Pro Commerce

Time to distribute everything

Have you read Edward Bellamy's book Looking Backward 2000-1887?

It was the first semi-rational socialist plea that I read.  It was published in 1888. I read it in the mid 1950s.

Bellamy proposed that everything available in the year 1887 be distributed rather fairly among all people. He only meant in the United States. (Socialists always have a selfish problem).

I realized when I read it that that was a viable way for our society to eliminate poverty and create an ad hoc equality. The United States was wealthy enough at that time to accomplish Bellamy's goals. Most people would end up being middle class farmers.

The problem with the Bellamy proposal should be obvious to my readers (but not to the large world of lefty fundamentalists who don't read my blog).

Bellamy's world would have had great equality but it would have been static.

In a real world, made up of Americans, everything would be constantly changing and improving and inequality would automatically follow from the constant change and improvement.  Our society is technologically and commercially driven and dynamic.   Always a positive sum. Never static.

Moreover, looking at Bellamy's happy world from our vantage point today, it would have nothing appealing to a real modern honest human being. It lacked the medical improvements that we now take as fundamental to civilization and the kind of freedom that we consider fundamental to our lives.

It is rather unfortunate that Lefties, more than anyone, fail to see that the socialist dream without the engine of progress that is America, is still available in Cuba and North Korea. Countries that completely suit the Bellamy ideal.

Gyre isn’t serious

There is quite a bit of press about a Pacific gyre that is many hundreds of miles in diameter swirling North of Hawaii that carries degrading plastic. It is not visible from satellites.

I have my doubts about two elements in this so-called scientific fact. The first is that I doubt that such a Pacific gyre is more than a periodic transitory event.

You can take a look at this article and see that oceanographers are projecting the movement of the Japanese tsunami debris to be crossing the Pacific right where the gyre is supposed to be. It goes right through the gyre.

 

I trust the accuracy of this material because there are oceanographic buoys that are floating in all of our oceans since the early 2000’s called the Argo project. There are 3000 buoys that are constantly tracked by satellites. Each one drops a kilometer or more into the ocean and measures a variety of data as they float around the world.

So how does this Japanese mountain of debris pass through the plastic filled gyre without cleaning it out? I doubt that it does.  

I think the gyre is periodic.

The plastic in the Pacific gyre is supposed to be a problem because it is ingested by micro organisms that are eaten by sequentially larger ocean species. We finally eat the plastic micro bits.

This really rings a false note for me. I can eat plastic regardless of size and I know that none of it gets into my system and all of it comes out of my human exit portal.  Its not food.

That is true for all biological species. The species either breaks down the plastic into digestible elements or the plastic passes through the digestive tract.

So where is the problem with this pressumed inedible temporary floating island of plastic trash?

The world went my way

It is pretty startling to me that the world of 2012 is pretty much what I wanted it to be as a young man. The trends in the world have been going in my direction for a long time.

First, had to come the change in my world view.

I was born and raised on Lefty bottle milk that was a mixture of proteins, FDR and communism. My father was a Rabbi who believed that Adlai Stevenson was the prophet who climbed Mount Sinai and brought us the 10 Commandments.

Second, years later,  two things converged to change my world view. The first was my reading of George Orwell's Animal Farm. A book I'm sure that has been banned from the entire academic world. I loved Orwell and happened to read that book at age 17. At age 19 I was on a kibbutz. The two experiences converged. I realized that successful kibbutz communism was a fantasy. Irrelevant to real human being.

From that point on I began to look at the world in terms that would evolve over time into my pro-commerce world view.

For the rest of my life I have watched the traditional communist lefty liberal views meet their appropriate tragic end. The Rosenbergs turned out to be spies.  Sacco and Vanzetti turned out to be the real bombers. The Soviet Union fell, communist China fell, India changed direction, virtually every other socialist communist government disappeared in the swamp of murder, starvation and abject failure.

The number of free market democracies in my life moved from a dozen to over five dozen.

Simultaneously in the United States a new respect and understanding of the marketplace began to emerge. In the 1950s we had Milton Friedman and William Buckley. As time went on we got Ronald Reagan and talk radio.

Today we have Fox news, a myriad of brilliant conservative intellectuals, a half dozen outstanding periodicals and the most marvelous democratic development of all: the Tea Party.

My life has been a trajectory of success and happiness.

Where is our tesseract?

The Tesseract is a four dimensional object. The one I'm referring to is in the recent movie hit The Avengers.  It is intended to be a source of infinite energy. The script revolves around the availability of unlimited energy for evil use.

