Pro Commerce

Golden ratio

The architect of the eastern span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, which goes from San Francisco to Oakland, is a client of mine, Donald McDonald.

Donald has given me the opportunity to write a blog about the golden ratio.

Donald used the golden ratio deliberately in his design of the eastern span of this bridge. The ratio can be seen in the relationship between the structure above the roadway to the supporting structure below it,  as well as the ratio to the extensions of the support cables.

Donald also relied on the design of the Saturn 5 rocket in doing his design work.

The bridge and tower are elegant because they use this historically appealing ratio in their design.

Leonardo da Vinci was a fan of the golden ratio and it has been used by artists for many millennia.

The math is quite simple. = 1.6180339887...

We have no idea why this is so appealing to the human eye.

 

Questioning bicycles

A recent article in Commentary magazine questioned the current elevated status of bicycles and bicycle riders in urban areas. This questioning was carried throughout the Internet because it does reflect a deep and growing concern about bicycles and their use in public space.

The general complaint is that bicycles ignore traffic rules and in clusters, bicyclists act like bullies.

I personally see two particular problems related to bicycling use in urban areas.

The first is that we have bad laws regarding bicycles. Bicyclists consider themselves to be improved versions or extensions of pedestrians. Therefore they should be allowed to use sidewalks and behave like pedestrians when traffic is light. Our laws do not reflect that. In others cities that are more genteel such as Copenhagen the laws do reflect that reality more accurately.

Secondly, the political forces supporting bicycles and the associated environmental hysteria that argues that bicycles are more than transportation they are a morally superior creation, have created a malicious hierarchy.  Bicycles are now on the top of a moral pyramid.

This superior-to-thou political force ignores the fact that bicycles are inadequate for carrying groceries or other frequent purchases.  That they are inadequate for ordinary Americans in inclement weather.  And most importantly they are completely irrelevant to the large part of our population that has slight physical disabilities. They can never be a significant form of transportation for our many seniors who cannot risk falling from a bicycle.

It is in both of these regards the time has come to temper our attitudes and worship of bicycles and bicyclists.

(The photo suggests the level of political hysteria.  These are rental bikes for short term walking distances.  The City of San Francisco has dozens of such locations.  Relevant only to people in good weather, dressed casually and fairly young.) 

Superman’s changing room

I found this traditional telephone booth in an obscure location in a parking garage in San Francisco.

I couldn't resist photographing it because phone booths are so rare these days and will soon be nonexistent.

It is hard to remember the period before the ubiquity of cell phones. How did we get in touch with each other? How did we let people know where to meet and what we were doing?

It was because of the ubiquitous telephone booth.

It is worth remembering that a private company maintained these generally clean and safe booths.

As soon as it was no longer relevant as a business these booths became public restrooms. The phone equipment was promptly destroyed by the rambunctious and disrespectful components of our society. In other words it was treated the way all public goods are treated…  like public housing. They are abused and neglected. 

Customer service in disasters

The photo on the right is of a Wells Fargo customer service truck near Lyons Colorado in September of this year.

Lyons at the time had suffered from horrific flooding caused by a torrential 18 inch rainfall in one day in an area that usually receives that amount of rain in a year.

I think it is not just humane for a business to be prepared to continue serving its customers during a calamity,  I think it is good business.

The best example I can think of was the work of A.P. Giannini, chairman and owner of the Bank of Italy in San Francisco who set up a mobile bank only days after the great 1906 earthquake. Giannini gained so much appreciation from everyone in the community and especially business people for being open promptly to help businesses that he was able to grow his modest Bank of Italy, in two decades, to become Bank of America.

Being open for business promptly after a calamity not only gains long-term support for the business but also is a magnificent display of the importance of commerce to the creation and sustenance of our society.

Part of the long-term gratitude the community feels toward a business for its extra effort in troubled times is, what I consider, a deeper appreciation for the role of commerce in creating our modern society.

Mural of commerce

This mural is in a two-story staircase in the dining area of what was once the San Francisco Stock Exchange Building. The dining room is now owned by a nonprofit called the City Club.

The mural was done by Diego Rivera. Rivera was a communist. There are two things that I wish to say about his mural.

First, it is an astute testament to the glories of commerce. Rivera did not have that in mind when he painted it. He was not a polite person and would not have deferred to the interests of the client. However, while trying to depict the laborers and technicians who he believed create commerce and whom he wished to glorify, he has inadvertently done a masterful job of promoting the genius of commerce.

Second, Diego Rivera has been mistreated by history. I went to see his house in Mexico City the early 80’s and it was an excellent Museum of his art with no paintings by his wife, anywhere.

A decade later with the rising  need for the Women's Movement to find some prominent women painters, his incompetent, unattractive and totally irrelevant wife became a woman's painting celebrity. Her name is Frida Kahlo. Her art now adorns the Diego Rivera Museum.

Because he was a communist, completely unwilling to look at the murderous rampage of his idol, Stalin, it is hard to sympathize with the treatment he gets. But because he was in fact a great muralist I do wish to express some sympathy for him.

Faux

I will admit that I don't usually know the difference between faux and trompe l’oeil.

