Pro Commerce

Vacation homes not cathedrals

Cathedrals are built during periods of great prosperity. Grand Central Station in New York is an example so are the many new museums in modern Berlin.

In San Francisco we have several wonderful museums that grew out of the boom times of the 1990s. The city is filled with large buildings and great structures built during earlier boom periods.

Right now San Francisco is in another boom. Not unlike many earlier ones. This one sees the city as the center of the global Internet expansion.

We should be seeing massive amounts of imaginative construction of every sort from new airports to great universities and monumental buildings.

But we are not getting any and we will not get any because all the tax money, the surplus from the high prices of home sales, is going into the salaries, healthcare and retirement benefits of the unionized city employees. These people are swallowing up the prosperity of San Francisco in their own personal lives.

Most of these people are using their bountiful wealth to build country houses scattered throughout the hinterlands of California mountains and lakes. Their taste is zero so their architecture is trivial; domestic and insignificant.

Thanks to government unions this boom era will not be visible nor bring forth any social good.

Forbes top 400

I think it was smart of a group of Jews to put together the list of people who are actually Jews in the top 100 and 400 of America’s wealthiest people. The Jew haters will put their own list together. It is better to have an accurate list to discuss. Nothing will contradict the brain disease that I associate with Jew hate.

There are 43 Jews among the top wealthiest 100 Americans and 149 among the top 400.

What does this tell you? Jews comprise somewhere between 1% and 2% of the American population. Depending on your definition of a Jew.

It tells me the following key items: America is the first society without hereditary classes. That is why Jews have done so well in the free market.

It tells me that the headline of this blog that 'commerce and modernity are based on merit, diversity and openness' is the most appropriate understanding of the success of Jews in America.

The meritocracy that I ascribe to Jews is the merging of ordinary human talent with a love of commerce. That is automatically meritocratic.

Jews are also a very diverse population as evidenced by the melange of people in Israel. Its not just the diversity of the people, it is the fact that they can work together. The coherence of this people, my people, comes from a common and recognized history including a written history. The written history, Torah, acts very much like the American Constitution, as a social glue. Combine Torah and the American Constitution and you get superglue.

Lastly, Jews are notoriously open on the most important issue which is the debate of ideas and issues. Jews have a written history of debate and discussion dating back accurately for 2000 years. This is the most evident form of openness imaginable.

I attribute nothing to heredity.  I also recognize that groups can have distinct attributes and can have higher averages than other groups. I recognize this among the Japanese. Jews and Japanese inherit nothing distinct other than their culture.

The plus symbol

I am going to use the plus symbol for pro-commerce.

Commerce's  most prominent attribute is that it is a positive sum human behavior. When two or more people interact in a commercial environment, sell something to another, they are all enhanced.

Virtually no other human behavior patterns are positive sum activities which is why the world was fairly static for the previous few thousand years.

War is predominantly a negative game, land changes hands and people die. Government is only a re-distribution of power that is a zero sum game. Religion, unless there really is an afterlife, is a zero sum game. The justice system is a redistribution and negative sum game.  In so far as population is looked at over time, reproduction and the associated child rearing, love and marriage are a zero sum game. Population growth per se is not beneficial. I have my doubts about the value of education considering how long the world has gone with education and little improvement in life.

Education does play a special role because two millennia of Jewish education uniquely prepared Jews for the modern commercial world.

There are some other positive sum games like commerce. I would have to put insurance in that category. I would also put in technology when operating in a commercial environment as a positive sum game.

In general I think the + symbol is more appropriate to pro-commerce than to any other human endeavor. Don't hesitate to argue with me, please.

Cats eat people

I am not surprised that people love cats so much. I am occasionally surprised when people donate tens of millions of dollars to cat funds.  People need pets and cats can be quite anthropomorphic.... warm, cuddly and responsive.

However I think most people should quickly learn that cats are very different from humans.

The media, particularly television is keeping this fact from us.

If a cat or cats happen to be stuck in a room with their deceased owner, they will eat their deceased owner. That is not very anthropomorphic. That is not really the way loving people treat each other.

Fewer cats would inherit millions of dollars if that attribute were more widely known.

I count six television programs that have gone out of their way to overlook this cat-eats-owner phenomenon. There are five forensic mystery programs: two NCIS and three CSI.  There is also Bones.

