Pro Commerce

Buttercup Bakery and Suze Orman

I recently read a book that was attacking the investment planning industry. The author was generally correct in her criticisms but she is an ignoramus who has no idea what the underlying problem is nor what might constitute sensible investment planning advice. (See my Simple Living Investment Advice for Old Age.)

One of the chapters was devoted to attacking Suze Orman. The author is a mean-spirited person and after mentioning that Suze got her business start working for Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley, the author found someone to say that Buttercup was not particularly good.

Wrong.  

Buttercup was great and beloved. Buttercup was the first modern retail eatery in America. It was the source of Chez Panisse and the Berkeley gourmet extravaganza. And the whole explosion of interesting hippie generated food that follwed.

Buttercup served elegant and imaginative homemade breads, pastries and served all its dishes with a wide variety of fresh ingredients and imaginative spices.  Buttercup was a member of the Briarpatch and I visited it several times during its early years. It was widely loved in the neighborhood.

More than a decade later the two owners invited me back for an urgent consultation.

The owners, in an effort to expand their kitchen and ovens, had borrowed money with onerous terms.

My visit was in February. The loan came due at the end of May and required an instant repayment with no renewal if specific revenue targets had not been met. The revenue in the previous months had been more than 10% below the target.

It was my job to figure out how to dramatically increase revenues in the coming three months without additional investment.

I did... and the two owners followed my advice. First I had them offer free coffee to the drivers of all the buses that stopped in front of the bakery. The goal was to make the bus passengers aware of the widespread love of the bakery and smell the baking aromas.

The second thing I had them do was create and distribute a flyer to all the residences within a half a mile radius. One side of the flyer offered two jobs in the bakery. It was a period of economic slow down in Berkeley.    

The other side explained the wonderful smells wafting over the neighborhood that were due to the new ovens. There was an explanation of the wood fired ovens.

The purpose of the flyer was simply to remind people of the bakery that they all loved.

Revenues immediately grew by more than 15%.  The loan was extended.

At this point, one of the most common things about small business, occurred. The owners sold the business and went to Mexico.

Irish banking strike

An Irish friend of mine was always very reluctant to tell me her age.

One day while discussing her history she mentioned that an Irish bank she had been working for went on strike for several months. This was when she was 19, after finishing high school school. Because I knew that the strike she was referring to must have been the one in the summer of 1976, I had no trouble knowing her age.

Strikes of this nature have always been of interest to me. It was a strike of the Grayline tour bus company in 1972 that allowed me to start the modern diverse thriving tour business in San Francisco.

There were several Irish banking strikes in the decade before 1976. The Irish had learned to do without bank accounts.

Initially people wrote checks to each other. But they quickly learned that the checks couldn’t be cashed.  So the checks were passed around with each person signing on the back for a few weeks. Soon people recognized that adding signatures was irrelevant.

Most people checked the names of the Issuer and the first signer to determine if the check was good. If both parties were known to be trustworthy the check was treated as cash.

The whole point to me was that people very quickly find ways to create a currency system. Of course the underlying nature of that currency system is trust.

It was about this time that I went to Japan to create and buy a large batch of special mulberry paper.   I had already commissioned a design firm to create a currency for use in the Briarpatch. After talking to business people and validating the potential success of the currency I decided not to do it. It was going to consume too much of my time being a banker.

Latin declensions

I had one year of Latin in high school. I remember it well.  It was difficult and challenging unlike any other school experience.. It has always had a positive effect on me and my ability to learn.

I was joking with a friend the other day about the plural of Prius.

Since Prius has a Latin ending, I was speculating on the plural, many such Toyota hybrid vehicles.  In English it would be Priuses.

I ended up looking it up in Wikipedia and found that Latin declensions were far more complicated than anything I learned in my brief one-year exposure.

I will save you the trouble of looking up the article in Wikipedia. The plural of Prius is Prium.

So when you are driving down the highway and (especially in California) you pass two or more such vehicles you can point out that you have passed a Prium.

I don't expect that to make much sense to anybody who is riding with you, but it is cute.

LSD and the Left

We are now in an era when a large proportion of the Lefty voters in America have experienced LSD or other psychedelic in their lifetime. What is the consequence?

I cannot accurately determine the percentage of people who voted for Barack Obama in the last two elections who had used LSD during their life. My guess would be roughly 20%.

I observed such people in the 1970’s who had used LSD and other psychedelics during the hippie era. I also tried it myself several times.

Psychedelics simply disconnect incoming sensory inputs from the traditional mental structure. The consequence is that the person on the drugs has a complete sense of disorientation. In a short time there is usually a reorientation but it connects to an incoherent world of senses. Like Alice in Wonderland.

The psychedelics wear off in a few hours, usually within eight hours.

Observing former psychedelic users I noticed two surprising post drug mental patterns.

In one case, such users become ‘Jesus freaks’. Jesus freaks decide that a strong belief in the Christian deity-prophet, Jesus,  will provide the emotional and intellectual stability that they need in their lives.  I don’t think these people end up being voters.

In the other cases I saw, there was a high level of paranoia and Lefty allegiance. The paranoia was accompanied by a sense that dark unexplained forces were at work in our world.  This coincided with the belief that the Democratic Party was the bulwark against chaos and dangerous threats. The Democratic Party, in the eyes of these former users, represented social welfare programs and general social protection. Not police. They saw the Democratic Party as a benign social government deity to protect them.

