Pro Commerce

Kabbalah, Gaza and Glock

Kabbalah is the esoteric teachings of Judaism.  So what does it have to do with Gaza and the Glock pistol?

Elements of kabbalah can be traced back to ancient times.  It gained attention when a powerful summary of its teachings were rendered in writing in a book called the Zohar dating to the 13th Century.  By the sixteen hundreds it was a widespread Jewish teaching and focused on the coming of the Messiah.  The need for a Messiah was growing.  Jews had been forcibly driven out of Spain and Portugal and were settling uneasily in  Holland, Eastern Europe and many parts of the Arab world where life was difficult.

Into this milieu of social anxiety, ranging across thousands of miles, came one of the worlds greatest con artists.  He came from a Jewish geographic sore spot that has festered for millennia: Gaza.  Nathan of Gaza.

Nathan of Gaza saw the dire need for a Messiah.  He found one and promoted him throughout the Jewish world with letters and travelling messengers.  His messiah was Sabbatai Zevi.  The Jewish world came unglued.  The arrival of the messiah led to mass pilgrimages, Jews everywhere sold their homes, their businesses and abandoned their villages to walk to join the messiah.  

The Turks were none to happy to have a messiah on their hands.  To cope with a nearly hysterical Jewish world they put Sabbatai Zevi under house arrest and over the better part of a year they converted him to Islam. Brilliant tactic to subdue a messiah.

The elders of the Jewish world blamed the hysterical outbreak on kabbalah and thence forth admonished young scholars to avoid kabbalah studies until late in life and only under careful supervision. I myself was warned against kabbalah studies by several rabbis, when I was young.

Now to the Glock. I don't mean the specific handgun, the Glock, which is a fairly recently designed weapon.  I mean all hand guns.

Kabbalah is dangerous to the society because it detaches the student from the rational world, the world we live in, the world we work in, the world we create families in. The world of commerce.

Everyone needs training and supervision in the use of handguns.  'Don't point the gun at anything but a target or the ground.'  'Don't point at a person with your finger in the trigger housing unless you are ready to kill them.' 'Keep the gun in a safe secure place and most of the time keep it unloaded and unchambered.'

Why does the Glock require training and supervision?

To make sure that the use and association of the person and the Glock occurs only in the rational world we live in.  Training is designed to tie handgun possession to rationality and rational behavior.

The Kabbalah, Gaza and the Glock, parts of our world that we need to keep under rational control.

Over cooked and over sauced

I may eat out at fancy restaurants enough to be considered a 'foodie' but I really get to eat at friends homes often enough to have a sense of modern home cooking.

I find a great difference between good restaurant food (including Applebees and the Cheese Factory, and  home cooking.  Sufficient enough to comment on the difference.

Among many of my friends the most prized dish is a roast that has strings around it which has been cooked for four to eight hours and an Indian sauce that had to marinate overnight.  Those are what many of my friends rave about.  They call it good savory cooking.

They also love vegetable with complex and imaginative french sauces on them and most of all steamed fish with a slow cooked complex marinade.

I personally think this is pre 1960's summer camp cooking.  

To me, the reality is that a century ago most fruit was worm eaten and barely able to get to the closest market without spoiling.  Fish was put on ice and was days old when sold.  Most meat had been feeding on sparse ranges and the meat was dried for as long as possible before getting to the market.

Today, fruit and vegetables are protected from pests with a wide range of lightly dusted pesticides early in the growth season.  Meat is fed abundant grass and extra food to make it tender at the stockyards.

All fruits and vegetables are refrigerated, the fish is flash frozen and we get it at the market in wonderfully ripe and tender with nearly perfect flavor.  

To me our food is so good when sold to us at the market it needs little more than light stove top roasting, a quick pan sauteing and ocassionally a sauce made immediately with fresh herbs, choice oils and vinegars.

I hope more people are eating with respect for the incredible high quality offered us in our supermarkets.

Internet service

I use a landline and a DSL service in San Francisco. There are only two companies that deliver residential Internet service. The reason we have only two is that our city government, in its general level of incompetence, has made sure to create two monopolies that do not work in the interest of the citizens.

Last week I went five days without a landline and its associated Internet service. I use AT&T and their service is so sub standard that it is really only good for raccoons and gophers.

What I want to suggest to my blog readers is that you get a backup service in the form of a T-Mobile hotspot. That is DSL over smartphone towers. I was able to use my iPad with the mobile hotspot instead of the computer based Internet from AT&T. T-mobile has it for $5 a month.

I have plenty of business to carry out and many important personal appointments. None would have been possible during the five days in which AT&T failed to arrive and deal with my service.

Why AT&T would assume that an ordinary residential human can go that many days without Internet service, I do not know. A high proportion of people with only residential operations are deeply involved in day-to-day commerce. I would guess the number is somewhere over one quarter of residential service users. And considering the need to carry on business after the standard workday that number could be closer to half.

Get with it AT&T and Comcast.

In spite of these monopolies I urge my readers to have a hotspot telephone-based Internet backup.

 

Dream of weight loss

I have written several blogs (here and here)in the last few months explaining the extreme good fortune I have had to be born in the most fortuitous time in human history. Commerce has thrived and brought good health along with it.

As I have thought about these blogs and the good fortune, I am reminded that there is one single issue that has not been resolved so far in my lifetime.

I am talking about obesity. I understand what created modern obesity. It is the Darwinian competition of food products on our supermarket shelves that have evolved into the most appealing and simultaneously fattening products that we humans can imagine.

The problem we now have is that there is not, and will not be, any restraint on temptation from the food products that are offered to us.

Since I have put on an undesirable number of pounds as I have aged, since my mid-50s, I would like to find a product that either restrains my desire to eat or makes sure that the delicious calories do not turn into subcutaneous fat.

I don't know how long I have to live and whether such a product will appear on the market during my remaining years. I just wanted my readers to know that the world at this date is not perfect. If this dream product arrived in the next few years it would be much appreciated. But in many ways I have been too heavy for too many years to fully appreciate its benefits.

Our founders didn't dream about commerce

The founders at Convention in Philadelphia created our Constitution in the summer of 1787. That was roughly ten years after Adam Smith had written his monumental Wealth of Nations and several decades before the earliest period anyone would call the 'industrial revolution'.

There were no department stores, there were no cash registers and there were virtually no retail business employees. There was limited public transportation and nothing resembling a modern hotel or restaurant. There were people who took in guests and served food in their homes.

