Pro Commerce

New York social climbing

In an earlier blog I was commenting on the sociology of San Francisco.

It is very curious that I can go decades in San Francisco without running into any of the thousands of people I know and when I'm in Seattle, New York Tokyo or Los Angeles I always run into the few people I know.

The reason is clear. In San Francisco social networks are parallel and sorted by time of day and geography in a way that does not create overlap.

In the rest of America, societies are organized primarily by commerce which is a tree with trunk and branches that helps connect most people who are active in the commercial society. They are secondarily organized by social climbing.

People are striving for societal recognition of various sorts and as a consequence they make sure that they are in the locations and venues where they will be seen by other social climbers. This is particularly true in New York and the East Coast.

These two phenomenon, the commercial and the social climbing create overlapping social networks based on time and geography.

That  explains this strange San Francisco phenomenon for me. If you need more let me know.

Culture of working at home

Two of my earlier experiences converge on this subject. One was the popular sociology in my college years, the other was research I did for Sumitomo Corporation in Japan.

The popular sociology of my University of Chicago years was a book called The Lonely Crowd ostensibly by David Riesman. (In reality it was written with the great sociologist Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney.)

The book focused on the idea of an inner-directed person and an other-directed person. Presumably an inner-directed person would do well working at home by themselves, but an other-directed person couldn't.

For Sumitomo in the late 1980’s I was doing research on the issue of working at home which the Japanese saw as the future. My partners and I did research on the Japanese idea of having small satellite offices that homeworkers would come to on a regular daily basis.

Neither of these elements of my past have any relevance to the culture of working at home.
There are many inner-directed people who can’t work by themselves, they are so self indulgent, and a few other-directed people who are so driven by money that they can.

Most Japanese need to come to the main office frequently and the rest have their own businesses.

Increasingly Americans are working at home. My guess would be that the number is now somewhere between 10 and 20 million people and growing. There are many people in this group who work at home part time.

What it takes for someone to work at home successfully, means being self-motivated, having a strong internal identity and a source of energy that is self generated.

These are precisely the skills needed to start and run a business. But the self motivated business entrepreneur also needs the same elements on steroids because the barriers to success are large, impending anti-business pressures are strong and such a person requires a persistence that is rarely found in individuals without support from others.

What is amazing, when you look at the world, is how few cultures have the elements that generate the kind of person who can work at home. The Japanese have many, Chinese coastal regions have many and a few other entrepreneurial societies have such people. But the rest of the world doesn't.  Americans are educated to have these qualities in abundance. And we are becoming better at it every year.

Our American culture leaves us to fend for ourselves as infants, puts us in a separate room to cry ourselves to sleep. Our high schools leave us pretty much to fend for ourselves living a leisurely self-directed high school life. Our colleges let us create our own curricula.

I long ago did a study of very small businesses and found that for most businesses, under 10 workers, 10 independent workers were many times more efficient than 10 people working together. Many times more efficient. One person working alone with independent contractors, can out-produce six people in a group.

This alone may be the reason for the dramatic increases in productivity that we have seen in the past 15 years. Unfortunately, a high percentage of the unemployed are not suited for self employment or home office work. Government training programs to retrain the unemployed can do little to create home office workers, the growing market for new employment.

There is a culture of home office workers in the U.S.... fortunately and it is growing.

Dumping

The previous blog is about a tariff placed on solar panels by the Department of Commerce. The basis for this tariff are dumping laws.

The idea of dumping is based on the flimsiest nonsense about business.

The presentation to the Department of Commerce for a dumping argument is always based on trying to provide evidence that a foreign business, (or group of businesses in this preposterous case) are selling some product in the United States at below fair market value. In reality, fair market value becomes defined as the price American sellers are currently selling their products.

There is no such thing as dumping in business. It is not an intelligent or functional business practice. Neither for domestic nor foreign businesses.

I know where the idea comes from. Ordinary non-business people see sale items in grocery stores and occasionally in a department store for sale below customary price. These are called loss leaders and are intended to bring customers into the store. Presumably those customers buy other higher-priced high markup items to offset the loss leaders.

The reality is that this type of discount sale only occurs in retail stores and industries that have very high markups to begin with and the loss leaders are a tiny fraction of the daily revenue.

I always explain to my clients that this is a losing market strategy. The type of customer attracted is not a future reliable repeat customer, and that such a persnickety customer seldom buys anything but the loss leader.