We, Americans, were promised our own Tesseract back in the late 1970s when Lawrence Livermore labs was going to make a fusion cell that would provide nearly unlimited cheap energy from hydrogen. Our own Livermore Tesseract was to be delivered before the year 2000 after we paid billions of dollars.

This was not the only miracle we were promised by scientists in the relatively near future. In 1983 we were also promised that there would be a vaccine to prevent HIV AIDS after we paid billions of dollars.

I don't want to be rude to my scientific friends but this blog is written in 2012 and no one has heard a word about our successful fusion based Tesseract. No one has heard much about a successful HIV vaccine except that one is periodically trotted out and tested.

If you wonder why I doubt some of the great claims of science, this is part of the reason. The other part has to do with the incredible silence of the major scientific organizations. Where is the AAAS, where is the  National Science Foundation or the National Academy of Sciences when announcements like this are made? The least these organizations can do is to suggest that scientific developments are hard or impossible to predict.

Menstrual biology

I have become known to a small group of my friends as ‘the boy who said the King is naked’. I have written numerous blogs that are completely non-PC. This is another.

I want to suggest that the role of women in our society must, to some extent, be considered in the light of menstrual biology.

From menarche to menopause women are affected by a monthly menstrual period. The amount of effect and the intensity involved varies over a wide scale between women and between periods. The effects are caused by hormones. The effects cover a very wide scale of attitudes and behaviors.

Why this is politically unacceptable as a topic of public conversation I do not know.

Here is a long official US government paper on menstruation. Nowhere does it mention the effects on emotion or mental state.

You tell me why. I am not a fool. I have lived with a dozen women. I had a wife who became another person during her monthly periods.  

I had a secretary (before it was illegal) who quit her job when she found on my desk calendar my coded message that kept track of her monthly periods.

I knew a judge's court officer in Seattle who put up a sign on her desk once a month to warn litigants that this was a bad time to bother her.

This subject only comes up because I find no one talking about and yet it is a reality of daily life.

It may be possible that the subject is quashed for old sexual moral reasons. It may be that women fear they will not be treated as equals in the workplace because of this issue. I don't believe either of these reasons are adequate to justify the complete suppression of this subject.

Are younger people smarter?

This is not a silly question. There is ample evidence in my family that four-year-old's are smarter today than any four-year-old I knew a generation ago.

It is a fallacy to think that there may be some genetic or evolutionary change. There isn't.

It is also possible that the evidence of data is against me. School test results don't seem to be higher. On the other hand the population that takes these tests has been growing steadily.

I think that the perceived level of intelligence in the populations I deal with has been increasing.

I give commerce 100% credit.

Let's do a thought experiment. Let's assume you were living in an agrarian society where 90% of the jobs were agricultural. What level of talent and skill would you encourage in your children?

Now look at our contemporary commercial society and think about the nearly infinite number of market functions that will support a middle-class lifestyle. A child being raised in our current environment can be encouraged to develop every imaginable talent and skill because that child will likely be able to use that extraordinary human element of diversity in our commercial world.

It is the application of that extraordinary human diversity that I believe I am perceiving as an increase in the level of intelligence. Because intelligence is a combination of spontaneity, information database and unique vision people are more likely to have the appearance of more intelligence as they are more able to accommodate the modern world of commerce.

Commerce allows us to become more intelligent humans.

 

Lincoln statue

I recently listened to an NPR program on computer-human interaction that a friend sent me.(You know I don't listen to NPR for fear of getting angry at their perpetual Jew hate.)

The program was good for the first half-hour as it summarized the state of computer-human interaction. The second half entered the realm of speculation that requires intelligence and that was not available to NPR.

It raised for me the issue that I had given serious thought to 30 years ago.

NPR concluded that a modern Turing test to distinguish a computer from a human being was based on a panel of people being deceived by responses where the computer was confused with the human 25% of the time.

The Phillips equivalent to the Turing test is an animatronic model of Abraham Lincoln with a full database of everything Lincoln was known to have said or responded.  I assume that such a model is not far off in the future and will be completely satisfying to nearly all interrogators.

In response to this model I concluded that the issue is not whether a computer can be distinguished from a human the question is whether the human is alive.

Consequently I was forced to define alive as meaning the ability to be spontaneous.

My logic led me to conclude, thanks to the modern computer, that a large percentage of human beings are not alive. They aren't spontaneous and they may not be capable of spontaneity. The technical term is zombie.

