Pro Commerce

Never enough argument

This is for me a chance to unload one of my dissatisfactions.

I am old and God knows how long I have to live. I am now two years into my ghost life thanks to the cardio-cath-lab miracle.

In thinking about my life there are some things that I've observed. I am saddened by the death of a few lovers. Our mutual pleasure and extraordinary intensity are gone. They're gone and they cannot be fully remembered, recorded nor made part of the historical record. They were truly ephemeral fleeting and magnificent.

I know that is true of countless human interactions. It has been up to poetry, fiction, storytelling and music to try and capture that. Sometimes it succeeds.

The title of the blog deals with another element in my life. I wish I had found more people to argue with, to debate with, to carry on in intense and exciting conversation. Conversation that destroys one's vision, perception and world are of enormous power and reward.

If there had been more, I would be even more grateful.

There is no 100%

I found myself recently referring to some 98% and 99% propositions.

When I use numbers like that I am most likely exaggerating. It is my way of saying there is no such thing as 100% whether it is molecules or people.

I have done hundreds of opinion surveys over many decades and I have never found any question that gets answered in a homogeneous response by 95% of all people. 95% is extremely rare and 90% is more likely to be something that happens.

One of the reasons this is true has to do with language. Even when a questionnaire or survey is of the simplest form the English language provides too many possible interpretations for any set of words to garner a 100% identical interpretation.

Moreover it seems to also be a fact in nature that variation is built into everything whether it is plant life, minerals or celestial.

Human beings do a superb job of making things intended to be 100% but we know from the language of 'Six Sigma', that most of the time it doesn’t happen.  Human beings have a built-in variation in their productive output and most of all in the long term survival of their goods and services.

It is always a wise human who anticipates variation in the world around them.

FDR upper class version of Clinton

I watched part of the the public television series on Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt.

The part on Teddy was not particularly interesting to me because it focused on him and did not recognize him for the truly extraordinary man he is in American history. One president who deserved to be on Mount Rushmore.

He was a man of extraordinary strength and political vision. He shaped modern America far more than any other man. Understanding him personally is quite irrelevant. Understanding what he did in every field from conservation, to military, to finance is very important and is not offered to us in the wuzzy world of public television.

The part on Franklin was a little more interesting to me because I had never seen the photographs of Franklin as a cripple. There were many photographs and movies of his atrophied legs and his swimming at Warm Springs. More importantly there are two things about Franklin that I actually never saw before seeing it on this wimpy public tv program.

First it is very obvious that Franklin was elected by the American people out of their love for Theodore. The Democrats chose him for that single reason.  He also represented an upper class person beyond the fray of standard Democratic party ugliness.

Second, I was stunned by what an emotionally pathetic person Franklin was. That is the reason for the comparison with Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is a spineless, lying, pathetic person who is desperately in need of affection and seeks public affection every minute of every day.

In retrospect I begin to realize that that was Franklin. He was not a liar, his word was always good and his anticipation of World War II is much appreciated.

The rest of what he did as reported in the TV series is irrelevant. The show was fairly accurate in acknowledging that FDR did nothing effective, like the current president Obama, to get the country out of the severe economic downturn.

It is sad that in our two financial calamities we got stuck with spineless, vapid Democratic fools who enacted useless socialistic economic notrums.

San Francisco as originator

I am not a promoter of San Francisco as a glorious city.

I am realistic about the city where I've spent most of my life. It has at times been one of the world's great centers of revolution, important change and global vitality. Today it is a shit hole of Lefty Fundamentalists political theology. It is also filthy thanks to its love of Street people.

I was just thinking about how extraordinary San Francisco has been over its history as a source of countless global movements and how little appreciation it has ever gotten. That may be fine. It may be wonderful that New York gets credit for everything. The ambitious go to New York, the creatives come to San Francisco.

That simply makes it easier for the next wave of global revolution to occur in San Francisco.

Let's begin with San Francisco in the gold rush. San Francisco did not have the hierarchical social structure found everywhere else on the planet at that time. It became a source of incredible vitality and wealth and consequently architectural and artistic refinement.

It was central to the creation of Jewish communities and Jewish private clubs such as the Bohemian club, all of which have an influence to this day.

San Francisco's gold fury was so shockingly aggressive that it generated many scientists and organizations that shaped and still shape the environmental movement worldwide.

The antismoking movement came from San Francisco.

The entire baby-boom of the 1890s came from San Francisco along with its music, its language, experimental communes, health foods and most importantly the politics that we know of as the Progressive Party.

San Francisco after WWII was the home of the gay movement and every part of it; the lesbian movement and every part of it as well as the subsequent training in human sexuality.

It was the revolutionary center of the hippies. The center. Everything the hippies contributed from home home-schooling to the health and food revolutions, to the fashion revolutions to music revolutions and a dozen other elements; they came from San Francisco. I can find the same things in arts, music and visual arts. By the way, modern TV came from San Francisco. So did the modern personal computer.

If you have ever been part of an underground event in your city whether it is walking through the sewers or having a paintball fight in an abandoned building or climbing a bridge; you owe that to the people in San Francisco who started it and promulgated. A teeny residual of that is Burning Man.

The list is endless. In includes the 1890 and the 1990 wave of 'cocktails'.

These revolutions came out of two elements that were present in San Francisco in the gold rush.

* The absence of social hierarchy to oppress the innovative people in our society and

* A fairly light touch of government that allows people to be imaginative and creative.

The current political disaster in San Francisco is probably not impeeding the underground creative world. San Francisco has always had idiotic politics.

(Photo of Philo Farnworth's lab where he invented TV.)

I bought a material book

I don't assume that things that I do in my life reflect any American universals. But they do reflect an occasional trend or pattern.

I ordered the recent Krauthammer book from Amazon in the material version.