Each of these programs should have had several cases where an owner was eaten by a domestic cat to cover up incriminating evidence. I have never seen such a program. Presumably the Humane Society pressure against such public knowledge is ferocious.

Just to let you know that cats have a limited degree of anthropomorphism that is justified.

Fame and my doctor in Tokyo

In the 1970s Stewart Brand and I frequently discussed the issue of fame and celebrity-hood.

Stewart chose fame and defended it because it made life easier when he wanted to contact and deal with important and prominent people. He was right. He never had trouble phoning a prominent person and getting directly through to that person.

I argued that anonymity was necessary and vital for me as a social organizer. I could not be known for taking credit for the work and organizing that I did. I had to distribute credit widely in order to get people to join with me in my organizing efforts.

There is an additional argument that I would add 40 years later. Having a life outside the spotlight has given me the option to think far outside the box of traditional mainstream concerns. Because I don't associate with many people who are important and overbearing I can let my thoughts wander and explore creatively. That is not an option for even a brilliant person who is famous.

There is an additional argument for Stewart. When I was in Tokyo a few weeks ago with shoulder pain I phoned my doctor in San Francisco who is a world famous traveling lecturer on internal medicine. He was worried that I might have had a heart attack so he sent me to a hospital where he teaches in Tokyo. The staff immediately recognized his name and treated me like royalty.  Complete check-up.  No heart problems.

Chalk that up for the value of fame. I benefited from my doctor’s fame.

Evolutionary biology and mud

While I was sitting near a playground in Tokyo, two things came together for me.

The playground happened to be a hippie dream. About 1 acre of dirt, some forming a hill and large quantities of rope and wood.  The rope was used for swings and high-wire lines stretched between trees. The wood was formed into benches and tables made by kids. The day I was there, there was plenty of mud and kids were sledding down the hill in the mud. There was a puddle with a rope and a tire over it.  The happiest kids were from age 3 to 10.

This kind of park is by far the most beloved by kids and the most hated by authority figures and governments.

Seeing, and remembering from every day of my life how much kids love mud and puddles I realized this is a core human attribute that must be in our genes.

While thinking about the mud issue,  I realized that I have never seen any evolutionary biologists mention this as a core human attribute.

I think very little of evolutionary biology and this is proof of position. Evolutionary biologists live in a fantasy world because there is no way for them to test or validate any of their hypotheses. We cannot observe behavior over millions of years even if there was only one ancestral species during that period.

So what can evolutionary biology be other than pure speculation. Another term for theology.

There is no evidence that humans ever lived a large part of their lives in mud. Then why do we love it so much?

Chemical worldview

There is one single question that dominates the conservative pro-commerce intellectual world: Why do Lefties have such a strong ideology that is not amenable to fact or data? How is such blindness possible among often intelligent people?

I read the works of many very intelligent and thoughtful people.  The question is incessant.

I am certain about one part. That once a mind has been shaped by age 23, it is hard-boiled, cast in concrete and for the rest of that person's life it won’t change.

The question then becomes how does one become a Lefty before age 23?

Again what I know is that the core of Leftism is paranoia. Fear of global warming, fear of Sarah Palin, George Bush, Fox news and Rush Limbaugh.  

My best source for understanding paranoia is a man I interviewed for public radio, Ronald Siegel at UCLA. His book on paranoia is here.

Siegel showed convincingly that paranoia is a physical phenomenon that is a result of a transmission from the medulla in the center of the brain to the cerebrum area immediately above it. Paranoia is a bio-chemical phenomena. It can begin at a point in life and it can end as well. Paranoia cannot be cured and it cannot be treated effectively.

Since I have known two real paranoids, both Lefties, who outgrew their paranoia I know this phenomenon is biochemical.

What remains to be understood by me or anyone else is how this small population of genuine paranoids can shape the thinking and worldview of entire generations before they reach age 23.

It helps that people who know they are dysfunctional are more likely to end up in academia or journalism. However the biochemical phenomenon may not be extensive enough to fill all of the liberal arts academic positions that exist.

What is running?

Is it obvious to you how people walk and run?

It is not so obvious to me. I notice that the very best robot, Asimo, does not walk very much like me, is not the best dancer (I’m not either) and certainly cannot run.

While Asimo has superb gyroscopic balance and instant servomotor corrections this does not seem to be the issue that permits human style walking and certainly not running.