I think it is time to examine the modern political population with these issues in mind.

Dairy to Texas

A few decades ago, a group of 14 Wisconsin dairy farmers moved their dairies to the Central Valley of California. They wanted to use emerging high tech dairy techniques.

Each of the 14 farms had 600 milking cow and automated milking machines. The cows were milked four times a day. They used spray water to keep the cows cool in the very hot California weather. Milk was picked up daily by truck and brought to a central cheese processing plant in Turlock that the same 14 farmers had created. The cheese plant produced and still produces roughly 1/3 of all the cheese sold in America and had over 1,000 employees.

The cows ate corn raised on the farms. California does not permit irrigated water to be used for raising corn so these Wisconsin dairy farmers had selected a location where well water was sufficient for their corn crops.

What is interesting is that these very successful, environmentally conscious and prosperous dairy farmers have been slowly moving their operation to the Panhandle of Texas.

The reason they told me for their move to Texas is that the California’s environmental and safety regulations are onerous.

An example one farmer gave me concerned backup generators.  These farmers must not have their milking machines out of service for even two hours,  because cows become ill if they aren’t milked (600 of them). Therefore the farms have three backup generators for electric emergencies. California inspectors require full emission control on each generator (expensive equipment) even though the second and third generators may not ever be used even once in a century.

This was given to me as an example of the insanity of California bureaucracy.

When I told this story to a Lefty friend, he was incapable of understanding the reality that these farmers face in California.  Even more significantly, most Lefties are unable to understand the terrible damage this out migration of business does to the California economy.

My Tokyo partner

This blog is about language translation.

For more than 20 years I was a partner in a Japanese social science think tank. I won't describe it here, that will be a separate blog, because we don't have any comparable think tanks in the United States.

What I wish to comment on is how my partner, Seiji Takekawa, and I communicated. This is highly relevant to machine translation.

If you know any languages or regularly see translations from other languages on Google or other computer programs, you will note that some languages translate fairly well and some languages do not translate at all.

Japanese to English is a complete failure. Machine language translation for many languages is a farce.  I do not see any possible improvement on the horizon.

That is why I am describing how Takekawa san and I communicated for two decades.

Early on Takekawa san brought in a translator. His English was poor and my Japanese is equally poor.

After talking with each other for about 5 minutes the translator would be dismissed. We could communicate perfectly.

The way we did it was for him to make a statement or describe a business project in broken English and for me, in poor quality Japanese,  to repeat back what I heard or understood.

Sometimes he would talk in Japanese and I would repeat back in English.

Invariably we understood each other and carried on conversations for hours. We carried on conversations that dealt with complex social science issues.

It was very rare for one of us to repeat what we had said in a modified form to make sure we were understood. Most of the time our interpersonal communications were perfect.

To give you an example of a particular subject matter and the level of complexity we dealt with.  One of our clients was a religious movement that was interested in selling a new design of household ‘memorial cabinets’. In Japan most households have a cabinet with photographs, incense and fruit dedicated to the memory of deceased family members.  Our business challenge was to understand this new religious movement and translate the issues into design criteria for the memorial cabinets and invent new sales channels that could be used. Not a simple subject. Not a simple language issue.  But we did it.  Our clients were very happy.

We had no trouble understanding each other. I had to describe burial and mortuary procedures in the United States.  Not easy for someone, like Takekawa san, who had rarely been to the U.S. to understand.

What this tells me is that complex language translations are quite natural for human beings but not susceptible to computer brute force or the prominent fantasies of computer artificial intelligence.

New abortion scene

I'm sure that most of my readers are aware that a doctor named Gosnell was convicted of murder in Philadelphia for his work at an abortion clinic. He was convicted of murdering three post abortion babies that attending nurses claimed were alive.

The prevailing argument about this case is that this will have some affect on the pro-and anti-abortion politics. I don't know about that because people have pretty much made up their minds.  The country is divided. Nearly 2/3rds of the country say they would not have an abortion personally nor recommended abortion to anyone in their family.  Simultaneously, half the population believe legal abortion should be available.

I only wish to point out that any doctor in the US who is conducting abortion procedures will now give a second thought to any abortion after the first trimester. Most fetuses are not viable even in the middle of the second trimester.  Post Gosnell, I can't imagine a doctor putting his/her life at risk now that a jury, made up mostly of pro-abortion citizens, would return a verdict of murder.

I think that will change the reality of work in abortion procedures.

Deep Eddy Austin pool

I was telling a friend about a freshwater swimming pool that I used in the early 1960’s when I worked at the corner of Van Ness and Market in San Francisco. The pool was inside downstairs near the corner of Oak Street and Van Ness.

My friend told me about a pool in Austin Texas that is fed by a freshwater stream. I was delighted to hear about it.  I asked how Austin handled the sanitation issues. My friend said that the water changed on such a regular basis that Austin bureacrats seemed happy with the quality.

The fact is my friend didn't know.

My 1960’s pool was wonderful to swim in. It was in a basement and was freshwater fed from the Hayes Valley River that was, and still is, underground. It is one of several underground rivers in San Francisco.