The only thing resembling modern commerce were sailing ships for the transportation and market auctioning of commodities.

At the constitutional convention, where 55 men were struggling to design a new government there was no consideration for the world of modern commerce. It didn't exist yet. There was an awareness of commerce between states and nations and the need to eliminate tariff barriers that were common on all the roads and rivers. Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris are among the few who had an understanding of finance and the general issues of commerce.  Two out of 55.

Which is the whole point of this blog. The Constitution that we live under was not designed for a commercial modern world.

Our constitution works for two reasons: * Number one, it is capable of change and * Number two, it is capable of interpretation.

So far very little has been changed through the amendment process to accommodate commerce except for an amendment allowing income tax.

Most of the interpretation has been around the 'commerce clause' in the Philadelphia Constitution. This was begun by the Supreme Court. Its first ruling in Madison versus Marbury established the right of states to internally regulate commerce and the right of Congress to protect interstate commerce.

It is my opinion that the Constitution of the United States creates and supports commerce mostly through its significant restraint on the powers of government. We were given a government that was inherently ineffective and inefficient. It is that stubbornly inappropriate government that has allowed commerce to thrive.

Commerce does best where the government is modest but stable.

Who is really a N----r?

As the business manager of a predominantly black church I became fairly well integrated into the black community in San Francisco.

The word N----r has become so emotionally charged that I am not even willing to spell it out in a blog associated with my name. But you know what I mean when I say N----r.

I use my voice to type this blog using Dragon Speak. Dragon Speak will not even spell out the N word. I'm not kidding. So far it has used 'native', 'vigor' and 'Nader'.

The word N----r has two meanings as I watched it used over several decades.

One meaning arises when one black person is describing another black person who is authentic in the eyes of the first. In this instance the use of the word N----r refers to a person who is authentically black for any one of a hundred reasons. It often has to do with something that comes from traditional black society. One example might be in reference to someone who is walking around with the toes of his shoes cut off. That would be something that was common in black neighborhoods for young rapidly growing boys.

That use of the word 'N----r' by one black to another is a high compliment. Meaning historic authenticity.

The second use of the word is somewhat negative. It applies to somebody who has done something that would only be expected of a black person. This could run in the category of minor crimes such as stealing a purse from a white woman. It could be something where one black attacked another black with a string of words called 'doing the dozens'. The most common example white people might know of the dozens would be: ' yo mother is so fat she need a garage door opener to get in yo front door'.

The two meanings of the word are not very far apart. One is highly complementary the other is simply an acknowledgment of the person being in the black tradition.

Our president must be understood as half black. He has not spent enough time in his life in the black community to ever qualify as a N----r. So when somebody calls him one you know they don't know what they're talking about.

 

Recidivism shows prisons are desireable

Two thirds of the people who are released from prison return in a short time.

Do-gooders have been trying, for at least a century, to change the conditions of prisons and prison-release-terms in order to reduce recidivism.

One hundred years of do-good effort has had no positive outcome. Of course this will not stop people from continuing to try for another century or two. There will always be do-gooders to fail at everything.

One of the reasons that recidivism is so high in the United States is that prisons are really not so terrible. If you have been in jail or prison it looks terrifying because you are probably middleclass. You poop in public. You shower in public. Prisons are noisy and often dominated by popular TV. Until you are inside the structure of a 'protection group', prison can be violent. The prison food is seldom good especially if you have favorites. The medical care is mediocre or worse. There is no real dental care.

Despite all of these problems, prison can be quite comfortable once you get used to it and certainly in comparison to a low income person's outside life.

When a person gets out of prison they find serious barriers to getting work, getting a comfortable place to live and providing all the necessities of daily life.  Prison looks more appealing.

I do not suggest that we make prison more uncomfortable but I do suggest that we come to understand that recidivism is in fact a measure of how easy life is on the inside in comparison to the outside. The outside gets more difficult and technologically complex every day.

In the early 1980's I wrote a book called Mental Snacks, I suggested that the solution to recidivism, which still requires ex-felons to commit new crime to get back in prison. We need voluntary prisons where people can sign up for a three-year term. These voluntary prisons should be fairly clean and safe.

Voluntary prisons could pay for themselves by keeping criminals off the streets and by having some modest internal work requirements.

Finding a hacker

In an earlier blog I expressed my view that the behavior of the IRS, especially in its tax-exempt division, represents the most corrupt-evil-government activity in the history of the American government.

I was not optimistic that Congress would be able to do much to correct the problem because the Justice Department is necessary for prosecution and the current Justice Department is nearly as corrupt as the IRS.

My solution was to find the internal documents and e-mails that would result in public action on many levels if it could be published on the Internet.

So far I have not been successful in finding the hacker to get those documents and publish them.

I have had much contact with hackers from their earliest days. A good friend of mine was Capt. Crunch ( John Draper) who was the father of phone freaking. John's gang was into exploring the phone system. The freaks became the hackers of the Internet. I knew many hackers in those days and Stewart Brand sponsored the first hackers conference in the early 1980's.

Which goes to the point that hackers tend to be young. I might have known some as I grew older but I did not maintain my contacts.

Because hacking and cyber-spying have become so geo-politically important and operate at the leading-edge of technology, one has to be a deep insider and be proven trustworthy enough to get into their world.

Today I would have to come up from my early teenage years into the hacker's social network because that is where trust and confidence arises. People do not expect a fellow teenager to be working for an international police authority.

I haven't given up on finding a hacker to go after the IRS fraud and publish it.

I am not optimistic about my ability to do this.

(You can donate to 'Find the smoking gun fund' here.)

Rich people and investments

Over many decades I have been an advisor to rich people. Some are newly and rich some are from established rich families.

The difference between the two is significant.  People who come from established wealth already have financial advisors and are fully aware of the range of investment opportunities as well as the many threats to their wealth from con artists to Las Vegas strippers.

People who have recently come into money lack these resources. They can't tell when a friend is interested in their money and they do not have long-term friendships with people who clearly do not want or need their money. They have no idea of the range of investments or the volatility of the many investment opportunities around.

The first thing most newly rich men do is buy a fancy automobile. They know the depreciation on the car and they know the sex appeal.

Both newly rich men and women are most likely to put their money into houses. Again they know the price and sex appeal of houses and they have a sense of the general depreciation prospects. People with new money are usually unaware of commercial real estate, partnerships and investing in their own success. They certainly don't understand the need for pre-nuptial agreements.