I have loaded on the right a photo of a sculpture I made that I think reflects the spirit of running. The image incorporates many elements of chaos. I think that running involves essentially restraint-on-chaotic movement.  Some physiologists call running ‘controlled falling’.  I think it is far more chaotic.

I was a runner for 30 years, five days a week, without fail. I watched many runners and saw that their patterns and styles were seldom similar.

Put the genie back in the bottle

I have seen some writing lately on the question of whether the sexual revolution can be reversed. Sort of a counter revolution.

The answer is not obvious. There were two groups in the United States that pushed the sexual envelope. The hippies and the male gay community.

While we no longer have good sexual behavior surveys as we did from the 1950s era of Kinsey until Playboy magazine died, the existing survey data suggests that outside of dense urban areas the sexual revolution never went very far. Except for the adoption of oral sex on a fairly widespread basis I see the era of 2000 to 2010 having many of the same sexual behavior characteristics of the 1950s.  

The reason that a revolution can pretty much disappear is (1) the unfortunate lessons of the revolution can be quickly learned and (2) the revolution can be constrained to an age or demographic cohort.

The lessons that were learned in the 1960s sexual revolution is that open marriage is an oxymoron and free sex is not free. Either emotionally or micro organism-ly.

It also appears that the sexual revolution was not transmitted to people older or younger than the hippies and the gay community was a closed circle of sexual experimentation.

In the late 1880s and 1890s there was a similar hippie flowering of sexual freedom in the U.S. easily visible in the underclothing that has survived from that period.  Colorful and sexy.

That revolution was not communicated to the general population except in left-wing ideological circles where freelove remained a catchphrase.... but it was of little significance in behavior.

While the genie cannot be put back in the bottle we could have a phrase that: ‘genies seldom wander far from their bottle’.

Get rich the Lefty way

To think about business and riches from a Lefty perspective. That was my personal challenge. The following is what I concluded.

The way to get rich is (1) to go into banking and particularly to focus on opening banks in poor neighborhoods and in very poor countries. I know that all wealth must come from exploiting other people and uneducated minorities are the ideal people to exploit.

(2) I must focus on conducting my business in the poorest countries of Africa, South Asia and Latin America.  That is where people are begging to be exploited and are willing to work in factories for little pay and great productivity. They are almost standing at the docks begging me to take their natural resources, already pre-packaged.

(3) I must cheat, manipulate and oppress my workers because that is the most effective way to get rich. Employees must be paid the minimum I can offer and forced to work under the most difficult conditions.

(4) I must try to invest in monopoly businesses, such as public utilities, in order to extract maximum profit using government regulation, corruption and bribery.

If I do not get rich from following these time tested Lefty truths about business, it is because I have not bribed enough government employees. I will need more help from the government for me to get rich.

Mali?

The day has come. The world is too small.

My news media has been filled with stories about a coup in Mali. The problem with the size of the world is that even among the tens of millions of news reading fanatics only a few thousand have ever been to Mali and even fewer have the slightest notion what the news is about.

I have been to Mali. I spent several days in the capital, Bamako. I wrote about the Bamako zoo in an earlier blog. (The zoo was nearly empty.)

In my recollection, most of the streets in downtown Bamako were dirt and the only two-story building was a movie theater. We are talking about a town no bigger than a small Mexican farming village. The notable element in Bamako was that the military barracks were two blocks from the Capitol building. People pointed that out to me as a reason for the frequent coups.  

Personally I loved Mali and the people I spent time with. Fun, alive and hard working.

The news media has mentioned that the Tuareg have something to do with the coup.  The Tuaregs are a Bedouin like group of desert dwellers who periodically, over the past thousand years, (according to Ibn Battuta in 1350) move toward the Niger River and capture the nearby natives. That is where Bamako is.

I cannot conceive how this piece of ungodly trivia becomes global news. It is the closest thing to irrelevance that I can’t imagine. I can see a picture of man on a bench in southern France cutting his toe nails as being bigger news.

My guess is the Tuaregs recently increased their power because of the abundance of weapons being smuggled out of revolutionary Libya.

But it doesn’t matter.

Blacks and crime

I’ve been out of the country for some time and missed the onslaught of racial warfare out of Sanford Fla. I know the U.S. President urged racial warfare as he had in the past around Henry Gates and as he had encouraged class warfare. I further know that Nancy Pelosi supports wearing hoodies in Congress.