My pool facilities were not heavily used and were not very well maintained. By that I mean that there was a constant smell of fungus in the dressing room and dark splotches visible on ceilings.

By 1964, the city had closed my wonderful freshwater, chlorine-free, pool. The city claimed that the water must be chlorinated. Chlorination was obviously necessary to satisfy some bureaucrat. Also obviously, the pool no longer had the revenue to bribe the local bureaucrats.

The bureaucrats continued to maintain their preposterous chlorination policy until 2010.

I know that because the gigantic pool at the University of San Francisco, I swim in, was designed in the 1970’s to have an ultraviolet-light purification system. The bureaucrats would not let the ultraviolet system be used and required chlorination.  The ultraviolet was finally permitted in 2010.

Miscellaneous information for more readers.

Dressing up

There are several cities known for dressing up in costumes.

San Franciscans put on parties all year long with dress-up themes and costume.  That includes the Symphony, Opera and Ballet.  They all put on dress-up and costume parties regularly.

Hippies had regular costume parades and parties all over the city all the time for decades.

The biggest events in the past few decades have been the costume parties of the Exotic Erotic Balls and the Gay Halloween event. Because it grew so big, the Gay Halloween event has been suppressed to some extent. San Francisco has an event called the Bay to Breakers Race which is a costume event with 70-90,000 participants.

I asked myself why San Francisco is so in love with costumes and dressing up.

I have two answers.

Number one: San Francisco is where people come to find out who they are. The use of a costume to cover up the real person as he searches for his or her identity, makes sense. Once people have found who they are, they leave San Francisco and go where their character is most appreciated.  

Children raised in San Francisco tend to know who they are and move away after high school. Almost no one I went to school with in San Francisco lives in the city today. That is true for the few other people I’ve met who grew up in San Francisco.

People are in the City to find out who they are and costumes are like a chrysalis to hide the developing product.

The number two reason: San Francisco is a city of façades. The most common architectural style is Victorian. Victorian homes and buildings permeate the city. Victoriana is rococo, pure façade.

Many of the Victorians and architecturally related houses have a fake roof line on the top. Like buildings in old Western movies.

This fake roofline is a sham.   It is very visible and common in the city.

In my opinion this environment of façade and fake rooflines is consistent with the idea of costumes and dress-up.

Golden Gate Bridge music

To me, the power of art is its ability to shape our perceptions. Great art has a major impact on our perceptions in many dimensions; auditory, visual, intellectual, taste etc. Lesser art has a lesser effect or no effect.

 

In 1975, I set out in a van to record the sounds of many public objects in San Francisco. The possibility for recording objects came to my attention thanks to a member of the Briarpatch with whom I consulted, Arnie Lazarus who had developed an audio pickup call the FRAP, flat response audio pickup. It was used by every rock and roll muscian of the time.

Arnie was on the trip, along with Bess Bair the great tap dancer known as Rosie Radiator, Doug McKechnie a musician and composer and lastly Don Sach a photographer.

We played and recorded half a dozen statues, sculptures, stairwells and banisters around the city. Our last object was the Golden Gate Bridge. A few nights earlier Arnie, Doug and myself had gone to test the Golden Gate Bridge for its acoustic possibilities. We were chased off the bridge at the time.

The idea of playing the cables on the bridge, like harp strings, came from in magazine cover done by David Wills. We played the bridge strings. Doug used several heavy mallets and hammers.

David's visual imagery had become an audio and photographic image. Doug made a short musical piece which was played widely on am radio up and down the West Coast.

Since then, countless bridges have been played and the New York Philharmonic has performed a  piece using local bridge sounds.

I consider that Golden Gate Bridge creation a good work of art because it has had repercussions in the visual and audio world.

T

he part that I remember most vividly is that we found one cable that had a standing wave.  A standing wave is an extraordinary object. It is a wave that is in perfect harmony with the object in which it travels and the distance it travels. It moves back and forth to perpetuity. You can check it out in Wikipedia.

 

We found a standing wave in one cable, and because of its potential danger to the bridge, I reported it to the bridge engineer a few days later.

You can find Doug's music online in several places.

Bing and Yahoo

Yahoo, with its new Mayer led CEO, is trying to get out of a 10 year agreement with Microsoft to use Bing (a natural language search engine).  Yahoo would make more profit from advertising if it used Google.

Microsoft made a mistake when it bought a natural language search startup that became Bing.

I could have told them at the time but I'm sure they would not have listened to me.  Too smart by a half.

Google is a service monopoly. In a book called Gods of Commerce that I published in the early 1990s I explained what a service monopoly is.

If you offer any service where there is a network advantage, that can be a Yellow Pages, a network like Craigslist, a currency, anything where the greater number of users the greater the usefulness. That is a service monopoly. Google is a service monopoly.

The monopoly status will be maintained as long as customers do not find a single significant activity that is missing from a service monopoly. If such a single significant activity is missing a new service monopoly can rapidly grow to replace the former.

Google isn't anywhere near having a single significant missing activity. Google moves very rapidly to fill any holes in its service.

Bing is one of many search engines that will have no future. Too bad for Yahoo and Microsoft.

The exception to my rule about service monopolies, of course, will be in some tyrannical country that has a unique language like China.