This photograph is of a house in the Castro district of San Francisco that has a  tudor architectural structure for the area over the front door . The architectural imagery is carried forward in a single brown line that crosses the entire front of the house

The brown line is not a single wooden beam. It is paint over wood and brick in most of the right hand segment.

I'm very impressed and think it is an ingenious design idea.

Whether it should be considered faux or trompe l'oeil I don't really know.

Generosity and political party

It is a fact that conservatives give much more generously to charity than Lefties. Here is a data set if you want proof.

I would like to suggest a simple reason for this disparity in generousity.

Conservatives actually are the kind of warm people who identify with other people in a direct one-to-one high level of comfort.

Lefties are almost exactly the opposite. They are not warm people who identify comfortably with other human beings. But they have an abstract belief in their own warmth and generosity. As a consequence they feel guilt about all the people who they do not help with their direct charity or with their personal charity via a local church.  So out of guilt they give their money and votes to the Democratic-Union party on the false belief that the Democratic-Union party helps poor people.

It seems logical to me.

I notice that low income people and women are the disproportionate givers to the homeless beggars I see. Both these groups vote Democratic-Union and both of these groups look at homeless beggars as examples of people who are ‘needy’.  Conservative know that most of these homeless street people are permanent, smelly, addicted, deliberate parasites.

How San Francisco has changed

The following was part of an earlier blog.

“When I was a Vice-president at the Bank of California I was flown to Memphis to be interviewed by the 1st National Bank of Memphis for the job of president.  I was shown the city, treated lavishly and kindly.  I was shown the house that would be bought for me and my family and the several clubs I would be invited to join.  It was 1970 and no clubs had black members but one club had a Jewish member, I was told.  (No one asked if I were Jewish because few people think of Phillips as a Jewish name.)

I made a good impression and when I got back to San Francisco I was offered the job. I knew that one reason I was desirable was because Memphis is the South and a Westerner was considered financially sophisticated but wasn't considered bad to Southerners the way a Yankee would have been” .

My, hasn’t that changed in the intervening 40 years.

At that time San Francisco still had its first Democratic mayor after a series of Republican mayors and we still had a Republican member of Congress, Bill Mailiard.

San Francisco was still considered a major financial center by most people in business. Many banks had started in San Francisco and new ones were constantly popping up. Charles Schwab was just getting started in the city.

San Francisco was considered a sophisticated financial and business supporting city.

Today San Francisco is considered a soft headed mess in league with Detroit and California as a liberal insanity centers with a surplus hatred of commerce. San Francisco does not have the problems of Detroit emerging yet. In the long run its disastrous union love affair and socialist absurdity will certainly be a problem.  In the meantime San Francisco is the Internet capital of the world with an expanding global Internet.

Just a brief note on why San Francisco went from being a sophisticated financial center, like New York, to  being the armpit of socialism and liberal nanny nonsense.

A high city tax on businesses payrolls and a general hostility toward business drove out the businesses that had provided political and social stability. Every single company started in San Francisco in the previous 120 years was gone.  Some like Bechtel didn't actually leave but turned their interests from local to international.

When these big businesses moved, they left a vacuum in city politics that was promptly filled by incompetent lefty union loving peaceniks and other fools who have run the city ever since.

Symphony seats

I went to the San Francisco Symphony last week on Friday night to hear conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. The seats were roughly 80% filled. This performance is usually sold out. I was able to buy tickets at a discount.

I don't really know Symphony finance and I don't know what experiments are being done in the symphony world to fill-up concert seats.

I could see a simple solution to the San Francisco Symphony partially filled hall

Two things seem to be the needed. First, as the time of the concert approaches, ticket sales should show rapid declines in price to fill up the remaining seats. This is known as marginal pricing and has been used by airlines to fill themselves up ( much as this makes airline travel uncomfortable for all of us in crowded coach seats).

Second, many box seats are always left empty. I think it would be appropriate, with suitable notice to the seat holders, that after the first curtain, which is usually the first complete musical piece, the seats will be given to the standing room audience.

The second point will allow symphony halls to be sold at over 110% of the seats.

You'll notice I used 110% which is often used in situations where only 100% exists. But 110% is accurate because it is 10% more than the number of seats which is 100%.

Walgreens joins Lowes

A few years ago I wrote a blog about encountering consumer fraud at Lowes.

I have now encounted exactly the same problem at Walgreens in San Francisco. Consumer fraud. Walgreens is a 112 year old company. A genuine disgrace.

You can see it on this label. The advertised sale price is in large letters, $2.99. Very visible to anyone. If you act on the visible sales information you will find out at the checkout counter that you have not seen the small type that says this sale price is only available to members of the Walgreens club 'with card'. This is intent to deceive customers. In legal language this is fraud.

If you are part of Walgreens, feel free to show them this blog and do what you can to end this corrupt practice.

The worst thing about fraud is that it reinforces bad corporate behavior. It does sell  more objects to people who are careless, have some disabilities especially with their eyes or to actual members of their club. On the other hand the people who are offended buy less at Walgreens. Those of us who are offended show no evidence that we have been offended. This pattern of fraud shows who buys more and are visible while those who buy less are not. It reinforces the corrupt behavior.

Companies don’t see the overall harm that is caused to its business in the long-term, because the long-term customers remember the abuse.