What I never saw in any of the recent racial warfare was the following statement that comes from a careful Pew study: "Black adults are four times as likely as whites and nearly 2.5 times as likely as Hispanics to be under correctional control. One in 11 black adults -- 9.2 percent -- was under correctional supervision at year-end 2007,"

We cannot discuss race in the United States until this simple fact is understood and openly acknowledged by all participants.

So long as a young black man actually poses a genuine threat that is disproportionate to the threat from anyone else in that age group then hoodies and black skin are going to be an accurate statement of danger: criminal danger: life threatening danger.

Most of the press and media sound like Al Sharpton and treat young black males as having no threat component associated with their skin color and behavior.

This kind of deliberate ignorance and ostrich imitation cannot be helpful to honest productive dialogue.

I’m glad that I am not black in America. I would be forced to live in the fantasy world where the media says my fellow young blacks are all innocent in the public eye.  

But I know they are dangerous to me and my family.

Is irony new?

I have great respect for David Gelernter who is the source in this article about changes in our language due to new technology.

I strongly disagree on this issue. Gelernter has objected to smiley faces and related icons. His argument is that they are not really part of language since they don't map to spoken words.

What has developed in many parts of the country and certainly in the language used on both coasts of the United States is the wild and rampant use of irony. In most of the United States and in most suburbs irony doesn’t exist.  Ordinary statements are generally direct and made at face value.

Irony on the other hand is a direct statement that is intended to convey the opposite meaning. The conveyance depends either on the obvious contrast to reality or on some vocal inflection. If I make a statement to a friend verbally, ‘I guess I am afraid to fly’ as a response to why I don't go from San Francisco to a party in New York that evening, the context or my voice will say that my response is ironic.

In writing it is much harder to convey irony. It is important that we find ways to convey irony because we use it frequently in daily life.

I suggest that the icons or emoticons are the beginning of a way to indicate that a word, phrase or sentence is ironic.

Bring it on. We need to be able to indicate when a written statement is ironic. It will give us greater flexibility in writing.

Palin, history, liberal arts

I have said many negative things about the mainstream media and their low level of intelligence.  I also want to add to this meme the thesis that liberal education may be an additional burden, thwarting the intelligence of that profession.

My liberal education, from a very early age, forced me to memorize a Paul Revere poem written by Longfellow. It turns out this brilliant effort on the part of liberal education to educate me was a gross mistake. The poem was particularly bad history. “One if by land, two if by sea?”

Sarah Palin was confronted by the media when she came out of a Paul Revere museum in Boston. She explained that Paul Revere told the Redcoats that they would not be able to take guns away from the Americans, a forerunner of the second amendment. Also that Paul Revere fired his gun to alert others and was focused on warning rebellious domestic leaders.

The entire American mainstream media, doing what it always does, said that Gov. Palin was wrong and stupid. Just stop for a moment and think about how preposterous the behavior of so many people must be for that behavior to occur. As you can tell from this NPR transcript a real historian confirmed that Sarah Palin was correct.

That is why I single out the liberal educational focus on Longfellow's historically inaccurate poem.  Left liberals think this poem is useful information for everyone.  It is really an example of why liberal education may be harmful. The inadequacy of the rest of the education of the news media seems to confirm my hypothesis.

I had a liberal 1950’s college education at the University of Chicago where I learned the details of the Federalist papers. I don't think that is part of any modern liberal education which now focuses on gender, race and clinically correct left-wing ideology.

 

Perverse outcome

The President of the United States told his State Department to stop the construction of an oil pipeline from Canada to a central oil hub in Oklahoma.

One of the side effects was to wipe out a large number of construction jobs in the U.S.. But that was a perverse side effect for the United States and a beneficial side effect for Canada.

In this article, the author points out that the oil flow from the United States is already moving north from Texas to the Midwest for processing and already moving from the northern plains along the same lines that the Keystone XL pipeline was planned. (Thanks to Alex)

The consequence is that Canada will not be wasting resources shipping oil or gas to an area that is already exporting both, the central U.S.,and will soon become a major global producer exporting in every direction.

Canada can now focus on the appropriate use of its resources which is to transport oil and gas to the Pacific for shipment to China and Japan.

What may have been good or bad policy in the United States turns out to have been very beneficial for Canada. 

Barack Obama may inadvertently be president of Canada.

Not voting self interest

I have a friend who is single, 45 years old and has a five-year-old daughter. Mary and all her friends vote Democratic.