To think that some industrial supplier to the United States would price their product actually at or below their own costs is based on ignorance. While this may be a tactic to gain market share it does not work because the market begins to expect to buy the product at the low price. You cannot raise the price in the future even if you have actually driven other companies out of business because it is easy, from the perspective of the world, to create new businesses who will compete with you.

Such a dumping strategy doesn't work.

On occasion where the technology and economies of scale are at work it is possible to sell at current cost and anticipated future reductions in your own costs. This is rare and only happens in the high-tech world where domestic producers are somehow blind to the same high-tech or economy of scale available in their future too.

Even in the outrageous instance where a dumping may occur the protective tariff is a waste of everyone’s money.

It is very rare in the history of the world for a protected industry that has accused others of dumping to survive very long after a tariff for protection has been put in place. Such companies are usually too lazy to make the necessary changes to compete in the future when the tariff is legally or politically outmoded.

Dumping is not a valid business strategy. The dumping idea that unions promote and the American government continues to protect is harmful to everyone.

Fortunately the world has the WTO to protect us all from this stupid idea. Unfortunately the American government installs anti-dumping tariffs and it takes many years for the WTO to unwind the mess.

Chinese solar panels

Would it surprise you to learn that the environmental community is full of hypocrites?

The environmentalists have pushed President Obama and his Commerce Department to put a 31% tariff on imported Chinese solar panels (retroactively). This occurred in May and is in full force today.

This is a case where the environmentalists want to favor domestic solar panel production and have great disdain for panels that are brought across the Pacific Ocean from China. They are misfocused on the transportation costs involved rather than the increase in expense for domestic buyers of solar panels.

Environmentalists are fanatics and are unable understand the there are supply and demand curves based on price. A 31% increase in the cost of Chinese solar means fewer total solar panels will be installed in America. They don't care or they don't understand. I have never seen environmentalists care about the reality of financial costs unless it supports their argument.

These are genuine hypocrites. If you want solar panels expect to pay more or more intelligently dump your environmental ideas.

7 men went to Japan

One of my good friends who was working in Japan in the 1980s, recently had a dinner for six of his American friends from that era who were in Japan.

They are gay, though they were not out of the closet at the time, and today they are back in the U.S., all financial successes and highly respected men.

I knew many similar people in that period in Japan.

What was so unique about these men? It appears to me that these were highly educated, very talented people who were forced to go to another country where they were comfortable with their sexuality. Japan is a comfortable place, and always has been, for gay men and women.

I won't go into details about why, only someone who understands Japan would understand the nature of sexuality in that country.

I must look back on the era in which gay people were just publicly recognizing their own sexual orientation because of the highly visible gay world in San Francisco and New York, yet could not enter the management level in the labor force and be comfortable.

I'm glad these men were able to come back to the United States and provide their extraordinary services to their home country.

Two books

Two books that I have recently read fed into each other.

The most interesting is by Jonah Goldberg (Tyranny of Cliches). Goldberg makes three points that are new and interesting.

The first is that the Left constantly uses the image of imperialism and provocative attack on Islam to describe the Crusades. That is simply not true.

Islam had been expanding for the 400 years prior to the first papal authorized crusade.

This is where the second book on the History of Jerusalem by Montefiore comes in.

The entire 3000 year history of Jerusalem is a history of blood and slaughter of an unbelievable magnitude. Islam did conquered Jerusalem and did close it to Christians and Jews at about the time the Turks were conquering the Byzantium Empire.

It was this expansion of Islam that provoked the Crusades. The Crusades only captured parts of the holy land and Jerusalem and went no further. They held Jerusalem for roughly a century.

It is good of Goldberg to make this point.

Goldberg's second point of interest is to suggest that popular cries for a modern Martin Luther in the world of Islam in order to bring tolerance and reform is a mistake. Luther's 95 theses, which you can find here, is a plea for greater church orthodoxy. The similar cries in Islam are coming from the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, the Salafists and the Wahabis. These are not reform movements. They, like Luther, are calls for orthodoxy.

On this point I partially agree with Goldberg. There is no Martin Luther model other than the pleas for greater orthodoxy. Martin Luther is not central in my history the source of Reformation even though he was excommunicated, he did marry and he openly introduced native language reading of the Bible.

To me the Reformation and tolerance was entirely the byproduct of northern Europe and especially Holland where the Jews from the Spanish Inquisition were allowed to settle. The Jews played a central role in the education of northern Europe in tolerance and religious reform.

