Pro Commerce

This sad era

First a disclaimer.  I don’t like to use issues related to public mood in any connection to commerce, culture or even the stock markets.  It seems to me to be far too intangible, impossible to measure or explicate to be relied upon as an explanation for anything. The consumer confidence index doesn't correlate with anything.

Despite that disclaimer, I wish to register the sense that the Democrat-Obama era is one of national American ‘sadness’.

Sadness is the emotion associated with emptiness, lack of direction and lack of hope.  It is almost the emotional opposite of optimism.

Somehow this mood has moved from the political realm where it is epidemic to the lives of ordinary people.  

If the hippies were defiant, optimistic and vigorously open to change, the current milieu is the opposite.  Despondent, with little hope and most people seeing a gloomy future,

I must note that I observe this and feel it, but it does not characterize me personally. San Francisco is a gold rush boom town to an extraordinary degree.  But the social ‘sadness’ is here too.

To me, the possible commercial impact is on the creation of new businesses.  While San Francisco is experiencing an explosion of start-up businesses (and Israel is too) the pervasive urban mood here is anti-business and the overhead gloom is not conducive to starting new businesses.

The hippies created a vast flora of new businesses because they wanted to create a new world and they were exuberant.  Those seem to me to be necessary qualities for starting a business.

A recent national seminar for lawyers who defend businesses against employee and customer plaintiffs was about jury attitudes.  The researchers report that most people on juries these day, around the country, are anti-corporate and sympathize with employees who are fired regardless of the reason and are supportive of customers who claim damages, regardless of the merits.

This does not seem to be the milieu in which entrepreneurial people are going to explore new businesses or test the market with a new business idea.

Gays and Jobs

A gay friend pointed out how many members of top Apple management were gay.  He is getting this from the local gay newspapers which also report a generally high proportion of gays in top management of many American companies.

My first reaction is that Apple was founded as a hippie company and retained its hippie roots. Steve Jobs was a hippie every day of his life.

That led to another thought: how much does the gay movement owe the hippies?

I can personally testify that gays were unnoticed as different and were openly welcomed by hippies who were not judgmental about sexual matters.  In the hippie business community that I organized (the Briarpatch Network) there were many businesses operated by gays.  We never noticed it.

I finally noticed it when Harvey Milk ran for San Francisco city supervisor and began going to all the hippie parties.  He got widespread support because hippies liked him.  Being gay was not of importance.

The role Glide Church played in the liberation of the gay community, with Ted McIvenna’s  Sex and Drug Forum, is unquestionable.  I also see a major role for the hippies, too.

The famous lefty lawyer

This is a continuation of yesterday’s blog about the anti-war demonstration at the Concord Naval Weapons base.

The only person arrested at the demonstration was the fellow with a wrench, who had loosened the first railroad track connecting it to the next track.

When he was to be arraigned for trial, the celebrity pot-and-other-lefty causes lawyer, Tony Serra, announced publicly that he would defend the fellow.  

A morning coffee mate of mine, Regina Sneed, and I decided to drive to Concord for the arraignment.  We arrived to find the fellow alone with no lawyer and quite bewildered.

I phoned Tony Serra’s office.  The office said he was out of the country.  I phoned a mutual friend who said Tony was unreachable at a neighbor’s house passed out on drugs.

Regina, who was a government lawyer who was licensed in California but not current on her Bar Association dues, offered to help the guy.  She told the prosecutor what  the circumstances were.  She got him a sentence of community service and probation time.

Concord and no legs

The physical power of humans in a group is what this blog is about.

In the late 1980’s I did a favor for a friend and flew her over the Concord Naval Weapons base so she could take photos for a planned anti-Nicaraguan-war protest.

A few weeks later a group of protesters lay on the tracks where the base trains had to cross some non-military land to get to the loading docks.  The train didn’t stop and one of the protesters lost his legs (Brian Willson).

The following weekend more than 10,000 people came to protest.  I went along, because this was going to be an interesting event.

While Jesse Jackson was giving a long rousing speech I was at the back of the demonstration near the railroad tracks.  

One man with a tool disconnected one rail from the next.  When the people nearby saw this they gathered around to pull the steel track up from the ties, which the horde had no trouble doing with their bare hands.  They then twisted the first rail to disconnect it from the next steel track.  While one group of twenty-five to forty proceeded to pull up rails, another group, of a few dozen began pulling up the ties and neatly stacking them.