Mary lives in the poorer section of a large California urban area because that is where she could afford to buy a home. She comes from a middle-class, well educated family. She went to a first-rate university and got her CPA license years later. She worked for a large CPA firm before venturing out to do her own work out of her house.

Mary earns between $60 and $80,000 a year. She pays roughly $600 a month for health insurance and $800 in taxes for Social Security. She also pays several thousand dollars a month in property taxes and her combined federal and state income taxes.

Mary knows that the Democrats have not voted to fix Social Security in the past five years. Social Security will be bankrupt before Mary collects. Mary and all her friends vote Democratic.

Mary knows that the Obamacare will not and cannot reduce her health care costs. Insurance based on actuarial costs for a person her age would be $90 a month. The rest of the insurance cost is for old people. Mary is middle-class and would never take her daughter or herself to public clinics which will be the alternative under Obama care. Mary and all her friends vote Democratic.

When Mary goes with her clients to IRS meetings she is confronted with an IRS agent who earns nearly twice as much as she does, has retirement benefits that exceed Mary’s current income, has lifetime health care and lifetime employment. Mary and all her friends vote Democratic.

Since Mary’s daughter was born she has paid over $1200 a month for part-time childcare so she can work during the day and will soon be paying even more for private schooling.  She cannot send her child to a public school since most are inadequate and dangerous.  Teachers unions, the most important supporters of the Democratic party, have stood in the way of school improvement for decades and in California are supporting more extreme progressive taxation on wealthy people which makes state tax revenue more volatile and schools more subject to severe cutbacks every time stock markets decline. Mary and all her friends vote Democratic.

The final blow, in my opinion, is that Mary has been, for professional reasons, expected to advise several of her clients to leave California because of their high tax liability. She lost those clients who also closed their small businesses because of California’s high personal income tax on high earners.  Mary and all her friends vote Democratic.

OWS and Rorschach

OWS stands for Occupy Wall Street.

I cannot believe our good luck. We have seen the most inventive political idea in a century.

The president of the United States called on young Lefty ideologues to fight his class war.

Thousands of young people around the country used public spaces to create hobo camps and create an amorphous unfocused political statement. Truly unusual, Vapid in the first degree.

While this group expressed no single idea or opinion they came up with a wonderful metaphor:  'We are the 99% against the rich 1%.'  It is just as meaningless as the inappropriate class war in America, the only society on the planet that doesn't have classes.

What I like most is that in the period since the OWSs were driven out of the public spaces they have re-configured into a wild array of political actions.

The OWS turns out to be a perfect Rorschach test of Lefty-ism. The Rorschach test is a psychological tool made up of random symeteric inkblots that is used to evaluate mental visions and perversions.

As we watch the OWS actions we learn what the Left is really about.  

* Lefty women put ideology first. When raped by a leftist they do not tell the police.

* Drugs and criminal behavior are comfortable companions for the Left.

* Homeless smelly dirty people are also comfortable companions for the Left.

* The Lefty politicians are so devoid of ideas and imagination that they project their values onto chaotic gatherings of young people who are protesting in abstract.

* The Lefty world consists of existing mainstream churches and union leaders who will join any movement they think is their ally.

* On the other hand unions do not want undisciplined young people interfering with union workers embarassingly high income.

* The Left is comfortable with property destruction by their own anarchist members.

* The Left desperately seeks to oppose all forms of business, banking, Federal banking, wealth and high wages for businesspeople but not athletes or lawyers.

* The Left tries to join any march whether it is LGBT, or Free Palestine but they are so incoherent other groups do not want them.

Put simply, the Left has no agenda and no coherent ideology for the 21st century after all their 'power to central government' ideologies failed in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Energy independence

The stupidity of relying on government vs natural gas and fracking.

Since the Nixon administration the United States government has been spending billions of dollars, hundreds of billions, to develop alternative energy sources to oil.

There is one simple lesson: the government is a useless entity for trying to create major innovations in technology. Yes I know about the DARPA, I used the first telephone connected computers. Yes I know about the Manhattan project. Yes I know about NASA.

Today, 40 years after the US government tried to develop alternative energy, we have the most dramatic success imaginable. The success comes from a commercially improved technology applied by businesses in their own field. It is called fracking and has generated the most extraordinary discoveries of oil and gas ever imagined. As Boone Pickens points out, his natural gas automobile runs at a dollar a gallon compared to four dollars a gallon for traditional gasoline.