The entire Islamic world is filled with a malignant cancerous Jew hate. There is no hope for reform in the coming centuries in this crowd of brain diseased people who hold their fragile countries together with their anti-Israel hate propaganda.

Goldberg also argues that research in the past 30 years has indicated that the Inquisition which lasted 700 years was mostly a case of the Catholic Church finding heretics and allowing them to confess and be redeemed. That the witch hunting and torturing were the actions of secular authorities and greedy uneducated peasants.

I find a few parallels in our own Salem witchcraft trials.

I will have to look further into this matter.

Asians dissolve the ghetto

This is merely an observation.

In San Francisco our black population has been shrinking as blacks have left in large numbers over the past half-century.

Because the black neighborhoods are dangerous, gentrification is slow.  Except for the areas where Redevelopment tore-down black neighborhoods and sold the re-built properties to blacks there is a very different pattern in the untouched black ghettoes.

When the market takes its appropriate role, old black neighborhoods are gentrified by Asians. Particularly by Filipinos and Chinese.

It seems to me that the reason these two groups are the ones who are buying formally black neighborhoods is that prices are low and neither the Filipinos nor the Chinese seem to be regular targets for black criminals. Their targets seem to be other blacks, Latinos and whites.

Just my observations. If you have a black population that is troublesome you might consider inviting more Filipinos and Chinese to your community. You could expect gentrification of the black neighborhoods in very few years.

Math is not the real world

It is common for people to talk about the world as a representation of mathematics. Not the other way around.

I was recently eating an artichoke and a friend pointed out that the leaves are formed as a reflection of a Fibonacci series. I have also heard similar statements about branching in trees, branching of leaves and seed arrangement in pine cones.  You can find variations on a Fibonacci series in seashells and countless other structures.

The Fibonacci series is 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21.. Where each number is the sum of the two previous numbers. The same pattern exists in fractions for calculating the Golden ratio.

A similar parallel power between the real world and math is found in the work of Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals which closely model shorelines and mountains.  Fractals are occasionally used in graphics programs to create such images.

Nevertheless math is not the real world. Math is simply a language that periodically is a good descriptor of real phenomenon.

Einstein is quoted as saying ‘As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’

I’m with Albert.  Math is many languages and sometimes a small part maps to a real element.

Craigslist and eBay

I'm sure you have noticed that Craigslist and eBay have done a superb job of creating a massive and effective garage sale market.

Craigslist has done a far more important job in this domain because it is focused locally where tastes are somewhat homogeneous and freight costs are low or negligible.

If one is an environmentalist, then recognition is due to these new businesses for keeping vast tonnage out of landfills and keeping vast amount of resources from being used to create new products.

In fact these two companies probably do more for the environment than the entire environmental movement in its history.

I feel compelled to make an estimate of how big the recycling garage sale market is that has been created by these two businesses.

Total reported retail sales excluding automobiles ( which have had a secondary market from the beginning) and food is roughly $1.5 trillion. Based on my wildest guesses from observing my friends, 10% of goods and services at retail are exchanged on Craigslist and eBay.

That means that $150 billion is being saved annually by people using second hand resources. I would value that at $0.5 trillion in new product pricing.

These two companies save Americans a great deal of money and increase our effective incomes significantly.

Castro movie theater

Sentimental Lefties seem to spend a great deal of time trying to save old movie theaters from abandonment.  It is the perfect example of my use of the term sentimental leftism.  Ordinary people do not try to salvage failing businesses that are failing because they have no customers and no future. Lefties believe that they can use the government to create anything they personally want regardless of the market demands.

Most movie theaters cannot be revived because of the technology and economies of scale that concentrates many theaters in one location, the multiplex.

I want to point out an exception, the Castro movie theater in San Francisco. It is a very large ornate and successful old theater.

The Castro survives because it does two things well. It sponsors and participates in countless film festivals. It runs an aggressive and comprehensive film revival series that is well-publicized and directed at its fanatic supporters.

This model works for bookstores and any other neighborhood venue when the nature of its business has generally passed it by.

Too much money

I was recently asked about the issue of charitable giving. I have written two blogs on the incompetence and futility of the Gates foundation.

I was challenged as to what one should do with too much money.

This is actually not subject on which I have written, or given much thought. I was president of several foundations and the futility of giving is incorporated in The Seven Laws of Money. If there is a positive side other than supporting people you know to be effective in the world and who are willing to accept charity, I have not seen anything else positive.

