Pro Commerce

Parliament is the wrong model

 

After World War II, the United States imposed parliamentary governments on Japan and Germany. In both cases we also imposed a constitution.

These two creations of government were the work of the liberals of that day. I went to university in that era and listened to Herman Finer lecture on the superiority of a parliamentary system. I was completely absorbed in his arguments. I did not see the light of alternative day for another five years.

The simple fact is that our American system with three separate functions and the Constitution with ammendments is superior to parliamentary systems.

This is evident in Japan and Israel where parliamentary instability is distressingly the cause of governmental volatility. In neither of these countries nor in England or Germany is the public offered the unifying power of a president elected directly (please ignore the current president, so full of hate and venom, that he promotes class warfare).

The United States has the unique benefit of extreme long-term governmental stability because of the checks and balances ( sometimes called 'deadlock') provided by two houses of Congress and a separately elected president.

The existence of a genuine Supreme Court and Constitution also create a unique protection of democratic values that is vested in stasis dare.  The real power of such a constitution that explicates the defense of citizens is in the Bill of Rights and its amendments that play an additional unifying social role ( similar to the 10 Commandments and Torah for the 2500 year old success of Jewry ).

I know that a representative House will someday be created by random selection of members. The American model offers the unique advantage that the lower house will some day be the entity that will be reformed and will truly represent the people.

It is time for all of us to celebrate the fact that America is the best of all governments. Despite the fact that governments are the weakest creation of human beings especially in comparison to the world of commerce that we have also created.

 

Politics of union dominated elections

 

This is a follow on to the previous blog about unions creating zombies.

In San Francisco’s recent election there was only one issue. Putting a cap on government union benefits.  Therefore every government employee and their family members who live in San Francisco came out to vote.

Two propositions passed and one failed. The two that passed included one that turned city tax revenues that should be used for maintaining the streets into a bond.  That effectively turned operating funds into bond revenue at twice the cost of ordinary operating revenue. Leaving more money from direct tax revenue for union pensions.

The other was a measure to modestly restrain benefits for some union members. This measure was a palliative alternative to a serious measure that had come up previously. The palliative measure was a stalking horse for the serious measure.  The serious measure was easily defeated by union voters and the stalking horse won.

The proposition that failed was an effort to increase sales tax to support the bloated San Francisco city government ( San Francisco has three times the number of city government employees than San Jose which is a larger city).  Union members will find every way to increase tax revenues just so long as it never taxes them.

 

Original ideas- 2

 

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

2.  Money is language. Money is not A language like French. Money is language like human speech is language, like bees dancing is language, like birds singing and like deaf individuals signing are language.

Money is language. It has rules, it has grammar and it has a wide range of attributes. There is negative money (a parking ticket) and positive money. It can be used as an incentive and as a disincentive. It can be practiced as a great art or abused in a criminal or profane manner.

I wrote a book in 1974 (with co-author Sally Rasberry) that sold over 100,000 copies and was a bible in the hippie world.  The Seven Laws of Money are in fact laws of money. They can be broken only at personal expense in ways never before described. Laws five and six are that: money cannot be given away nor received as a gift. This is why foundations usually don't reflect the donor’s intent and why trust fund kids are usually a mess. (A fairly good summary of the Seven Laws is here).

The subject of money as language was a chapter in my 1990 book, Discourses. The grammar of money deals with accounting, honesty, reliable repayment of debts and understanding the context in which money is used.  Giving someone a dollar for a cup of coffee can be a generous act, and insult if it was someone's home, an ironic statement or gratitude.  The chapter is here.

 

Zombie movies are correct

The most frightening element about zombie movies is that zombies are relentless, hard to kill and they don’t understand why humans object to being eaten.

If those last three elements sound like modern unions, it is not an accident.

To be a member of the union you must give up your individuality (or pretend that you have given it up until your retirement) because unions are inherently opposed to meritocracy. Meritocracy is nothing more than recognition of individual uniqueness and accomplishment.