Pulling up the ties left the one remaining track hanging in the air.  Another group of twenty-five to forty jumped on this track, breaking it off and removing it.  In roughly twenty minutes this crowd of strangers had pulled up one hundred yards of steel railroad tracks and all the ties.  Neatly stacked.

I had never seen the physical power of a group before. With bare hands.  Nor have I seen anything like it  since.

(Continued)

 

Gini

The Gini is a measure income inequality.  Barack Obama, as part of his political ideology, has been promoting the theme of large and increasing income inequality in America.  It has become a Democrat meme.  I hear it everywhere I go.

Here is a table of Gini measurements for most nations around the world. You will see that the United States is in the middle with a Gini of 45 (high’ is ‘bad, low is ‘good’).  Most of the third world is very bad, with high numbers like Guatemala 55, Brazil 52,  Mexico 48 and China 47.  Most of the third world are kleptocracies.  

The countries held up as examples to Americans are Japan 37,  New Zealand 36, UK 32, Canada 32, France 31, Australia 30, Germany 27, Denmark 25, and Sweden 23.

To me Japan and Germany are good examples to compare to the U.S.  Productive industrial societies. However they are both countries that are rather homogeneous and have an egalitarian moral code that results in promoting a large middle class.

The rest have several distinct problems with income distribution.  They are *small so the wealthiest people leave the country to avoid heavy taxation, *they are generally not productive such as France and the UK which also *have the wealthy leaving and *they are not industrially productive like Canada and Australia that depend on extractive industries.

Now to the American issues.  

This data is highly subject to ideological interpretation.  I do my best to be neutral, but my bias is written in the title of this blog.  

Income inequality has increased slowly from 1970 to 1990 and has accelerated since then. The same is true for wealth.   Measured by tax returns and Forbes’ estimates of high income and high wealth individuals the mobility in the U.S. has been positive and significant and is not seen anywhere else on the planet.  Few billionaires. very few, inherited their money.  Most made it themselves.  Most modern top corporations were created after 1970.

So what has happened?  Businesses and the owners and managers of those businesses have grown geometrically as America became the great economic engine of the world.

We got rid of our hereditary economic elite in 1960, we opened the country to international competition by the 1970s and we had a boom in innovation and technology from that point on.  The most educated and the most entrepreneurial benefited.

Sounds good to me.  America is the economic engine of the world and we reward the engineers with financial bounty.  It will not be hereditary as I discussed in the previous blog.

So hurray for our income inequality.  It may not last long.  It depends on commercial innovation and we have no idea how long that will go on.  

Plenty of people in America are envious.  Envy is their problem.  No progressive tax policy in history has ever changed the income distribution.  So the envious will just have to wallow in their own bile; most Americans are not envious.  

The rest of us just get to enjoy the bounty of commercial innovation. Even low income Americans have smart phones, home appliances and a large assortment of electronic do-dads.

 

Hereditary elite

Many years ago, David Brooks raised the question: ‘will we create a new hereditary elite in America, that is more meritocratic?’

A quick examination of what holds an hereditary elite together in the first place.  Most of the world is ruled by hereditary elites.

The American hereditary elite fell apart because the post war period saw top management and control of American corporations passed on to the meritocratic superiors generated and made visible by WWII.

The closed school system in the Ivy leagues that had been largely restricted to the heirs of the elite fed their graduates into private clubs and ultimately ownership of major corporations.  Only the offspring of the nouveaux very rich could enter this Ivy league ladder. Only white Protestants were admitted.  Clubs, neighborhoods, parties and a social register helped this group know its members.  As it still does in most of the world.

David Brooks lives in New York and is alarmed to see the same elite school ladder being erected on the basis of money.  Rich wives get their kids into very expensive exclusive school and shower them with private tutors and specialized summer camps.  Brooks also sees the traditional use of big portfolios to get offspring jobs at investment firms and a whole new array of private expensive neighborhoods (penthouses, jets) and club-like gatherings.

Will it create a new hereditary elite?

I don’t think so.

DNA still operates.  The children of a female law professor and a hedge fund manager are still an ordinary cross section of Americans.  The best tutoring and schools can only do ‘so much’.  

The predator world will still go after the offspring of the rich.  Beautiful seductive woman, social climbers and con artists.