Does this mean you should let your money accumulate and pass it on to your heirs?

Definitely not. You can only harm your heirs with large amounts of money.

What then?

I see a number of good examples. In one case, a friend used his vast inheritance to bring Indonesian and other South Asian music to the United States. He spent all his money on this type of venture while he was alive. Great example.

Another case is the John M. Olin Foundation that gave money to the donor’s free enterprise interests and dissolved a few years after his death. He knew his money would be co-opted by Lefties just as has happened to every major foundation.

My third case example is where the person doesn't use the money for charity, but establishes prizes and goals for the accomplishment of the donor’s interests. The race to space is an example. There were many early examples of prizes including the first plane flight to Europe.

If you can think of any other examples, please let me know.

America and commerce are an accident

The combination of 50 separate states under one national Constitution is truly an accident that is great for commerce but could never have happened anywhere else or under any other circumstances.

We are an exceptional nation but entirely an accident.  Our Constitution is the only real constitution in the world.  It was self imposed at a time when the notion of a constitution to limit government was in vogue. That vogue passed away.  No other people ever chose to protect or entangle themselves with such a constitution. And a Bill of Rights.

Yet for us, the Constitution has created a text centered people, just like the Diaspora Jews.  The Jews had the text center of the Torah, the sacred words forever to be debated and reinterpreted.  For 2,000 years the Jews have been without a government, a disconnected but coherent people studying a sacred text from the past and living in the present under a wide range of circumstances always re-interpreting the sacred text. 

The same is true for Americans. Our sacred Constitution holds us together despite having a weak, and at times incompetent, central government, trying to cope with 13-50 separate state governments.

Our separate states slowly conferred power on the central government, but never very much.  To this day we have a weak central government compared to most other industrial governments.  Look at the 2008 financial crisis and the fact that we still have no rational plan to remedy that pathetic national incompetence. We probably never will remedy our incompetence.  Remember that the 1913 Federal Reserve didn't have teeth until the 1950s. It is still ineffective and completely failed our financial structure in 2008.

Had this American socio-political experiment occurred anywhere else, but safely sequestered across two large oceans, the neighboring countries would have taken advantage and swooped in for control.  This would have destroyed America many times as the states and the national government squabbled (1812, 1846, 1863, 1898, 1916, 1939, 1953, 1963, 1973).

Truly an accident but a fortuitous one for those of us who love commerce.

Spouses write the obituary

In several recent cases where my friends have died and were prominent enough to warrant an obituary, the surviving spouse or family determined what was in the obituary.

In one case, a woman, the obituary focused entirely on her activities after her marriage late in life because that is what his family knew.  In fact many of her most important contributions occurred long before she married. Her name was Annie Styron.  She was the editor and major influence on the Briarpatch Review and a Simple Living organization called Mint. She also was a co-founder of Friends of the River.

In another case, Ernest Chick Callenbach, his obituaries focused on his environmental writing and his work on the Film Quarterly.  Chick wrote several books on Simple Living and was an early hero in that field. His wife was not a simple liver. Chick also joined me in co-authoring A Citizen Legislature. The campaign to create random selection of legislators. We jointly did several public experiments on the idea and Chick was an active promoter.  Random selection of legislators is an idea that is currently coming of age and has been successful in the California redistricting for 2012.

I have written obituaries for a number of friends, some while they are alive. It is my hope and their hope that the obituaries will be adequately inclusive of their contributions.

San Francisco structure

A friend recently asked me whether any sociologist has done a decent study of San Francisco. The answer is no and the relevant answer is sociology is not capable of understanding what San Francisco is.

I do not claim, despite a lifetime in this city, to understand this stunning urban mechanism. San Francisco has two primary qualities. First it is the city where people come to find themselves.  In that sense it is a crucible. These people leave once they know who they are and what they can do. While they are here they find themselves.... by what they are doing not by their occupations.

Second, San Francisco is in fact the most important source of new ideas and innovations in America, maybe the world. I will not make a list. No one has any sense of the significant contributions of just the hippies and the gay community, not to mention innovators in 100 other fields from graphics, banking to technology.

The overlay of daily life in San Francisco has always been boring and superficial. The ferment occurs at an invisible level. I observed several interesting aspects of this invisible ferment.

While I run into friends on a short visit to Seattle, Tokyo, or New York I can go decades without running into any of my thousands of friends in San Francisco. The social networks simply don't overlap.

