers take early retirement and they put recent new hires on temporary leave.

Can you believe it? No national government has ever reduced its size. Even Greece today after two years of near bankruptcy has not laid off one single government employee.

And there are people (the entire Left) who admire government.

Government only metastasizes.

Steve Jobs

I know that many readers will turn to me to hear about Steve Jobs.

First and most importantly I believe that Steve Jobs is the first American to get the true appreciation for his contributions to business. This is a landmark step forward for America and Americans. The business world has had many great geniuses who have contributed to the cornucopia of our lives. In the past none of them have been appreciated. In fact many such as Rockefeller, Carnegie and Gianni have been demonized.

Secondly, Steve Jobs embodied two of the most visible characteristics of commercial genius and absolutely no credit is given to either of these characteristics. Steve Jobs began his business career as a hippie selling illegal black boxes. The black box was a device to get free long distance phone calls.

True entrepreneurial geniuses begin with (a) the unbridled optimism that was part of the hippie ethic and (b) a distinct sense that consumers are far more important than the 'God damn law'. If they will pay for something you should supply it.

Thirdly Steve was fired by the bureaucrats in his own company and justifiably.  True entrepreneurial innovators can start a company but most often not run it. Steve Jobs used his time in the wastelands away from his company to learn management. An open and curious man, willing to learn.

Thank you Steve Jobs. And thank you for the lessons

Japan gets started

I have been an ecstatic fan of the American Tea Party. It is a unique flowering of American democracy.  It arose to confront the very anti-democratic Democrat Congress of 2008.

Since I spend a great deal of time in Japan and love the nation, I keep hoping that a grassroots democratic movement will arise.  The incumbent government was dishonest and less than competent in dealing with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown.  I have been waiting for a grassroots response.

It is finally beginning to happen as is evidenced in this newspaper report. This new demonstration against nuclear power has grown slowly and is totally independent of the baseline Hiroshima anti-nuclear movement.

It took a while to get underway because people had to deal with the issue of an alternative to nuclear in Japan. That alternative is natural gas and the alternative is not easy to understand.

Japan is not a democracy in any sense that we understand that word.  It has a Parliament but most of the members are the children of former members. There have been two party up risings in the past 20 years. Of no consequence.

For the past 500 years the tradition of oppressive government was rewarded with an agricultural uprising where the government accommodated the farmers, but killed the leader.

We are just beginning to see how a modern government handles an uprising.

 

Tiscornia

 

How does the mind work?

I wrote the following blog nearly 2 years ago. I put the name of the property owner in the story as Luigi.  In the two years since than my memory has been trying to remember the man's actual name. His name was Tiscornia.  I don't think we ever referred to him by his first name.

Because he died more than 40 years ago without any children, the nieces and nephews are part of a trust fund that still owns Bank of America property which is on a 99 lease. The trust is listed as a Corporation.

This is a cute story, so I will repeat it.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the early 1960s I was elected president of the San Francisco Young Republicans, a 4,000 member organization held together by the desire of young newly arrived single San Francisco women to meet men and vice versa.  Elected with me was a secretary, whom I didn't know, who turned out to be a beauty.  She was charming, sweet and truly innocent.  Something I had never encountered in a 22 year old beauty.  The reason turned out to be, that she had always previously been fat. After high school and the debutant ball of that era, she started seeing a shrink to lose weight.  It worked. 

She fell in love with the shrink and they had an affair.  When her parents found out they drove the shrink out of town and my secretary was left to mope in love-sick pain.  She lost a lot of weight and emerged as the swan.

We both ended up at the Bank of America.  Me starting the marketing research department, she as a secretary in the legal department.  At the time, the Bank was trying to buy property in the heart of San Francisco for a new headquarters.  I knew about it and knew about the completely unwilling owner of the main block the bank wanted.  The owner was an old miser named Luigi.  My gossip sources told me that he was also a lecher.  I went to an Executive VP in charge of the new building and suggested he send my Young Republican secretary to take notes at the meetings with Luigi.  The EVP later put me on the building committee in return for my brilliant suggestion.  The brand new interest in selling his land, on the part of Luigi, led to a final agreement (based not on a sale of land but a 99 year lease).  