We don't seem to have learned the lesson that rewarding people or businesses for accomplishing technological innovation is the correct way and the best way and the cheapest way to get new and better technology.

Obama speech to U. Chicago Law Faculty

 

My friend Bookie found this private speech to the U. of Chicago Law Faculty:

My fellow Law Faculty members, I’m proud to come here before you and to tell you what I’ve done so far as President and what I plan to do if you elect me again.  On the economic front, I’ve increased America’s debt more than any other president in history.  I’m proud of that, and I hope to beat my own record in my second term. Working with a compliant Congress, I’ve also put into place policies, including ObamaCare, that ensure frightened employers who will not hire, a stagnant economy, and a shrinking labor force.

Miyake and Penn

I saw an exhibit of the combined work of Issay Miyake the world’s greatest clothing designer and Irving Penn one of the greatest photographers. It was in a modern and elegant museum designed by Masahashi Ando.

I came out of the exhibition with a very different perspective. That is a sign of a good exhibition.

What I concluded is that modern architecture, the most imaginative clothing designer and a great photographer are part of a dying mode of style.

I say this because I feel more comfortable and more vital in a remodeled warehouse or old building, wearing clothing that is a weird construction of my own personal choices for that day. The photographs I take with my smart phone are the ones that I enjoy most.

I do not think I'm alone. I think I am actually reading the direction of the contemporary world.

Japanese engineering degree

The importance of drawing lessons from our own era. The Left never looked at the failures of the Left in the 20th century.

There is a failure in the past 25 years that should not be ignored.

The San Francisco Bay had an earthquake in 1989 of magnitude 7.1 Richter near Santa Cruz, roughly 100 miles from the center of the Bay. The earthquake shook for a few seconds.  A bridge fell down, a freeway fell down, hundreds of houses collapsed and hundreds more were destroyed beyond repair.

Tokyo, an area with roughly 10 times the number of houses and buildings, experienced an earthquake in 2011 of 9.0 Richter, 140 miles away. The earthquake shook for five full minutes. The only damage was to a 100-year-old auditorium where most of a ceiling fell. Two of my friends lost their best red wine bottles.

A 9.0 earthquake is 100 times greater than a 7.0 earthquake. 100 times.

The lesson here is very clear. Japanese engineering is inordinately better than American engineering.

There are hundreds of other examples of the superiority of Japanese engineering. Simply ride on one of their subways or their trains, even compare a Toyota to a Chevy and you will know that Japanese engineering is orders of magnitude better than American.  Today there are almost no American cars in Japan, only a few German models are imported.

I make a simple prediction. In 50 years, when American chauvinism has declined, the best American engineers will be trained in Japan. First they will have to become good mathematicians which is already a characteristic of nearly all Japanese high school students.

H-1B visas

There is an interesting article in the New York Times about how the Bell Labs created modern American technology. You may want to grab a Chablis, put on your yoga clothes and read this New York Times article.

The H1B visa is directly related to this article. The H1B visa is the main visa that is used by businesses to bring in foreign professional workers. Without it there would be no Silicon Valley no Internet no Google.

Right now there is a campaign by many in politics to keep the H1B visa totally inadequate as it is today allowing in only a trickle of new vital workers.

The relevance to the New York Times article relates to my own experience. In the 1970s I was often called upon to advise the Japanese government. When Japan asked me how America generated such great innovation I pulled out a copy of the Bell Labs telephone book. Virtually every name in the book was unpronounceable. Nearly the entire staff came from outside the United States.

If Japan wanted American style innovation, it had to find a way to attract the greatest minds of the world. It had to rely on 2 billion adults not 70 million native Japanese.

The same is true of the United States today.

Don't expect self-serving narrow minded political people to understand this reality.

We need to expand the H1B visas to the level of hundreds of thousands per year. And let the creative forces of the world bring their families with them, so they will stay and help us. They are our future not the unemployed tech workers who vote for xenophobic politicians.

I’m an activist

I have many friends in Sweden.  When I first saw rampant Jew hate in the press about Sweden I wrote to my friends asking how they could let such behavior pass without objection.  I just wanted something done by decent people.  Most said they abhored what they saw in the mainstream press.

According to Dr. Mikael Tossaveinen, head of the Scandinavian desk at Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the research of anti-Semitism, the phenomenon is not unusually prevalent in Swedish society.