However social networks are very open and people are gregarious. You can find anyone if you pursue them. You can find any relevant person simply in your daily pursuits of your own interests.

I have done many studies of the city and found entire industries thriving here with no acknowledgment and no visible presence.

I think part of the reason is that most people are engaged in the pursuit of their uniqueness and that this creates layers of parrallel networks.  Elsewhere people are engaged in some form of commerce.  Commerce connects people, much like a tree and branches. 

As I observe more and as I think about it more I will comment in this blog.

Immigrants vote for their old country

I went to a naturalization ceremony a few years back.

At the door, there were many desks with Democrats signing up new citizens. I only remember one Republican registration desk.

It is not surprising that new immigrants should sign up for the Democratic Party. Except for the smart ones, Cubans, who know that the country they left was a tyranny based on the same pro-government values as the Democratic Party, others do not have such clear vision.

Most people who become citizens simply have no understanding that it is the Republican party that stands for the Hamiltonian, Constitutional values that have made commerce successful and made America so appealing.

Even though they are required to learn history they probably never understood that slavery was the core of the Democratic Party for a century. Nor do they understand that the Democratic Party has been anti-commerce for the entire 20th century.

The reason that this country is so appealing is because of the values of Hamiltonian pro-commerce democracy. The reason the country they left offered so little in the way of personal and family development, jobs and freedom is because that country was suffused with government. They are leaving an ominous pro-government environment and voting to restore it in their new home.

Why?  Because the education we give new immigrants is entirely inadequate.

We give the same inadequate preposterous failed education to the bulk of our college students as well.

Internet origin

The whole brouhaha about the origins of the Internet occurred a few weeks ago. I have nothing technical to add to that debate. Except that Obama as usual was wrong.

I used what is now called the Internet from day one and I have the perspective of a consumer.

I used computers from 1960 on. I use them for statistical research, marketing research and tabulating survey data.

My first use of a terminal connected by phone to a DARPA computer was in 1971. I began using a terminal and a phone modem to connect to the SPIRES computer at Stanford. I put my entire written book, The Seven Laws of Money on the SPIRES computer in 1973. It was uploaded to a typographer in Reno that year. From my perspective, dial-up modem connections to computers were a fact of life. We were using land lines, voice lines. The Stanford computer allowed me to use several other computers in the United States. I regularly used the computer in New Jersey, NJIT.

When I traveled to Japan I took a portable teletype machine (about 15 lbs) with voice modem built-in. I communicated with my office in San Francisco by international voice telephone line. My office had a dumb terminal and voice modem. By 1981 I got a dumb terminal and modem for my father, but he never used it.

I upgraded my teletype to several other terminals and by the late 1970s I had a Kaypro semi portable computer (25 lbs). Shortly after getting the Kaypro, which still used a voice modem, I was among the very first to join the Well. This was roughly 1980. The Well was one of the first two ISPs.  

I was so excited about the Well and the online conferences that I created a business called CLOUD. CLOUD was announced at a gigantic New Age business conference in Tarrytown NY where I tried to sign up the famous and near famous of that era to be writers for my new online conference facility. No one signed up. They didn't have computers or didn't use them. I offered to let them write their wisdom on typewriters and paper and I would enter it online. No bites.

There was no change in the basic computer phone line structure for a decade. In the meantime several programs became useful for the desktop computer. One was the 3-2-1 accounting and database program the other was Word Perfect for writing. Before that we always used line editors a really stupid system. Each line was numbered and any correction was a rewrite of the erroneous word with the correct word in a specific numbered line.

While I used e-mail on the Well, the widespread use of computers had to wait until the 1990s at which time the Internet arrived.  

I visited Xerox PARC in 1971 and the leader, Bill English, was a good friend of mine. I also visited Doug Englebart’s lab in the same year. Doug was in my circle of running friends in Menlo Park.

How much of the Internet history was connected to government products or government invention is not evident to me. The Internet began only when there were many people I could communicate with on e-mail and many functions on my browser. That was a time of full commercialization.

Boycott Jesus

It should be no surprise that mainstream religions these days are much more interested in their Left wing political agenda than in anything to do with Christ or Christianity.

The big mainstream religions, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican and Episcopalian are all into the boycott Jesus movement. I'm not kidding.

These churches are supporting a boycott of Israeli goods made in the area that Israel conquered in the 1967 war. Israelis have been settling by the hundreds of thousands in parts of the conquered territory, particularly the parts that are close to the rest of Israel and have strategic military value.