To be a union member you therefore become a zombie. Unions are creating zombies by always pushing for their goals of membership seniority and union power. Unions always choose to fire the most recent hires rather than lower wages among existing members. 

Zombie like perserverance too: As evidenced in Wisconsin and two other states. Unions will never give up no matter how serious the defeat in an election. Like zombies coming back again and again using their members money.

Government unions that give themselves far higher wages and benefits than non-government workers are even more extreme.

They don't understand. Like zombies unions absolutely fail to understand why taxpayers might object to this use of tax money to support a non-meritocratic system that pays more to bureaucrats than taxpayers earn.

This is an era in which zombie movies are thriving. I hope the day will come when zombie movies are not so frightening.  And when they aren't such a realistic representation of the world we live in.

 

Debit card charge

There was a recent flurry of articles and protests about debit card charges.

Bank of America, in response to new costs associated with debit cards because of the Dodd- Frank financial legislation, put a five dollar a month charge on debit cards.  Most other large banks followed suit.

When the brouhaha against the new charges reached a crescendo, the banks walked back their charge ( I love the political slang ‘walked back’).

This was a stupid act by Bank of America management in the first place.  Had I been a member of management I would have explained three things.  I would have explained the same things to the management of Netflix:

One:  Never use business fees or penalties to react to political issues. Never.  You will always antagonize somebody powerful, usually many somebodies.

Two:  Always announce fee increases and their reasons well in advance. Most people will accept new fees if they are warned in sufficient time to think that they have time to change their behavior. I have tested this many times and one of the success of the modern credit card business was due to my discovery that you never send credit cards to people until you have warned them it is coming and they can phone to refuse it.

Three: If you wish to apply a new charge to an existing service, connect the charge to usage functions in order to make it more palatable. For the debit card, the optimal charge would have been $.25 for every usage under $10 and $.10 for every usage over $10.  That would raise more money than the five dollars monthly charge.

In fact the banks will soon introduce the per use charge when the public is no longer paying attention and it is no longer a political issue.

Hanford reactor site

Just read this statement from the WSJ:

“The U.S. government has spent more than $34 billion over two decades at a nuclear-cleanup site in Hanford, Wash., a 586-square-mile site contaminated over four decades. Underground waste-storage containers there, thought to be impermeable, leaked. The cleanup is expected to take another 50 years and cost an additional $115 billion, according to the Department of Energy.”

I personally love technology, have great expectations about future technology and have at times been enthusiastic about nuclear power. I am an expert witness in the field of energy.

When I read the paragraph above, my business view of the world kicks in. It says that regardless of Harry Reid or the citizens of Nevada, safe storage of nuclear waste is not the issue. The issue is the cost of cleanup.

Walkscore.com

 

Why did you pick that particular house or apartment?

Hopefully a major issue in your selection is the neighborhood.

Again hopefully you looked at transportation and access elements.

If you are one of the many people who love cities, and one of the many people who enjoy walking, you are considering a neighborhood close to transportation and amenities within walking distance.

There is a website designed to make you a happy, informed person. It is walkscore.com

Walkscore evaluates every address for ease of walking to all important transportation and neighborhood amenities.

Very worthwhile to know about, especially if you are buying an apartment building or condo that you hope will be appealing to urban walkers.

 

Golden goose killer 2

Not so depressed now.

Friends at coffee pointed out that the Tea Party will control the House of Representatives for three more years.  The expenses of government will not be cut but they may be held in check.  Three years of no government growth is a blessing I can not ignore.

Whether the Tea Party can still be influencial in the 2012 election remains a fantasy for me, but not an impossibility.  The Tea Party is a unique flowering of the genius of America, the first such civil genius in history... but its endurance remains to be tested. 

Golden goose killer

I am depressed this morning.  

The first major effort at stopping the metastasis of the U.S. Federal government has failed.

From my perspective there is only one human force that has taken us out of the feudal world and that is industrial commerce.  