Most rich people, new and old money, are forced to live in a world in which they can't hide their wealth and information about that wealth. They are too often ostentatious if the money is recent and they do not know how to adjust their lives to a sliding scale of expenses based on income going up and income going back down.

The most tragic problem of wealth is the inability to identify genuine friends. There is no way to deal with this simple fact of wealth.

The best advice for a person with new wealth is to invest in whatever it is that made them wealthy. The best advice for old wealth is to find what excites them and stirs their passion. Their investments and time need to go into genuine passions which are very hard to find because they are surrounded by people with other agendas.

 

Good things can circumvent

Unlike anything else humans have invented, commerce is inherently good. I call it "good" because it is designed to automatically use human skills to circumvent efforts at commercial suppression.

That is why a person in prison can buy virtually anything he wants. Commerce is designed to circumvent restrictions.

The goal of industrial commerce (one of three forms of commerce) is to reduce costs. That means human ingenuity becomes highly refined and rewarded in commerce.

The object of trade (another form of commerce) is to carry out each transaction with sufficient resources to repeat the transaction. That means there will be some price at which a transaction will be carried out.

I am thinking of the current environment that is hostile to commerce. The Democrat-Union Party with its 18th-century tribal ideology is unusually powerful in the United States right now. Nevertheless, products and businesses already established in the market have shown that consumers exist to demand these products. Therefore it is virtually impossible to suppress them. Someone will repeat their success.

The government would have a great deal of difficulty taking away smart phones, Internet service or talk radio. Because each of these is established as a market they act as proof to new entrants that the market exists.

The same is true for hybrid automobile engines and is just as true for the extraordinary variety of invented foods sold by Trader Joe's.

Once people in the commercial world know how to create a product or service and know it has a market it is very hard to suppress that commerce.

Incarceration rates

My regular readers know that I love data. When somebody throws a number at me I always have to look it up. I am regularly hit in the face with the number 700 Americans incarcerated per hundred thousand. This is reported as the highest incarceration rate in the world. It turns out to be an accurate number of Americans in jail and in state and federal prisons.

So what does it mean?

Here are three rather baffling charts.

* The first shows the relative incarceration rates around the world. The United States (in brown with over 700 per 100k) is definitely at the top of the list.

*The second chart shows the incarceration rate by male and female in the United States since 1925 but it excludes jail data. Jail refers to any sentence of a year or less.

In this chart (without jails) we have an incarceration rate of 500 per hundred thousand which has soared since the late 1970s and leveled off sometime in the early 2000s. This reflects a rise of convictions in the previous decade and a peak in crime in 1991.

* The next chart shows the homicide rate for most nations.

We have some homicide rates that are astronomical: for Honduras 90 per hundred thousand, Venezuela 50 per hundred thousand and Brazil 30 per hundred thousand. The United States is under 5 per hundred thousand. Orders of magnitude different.

These homicide rates are palpable. I visited Guatemala, murder at a 40 per hundred thousand, and you could feel the tension in the people in the streets of Guatemala City.

Look at charts 1 and 3.  The incarceration rates are unrelated to the homicide rates. Honduras is 159 prisoners per hundred thousand, Venezuela is 169 prisoners per hundred thousand and Brazil is 274 per hundred thousand.  (Guatemala is 87 prisoners per hundred thousand.)

High homicide rates low incarceration rates. 

There are probably many explanations. One of which is that the United States has criminal laws that put drug sellers in prison while Latin American countries rarely do. Another is that the American criminal justice system is more efficient and more successful at imprisoning dangerous criminals.

The other explanation may actually be the best. We have so many people in prison we don't have to worry about them wandering the streets and murdering other people.

At this point I can only look at the data. I have very little confidence in criminology since the people that figured out why our crime rate turned down in 1991 were economists. (Because abortion became available 20 years earlier.)  That leaves me on my own, with you, to understand the crime data.

I love data.

Persian gasoline

The vase on the right creates cognitive dissonance for me. It is ostensibly a Persian vase from the 1600's passed on to me by my mother who got it from her aunt.

To me it is a beautiful vase and a sign of high-tech culture. I have also seen a continuous line of brilliant Persian art from the 400 CE until the 16th century.

In my mind it is hard to reconcile this extraordinary cultural development with modern Iran that is incapable of turning oil into gasoline,  Iran sells oil and buys gasoline. It can’t build oil refineries. It is a society that cannot build a bicycle for export but claims it can make nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles.

I just don't understand what is going on. Persions are not Arabs. Arabs I can understand because I have known many and they absolutely cannot fit into the modern world of technology. Persians on the other hand seem to do quite well in fitting into modern technology.

It cannot be Islam alone as the problem. Arabs and Persians are Muslims. It could be an Islamic state that creates the problem. Under the Shah, when I visited Tehran, there seemed to be a modern society evolving. It stopped and the people who had evolved may have moved to other countries, including Los Angeles..

It was a Persian who, until George W Bush arrived, was the best friend the Jews ever had, King Cyrus. Today the loudmouths out of Iran are spewing Zyklon B (Jew hatred).   I also know that they have not killed the few thousand remaining Jews in the original home of the Persian Jews: Isfahan.

What will reconcile my cognitive dissonance? Is Iran a state of idiot incompetents, or the heir to the great Persian Empire?

 

Chanting. Now its ‘What do we want?’

If you want to do something that will have a long-term social impact please listen to the following cautionary tale.

In the 1950s there was a very successful school for community organizers. Highlander Education Center in Tennessee.

Founded in the 30s by Communists and Quakers it was funded in the 50s by several pro-civil rights unions. It also got funding from the few incipient civil rights granting organizations.

Highlander trained all of the major civil rights organizers and leaders.

Part of the organizers’ training was to create cohesion among protesters. This was done with songs and chants.

I was in demonstrations and protests from the late 50s until the early 1980s. We always sang songs and chants. The most popular song was: "We shall overcome." Later in the hippie days a popular chant was:" Gimme an F." From a song by Country Joe. The F originally stand stood for F I S H. It changed. The chant sounded like an army Sergeant's marching chant.

I have gone to protests and demonstrations since the mid-1990s and today there is only one chant: " What do we want?" The response depends on the protest. "We want clean clothes" should be the response from the squalid Occupy movement. Just one endless mindless chant.

So Highlander has failed. The chanting today is limited to a child's potty training mantra.