Need I make my blog point any clearer?

Jesus was a Jew. Jesus was a craftsman of some sort. He made his living building a variety of objects and he travelled a fairly great distance from his home in Nazareth. He sold his wares in many areas based on his various hypothetical teachers.

If his wares were ever sold outside of Nazareth, to any sailors on the Mediterranean or travelers (very likely), modern-day mainstream Christian religions would have advocated boycotting Jesus.

Those religious groups should be required by the laws of anti-deception and anti-fraud from calling themselves Christian. They are advocating boycotting Jesus.

History of the quill pen

I wanted to point out a technological change in our lives in a simple illustration.

I never used a quill pen for serious writing.  Though I have used one for calligraphy.

I did use a metal dip pen early in my life. I used an ink filled pen for a decade.

Quill pens were in use for roughly 1300 years until the American Civil War.

Metal dip pens were used for the next 70 years.

Ink filled pens were used from the First WW until the late 1960s. About 40 years.

Ballpoint pens were in serious use thereafter until e-mail made them far less important. Roughly 30 years.

While the transitions are shortening the big steps in technology are more impressive.  

In each step there are fewer objects involved. A quill, a knife, a big jar of ink and a small jar of ink.

 Finally there is one universal object, some form of computer, that includes the previous Quill pen and ink.

 

Greenhouses produce C02

Are you buying cut flowers or greenhouse potted plants?

You may be one of the worst offenders against the environmental fiction of global warming due to human produced CO2.

The reason is simple and straightforward.

Most cut flowers and a high percentage of potted plants are grown in greenhouses.

Near me, in San Francisco, the town of Half Moon Bay is filled with greenhouses. I mean filled. Hundreds of acres.  Half Moon Bay is foggy much of the time but ultraviolet light comes through the clouds

It is very common in greenhouses to turn on a few tanks of CO2. I wish to remind environmental friends that plants thrive on CO2. Because the greenhouse is a somewhat closed facility it is feasible to release CO2 into the air to increase its concentration above the natural .04%. That is 4 100ths of 1%. Smaller than your smallest toenail relative to your whole body.

People who grow pot use very high concentrations of CO2. If you smoke dope, actually high quality dope, you are encouraging very high releases of CO2.

Marriage for old age

All of my older unmarried readers. Those over 50 who might want a mate. I have seen a phenomenon that is more visible to me as I age.

I have seen three women friends of mine who were in their early 60s getting married for the first time.

The men they married seem to be competent and financially stable.

The reason for this older marriage seems to be a desire on the part of both people to have a close intimate who will help them cope with the misfortunes of old age.

None of my friends have said this is their motivation. I am only speculating.

I do hear this spoken of as a motivation among my older gay friends.

In any case, I suggest that this is a valid and real reason for pairing and marriage among people who are approaching Social Security age.

Jew hate is a brain disease

I consider Jew hate a brain disease.

My position is based on an interview I did with Dr. Ronald Siegel and his book the Voices of Paranoia. Siegel is a professor at UCLA and has demonstrated to my satisfaction that paranoia is a physical phenomenon based on emissions from the medulla oblongata in the brain stem.

These emissions, whether liquid or gas, are transformed in the cerebellum or the corpus callosum into paranoia. This mechanism appears to be very ancient, sometimes referred to as the reptilian brain.

I would describe someone who considers the infinitesimal number of Jews, a few hundreths of 1% of the world population, to be the dominant controllers of the world as medically paranoid.

Do you have another term to describe such people? I see no evidence that the world is controlled by anyone, much less by a few hundredths of one percent of the population.

It is on the basis of Dr. Siegel that I call Jew hate a brain disease.

Most Arabs have this brain disease and it is widespread in Europe. There is no evidence that it is passed on by micro-organisms. It seems to be passed on by large cultural forces.

Pork lovers never learn

This is a blog for politicians.

I always get more readers when I blog about politics. This is an important blog.

In 2009 and 10 we had one of the most important political lessons in modern time.

Pork doesn't work. Pork is what a member of Congress or any legislative body channels in the form of benefits to his elected District.

Under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Congress of the United States sent back to each Democrat's district the largest amount of pork in the history of the planet. If that pork worked it was an important lesson. $800 billion was doled out in the form of pure pork.

In the next election, the Tea Party made sure that the Democrats lost more seats in the House than they had lost in any previous election. The Democrats didn't lose a few seats.  The Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House. Politico says: “Several state legislatures made historic transitions to Republican hands — some for the first time since the 19th century — and nearly an entire generation of state Democrats saw its ranks obliterated.”