This is a change for me. I usually buy the e-book version put it on my iPad and read it on long airplane flights.

This is a change for me, maybe one reson why material books still sell.

What changed my mind is that I know that the Krauthammer book is so good I will want to lend it to my friends. I do this with all good books. And of course I lose a few in the process. Actually I lose many.

To me it is always important when I find a good book to be able to pass it along to friends. The e-book version makes that difficult.

I have published a dozen books, myself, in the e-book format and I know that people are buying them.

I simply wanted to note that I have used a self observation of my need to buy a material book that I know is going to be good in order to pass it on to friends.

I hear that Amazon and others will sell you an e-book and add a material book for a discounted price. That sounds good to me, I just haven't seen it in effect.

Jimmy Carter, the zombie

We all know that Jimmy Carter hates Jews and he always has. His nasty relations with Prime Minister Begin in the Israeli-Egyptian war conference have been recorded in many places.

There are two other Democrat-Union presidents, in addition to Jimmy, who hate Jews: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Bill Clinton’s Jew hate views are often ignored.  Clinton is so desperately in need of love and appreciation that he constantly asks his friends to argue the opposite and to falsely make pro-Israel statements. In truth, he always blames his failure at Camp David between Arafat and Barak on Israel. He still does and did recently at an Iowa barbecue.

What provokes this blog is that a man named Wright wrote a book trying to suggest that Jimmy Carter was helpful in the Camp David negotiations between Begin and Sadat.

The book review in the Wall Street Journal was written by Elliott Abrams who is smarter than all the recent Jew hating Democratic presidents and he is honest (which is not true for any of them).

Abrams points out that the book about Carter is nonsense. Carter did nothing to be helpful in the actual negotiations. Begin and Sadat wanted a peace treaty, they started it, and they knew that Egypt would have to be paid several billions of dollars by the United States in order to make it work.

So they invited the dimwitted American president, Jimmy Boy, to participant, and he did. He took credit. But he actually did only one thing that Begin and Sadat wanted: he help get the U.S. Congress to vote a perpetual $2 billion to Egypt.

Any effort to establish Jimmy Boy as a competent, decent, non-Jew hating president is simply resurrecting a zombie.

Peter Thiel is wrong

A little over a week ago an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal Saturday Review section by Peter Thiel about business being based on success with monopoly conditions and failure with competition.

I'm sure everybody has already put in their two cents worth about the absurdity of that statement, which is blatantly wrong based on the most miniscule of data and observation.

I just wanted to put in my particular observations because I have a slightly different take than the traditional economist or business commentator.  I’m still very different from Peter Thiel. I don't know if Thiel is ignorant.  He's definitely uneducated but I admire his anti-academic attitudes.

Disclaimer: When I was starting a new micro-payment business, twelve years ago, I ran into trouble with PayPal and found it to be a disgusting, inhuman, merciless organization. The only way I could deal with the organization, to get any attention to get any response was to sue the bastards. Then I could at least talk to their lawyers.

Thiel is looking at PayPal and Google as his examples of a monopoly being successful.

PayPal is no monopoly. Banks have just been very slow to accommodate online financial transactions. Most banks have far more assets and liabilities than PayPal. The top ten banks have net revenues in the tens of billions of dollars compared to PayPal’s half a billion dollars. They also didn't pay attention to PayPal because PayPal doesn't make loans, which is the banking raison d'être. PayPal is not a monopoly.  It was a weird offspring of the money transfer business. It was of no interest to the real banking business and still isn’t.

Google is a different story. I described the future Google (before it existed) in several 1980's books I wrote.  I described that type of business as a ‘service monopoly’. Google didn't exist until they had a chance to copy most of my ideas. When Google began there were many search engines but Google became so good, so reliable and so comprehensive that no one else had a chance. That is what I call a service monopoly.'

A service monopoly is a business that has so much of the marketshare and does such a good job that the customers have no reason to go anywhere else.

Newspapers lost their classified ads because Craigslist was more comprehensive, more accurate, more reliable, cheaper and more precise in meeting the consumer's needs. Craigslist still has no comparable competitors. It is a service monopoly and will be one as long as it provides what the customers want.

Google could be wiped out any time if a better search engine came along and provided better services that consumers want.

Back to Peter Thiel and his nonsense. He ignores the most common and economically understandable phenomenon for corporations to grow and be successful. Economies of scale.

Economies of scale occur in production, distribution, marketing and management. That explains why we have so many global corporations that are so large and so extensive. They have no monopoly. They have merely grown by effectively using some economy of scale or multiple economies of scale.

There are only a few automobile companies in the world and none of them are monopolies. But they are gigantic and they are responsive to their markets. In the current world there is a hell of a lot of money and consequently no barriers to entry in anything.

Ask Elon Musk, he entered the auto market. He had no trouble getting startup capital.

Economies of scale are what matter most of the time.

Service monopolies occur at other times.

Can't you see that Mr. Thiel?

Steve Jobs and arrogance

A short while back I was discussing how Bill Gates achieved his financial success. Part of it was arrogance. I was questioned about that statement.

I cannot say that I have known many CEOs who are arrogant. It is not a universal nor even a common quality.

However, there is a strange element of almost all business leaders that is identifiable. To some extent they would have to be called ‘sociopaths’. They do see the world as clay for them to mold and shape. They do see other people as susceptible to their guidance or wile.

However the negative aspects of sociopathy do not seem to appear among the CEOs I have known. They are usually very determined, charming and capable of bearing the burden of hostility from others. Or ignoring it.

Maybe we need another term than ‘sociopath’. Maybe we need a term for beneficial sociopathy.

In thinking about arrogance, a related subject, I couldn't help think about the stories about Steve Jobs. He was arrogant. He refused to replace his hippie demeanor except when he wanted money from banks or Wall Street. He was so arrogant that he killed himself with his monomaniacal food and health obsessions.