Olde bar smell

I recently went into a bar that I had not been in for more than 40 years. The bar had been remodeled several times in the 40 years. Totaly remodeled including completely new furnishings.

The bar smelled exactly the way it did 40 years ago when I was a young adult.

I once visited my grandfather's house that I had lived in when I was three years old. The revisit was 30 years later. The house was no longer a home, it had become an architectural office. It's still smelled the same.

The issue to me is not my ability to retain a smell in my memory nor the fact that most bars smell like piss and urinal deodorant but the fact that rooms have a smell that seems almost permanent.

I have often tried to change the smell of an apartment or home using baking soda, incense and ozone and never succeed.

Why is this?

Gov’t computers

The title of this blog may be an oxymoron.

I am reminded of this issue because the State of California has just canceled a computer program for the judicial system that was to cost $25 million and was already overrun and nonfunctioning at $100 million. The same is true for the history of many computer programs in cities and police departments. One of my friends designed a computer program for a government agency and spent 10 years suing to get paid.  Because the specs kept changing and the agency was never satisfied. It worked fine.

Of course I know that the military and NASA and a few other agencies get functioning computer systems. Sometimes, like the FBI and the IRS it is delivered 10 years late at 10 times the cost. Generally, if not always, the work is done outside the government.

My reason for bringing this up is simply to point out the reason government is so incompetent at dealing with incorporating computers into their processes.

Business is hierarchical and always goal oriented as well as solution oriented. Someone always has the final responsibility. For most industrial commerce the goal is reduction of costs. Problem solving is the daily function of business.

Government is organized to resolve conflict and find resolution among converging power groups.  Quite different from commerce.

The implementation of a computer system in a government agency shouldn’t work and it doesn’t.

The problem arises not because the government cannot set goals, but because the government is incapable of having stable goals with a final responsible person to deal with. The government must inevitably adapt and change goals, measurements and specifications to the changing power forces within it.

Let's not expect the government to be capable of anything other than reconciliation and mediation of conflicting power bases.

It can’t and shouldn’t do business.

Is welding the oldest business?

I'm a welder.  I know the answer to this question is that there are many older businesses than welding. I'm not sure I buy the thesis that prostitution is older because I know of no records for sex for money that antedate the sale of food or furniture or metals for which we have receipts going back more than 5000 years.

I bring up the issue for two reasons. Welding is by definition the melding of two metals by liquefying them both and puddling the liquid pool. This was done by blacksmiths as far back as three millennia. Japanese sword makers were able to make swords by welding brittle metal for the edge with more flexible metal for the core. I saw welding being done in Kabul in 1971 where the acetylene was in a clump of rock and the fumes were picked up in a hood and connected with a hose to the torch where it was merged with oxygen.

I would be happy if someone looked into this issue and published the results.

What leads me to think about it is that most industries do not have a very long lifespan. Metallurgy may be one of the exceptions that survives into the modern world and has been able to adapt because it is not associated with any single company nor trade and it must adapt to almost every other technology in order to survive: bridge building, engine building and transportation.

Failed ideology of taxes

Maybe it is time to bring the 2012 State of the Union into the presidential election debates.

President Obama made the following statement about income taxes:

“If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. …. In fact, if you're earning a million dollars a year, you shouldn't get special tax subsidies or deductions.”

There is enough wiggle room in this statement for the president to shed responsibility, a common practice for him. He does not specifically say income taxes but he is clearly implying that. He does not say which subsidies or deductions but it is assumed that this applies again to income tax.

There are two problems with this proposal. Number one is the fact that taxes cannot be at 30% for anyone but salaried workers with W2 forms.  Nearly everyone else files a more complex return and will find many ways to reduce their adjusted gross income.

The following table shows effective tax collection based on the past 23 years. You will note that the highest year the highest marginal collected tax was 28%. The same is true in this chart when applied to individual income. The fact of the matter, which seems to be elusive for president Obama is that many times in this 23 years the marginal tax rate was much higher than 30% but it never resulted in an effective tax collection above 28% of the top income earners.

The second fact that seems to be ignored by the entire class-warfare-political party is that the more progressive you make income taxes the more volatile you make tax revenue. It's an obvious fact. The poor, students and teachers get hurt the worst.

So to summarize the consequence of the president's idea: it's an ideological fantasy and any effort to promote it will harm people whose income depends on government taxes.