Visa trade secrets

This blog is a business confession.

I was describing the nature of trade secrets to a friend. I had explained that under California law a corporation cannot keep an employee from going to work for a competitor. This is one of the few good things about doing business in California.

However an employee going to a competitor cannot give that competitor trade secrets from the former employer.

That is what led to my discussion of trade secrets.

I had been the newly hired marketing researcher who studied the four year old BankAmericard, the first travel and entertainment card issued by a bank. It was intended to be a general purpose card. I knew everything about the BankAmericard.

When I left the Bank of America a few years later to join the Bank of California and start a marketing planning department, I set out one morning to visit my peers in banking.

All four of them were sitting together in a Wells Fargo office when I arrived. A fortuitous surprise for me. They were discussing a proposal from a man named Salverson. Salverson suggested that he create a credit card to be a service to the banks. The four bankers had laughed at Salverson's suggestion.   They told him ‘the only credit card we need is green paper’... meaning cash (that was a bankers' joke.).

It was at this point that I used a secret from the Bank of America. I said that BankAmericard was extremely profitable and had generated $13 million in its fourth year of operation; net net. They wanted to know how that was possible and what internal interest rate was being charged. I knew another inside secret. The Bank of America was charging BankAmericard a 14% internal interest on its money.  BankAmericard was really profitable already.

My four friends were stunned by this revelation. They promptly asked how we could start our own credit card and I explained how it could be done under existing banking law. (The same law that made a check clearing house possible.)

Out of this, in less than six months grew MasterCard. By the time MasterCard was started, it had hundreds of banks joining it.  BankAmericard had to change its name to Visa and asked other banks to join.

I confess, I used trade secrets to help create MasterCard.

Opening a restaurant

I have been the business advisor on many restaurants. The first, Victoria Station, was in the late 1960s. It grew to become a chain of 100 restaurants. Another was Green's at Fort Mason. Greens is a high quality vegetarian restaurant with over 180 seats that has been full throughout its 33 years of existence.  That is a hell of a long time in the restaurant business.

Whether a restaurant will be a success or not has to do with hundreds of factors.

Whether it CAN BE a success is a different story. It is so rare, as to be almost nonexistent, for a restaurant to open slowly and grow slowly to reach capacity and success.

From my experience, if a restaurant is to be successful, ever, it must open its doors at full capacity.

It doesn't really matter how the customers come to the initial opening, whether it is because they are friends, because they have personal invitations or whether they get special treatment....  none of that matters. What matters is that the restaurant opens full of people and remains full of people for the first weeks and months.

You will often see a full restaurant next door to an empty restaurant. It is my experience that the full restaurant opened to capacity and the empty restaurant opened nearly empty.

CO2 and the Jews

Both CO2 and the Jews are much maligned. By ignorant people. CO2 is the source of life. All the greenery around us depends on a microscopic amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Much of the great technology and medical advances are owed to the Jewish people.

CO2 is measured in parts per million. There is currently 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

If we measured Jews on the same basis there are 5000 ppm based on global population.

Put this in percentages, Jews are 0.5% of the world and CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere.

There are many hundreds of millions of people who think that a slight rise in CO2 from the infinitesimal to the infinitesimal will bring about a near apocalypse. There are similarly many hundreds of millions of people who think that the infinitesimal number of Jews control the world and do so for their (our) own malicious benefit.

Since CO2 has reached 1000 ppm several times in the past 800,000 years for which we have measurements, it is hard to understand how this inert gas can be so frightening.

It is even more difficult to understand how half a percent of a population can be in control of the entire world with over 160 nation states and a United Nations that hates Jews.

I have no particular way to make a point of these two infinitesimally small numbers, except to point out that anyone who finds a mechanism to justify preposterous attributes of these small numbers should be considered ‘weird’.

We do not have any metrics for the CO2 levels during the dinosaur era, but since carrots and celery grew to the size of house, it is reasonable to conjecture that the size of the dinosaurs was due to the abundant plant life and food available to them.  The abundant plant life could be attributed to a high level CO2.  

Jews in the first few centuries after 100 CE were a much bigger proportion of the world, maybe 5%, and they didn't control the world.

Paradise

I live in a home in San Francisco, in the United States in the year 2013.

You and I live in paradise. Sometimes we forget what a paradise we live in today.

For 10 years from 1972 to 1982 I avoided all media including TV, movies, newspapers, magazines and radio. I knew what the news was most of the time but I didn't know who died during that ten year period.  News is in the air.

I was extremely happy during that 10 years.

As an ordinary person, without an inheritance,  I have been an airplane pilot, a partner in a large sailboat, a skier, a scuba diver, a runner and I am currently a regular swimmer and martial art practioner.

Knowing that it is my current immersion in the media around me that keeps wild happiness at arms length. Some of the time.

Not only do we live in a paradise with luxury living, food, transportation, recreation and communication, but all of these have been getting better throughout our lives.

Communication has been getting better in every way in every medium.  We don't change automobile tires anymore, cars are much more reliable, streets are cleaner, we have gone through a period of astronomic crime and that is over. We have extraordinary healthcare technology, our air and water are so much cleaner in the last half century.

We owe all of this to the fact that our country was created by frontiers people who supported each other out of generosity and only built the most minimal government when it was needed.