Did politicians anywhere learn from this historic world shaking event?

Apparently not. Maybe it's the only thing politicians know how to do.

If politicians really learned important lessons and sought a more effective tool for reelection, it would be being in sync with their electorate.  That would be more powerful than any pork.

I personally have stopped giving money to the Republican Party this year because so many Republicans voted for agricultural subsidies.

When more people start acting against pork and more politicians learn that pork doesn't work, our government will work better.

Of course this is not true at the local level where corruption is vital for the construction and real estate development industries.

Hire a bureaucrat?

If you run a business, ask yourself this question, would you hire a former bureaucrat?

There are a few instances where you would hire a former bureaucrat. If you run a defense industry and want an insider, yes. If you want a security person you might hire a former policeman or fireman. The same goes for a teacher.

On the other hand, the longer a person worked in any bureaucracy, the less desirable will be that persons work habits and employment attitudes.

There are very few jobs in the free market where seniority is more highly valued than productivity. That seniority over productivity quality is almost the definition of a bureaucrat.

It is because of the unwillingness of rational people in the open market to hire bureaucrats that we have two serious social problems.

One is that government is a malignant cancer. No one in a government position is willing to fire someone else, knowing they will never get work again.

Two, government workers are stuck in their job for life, therefore they cling to it and they further emphasize the necessity for seniority over merit.

Gay child rearing

There is a great deal of controversy about a recent study published by Prof. Mark Regnerus.

The study finds that in a narrowly defined family relationship of gay parents, that survey evidence does not support the widespread court testimony that gay families have the same or better child rearing outcomes than heterosexual families.

I am an expert on survey design. I looked carefully at the Regnerus study and find it is excellent. There are no comparable studies of this subject that are competent.

The Regnerus findings are based on reports from children who are now adults and whose own parents had 'some homosexual relationship' when they were growing up.

Since they were growing up in the 1980s, it was very rare for a stable gay couple to be raising children. Therefore the sample is much too small to be of any current relevance.

I don't expect to find a reliable study on this subject for another decade. Children whose parents were both openly gay and offering a stable relationship will not be in sufficient numbers until then.

Yelp, 5 years of dishonesty

I wrote a blog a while back about the dishonesty of Yelp.  In many cases their salespeople pressure small businesses by offering the opportunity to host favorable reviews at the top of the page and threatening to do the same with bad reviews if the small business doesn't buy Yelp advertising.

My blog goes on for pages and pages of comments supporting the experience of many small businesses.

Yelp is now five years old, has expanded to the entire United States and is still running a dishonest operation.

This should let you know two things. First there is a desperate need for a reliable online reviewing mechanism. Second word-of-mouth about a dishonest Yelp is not effective so far.

Memorial day for people killed by socialism

I propose to the new, hopefully Republican Tea Party Congress, that it is time to create a specific Memorial Day to honor all the individuals who have been killed in the last century by socialism.

My reason is simple: it is time to make the American public and other people in the world aware that socialism is a synonym for killing citizens.

It is worth debating the fact that Nazism was a National Socialist movement. That starts off with 40 million people killed. Next are the Soviet Union and China and the numbers are very loose ranging from 40,000,000 to 80,000,000. There are many more to throw in and they would always be interesting to debate about.

Isn't it time to make Americans and the world aware of the historic consequences of our experimentation with strong centralized government?

We need a Memorial Day to remember and honor the tens of millions killed by socialism

Nutritionist lose 3 times

Isn’t it time that the American Society for Nutrition issues a public apology?

Of course I’m kidding. No scientific or even pseudo-scientific body has ever apologized for the stupidity of their membership.

There are three significant cases where nutritionism has been wrong because they didn’t bother doing the simplest of tests.

Parents still talk about their kids being out of control because they ate too much sugar or ice cream. That was a nutritionist fallacy.

It is easy to test sugar levels in the blood. Actual sugar consumption doesn’t raise sugar blood level very rapidly.  A piece of cheese will do it faster.

For many decades nutritionists have been telling us to consume multivitamins daily. Now the authoritative CDC has told us that multivitamins are irrelevant most of the time and harmful some of the time.

For decades I have avoided eating egg yolks because we know that egg yolks are primarily cholesterol. There is a blood test for cholesterol and a nutritionist should have connected the eggs to the blood level. Egg yolks do not create human blood cholesterol.

