Pro Commerce

Tips and tipping

I wrote about tipping more than 30 years ago in several magazines and newsletters. I've written four blogs on the subject over the past 15 years. Nothing I said then has made a dent on any mind whatsoever (in case you want to point to several areas of my intellectual impotence).

The subject has come up again. A good friend, and his family, stayed with us for a week in Tokyo. He was appropriately stunned by the absence of tipping. Complete absence. Ordinary meals in Japan are much cheaper than in the U.S. without tips. The business lunch with 'specials' is the best priced meal on the planet.

The subject of tips and tipping often comes up and no one seems to be conscious of the fact that tips are not a way to reward or punish service workers; they are a remnant of a training tool for slaves and servants. And a way to reinforce the slave-servant-master hierarchy.

Every job that involves tips was formerly done by slaves and servants. Food service, taxi and livery service, baggage handling, hair cutting, etc. All the places where we don't tip service people are where the service was formerly provided by skilled workers: gasoline stations and auto repair workers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, dentists, lawyers, retail clerks, firemen, policemen, ambulance workers, nurses, etc.

Tips are a vestige of slavery.

Japan is proof. They never had slaves. They did have many people we would call 'servants' but the relationship was familial.

The people who should know most about tipping in the U.S. are blacks. But they don't.

Big trouble for me

I'm in trouble because of a personal policy.

More than 40 years ago I developed a policy to never read about or watch a film about someone I knew personally. The reason was simple and obvious: I knew that person on many dimensions that I can remember vividly, while the medium representation of that person is very limited and inadequate. Like reading a comic book version of a great book such as Moby Dick or Tom Sawyer.

That policy has stood the test of time. I knew Jim Jones and Harvey Milk. Nothing written or filmed about either comes close to the reality I experienced. The material on both were far off the mark.

So what presents the current problem?

As I get older, more and more people are included in the net of people being described in the media. There is a new musical about Doug Engelbart and Bill English with a role for Stewart Brand.

I was a central character in the hippie world, almost at the very center. What should be my policy now?

I knew Doug from the running group around the Portola Institute. Folks, we ran in tennis shoes. The whole running 'thing' including Running magazine and running shoes grew out of that group.

I went to Doug's lab at SRI (still a non-profit in those days) and got a private demonstration. Doug was an engineer with a vision. As a person, he had little affect. His whole operation was a 'kludge', a word we used back then. The thing that ultimately became the 'mouse' was a metallic cross between a multi-keyed harmonica and a knife sharpener. The screen and keyboard were as slow as molasses..literally. Just one little cursor and one slow letter entry at a time. A system I used and screamed at for the next decade while writing two books. Doug didn't even have a line editor yet.

William English, Bill, to everyone I knew, was a good friend of mine. We worked together over several decades, along with his wife Roberta. Everyone who knew them, mentioned them together. Bill came to run Xerox Parc and went to Japan to develop the Japanese keyboard when he got Xerox to form a partnership with Fuji. I tell one story about Bill here. I stayed at their house in Tokyo.

I will still follow my policy of not dealing with media about people I knew or know. I will just start writing some of my memories.

Tourists in Tokyo

I was a little shocked to learn yesterday that some American tourists I met had stayed in a luxury hotel and enjoyed their three days in Tokyo. Buffet: American breakfast.

The first day was a bus tour of the city stopping at a few temples, including one really weird one near the Tsukiji fish market. They drove through and looked at the market. The second day to Mt. Fuji and a boat ride. The third day, Disneyland. Food at tourist locations. Lots of good food but few fish choices. Then off to Kyoto.

I love commerce, so I can't complain that some company makes money from this kind of tourism. There are clearly people in the world for whom this is an enjoyable visit to Tokyo.

I also love Tokyo. These people are not seeing anything of Tokyo, the largest city in the world and the most interesting. (The second most interesting is Tel Aviv.) Missing food too. More restaurants here than anywhere on the planet, 160,000. With more Michelin 3 stars than Paris.

At the Tsukiji fish market, all the action occurs between 5 am and 7 am. It is the most exciting and chaotic action visible anywhere on the planet. In the past five years a viewing area has been built in the tuna auction area to protect the visitors and the workers. A little less fun, but necessary.

No one should ever miss the sea of humans at Shibuya crossing. The only place like it in the world. But that is wildest in the early evening, when tourists are back in their hotel.

There must be good tours of Tokyo. I've been coming here for 40 years for a month or two and I still have felt I've missed too much.

My brother and his wife took a bicycle tour of Tokyo starting early on the day they arrived when they had jet lag. They learned more from their bicycle perspective and the meals than anyone else I've ever heard of.

I have some interest in the tour business. I shook-up the tour world (literally the world) when I started a tour of the 'bad area' of San Francisco in 1972. You can read an earlier blog about that adventure.

Fortune cookie wisdom

This is a little long for a fortune cookie... it was on a piece of paper that came with a pedometer.

This pedometer recommends, 'for a long life' 10,000 footsteps a day. This makes some sense. I exercised vigorously all my life, running five days a week for 30 years and it doesn't appear to have helped my heart or my circulatory system. But avoiding a sedentary life is probably good advice.

Read a 1,000 words a day. Well, maybe. I find reading is fun. For people like me, fun is rewarding too.

Write a 100 words a day. Why? I write many hundreds a day, because it generates the two following items. That may be a good reason for me, but not for many others.

Interact with 10 people a day. This is flat out good advice.