Except for airlines and other institutions that are selling limited space at marginal rates I find that club cards and memberships are counterproductive. People who are very price conscious appreciate it.  Such practices offend the rest of the people who know that they are not getting the best possible deal whether they are regular customers or not.

These long-term effects are far more important than most businesses realize and the harm this behavior does is cumulative. Whenever a competent competitive business comes along the fraudulent businesses lose their most profitable desirable customers.

(After writing this blog I find that Walgreens has a practice of fraud all over the country and has been sued appropriately in a few states.)

WikiLeft

In many ways we are now so dependent on Wikipedia that it is rude and unfair to criticize this great institution. Wikipedia is an order of magnitude better and more comprehensive than any encyclopedia in the past.

Nevertheless I run into problems with (the American version of )Wikipedia ,which I do in fields that I know very well, on occasion. When I run into these problems it is always because Wikipedia ends up having a Left-wing bias.

Of course we all grew up (if you are over 20) in a world where the default position for everything in knowledge and information and data was filled with a Lefty bias. But that has been changing thanks to the slow but steady growth of pro-commerce understanding that is most evident with the emergence of talk radio and Fox TV.

I can give you two examples so you know what I mean. Take a look at random legislature (sortition), a field in which I was the first to write and develop the material (there is a reference to my book). You will find that the wiki entry is a debate between the reasons for random selection of legislators and a few outliers who don't like it.  This is a new idea and should be treated with respect and have a wiki entry of its own that completely explains what it is about. It is not the place for a rant by Lefties and status-quo-others to voice their opinions. The first quote in favor of random legislature is from a Marxist. The authors don't know enough to mention that the largest state in the world (California) used random selection to create the committee to design apportionment.  It has been very sucessful and widely discussed.

The other place to look is: global warming. It is 95%  standard Lefty rant and 5% questioning.  When I looked yesterday there was no acknowlegement that the latest IPCC again reduced the predicted effects.  And no mention of the pst 16 years with no warming. 

Wiki needs a button to click if you know a great deal more than the people writing the wiki and wish someone to contact you. It also needs a button to click when a wiki entry is a decidedly filled with Left-wing bias. No other bias ever seems to stand out so blatantly.

(There is a more comprehensive article on the Lefty bias of wikipedia here. Don't waste your time looking at Wiki bias, they never noticed the six Lefty mainstream media channels in the U.S. versus the  one channel that isn't Lefty. They also have an absurdly biased video on the influence of money.)

Government controlled healthcare

You will never hear me complaining about Obamacare for any of the standard reasons. I don't care whether you get to choose your doctor or the type of medicine or the treatment or any of the other countless problems that Obamacare creates or the ridiculous re-distribution of income that it is intended to create.

I have one reason and that reason is so significant and so important that I cannot believe any society would Institute socialized (government directed) medicine in any form.

The free market of commerce is what has brought us all of the life-saving, pain avoiding realities of modern life. When the government starts making rules about medicine and medical technology the innovation that has made life worthwhile for most people disappears.

This is not ranting. This is based on this list of the most obvious fact that anybody can look up. Americans comprise less than 5% of the world's population. And yet Americans receive 50% of the Nobel prizes in physiology and medicine. These are men and women being rewarded for their contributions to our life survival and well-being.  These are people thriving in the most commercialized country in the world.

Let me repeat that. The innovations that these people create are not from countries where the government makes major determinations about medical care. They are coming disproportionately and startlingly (in orders of magnitude greater frequency ) from the most open commercial medical market in the world: the United States.

If you want government intrusion in the medical market, you are a Luddite of the most malicious mean-spirited kind. We all have the information, now. The reality is: you have to get the government out of the way in order to have innovation in medical technology.

Briarpatch auto co-op failed because

The Briarpatch was a network of small businesses that I helped create in the 1970's among the hippy entrepreneurs that radically re-shaped the nature of our modern world.

I can mention just one of the many success: the modern bicycle revolution that grew directly out of the hippy mountain bikes.  But this blog is about one of the many hippy failures.

While we have grocery co-ops that have survived in a few areas in a few circumstances we don't have auto co-ops today.

In San Francisco and on the Peninsula we had three auto co-ops. In the East Bay we had a tool borrowing business specifically for auto repairs. They all failed.

It turns out there are two problems with auto co-ops that no one could cope with.

The first is that auto mechanics are highly skilled people who move perpetually. They can find a job anywhere and they do. The consequence is that unless an auto repair business is extremely well run with great incentives to stay at that single auto repair business, the mechanics will flow through like a river. The management of the co-ops never knew how good a mechanic was until months later when the customers brought the car back with the same problem or a new related problem caused by the mechanic who is long gone.

The second problem was even more difficult to deal with. Most people have a deep emotional relationship with their car. If they think there is a noise in their wonderful little car or that something isn't working the way it did before they are perplexed and anxious. There is very little that a mechanic can do other than repair something that is actually broken.

The way most auto repair shops deal with this emotionality associated with cars is to dedicate a group of frontline customer-relations-experts to deal with customers. These frontline auto repair customer relations experts are really salesman or psychotherapists. Their job is to make the customer feel good about whatever is bothering them and to protect the mechanics from the hysteria that the customers carry with them concerning their precious car.