There is no question that Steve Jobs was a very different kind of leader than we find in almost any other bureaucracy or business. I don't think arrogance is a common leadership trait.

Leadership for me

I had trouble finding a title for this blog. I have been looking at recent articles on leadership. I was forced to ask myself what I knew about the subject.

I've taught management many times and never included the concept of leadership in my teaching.

Let me explain the problem. I have been a leader all my life and nothing about the concept that I see being taught seems to have any relevance to me.

Let's begin with my statement that I expect virtually no one to take calmly.  “I have been a leader all my life”.

When I first went to university, I visited many clubs: the Young Communists, the Students for Democratic Action, classic films, etc. At the next meeting of every club I visited, after my one appearance, I was elected president.  I’m not kidding I’m not exaggerating.  Once I stood up at an organizational meeting of 100 people about some student complaints and I was immediately made the leader.

In the most outrageous case, outrageous meaning I don't expect even one out of 100 readers to believe it. In order to get into the University of California graduate school of economics I needed a BA in economics.  So I went to the nearby San Francisco State College. I had been on the campus for two weeks and knew no one. The Student Council asked me to be student body president. I actually agreed to it for the one year I was there.

This never stopped happening to me until I decided to become too outrageous in my dress (all white clothes) to be considered.  Finally after age 65 I became too old for people to make me their leader.

So when I hear the word ‘leader’ I assume that it has to do with some internal quality that is externally visible. I can recognize it in other people. I can't imagine how it can be developed.

The problem for me is that in all cases where leadership is described the texts or lectures talk about how leaders have ‘visions’ that guide their direction.

I never had visions.  I never tried to get my followers or employees or fellow members to pursue my ‘vision’.

I simply did then as I do now, go about my life doing what I want to do. I do what's interesting to me and what I’m most effective in doing.

When I look back, all the things I did, that would appear to be ‘visionary leadership’ in my organizations, groups and departments were novel, important and interesting directions for ME.  I never had visions and I never tried to get anybody to follow me.

In retrospect, I simply did what I wanted to do and because of my leadership qualities other people followed me. I always listened to everybody I was involved with.  I always had meetings to discuss what was going on.  But I always did what was most appealing interesting and magnetic to me. That's where I led.

If you are a leader and you are bewildered by all this talk about visions and leading people with images and goals, you might identify with me who never could make sense of any of that stuff.

The title of this blog should be ‘leadership is doing what you want and what you are most capable of achieving. It's personal’.

Philanthropy almost never works

The subject of philanthropy comes up for me on a regular basis. I always say that it doesn't work. It doesn't.

Philanthropy often comes up in connection with some wealthy person who is ascribed unusual powers because of their philanthropic donations. Utter nonsense.

More than 95% of all philanthropic donations go to existing philanthropic organizations that are in the business of sucking the money out of rich people, or generous people or adoring people.

So the rest of the question deals with the remaining 5% of philanthropic donations, especially if they go to nontraditional recipients.

Even more central to this discussion is:  ‘Who the hell am I to talk about this issue?’  I was president of Point Foundation created by Stewart Brand from his Last Whole Earth Catalog.

We decided, our six man board, to explore the most innovative forms of philanthropy and pay close attention to our impact. That's why I know about this subject.

From that experience I can tell you that people who are going to make an extraordinary impact and beneficial change in our society are going to do it with or without philanthropic support. These people are driven by many demons; none of which are money supply.

There's a word in the last paragraph that's extremely important. “Beneficial”. Very little in the way of imaginative philanthropy turns out to be beneficial. We have such little understanding of society that we cannot know the direct consequences of most activist behavior and certainly cannot see the repercussions. In half a dozen of my grants I found the negative repercussions  outweighed the positive achievements.

In the creation of a prostitute union with my grants; I found that local police forces turned their attention to prosecuting John's, not my goal. In funding the anti-whaling movement I found I had created a racist anti-Japanese organization. Certainly not my goal.

Over the years,  looking at the world of philanthropy I have found many similar examples. The Ford foundation gave hundreds of millions to Left-wing Lyndon Johnson style organizations. A careful summary of all of these projects, over decades, discovered that none were genuinely positive. Most were frittered away in the salaries to very nice people. The share of ‘poverty; in our society never seems to change.  Trillions of dollars spent.  Never changes.

In looking at more than 400 experimental grants over 35 years, I have only seen one that I consider positive. One out of 400.  

The one grant is so esoteric as to be the example that breaks all the rules. It was a series of grants to Indonesian music and dance troupes to tour the United States. I got a lovely girlfriend out of that. The donor got to hear music without going to Indonesia. And many people got the benefit of hearing new and exciting music.

That's my only example.  

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P.S. Don’t forget I spent seven years in Third World aid; the ratio of positive to negative grants was about the same, 1 out of 400 projects were positive.

Mass transit doesn’t work any more

Mass transit is of a political issue but it should not be. The Left has somehow or other come to believe that mass public transit is desirable.  They particularly like fixed line public transit like light rail.

From what I am watching in the rapidly growing San Jose Bay Area this is a bad policy idea.

The initial thinking about rapid transit was based on workers who lived in one area commuting to a another area usually a downtown or near downtown production area.  Mass transit was to be cheaper and reduce auto traffic.

That world has disappeared. First of all Joel Garreau demonstrated that much outer suburban commuting was in a great circle around the city center to other suburbs. This type of commuting arose because industrial production is gone and has been replaced by production that can be done in residential or near residential areas.

In the San Jose Bay Area that I watch, commuting is done from the urban area to the suburban areas 30 or 40 miles away. The high priced high-tech workers want to live in the more exciting urban center of San Francisco but their work locale is in the lower square footage priced suburbs.