Americans Elect... didn’t

Last week an effort to create a middleground third political party in between the existing two parties came to an end. The group had $50 million to organize the new idea of a middle American party. They spent $35 million building their website and promoting their idea, before giving up.

This is probably the second greatest political success in America so far in a century. The first of course is the historically most important event since the Constitution, the modern Tea Party. The creation of a middle party would have shown a serious dissatisfaction with American politics had it succeeded.

The failure of Americans Elect is a truly astounding success for our two-party system and evidence of public confidence in that system.

America's two parties regardless of all the negative rhetoric, are totally comfortable to Americans.

I have always known, since my early days in survey research, that the majority of Americans do not vote because they are satisfied with the outcome of elections. If they were dissatisfied they would turn out to vote.  Angry jurisdictions (like Berkeley, CA) have high turn-out, happy jurisdictions like Iowa farm country have low turn-out.

In fact, today maybe more than at any time in history, Americans are deeply satisfied with their two-party choices. I would say that the Republican Party with the infusion of clarity and integrity that comes from the Tea Party is very satisfying to the bulk of Republicans. The reinvigorated conservative movement in America is alive and vigorous and satisfied with the Republican Party.

The same is true with the Democrats and the liberal movement in America. President Obama and the Democratic party are accurate representatives of the class warfare, increase in government expansion and debt and anti-war sentiment that is the modern liberal mainstream position. The spectacular support of Obama and the Democratic Party by the mainstream media and modern academia is the best evidence I have that the Democratic Party truly represents its members.

Congratulations are in order to the success of the American two-party political system.

News needs debate

On occasion as I'm falling asleep I watch TV news. I also read newspapers when they are left on the table at my coffee shop.

I do not find news, in its current format, to be very appealing. I have gone a decade at a time without paying attention to the news.

One of the reasons for my disdain, and possibly the reason for the declining role of newspapers and TV news, is the failure to understand that news is never a single matter of truth or solitary observation.

Most events are seen differently by different people and accepted in different interpretations.

I suspect this is the reason that there are completely separate modalities around Fox news and MSNBC and that CNN is unable to capture either of those audiences. Both the Fox news and the MSNBC audiences understand that news is always a polarity and they accept the polarity that they are offered on these two networks.  Few believe in the false middle ground of CNN.

What I think is missing is a news source, TV and newspaper, that presents the debate inherent in most news reporting. Let me give you an example since most TV news is fire, murder or mayhem.

Fire can be reported from the perspective of a property owner, Fire Chief or a neighbor. A murder always has multiple perspectives based on multiple observers and it is always seen differently by family members and outsiders. Mayhem is inherently subject to controversy both as to cause, negligence and remediation.

There is plenty of room to introduce debate and controversy into the core of news reporting.  I believe it will be more interesting to ordinary human beings if it has debate and controversy.

Jews and debate

I have recently been in a discussion with one of my readers who claims that in his later life he has begun to see a Jewish conspiracy. This conspiracy is caused by tribalism in his opinion.

I am a Jew and I can assure you there is no tribalism, or very little, among Jews. I have never gotten a job, a discount or any favoritism for being a Jew from other Jews. In fact there is often an element of competitiveness and hierarchical arrogance in Jewish relationships.

I compare such presumptions of tribalism to actual tribalism that I see among Filipinos, Chinese, Rom people and Arabs.

And yet my reader cannot help but see the stunning success of Jews in a commercial society as having some explanation. The fact that Jews are not involved in Chinese or Japanese societies seems to be overlooked by him.

I have tried to think like he does and identify the element that makes Jews so successful in our modern commercial-technological society.

I think there is an important element that is essential. It is called the Talmud and consists of two parts the Mishnah and Gamarrah.

The Talmud is a 2000 year long debate about moral issues. All sides of the argument are presented and recorded for posterity from every region of the world. Over time certain forms of logic are recognized as dominant.

I know of no other human group that has written down and talked to their offspring about the logic of moral debate.

Since I believe that both commerce and technology are held up by the tent poles of debate and open examination of ideas, I believe this Talmudic tradition is the source of Jewish prosperity in a commercial-technological society.

I have written books with non-Jews over decades and been in business with many non-Jews. There is no tribal advantage among Jews that results in working together. However I also have a few close Jewish friends and we have beneficial relationships that come out of our unique form of debate and mutual interrogation.

Castro is new Pacific Heights

Almost none of my tens of thousands of readers live in San Francisco. So I seldom write about San Francisco unless I believe there is a larger lesson.