But most importantly, the world of commerce is now firmly committed to meritocratic top management.  An heir to money will make unforgivable mistakes in corporate management that will be unacceptable.  Example: the Ford, Rockefeller and Motorola heirs.

America will never again have a powerful entrenched hereditary elite.

Hereditary criminal class

We have an hereditary criminal class of black males.  It is in urban areas.  I estimate the number in this class at one and a half million in the age group 15 to 30 with 20% in prison or jail.

We are into the second generation of this class, with the third generation just entering its teens.

What, if anything can be done?

My observation from working eleven years in a black oriented church is that the focus in dissolving this hereditary class should be on young black girls from 13 to 18.

In the black American culture, the women are the powerful coherent stabilizing force.  The males born into the hereditary class have a single young mother.  Those young mothers lose control of their children to black male gangs at an early age.

The solution, that I think makes sense, is to focus on intense social support for the potential mothers by making them part of a cluster of girls who postpone childbirth until they are old enough and personally strong enough to act as strong mothers.

This would mean creating private black girls schools for junior high and high school ages.  The schools should guarantee productive jobs and living conditions for the graduates.  

If initially funded privately and demonstrably successful in producing girls with jobs and much later childbirth, other social institutions would turn toward this model.  Churches, community groups and lastly government funding would slowly begin to focus on this model.

There does seem to be a way we can deal with this dangerous group of young black males.

Nation building

As we watch Iraq and Syria dissolve into tribal segments, it is appropriate for me to ask the question: ‘what creates a nation?’

I don't think either nation was destined to fail.  I think they were close to success.  The same is true for Libya and Yemen.

My prime examples of nations are Greece, Italy and Spain.  These are virtual nations without governments.  The governments are so weak, they are hard to define as governments.  Suggesting to me that government is not necessary to have a nation.

These three European countries are nations that have a common language, a common history and most people within in the national boundaries identify with the nation, its flag and its geographical boundaries.  

There is plenty of hedging in these descriptions,  The Basque and Catalans are restive in Spain.  Greece had a post WWII civil war promoted by the communists.  Italy has Naples and Sicily as perpetual issues.

This evidence suggests to me that time is the best glue for nation building.  Forget all the memes on this issue: ‘civil society’, ‘common military experience’, ‘agreed figure head’.  It seems that commonalities of language, history and consensus on boundaries are the key elements of a nation.

Democracy as a governmental overlay seems to be helpful in many instances.  Certainly in the case for Greece, Italy and Spain.  Democracy does not create an effective government but it does form a level of cohesiveness that keeps the tribal fragments from separating off.  Lebanon and the Philippines are good examples where democracy keeps tribal segments from dissolving the nation.  But Lebanon and the Philippines can not be examples of strong nations.

I think that Iraq had a chance to become a nation, in another 30-50 years had the U.S. played a greater role in the postwar stabilization and emphasized a balanced central government that was inclusive, not a dominant vengeful Shia leadership.

Similarly I think Syria, Libya and Yemen could have been stable if they had moved on a slow track toward an elective government, as Spain did.  All three Middle Eastern countries plus Iraq needed a Great Power protector to maintain their sovereign borders.

Russia is a different story.  The USSR was never a nation because the sub-nations had their own identity, except for the tribal amalgams of Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Czechoslovakia.  The surviving Russia is a nation, an old nation, but the recently installed democracy failed.  I have no idea what Russia teaches us about creating a nation.

As Russia disintegrated, the strongest surviving institution, the former KGB, became the only power source.  I don’t know what can be done in a similar situation in the future.

Hiring political operatives

Every business that grows has to deal with the world of politics.  

In San Francisco we have two examples. One good and one terrible.

The good one is Uber.  Uber hired professional lobbyists who told them the way around local greedy political satraps was to go to the state level, in California, and get legal accreditation there as a limousine service, not as local taxis.  They did, they paid the necessary people and they are in good shape in California.

The bad one is Airbnb.  They hired local Lefty political activists.  First the Lefty advisors gave away the baby and the bathwater and second, they still got into a losing fight with the Luddites and unions.

What should a growing business do?  First, recognize that politics is a zero sum game, you either lose or you may be lucky and get a draw.  To get a draw you must put up money for the personal gain of the political players. Corruption is never open, it is always subtle and under the table.   Find the professionals who have done this all their lives, usually ex-legislators.  Follow their advice and give money to them to use at their discretion in ways you don’t want to know about.