Research shows that some 5 percent of the population can be considered anti-Semitic, with another 20 percent harboring ambivalent attitudes.

“Most Swedes know next to nothing about anti-Semitism, and so it doesn’t surprise me that they don’t see the connection between the imagery and Nazi propaganda,” Tossaveinen said. “This becomes extra problematic when they come across anti-Israeli propaganda made in bad faith by people who are anti-Semites.”

He added that Swedes “don’t understand the racist message” and thus will spread the anti-Semitic art because they dislike Israel.

“Then they will be surprised when someone calls attention to the anti-Semitism and interpret that as silencing their criticism of Israel,” Tossaveinen said. “It’s quite tiresome and it happens remarkably often in Sweden.”

Dinosaur of the future?

In the Tokyo neighborhood of Diakanyama I visited a fascinating new store.

The name of the store is Tsutaya Honya.  Honya means bookstore.  Tsutaya is the name of a man who made his money in transportation and wanted to build his fantasy bookstore.

The bookstore is three buildings with elegant architecture and the most exquisite interior decor anyone can imagine. Something of beauty that can only exist in Japan. There is a large and comfortable Starbucks, a small convenience store and on one floor of one store is an elegant restaurant. The store is divided into many sections such as automobiles and technology and architecture. In each section are products and magazines related to the subject.

There is one entire floor dedicated to DVDs including thousands of classics in video, TV and film.

Throughout the buildings there are comfortable chairs and reading areas. When I was there at noon on a weekday the store was crowded.

The question for everyone in the book and publishing business is whether this is a dinosaur or the future of some part of the publishing world. It is also possible that this readers' paradise is only possible in Japan that has more readers per capita than most of the world put together.

My rock store

My general understanding of retail behavior is best described by a metaphoric store.

I think that a large component of retail is the sheer satisfaction of making choices. Making a final choice for most people.

To test this vision I imagined a tiny store on a heavily traveled, tourist related, walking street.

In this store would be more than a dozen trays with black velvet and on each tray would be several dozen pebbles. Behind each tray would be a photograph of a beach from which the pebbles were collected. Each tray would also have a postcard photo of that beach and a small velvet bag to put the pebble in.

It was my view that for a dollar a pebble people would happily choose from among the beaches the specific pebble they wanted to own.

If my thesis about retail behavior was correct the store would always be crowded and people would love to buy pebbles.

I never created the store. I have always been certain of my hypothesis.

You can create the store if you wish to prove me wrong.

Muji eco is really style

Are you familiar with a store named Muji?

Muji began in the Omote-Sando district in Tokyo more than 40 years ago. The chain is owned by the Seibu department stores.  A good friend of mine was the person who suggested the Muji idea.

The idea is environmentally pure products. There are no Muji products that use dyes or artificial material. They are always cottons, silks, wools and clear wood.  The products also have no brand on them other than the store price label.

When I visited the first store I recommended something that I now find preposterous. I recommended that the first store in the United States should be in San Francisco because the 1980 hippies would love the environmental cleanliness of the products.

I was completely wrong.

Fortunately, the Muji management ignored my advice and opened their first offshore store in Paris. Then London, and eventually Manhattan.

What these people knew that I didn't know or understand was that the entire environmental movement is nothing but style. My friend Alex has been insisting on this point for 15 years. But the Muji people saw this more than 40 years ago.

Environmental everything, from food to clothes to recycling and even environmental issues, are entirely a matter of style. The environmentalist puts on the cotton clothes, the composting behavior and the recycling attitudes just to show how stylish they are.

It sure took me a long time to fully understand that from a more marketing point of view. Of course the first store outside Japan was in the style center of the planet, so it had to be in Paris.

Link of finance to real world

The economist I read regularly, Greg Mankiw, writes the leading college economics textbook.  He has updated his textbook to reflect the 2008 financial collapse that brought down the commercial sector.

Here is the location of a preprint of the chapter on the connection between finance and commerce. My summary is simple. Mankiw does not understand how to separate the financial crisis from a commercial effect, much as I respect him.

I have said and written here many times the only way to allow the highly volatile financial world to work most efficiently is to disconnect it from the commercial world.

The connection occurs via banks that make loans to business. When banks are hit hard in the financial domain they respond by calling in healthy commercial loans which in turn significantly restrains the world of commerce.