Genomics are like nutritional science

I read a review of a book by Nicholas Wade about genetics in a Wall Street Journal’s Saturday supplement. It was clear that Wade, whom I knew from his time as science editor at the New York Times, had put together the reliable research in the field of genetics in his new book.

It turns out the book is so bad I will not even reference it here. I read it immediately on the possibility that genes effect human behavior. The first four chapters are an apology for the subsequent chapters in which Wade claims that genes have a dominant influence in our society in determining human behavior.

Two facts jumped out at me on page 115.  We find out that the number of genetic sites necessary to distinguish race or as he calls it ‘continent of origin’ requires 128 locations on the genome. To identify national origin or ‘ethnicity’ as he calls it requires 326 locations on the genome. Even under these conditions you would still have only an approximation for the origins of the particular gene holder.  A probability statement that the person’s origins were in Asia or Africa.

I put this ‘fact of genomics’  in the same category as nutritional science.  If each gene site or allele pair, (Wade is never clear) produces a protein that generates new proteins in the growing cells of a human then it is inconceivable that that so many separate interacting proteins could have any knowable outcome. The environment (and what we call culture) could intervene in hundreds of ways to influence the human behavioral outcome of this many gene generated proteins.

Nutritional science during my lifetime has told me not to swim for an hour after lunch. The Army tested this and found it to be nonsense. Nutritional science has told me not to eat fats because they lead to heart disease. This is by way of the problem of consuming cholesterol which the body presumably turns into cholesterol in the bloodstream. False. It has also been insisted by nutritionists that children behaved badly after eating ice cream because the sugar goes directly into the bloodstream. False. Nutritional science seems to be as vague a field of study as its sister political science.

Nutritional science now joins field of genomics and neuroscience which I also considered to be voodoo because they are based on theories, opinions and Puritan prejudices without any possible way to run a controlled experiment.

Cardiac cath labs

This blog has two main components. One deals with the extraordinary function of Cardiac Catheter Labs and the other deals with the problem of government run medicine.

(Data sources are here.)

A cardiac catheter lab is a room with a surgical table and all of the associated surgical equipment plus an imaging machine that allows continuous imaging of the patient. The images are transmitted along with other vital signs to a small control room. The Cath Lab is operated by 5 to 7 trained personnel including surgeons and technicians.  Most labs are installed in pairs so multiple emergency patients can be treated as the team moves from one lab to the next.

A standard fully equipped Cath Lab costs more than $1 million and most of them are installed in pairs at several $ million.  The prices are coming down as one would expect in a commercial society.  There are roughly 5,500 Cath Lab's in the United States and I don't know how many of those are pairs.

In these 5,500 Labs there are roughly 1,000,000 annual catheterizations in which the doctor enters the patient's artery via the arm or leg and operates on the moving heart. Roughly half of these, 0.5 million involved implanting a stent. A stent is used to keep an artery open after a clot has been removed.

Cath labs have been in use for more than a decade and are now fairly close to most people in the United States. The effectiveness of a catheter lab in avoiding a heart attack with permanent damage is based on getting the patient to the lab in less than an hour and preferably less than half an hour after onset of symptoms.

It is my opinion, that we will begin to see a significant and abrupt increase in the lifespan of American males as soon as reliable data is available. I would expect the addition of one to two years in male lifespan within the next five years. Males tend to have a higher death rate due to heart disease.

I am unable to get reliable data about the number of cath labs in other parts of the world. From what I can tell there are about 10 labs per million people in England, less than 10 per million in Canada and roughly 3 per million in Australia and New Zealand. In the United States there are more than 20 per million people.

This takes me to the second point which is that the English-speaking countries who have nationalized healthcare are finding it much more difficult to finance these multimillion dollar life-saving facilities. I assume that in the rest of the world, it is even more difficult to get these very expensive life-saving facilities. That is probably because national healthcare is ultra cautious and ultra-stingy. It is also harmful to the health of a population in a period of dynamic healthcare technological change.

Mr. Fixit is gone

When I was growing up there were travelling fix-it men who would go door to door and could repair nearly anything.  Many had training as tinkers so they could fix holes in pots and pans.  They always sharpened knives and scissors.

Until I was in my mid-adult years there were repair shops in cities with piles of electrical appliances in the window including vacuums, toasters, radios, TVs and sewing machines.

Where did this all go?

It disappeared for two reasons:

(1) Our whole world of commerce has become more of a hive.  Few people can do other peoples' work. Technical skills are deeply embedded in every process from an espresso machine to a TV control unit.  Virtually no one has the multiple technical skills to do many kinds of repairs.  Auto repair people are trained in new technology as regularly as doctors.

(2) The Costco phenomenon.  Costco exists because brand names have become so reliable, thanks to Japanese brands, that virtually nothing gets returned for poor quality.  Before the rise of Japanese brands new products had so many defects that department stores couldn’t handle the volume of returned merchandise so they carried only a few brands where the product had been opened and inspected before being sold.  

Costco’s and their imitators sell products in unopened boxes from shelves piled high. The quality is so high the boxes don't need to be opened.  A tiny percent is returned, usually for non-quality reasons.

In Japan from 1965 to 1990, entire new Cadillacs had to be taken apart and reassembled by the new car dealers to make sure they met the Japanese standards of no defects.

Goodbye Mr. Fixit.  We now buy new products for less than we used to pay for repairs.

Hippie mentality

In response to a question by some close friends I did some research. They wanted to know how hippies, who were so anti-government, could now be voting for the tyrannical Democrat-Union party?

I had to figure out the answer. Here is my response:

To understand how the hippies are behaving today it is important to look at my definition of who is a hippie and who was a hippie. By my calculations the hippies were a major part of the American baby boom;  Americans born between 1945 and 1960. Roughly 60 million Americans. As of today baby boomers comprise 25% of our adult population.

During the hippie era (1965 to 1985), I used a “four orders of magnitude” categorization.

* There were 25,000 people who were the hippie organizers and leaders.  

* The next 250,000 were the true hippies who used the language ‘pigs’, ‘ pad’ and ‘joint’; they hitchhiked, liked the smell of patchouli oil, wore old worn out hippie clothing, rarely cut their hair and came to all hippie events. The first question they asked each other was ‘What is your sign’? That question was part of their anti-hierarchical social value system. They did a wide range of drugs. They participated in the daily life of the Whole Earth Catalog and dropped out of college if they ever started.

* The next 2.5 million young people called themselves ‘hippies’, wore occasional hippie clothing, smoked pot occasionally and tried to buy food in bulk.