As businesses move to lower square footage priced suburbs we are getting a Wagonwheel effect. There are many lines of traffic extending in and out of the city to many different locations that are constantly changing because corporations are able to move their headquarters or move their production office space to lower rent and lower tax locales

To put it in other terms:  both the workers, the commuters and the companies that they work for are in rapid motion relative to the traffic patterns. Only autos and small buses can accommodate the changes.

Where I live, near a formerly modest traffic street, I have watched the street and the many avenues leading off of it reach traffic capacity in the past year, as people find new routes to connect their work schedule and their living accommodations. These changes are occurring on a year by year basis.

Public transit is lucky to get built in one 10 year period. In order to support revenue that doesn't get generated for another decade. This does not work in the current work milieu.

Additionally we have a local problem.  With high-tech jobs 40 miles away in Silicone Valley and workers preferring to live in San Francisco, the tech companies now offer wifi enabled luxury buses.  They now carry tens of thousands of people.  It would take 15 years to build a rail line to service this traffic.  The traffic might not be there in 15 years.  Most certainly the residential county, San Mateo, that the rail line would cross is adamantly opposed to any bond financing for ANY form of improved transportation.  The county wouldn’t let the BART transit extension into their territory. Period.

A long wait to be validated

This is a success story based on my business advice. My advice is unusual and so this story is worth telling.

Sometime in late 1974 about five or six months after I started the Briarpatch Network of small hippie business, I was having lunch with my kids at our favorite Taqueria  on Mission Street in San Francisco. Since it had opened a year earlier it had become our favorite for many reasons including the tongue burrito for me and the wonderful fresh fruit drinks for my kids.

This particular day the owner came over to talk to me. Miguel Jara had heard about the Briarpatch. He wanted some advice.

Two stores were opening on his block within 100 feet of him and offering a similar menu.

From the day he opened Miguel's store had a line outside. It still does.

I left my kids and my burrito and went to look at the new stores. I came back and explained to Miguel that the two new restaurants would improve his business, if that was possible. They would take the overflow of his lines… but then the people they took would be very dissatisfied.  It would make Miguel’s lines look less crowded initially. But the people who went to these other restaurants would always come back to Miguel with a new genuine loyalty.

I did not comment on how Miguel made his food, which was much fresher and more imaginative than any other Mexican restaurant I had ever been to.  Most importantly, I did not want to sound racist by telling him his real secret: that his restaurant was more than twice as clean as any other Mexican restaurant anywhere. He maintains the cleanliness in his restaurant at a maximum level. That just doesn't happen anywhere else in the Mexican restaurant industry. Simultaneously he always had the flavor and feeling of a Mexican neighborhood restaurant. That combination could not be duplicated in most other neighborhoods.

Then he asked me what I thought he should do in the future. My answer was that he had to choose between leading a calm successful, prosperous life with a good income and great respect from the community…. or opening other sister restaurants, possibly becoming a chain and making more money but living with ungodly amounts of anxiety and stress.  He would also have to protect himself from the constant pressure of people who wanted his money.

This was the point in the life of his business at which he had to make the choice.

You can see from the article, 40 years later Miguel Jara has maintained his one restaurant which continues to have a line out the front door, to make plenty of money for him.  Now he has something I could not have anticipated.  Miguel has the emotional satisfaction and the well deserved recognition as the best taqueria in America.

Miguel Jara followed my advice. Not everyone does. I'm happy to say the evidence supports my business thinking.

Demographics of voting

Several books by Lefties have made the point that demographics are on the side of the Left. They argue that minorities are growing and are increasingly Democrats. They argue that young people especially single women are increasing in numbers and are decidedly Democrats. Lastly they argue that there is a migration back to central urban cores and those are Democratic population centers.

They argue that the reason they do not control the House, which is pretty representative of changing populations is that many of the districts are gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.

I pay attention to data and this would be very disturbing if it were true. I was helped in my thinking by this article in Commentary.

The article points out that second generation minorities and immigrants do not vote decidedly Democrat. So time is not moving in the lefty direction. Importantly young people seem to change their opinions on a regular basis, cyclically. Sometimes they are more Democrat sometimes they are less.

Single women are a very different matter. They are offset by increasingly hostile males who are voting against whatever position single women take. Males constitute a large and growing population.  They and their wives are operating as a counterweight to single women.

Lastly and most importantly the demographic problem of population moving to urban areas is actually detrimental to Democrats because there is virtually no gerrymandering of any consequence. What is happening is that when you go from a 50% Democrat congressional district to a 90% Democratic congressional district, like the one I live in, you still have only one representative. The district you left, when you moved, now has a better chance for the Republicans to win. Making urban districts more Democrat is counterproductive from both the point of view of the House and the Senate.

The demographics are not in fact beneficial to the Left.

Kids park by Parkour

In this blog there has been the persistent viewpoint that most of contemporary children's playgrounds are a visual and experiential disaster. Ugly, no fun and without any danger. Three negatives from a child's point of view and from the point of view of a grandfather who has to entertain kids.

I finally saw a simple, inexpensive and brilliant alternative.

What I saw is the kind of indoor equipment that is being used in Parkour training classes.

I cannot define Parkour. It does have a history.   It does have training schools.  But for anyone who, like me, was an over energized kid it is nothing more than being an over energized kid in any reasonable environment.  

What changed my mind about children's playgrounds was watching children from age 3 to 13 playing on a standard adult Parkour structure. They loved it. They found just as many uses as one would expect.

Which is to say that Parkour is adult behavior modeled on an energetic child's perspective.

To have fun in a children's playground we simply have to take an adult Parkour structure and make it available to kids.

Enough. Simple. Hey you public servants out there. Listen
up.

Frisbee

There has long been a discussion about the future of soccer in America. I have landed on the 'no future in America' position on several occasions in my blogs. My explanation deals with many issues ranging from the metaphor implicit in soccer to the emotional nature of the game.