Nearly every city in America is Democrat and union controlled. Don’t assume getting a Democrat lobbyist is a good idea.  Get the fanciest, top drawer, suede shoe lobbyist you can find, regardless of party.

Chosen people

I have mistakenly believed that we Jews are the ‘chosen people’.  It is not true as explained here by my wonderful and brilliant friend David Boxenhorn.

I am wrong for two reasons.  My Hebrew is insignificant.  I translate the phrase “ams’gula” incorrectly.  It is not ‘chosen’.   I am also careless.  I read it in an important and frequently use Hebrew blessings to mean ‘chosen’.  

In Exodus the statement read correctly is: ‘if you hear my voice and keep my covenant then you will be to me a treasure from among all the peoples’.  Notice the subordinate clause.  ‘Keep my covenant’.  Note, being a ‘treasure’ is far from being chosen.

The whole issue is repeated often as ‘keep my commandments’.  Every subsequent disaster was blamed, by the prophets, on the Jews breaking that covenant and not obeying the laws of Torah.

Separately, on major holidays the Hebrew is phrased differently.  It says the Jews were chosen.  But only ‘chosen’ to inherit the Shabbat and the Holidays. A very different meaning of chosen.  Closer to Exodus.  Chosen to follow the commandments given in the covenant.

 

Starbucks and Israel

What do these two have in common?

It is not the history of Starbucks opening outlets in Israel.  That failed.  I am partially to blame.  I helped Starbucks open in Japan with a very appropriate partner.  Starbucks was so startlingly successful in Japan that top management thought they were geniuses at overseas business.

They didn't understand what I had done to make the Japanese business so successful. The choice of a partner, the Sazaby brothers.

So they opened a few outlets in Israel.  Which promptly failed.  Israelis were already drinking good Turkish and Italian coffee; they were sophisticated coffee drinkers just as the Japanese had been. This time the arrogant Starbucks didn't use a partner.

So what do the two have in common?  A do-gooder mentality.

Israel has generosity to strangers and people in need built into their DNA.  Also written into the Torah and 3,000 years of Jewish teaching. Every page.

So Israel, from its founding has been sending aid, doctors and supplies to every disaster and needy group of people on the planet in troubled times. Usually, this tiny country sends more aid than 3/4ths of the rest of the world combined.

They have helped in every African country and recently in Nepal.  Israel gets every vote from Africans in the UN to destroy them.  True for almost every other country they help, including Cuba.  In the case of Nepal, much of the world press claimed Israel was helpful to ‘burnish their recent image’.  Israel has been doing this for 70 years.

So how does this relate to Starbucks?  Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, has pushed the company to be the leader in every form of social do-gooding.  He is a Lefty Democrat and a Jew by birth.

Starbucks founded the do-good coffee processing world of local coops and environmental remediation.  It gives college scholarships to its employees, has very generous employee benefits and supports a dozen other local do-good activities.  

Recently Starbucks tried to help Schultz’s good buddy Barack Obama with a campaign to create jobs and get every barista to discuss the Obama lies about race in America.

Starbucks gets the same treatment as Israel.  In every Democrat city Starbucks is attacked, penalized and stigmatized in everything it tries to do.  Everything about Starbucks is blocked, paralyzed and disparaged by the Left.

You can take any lesson you want from this.  To me, it means generosity is only done for the benefit of the donor, and should only be done for that reason.  Recipients of generosity never love the donor and usually hate the donor.  It is the 5th and 6th laws of money in my book of that name published in 1974.

The Buck Trust and Marin County

The story is longer than the lesson.

The lesson is that one person’s generosity may reduce other people’s generosity to the same recipients.

The story. The estate of Beryl Buck was not large enough to warrant its own foundation with all the administrative costs; roughly $8 million.  So it was folded into the San Francisco Foundation for operation as a sub-trust in 1975.

By 1980, the Beryl Buck trust was worth $275 million when an Orange County Oil well was sold.  The same kind of Orange County oil event that created the Glide Church Foundation that I managed for 11 years.

So the fight began.  Two of my friends, Bob Gnaizda and Sid Wolinsky went to court to get the Buck trust separated from the San Francisco foundation and available for charitable use all over the San Francisco Bay Area, especially for the poor in many other Bay Area cities.  The original trust specified that in just such a case, the trust should go to an old people's charity in Marin County, one of the richest counties in the U.S., where Beryl lived.