*The final 25 million, comprising roughly 40% of that generation, identified with the hippies in values and music.

The hippie belief system was based on a deep sense of rebellion against the society we lived in. We believed America was corrupt, tyrannical and hypocritical. Actual experiences with police were usually negative. We hippies believed we were creating a new society. Every experiment of every sort was considered a positive effort. That went for everything in food, healthcare, religion, clothing, home building, transportation and media. The most powerful ideas were the belief in universal human brotherhood and innate human goodness. Hippies believed that individual relationships were the most important relationships and that institutions, other than cooperative free associations, were undesirable. Everyone was equal and entitled to an equal voice in governance.

An offshoot of this hippie value cluster was a strong belief in starting our own businesses. Something at which the hippies excelled.  They nevertheless had contempt for large businesses as part of the corrupt establishment institution.

The hippie values of the 25 million in this age cohort became assimilated. Many of the values of the 2.5 million who called themselves hippies were converted by New Age religions and Werner Ehrhardt-like symposiums into 19th century positivism.

The 250,000 genuine hippies moved out of their core cities of San Francisco, West LA, Austin, Seattle, Portland and settled in exurbia. I would guess that roughly half, I25,000 moved to exurbia and places like Hawaii. The rest, 125,000 remain in urban areas.

So how do they vote today.?

Hippies did not vote during the late 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s.  They didn’t register to vote.

People tend to vote like their neighbors. Hippies have been increasingly voting since the late 1980’s but roughly half still do not register to vote, much like the rest of the population. That means that roughly 60,000 hippies live in exurban areas and vote Republican and another 60,000 live in urban areas and vote the Democrat-Union party

My best single piece of evidence is the town of Jerome on a NorthWestern hillside in Arizona. There are 440 people living there of whom 270 are over 40 years old and are pure original hippies. The rest of the town is mostly hippie.  Jerome is exurban and voted 80% for Mitt Romney in 2012.

I do not claim accuracy for my description of hippie politics.  I would summarize it by saying that hippies vote the way their neighbors do and they have scattered throughout the United States in ways that reflect the general population of their age cohort.

Costco and food-to-go making us more Japanese

I have spent more than the last 40 years visiting Japan every year; usually for more than a month. From the beginning in 1971 I have observed that a typical Japanese family meal is created by bringing home from the grocery about 90% of the food to be served which has already been prepared and adding roughly 10% of something prepared in the kitchen by heating (and that includes tea and soup).

That seems to me to be the standard in Japanese families and home eating environments. It includes families with children.

This has never been the practice in the United States. Up until the 1980s nearly all families prepared nearly all of their own home meals. Some of it was bought prepared such as dessert and occasionally pizza. Many subcomponents of the meal were bought prepared such as sauces and drinks.

Since the 1980s there has been a slow movement from the American household style of dining to the Japanese-style.

Supermarkets, fast food retailers and places like Costco now provide a wide selection of prepared food for the American home pallet.

We are going Japanese. I think it's because the quality of the food is better for most people when it is prepared by commercial kitchens. (Though 'foodies' will deny it.) I also think we find food preparation to be less of a family responsibility and more of an occasional recreational activity.

Controlled smoking experiment

It has now been more than half a century since the United States government officially started attacking cigarette and cigar smoking as harmful to our health. It has been almost as long since our government started punishing cigarette manufacturers and restricting individual cigarette tobacco smoking and adding onerous taxes on tobacco.

One would assume that a good scientific study had been done to validate the legitimacy of this government intervention in commerce and personal freedom. There has been 60 years, more than half a century in which to do such research.

Anyone who knows how much smoking offends the Puritan sensibility, will guess that: no reliable research has been done.

What would be reliable research?  Any longitudinal study that restrained one group of smokers from smoking and allowed another comparable group to smoke by choice.

Such an experiment could easily have been done in federal or state prisons with long-term prisoners. A sample in one state with no smoking enforced on a sample group, effectively with serious punishment and free smoking in a comparable sample group in another state. Such samples could have been tracked over many decades so that real mortality would be no known. The sample size need only be in the low thousands to have a very high level of reliability. After all we are only measuring a difference between 3% of non-smokers who die of lung cancer and 9% of smokers. Anti-smoking ideologues claim a dozen other causes of death are the result of smoking.

No such study was done. No one really cares about the realities of science or medicine.

The antismoking tyranny enforced by our government and many others is based on Puritanical bias.

I didn’t suggest prisoners because their smoking would be acceptable. They will smoke anyway. I chose prisoners because a sample of them could possibly be forced to not smoke with sufficient effort,  inducement and supervision.

Under appreciating the American role in commerce

Without the numbers it is hard for most people to understand why the American economy is the locomotive driving most of the world. For the past five years the United States has not been driving anybody anywhere. We are stuck in a Democrat-union anti-commerce environment.

Let's take data from the year 2006. The United States was the major market for the other giant economies in the world. In the United States we were consuming nearly $14 billion worth of goods and services. We had grown in the past decade at 23% on a per capita basis.

England, France and Germany in total in that year was less than half our size at roughly $7 trillion of GDP. England, France and Germany had grown in the previous decade by 18% on a per capita basis.

Japan was at roughly $4 trillion and had not grown in the past decade. China was at $6 trillion.

The United States was a bigger market than any combination of Japan, China and the combined group of UK, France and Germany.

Let us also add in the significant commercial innovations during that era. The creation of the global Internet, Google and the beginnings of Internet commerce as well as the expanding use of computers in business and the global distribution system created by the American UPS and FedEx.

The United States has long been the driving engine of commerce on the planet. It is important to realize that at a time when we have been crippled by a Democrat-union government for five years; we have had no per capita growth and our failure is transmitted to the world.

We have now shackled ourselves with a medical healthcare service that is government run and will certainly present the same shackles on our system that it has created for other countries. It has been the United States that is the driving engine for all medical improvements and now, just as our economic engine can barely pull anyone else our innovation engine in healthcare faces the same problem.

Commies for public office. What about Muslims?

In the 1950s, when communism was a powerful force in the United States and the world, there was extensive discussion among intellectuals about the appropriateness of letting communist party candidates run for public office. The leading thinker was Sidney Hook.

Since the Left was wishy-washy and lacked even modest logical skills, there wasn't a very interesting discussion because the Left couldn't see any problem with communism.