A new phenomenon has entered the discussion which has really ended the debate. The mothers of young female soccer players have come to the conclusion, based on articles in mass media, that the soccer concussions are particularly damaging to their daughters.

So what are middle American mothers' daughters doing instead? Based on my fairly small sample and fairly wide sources of information, they are playing a game called ‘ultimate’.

Apparently, ultimate is widely played in American schools. Those of you who are anywhere near my age (old) wouldn't know this. We also wouldn't know that the game of ultimate is really two 7 person teams throwing a frisbee back and forth. It is played on a field about the size of a football field and has very simple rules and is usually played without a referee. It is so free of brutality that it is often played with mixed genders. Perfect for Title IX.

Just wanted you to know about ‘Ultimate’ Frisbee. It looks like the perfect sport. It was invented 76 years ago with a pie tin in Santa Monica. That sounds pure American to me.

Modem design

I wanted one of my grandchildren to see how ideas flow and influence the world.

We were at a street fair for design in Seattle and there was a table from the local design school with several students at the desk. I said to them that one of the most common objects in nearly 100,000,000 American households had never been the subject of design school imagination. What was it?

Nobody knew. I answered: it is the Wi-Fi modem. It is in nearly every American home and there is no intelligent design component to any of of the devices.

We proceeded, four of us, to come up with rough sketches. The design students turned one into a vase, another into a slug and still a third into a transparent sphere. I turned it into a clock with the lunar schedule and an inside-outside thermometer. I put the USB connectors and power line into a downward facing extension.

I then pointed out to my granddaughter, that as far as I knew this is an original idea not on the market and that these four design students will spread the need for design in this product to others in the design field. In 3 to 4 years we should begin to see some design imagination in Wi-Fi modems. 

This may not be an original observation on my part but I see no discussion of it nor any rudimentary design concepts. It is also possible the modem Wi-Fi object may be replaced by something else.

In any case, if I am right we will see.

The Left is anti-Israel

My friends on the Left continue to delude themselves. They do not acknowledge that 99.2% of the hatred of Israel among Americans and European non-Muslims is entirely on the Left. Is it possible that only .8% of the Jew-Israel hatred is to be found in right wing parties in France, Austria and Greece?   Yes and it is still less than 1% of the total.

Let's be realistic about the 99%. Where does Jew-Israeli hate reside?

* It is entirely in universities and colleges that have gone berserk in their BDS and anti-academic Israel policies.

* It is entirely in the media of all English language and European voices that were Lefties for the last century.

* It is entirely in the Democratic Party and not among Republicans.

* It is entirely in the Leftist mainstream churches and not at all in any of the evangelical world.

* It is entirely to be found among Leftist blacks and not at all among Asians.

* It is entirely to be found among leftists nations: Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, Spain, Ireland, Norway and Sweden.

How can this not be visible to the many people on the Left who face this reality constantly? Especially hard to understand how Lefty Jews can ignore this reality.

We have changed sides

You have to be pretty intelligent to have noticed that we have changed sides. ‘We’ being the United States under Barack Obama and the Democratic party and ‘sides’ being the Middle Eastern battle between Sunni and Shia. Before the actual names (Sunni, Shia) came out of Islam this battle was already 3000 years old.

Before Barack Obama we were allies with the Sunnis. The Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan were our closest friends. Very close. For nearly a century.

Now under Barack Obama we have sided with the Shia in supporting Syria’s Assad, Hezbollah, the Egyptian brotherhood, Gaza and Iran.

My observation was stimulated by one of the few superb Middle East writers, Lee Smith.

You may not notice but Saudi Arabia is not helping us in any way in the Middle East especially in dealing with IS. And the Saudi’s have become an ally of Israel, Jordan and Egypt.

We have changed sides in the Middle East under Barack Obama. This is significant. It has also been an additional source of Obama’s hostility to Israel, for those who can't see the obvious.

The American State Department has always been pro-Arab in all aspects but tried to maintain a balance between Sunni and Shia. That balance has disappeared.

It is not too late to change back. But we can’t start for 2 years.

The 23yr old hump

It has regularly been a theme of this blog that people stop thinking after age 23. They become like cast concrete or a hard-boiled egg. This happens to 993 people out of 1000. I have a near orgasm anytime I meet one of the remaining seven out of the thousand.

There is no mystery in my definition of being able to think. Thinking is not choosing what color shoes to wear nor which employee to promote. Those are choices made with cookie cutters applied to an existing dough of one’s frozen world view.

Thinking is merging two separate categories of thought.

The question I was asked the other day was: ‘is there anything that can be offered to or provided for people before they are 23 to allow them to be able to think in later life?’.

The subject came up around the movie Lucy and the theme that she was able to use the 90% of her brain that others apparently don't use. The 10% brain usage metaphor makes no sense to me. I was never brighter than many of the other early entrants to the University of Chicago when I arrived at age 15. Over time, I found that I continued thinking and many of the people around me didn't.

I actually don't have the answer. I also looked at my own history and cannot find a unique personal source.

I had a great deal of experience before age 23, including a year in Israel, a year in industrial production, a few months on a kibbutz and the extraordinary intellectual milieu of the University of Chicago. Other people have had similar experiences and still became hard-boiled at age 23.

Maybe I will have an explanation before I die. Maybe.

Bill Gates

I have come to believe that Bill Gates is not a particularly bright guy.  

It was good luck and arrogance that made him rich. The good luck was having someone else's software to sell at the very moment IBM wanted to get out of the personal computer business. The arrogance was in Gates’ absolute unwillingness to amend the agreement he had with IBM, once they both realized how valuable it was.

I have written about Gates’ complete inability to understand the development world in an earlier blog about the Bill and Melinda development foundation. He is totally off-base and understands nothing but the standard foundation groupie trivia.