Most of all the frontiers people who settled this country appreciated commerce more than any other peoples on the planet.

Thank you all, and thanks to our great business people who have given us this paradise.

The poor poor

We often talk about the ‘poor” people. I try not to. Poor is a value judgment. For example the ‘poor dog is in pain’, ‘the poor kid is going to be spanked’ and ‘poor woman has no taste’.

Those are value judgments. To put someone in the economic category of poor is similarly a value judgment.

You can take a look at the way the Census measures poverty. You will find that a person who owns their own house, has a mutual fund portfolio and owns several cars could well be considered poor by the government definition.

The level of poverty is based on food costs for a balanced meal 50 years ago.  Food most of my friends wouldn’t eat today, focused on beef, butter, frozen peas, mashed potatoes, iceberg lettuce and jello.

Poverty is something that Lefties and only Lefties love to talk about but it is meaningless. A poor American will have cable TV, a cell phone, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and most likely a car. I know.  I interview ‘poor minorities’ as an expert witness regularly.

Compare that to three quarters of the world and you can see that an American is living in the lap of luxury. Especially since Americans have available public transportation, luxurious recreation facilities, abundant choices of fresh food, free water and free education.

Just wanted to remind you that ‘poor’ is a value judgment not a meaningful measure of economic status. 

Body Shop

I recently saw a short article about the late Anita Roddick (Dame) about starting a business.

Ms. Roddick is known for having started the Body Shop.

That just doesn't happen to be true. I know the history since I was a consultant to the original Body Shop which was a member of the San Francisco Briarpatch.

The real founders of the Body Shop where Peggy Short and Jane Saunders.  They were hippies who had opened a shop in  Berkeley and a second shop in San Francisco on Union Street. At the time they were doing what several other people I knew were doing. Which was commissioning cosmetics from a Berkeley chemical lab. Peggy and Jane just did an extraordinary job of selecting the smells and doing the graphics.

Anita Roddick took every detail of Peggy and Jane's stores. Cosmetics, design and the name.

More than a decade later when Roddick wanted to move her version of the stores into the San Francisco Bay Area she had to negotiate with Peggy and Jane. The Bay Area women were happy to take the money offered to them and change the name of their store to Body Time.

Most of what Anita Roddick said about activism and her charitable giving and the purity of her products were not true. That should not be a surprise.

TED is only 10 minutes

This is just a blog to point out the obvious.

Nearly everyone has noticed that our attention span has become much shorter because of the Internet.

That is not my observation. My observation is that as information becomes more abundant, as intelligence proliferates and as we have ready access to facts, that we have changed the nature of our communication.

We communicate important and useful information in much shorter segments.

To someone who has been reading fiction from  the past few centuries this pattern is visible. The great novel of Moby Dick is filled with long rambling arcane sections on every imaginable type of information that was interesting to someone in 1850. Contemporary fiction, such as is common in Japan, has almost no background, scene setting, or similar baroque digressions.

Business letters by the end of the 20th century were curt and to the point. The opposite of the beginning of the 20th century.  They were flowery and long.

The reason is straightforward. As our common knowledge and education expands, our ability to grasp new information requires less background and support. If we need to know something, we can look it up quickly on our smartphone.

The best example of the institutionalization of this reality is the fact that most TED talks, that are widely circulated as intelligent comments, are only 10 min. long.

Internet friends and dissatisfaction

I have detected an ennui, a dissatisfaction among people I know.

This ennui seems to be unrelated to stage of life, success in business, or any other obvious factor.

My son is leaving the Bay Area with his wife to travel around the United States for three months to see if there is a better place to live. They call their trip "the search for intelligent life."

I think I know the problem.

The Internet is the problem. On the Internet my intellectual companions are readily available and scattered around the planet. One is in Jerusalem, another in Tel Aviv, a third in Calgary, several in Tokyo, another in Venice California.

These are now important friends with whom I am comfortable.  I need my regular contact with them.

Therefore I am impelled to feel that my life in San Francisco is inadequate because I do not have these friends as close physical companions.  I have plenty of friends and a few locals who are really close.  But I’d say half of my vital friends are only via the Internet.

I think that my ennui and that of others is because of the wonder of the Internet.

We can't possibly have the kinds of close relationships that are important and have those relationships be local. The Internet has spoiled us in a strange way.

Auto license and accidents

Since 2005 there has been a dramatic decline in American auto fatalities. Roughly a 30% decline. This is an amazing statistic and very important.

In looking at the reasons, there appears to be one outstanding explanation. Most states are restricting the use of automobile licenses for people between age 16 and 21. Restrictions such as immediate suspension for any driving problem.  Even minor ones.

We should all be pleased with the success that state governments have had in carrying out this humane effort.

We could do twice as well. We could cut the current number of fatalities in half.

We could save 15,000 lives a year and over 100,000 disabilities.  More than all the gun fatalities.

The two countries whose driving habits I have examined, Japan and Germany, have half the auto fatality rate that we have.

The Germans, drive on autobahns at speeds in excess of 150 mph. That is why their cars are so good. The Japanese went from no seatbelts to everyone wearing a seatbelt with no change in the fatality rate.

So how do these Japanese and Germans do it?