There have been few genuine competent longitudinal studies of ordinary people. There are a few done in Denmark that I consider reliable. The only other one was done in Oakland California, in the 1960's, with 5,000 people. I was involved in it. The study found that having more friends, real friends who interact with you in everyday life, was good for mortality and morbidity. Social people are healthier and live longer. Which is almost a truism. Since people are social animals.

Lastly, do 1 good deed a day. Yea. I'm strongly in favor of that. Only trouble, from years of doing it, you can never be confident that a 'good deed' will have positive outcomes. Most foundation grants have negative consequences. Helping other people is only good when they want your help. All acts have multiple outcomes, most unforeseen.

So much for fortune cookie wisdom.

Babies

I was reading a book of old (early 1990's) George Will's articles and speeches. He was very concerned about the high crime rate and the rapidly growing number of children without a dad. He was right to be concerned. That was the peak of American crime.

It was nearly a decade before Levitt and Donohue showed that the crime Will was railing against was the by-product of mothers who didn't wan't their children. The criminals were born before legalized abortions became widely available.

It is more than two decades since the crime rate began falling dramatically. Now our main crime is caused by a specific group of permanent black underclass males.

I wondered what was happening with the children born without a dad. The census shows that 1.5 million such babies are born in America every year. 1.4 million are born to women who didn't graduate college. Nearly 1.0 millions of those didn't try to go to college. Women who have children after graduating from college are married in 9 out of 10 cases. That is the great 'inequality' in our society. Graduate from college and your kids have two parents. Don't go to college and most likely the women who have children will be single.

A few women (70,000) who are well educated and successful also have children without a dad after age 40. That seems to be no problem for the society. Maybe that data should be used to argue for gay marriages and their offspring.

While this out of wedlock data may be alarming there is one piece of the data that was surprising and unrelated to the permanent black criminal class. About the same number of black children are born without a legal dad as are hispanic children. Yet the hispanic children are not growing up to be a permanent criminal underclass. The hispanic community seems to provide extended families and evangelical community churches.

This suggests that the black community has a serious cultural problem that, in addition to producing children without dads, is producing a disproportionate number of criminals.

I didn't expect to find that in the data.

There were two facts that stood out but were not surprising. There are only 3,000 Asian-American women giving birth each year without being married to the father. And Utah has the lowest proportion of single women giving birth, of any state, in the U.S.

Travel young

My mother used to do something that was rude. I did something rude too. Both of our behaviors have a touch of reality.

As my mother got older (she had white hair before she was 30) other old people would talk to her about their grandchildren and show her photos. They would ask my mother about her grandchildren. Her reply was: "I have four boys and five known grandchildren... I don't really know how many actual grandchildren I have?" That ended any old people's conversation, which she never wanted in the first place.

In my case, since I have been a world traveller, many friends typically suggest I visit their favorite quaint place in rural France or the Italian Riviera. My rude reply was always: "I'll spend more time in Europe when I'm old and in a wheel chair.... otherwise I'll go to more challenging places while I'm young."

Now that I'm old I'm glad I went to more challenging places when I was younger. Today, spending much time in India, Afghanistan, Nepal, Laos, West Africa and on the coast of Malaysia would be difficult for me. Too much walking and too many hardships.

Now my friends seem to see the world's coastal cities from cruise ships and see other places from their room in luxury hotels and tour buses.

I did see Europe after college with no money in my pockets (not impressed with the French who were mean to me as a young American). Again, years later, many times for business and to give lectures.

Now, that I'm old and the world has changed, with Europe openly belligerent toward Israel, I wouldn't give those Jew hating bastards a penny of my tourist dollars.

Former communist disappointment

Vaclav Havel and a Polish leader of Solidarity, both former communists, wrote about their disappointment with the post revolutionary period that they had both helped to create.

Both were saddened to see the rise of secularism and consumerism. They railed against the new 'credit card life'. Both had hoped for a society of 'truth'.

That is sad. I wish I could have explained to them that the new freedom of commerce does not generate a love of Tolstoy or a love of the arts and 'truth'.

The world of commerce does more, much more. While the two revolutionaries saw ordinary people enthusiastic, working hard, eating abundance and buying a lifestyle, what they can't see is the the proliferation of artists, dancers, philosophers and creative people who have found new authenticity.

Nobody in the new commercial society needs to stay up all night copying a censored forbidden book. A few people are living authentic lives (living their own 'truth') and generating dialogs, articles, books, films, conferences and videos that are creative and extraordinary beyond anything that could come out of a closed communist society.

Maybe the new Tolstoys are Charles Krauthammer, Mary Douglas, Thomas Sowell, Craig Newmark, Sergey Brin, Bibi Netanyahu, Jonas Salk or Amos Alon. All products of consumer commerce.

Modernity

My son recently suggested that most people confuse modernity with commerce. I am trying to create an original connection between commerce and authenticity. 'Modernity' is confusing the issue.

I think the confusion is real. But commerce is substantive and has distinct attributes. Modernity is a vague conception with no stable attributes. At best we can say that modernity is opposition to tradition or rejection of tradition with an overlay of anti-traditional religion.

The reason for the confusion between modernity and commerce is the historic emergence of both at roughly the same time. This emergence was caused by commerce that brought us mass produced elegant dinner ware and stationary steam engines for power supplies. Both are none traditional. Both replace traditional ways of life.

Commerce sprouted a new world of health, abundance, vigor, pragmatism, novelty, technology and the opening for personal authenticity because it is a meritocratic world.