On the other hand one or two gifted intellectuals pointed out the unfortunate reality that even in a democracy a party determined to destroy the democracy could succeed by getting elected. Today we know of many examples where an elected party has eliminated an incipient democracy. This is true in the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Iran, Russia and Turkey.

Therefore it is reasonable to now ask ourselves whether we should allow Muslims who advocate the destruction of democracy, American legal systems and freedom of religion to run for public office.

I am personally in favor of requiring that all people who run for office must sign a statement supporting democracy and the Constitution lest they be subject to legal removal from office if their actions contradict their signed statement of support.

I realize this is harsh and probably not necessary. Nevertheless it is a subject we need to discuss because we are in a period of hysterical denial about the dangers about modern Islam. (The hysterical denial seems to be most extreme on college campuses.)

Tall buildings

The photo on the right is downtown San Francisco. On the left side of the photo is a cluster of dozens of tall buildings. On the right are two buildings that stand alone. Why?

The two buildings on the right are entirely residential. All the buildings on the left are commercial.

Commercial buildings need to be close to each other, or were in the past, because business requires a significant amount of face-to-face time. You actually need to talk to your lawyer some of the time, to your designers some of the time to your accountants and to your bankers. This was much truer in the past than it is today but it is still reflected in the density of commercial buildings.

Residential buildings need to be in lively retail areas but they do not need to be close to each other.

What is it about tall buildings? Why do I see them in Third World countries that lack the skills to even create a modest sewer system or build a bicycle?

The answer is that tall buildings, with steel structures and elevators have significant economies of scale and consequently can return healthy profits to the builders. As the floors go up, the cost per square foot goes down dramatically. The only incremental costs are the materials. Elevators are quite efficient and only water needs to be pumped to higher floors. Water can be pumped to the roof and gravity does the rest.

How high the building goes depends on the point at which economies of scale disappear. But even at that point the building can go up a few more floors because the total cost per square foot remains lower at the eighth floor than the costs at the second floor.

Limits on building height generally are related to the geology at the base and the technical skills that can be effectively imported to do the construction.

If you can get into the construction business for tall buildings it is a desirable field to be in, worldwide.

Good things can still happen

I am looking at some of the grim elements in the commercial and political world of May 2014.

I don't want to make you miserable today. Just a smattering of ills.

* The current Democratic-Union administration has been creating regulations that are damaging to commerce at a stultifying rate.

* Local Democratic urban areas are similarly destroying new entrants to commerce, new entrants to technology and doing everything possible to stifle economic growth.

* The current economic malaise is global and five years old with no prospects for improvement with anti-commerce governments nearly everywhere.

Nevertheless I see a few vigorous weeds growing through this Lefty cement sidewalk. The weeds are trying to circumvent the Lefty anti-commercial suppression efforts.

New businesses often start in bad neighborhoods where regulation is weak and oversight is nonexistent. The black permanent underclass has made most bad neighborhoods dangerous. But there are still many such areas that are not black.

There is always Israel to create new and important commercial innovations.

There will always be the rebels in America who will find a way to create new innovations outside of the realm of Democrat Union control. Places such as suburban Texas and the Midwest.

Most importantly there will always be a few hundred thousand Americans with open minds who will find a way to circumvent the totalitarian drive of the Left.

To me the rise of conservative talk radio is an example of circumventing the evils of the Democrat-Union world. I expect to see similar circumvention in higher education. Most importantly, I am impressed with many of the Jewish intellectual journals and blogs that have emerged in the last five years to stimulate and support intellectual ferment.  Intellectual ferment is desperately needed for the future. Such ferment preceeded the vigorous economic development of the 80's and 90's.

Unified National Service test

When I started out to write this blog I had a good idea. That is before I checked on the core data of my blog subject.

My idea was quite simple. Many people getting out of jail or prison, many people arriving as immigrants, and people who have lost their job and are looking for new sources of income will look at the array of modest skills that appear to be income producing. Skills such as massage, hairdressing, personal care, home care, simplified nursing functions, gardening,  vehicle driving and more.

It turns out that nearly every one of these simple jobs requires some form of state or federal licensing. In most cases this licensing acts as a barrier for low income people.

I was going to look at a possible solution using a national safety and skills test for the 50 to 80 occupations that should not require significant skills or knowledge and are amenable to on-the-job training and apprenticeship.

Then I looked at the number of business licenses that are required in California. Here is the list of businesses that require licenses in California. Over 120. I realize that any effort to short-circuit,  circumvent or make this process more reasonable would face ungodly amounts of political opposition from established licensed businesses. And licensees.

Now that I look at the formidable opposition any change would generate,  I realize the process would have to be set in motion at the national level at incremental stages.

To make this politically feasible we would have to start with 10 occupations that are clearly rudimentary and would require only a one hour federal health and safety test to be accompanied by a written certificate of apprenticeship for final certification.

We would not be getting around the certification process but would be making it simple and national. That would allow new entrants, allow mobility and preserve the value of existing licenses.

The legislation would also have two provisions: One would allow competitors to sue in small claims court over violations of industry norms. Each industry could publish its own norms. That would offer protection to the public.

The second provision would specify additional dozens of federal certifications to be introduced over multiple five-year periods if the first certification process was successful.

Comments?

More on gratitude

In a blog a few months ago I wrote about the extraordinary good fortune I had to be born and live in the most fortuitous time in human history.

I wrote about the extraordinary developments in medicine during my lifetime as well as the explosion of economic benefits during this time as well.

I have since realized that I have lived in even more extraordinary times not just because of the medicine but because of everything else that has impacted my life.

I left out of the medical phenomenon five issues that have impacted my life and family.Two of my children would have died at birth because of an Rh negative blood type, which is remedied by modern medicine. Another child would've died because of malignant skin cancer. A spouse faced early death from breast cancer. Neither cancer is fatal anymore. I also had a father and a close girlfriend who suffered from epilepsy and would not have survived except for our modern pharmacopoeia.  One of my good friends survived polio.  I have lived two extra years, to date, thanks to cardiac catheter lab surgery.

Aside from those highly personal issues, the most extraordinary personal benefit for me was living in the hippie era and participating in 15 years of sexual freedom. I also participated in the creation of Ted McIlvenna’s Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality. I shared in the fun that would not have been possible at any other time, nor since.

In my lifetime travel went from railroads to commercial prop planes to jet planes over international distances nonstop. Every year, for 40 years I have been able to go to Japan for a month or more and do so on a timescale that did not interrupt my life. My own contribution to travel was the creation of a single currency useful around the world (the modern credit card).