Answer: both countries have extremely difficult drivers tests.

The preparation for the test is expensive with roughly 40 hours of training. The drivers test for an automobile are almost as difficult as the tests I took to become a pilot.

When we want better and safer driving in the United States we know how to do it: have a difficult drivers tests.

SLA and Patty Hearst

Do you know any of the history of the Symbionese Liberation Army? Called the SLA.

I had been working at Glide Memorial Methodist Church for several years when the SLA appeared in the media. I had heard rumors on the street that an organization was planning to kidnap a wealthy heiress. The two I knew of at the time were Patty Hearst and Eileen Rockefeller. I phoned them both to let them know about the rumor. They both told me they would ignore it.

After Patty was kidnapped along with her boyfriend, Glide became involved in the negotiations between the leader of the SLA, Cinque, who was in prison and Patty Hearst's father Randy.  The SLA made increasing demands, including feeding thousands of poor people, which Glide arranged and Randy paid for.  The issue finally disappeared when Patty was freed and the rest of the members were burned in a house that was in a shoot out.

There is very little to comment on about my experience. Armed gangs with a half-baked revolutionary ideology are easily defeated if they lack military skill. Feeding the poor in San Francisco did not make them the heroes of the NYTimes and New Yorker, which is what you need to succeed.   Like their incompetent hero, Che Guevara, they were surrounded and slaughtered.

Left and right

My friends always assure me, when I talk about the stigmata of the Left, that there must be something comparable on the political Right.

The basic assumption is that Left and Right are a single dimensional line.

I am here to disabuse you of that nonsense. Hitler and Stalin are not on two different ends of the same line. Stalin is clearly on the left. Hitler called himself a socialist, believed in strong centralized government with government control of capital investment and five-year planning.  That does not put him on the opposite end of a single dimensional line. That puts him on the same side as Stalin. Both killed innocent humans to further their ideology in vast numbers.

In fact, I would argue that the Left is much more homogeneous and well described by a one-dimensional line. The line goes from weak central government with capital controls such as France to countries with a great deal of central planning such as Stalin's and Mao's 100% central planning and still further to the Left the Trotskyite revolutionaries and the North Korean tyrannical extremists.

On the Right-hand side of the line I find no coherent political group. There are, in the United States, moral right-wingers such as Pat Buchanan who opposes abortion and hates Jews, and Ron Paul who favors the gold standard and no foreign aid. In the same cluster are the traditional conservatives who favor business, lower taxes, smaller government and free trade but have no stance on moral issues including gay marriage. It is hard to see that the Right, as a cluster, has anything in common.

It is even harder to see how the Right could be put on any uni-dimensional line representing any coherent value system. Many Righties favor abortion and gay marriage, many oppose them.  All Lefties favor them.

There is no Left and Right. There is a Left and there is a pro-commerce world. Separate from all of this is a moral dimension that is in a different geometric space.

(I recommend the interesting comment by Dvid Boxenhorn below.)

African equality

I have a unique vista on Africa. A 200 year perspective.

As a graduate student in economics I was hired to read every book and look at every map of sub Sahara Africa before 1850 and record all the economic transactions and prices. The project was for a Professor Miracle at the University of Wisconsin. He later published the first book on African economic history.

I also traveled through West Africa examining development projects in five countries for an organization out of Washington DC, where I was a board member.

I can state authoritatively that the entire sub-Saharan Africa has a common behavior. When anyone generates a success, more income than everyone else, he or she is expected to distribute the surplus to tribal relatives. It is always done.

No one is allowed to rise above the equal income level.

You may know stories about rich tyrants. Since you are not there you are not aware that the rich tyrant has always made his entire tribe rich following the core African value of the equality among tribal members.

There are many explanations, by economic experts, of the reason for Africa's complete absence of development despite an often well-educated workforce and vast natural resources.

Except for the fact that it is a sheer rebuttal to Lefty 'redistributionist' ideology, it must be clear that a society or continent that values equality over everything else, is doomed to economic morass.

Ten ways Democrats screw the poor

When you increase the price of goods and services, poor people are more affected than wealthier people. An increase in gasoline price per gallon affects poor people much more than anyone else; the same is true for clothing food and utilities.

Here are the 10 ways the Democrats increase prices for goods and services for the poor.

1. Urban Democrats throughout America try to ban Walmart, Target and many other low-cost stores from their cities. The cost of nearly everything at Walmart and Target is lower than at the stores urbanites have to shop at. Direct effect on poor people.

2. The standard way for Democrats to raise taxes for their many policies is to tax wine, liquor and cigarettes. These products are used disproportionately by poor people. These taxes are a direct levy on the poor.

3. The Democratic Party, in nearly all Democrat-controlled states, increases the number of licenses for semiskilled retailers. Licenses are required for barbers, beauty salons, manicurists, acupuncturists, massage and a long list of semiskilled nonprofessional occupations. The only people hurt by this are the poor. They cannot get inexpensive services and they cannot  easily create work for themselves.

4. The Democratic party has always been a strong opponent of free trade agreements. For over 200 years economists have explained that increases in international trade reduce costs. If Italy can produce leather shoes at a lower price, then free trade will bring lower-cost shoes to the United States. The Italians, conversely, will buy the lower cost architectural engineering services from the United States. The poor benefit the most from lower-cost goods and services. They are hurt the most by tariffs and trade barriers.