Co-ops always found it hard to keep customer relations experts happy. The customer relations people either demanded a great deal more money than seemed justified to the rest of the mechanics or they were so important to the survival of the business that they became the owners or top managers. Again something difficult to create in a co-op environment.

That's why we don't have auto repair co-ops, today.

(Here is an article about the Palo Alto Auto Repair Coop.)

Halloween special streets

Halloween was a few weeks ago but it is a good place to comment on an interesting urban creation.

Several people commented on the fact that Halloween today is not like the Halloween when they grew up. The difference is that they went door-to-door with other kids in their neighborhood.

Today in large cities kids go to specific neighborhoods where all of the kids congregate and jointly go trick-or-treating with adults out in the street. In one neighborhood near me there are well over 2000 kids and a few hundred adults every Halloween. It is safe and fun for everyone. The entire neighborhood is decorated and the kids and adults are wearing fancy costumes.

This is the way the urban world has adjusted to the incrediby high crime rate of the 1980s that extended into the 1990s. Today's way of celebrating Halloween is a vestige of our solution to that high crime era.

Of course I cannot fail to mention something that most people remain blind to. We have a hereditary permanent black underclass that is illiterate and innumerate with a high proportion of criminals. It constitutes half of our crime problem today and indefinitely into the future.

Pro commerce rant

There is a great difference between the way I live in San Francisco, Tokyo and Tel Aviv in the year 2013, and the way everyone lived on the planet in the year 1713.

That is the core of my rant about pro-commerce. I feel that I am pretty much alone in seeing a dramatic difference. And understanding that the difference is due to one single thing: the emergence and success of commerce.

In 1713 nearly everyone in the world faced daily hunger. Most people died of hunger and disease. When there was food it was constantly the same food day after day. There was very little variation in daily eating. In most of the world nature presented daily problems in the form of weather that was too hot, too cold, too windy, too dry or too wet. Each of these forms presented hazards from floods, famine or worse.

None of this was as serious and frequent as the daily emotional pain of death to family members, to close friends and to both friends and family when traveling.

Death and the threat of death was everywhere among humans. Survival depended on proper familial and class relations. Everyone needed the protection of his Lord, his large family, his cousins and everyone else in their social network simply for survival.

Now on top of all this world of terror, that much of the world still lives with, everyone faced incredible pain from their own bodies. The simplest and most frequent bodily pain was teeth. Everyone had abscess and root canal problems The more persistent were disabilities that came with birth such as bow legs, deformed feet, hunchbacks, vision and hearing problems as well as very common skin problems. Bathing in fresh water was rare or non-existent. There are dozens of diseases that I can't list because they are gone and their horror is not appreciated. But you still see them in Third World countries.

The most common problems around the world have been declining for a century. Polio, TB, the childhood diseases with lifetime consequences such as measles, mumps, rubella, and all the associated infections.

Why do I mention all of these problems.? Because it is hard for people to see, first that almost all of these problems have disappeared in the modern commercial world and second that we have commercially invented treatments for all these malignancies.  They can’t be clearly seen as the sole inventions of the commercial world because they have been transmitted around the world by foundations, government and goodwill to every Third World country.

When I hear a Lefty bemoaning the triumph of commerce of big business of corporate success I hear that ignorant person blindly attacking the world that has removed all of us moderns from this unimaginable misery and pain.

 Did medicine and the associated technology come from something other than commerce?

 If it didn't, why did India look the way it did in 1960? It didn't have much commerce other than what the British brought.

 Where was modern medical technology in Central America or the Congo in 1960? It wasn't there because medical technology, health aids, sanitation and the resulting longevity all come from commerce.

 So does long distance instant communication, transportation, safe housing and the variety of life choices we now have available.

 The most important part of this rant is that whoever we are today is because of the nearly millions of choices that commerce has created in the world of occupations, skills paying work functions. Virtually none of this is available in North Korea or Cuba. Our choice of who we are, our decision as to who we can become….. is the byproduct of booming commerce.

Commerce and cooperation

Most people have an inaccurate view of commerce. Most people see it as based on competition. They see Microsoft and Apple suing everybody left and right to try and gain an advantage in the marketplace. They see large companies buying smaller companies with potentially better products sometimes to keep them off the market. They see movies about aggressive business owners and corporate leaders plotting the demise of others in their field.

What most people don't see is that 98% of commerce is cooperation. It is cooperation in the work environment. It is cooperation in the development of industry standards. It is cooperation in relationships with suppliers and contractors.

Cooperation is the milieu in which commerce actually operates despite the superficial evidence of competitiveness. When a business needs help it turns to a wide range of independent contractors, lawyers, designers, business consultants, engineers, accountants and headhunters. In each of these relationships there is no contract, there is just an assumption of cooperation mixed with a little bit of self-interest. Self-interest usually leads to cooperation.

If one looks at the entire world of commerce people are helping each other every day in hundreds of ways without contracts merely based on trust and goodwill. Cooperation is the ground milieu in which commerce operates and thrives.

Somehow  we need to make it clear when a person buys an apple. The entire supply chain of cooperation and goodwill exists to get that apple from the tree to the final buyer.

Hormone cocktail

There has recently been a big brouhaha in Santa Rosa California because a 13-year-old boy was killed by a police officer when the boy refused to put down an AK-47. The weapon turned out to be a pellet gun. Hundreds of people have been demonstrating about this issue for several weeks. Most of the demonstrators are Marxists, Communists,  Left-wingers and anarchists looking for the next new issue, but a few are just ignorant people. Ignorant at a stunning level.