I got to see two of the ancient human fallacies destroyed by modern commerce. Germany and its allies were proponents of anti-rational human qualities, blood, soil and Jew hate. Nazism was effectively destroyed by commerce. America in the form of American productivity defeated Nazism.

Communism, another ancient belief in the use of government to create ideal worlds, was similarly destroyed by the extraordinary productivity and glamour of commerce. Of course both the the Nazi and the Communist values survive as remnants in Lefty and environmental politics.

There is one thing that I have seen in my lifetime that is extraordinary beyond anyone's wildest imagination. I saw my own people go from 2000 years of exile surviving unrelenting hatred by their neighbors to the greatest human abomination to ever happen. Then to the creation of Israel.

I went to Israel in 1959 and saw a new country being created. Ten years after it fought to be a nation Israel was unbelievably poor. We ate only Arab food, black bread and oranges. There were few trees and the country had virtually no infrastructure. It was truly a Third World barren landscape.

I have been back many times since then and Israel is now one of the most successful productive and lush green countries on the planet. No qualification to that statement.

We Jews have reemerged not only as a thriving people but we are in the middle of the darkest hole on the planet, Arabia,  surrounded by the same ancient monsters that we left 2000 years ago. Today, in every moral and human enterprise Israel is the light of the world. I saw it happen.

I can (slightly) speak to others in hotels and retail stores, in a language that has been dead for 2000 years and is now alive and singing.

I live at the most fortuitous time in human history. I am grateful.

Humans may not exist as individuals

I woke up one morning, thinking as I usually do about the question of mass hysteria. Or to put it differently, mass concurrence on ideas, images and values that may not be connected to anything in the tangible world.

I may have gone to sleep after watching a few ants walking across my bathroom sink. The great physicist,  Richard Feynman,  was motivated in some of his early thinking by watching ants as well.

What I woke up thinking was that humans may be part of a hive rather than freestanding individuals. Individual ants exist and operate as part of a hive. They function in an almost complete autonomous relationship to the operation of a hive. Most don’t know what other ants are doing.

This is very close to a perfect description of the way human beings operate. We operate in the commercial environment in which we have only the vaguest notion of how any part of our life is operated.  The computer screen you are looking at in front of you this moment was created by 1 million different people carrying on hundreds of thousands of separate operations none of which are apparent to you or me nor would they be understandable if we saw them operating.

The delivery of the content from me to you proceeds through a complex process, through the hive of commerce without either of us being even slightly aware of how it works much less knowing how it works…. even if we saw each of the details.

I'm always struck by how every god-damn person in San Francisco believes the same thing  every day about the same stupid Lefty political ideas.  They don't have to talk to each other to learn about it. They don't actually understand anything about it. Millions of Bay Area people believe that the government can raise the minimum wage and it will be beneficial. They have no idea how it would work nor do they have in mind a dollar amount where businesses would totally cease operating. They are ignorant all at the same time.  

To my mind we are part of a hive. We are not individuals operating autonomously.

 

Expectations of business

Here is an interesting article by an economist about the multiple factors that go into a retail purchase other than price and quality.

The author lists a number of current concerns such as vegetarianism, global impact, local sourcing, obesity elements, union made, packaging issues, trans fats, nutritional information, and so on ad infinitum.

I was one of the key founders of the socially responsible investment movement.   I was shocked, over the years, at the increasing number of business requirements that were made upon retail products by Lefty socially-responsible-activists. They expected corporations to adopt all of their ideological nonsense at the administrative level and build it into the products they put on the market.

When the enviro-socially-responsible campaign started out I was supportive.  We wanted women on the boards of directors and aggressive minority hiring within the companies. Forty years ago.

The movement lost me very quickly when they started adding new areas of socially responsible corporate behavior.  They started  including opposition to animal testing, making demands on working conditions of overseas suppliers, ranting about the ratio of CEO pay to average employee's wages, demanding measurement of environmental uses of energy and all other resources. The list goes on and on and on. Of course some people believe in this crap, ranging from GMO products to organic anti-pesticide issues and of course there are products on the market that catered to goofballs.

Commerce is there to cater to everyone who can pay for the product and that includes environmental Lefty goofballs.

It must be hard to teach economics when every student knows that supply and demand is not determined by scarcity of products or the price intersection of two lines.

Russell George fights evil

The story is simple. The evil is shocking.

About 15 years ago it was reported in the prominent scientific journals that the areas of the ocean that had the least flora and fauna were those that lacked out flowing rivers with particles of iron in the water. It turned out that the particles of iron flowing into the nearshore ocean was providing the plankton with the necessary iron to carry out photosynthesis. The plankton provided the food base for a higher chain of flora and fauna.

At the time, it was proposed that more extensive fisheries could be developed by dropping iron filings into the ocean in the desolate parts of the nearshore ocean.

Many scientists proposed such experiments. All were rejected by the narrow minded, environmentally-blind authorities who had anything to do with oceans.

One persevering scientist/entrepreneur, Russell George, carried on the fight for more than a decade. When he finally realized that the environmental lobby was totally hostile to any experiments that might benefits humans by engineering,  he changed his tactics.

George was smart enough to finally get a native tribe that wanted salmon in their fishing waters. The tribe agree to have him dump a boatload of fine iron filings in their waters in the North East Pacific.

What George had figured out was that the ideological environmentalists were incapable of resolving a conceptual conflict between their anti-human engineering stance and their pro-native peoples politics.

Here is the report on George’s experiment. Two years after he dumped his boat load of iron filings,  we have the extraordinary abundance of salmon that he predicted.

Russell George will always be treated as a criminal pariah because he crossed paths with one of the most evil groups in the world: modern environmentalists.

But now we know it is possible to feed the world with abundant sea resources if we stop listening to the voices of environmental quackos.

Russell George is one of the greatest heroes of the 21st Century.  There should be statues of him on every university campus on the planet. (Yes, I know there are many people who hate Russell George and consider him a con-man.)

Thomas Piketty

With nearly perfect timing, the ideological and malicious scaffold of Lefty-union politics, these days, about income distribution happens to coincide with a massive data based research project by a French economist, Thomas Piketty. Piketty is consequently the subject of great interest in the professional economics world.

I have not read Piketty and have no reason to do so. My knowledgeable readers need to know the issues. My primary source is an article in the New Republic by Robert Solow. My secondary source is the senior economics professor at Harvard, Gregory Mankiw.