There is one force capable of destroying industrial commerce and the modern world: metastasizing government. The force that has never been stopped in human history.

The United States grew large and prosperous because we are surrounded by oceans and our government was very weak for 150 years.  We are still essentially a new country, but our government is metastasizing rapidly.  Thanks to the 2008 Congress with less popular support than the NAZI Party before the Reichstad fire.

The one other new country is Israel, which is equally rich (if overseas Israeli’s are included in the GNP)  But the youth who filled the streets of Tel Aviv a month ago want more government.

The two other fairly new governments are Germany and Japan, with semi-new governments in 1947.  Japan killed the golden goose with toxic Keynesian deficits in 1991 and has not grown in the 20 years since.  Germany is still alive thanks to its deep hatred of Keynesianism.

If you think government can’t stop commerce, visit Cuba, Tehran or Detroit.

The rise of industrial commerce was fortuitous.  We don’t really know how it happened.  But as a few of us are coming to understand, the metastasizing cancer of government can kill the modern world.  

Our grand children may have pretty much the material we have today but few choices to live creatively.

We have reason to be depressed today.

 

Local currency fallacy

 

There is a recently circulating document that supports an anarchistic hostility toward money. I give a reference to this fallacious argument, only reluctantly.

The anarchistic argument against money is essentially tribal. People act generously where money does not function.  

This is true and it highlights the genius of money and the nature of money.

We do not live in tribes where we are able to exchange goods and services among our family and peers. We live in a society where every single object, without exception, with no exception, is generated in the marketplace.

I have studied many tribes and visited many.  It is indeed true that they do not use money within their tribe if the tribe is small enough. They must use money, even in the form of cowry shells if they want any goods or services that the tribe cannot produce.

If we look at the contemporary world, everything is the byproduct of people cooperating because they can buy and sell using the medium of money.

Even the lemon on my desk is the byproduct of trade despite the fact that it was given to me as a gift by a friend. The seeds for the tree, much of the fertilizer, and all of the tools used in the creation and care for the lemon tree came from thousands of people around the world who cooperated via the money market. It was a gift to me, but it existed because of the cooperation of thousands of strangers, many of whom would not like each other at all.

I am particularly guilty of failing to understand the fallacy of local currency.  Back in the day when I had organized the Briarpatch network of businesses in the Bay Area, nearly 1000 members at one point, I proceeded to design and plan for a local Briarpatch currency that the members could use for intercourse.

I still have the paper in my closet. It was designed to be impossible to imitate. It was made in one small Japanese mountain village. It is a unique design of mulberry paper.

While this currency would have circulated among the thousand Briars, it would have been nothing more than a beautiful vanity object.  It would have been irrelevant to trade outside of the small circle.

Not surprisingly it would have been very profitable for me as the banker, because a large percentage of the currency in circulation would never be converted back into dollars.... Most of it would be saved as rare mementos.

Money was the first invention that took us on the road to global cooperation among people who don’t like each other and who will never meet, but whose skills are vital to each of us.

 

Original ideas- 1

 

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.(All twelve)


1.  I was the key founder of MasterCard (1967) which was itself the original source of the modern all-purpose credit card. Here is the history, with detailed references.

The unique idea that I began with and which has not been appreciated to this date is that a successful new financial instrument, in this case the general purpose consumer credit card, must not be proprietary. The original general purpose credit card was created by Bank of America (BankAmericard), only available through Bank of America or its affiliated banks. When MasterCard was emerging as a card that any bank could offer to its customers, Bank of America changed its vehicle to the modern Visa card, open to all bank customers.

Moreover, at an early date in the introduction of the modern credit card, I realize that no national government could play a role in the ownership or operation of the credit card if it were to have a useful global function.  I successfully pushed for international open transactions without governments playing a role.

I believe that these Insights remain applicable to all commerce and are now understood in the open source software world.

 

Silverfish, spiders and slugs

 

Trade related hostility.