You can see why I think the American Society for Nutrition should be apologizing for their carelessness and scientific sloppiness.

More complex society

When I built a park for winos in the late 1970s there was one common refrain among the Street people of that era. The two images on this page show the park under construction and after completion. The park was on the corner of Sixth Street and Minna in San Francisco and lasted two years.

The most common explanation that men and women who patronized the park gave for wanting to live on the street was that society was too complex. They would explain the need to have a telephone and a bank account and a driver's license in order to rent a decent apartment. Each of these things required the other in a circular impossibility.

Today our society is significantly more complex than the late 1970s.

That was about the last time I had to take a written driver's test. I recently had to take the test again because of my age. Last time the driver's handbook was 16 pages long. Today it is 96 pages long.

The increased complexity of driving is related to the following changes: we now have disability stickers and parking, we now have very large trucks on the highway, we also have light rail on the streets, we have to cope with orders of magnitude more bicycles and more signage.

I passed the written exam only to find out that I needed to take a written exam for my motorcycle license. This was based on a brand-new book of 40 pages. The details required a description of the five different kinds of motor powered vehicles and endless other requirements including laws about the proper way to stop using appropriate brakes and the way to ride through gravel. I’m telling the truth.

I think that is sufficient evidence to show that our society is getting more complex, rapidly.

The two driver's tests require a very high level of test taking skills (the multiple choices depended on highly refined language skills) and suggest to me why many ordinary people don't have driver's licenses.

We are definitely making life difficult for ordinary people. We are probably increasing the number of people who want to live on the streets and drop out of our society.

2% are leaders

We have been hearing for a year about the top 1% in our society. The Left and our affirmative action president insists that this tiny number of people need to pay more taxes. The rest of the society has been responding that these people already pay more actual taxes than nearly everyone else combined.

I want to remind my readers that for the previous 60 years, since the Second World War when leadership was an important issue, we have always talked about the 2% of our society that are leaders.

Many studies of leadership have shown that different circumstances generate different kinds of leadership. Sometimes on a sinking ship an unexpected person emerges as the one who is calm and knowledgeable.  In an airplane accident still another type of person will be able to respond.

The qualities of leadership are not always known or appreciated in advance.

The proportion of people who are leaders, in any society, in any environment, remains extremely low. The military found that only 2% of any cross-section of our population are leaders. This seems to be true in my experience.

Therefore it is rather bizarre that the Left should be picking on 1% of the population and ignoring the fact that 2% of the population comprises our leadership both entrepreneurial and political.

Does this mean that only half of our leaders are being appropriately rewarded? Half of 2% is 1%.

Dodd-Frank created the mess

The mythical visitor from Mars would have trouble understanding why Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were the people that wrote the legislation to govern financial institutions after the financial crash of 2008, considering these were the two men who protected Fannie and Freddie the main institutions that caused the financial collapse.

The mythical visitor doesn't understand the extent of ignorance and business hatred that dominate the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party protected the main institutions that led to the crash and had a veto proof power of Congress when the time came to ameliorate the mess they had created.

The Republican Congress of the early 2000’s and President Bush constantly begged for legislation to open the books of Fannie and Freddie and to replace the two CEOs.  They were blocked by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.

Of course the Democratic Party had no choice in either case. These were the two men  (Dodd and Frank) who the party considered most knowledgeable on financial issues. Of course they weren't, but we must live with widespread ignorance and discomfort with numbers (Democrats can't do simple arithmetic) within the Democratic party.

Born before 1776

There is a vast amount of educational ignorance in our society today.  It is particularly apparent in the press among journalists.

I see endless streams of comments attacking greed. It seems to be acceptable to attack greed publicly without the attacker being considered an ill educated buffoon.

If you attack greed you are showing that your brain has no education past 1776. That is the year Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations and explained that people do not get up at two in the morning to bake bread for us nor get up at five in the morning to serve us a cup of coffee out of sheer goodwill or love.  In a free commercial society people invariably are acting in their own self interest and we are the social beneficiaries.

Commerce is built on people acting in their own self interests, and that includes greed. Communist societies that all failed did not understand why commerce is such a successful mechanism. They were based on the sole motivation of terror.  They had to be prisons to keep people from leaving, like Cuba and North Korea today.

Terror was the emotion that drove the world during most of human history.

Thank Goodness we are in a much healthier era. Unfortunately too many people are ignorant of the way the world works.