The case belonged to the cy pres category, focusing on the original intent of a small trust that had become gigantic and no longer related to the original intent.

Bob and Sid lost the case.  We had a consolation drink together.  The money all went to a new Marin County Foundation, set up for that trust fund.

So a rich county got a gigantic charitable windfall.  

The consequence was that money from every other charitable foundation in the U.S. dried up immediately and remains dried up to this day when it comes to donations to Marin County.

The banker’s mind

I often hear people talk about a generic 'banker' and how such a banker thinks.  It is always negative and demeaning.

I know more about how bankers think, having been one.  

I was the first person hired by Bank of America to start a marketing research department.  Joe Bowler was my partner and Barney Taylor, an old department head, was put in charge of us.

One question management gave us was whether to keep a low cost checking account called the Tenplan. Ten cents per check, no other costs.  It had been aimed at college students.  As well as other low income customers.

Were the customers different from ordinary checking account customers?

I have always prefered observation to asking questions.  I devised a survey in San Diego where real estate appraisers would  go out to a list of addresses I gave them (randomly selected) and record a price for the house or an estimate of the rental for an apartment.

Half the list was Tenplan and the other half ordinary checking.  Only I knew which numbers were which.

The management committee to whom I was to present the findings were executive and senior VPs.  I deliberately gave them each a sheet with the total value of the houses and rents for regular checking and Tenplan listed in four columns by the branch that had collected the data. No totals for the four columns.

Deliberately no totals for the four columns.

Each man in the room took out his pen and calculated the four totals at the bottom.  That is what a banker does.  That is a banker.

Bankers are ordinary patriotic Americans who are good with numbers. Nothing more.

The totals for regular checking and Tenplan were the same.  Regular checking was more profitable. Tenplan was eliminated.

Use random more often

The public doesn't understand random very well.  Otherwise we wouldn’t have long lines at the Mexican border or for TSA at airports and immigration at ports of entry.  (I know immigration at ports of entry are being automated, fortunately for all of us travellers.)

Random selection for screening works just as well for finding and deterring people trying to get through inspection systems.  Any random system would have a supplemental ‘screen guilty looking people’ on top of the random selections.  Random makes guilty parties even more visible.  

Random screening means using a random number generator (a table from a book of random numbers or a sequence of numbers from an irrational number such as 3.1415926535).  The proportion of people or objects to screen depends on the circumstances and experience.

A selectee from a random number screening should get a more thorough screening; the selectee should get a 100% screening.  That is important. A few 100% screenings is better than an 80% screening of all the subjects.

I was thinking about this concerning the screening that Israel uses in the West Bank and Gaza.  Israelis are smart enough to understand this.  I hope they use it.

Free speech?

Special thanks to Pamela Geller and the world of Lefties.  Together they have opened a genuine discussion of free speech.

Pamela Geller sponsored a cartoon competition about drawing Mohammed.  Two Muslims got shot trying to kill attendees of the competition.  Geller has personal body guards.  She is the brave person defending two basic American rights, the rights described in the FIRST Amendment; the right to free speech and freedom of assembly.  Geller has used TV, radio and the Internet to make her case and to make it effectively.

The issue would have no platform except for the Left.  The Left in control of the FBI and Homeland Security has never contacted Ms. Geller about the tsunami of threats she receives from Islamic terrorists.  The American public recognizes that that makes Ms. Geller a hero.

Then the Lefty media en masse and a trickle of others have attacked Geller as a provocateur deserving of punishment or possibly death. The FIRST amendment, to them, doesn’t cover provocative speech.

I’m sure my readers will be surprised to find I have been ambiguous, until now, on free speech and free assembly.  It is because I am a Jew.  I have never hesitated to beat the shit out of anyone I met who was attacking me verbally as a Jew.  I have also physically threatened small groups of assembled Jew haters.  To me they deserve punishment not protection.

Now I see that I need to modify my position.  Because Lefties are such blatantly angry people and cowards at the same time, as evidenced by their anti-free speech position, I have modified my views.

I am now a strong defender of free speech and assembly in America and in general.  

But that doesn't extend to me or anyone else who feels the need to punish Jew haters. Jew hate has a history that takes it out of the realm of a ‘god given right’.  The right to express it is fine, but it shall never be free of consequences from me or others like me.

Visioning

I’m not too positive about ‘visioning’ in business, even for non-profits where it is much more common.