Modernity is merely a commentary on the new commercial world in the form of the arts, architecture and secular consumption values.

To summarize: two hundred years ago commerce brought to the world a new day, a new way of living. It was called 'modern'. Since then the term 'modernity' has been applied as a commentary on commerce. But 'modernity' is neither meritocratic, since it flows from the mouths of anyone, nor is it tied to technology since it is often approved of by Luddites.

Modernity is a rejection of tradition.

Commerce is just commerce moving in its pragmatic way; lowering costs and expanding markets.

Hot coffee

I'm in a country where I have been served coffee that was too hot to drink and some wonderful mushrooms on top of veggies that I had to blow on to cool off.

Japan is a country with few lawyers and little litigation.

Is my new found pleasure, here in Japan, a good thing for a pro commerce policy?

I generally defend American litigiousness. It is a price we pay for radical autonomous individualism. Does the same apply to our class action cases that suppress market freedoms? Should I defend these anti-hot coffee class actions?

I'm going to surprise you with my answer. 'Yes'.

Generally, the market should offer safe goods and services. Half of all customers have below average IQ's and their needs must be considered too. That includes serving coffee that is not too hot to scald them when the idiots spill it on themselves.

This corporate-legal paternalism annoys me no end. I stayed at a Wyndham Hotel in Colorado Springs where the water was not really hot, for my showers. Awful. It was the policy of the chain and I've never stayed in another one of their hotels.

What the market should provide is very hot food, coffee and shower water for those of us who want it. We get different kinds of whitening agents for our coffee, different sweeteners, we get different levels of cooking for our meats. We could get different temperatures for our coffee and other products. Commerce can offer those options.

Yes, commerce should protect the vulnerable population, but it should also give us high risk nuts our options. That is pro commerce not legal paternalism.

Learning from Google

It is not obvious to us old folks how much of a learning tool Google is. Not only does it answer our questions, which some may see as learning, it can and does lead us to new information that we weren't looking for. Much like browsing in an old fashioned library or just browsing in an old fashioned encyclopedia.

What got me on this track? I woke up one morning thinking I should honor my fellow Jews who died in the last Jew hating Shoah. We are in a new one now.

The idea I came up with was to get a number tattooed on my arm. That led me to the question 'how many digits did the Germans use?' The number of digits would have been a clue to the size of their intended project.

Thanks to Google I learned two things.

My idea is not new. Using Google images and following the clicks to the original pages, I found several people who had gotten number tattoos on their arms for exactly the same reason. Too honor Jews in the last Shoah.

And... tattoo numbers were not used on my people who were marched directly to their deaths, mostly women, children and old folks. The tattoos were for the worker slaves. So the number of digits needed was not very large. Five, or so, with an alpha to show which death camp the slaves came from.

I learned those two surprises from Google. Not just Google but from Google images.

Heidegger

Don't worry. I'm not going to write a Germanic philosophic piece to ruin your day.

I had a period where I loved Hannah Arendt's work and that period has passed. That is the only time I paid attention to Heidegger. I always knew there was a deep connection of his work to Nazism. There would have to be. Politics is a subset of worldview.

Recently I read a commentary on Heidegger in Foreign Affairs by Christian Madsbjerg that helped me to realize that Heidegger is an important philosopher of the anti-commerce world. My intellectual nemesis.

Heidegger is a champion of the Germanic 'blood and soil'. You are 100% the by-product of your cultural and historic traditions and proper living is an acceptance of that. This is a perfect statement of anti-commerce and anti-Jew.

Jewish tradition also believes in the power of rational thought and the power of social institutions to accommodate individual character. As a consequence, Jews fit well in a commercial society.

Heidegger is a champion of the tribal world with its intense and deeply intertwined personal relations.

Commerce is a pragmatic world where individual relations are autonomic, ad hoc and open. We commercial people sell to everyone, buy from anyone; we work with the most competent people regardless of their family and we use technology where it works best. Pro commerce and anti-Heidegger.

We find authenticity in following our lives to where they lead us in a multi-complex world of commerce.

Mundane

The word is clearly from the Latin for 'world'. If you are a Buddhist, a pro commerce person or you are in the tradition of 'aliveness'; then being part of 'this world'...'be here now' is to consider Mundo to be of the highest value in daily life.

So how did 'mundane' get the terrible connotations that it has in our current language?

For two reasons. One is mainstream religion: Christianity, Islam and the other religions that promise a heavenly afterlife. If there is a heavenly after life then anything in the current life is subsidiary, inadequate 'mundane'.

The second is Leftism, Environmentalism, eschatology, Heideggerism, communism, socialism, Rousseau, Marx and every offspring of the French Revolution. This is all one anti-commerce package that imagines an ideal world that is better. Making our current live mundane in the most negative meaning of that word.

The meaning of mundane must be made current. I love mundane. I love commerce. I love being alive in this world. Praise be to mundo, bless us all.

Innovations

I'm still focused on the Jan-Feb issue of Foreign Affairs that discussed 'entrepreneurs'. It just missed so much about reality

When using examples of global innovations in technology, that changed lives, their examples seem to focus on Apple products, Google, and Facebook. That is just blindness

I focus on three innovations that don't support the normative values of academia and the notions of popular culture. ( I started to use the term 'mundane' which is a terrible perversion of the word. See tomorrow's blog. )

My three are: Craigslist, Task Rabbit and Google (again for different reasons)

Craigslist is the biggest innovation of our time. It created a gigantic garage sale. Allowing people to buy and sell a spectacular variety of goods, never before possible. I would guess that its reduction in personal expenses and increase in personal product satisfaction has reached 10% of GDP by now. It wiped out newspapers by replacing their 'classifieds'. Print on paper now has half its earlier circulation as the press founders on their death beds.