5. The Democratic Party is owned and supported disproportionately by unions. Unions thrive by limiting the number of employees the company can hire. This is done by raising retirement costs, health costs and creating unwieldy work rules. The consequence is fewer people get jobs in unionized shops, and the poor people with the fewest skills are the ones most frequently excluded.

6. One party has been the strongest advocate of welfare, food stamps and disability payments. These are essential for people who genuinely need them, but the absence of careful criteria for their usage and the Democratic party opposition to means testing (checking to see if the welfare recipient owns $1 million house) has detrimental effects on the poor community. With a heavy presence of non-working peers in a neighborhood, there is encouragement to young people to choose a life of sloth and dependence. Such encouragement is a disability to the poor in and of itself.

7. The Democratic Party has been a national opponent of school vouchers. Such vouchers are used to escape the lowest quality public schools. Since these schools are disproportionately in poor neighborhoods with low income students, this policy causes direct lifetime harm for the poor.

8. The Democratic Party has been the sole pressure to create and raise the minimum wage. This is because the party is in the thrall of unions and unions know that raising the minimum wage will raise the already higher union wages. In simple supply and demand terms, when you raise the price of a good or service there is less demand for it. When the price of labor is raised by a minimum wage law the number of people employed declines. This is particularly true for young people and people with minimum skills. This hurts the poor more than anything else that the Democratic Party does.

9. The Democratic Party has long been the source of price and cost controls. It was Democrats who allowed wholesalers to set retail prices for decades before courts threw it out. A Democrat administration has reinstituted this rule after a 50-year absence.  The Party sets minimum prices for milk and milk products and many other agricultural products.  The Democrats created the fantasy need for ethanol that dramatically raises the price of corn for poor people in Mexico, Egypt, and the world.  Everything is more costly for the poor, including food. Especially food.

Urban Democrats always support rent control. Since poor people move more frequently than any other population except young people, rent control does not benefit them at all. Most poor people leave the urban center as rapidly as possible if they cannot get public housing. The public housing, of course, is filled with graffiti and is dangerous. A distinctly poor problem.

10. School busing was a necessary policy in the government mandated segregation of the Jim Crow South. In the urban North, segregation was real but not created by government policy. The urban North school busing had two effects: it carried the criminally dangerous behavior of ghetto neighborhoods into all schools, making life for the poor a relentless environment of danger.  Busing also drove middle-class populations out of the cities and out of the public schools. It left public schools with seriously diminished parent support and a rapid decline in quality of education for those remaining in public urban schools.

Summary: the Democratic party is shockingly harmful to the poor of America. That is not the intent of its policies, but that is its effect...unambiguously.

GMO labelling crud

A group of Lefties, environmentalists and food fetishists in California recently put an initiative on the ballot to label foods as being genetically modified (GMO), when they are.

More than 20 years ago I started an organization called the Project to Label Gene-Altered Food.

I began the organization after listening to a number of Boston intellectuals tell me that genetically modified food was the same as all previously developed foods using selection and breeding.

I knew that was nonsense. No breeder could put a pig gene into a banana. But there were genetically modified foods with that combination.

Because the metaphor being used was so ridiculous I decided it was important to warn people that they were eating genetically modified foods in order to follow the actual population risk of genetically modified food. To follow it  for several decades. That would be the only way to detect serious problems if there were any.

I learned the genetic food and animal field. I met all of the important activists on all sides of the issue.  I influenced the Japanese legislation on the issue of genetically modified organisms.

At the same time, the Department of Agriculture was examining the definition of ‘organic’ in order to create a national standard. A national standard was intended to replace the many state organic certification organizations.

My organization immediately joined the campaign and got my allies to do the same. (Here is the letter my organization sent.)  We realized that by excluding genetically modified food from the term organic we would accomplish our goal of having a category of food (page 12) that had no genetically modified components.

The campaign to label organic as excluding genetically modified food along with irradiated food and urban sewage waste was joined by several hundred thousand people. The largest public campaign in the history of the Department of Agriculture.

For the past 15 years, organically labelled food automatically excludes genetically modified foods.

So, what would legislation  labeling all food with genetically modified organisms do that is beneficial.? Nothing. It increases the cost of all foods.

In the twenty years genetically modified foods have been on the market no problems have been detected.  The issue is now moot.

Increasing the cost of foods, of course, impacts poor people more than anyone else. But environmentalists, Lefties and food fetishists don't care about anyone else. And they are not willing to shop for all their own products at Whole Foods.

That is the source of the title of this blog.

At least until now my efforts have been successful. ‘Organic’ in the U.S. still excludes genetically modified food and we are not burdened by additional costs of labelling all other foods.

I regret Socially Responsible investment

In 1971 I believed in a concept called corporate social responsibility.

I played a major role in getting the socially responsible investment movement going.

I paid for and convened a conference in Inverness California of the 30 leading organizers in the corporate social responsibility field. We used that conference to create common plans and joint projects.

As a foundation president, I funded research into the 'social-issues-behavior' of public corporations and funded publication of the results. I funded and supported many activist proxy battles.

I solicited funds for the newly emerging socially responsible mutual funds to help them get started.