It has never been wise to carry a fake firearm in public. And it has always been wise to drop what you are carrying anywhere when told to by an authoritative voice.

The issue is more critical today than it has ever been. I will explain why.

It is directly related to the title of this blog.

In any emergency situation where a person is faced with a significant threat, his body is filled with hormones specifically designed to compensate for the circumstances. These hormones, called the hormone cocktail by Rory Miller in his book Meditations on Violence, allow one to move very quickly, move deliberately when under pain, to ignore pain and to exert extraordinary physical energy. Simultaneously, it limits the focus of attention and vision to the emergency situation and can create a fight or flight panic.

Such an hormone cocktail occurs with police, law enforcement and military personnel on a regular basis.

Over the past two decades training has been focused on helping these personnel to act effectively and to avoid endangering themselves in potentially dangerous circumstances. Special training has been developed to put a person with a weapon under stress that stimulates the hormone cocktail and then requires the person to make quick life-saving judgments.

You probably have seen some of the training on TV and in movies. The person being trained is put in an environment with lots of loud noises and faced with pop-up targets that include very dangerous people along with innocent hostage victims.

The first thing the trainee must learn to do is to get out of the way of the threat. Get behind some protective object. You will notice that when two policemen stop a car one will get behind the door of the police car while the other approaches the car that has been stopped. Find physical protection first.

The second thing you'll notice is that people in dangerous situations fire immediately as soon as they detect a weapon or direct threat. The reason is simple. This is an important part of training.

A real threat, a criminal with a weapon, we'll shoot immediately without warning and kill the law enforcement or military person. That means the trainee must learn to offer no warning shots, that also means no firing to ‘disable’ the threat. It means shoot for the bulk of the body and kill the threat before he kills you.  Your life is at stake.

With this kind of training, you do not want to be in any circumstance where you can be perceived by a professional law enforcement or a military person as a threat.

It is that simple. Don't wear a hoodie, don't carry anything that looks like a weapon. Don't look like a threat when you are in public. And tell that to children.

Derivatives market and bonds

This is a highly relevant issue today because a man has been nominated for the position of derivative controller and his name is before the Senate for confirmation.

Five years ago, the government decided it was going to make the derivative market a public open exchange. Five years ago. It still hasn't happened.  

What is a derivative? What are they talking about?

Banks and other financial institutions create derivatives as a form of insurance on bonds and other low risk securities. The derivative is a contract promising to pay compensation for any losses on the face value of the underlying bond or low risk security. Since these securities have a very small risk of defaulting in the first place a derivative becomes a good form of leveraged debt.  Banks can lend money on the derivative.  If the underlying security is a municipal bond and the municipality is likely to go into bankruptcy the derivative, which promises to make up for the decline in face value of the bond, will rapidly go down in price, and the yield will go up.

It doesn't appear that creating a market for derivatives would be easy because each derivitive is a separate contract with hundreds of variables in each paragraph of a 60 page agreement.

The government can't do it. The government has failed after five years.

Should we be sympathetic because the problem is so difficult? No.

A bond issue is really a 60 page contract as well. It is an agreement to pay under very contractual conditions the face value of the bond. A single bond issue is offered with a wide range of interest payments, maturity dates and details of special circumstances that affect the payout.

There has been a market for bonds since 1620. The market for bonds is no different than what a market for derivatives would look like.

If the commercial world were told to create a public exchange for derivatives it could do so, quickly, just like the bond market.

But the government is incapable of doing something that the market has done with perfect functioning in dozens of countries for 400 years.

How to get rid of Democrats 2

We have to find some way to get rid of the Democratic-Union party. It is anti-commerce and without commerce we would be living in 1830 under conditions like those in North Korea and Cuba minus modern technology and medicine that they buy from commercial countries.. That is the future the Democratic-Union party wants. It has shown no hesitation to control all utilities, all airports, the entire medical health care system, private property, personal firearms and to tax business success more highly than any other public behavior.

I have several suggestions for how to make the importance of commerce to our lives more visible.

On a rotating basis for one year, one out of every 10 businesses in every area should be closed for a week and not pay any employees during that week.  Some exception should be made to provide reduced service at life saving points. Announcement of the closure should come well in advance for many businesses such as an airline, taxi services and for grocery store. Signs should be posted at the closed businesses saying 'We live in a commerce hostile environment, let's change that'.

The same sign should be put on the products in retail stores that reflect the supplier who is taking the pro-commerce week off.

For one month, every product sold at retail should have an identical label affixed that says 'Thousands and thousands of people were involved in the design production and marketing of this product with you as the final consumer.  Do you appreciate what went into this product?'.

Lastly, retail stores should take specific sections and post signs that say: 'These products in current dollars cost $X.XX.  Forty years ago, they cost $X.XX, if they were available at all. Commerce has been reducing the cost of everything from that time to this.'

It is my hope that these few steps would go a long way in the direction of helping people understand the central role of commerce and the destructive role of the Democratic-Union party.