Most of all, worst of all, Craigslist is and was a hippie operation. Driven by love and joy, determined to do the best job possible. That never makes it into academic or popular writings

Next is Task Rabbit. Just getting started but truly radical. I go to Task Rabbit for small jobs around the house, or for parties or business projects that are short term. People bid on my jobs and list their skills

That is from my perspective. From the workers perspective, they are self employed, no invoices to collect on, infinite variety of work and a chance to work in countless environments and find out what you love doing.

It, like Craigslist is changing the way people run their lives

Lastly, Google. Google started with no advertising. That wiped out all competitors, because the public really prefers life without ads. It became a corporation worth $billions by selling 'listings'. To understand the 'no advertising/business runs on listings' idea you must go to my 1984 book Marketing Without Advertising. Google's innovation was wiping out the world of advertising, about $150 billion worldwide. Like Craigslist it helped ruin the world of print on paper and gave us a direct way to find what we are looking for: Listing

See the world through my eyes; and you see how commerce changes the way people lead their lives. That is where innovation occurs

Lastly I forgot to mention that Apple would be 2% of anything to this day, except that they became open source when they introduced iTunes and let a million people design and sell programs to the public. It fits everything I've said so far about innovation. But doesn't fit the academic/popular models so widely discussed.

Real entrepreneurs aren't

I was just reading the January-February edition of Foreign Affairs magazine which was focused on entrepreneurs and the national climate that encourages them.

In general the articles were reliable and somewhat accurate within the domain of popular ideas.

But my experience suggests it was off the mark because the entire subject is off the mark.

Who am I to talk? I am the founder of the Briarpatch Network, the hippie network of small businesses. I worked as a consultant with more than 1,000 start-up hippie businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area over a decade. That probably makes me the leading authority on this subject now and for a century into the future.

I don't recognize the term 'entrepreneur'. Its bull. Everyone who starts a business is in the same category: a person who starts a business. From this group there is a subset of people whose businesses survive. These are 'small business people'. Among these there is another subset, those who want their business to grow and it does. Those are the people mistakenly called 'entrepreneurs'.

One element that is often omitted in describing people who found innovative businesses. They invariably start in poor neighborhoods (in poor suburbs, these are started in garages). Because neighbors don't call the cops and 'strange goings on' are strange. The tofu business started in just such a neighborhood, so did several electronic companies and many manufacturing plants from wind generators to pot pipes.

The two elements that are always overlooked on the subject of start-up businesses: up-beat and outlaw.

Everyone who starts a business is up-beat and they are usually in an up-beat environment. You have to be up-beat to face the daunting task of facing the odds against succeeding. I never see that stated clearly and blatantly. I suspect that when the national mood is down-beat, not many businesses get started. The hippies started more new businesses than any group on earth, or anytime in history. They were astoundingly up-beat and intended to create a new world. A new world with new food, clothes, technology, new governance, religions and everything else.

The hippies were also outlaws. Not just because of drug usage but in their outlook on the surrounding society. Nearly every start-up business I dealt with began without a license, without paying taxes or any of the legal fees including withholding taxes or workers compensation. After they got going and knew they would survive they became legal.

It is the outlaw quality that is usually overlooked. People who risk their lives in starting a business are not conformists who could get a salaried job. They are defiant. A quality that makes for an innovator.

That's my experience.

Several of my start-ups became global corporations. Their stories are varied. Body Shop is just one example. Three women started a cosmetics business called Body Shop based on their hippie ideas of safe and healthy ingredients. They had good design skills. A British woman copied every detail of their business and grew it to a global scale. She then went back and paid the three founders a reasonable lump sum settlement.

Another global business example is the modern bicycle... I'll save that story for another time.

Next time you hear the word 'entrepreneur' question the term and note that the user has ignored the requisite up-beat qualities needed to start a successful business and the outlaw origins of most innovative businesses.

New dryer

The photo on this blog gives away some of the surprise I am going to tell you about. There is one thing to know and one thing to think about.

To know: I am in Tokyo and will be here for awhile. To think about: new housing costs in America are high because local building codes make inexpensive pre-fab houses nearly illegal. A pre-fab house, delivered can cost 1/4 the cost of the identical house built on the spot.

All housing would be even cheaper if Americans could use the standard pre-fab Japanese bathroom (no toilet in it, like San Francisco's old homes). I've thought about starting just such a business. It would be 'high-end'. High end people were the first to use Japanese spray toilet seats.

The surprise to me was the Japanese bathroom in the apartment we are staying in this year.

It has a built in hot air circulation system that is used to dry clothes. So the apartment doesn't need space for a dryer. The bathroom serves that function in the winter and on rainy days. The Japanese often like to hang laundry, to dry, outside; for the smell and freshness.

I love it. Hang the clothes in the bathroom, close the door and turn on the dryer function for roughly an hour or hour and a half. Wonderful.

(Imagine my surprise to find the photo is turned on its side and I can't make a correction with the software and Internet connection I have here in Tokyo.)

Existential reasons for living

I've reached the age where a goodly number of my friends and associates have died. In another five years, half my friends will have died.

I am seeing an interesting but unverifiable pattern. Many people seem to die when they no longer have a reason to live. That is most obvious in the case of couples who have been happily married for a long time and the surviving partner dies within a month of the first ones death.