The Bank of America building was and still is a major landmark in San Francisco.  My secretary married an English count within a year.

 

President starts class war

Is there anyone in the media or the blogosphere who knows what a class war looks like?

A class war begins with hundreds of unemployed student age youth milling around Wall Street with picket signs expressing hatred of the rich and refusing to move. It grows to thousands on weekends and spreads to other urban areas filled with angry youth.

That is what class war looks like at the beginning. Since there is no chance of this spreading, Americans don’t hate other Americans.... that is also what a class war in America looks like at the end.

Did our affirmative action president deliberately start a class war?  

For two months he has been blaming unemployment , our financial disaster and minimal economic growth on ‘millionaires, billionaires, Wall Street, hedge fund managers and people who fly in executive jets’.

That is a president deliberately trying to start a civil war. Our president should probably be tried for treason. The only problem is I fly coach class and the anger he tries to direct at executive jets gets my personal sympathy.

Imagine, the president of the United States successfully getting a class war started. He did.

The malice in his heart is inappropriate for any leader under any circumstances. He has blamed everyone and everything for domestic problems. Everyone and everything except the Democratic Party, himself, Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank the two men most responsible for allowing Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae to run a federal mortgage scheme out of control.

Embarrassing.  Very embarrassing.

 

AOL, Yahoo and Groupon

These three companies will be in the news quite a bit for quite a long time. They are failing.

There is one reason. They are all attached to a false view of the business world.

AOL and Yahoo have tried to survive on (banner) advertising.  I wrote a book with Sally Rasberry in the mid-1980s called Marketing without Advertising and pointed out that advertising does not work. There are only three exceptions: advertising communicates to a company’s employees however it’s a very expensive way to communicate, advertising can influence tourists who have no other reliable source of information and the same is true for advertising to children.

I do not consider Google click lines to be advertising. They are listings. Listings are information, such as the Yellow Pages, that is presented to you on the subject you are looking for.  Listings work, they are good business.

Because AOL and Yahoo are funded by (banner) advertising they will fail as more buyers of the advertising realize how irrelevant and how ineffective it is.

Groupon is a separate case.  Groupon allows groups of Internet people to get discounts from merchants who are making special offers to attract a group based on the marketing fallacy that discounts attract new customers.

Discounts attract people who want a discount. They have no interest in the product or merchant at the full market price. They will not return to the merchant unless the discount is offered again.

The discount is not the equivalent of a sample. Samples work for marketing for obvious reasons: people want to know what the product is about. They want to know without taking the risk of buying it.

The discount is not a sample, it is just a product or service at a price below the normal market price and appeals only to discount shoppers when there is a discount in force.

One city loves business

I have proof of my recent political theories.

I have advanced two important political theories in my recent blogs. One is the reason all cities are Democrat with rotten government (cities attract disgruntled youth) and two that the Republican party disappeared along with the hereditary upper class (the Republican party had the benefits of the influence of the clubs and organizations run by the hereditary upper class).

The city that proves my two theories is Salt Lake City.  Salt Lake City is a beautifully run city with the minimum of corruption, superb infrastructure, a great new intracity rail service, wonderful pro-home building zoning, great schools, great medical care and spectacular public swimming pools and other recreation facilities.

Salt Lake City is the only city in America that is pro-business. It is growing very rapidly for that reason. It has an highly educated population and has a religious ethic of hard work.

The City is slightly more Democrat than Republican, young and pro gay, with local elections that are non-partisan.  The City is one quarter Latino.  The urban area that surrounds Salt Lake City is heavily Republican.

The City is still run by the Mormon Church, much like the Old Republican party used to run other pro business city governments.

My theories are confirmed.

While the urban area is strongly Republican, the few Democrats concentrate in the city.  The city remains well run and pro-business because a proxy for the Old Republican Party, the Mormon church, remains very powerful in running the city.