How to get rid of Democrats 1

I have recently been thinking about how to get rid of Democrats. The Democratic-Union Party, my new correct name for the group of people who call themselves Democrats, is anti-commerce. The consequence of this anti-commerce attitude does great harm to the poor, the young and the hopes of civilization around the world.

So how do we get rid of the Democratic-Union Party?

This blog is number one of two and is focused on helping people to be aware that unions in our country control the Democratic Party at the local, state and national level.

One suggestion is that every government employee who sits in an office or works as an inspector have a large button on their shirt that says ‘I am a union member’.

My second suggestion is that every government office show on the wall the amount of money contributed to the Democratic Party by the union members in that office in the previous election.

I suggest that In every government office be posted the average wage of the employees in that office and their estimated retirement benefits (as a percent of their salary).

Lastly I believe that every government office should be forced to take the most generous union work rules around the country and apply them in that office. The most generous work rules I know are at the San Francisco Municipal Railroad where workers are given 40 days a year to stay in bed and not have to phone in to management to say they are not coming to work. No reason needed.  Just stay in bed or stay at the bar drinking.

If the nature of our government and its control by unions were visible to the public I don't believe anyone would vote Democratic-Union again.

More on the Exploratorium

The San Francisco Exploratorium was created in the early 1970's by J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother. The facilities have been moved to a new location with vast amounts of donated money.  In the previous blog I explain some of the deficiencies of this new tourist site.  

Not much has changed from the old location.

In the late 1970's I donated a Japanese Magic Mirror ( Makyoh) to the Exploratorium. I included translations of Japanese research journal reports on how the mirror worked.  The mirror casts a 3D image on the wall (mine was a standing Shakyamuni Buddha) and it was in focus at any distance, reflecting sunlight.  The Japanese documents I provided reported on a microscopic study of the surface of the mirror and explained that it was an hologram created by trial and error. The technology was more than a thousand years old.  I had taken the mirror to an oId traditional Kyoto craftsman to be polished.  He had spent about an hour, while I watched him, polishing the mercury surface with pear oil and a cloth.

The Exploratorium lost the mirror, when I checked about a year after donating it.  It had cost me about $600 and today would be worth about $8,500 with inflation and the changing value of the yen.

The real problem with the mirror is that it demonstrates that a thousand years ago a very recent scientific development (holographic diffraction patterns from coherent light) was already a technical tool in public use.  We think we are the scientific geniuses of all time. Nothing that contradicts that is acceptable.

About the same time I made a proposal to the Exploratorium to create a device to measure earth tides.  The same tides that flow around the world twice a day, created by the earth-moon interaction, are visible on the oceans because they can average +/- 3 feet around the mean when the oceans contact the shore. On large land surfaces they only measure +/- one foot and are not visible as they travel.

The land tidal wave device I proposed was a laser setup 8 miles away from the Exploratorium that was focused on a dark chamber in the Exploratorium and recorded the wave motion on a photosensitive paper.

The staff had no interest in the idea.  To this day I've never seen any device that shows people the land wave that travels under our feet and our houses twice a day.

To me, the Exploratorium is a constant disappointment.

S.F. Exploratorium

I recently went to the San Francisco Exploratorium and was disappointed. The new San Francisco Exploratorium is in the heart of the tourist district on a wharf.  It is very large, expensive and architecturally lovely. The setting on the Bay is magnificent.

First, what is an exploratorium?

It was a conception of Frank Oppenheimer, the brother of the famous Robert Hiroshima Oppenheimer. Frank believed that science could be better taught with hands on demonstrations especially demonstrations that children and young people could play with. He created the Exploratorium in the early 1970s. It is a fun place for kids to go.

I was disappointed because there are five very important facts of life that deal with science but this massive tribute to science ignores or misrepresents.

The first is the fact that wind is not what it feels like. In fact wind is the laminar flow of air at different speeds in different directions. The Exploratorium has a demonstration outside with a 30 foot pole with wind speed and direction indicators each foot of the way up. Each is going a different speed and direction.

You can see the same phenomenon by looking at a tree with leaves or watching a butterfly. The explanation with this display is that this foot by foot variation is caused by the hills in San Francisco which create turbulence. Bull shit. This phenomenon would be observable on a desert or on a boat at sea with no hills for 100 miles.

The second is a startling fact  which puts all of scientific theory into question. It is called a standing wave. In a long steel column or a canal of the right harmonic length a wave can start at one end and travel to the other end and come back an infinite number of times with no additional energy. A true perpetual motion machine. This is not only not discussed it is not displayed anywhere. I heard one such wave when listening to a long cable on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Number three. We are surrounded by radio waves and electromagnetic radiation of all sorts. It is coming from high-power wires, transmitters, batteries and electric wall outlets. There is no discussion of how this radiation interacts with humans. Humans can sit in a microwave room and be very comfortable.

Humans are frequently hysterical about radiation from cell phones causing cancer as well as from cell phone towers and electric power lines. No discussion of this, no examples and no displays on this subject.

Number four, one of the hottest discussions in our society and around the world is the role of nuclear radiation in our lives. No discussion anywhere at the Exploratorium about the various types of radiation or the ways in which they interact with humans.

No discussion of the fact that an entire professional population regularly flies at 35,000 feet in the air; that enormous populations live a lifetime at 6000 feet and these populations are subject to 3 to 4 even 10 times the level of radiation that the rest of the population experiences. No discussion of these effects.