I try to keep my blogs related to business but this is an observation that is somewhat incidental.

People in specific trades have specific hostilities.

The three I have in mind are silverfish, spiders and slugs.

Museum curators, weavers and people in the natural fiber world have an hostility toward silverfish, small wingless insects, that lay eggs in natural fabrics, particularly in wool.  They actually eat fiber where they are born.

Maids, cleaners and estate sales people have a hostility to spiders, a frequent source of extra work for them.  Spider webs are often a sign of careless workmanship.

Gardeners and landscape architects have a significant hostility to slugs, a mollusk that is very fond of domestic gardens. I’ve seen gardeners throw slugs into the air and say “I hope you can fly.”

Feel free to add to the list of trade specific hostilities.

 

Medical apps and lawsuits

There are a vast number of personal health items for sale in Japan that are not for sale in the United States.

In Japan, you can buy complex mechanical foot massagers, back massagers of every kind, and many ingenious exercise tools for stimulation and stretching. None of these are available in the United States.

One of my favorite American exercise devices was a pseudo-boot that allowed me to hang upside down and stretch as well as do stomach crunches.  It was a simple device that fit on my ankles and had no moving parts.

The manufacturer was sued about six months after the product came on the market. The product was taken off the market immediately, simply because the cost of a lawsuit would have been astronomic for the manufacturer.  Nobody could be hurt by the device except by their own stupid misuse of it.

Because American lawsuits are so easy to bring and so expensive to defend, only the largest corporations can introduce new health and exercise related products and even then they make sure that the most aggressive idiot cannot hurt themselves.

 

Don't expect medical apps on your smart phone.  The FDA will regulate those out of existence.   The currently available pulse measure app has no future.

Harvard humility

No. No.

The president of Harvard urged students at graduation to consider humility as a major learning experience at Harvard. The Dean of the Business School echoed that same sentiment.

For God’s sake, Harvard has the issue completely backwards.

I have dealt with three business circumstances where the Harvard name was taken as evidence that the person or persons involved were honest.

In the first instance one of the partners was a Harvard graduate himself who had recruited another Harvard graduate as a partner. The second partner turned out to pull a swindle of brilliant proportions intended to gain ownership of 100% of the company. He was humble but completely dishonest.

In two other instances a Japanese firm was buying an American business. Because the number one University in Japan graduates very competent and honest people, the Japanese had selected American lawyers for the buyout who were Harvard graduates.  They assumed that Harvard lawyers would be honest.

Never have I seen any companies so badly screwed in a buyout by their own lawyers.

Harvard does not need to teach humility. It needs to teach the importance of honesty.

People in politics and theater

Would you like to hear me say something rude?

A friend recently asked why I go to Tokyo annually and to Israel semi-annually. My answer was simple: that is where I find the most interesting people.

Which led me to think about where such people are in the United States.

There are two places where such people are not to be found. One is in politics and the other is in the movies and theater. I spent years in both domains.

It is rude to say a group of people are generally boring. Obviously there are intelligent and interesting people in politics, such as Paul Ryan and in entertainment such as David Mamet. But in general these are vast wastelands of people who are deeply engrossed in trite but necessary professions.

I went looking for interesting and intelligent people in the United States several times. To find them I created a public radio program called Social Thought. Here is a list of the people I interviewed.  They were nearly all in urban areas, a disproportionately large number were in the San Francisco Bay Area and in the Boston, New York and the DC corridor.

Tipping 25%

 

Last month a journalist, Ed Arnow, came up with a story that high-class San Francisco restaurants and waiters wanted a required 25% tip. The story went viral around the world. There was not a shred of evidence to support the story.

One of my wonderful readers asked my opinion about tipping.

Tipping is a left over artifact of slavery and servants. Any contemporary job that was held by slaves or servants is a job where we currently tip. Waiters, baggage carriers, parking valets, room clerks, hotel cleaning staff, pages, hairdressers and barbers.