In my own neighborhood the Castro, there is the most startling explosion of new houses, newly remodeled houses and expansion of existing houses. I'm talking thousands of units in a small geographic area. The Castro district centered on the dying Castro gay commercial center is a booming residential area.

What is important are the three phenomenon that I associate with this. First this is a gay neighborhood that makes certain that it is safe, ultrasafe in fact.  Second it is automatically aesthetically desirable.

Third, it is very casual in this social milieu which is suited perfectly to the successful business people in the new Internet boom. This is in distinct contrast to the northern Pacific Heights section of the city which is made up of fancy clothes, social climbers and self defined elites.

It is important to note that new wealth hides itself in casual clothing at work and in leisure. Such is particularly common in the Castro gay neighborhood.

The lesson here is: a new neighborhood will bloom today if it is safe, attractive and avoids social climbers.

Humans marry out, not commerce

If you were a male trader or explorer traveling in tribal areas you would find almost everywhere on the planet that you were offered a bed at night with a woman. If you stayed several nights you would be offered several different women.

How tribal people learned that they needed to diversify their DNA I don't know. But most tribes know that without diverse DNA in the form of children from outsiders, the tribe would not last more than four or five generations. Inbreeding is fatal for small groups of isolated humans and most mammals.

I bring this up because it does not seem to apply to commerce.

Very few businesses survive more than one generation and only a tiny number survive two generations. Many industries do not survive two generations and few industries survive three generations.

There doesn't seem to be a commercial version of marrying outsiders. The necessity for commercial status quo seems to be the dominant force. Businesses and industries resist change. The constant creation of new businesses by new people seems to be the source of commercial vitality.

I merely wanted to point this out because small towns and retail shopping streets in small towns tend to die. New vitality tends to come in new geographic locations.

Cosplay from Japanese

Cosplay is the use of costumes to imitate or represent characters found in manga, anime and comic books. There are periodically conventions of young people dressed in costumes. I saw a conference in San Francisco in Japantown with over 5000 young attendees. There have been similar events in San Diego with over 100,000 attendees.

What I want to point out is that the word cosplay went from English as costume play to Japanese as cosplay and now back to English.

The Japanese very frequently use English words and phrases and modify them for their own use as they did in this case with costume play. There are many words now in the English language that underwent this morphology.

There will be many more such English to Japanese to English constructions in the future.

The newspaper world is bad for us

We recently had a sad lesson in journalism in San Francisco.

Philip Anschutz created a free daily newspaper in San Francisco based on a free newspaper model he saw in Amsterdam and London. He also built a similar newspaper in Washington DC. Both called Examiners.

Based on his careful understanding of the success of the Wall Street Journal in attracting the largest newspaper audience in America and the similar success of USA Today, he put tables and charts and numbers on every news page. If the article was about the local bus service there was a chart showing arrival times over the previous five years. If the article was about hospitals it showed morbidity data for the local area.

For reasons unknown to me, the San Francisco Examiner was sold to a Canadian suburban chain publisher who promptly dropped all numbers from the paper, except page numbers. He is a traditional journalist and believes what nearly all journalists believe: ordinary newspaper readers are too dumb to do simple math or understand any numbers.

I think that is both a description of the readers of most newspapers including the New York Times and a description of the educational failure at the core of most journalists' skills.  

Do your news sources use numbers?

Coffee shop, Latin America, union idea

One day a week, I go to a coffee shop where the tables for customers are very close to the kitchen baking area. The kitchen staff has loud music turned on and the customers have trouble talking to each other as a result.

I talked to the manager who somewhat understood the problem, and just for me turned down the music. This shop is owned and mostly operated by Latin Americans.

I began to realize that it is a well established Latin American idea that the workers are more important than the customers. This is also a 400-year-old union idea.

In a stable economic environment where very little changes, as was the case in most of the world before 1900 and is still the case in much of the world, workers can demand better treatment without directly chasing away customers. That seems to be the case in Latin America and one of the reasons it remains so backward.

However, in our contemporary world the market is changing rapidly and customers cannot be subsumed under the interests of workers (except in government). Customers, every year as modernity expands and extends, have more choices and greater retail opportunity. No business can treat them as a secondary issue.

Cargo cult

It seems that many of my friends do not know what a cargo cult is.

The term cargo cult does not describe the phenomenon adequately. When a group of people focus on exterior surface qualities and attribute the structure to those surface qualities that is what is called a cargo cult.