I can add a story that reflects poorly on me. At the point where my father seemed ready to die, I desperately needed a vacation and was going to Tokyo as usual. I, half jokingly, asked my father to give me a week of vacation before he died. He did: exactly seven days. ( I flew back, refreshed and grateful.)

Several of my friends became depressed and tried many therapies and drugs to feel better. When nothing worked, they promptly died of various medical problems.

I watched two street people near my morning coffee shop, who degenerated over a year or so. In both cases, they just sat down, wouldn't respond to anyone bringing them food and coffee, and died.

I've know several people who retired from salaried work and died shortly thereafter.

It makes sense to me that having a reason or reasons to live is necessary to live. 'Reasons' seem to cover a large range. This suggests to me that living is a self generated existential issue. 'Authentic people' seem to live longer. So do people with a sense of humor and those who are embedded in a social network.

I have many reasons to live and always have. One reason to get up in the morning is this blog. I love writing it and I appreciate my readers. I really do.

Driving adaptation

I'm beginning to think that we should have a cap on the number of laws passed each year by state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. Maybe a total of ten. I know California passes 500 laws per year. A farce by any definition.

What brings this to mind is people talking on the phone while driving.

When this became widespread in about 2005 we already had more than a decade of auto cell phones in use. It was the proliferation of smart phones that attracted public attention. And concern. The concern was justified because we could see that many drivers were distracted by their cell phones while driving.

The first reaction of politicians everywhere was to introduce draconian penalties for cell phone use while driving. Those laws are still in place.

What has actually happened?

Our commercial society has adapted. Drivers have learned to use the phone in a way that does not require diverting their eyes or diverting attention. Manufacturers have built phone systems into automobiles and made them voice activated. A standard commercial response to a customer problem.

The whole issue is gone. Not because of the laws, but because of commerce and public learning, something that is an inherent part of a commercial society.

Dr. Livingstone I presume

I view the world through the concept of culture as understood in anthropology. I have spent 45 years visiting Japan to learn more about culture

All of which led me to think about the recent historic confrontation between American president Obama and Israeli prime minister Netanyahu over giving Iran nuclear weaponry.

We have Obama whose father was a second generation literate from a cattle and fishing tribe and a mother who was an angry communist who was strongly anti-American. Netanyahu had both parents from a society that has been literate for a 100 generations. He had served in his national army and his brother had died serving in the army of Israel to save civilians.

That led me to remember Barack Hussein Obama's tribe, the Luo. The Luo live around Lake Victoria where David Livingstone had been ill and livng for 7 years in the 1860's. He met a search party sent out to find him, led by Henry Stanley, where the famous 'I presume' phrase comes from.

Why do I know about this? One summer as a grad student I was hired to read all 136 books and maps on pre 1900 Africa in all languages for professor Miracle who wrote the first economic history of Africa. I found all the economic references in about 100 books and maps. I read the works of J.H. Speke, a great British explorer, who found the headwaters of the Nile in Lake Victoria, which he named. His find was disputed, expecially by David Livingstone, who went on a separate expedition. Speke was right from the beginning.

When Barack Obama Jr. refers to the American slave past and his connection he is wildly wrong. Nearly all American and Atlantic slaves came from West AfricA and most had the traditions of humor and Brer Rabbit. Obama's family was from East Africa where slaves were sold and traded by Arabs to Arabia and had little or no sense of humor.

New heaven

My definition of ‘heaven’ is the place where ghosts hang out together and enjoy each other's company.

We are living in a world in which the number of ghosts is high and that number is rising rapidly.

I think the most stunning creation of ghosts came with the Salk vaccine and infant child inoculations. Millions of people are alive because of those inventions. Millions of pharmaceutical ghosts.  

The second great act of ghost creation was the transformation of the emergency room into trauma centers as a result of the medical improvements developed in the Vietnam War.

Then in the 1980’s came a rapid series of medical developments. I give credit for many modern ghosts to the breast cancer drug Tamoxifen. After that we got the Catheter Lab which has since saved millions including me.

Currently we're getting cures for hepatitis C which has affected several of my friends who were going to die. A number of friends have also survived because of organ transplants which have been improving for decades.

The most recent miracles drugs are effective against melanoma, some forms of leukemia and lung cancer. These last three are not yet in widespread use but they are going to produce a large population of ghosts to join us in the heaven of medical and surgical survivors.

AT&T is off

For all of us lovers of commerce,  the removal of AT&T from the Dow Industrial Average of 30 top US corporations was a surprise. Its replacement with Apple, a major tech modern corporation is less of a surprise. It is only hoped that being put in the DJIA a does not have the same effect on Apple that it had on Intel and Microsoft which after they were put in the Dow lost their vigor.

What is disturbing to me, although I do not take issue with additions and subtractions to the Dow, is that AT&T is one of the most fascinating companies in American commerce.

AT&T was designed by its founding CEO, Theodore Vail, to be a government regulated monopoly. It was his clear understanding that a regulated monopoly was precisely the best form of long corporate life because the monopoly regulated the government and the government protected the monopoly status.

There've always been tiny telephone companies around the country but they have been irrelevant. The regulated monopoly guaranteed AT&T a steady profit and its role as captain of commerce for over 100 years. It entered the Dow Jones in 1916.

AT&T has been a marvel of reinvention. In the late 1980s, thanks to a favorable court ruling for MCI, a competitor, AT&T was forced to break up into regional telephone companies.  