Service occupations that did not exist in the days of slavery and servants are never tipped.  Gas station attendants, plumbers, electricians, doctors and dentists, the list is very long.

Don't expect any changes soon.  To require an end to tipping would need federal legislation and a comprehensive campaign to explain the reason for the change.

 

Disturbing wake-up call

Every head of government woke up this weekend with an intelligence report that must have been quite hard to interpret.
 
While the information is public it seems to be of no interest to the mediocre left wing minds in the American journalistic world.

It is reported in the Iranian media and picked up by the Jerusalem Post writers as well as the Debka intelligence insiders.

Two large Iranian military installations suffered severe damage from explosions. The installations are 45 min. from Tehran. In one instance an admitted Republican Guard general was killed, apparently involved in putting a warhead on a missile. In the other instance the fire burned for 14 hours because outsiders including ambulances were not allowed on the super secret base.

In addition to this the Iranian government has admitted that a new virus of the stuxnet variety is already collecting data about machine tool controls and sending the information to a computer in India.

The third report is of a murder of the son of an important Iranian top official in Dubai using the same homicidal technique, smothered in his sleep, that was used earlier by a foreign secret service and unknown to the Dubai police.

In general it looks to me like the Israelis have very effective tools for delaying an attack on Iran until there is an American president who has common interests with Israel and cajones.

Harassment for contributions

So Federal District judge Morrison England Jr. has told all of us who made contributions to political campaigns to go fuck ourselves.

What happened?

In the November 2008 election in California there was a proposition to ban gay marriage. The proposition passed and members of the gay community, in their fury, started punishing people who had made contributions to the proposition. There were many people punished in many ways.

In one instance, a personal friend of mine who is a single, elderly, woman, living alone received several life-threatening harassment calls because of her contribution to the proposition. She was frightened.

California law requires that contributions be accompanied by the name, address and phone number of the donor. That was the source of information for all of the harassing phone calls and other threats.

Judge England Jr. has argued that such harassing behavior does not justify keeping donor information secret.  He argues that threatening illegal behavior should be handled by local law enforcement.

So judge England is really saying "fuck yourself".  

I no longer contribute to any political campaign, and when asked I always demand that the law requiring my name, address and phone number be changed.

San Francisco assessors office

I will give you the background but first let me assure you that incompetence is not the reason that the San Francisco property assessor's office behaves the way it does.

First, every year I have to fill out the same form to get a senior discount on my property tax.  There is no reason for this annual wastefulness. If my status ever changed, I found the fountain of youth, or died, my status would be communicated to the assessors office automatically.

Second, when a property owner applies to lower the assessment on their property, where the property value has fallen, there is an 18 month delay before the new assessment is applied. The re-assessed value then only lasts for one year. The property reverts to its higher assessed value automatically.

Thus the assessors office is getting a cascade of increasing re-assessment appeals. The whole process is burdensome, growing exponentially and unnecessary.

To assume the assessors office is just incompetent is a mistake. The assessors office, for 90 years or more, has been corrupt.

In the early 1960’s I formed a group called Research in Politics and invited guest speakers. Being a naïve San Franciscan I asked a visiting Chicago political science professor if he was impressed with the lack of corruption in San Francisco.

He said that an absence of corruption in local politics was not possible, the corruption must be well hidden. He put a group of students to work on the issue and returned with a talk six months later.

He found, in 1964, that there were 14 hat check girls at the leading restaurants. The 14 hat check girls worked for the assessor. Big landowners who wanted favorable assessments would give cash to one of the 14 hat check girls who would deliver it to the assessor.

Years later when a state attorney general began investigating local assessors many were found to be corrupt and were sent to jail.

In San Francisco, our assessor, Russ Wolden,  was also found guilty and sent to jail but the news was only three column inches in the newspapers and 30 seconds on the TV news.

I looked up the assessments of the newspapers and TV stations and they were preposterously low.