In the event that you don't know who Robert Solow is, he is the economist who created the modern backwards ideological framework for Third World development.  Solow created the idea of a ‘take-off period’ that said all developing countries need is money. The same perverse logic that leads Lefties to think that giving money to poor people will end poverty.

You can also tell the orientation of Solow's antique thinking because the review is in the New Republic.

Clearly what Piketty has done is to look at major nations’ data on income distribution and productivity going as far back as he can. In some cases he can go back several centuries. In most cases he gets less than a century of data. His conclusion is that there is a simple linear relationship between national output, productivity and income distribution. His data apparently is different for most of the world from the United States, which he admits. He is unable to understand why this data distinction exists. Nevertheless he goes on to predict that significant and perverse income distributions will persist into the future because productivity increases go to capital which in turn goes to the richest top of the society.

I see numerous problems with this material. First anything abstract at this level is subject to ideological distortion. The best example is Malthus. His linear projections of food production and population growth did not take into account technological improvements in food production. The abstract equations looked fine. The reality had no connection except in countries that continued to have Malthusian levels of  food production.

The second problem is that Piketty has no idea how much income distribution in the United States has changed. We no longer have an elite class that can pass on its capital to its family. Nearly 100% of the top economic class in America has earned its money de novo since 1960 as a byproduct of productivity. Moreover the middle class in America gets nearly all of its benefits in income from capital improvements and capital investments which are promptly passed on in the form of bonuses and stock options to the workers. Separation in income distribution from the middle to the top income brackets has no reason to expand adversely.

Third and lastly, projections into the future, have been disastrously bad for the population explosion and global warming…. also projections made by Lefty ideologues. One more Lefty ideologue making a linear projection into the future should have no credibility with anyone except a Lefty.

Dishonest businesses

For someone who loves commerce as much as I do it is a little distasteful to tell you that there are four businesses that are not entirely honest. Three of the businesses are flat out dishonest.

The three businesses are: pearls, wigs and diamonds.

I went to a pearl wholesaler in Osaka, Japan and watched the entire process. I was a consultant for a minor issue at the pearl wholesale plant. Here is how the pearl plant works.

All of the pearls come in wet in netted boxes. They come in one door and are put on a conveyor belt. From there on they are sorted first by size, then by color and finally by surface quality. Almost all of the sorting is done by skilled women. In the end small boxes are packaged and shipped to the pearl distributors who put them in their final packaging form.

When the pearls end up in a retail location the price is determined entirely by the packaging. You can be getting a $400 pair of pearl earrings that are just as rare or just as common as the $50 single pearl necklace. You are paying for the box and the packaging.

Exactly the same thing is true for wigs that can run from $200 to $8000. The sewing and netting that hold the wig together may have a minor difference in quality worth several dollars but the final wig pricing is the result of packaging. There is no rarity or abundance of any of the particular hairs that are used. (Most wigs are sold to black women.)

The same is absolutely true of diamonds, but it is hard for people to believe this because they can get their diamonds appraised and be told that one diamond is $200 another is $12,000. It is usually the appraiser who seeks to satisfy the customer based on the quality of the diamond's setting not the diamond.

I learned this from my several department store clients. They never operated the pearl, wig or diamond departments. The boxes containing the products came into these departments with different pseudo-wholesale prices so that the selling staff would not know what was actually going on.

The department store would get private secret annual kickbacks from the wholesalers of these departments based on the level of success in selling the pseudo-high-end products.

The fourth product that is not entirely dishonest is gasoline. It is retailed at many different prices and occasionally some company claims to have a secret ingredient. In most of the United States the oil refineries are owned by entirely different companies than own the retail outlets. Trucks often have the names of the retail companies': Chevron, Shell etc. but the delivery trucks go to the closest refinery if their own brand name refinery is not available. Nearly all gasoline is the same regardless of the brand name at the retail outlet. You can check this yourself by looking at the number of oil refineries within a few hundred miles of your own gas station. There probably aren't many and there certainly aren't enough to match each one of the different retail brand names.

Over time and with the expansion of the Internet and Internet shopping I expect these pseudo-business distinctions to slowly disappear.

What’s good about e-cigarettes

I brought back a pack of electronic cigarettes about five years ago. I bought them in Japan for about $75; they had been made in China. They looked like cigarettes and when you sucked on the inhale end the other end lighted up red. They had a small insert at the mouthpiece where you could put a pure nicotine dissolved mixture which was heated by an electric filament driven by a battery in the cigarette end. Mine was rechargeable inside the cigarette pack.

Over the years, since then, many variations of the e-cigarette have emerged; most no longer look like a cigarette.

We had a stoner house guest, for a few days, who used an e-cigarette that looked pretty much like a cigarette lighter which he could puff on periodically then put it back in his pocket; it was based on marijuana extract. It had a slight marijuana smell. Most e-cigarettes have little or no smell and produce only a non-nicotine vapor.

At this point, exactly nothing is known about the health consequences of e-cigarettes. 1000 monkeys could be smoking at this very minute and we would not know the biological effects for many years. We can also be certain that the vapor produced by e-cigarettes has trivial medical effects.

Nevertheless every Lefty who wants to remake the world in her own image has decided that e-cigarettes are medically harmful and must be regulated like tobacco tar generating cigarettes. Laws and ordinances everywhere are being passed without a shred of evidence to justify them.

This may appear on the surface to be a typical example of the ideological malice built into Lefty-union thinking.

The consequences may not be as bad as most Lefty-union ideological outcomes.

I wake up occasionally and try to explain the incredible economic boom from 1980 until 2008 as the byproduct of the hippie generation. Hippy innovation was a major driving force.  What created the rebelliousness among hippies in the first place was their absolute certainty that marijuana was not harmful and that most other similar drugs were not only not harmful but probably psychologically beneficial. An entire generation of 25 million people decided that their society was incompetent, stupid and malicious.

I think the current generation of teenagers who are smoking e-cigarettes, do so with full knowledge that the laws, opinions and experts stacked against e-cigarettes are nonsense.    They are happily smoking e-cigarettes in a way that makes them a rebellious, defiant population. The current teenage smoking population is probably no more than 2.5 million people and may not grow much beyond 5 million. But 5 million rebellious people could create a mini boom in economics in the coming decades, like their hippy predecessors.

In any case the presence of lies and distortions about e-cigarettes appears to me to be capable of generating a rebellious, defiant generation that will produce interesting businesses and cultural contributions.