In California, Pacific Telephone became an innovator itself. The Texas successor to AT&T bought the part of Pacific Telephone that was not in the portable telephone business. The Pacific portable phone business had the wrong technology and was a failure.  The the new cell phone business that went to Texas succeeded using a different technology.

The Texas telephone company promptly grew and became a buyer of nearly all the rest of the previously spun off telephone company's. Texas T&T (Southwest Bell) became the new giant AT&T.

What is striking to me is that no single person can be credited with this brilliant corporate maneuvering. From break-up to new giant it became dominant in smartphones and Internet services.

In the case of Citibank, that created a giant financial corporation, we can identify one person who was the genius, Sandy Weill. In the case of IBM we can identify the man who was the genius in helping the company survive the end of giant computers, it was Lou Gerstner.

There have been other great corporate survival stories. General Electric, Bank of America,  IT&T, AIG and even Ford Motor Company. What is amazing is these great corporate transitions are different.  No single person did it.  They are a tribute to modern management that has made this type of survival possible.

Some people work very hard

I continue to find friends who work 60 hours a week or more. That doesn't count the number of hours they spend looking at their e-mail the rest of the time.

This is a fairly new phenomenon dating from the early 1980’s. It seems much more extensive now than it did then. What is going on?

I see three interacting forces at work to make a significant portion of Americans work harder than anyone ever expected. My guess is that out of 140 million people in the workforce, I'm describing more than 40 million who work 60+ hours a week.

Since I first noticed this in the early 1980’s,  I have seen a rapid acceleration in delivery services and communication. It was in the ‘80s that we got used to FedEx, DHL and UPS. We got accustomed to overnight delivery of paper and packages. We got fax machines.  We got answering machines that allowed for asynchronous communication at any time of the day and night.

The situation has only gotten worse over time with  improvements in communication including portable phones, Internet and smart-phone texting.

• The consequence of this acceleration in communication and delivery is that it encouraged people to work faster to keep up with the increased flow of production.

• That goes along with the second serious problem: inadequate management. My wonderful friend Michael Doyle introduced improved technology for meetings in the 70s and 80s. His book was How to Make Meetings Work. This was a minor step. As I see the problem, we have widespread poor management. The reason for this is that good management is rare. Management can only be passed along in person very much like mystical lineage transmission. With the absence of a draft Army,  we have very few people who have learned management directly from the military where it has been perfected.

• The last reason for such hard work is that we have changed the nature of the workforce. We've introduced more than 15 million self-employed people. Self-employed people tend to be self motivated and work much harder than the rest of the population. We also have vast numbers of people working at home and in coffee shops. Again these are self-motivated people who work harder and longer than everyone else. And lastly we have a dramatic increase in the number of contract workers. These people are also self-motivated and hard-working. This entire category of self-employed and contract workers creates a category of hard work and long hours.

With these three explanations I feel satisfied in my explanation of the magnitude of hard working people in our society.

The Supremes and random legislature

The Supreme Court recently took a case from Arizona in which a state initiative was used to create an independent commission for designing legislative district's.

This is of concern to me because a similar initiative created a similar commission in California. Except that the California commission was made up of 15 randomly selected people from three categories of partisanship. I have a stake in any random process because that is the future of legislative bodies. It comes from my book A Citizen Legislature.

The problem the Supreme Court is dealing with is that the Constitution specifically names legislatures at the state level as the entities that choose legislators and decide the way they are selected.

This forces me to deal with my evaluation of how the Supreme Court functions.

* Some originalists require an interpretation that uses the original meaning and intent of the words in the Constitution for current issues.

* Others look at the way that the same wording would be interpreted in contemporary circumstances.

* And still others, who are not in my favor, feel the Constitution should be adjusted to the times.

This presents a specific challenge to me that is not covered by any of these models. The use of random selection was not one of the options for creating representation in 1786. While it had existed in ancient Athens it was not perceived as relevant to the Constitutional Convention. They were much more familiar with voting elections as were common in England and Holland.

They also didn't know about popular initiatives as a way to represent the electorate.

So we have something new that is a much better source of ‘representation’ and would've been welcomed by the Constitutional Convention because of it's better representational qualities. But that option didn't exist.

So how do we interpret a value that was held by members of the Constitutional convention, true representation, that is now used differently in contemporary society?

Working after age 45

I have recently been running into a number of people over 50 years old who are having great difficulty in finding a job. These are people who have been productive and successful in their fields for the previous 30 working years.

I admittedly have great sympathy for them. Particularly for some of the engineers and others who have extensive graduate training.

Which leads me to suggest that before one turns 40 there are some important questions one needs to ask oneself.

• Is my field of work expanding or contracting? If it is the latter will I be one of the people who is employed in the coming decades. An example of a contracting field is journalism.

• The second question is: are my skills so arcane or highly specific that I will be too expensive in the future and readily replaced by a younger less expensive person?

• Lastly, will I move up in the management to the point where my skills will not be generalized, will not be transferable to other industries and will not be sufficiently valuable in my own, if I lose in a political battle?

I see no one and no businesses that are helping people answer these questions and prepare to develop plans to cope with these problems in a rapidly changing business environment.

Charlie Munger’s kids

One of the strongest drawbacks to being a very rich person is the offspring children will usually turn out to be tragic cases. Walking disasters in most instances.  Or unhappy people with a lot of money and predators everywhere pursuing them.

I have pointed out before that two children of Larry Ellison have done well as producers in Hollywood.  His daughter has made some first rate interesting films.