So the beginning of this blog is not really about incompetence in the assessors office. We can be sure it is a reflection of modern day corruption.

Babbo

 

The news yesterday mentioned Mario Batali, the chef-owner of Babbo restaurant in New York.

He compared Wall Street bankers to Hitler and Stalin in several prominent publications. His restaurant is one of the top in New York, very expensive, and popular among the rich financial set.

Many years ago, after Ruth Reichl left the New York Times and became editor of Gourmet Magazine, she wrote a column listing her four secret favorite New York restaurants.  Babbo was one of them so I tried it on my next trip to New York. It was the only one of the four that I considered equal to the top ranks of San Francisco restaurants.

Now the question is, whether New York bankers care that a business person has insulted them, and they care where they go for a fancy meal.  If both of these are true it is possible that the restaurant, despite an apology, may lose business.

I would personally like to see Batali punished for his hostile and self loathing ideology.

In my experience, most consumers would happily buy what they want from Hitler himself unless he had killed a member of their family. Just one more positive and negative amoral attribute of commerce.

 

Allia and Oyaki

I have always had artists as clients. I have actually had a few famous and several great artists as my clients. These artists have been in many fields from music to fabric.

There is one simple inalienable rule for artists: an artist is not a business person. An artist must be guided by a businessperson either in the family or by marriage so that complete trust is possible.

The reason is straightforward. A businessperson will always have the upper hand in our society, therefore the businessperson must be acting in the interests of the artist.

I have never found an exception, never.

An artist client, Allia, once called me and claimed she had a perfect counter example: the famous Japanese designer and fiber master Oyaki san. I had no answer; as far as I knew Oyaki san was his own business manager and a great artist.  Could I be wrong?

A year or two later I was sitting with two friends in Tokyo when the wife, who is a great businessperson and runs her own corporation, got up to answer the phone. Her husband begged her pardon and said "She will be on the phone for an hour. Every day she gives business advice to her lifelong friend Oyaki san."  

So that is how an artist and a businessperson have combined to fulfill my core business advice to artists.

Neither of the names I used are real.

Do you trust science?

I really wonder if my grandchildren should be taught science in school. I know that they shouldn't be taught about sex because public schools have sex all wrong. The following two articles are what raise my doubts about science. (Of course the total conquest of our public schools by the Al Gore fantasy of  human caused global warming long ago raised my doubts about teaching science in public schools.)

The first article attracts attention because of a beautiful graphic. The article in the research underlying it suggests that a small group of businesses, on a world scale, are closely interconnected and have a malicious hierarchy that puts a few of them on the very top in control of the rest.

The graphic and the list of businesses comes out of a scientific research agency that seems to focus on what they call complexity.

Ostensibly the connection among all of our global businesses, with malicious intent, is based on mutual stock ownership.

When you look at the list and look at the institutions at the top you are either an idiot, a scientist, or a lefty ideologue.

The businesses at the top that seem to have a global equity interest in controlling everyone else are banks and investment company's.

Hey you idiots out there, owning stock in a company is what banks and investment companies do. They rarely exercise any influence whatsoever on the companies they own shares in. In maybe, one out of the million shareholding transactions the shareholder tries to have an influence on the company. These one out of 1 million instances tend to be state employment pension funds, acting on behalf of unions.

The second example is from an experiment that got worldwide media attention suggesting that neutrinos from Switzerland travelled faster than the speed of light on a recent visit to Italy. The scientists involved were very decent and offered their raw data to hundreds of other scientists.

Weeks later the problem with the experiment was uncovered and published in an online physics journal.  Barely covered by the media, the article explains the anomaly in the first Italian result.

The problem was that the researchers in Italy and the hundreds of others around the world who reviewed the data didn't know elementary quantum mechanics nor the history of physics.  As we are reminded by the scientist in Holland "Michelson and Morley showed that an interference pattern is reference-frame independent"

In other words, the neutrinos were not exceeding the speed of light from the reference frame of a satellite clock moving at 18,000 mph.