Now he is on the front page of the groupies favorite magazine, the New York Times Weekend glossy. He has been enamored for several years with an Australian who promotes Big History.

Big History was first explained to me more than 40 years ago by my friend Stuart Silverstone who is still promoting the idea. It is a graphic way to present human history beginning with the big bang and having separate timelines for anthropology, civilization, biology and a dozen other categories. Presumably, one learns effectively by looking at the big picture.

The problem with Big History should be obvious to my readers. It was once used heavily in natural history museums and has fallen into disuse. The reason: history looks very different to a Native American Inuit, a Chinese Mandarin and a Bedouin in the heart of Tel Aviv.

That is why natural history museums no longer use giant murals of timelines on their wall. You see history from the perspective of your life and your culture.

My friend Stuart has heard my critique often.  His way of dealing with it is to asked me to write segments of great interest to me such as the history of commerce.  To me, commerce created the entire modern world two hundred years ago.

Gates doesn't see this. He isn't really very bright, to put it politely.

Mexicans and Palestinians

There is a problem with many Leftist Americans who can't understand why the Israelis and Palestinians don't get along. It seems to them that people who live so close together and have such a similar historic background should find some accommodation. The permanent hatred that the Palestinians teach their children and they deeply ingrain in every act of self abnegation makes no sense at all to my anti-Israeli Lefty friends. Former friends.

I have a simple way to explain to them what is involved. They only need two things: to speak good Spanish and to be placed in Mexico City.

Now, my recalcitrant student, walk one block in any direction and listen to the comments around you. You will find a constant stream of comments about how arrogant Americans are, how Americans are trying to force their culture down the throats of the Mexicans and worst of all what nasty human beings people from the United States can be.

The United States and Mexico have only lived as neighbors for 400 years. The United States only conquered a small area of Mexico that has become four American states.

Nevertheless, we welcome millions of Mexican immigrants every year with abundant job opportunities, generous welfare, free education and free healthcare. As citizens they are welcome to the few remaining American rights.

American expats, settling in Mexico in retirement, are severely restricted in what they can own and their legal rights while living in Mexico regardless of their tenure or commitment.

So 400 years living next to Mexico doesn't seem to have any beneficial effects on the Mexicans hatred of Americans. Now tell me, my Lefty former friends, why Palestinians should be so superior to Mexicans in their dealing with Israel.

Electric car charging stations

I recently looked at the market for electric charging stations in downtown urban areas paid for by the local utilities.

If you see any charging stations in downtown, take a photo for your records.  They will come and go in an historic blink of an eye.  Why?

Electric cars are a short lived fad.  The hybrid is a good idea from a power supply and physics point of view.  On a cost basis, the electric car with its expensive batteries, will keep the proportion of the electric auto population limited. Americans want more space to live in, in houses and cars.  That favors non-electric fuels for the majority of cars.

As for central urban charging stations, that is a short term plan.

The main reason, men (women rarely) buy electric cars is to commute to work.  In the many parts of the U.S. where electrics get a priority highway lane, that is the primary reason for buying an electric.

The other reason for buying electric is to be ‘a good secular person’, the same reason for all other current environmental and armageddon behavior like sorting garbage and saving water.

The consequence, I see, is that work locations will have solar panels to charge their employee commuter electrics during the day.  The utility provided charging stations will be incidental.  

There will also be a problem with the public charging stations because it is too expensive to supervise a parking space with a 30 minute charger, when the parking space itself is free.

Politics and theater

I know the two words in the title of this blog are usually connected: politics and theater. It is because politics is nearly all theater and a shameful amount of theater is Democratic Party politics.

That is not what this blog is about. This blog is about pro-commerce.

The unexpected reality of commerce, which is making it increasingly impossible for the traditional hereditary elite of the world to maintain its hereditary status, is the fact that the child of a great commercial genius will probably not be a commercial genius and may not, in most cases, even be commercially competent.  The business can not be successfully passed on to an heir.

This inability to pass on genetically, culturally or by education the ability to make an offspring successful in commerce means that meritocracy has a great future in a commercial world and condition of birth means little.

Whenever I say that we live in a meritocracy from which the hereditary elite was dissipated in the 1960s  I get  pushback. People say: 'look at the Bush family, the Gores and the Kennedy family'. We have hereditary political elites.

Sometimes people give me similar examples from the theater industry where countless children of stars became celebrities when they grew up. Judy Garland/Lisa Minnelli, Ryan O’Neal/Tatum O’Neal and Martin Sheen/Charlie Sheen/ Emilio Estevez.

What is relevant to this conversation is that indeed political and theatrical competence can be passed from parent to child. They are both tribal with many families in the tribe.

The reason is that political and theatrical competence is not very competent.  It is not very complex and not hard to learn. It consists mostly of who you know and who your family’s networks are. To put it in the most crude terms: politics and theatrical life is often based on insider tribal status.  Insider status rarely helps when passed on in the commercial world.

This is not to say that all politicians are at a lower level of competence than successful businesspeople nor is that true for all theater people. But it is generally a fact that a competent businessperson is significantly more competent than a similarly successful politician or theatrical person.

Small capital

There is a reason you don't hear me often complain about lack of acknowledgment for my many contributions.

The reason is that I have led such a charmed and joyful life that to ask for recognition for my contributions would be sheer greed. I get an acknowledgment for a few of my contributions and that is frosting on the cake of a wonderful life.

So what is this stupid paragraph above about?

I had a wonderful dinner last week with an old and beloved Swedish friend, Sven Atterhed, who was the genius who brought knowledge of the Briarpatch to the world and build a global business consulting practice based on the innovative thinkers he met in the San Francisco Bay Area. He also brought me and my Briarpatch model to Sweden where it  resulted in 4000 new small businesses in the 1980s.