No discussion or examples of the few particular types of radiation that can do human harm and the vast amount of radiation that has no impact at all.

Number five is my personal issue.  Human beings do not have the ability to know whether they are breathing too much or too little oxygen. We cannot detect the level of oxygen in the air. The mechanism we have to detect this core survival issue in the air around us is our detection of CO2. CO2 comprises a tiny fraction of the air around us and yet its detection is the only mechanism we have to know whether we are in a safe environment. No description, explanation or discussion of this at a time when there is global hysteria about CO2.

You can see why I am a little disappointed in this massive expensive demonstration of science. It is off base when it comes to our vital daily issues of science.

3/5ths declined to ⅕th

You will recognize the 3/5ths figure in my blog title if you know the US Constitution. Article 1 section 1 clause 3  specifies how many representatives each state gets as well as the number of people who are taxed. Slaves are to be calculated as worth 3/5th of a non-slave in the census. Of course, Indians and women were were worth less.

I want to make the point that since the end of slavery and after the end of the civil rights movement, descendants of former slaves and southern blacks saw their value in society decline significantly.

The value of a black person as a slave in our society was considerably higher, three times higher than a black person today.

On what do I base my numbers?

Blacks cause five times the number of crimes in our society, are arrested and incarcerated at five times the rate of the rest of the population. Yet the news media does not mention this fact despite the daily occurrence of crime with intense reporting and focus on crime, murder and mayhem. No mention of the central role of black men.

The same is true for the issue of homeless people begging on the streets. Blacks constitute five times the general population among the homeless begging on the streets. Yet the media does not mention this fact in its regular coverage of the numbers of people who are homeless begging on the streets.

I think the reason the media coverage on this subject is so heavily censored by the reporters and editors is that everyone assumes that some large part of the black population in America is a moral, economic and political disaster that cannot be remedied.

I refer to this population as a permanent hereditary underclass of black males who are illiterate and innumerate and will be so for the next century because we have no way to change that outcome.

We are blind to the horrible degradation of blacks in our society over the past 230 years, the steady decline in their functioning, and we are unwilling to discuss this tragic reality.

Data on the current recession

The Wall Street Journal had a small chart showing the age of US firms.   Starting at the beginning of the current recession, the summer of 2008, the number of firms that were five years old or less dropped from 40% to 35%. That was shocking news to me.

The reason is that young firms (meaning firms five years old or younger) are a major source of new jobs and economic growth. The absence of these startups and young firms provides a good explanation of why the Obama recession has been the longest and most serious in a century.

Small firms (meaning those under 500 employees) comprise half of the employment in the United States and 60% of the new jobs. There are only 1 million firms with over 500 employees but there are 5.5 million under 500 employees. Half of these under 500 actually employ less than five employees. Overall, nearly 3/4ths of the companies with less than 500 employees have 10 or less employees. You can see that this small business component which generates the bulk of jobs and economic growth is made up of very small units. The kind I have worked with for 40 years.

I personally cannot understand why anyone would start a new business with all the inherent risks to their lives, risks to their future, risks to their investment and the investment of others in a milieu where the president of the United States is strongly anti-business. (Isn't he the one who said several times: ‘you didn't build that business the government did’?) At the same time he was spending a trillion dollars on government jobs. He and his Democrat-Union Congress did this at a time when every government union worker was making more money than the workers in ordinary jobs, getting better healthcare and astronomic retirement benefits.

Becoming a government worker is a desirable alternative to starting or joining a new business. A government worker never has to take any risk, never never anticipates being fired and knows she may get a fat butt along with lots of money when she retires early.

The data suggest to me that a large decline in stocks, which took a great deal of capital out of the hands of people who could have lent some to their friends to start a business combined with the government expanding its reach aggressively and led by a person who is anti-commerce was sufficient to make sure there would be no growth in the economy and pathetic growth in employment.

Banking nightmare

I make it a point, in this blog, not to call people ‘stupid’. So when I see actions that would normally fall into the category of stupid I am inclined to think the behavior is malicious or naïve. You can judge the following for yourself.

In the period leading up to the financial disaster of 2008 there were many small and medium sized banks that were facing serious portfolio problems with their mortgage loans. Loans that were rapidly going into default. The solution that the Federal Reserve and the bank controlling entities in the executive branch began using was the same one they had been using for the previous 75 years. They told the large banks to buy the smaller banks that were in trouble. Many of these banks that were in trouble had formerly been Savings-and-Loans that had been bailed out by the federal government in the late 1980s and turned into banks. Chase, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo were pressured to buy these failing banks and a few brokerage firms.

So what has happened now, nearly 6 years later? This Obama Justice Department is suing these banks for the bad loan mortgage loans that were on the books of the failed subsidiaries that they now own.  Subsidiaries they were forced to buy by the very government that is tormenting them now. Not just tormenting but demanding billions of punishment in payment.

This is your Democratic elected government. The executive branch is run by several anti-commerce Democrats who have no relevant experience in business, finance or executive management in government.

Do you think that any large bank in the future will respond positively to government pressure to buy smaller failing banks?

Circumcise

Can you believe that I have something useful to contribute to the discussion of laws regulating circumcision?