My experience has been negative.  In several non-profits, the visioning preceded a disaster within a year.  One non-profit disaster was where the general manager was embezzling.  In another case, the leader was having sex with the staff. It finally blew-up.

In the case of a giant profit making bureaucracy the visioning preceded a set of lawsuits about the ethical subjects that came up in the ‘visioning’.

My guess is that people were asking for ‘visioning’ because they sensed a serious structural problem that was taboo or too difficult to approach through classic ‘in-house’ chain of command approaches.

Commerce is 100% empirical.  Responding to the market, changes in the market, and trends are what keep a business alive.  The responses to the market must be sensitive, with plenty of marketing research, feedback and metrics to examine.

If someone wants to call that ‘visioning’ it is fine with me.  However, that type of behavior is inherently built into good management, with plenty of informal staff bull sessions, mixing of management from top to bottom and open lines of protected ‘channels for honest reporting’.

Uber tips

As I've explained before, we have tips and tipping in all the occupations formerly occupied by servants.  In America these were also occupations for blacks and slaves.  

I have never seen a way to get rid of tips.  Now I can.

The new Uber service and its taxi peers, are based on smartphone apps and pre-registered credit cards.  There are other similar smartphone apps with pre-registered credit cards.

When you use these services the tip is added automatically where tips are part of the occupation.  Meaning, from the customer’s point of view, there is no tip.

My friends always cite this as an advantage of Uber.  They dislike the emotions and rig-a-marole around tipping.

The smartphone apps have gotten rid of tips.

Now we get to watch this approach spread. 

School these days

I've had several grandchildren who were much smarter than their elementary and preschool teachers. I was. So I know what an issue it is.  

I watched each one try several strategies over several years.  First, she tried to be smart and do well.  She finished everything immediately and had nothing to do.  She was treated as a smart aleck who was a problem child, too bored.

The next year she tried to be lazy and dumb.  The teachers treated her as lazy and defiant because she couldn't hide her intelligence.

Finally she tried to blend in, do just exactly what was expected and never look smart.  The oldest has been able to do this for ten years so far.

Me personally, my teachers were so dumb, they never noticed I was smart. I was able to hide with no trouble, and spent all the public school years fantasizing and drawing pictures.  I solved the worst problem, high school, by going to college when I was 15.

Now I have one elementary school granddaughter with the same problem.

But she goes to a rich fancy charter school.  The school gets all her teachers and counselors and psychologist and other experts together to analyze the kids.  She has a big problem.  They are ‘on to her’.  But they don’t have the skills or programs to challenge her intelligence and curiosity in their classrooms.

Now she can’t just ‘blend-in’.  What can she do?

Modern commerce the source of peace

In the previous blog, one of my brilliant readers comments about the role of ‘nationalism’ and ‘religion’ in extending the realm of tribes for the purposes of trade.

The only connection I see is one exceptional circumstance, otherwise trade comes before nationalism and religion.

The exception is when ‘tribes become states’.  We Jews are a ‘state’  A state is held together by common institutions of all sorts; some or all of the following: language, rituals, history, values and voluntary associations.  These are types of states that can't be defined as nationalistic since many of these states exist without a physical nation.  These kinds of 'geography-free-nations' bring trade to the world.

Jews in the Mediterranean created the networks of trade that created the Roman Empire because they could trust each other enough to carry on trade over long distances.  This was true of the Phoenicians before us and is true of the Overseas Chinese today.  

Both the Jews and the Chinese appear to have created the greatest trade route of all time, The Silk Road.  Each going the opposite direction.  It must have been massive trade.  Eleven thousand Jews were stuck in China when the Silk Road was closed.  There were over 600 acupuncture shops in Baghdad before Mohammed wreaked his havoc.

In our day, commerce precedes any form of nationalism or religion. Both Africa, Arabia and Latin America are gigantic land masses that are nearly 100% tribal, yet trade and commerce survive. Nationalism is weak and religion has been quiescent for centuries. Tribalism remains in place.

Humans kill our neighbors because we are carnivorous predators.  That is our default setting.  When we are on top of the hierarchy we kill, whether we are Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao or Fidel. When we have superior technology we create armies and kill large numbers, like Genghis Kahn, Julius Caesar and Cortes.

It is only modern commerce, with its values of meritocracy, diversity and openness that subdues our human predator nature.