Solution: FLIC, Federal Loan Insurance Corporation.  The FLIC will guarantee that a bank will not call or reduce a business loan except where the underlying assets have declined. That will guarantee that financial crises will not be communicated to the commercial world.

I hope Dr. Mankiw gets the word. I hope Congress and related SEC staff get the word even sooner.

Hot water vs tea

I like to order hot water after dinner at a restaurant in lieu of coffee or tea.

Tea is a planetary response to a serious problem that humans have always had in the past.

Most water on this planet was foul tasting and filled with pathogens until recently.

The solution to the pathogens was to bring the water to a boil. The solution to the foul taste was tea flavoring.

The water I drink at home and in Japan is clean, safe and tastes fine. That makes it a good drink when heated. A warm and comforting drink without any additional flavor to disrupt a satisfied palate after a good meal.

I certainly hope that restaurants in the future will charge as much for hot water as they do now for tea.  We hot water aficionados are not cheapskates.

Japan today - economics

Japan is an important lesson from the 20th century, for those who are capable of learning.

She had a financial meltdown arising from a real estate bubble. The Japanese stock market dropped to one third of its previous high and the economy has bumbled along at roughly 1% GNP growth for 20 years. During the entire 20 year period there has been a significant deflation and near zero interest rate.

In the early part of this strange twenty-year period the Japanese took the advice of Paul Krugman and used Keynesian stimulus to try and gain rapid growth. The growth did not come but the debt became a multiple of the GNP. Very simply Keynes failed.

The Japanese in the 1970s were very pragmatic and inflated the yen just as the oil crisis hit the US and Europe causing slow out-of-control inflation. Japan had no inflation. Japan had very rapid economic growth in that period.

Today, according to my friends in Japan, the Japanese have become pragmatic again. They are accepting a modest growth because it turns out to be real growth for the population when the deflation is taken into account. Part of the deflation is caused by low prices from China. This is much appreciated.

Japan is allowing the yen to appreciate on the world market, again because their own experience suggests that this generates domestic efficiencies which produce future export gains.

Lastly, the Japanese are accommodating to the current economic conditions and have found a significant and expected boost in employment and economic development as they replace the damaged facilities in the northern tsunami ravished regions.

Japan is in good shape.

Relativity not equality

Every now and then I hear conservatives rail against relativity in our society and especially against preaching relativity in the academic quagmires that abound.

The relativity that is disparaged is the idea that all positions in all societies are equally valid. The conservatives who promote this anti-relativity view argue that sending someone to jail for theft is not equal to cutting off their hand, as might be done in similar circumstances in a Muslim country.

This is not what relativity is about.

Relativity in its simplest form is the statement that: if you wish to judge another culture you have no place to stand in which to compare your culture to theirs.

That is a fairly reliable honest and accurate statement that is hard to dispute. It does not say that all cultural moral positions are the same. It says that there is no simple or obvious basis to have an outside objective perspective.

What this means is that we have our own values. We can consider our own values to be at the top of a hierarchy or pyramid.  That is fine. That is the way the world works.  We should simply be intelligent and wise enough to know that other people in other cultures may not accept our position.

Many people have tried to find absolute values that apply everywhere in the world. In philosophy this was Immanuel Kant. He failed. Anthropologists have traveled the planet and they too have failed to find anything of importance that is universal, other than a few biological similarities among Homo sapiens.

That’s it. Like it or lump it.  Anti-relativity is not a political position that justifies serious respect.

Japan today - demographics

I have reported in the past the Japanese efforts to increase the number of children with financial inducements of every kind, including inducements to potential grandparents.  All efforts have failed.

I have reported on my visits to repatriated Japanese from Brazil. They have been rapidly returning to Brazil. The Japanese have not found a solution to the decline in their total population which is now 2 million below their peak of 123 million.

Japan believes it is not capable of absorbing immigrants.

That is not how the government is currently behaving. Japan has been actively accepting non-legal immigration. Immigrants are coming from the Philippines, South Asia and South Korea as they have in the past to fill serious worker shortages.

What is different now is that the government is giving these workers extended temporary work visas and making no efforts to stop the number from growing rapidly. We are talking a million per decade.

Additionally, young Japanese men are traveling to other parts of Asia and bringing back wives. A somewhat effective way to have new Japanese children.

All in all, before too long Japan will figure out how to make this immigration legal and popularly acceptable.  It looks like Japan will have solved its demographic problem.