The term is applied to so-called primitive people who encountered the Japanese military and the American military in the Melanesian islands in World War II. After the war these islanders built imitations of the control towers, landing strips and airplanes made out of bamboo. It appears they hoped that the cargo of food and fascinating products that came with the airplanes and control towers would re-appear if the superficial objects were built.

That phenomenon of building the superficial to get the original structure is called cargo cult behavior. There should be a better term for mistaking surfaces for structures.  Maybe ‘superficial causal fallacy’ would be better.

This is a two-part blog. In this blog I want to point out that we all are part of a cargo cult and some of our representatives carry this notion too far. In the next blog I want to point out that we have built into our society a deep cargo cult mentality that permeates our educational ideas.

A leading promoter of our own cargo cult was Albert Schweitzer. A German doctor who opened clinics in West Africa in 1913 and began treating Africans with European medicines. Because he believed that the advanced nature of European medicine came from the European foundation of Christianity, he required that his patients accept Christianity along with his medical treatment. Not surprisingly he received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.

He was part of a dominant Euro-American cargo cult that is still operating and that believes Christianity is a foundation for modernity and medicine. Christianity existed even in its Protestant form for 400 years before the development of sulfathiazole or penicillin. Commerce and technology exist without Christianity in most parts of the world today and they both are the real structure on which medicine is built.

Schweitzer was always a great hero during his life but he was promoting cargo cult ideas.

Liberal arts: maybe not

You may need to look at the previous blog to understand what a cargo cult is. It is a belief that superficial material reflects the internal structure. The picture on the outside of the can of frozen food container is the source of the food inside.

Referring to something as a cargo cult means that the people involved are seeing something superficial as fundamental to the structure.

I began thinking about Liberal Arts as the consequence of our belief that our successful commercial-technical society is somehow related structurally to the presence of Liberal Arts.

I suspect that they are not related. Maybe Liberal Arts exist by itself without commerce or technology. We teach Liberal Arts as though they were inherent in the structure of commerce, inherent in our social milieu. I doubt it.

Most people during the Second World War and afterwards asked a similar question when they wondered how the Third Reich grew out of the sophisticated German culture of Bach, Goethe and Kant?  

I say it didn't. The Liberal arts had no effect on the creation or suppression of the Third Reich.

Liberal Arts do not promote or suppress commerce or technology. They are irrelevant.

When I say this I must recognize how excited I was as a teenager to go from being a science geek to studying the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago.  I loved what I was studying.

But the Liberal Arts were irrelevant to my future role in commerce. I was excited by the moral debates and issues that I encountered in dealing with literature. I was even more excited by the analysis and understanding of my society that came from the social sciences. I loved the ambiguity of my new found knowledge, I loved the classroom debates and I loved the challenges in the world of morality.

Nevertheless I believe we have cargo cult that thinks artists, musicians and liberal arts make a positive contribution to commerce and technology. They probably don't.

I think we need to distill out of the vast panorama of the Liberal Arts what genuinely contributes to solid intellectual thought.  It may be a small part.

New shopping phenomenon

This is a 2:30 minute video on the way Tesco uses smartphones for shoppers in Korea.  Brilliant.  Korea is the country with the most people connected to the Internet.

Tesco lets shoppers select food in the subway and have it delievered when they get home.

 

Cherry blossom religion

I have great respect for many anthropologists who have written about Japan.

There is one point on which they are all wrong. In fact all of the reference materials to Japan and religion are wrong. Japan is supposed to be organized around two religions: Shinto and Buddhism. Shinto is recognized as the main religion involved in marriage and Buddhism is a religion involved in death.

While the Japanese have many Shinto and Buddhist temples and buildings that appeared to be a combination of both, most daily behavior that resembles religious behavior is unrelated to the temples.  Religious behavior is a mixture of gratitude toward rocks, food, society, icons and natural objects.

I have been going to Japan in the spring, lately. I can state without qualification that the religion of Japan is the worship of cherry blossoms.

All government and business calendar budgets, all graduations, all official vacations are tied to cherry blossom season.

At cherry blossom time, the entire Japanese society, worldwide, goes to view and celebrate blooming cherry trees. The pink of cherry blossoms is incorporated into every imaginable commercial product and retail festivity.  People have parties and picnics associated with the cherry trees. There are many seasonal foods including cherry blossom ice cream.

The religion of Japan is cherry blossoms. Go there sometime at cherry blossom time and see for yourself.

Oracle vs Google

San Francisco voters have a long and interesting voting history.  

The City is required to separate authorization from funding for most civic projects that are put on the ballot for citizens to vote on.