At dinner, Sven told me about some of the people he was dealing with now. One of whom is Steve Blank who is given credit for being the father of the lean startup movement. The key person in the lean startup movement is Eric Ries.

The Wikipedia entry on the subject gives credit to everybody in history starting with Jesus, but not to me.

Weird, consider: in a book I co-authored with Salli Rasberry published in 1981, Honest Business, I have an entire chapter, (chapter 6) titled ‘Small Capital’.  In it you will find the first paragraph: “When you start and run a business with the primary goal of serving people you will be more effective in starting with minimum capital”. I go on to describe examples of where it is best to start without any outside investment and how to do it.

Considering this book was published by Random House and considering that tens of thousands of people who came in contact with the Briarpatch and its progeny.... I have no doubt I deserve some credit for the lean startup movement.

Regardless of giving me credit. If you plan to start a business I have always given the same advice: ‘make the product or service work first, even if you have to do it at night while working at a daytime job at Starbucks, then get customers before you actually quit your daytime job and start building the business.

Thirty-five years of preaching this, should get me a tiny bit of recognition.  Maybe?

Source of black violence

The recent black anti-retail violence in Ferguson, Missouri has raised the question of violence in the black community which is so horribly self-destructive. The black violence in 1967 in Detroit has totally destroyed that city. Forever.

I have been willing to discuss the serious taboo about the rise of a black permanent hereditary criminal underclass. There is a separate origin for the urban violence directed at retail business in many parts of the United States particularly visible in the 1960s.

Beginning in the 1950s, and reaching a peak about 1955 there was a migration of blacks from the South to Northern urban areas. Nearly 5,000,000 blacks migrated during this period. It is these black new immigrants that were the source of the riots in the 60s.

The worst riots were in Chicago, Detroit and Washington DC. They also included Newark, Harlem, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Omaha, Watts and Baltimore.   

Decades later a new source of violence arose, without the full-scale, retail property destruction of the earlier period. It arose from a different source.

Ann Coulter in her book on racial demagoguery shows that the 1987 Tawana Brawley debacle was the beginning of a quarter-century of media exaggeration of white on black crime. By the 1990s the media story had become one of white police officers deliberately killing innocent blacks. The story is always found to be phony after courts examine the facts. The phony story has been promoted with unending consistency and frequency by the news media.

Ferguson Missouri is a combination of the earlier violence brought to urban areas by the mass 1950’s migration, of which Ferguson is a geographical byproduct, as well as the 25 year media malicious trope about white police deliberately killing innocent blacks.

The extent to which this original population migration created the permanent hereditary criminal underclass is not a subject I am prepared to comment on in this blog. It has taken three generations to create this permanent underclass and I have not identified all the malefactors.

East German Syndrome

East Germany became a part of a united Germany in 1990. There is one lesson that the world has drawn from this reunification and another lesson that I have drawn from it.

The lesson the world learned was that reunification of a successful commercial society with a communist society is an expensive proposition. It is such an expensive proposition that no country would embark on the same course again. From looking at the East German unification there is no chance that a Korean unification will be possible. South Korea could never afford the burden of integrating with the poverty and horror of North Korea.

The lesson I learned is that once people have become inured to a society in which merit is not rewarded and freedom is marginal that comfort with a stagnant life becomes ingrained and can be passed on to at least two additional generations.

It is now nearly a quarter of a century since Germany re-unified to include it's totally disabled population of East Germans.

East Germans, in the most recent election, supported one of their own prodigies, Angela Merkel, by a sizable ratio. 37% supported one of their own. An estimated 27% were voting for Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union Party.  Former communists now are also voting in the Left Party which gets 20% of their vote. The two Leftist parties together are roughly 37%.

To me the ‘East German Syndrome’ means that creating a lazy, grubbing population in a communist or socialist milieu means decades and decades of despair and malaise. East Germans vote turnout is noticeably 10% lower than Germany as a whole.

Socialism is a nearly hereditary debilitating disease.

Ripped fabric

When we discuss a body politic it is not uncommon to use a metaphor of social fabric.

When we look at a society in distress we use the term ‘ripped social fabric’.

I think the metaphor is particularly appropriate because fabrics are composed of woof and warp. Warp is the closely aligned parallel threads through which the woof is woven to give the fabric its strength. Sometimes, as in the case of felt, the fabric can be beaten and abused so that micro fibers connect the woof and warp to increase its strength. This is also a useful metaphor because challenges and threats sometimes strengthen a society.

In our society the social fabric has been rent.  

* First we eliminated our hereditary elite in 1960 and we have not replaced it with an enduring stable political alternative.

* Second we attempted forced integration of our public schools which wrought havoc in the school system and has significantly diminished its democratic mixing function.

* Third the hippies became a massive movement in the 1960s  that challenged nearly all of our sexual, religious and managerial values.

* Fourth, in our reaction to the Cold War we became divided on a pro and anti-commerce fault line with the Democrats and unions adopting the anti-commerce position.

* Fifth we watched a constant internal population migration beginning in the early 1980s that separated Democrats and Republicans into urban and nonurban populations.

* Sixth,  this change in populations resulted in political representation that was similarly divided.

* Seventh,  we saw the most astounding abuse of government power when the Democrats, without a single Republican vote, passed Obamacare bringing government power to bear on 1/6th of the commercial market.

* Eighth, we were stunned to find that the most powerful government agency, the IRS, for the first time in its history was using its power for malice on behalf of the Democratic Party.

* Ninth and lastly, president Obama, from the day he took office, has made every effort to promote class warfare, to harshly malign any political opposition and provoke racial animosity.

Are all of these factors sufficient to rent the social fabric of the United States?

My answer is "yes".

What can we do? First we have to acknowledge the severity of damage that has been done to our society before we can even consider remedies. I see no discussion anywhere about the extraordinary damage that has been done to our social fabric.