As a corporate treasurer and foundation president I personally visited all of the major foundation managers and treasurers in New York to encouraged them to use their portfolios to support their programmatic values. In every case, the treasurers laughed at me. They said ‘if you don't like the corporation sell the stock’.

Over the years, I have come to regret my involvement in this movement. Corporations have absolutely no social responsibility. As Adam Smith so wisely pointed out, by seeking to lower costs,  creating jobs and expanding their markets they're doing everything that anyone should expect of them. They are doing more for more people than any other entity or institution on the planet.

Over the years, the core problem of the corporate social responsibility movement became obvious to many others. The socially responsible causes had multiplied and changed. In the early 70s it was napalm, Native Americans, baby harp seals, women and minorities on boards of directors and investment in South Africa. Over the years, new causes were added from food safety and health issues to animal testing in cosmetics, animal products in pet  food, LGBT, investment in tobacco.....  and the list goes on and on.

What is socially responsible corporate behavior is chimeric.... it changes with the month. It is trivial, flippant and irrelevant to business.

Does big business kill small business

I hear this from people who are not anti-business. It is taken as a truism.

I wish there was such a term as ‘falsism’.  This idea that big business destroys small business is definitely false.

I have worked with bookstores when Borders and Walden's were becoming a problem. Once again when Amazon appeared to be a problem. I worked with clothing stores and bagel outlets when new chains appeared to be a problem.  I worked with coffee shops and tea shops as Starbucks grew and expanded.  I also worked with large retailers that faced incoming Costcos and Walmarts.

In each of these cases, without exception, if the management was willing to make the necessary changes and innovations that were appropriate for their clientele, they had no problem continuing to succeed in business.  

For bookstores, they were going to lose some of their top 10 best seller sales. But they could much better acclimate their inventory to their clientele, if they knew their clientele. They also began having readings and events that interacted with their customers.

I showed the numeric benefit to existing coffee shops when Starbucks arrived, with proof in an earlier blog.

The same was true for every kind of business. Greater interaction with their clientele community, more selective and highly specific inventory improvements were all that were needed. In a few instances, the local businesses needed to lower their costs by joining cooperative wholesale buying groups.

I saw a few businesses fail. The reason was simple and the public will never understand. These people were exhausted. They were tired of running the business. They did not have the energy to make the appropriate changes.

Big business does not kill small business. It makes it better.  

Cheaper to import a child than raise one

I just did a simple calculation in my head.

The social cost for raising a child who is born in the United States up to the age of 25, when presumably they have left their home and got a job, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The cost of importing a child who has already demonstrated physical and mental health and who is younger than 25 is less than $10,000. A big difference.

Since the United States remains a magnet country for immigrants from the entire planet, it will always be possible for the United States to grow vigorously by importing desirable young foreigners.

I know there are some drawbacks to this observation. Some of the money these new Americans would earn would be sent back to their families. Some of these new immigrants would be supported by our welfare structure. Hopefully not many.

When I look at this option, which is politically possible, I can see that the American population has a long-term positive growth rate, regardless of domestic reproduction.

Asian wave

There is a steady drumbeat in the political world about the growing importance of Mexicans and Latinos.

I think these projections overlook a much more important demographic population that is growing rapidly: Asian Americans.

This rapidly growing population has several advantages over other immigrant groups.

First this population does extremely well, better than the rest of the American population, in intelligence tests and in academia.

Second this Asian-American population is also very successful in business. Both Silicon Valley businesses and private retail stores. At this point in California, several Asian-American populations are becoming dominant in medical, elderly healthcare, electronics, engineering and accounting.

Third, and most importantly, with my own eyes I am seeing a vast number of couples dating and married in public who are a combination of Asian-American and non-Asian American. This type of intermarriage seems to be proliferating which means that assimilation is moving at a rapid pace.  I don’t see a similar pattern of rapid interracial activity among Latinos and Blacks with others. I live in California.

I call the subsequent assimilation and rapid commercial success rate of the Asian-American population the coming Asian Wave.

Our taxes dollars made Walmart

A new Lefty friend asked a question that gave me great pleasure to answer.

Why is Walmart able to offer such low retail prices? 

The answer is: government subsidies. Does a Lefty like to hear that?  They don't.

Here's the story.  During all your life and mine Federal tax subsidies to farmers have been in the range of $30 billion current dollars per year.  That money just poured into the farmlands of America with virtually no place for farmers to spend it.  In 1962 Sam Walton started his retail shop in rural Rogers, Arkansas.  The farm money started to role in because Sam had plenty of interesting items that farmers had always had to drive into big cities to buy. The farm money kept pouring in and Sam kept opening rural department stores.

If you want to see a fascinating video, here is one that shows the expansion of Walmart stores from one in Rogers, Ark. to the entire farmland of America and then into adjacent suburbs.

With this kind of size and buying power Walmart, thanks to nearly thirty years of $30 billion a year in Federal subsidies to farmers, just did what any large retailer would do: improved distribution and started outsourcing.  The distribution system is a marvel of standard business, the outsourcing to China came earlier than everyone else and owes to the brilliance of Walmart management in seeing the future of China.

P.S. Mall of America tapped into this same ocean of money in 1992. It has over 500 stores in southern Minnesota.