With an unbreakable tradition, San Francisco voters nearly always vote for civic project authorization, to make city officials happy, and vote strongly against funding. 

That is exactly what happened in Judge William Asup's Federal District Court for Northern California located in San Francisco.  The jury voted that the Java patents that Oracle gained by buying Sun Microsystems definitely applied to the software that Google used in building its Android mobile phone system.

But they also voted that the parts of Java that Google software engineers used were small samples of universal applicability that fall under the patent concept of 'fair use'.  That means that Google doesn't have to pay for using that patented materials.

The jurors did to the court what San Franciscans usually do to ballot initiatives.  'Yes we agree with you, no you don't get the money'.

More trial to come if the belligerents don't wise-up and settle the case.

 

 

Kool-Aid voters

I just love the title of this blog.

It makes sense if you know two things. The first is that a core of voters, 40%, are Democrats and will vote for the Democrat party despite having brought us three years of the worst economy since Franklin Roosevelt.  To vote for a party whose presidential candidate is egotistical, lacking in any leadership qualities whatsoever, humorless and mean-spirited.... one has to be a Kool-Aid drinker.

The second thing you have to know is the meaning of Kool-Aid drinker. This is an historical reference to Jim Jones, Jonestown and the 1978 suicide of more than 900 followers of Rev. Jones.  Jim Jones was a Lefty fundamentalist preacher who persuaded his followers to commit suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

The Kool-Aid voters referred to in this blog title are the Democrats who are going to vote a straight party ticket this coming 2012 general election.

55 mph speed limit

You probably know that California has the strictest air pollution commission in America (arb).

It turns out that having regulated everything including barbecues and fireplace fires, there appears to the nothing left to regulate to reduce air pollution any further. I suggest that most air pollution at this point is natural. It is particles that occur in the air as the air mass passes over ocean, trees and land.

The California air pollution commission is so desperate to reduce emissions of any sort they are proposing a 55 mile an hour speed limit for driving in the state of California.

This should tell you what incompetent ignorant people choose to serve on government agencies. No person I know, even Lefty eco-freaks, intends to drive on freeways at 55 mph.

The hard core measurable facts on driver behavior are available by comparing the Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco Bay to the Bay Bridge. The speed limit on the Golden Gate Bridge is 45 mph and it is observed by drivers because the two lanes of opposite direction traffic are adjacent. Drivers want to save their own lives. When the 45 mph speed limit was posted on the Bay Bridge it was completely ignored because drivers saw no justification.

We will control air pollution to a much greater extent by praying, dancing and getting drunk at Indian celebrations.

Obama’s record

Many of my friends on Facebook are Lefty Fundamentalists. Somehow or other they are under the weird misapprehension that the last 3 1/2 years of Obama Democratic administration have resulted in a healthy growing economy. They continue to make absurd misstatements related to this misapprehension on Facebook.

I started to put together all the relevant data. Remember I am not just a statistician, I had graduate training as an economist at UC Berkeley and worked directly with the leading economists in business cycle theory. They were my friends and I did graduate work for them.

I don't need to put together the data. The Wall Street Journal did it for me (April 28th).

“The economy has been growing for 11 quarters since the recession officially ended in mid-2009, and quarterly growth has averaged 2.4%. That's slower growth than in every modern expansion, and about half the growth rate of all recoveries since World War II, according to Congress's Joint Economic Committee. The first 11 quarters of the Reagan expansion in the 1980s, by notable contrast, grew an average of 6.1%.”

That is not what is relevant to me or you. Looking at the detailed data we find that the commercial economy has been growing at a healthy rate in this recovery, both consumer spending, profit, exports and capital investment.

So what is wrong. Government spending at state and local levels has been negative. There are two reasons for negative state and local government spending.  

The first is that many states have tied their revenue to progressive income taxes especially NY. CA and Il.  The consequence of this is that revenue is highly volatile because rich people have highly volatile income related to financial markets. Volatile income tax revenue means people, mostly teachers, have to be fired at regular intervals.

Second, most of our big state governments have been captured by union government employees. That means state revenue is being siphoned off into high salaries, retirement and health benefits instead of jobs. Money going into retirement and health benefits has a low multiplier certainly less than 1. Government spending is a drag on business to begin with, and government spending on retirement and health benefits is a bigger drag.