Can commerce be stopped?

This is neither a rhetorical question nor an expert comment. Nobody knows the future.

The reason I bring up the question is because I've recently become  conscious of the impact of the World War I on Europe. Up until 1914 Europe was a rapidly growing center of commerce as well as culture, technology, the arts and a fully integrated society for Jews in the northern latitudes.

Thirty years later, 1945,  Europe embarked on a different course, socalism. 100 years later, Europe is stuck on that course.  Europe is steadily moving towards second and third class status.

Europe is no longer an important factor in technology, commerce or the arts. It nationalized all of its important commercial industries and remains in a slow growth pattern decade after decade. Thanks to its Muslim labor imports, a negative reproduction rate and dependence on Russian oil, Europe has a grim future. Maybe no future.

If one century and two wars can do this much damage to a 300 million person population it gives one pause to think about how much damage socialism and war can do to the United States and its commercial world.

The mitigating factors are that:

* Over the past century the number of big corporations has gone from a dozen to many hundreds.

* The number of businesses has grown at a similar geometric rate.

* While government has grown in the United States in proportion to the total GDP it is not popular with the majority of the population and in the absence of government meritocracy it is held in low regard among thoughtful people.

My main source of optimism, if there is any, is the magnitude of commerce that has penetrated the society and become normative thinking. Most people prefer the life they have today, with technological and health innovations. Most people prefer their life with relative freedom to choose occupations and with a wide range of lifestyles that are delivered by commerce.

Most people prefer a society that is meritocratic rather than one with an hereditary elite or unionized.

I simply wanted to recount the issue because we have a rather grim environment in the United States. We have a president, a White House and leaders of the Democratic Party committed to doing violence to our world of commerce. They push damaging minimum wages, horrendous government employee wages and benefits, unreasonable expansion of rules and regulations, unreasonable government control of health care for the population and a vast symphony of sycophants in academia and the media.

San Francisco Summer of 2014

The actual data are not available yet but I can tell you, based on walking and driving around San Francisco and talking to my retail clients, that this summer has been the best tourist summer in San Francisco history.

Ordinarily the city gets about 9 million tourists. This year the number is closer to 10 million.

In asking around, I have found two explanations. I am able to get a good perspective from hoteliers, restaurateurs and auto rental agents.

The first and most important reason is the incredible global profits of corporations headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. Because it is virtually impossible, with double taxation in the U.S., to bring home the earnings from global operations, these global Bay Area corporations are rewarding their overseas staff with business trips for the staff and their families. They come to visit headquarters in the Bay Area.

In some cases there may be legitimate business reasons. In most cases it doesn't matter.  It is a good incentive with money that can’t effectively be used for the high investment returns that are only available by re-investing in the U.S..

The second and slightly less important reason is that the English pound is almost 15% higher than it was at the beginning of the year; and the dollar is cheap for Brit's. They are coming to enjoy their monetary advantage.

San Francisco is, of course, benefiting from this unwarranted well-being. Nearly all tourists still leave San Francisco saying how dirty the city is and that it is filled with unpleasant beggars. 

Chestnut and Union

The two streets in San Francisco that I want to describe are both pedestrian shopping streets in the same Marina neighborhood. They are both straight East-West streets and they both go roughly 6 blocks; they have the same parking and residential circumstances.

In the 1960s, Union St. got an overall design by an architect friend of mine, Beverly Willis. For the next 30 years Union St. was on the map for all visiting tourists and was a very successful walking destination for shoppers. In the 90s and since then it has been dead. The picture below was taken at the same time as the picture on the right. Sunday early afternoon on a warm Summers day. Union Street was empty, Chestnut Street was crowded.

What is the difference?

Union street has banned virtually all chain stores excluding two or three such as Starbucks.

Chestnut Street welcomes chain stores and more than half of the storefronts are either chain stores or well-known brands.

Union street has virtually no good restaurants and only a few bars. It has little nighttime traffic and most of its daytime stores are for jewelry or nails. The fashions are boring.

Chestnut Street is noted for its many good popular priced restaurants, it's jumping bars and the fashion outlets. The stores are perfectly in sync with the age group that crowds the street.

Why are chain stores so important to the vitality of a street with walking shoppers?

I can identify two reasons.

* The first is that people are familiar with chain stores and their presence offers physical security.

In San Francisco there are two routes from downtown to Fisherman's Wharf. The short route is through North Beach the long route is along the waterfront. Very few tourists take the short route because there are virtually no chain stores that they recognize. Excluding Walgreens they do not see any familiar signs that let them know that they are in comfortable territory. Chain store names whether it is the Gap, McDonald's, Starbucks, Whole Foods or UPS give people a sense that they know the neighborhood; the sense that they know what is in the store. Chain stores provide a comforting environment. (This doesn’t apply to German tourists who will go anywhere.)

* The second is that chain stores have vital information about consumer tastes and interests because they have geographic diversity. They do a better job serving their customers.

Chains can spot street fashions in West LA, in Boulder and in Tel Aviv. This sensitivity is not available to local stores. The chain stores can also detect changes in consumer patterns in both marketing appeals and supplier innovations. These are rarely accessible to local stores.

Most importantly the managers in chain stores have an incentive to work harder and do a better job because there are promotions and slots in management above. That is not true for local stores.

The last photo I have included is a government project. The state, local and federal governments wiped out an historic black neighborhood with urban development. Decades later they replaced it with a city designed Black Heritage Jazz Cultural Center.

Look carefully at the photo on the right and you will not see pedestrians. It didn't work.

Government bureaucrats don’t have the vaguest idea of how business works. They have put tens of millions of dollars into supporting the few businesses that have been bribed into opening stores. Being public-housing-project-adjacent means failure even if it hadn't been a bureaucrat design.