The first proposed law against circumcision was promoted in San Francisco. Defeated overwhelmingly.  So I have been following this debate for quite a while. Most recently Europeans, Germans and Poles in particular, have decided to make this an issue.

My contribution to this discussion is very simple. There are two reasons why anyone with an IQ above 50 would promote a ban on circumcision.

I am here to tell you that there are people, mostly gay men, who believe there is an aesthetic value to an uncircumcised penis. These men constitute a very small percentage of the gay community which itself is a small percentage of the general population.  Such people are a teeny minority. There, of course, is no reason why these people should want to legally ban circumcision because they will be too old to benefit from their legislative aggression based on aesthetics.  Newly uncircumcized boys will be 20 years old when these middle aged gays are retired and hard of hearing.

That leaves the 100% of the rest of the people who want to ban circumcision for non-aesthetic reasons as Jew-haters. Simple, clear, unambiguous Jew haters.  Jew and Muslim haters.

My financial advice

There are two kinds of traditional financial advice. Personal and business.

My personal advice has been offered in the book called Simple Living Investments which is in an e-book format on scribd.com.

My business financial advice is scattered through several books.

If you are starting a business there are ttwo prime sources of funding. First your credit cards or a second mortgage. You should be the first to take the risk.

Second your family and your close friends. They know how competent or incompetent you are in business. If they are willing to give you money, and I mean give, then you probably have useful business skills. They know you have a chance to turn their ‘gift’ into stock (if the time comes).  If they won't ‘give’ you the money and suggest that it be loan, then make a written loan agreement and make it explicit about what happens if you fail. 

Do not under any circumstances go to the SBA or any version of it. It is an incredibily corrupt waste of time. You will have to hire a scam artist to fill out your forms and by the time you get the money it will be irrelevant.

If there comes a point in your business where you have assets that have resale value, such as refrigeration, trucks, office equipment or industrial tools, that is the time that you can approach a bank for a loan on the assets or potentially a lease for some of the equipment.

Anybody who thinks that banks make loans to small businesses is using too much marijuana. Banks only lend on assets.

Lastly, if your business is successful enough for people to want to buy shares in it or buy the bulk of the business, get a reliable business consultant to act on your behalf. Mergers and acquisitions and outside business funding are treacherous areas in which only experience is what really matters. Hire that experience.

That is my advice on finance.

Top resources for finance majors

I get an endless stream of emails offering material for this blog. I tried once to let an interesting relevant article written by someone else appear here. My readers, you, responded vehemently against that idea. You apparently want my material from me. Thank you. That also means I reject a constant series of offers.

I got an offer that I didn't think I could refuse. This group publishes a list of blog and online resources for people interested in finance. They listed me. I'm grateful and I am listing them in return.

That reminds me of a piece of business advice that I give to theatrical or musical groups.

The most successful local theatrical performance I have ever seen was a giant local musical with almost 300 performers, nearly all amateurs. The audience, for three weekends, exceeded a thousand people for each performance. Do you see the connection?

Every performer has family and friends who get invited to see that performer perform. That is how you fill up an audience. You get a heck of a lot of people into the performance and make sure they invite their friends and family to be in the audience.

That is what this intelligent URL has done.

In the next blog I will actually give you my financial advice. It is not standard financial advice as you can imagine.

The NRA

From some of my earlier blogs you can sense that I have been concerned about a civil uprising in the United States. Some of my readers have suggested that I get some form of self-defense.

I finally began investigating the issue to see whether I could buy any reasonable self-defense weapons.

When I was the business manager of the Glide Memorial Church (social activism central on the West Coast)  I had offended some ex-con prison activist building tenants who subsequently threatened to kill me. I went to Sears and bought myself a rifle and ammunition which I rode home with on my motorcycle. By the time I got home I realized that I was much smarter and more competent than those ex-cons and so I developed a number of alternate ways of dealing with them. I returned the rifle.

This time, as I looked at the self-defense milieu,  I found that in order to buy a handgun I had to take a handgun safety examination (HSC) for $25 and demonstrate an ability to load and unload a handgun. So I read the 56 page Department of Justice PDF for the test. On page 6 I found I didn't need such a certificate because I am an honorably discharged veteran.

Actually I'm not an honorably discharged veteran. When I found my discharge documents from the late 1960s I found that I had been put on separation status that allows me to be recalled by an act of Congress at any time (45 years later it still hasn’t happened).

I read the entire 56 page PDF and was absolutely shocked at the number of laws on the books, at the felony level, directed against gun owners. Example: I can't give a handgun to my son without his having to register it and he can't give it to his sister without going through a certified gun dealer and having her take the handgun test. In San Francisco, in California, I can't get a wide range of traditional pistols nor can I get ammunition on the Internet and I am severely restricted in the types of ammunition clips I can own.

That is only the beginning of the limitations on my ownership or use of handguns and rifles. The list is  long and absolutely unwarranted for any responsible law-abiding person.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog the anti-gun movement is hysterical. I also pointed out the reason that this movement is blind to the reality around us (a permanent black hereditary under-class with illegal guns) and is acting at an hysterical level.

The main institution working against this hysteria is the National Rifle Association and their lobbying group the Institute for Legislative Action. I sent them some money after encountering the real world of anti-gun hysteria.