To summarize: Obama and the Democrats are drowning in the swamp they made themselves. Their stimulus went into government which was swallowed up by union wages and benefits. The Democrat hatred of the rich who generate business and jobs has created a progressive income tax structure that turns government into a perverse transmitter of financial disaster.

The Democrats are drowning in their own swamp of ideological blindness. The rich who are immune and the poor who suffer the most will continue to support this status quo.

Romney: run on Obama’s blame everyone

I found a very sensitive issue among Lefties. I suggest that candidate Romney use this issue at some point later in the campaign. It really hurts Obama's core supporters.

The issue is the fact that Obama has no leadership skills as evident from the fact that he blames everyone for every failure.

President Obama blames the economic situation on George W. Bush, when he is talking about how bad the economy is.

When he has trouble with Congress failing to pay attention to his proposals he blames it on Rush Limbaugh and Fox news.

When the economy is not responding to Obama stimulus efforts, he blames it on Wall Street, hedge fund managers, "millionaires and billionaires".

Most Lefties know that this is Obama's behavior and they know that a leader would never do something like this.

It is a weakness that cuts directly into his support. Lefties know in their heart that Obama is not a leader.

P.S. Yesterday the Republican National Committee announced a new tv campaign based on Obama as the blamer.

Derivatives market

Congress passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that included one element I support.

I support the creation of a public derivatives market. A derivative is a financial instrument that acts as insurance for the payment of another instrument made up of regular payments. You can have a derivative for a bond. The derivative would guarantee the payments for the bond.

So far, after two years, a derivative market has not been created by the financial institutions charged with that responsibility. That includes the SEC and the Fed.

Creating such a market would be difficult because each derivative can be from 40 to 60 pages long. It is a contract usually written by a bank.

My regular readers will understand why this market has not been created. You cannot get the government to do anything that requires intelligence and competence. You just can't.

What is interesting to me is that such a similar complex market has existed since 1610. It is called a bond market. Bonds are issued in many denominations for a single class of bond and with many complicated restrictions on payments and collection.  Nevertheless we have a bond market and bond traders are fully aware of the many complexities of the individual bonds they are trading.

But there is a contrast. The government was ordered to do something from scratch. The commercial market created the bond market over 400 years. Big difference.

Don't ask the government to do anything complex.

(Don't give me examples from NASA or DARPA.  Both are government agencies that used private companies for their innovation.)

Kareishu

A short while back I wrote a blog about the most unusual subject anyone has written a blog about.

The Japanese have invented a completely new sense category that no other peoples have noticed.

This is the second new sense category that the Japanese have introduced us too.

The first sense is in the taste spectrum. It is umami which is savoriness.  It is now our fifth taste sense.

We now must give the Japanese our gratitude for another sense caegory. In this case a smell category. The Japanese have noticed that old people have a unique smell. They call it kareishu.  This word is familiar widely among Japanese and can be found on many soap and body cleaner bottles.

The word is related to the recognition of a smell emitted by the body from a protein called nonenal.  Nonenal was discovered by the Shiseido Research Laboratories.

I tried the soaps that the Japanese label with kareishu but they were rather irrelevant because they did not cover up the smell of old person sweat.

I found the Shiseido product that is an underarm deodorant.  Here is a picture of the container.

When I asked American friends whether they recognize this smell category they explained why they don't. First they believe old people have a distinct smell because they live in musty quarters. Second they believe that old people have poor hygiene.

Why should someone's hygiene change as they age?

In any case if you are planning to get old you should know about kareishu and the Shiseido deodorant.

Obama to Russia: wrong

A short while back there was a discussion of president Obama’s off the record comments in a microphone to the Russian president that the Prime Minister should ‘cut him some slack until he is reelected’.

Most of the commentaries on the subject were about the subterfuge involved in the president's comments.

My view is that his comments show clear ignorance of the workings of the American government.

If he is re-elected he will be a lame duck president. Probably the lamest duck in a long time... but that is a separate issue. The most interesting part of being a lame duck for four years. Is that the State Department during that four-year period will go its merry way.

I don't know what the State Department's interests are in its dealings with Russia but I know that the State Department will pursue his own interests and strategies in total disregard for the president.

The last president, G.W. Bush, fully understood this lame duck State Department problem. So he appointed his closest advisor and intimate friend to be Secretary of State.

It didn't do any good. The State Department set out on its own policy specifically in regard to Iraq and Israel and ignored the president’s established policies.

This is the history of the State Department and a lame duck president regardless of how knowledgeable, skilled and determined the president is.

I wish this had been part of the discussion about the president's off-mike comments.