It now turns out that Charlie Munger's children seem to be okay, too. Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's partner. Both offspring have been spending their money in California politics to try and improve the process. In the daughter's case, her focus has been to improve education.

Neither of them have much political skill and neither has ideas that I consider good.  But I still have to respect the fact that they are activists trying to make the world better and seem to be competent people.

Bitcoin explanations

Not long ago the Wall Street Journal asked the question whether bitcoins or something similar has a future. I'm not particularly interested in the negative responses.  I wrote a blog on why bitcoin will fail.

As far as I can see the negative reasons vastly outnumber the positive ones.

What is interesting to me are the arguments that the pro-bitcoin promoters suggest. The following are the arguments they make.

*Bitcoin transactions can be carried out on an international basis cheaper

*Transactions can be carried out on a smart phone.

*There is no inflation due to money printing.

*The digital vehicle is not subject to political or national stress.

*Digital currency will allow greater personal privacy

*Digital currency is an example of the future.

What is interesting to me is these are weak arguments that have absolutely nothing to do with why a bitcoin kind of idea would ever succeed. These are forms of sophistry not business arguments.

In order for a new category of business to succeed it must either be uniquely different and satisfy some genuine need or cover some existing set of needs and add some advantages

Except for the fact that international secret transactions would be possible, without carrying suitcases full of currency, there are no other important business arguments.

Bitcoin fails in the realm of argument as well as a business.

Explaining current technologies to a 1950’s person

There was a cute item on Facebook recently. It asked the question: ‘What would be the most difficult thing about today to explain to somebody in 1950?’

The favored Facebook answer was: We have a small palm-sized device that can access all of the knowledge and information in the world, many times greater than the encyclopedia, and yet the most common use of this device is to watch videos of cats and dogs.

I like the question. I like the answer. Not necessarily together.

The question is really about identifying the parts of contemporary society that have actually changed our perception of the world around us. The answer reminds us that technology and potential change in perception is irrelevant to our day-to-day interests.

I was around when the first Dynabook was being conceived at Xerox Parc.  I failed to ask myself how would this futuristic device be used (it was going to be large but portable). The answer is that the only way we get answers today is to use Google (I mean generically). Only a tiny fraction of a percent of all inquiries go to someplace other than our Google database, using a book or other reference. An encyclopedia is pretty much meaningless in its relevance to ‘inquiries’.

We have dramatically changed our global reference points. But not because of technology.

In the 1950's in our confrontation with communism we came to understand our own religious background and the importance of our market economics.

With the end of communism we came to understand the values of a liberal society and our expansive religious freedoms. Except for our smartphones and the speed of almost every other form of technology most things would be comprehensible to somebody from the 1950s.

The one change that would not be comprehensible is the combined impact of smartphones, e-mails and rapid delivery from FedEx. We now have a part of our society, maybe a third of the workforce, that works harder than anyone ever imagined. Working 60 hours or more a week. That would be very hard for anybody in 1950 understand much less conceive.

Nor would someone in the 1950s be able to understand how big the United States is.  It was significantly greater than the rest of the world on 1950 and is still greater than the rest of the world in 2015.

Lastly a 1950’s person could not have conceived that millions of Americans would be able to earn a living doing whatever they want, following their dreams and loving their work. That job titles would be almost nonexistent and work would include vast numbers, millions, of self-employed people working at home and in coffee shops who are self-motivated.

How can there be rich entrepreneurial Democrats?

The question is perplexing.

I am talking about people who are rich because they created businesses and benefitted from the business. They presumably are smart or business-wise and yet they politically favor the 19th century anti-business political party.

One of the most magnificent attributes of commerce is that it is 100% empirical. You can begin a business with a brilliant idea, with extraordinary vision and with vast sums of money and completely fail. Commerce does not reward anything except empirical behavior. Where the seller satisfies the buyer.

A person's behavior is empirical when they try a variety of actions and responses and do their best to be self honest about the direction of their learning. I cannot generally defined empirical but I can make it clear that that is the only way to be rewarded by commerce.  Intelligence, charm, beauty and heredity are never decisive in business success.

Commerce focuses on three elements that have clear metrics: one is reducing costs, the metric is money. Second is increasing sales or revenue. The metric is money. Third is seeing or detecting and reacting to changing revenue streams. The metric is data of many sorts including money.

A person who focuses on these metrics is living in an empirical world.

The world of commerce is a voluntary world of exchange transactions. Empirical behavior is the only behavior that is rewarded. Such behavior arises only through responding to metrics.  The source of the metrics is the number, frequency and quality of voluntary transactions.  The end result is improving those transactions for all parties involved. That is the definition of commerce and success.

Politics is not empirical, it is tribal.  The empirical entrepreneur can still be in his Democrat tribe with no cognitive dissonance.

Arc of human development

I would love to use a term such as arc of moral progress. But what I'm discussing has nothing to do with morality nor does it associate itself with the traditional notions of progress.

From my decades of working with a contemporary group of businesses, I recognized that commerce, in the modern world, thrives on four qualities: meritocracy, diversity, openness and preference for markets.

I defended each of these many times in my blogs and know that they are the source of modernity, the source of our current long lifespan, extraordinary health and abundant lives.

What I haven't previously succeeded in doing is finding a word for this arc of human development that is built into the expansion of ‘commerce’.

In many ways my terminology (arc of human development ) has a similar nature to Darwinian evolution. There is no recent evolutionary step for a species that is superior to a similar step that occurred 10 million years ago. For both evolutionary steps the  important attribute: is that they are ‘the best fit for that species in that environment’.