Should we really trust public schools to teach science? They seem to do a worse job on science than they do on sex.

Truly great fun

Can schadenfreud be truly great fun?

Schadenfreude is a wonderful and unique German word that means rollicking fun watching someone else suffer.

In this case, watching the president of the United States, a man I consider to be arrogant, generally incompetent and particularly mean, suffering from choices he has made.  It is indeed fun.

Obama has chosen to ally his political fortunes with the environmental movement, labor unions and his own campaign of class warfare based on blaming rich people for high unemployment.

Now he has thousands of people protesting and hopefully living in the park across the street from his home, the White House.

The protesters are environmentalists who object to a secondary oil pipeline from Canada. The allies who want the jobs that will be created from a new pipeline are the unions who give Obama more money than any other category of donor, and provide him with more campaign workers than any other political group.

To add to this melange of schadenfreude that we fans of domestic energy and opponents of class warfare can enjoy is the Democratic Party support for the left wing-anarchist-campers (flea party) in many public urban spaces.

There's more fun.

The unions, which have been losing favor for decades carried out criminal activity in Wisconsin and were not punished.  The left wing-anarchists-campers are similarly criminal and not punished.

Democracy does not flourish when crime is unabated. The American public does not like what they see and does not consider it part of public discourse.

Watching Democratic mayors promote and tolerate crime because they like the criminal's message is part of the fun we get to enjoy… knowing that the public is hostile.  And the media blithely reports the story as though it is not funny.

Herman needs his sea legs

Running for president as a black conservative requires sea legs. Journalists are usually racist Democrats and you will have a particularly rocky campaign. 

Herman, there is a way to be aggressive and successful in dealing with the recent bimbo outbreak.

This is what I recommend you say: 'I am a champion of women's rights and always willing to defend a woman against any aggression. The few women who use sexual harassment laws to make money, to gain attention, to blackmail are doing great harm to the many real women who are raped and brutalized.

'As a man, as a candidate and as president I will defend all women against rape and brutalization.

'I consider it offensive that a few women miss use the law and impugn the the needs of real women to be defended against actual sexual threats.'

I gave advice to Martha Stewart before her lawyers, too smart by a half, told her she could win her case. If she heard my advice, she didn't take it. Herman I hope you get my advice and take it.

 

Pickets do harm

It is hard for me to say this, but the unions in San Francisco, in particular, are seriously evil.

This picture does not tell the story. These people appear to be picketing a retail mattress store.

None of this is true.

This is not a picket line of employees complaining about employment conditions. These are people paid by a local union to picket.

The business they are picketing has a retail store on the first floor to sell mattresses that are made on the second and third floor and in other locations. The retail and manufacturing business, McRoskey, has been in business for 112 years.

The mattress business has been growing recently as its sales expand with an expanding interest on the part of Americans in their sleep and as they have good experiences sleeping in hotels.

The increased number of employees at McRoskey’s is what triggered the attention of a local union. There has been no interest among employees in unionization in 112 years.

This just infuriates me.

Build a local business that is successful enough to last more than a century and then find that some left wing union activists.....  claim to know what your employees need.  And they try to hurt your business by driving away customers.

 

SwissArmy smart phone

 

I love my smart phone.

I have an android that allows me to talk into the phone .... and then see the usually accurate transcription.

It does a number of things that I find useful. I am very grateful and unreasonably possessive.

Simply looking at my attitudes toward my smart phone, I jokingly said it has everything, it is the modern version of my old Swiss Army knife.

That led  me to create the image on this page.

 

 

Black stereotypes

 

I spent 11 years as business manager of a black church.

There is a prevailing stereotype that American blacks are not capable of simple arithmatic.

It is the nature of stereotypes that they are often accurate in describing 60 to 90% of the population being categorized. Sometimes stereotypes are positive other times, not so.

In my experience, with hundreds of close friendships with American blacks, the stereotype was disproportionately accurate.  