I don't have a term to describe the nature of Darwinian evolution. It might be called the ‘arc of life’. Making life possible on this planet.

To that extent I am comfortable in talking about the ‘arc of human development’ for the attributes of commerce. Our lifespan has expanded, our comfort zone is extraordinary, our health is an astounding miracle and  the variety of meanings for our lives is incomparable.

I can only call that, commerce, the ‘arc of human development’.

Authenticity and commerce

While I have regularly pointed out that commerce uniquely provides the roadways and the potential roles in society for people to find their individual authenticity, I want to make this more explicit.

I have followed the list of occupations that the United States government created in 1938, revised in the 1960s and again in the 1970s. It began as a few thousand occupations. It expanded to tens of thousands of occupations and by the 1970s there were hundreds of thousands of occupations.

The original conception of the job with an occupational title was derived from union shops and the military where such finite and describable job functions have existed for a century or more.

The government finally gave up trying to categorize occupations sometime 30 years ago. The reason is simple. Not only do we have so many occupations in our commercial world, we have transcended occupations to the point where they rarely described work or activity of an individual in the workplace.

Moreover, job descriptions in this sense are irrelevant. People rapidly assume new responsibilities and new functions as a business shifts and as the individual’s talents expand.

Occupations are a small part of human work activity in the United States.

Today, it is entirely possible to do what I do. Began every day figuring out what I want to do that day, often a dozen or more things.  Doing this I am able to generate income, over time, with some subset of all the many things I do. I act from my own internal demands and some of them generate income.

I am able to support myself because the commercial world is so vast that it can find a useful and productive function and an income generating function for some of the many activities I engage in.

I am not alone. There are several million people able to live as I do. We don't start with any trust funds or assets to fall back on.

It is into this commercial world that individual arts, skills and talents are brought.  It is this commercial world that allows for individuals to be authentic.  

Other worlds of government, military and religion offer a few niches for authenticity to be expressed.  But commerce uniquely provides an infinite number of such authentic income generating niches.

A tentpole thought

For me there is a mental hierarchy that has been embedded in English.

The sequence of most concern to me is from: ideas to concepts to thoughts. I perceive concepts as being larger and more comprehensive than ideas.

I perceive ‘thoughts’ as being more comprehensive and inclusive than either concepts or ideas.

It is to the thought of ‘Pro Commerce’ on which I am particularly focusing my attention.

Furthermore, I think that some thoughts are ‘tentpole’ thoughts.  I particularly select Pro Commerce as a tentpole thought.

To understand what I’m talking about we may need to find another thought that is a tentpole. One is ‘progress’. 'Progress‘ is a tentpole thought.

I want to thank a naval class I taught in India for this insight. At this Indian college, in Lucknow,  they were trying to teach naval officers how to become entrepreneurs. The school’s thinkers had come to the conclusion that the first overriding thought that had to be absorbed and comprehended was the thought: ‘progress’.

In India most people see world history as a series of cycles.  Humans don't really change from cycle to cycle.  Cycles can be thousands of years long. We always end up where we start….. forever. So the thought ‘progress’ is fundamental to modernity and commerce. The god of progress is Ganesh, the elephant god.  Ganesh, these days, is assigned to be the god of progress. Being involved in business, starting a company, requires a belief that what you do will have an additive and cumulative effect on society. The cumulative effect will be the equivalent of a step in some direction that does not get repeated in another cycle.

'Progress’ as a thought is one hell of a core thought.  It is a tentpole thought of modernity.

Pro Commerce is similarly a significant thought. It embodies the entire world of personal morality, human development and many other intellectual conceptions.

In this blog, I have introduced two cognitive perceptions that are independent.  One is the perception of ‘thought’ as a mental process or state that is at the top of a hierarchy of concepts and ideas.

The second perception is the use of a ‘tentpole’ in the mind. The entirety of human beings’ mental constructs are built around a few tentpoles. I don't know how many tentpoles there are but I do know that these thoughts, ‘progress’ and ‘pro commerce’ are uniquely important tentpoles of our modern society.

Pilots’ tales

Some of my readers know, and others can tell by the photograph on the upper left, that I was a private pilot. I had my license for over 55 years.

I was talking to one of the members of my morning coffee group and was surprised to find that he had taken a private pilot training class. He wasn't a private pilot but be understood the issues. He can listen to my flying stories.

I am no exception. Nearly every private pilot has a full book of stories about their experience as a pilot; we will gladly share with anyone willing to listen for even 5 minutes.

We are in a small exclusive club where we have a desperate need to tell each other stories. When we get together that is precisely what we do.

When I think about the myriad stories I have to tell, I would love to have someone listen to them. They deal with several elements of flying that are unique in airplanes.

First  our experience is defined by the fact that it occurs in three dimensions as opposed to automobiles. Because of the three dimensions there is no sense that you can safely stop, pull off to the side of the road and make corrections. Therefore everything to do with being a pilot has to do with solving problems without stopping.

Furthermore the three dimensional elements act to create multiple story lines. As a pilot will tell you, when something goes wrong, several things go wrong simultaneously. This is because we are dealing with forces that are not found on the ground for automobiles. One is weather including clouds and visibility, another is turbulence which is invisible; still a third deals with the density of air which changes with altitude. Planes can be flying inverted and still be flying.  Cars can’t.

You put all of these variables together and you've got plenty of room for good stories. Sadly the stories require someone who understands the convergence of all these forces.