I learned early on the job that black peers and audiences could not follow a numerical presentation. It would have been easy to manipulate this fact. I didn't. I found other ways to present the numeric data. Usually in the form of a story like the Uncle Remus stories.

I bring this up simply because it is unfortunate that we have a president who seems to have the black arithmatic failure implicit in this stereotype.

President Obama, has been corrected, but fails to understand simple numbers. He has been told many times that the upper most part of our taxpaying population pays a larger percent of their income in taxes than the middle class. He doesn't understand.

 

Sorry transfer folks

Sorry transfer folks... no measurable impact.  (People transferring their accounts from banks to credit unions.)

I was responsible for measuring the impact of an anti-bank action regarding the Vietnam War at Bank of America, in 1966, by a much bigger and more cohesive movement than Occupy-Transfer.

With 50 million deposit accounts, back then, and 200,000 new and closed accounts a week I couldn’t find any effect.  

Today the major banks open and close 2-3 million accounts a week.

Imagine the impossibility of measuring the wimpy Occupy-Transfer campaign organized for yesterday.

Impossible.

 

Samantha’s war

You may have wondered about the United States sending 100 troops to Central Africa?

Two things you should probably know. One is that Democrat Woodrow Wilson had a propensity to start wars. He started 14 wars. Our current president seems to be an heir to that Democrat tradition.

Secondly, you probably didn't read Samantha Power's 2003 book on genocide. I did. At the time I was incensed at her absurd position.

Samantha took the Harvard arrogant position that the United States could stop genocide by placing a small contingent of troops in the way of genocidal forces. But being from Harvard she was opposed to every other form of military action and strongly opposed the Iraqi invasion.

This woman now gets to play with the lives of American soldiers in her fantasy of sending a few troops to stop genocidal tribal warfare.

Her ivory tower theory is wrong.  Tribal people are capable of using a wide range of guerrilla tactics and they will either destroy us on the ground or suck us into a Vietnam or Somalia type of conflagration.

This president is susceptible to advice from elite, arrogant, Harvard snobs, for obvious reasons.

Global war on business

I make notes on my phone about future blogs. This title was just such a note. I planned to write on the subject after I saw the consequences of the Occupy Wall Street global expansion.

It turns out that the summertime venom against commerce that has been pouring out of President Obama's mouth took form only among the tiny number of rabble-rousers in America. It spread globally for a few weeks but promptly evaporated.

It is now time for all of us to celebrate.  The world must have learned from the 20th century that commerce is the wave of prosperity and the only future.

We may be stuck with an anti-commerce venom spewing president but we now know that the world is not anti-commerce.  The flag of commercial hate was not raised around the world.

Three cheers.

As a footnote it is also worth observing that the focus on Wall Street, the very wealthy and Jew hate did not resonate anywhere else.  The cluster of these three, a Jeffersonian montage, is very American.  For the first time I can say, fortunately.

Ranked choice voting strategy

 

I wrote a letter to the editors of both local newspapers on this subject.  This is the gist:

In the San Francisco Mayor’s race, next week, where the first round leader may not get 51%, your ballot can get two votes in the second round if your 1st choice is one of the bottom candidates and your 2nd and 3rd choices are your preferred candidates.  (The bottom two mayoral cadidates, out of 16 choices, are pretty obvious)

The way ranked choice voting works, when the bottom rung candidates are eliminated after the first round of counting their accompanying 2nd and 3rd choices are distributed to the remaining top vote getters.

The consequence is that an optimum strategy, if the first place vote-getter will not win, is to cast your first choice vote for the certain loser.

Interesting.

Frankly, a random selection of politicians would always be better than the 'select the most egomaniacal' approach we currently use.

Ranked choice has demonstrably introduced two new problems. It is not supposed to make candidates more vicious. But it has instead directed campaign malice at the leading candidate on behalf of the rest.

And once a ranked choice second or third placed person is elected there is a greater chance the public will feel confident in recalling that person.