Not so sapient

My circle was talking about Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens. So I read it.  It is a speculative history of humans.  It is definitely not “wise”.  It is just an up-to-date speculation with a synthesis of the latest popular journalism in anthropology, biology and history.  I hate to say this about an Israeli, (the author) but there are below average Israelis and especially among academics.

I read the book in one sitting.  Because it is in my genes somewhere from neolithic times that I must listen to the tribal stories of our origins.  

For we ‘moderns’ that history changes slightly every year, so we listen to the story again and again.  Harari is up-to-date on the the Denisovans, so that makes him the current storyteller of our origins.

There are three problems with Harari’s book.  The problems are given away on the cover where the book is praised by Jared Diamond.  Diamond and Harari come from the same lineage :  Science-fiction-history.  

I read Diamond’s Guns Germs and Pot, on a trip abroad; I was immediately impressed.  Then on the plane home I had time to think about it.  The flora and fauna of India and Europe are not different because they are on separate continents.  Diamond never heard of Genghis Kahn. Nor would his silly hypothesis explain the explosive growth of Japan or Taiwan. Just ignorant from a narrow biological education.

Harari is ignorant of many similar global realities.  What he considers the source of social organization is “imagined orders”.    No!  Its called Social Thought.  I ran a public radio program interviewing people in the field for nine years.  The father of the field is Mary Douglas; first published her masterpiece in 1986: How Institutions Think.

His second nonsense is a fanatic focus on science.  No understanding of the relationship between science and technology.  Technology is the empirical world that gave us Galileo's measurement of the acceleration of gravity and the Dutch lens makers telescope that gave us Copernicus’s moons of Jupiter.  All of which produced the first science of Newton and Huygens.  Science is the theology that is used to explain the world discovered by technologists.  Einstein the scientist explained the theology behind the worlds discovered by the technologists: Hertz, Planck and Michelson-Morley.

Harari’s third problem is the greatest.  He hasn't the vaguest notion of commerce, that changed the world.  He clearly hasn't read Matt Ridley.  A mistake at orders of magnitude.  Commerce created the modern world.  You have to be a blind Lefty to miss this reality.  Commerce carried technology to its high level of importance.  Which is why technology flourished first in Holland and so did the origins of modern commerce.

Harari’s science fiction is a combination of modern journalistic speculation and antiquated Marxism.  His two main crutches are ‘imperialism’ and ‘anti-capitalism’.  You know this when he describes how banking works by naming his hypothetical banker McGreedy. 

Lefty hair lice

In 1972 the U.S banned the use of DDT and made finding a supply of it impossible.  Japan followed suit.

After a trip in the Third World in 1975, with my girlfriend, Annie, we returned to Japan and found we had hair lice.  I found a doctor in the countryside near Nagoya who had hidden a supply of 10% DDT powder.  It killed the hair lice immediately.

When I was a kid in school in the late 1940’s we occasionally saw a kid with a shaved head.  We knew he had had hair lice and had been treated with kerosene.

What is the connection of all this to the Lefties?

We went from an embarrassing and unpleasant treatment for hair lice to a simple instantaneous treatment with 10%DDT powder.

If you have kids, you will not be surprised to learn that hair lice are epidemic in schools in America, everywhere.  The treatment is meticulous hair combing, with special combs and astringent washing over days and certification from doctors that the lice has been properly treated before return to school.

It was Lefties, in the name of saving the environment from DDT, that got DDT banned.  It all started with a book by the incompetent Rachel Carson in 1962 based on the claim that DDT was destroying wild birds egg shells’ especially pelicans.  It was not true.  

To this day we suffer the consequences of bad science banning DDT including harmless 10%DDT powder.  

Fortunately the ‘we’ I write for are not Africans.  Tens of millions of Africans have died from malaria because DDT is banned.  Worse than hair lice, if you are an African.  

Tomorrowland

Walt Disney created a wonderful world of make-believe movies and physical environments.  He saw the business connection of the two.

Back when Disney World in Florida was opened in 1971,  I read about a national contest to submit designs for a Tomorrowland exhibition that would be added to the new Disney World. It was later called the Epcot Center.

I built a model of a futuristic restaurant.  It had a main dining room with a window looking out on an elegant Japanese garden.  It had an entry area for waiting with a bar and a large sign on the wall announcing the required behavior for restaurant guests.  

Each table had individually crafted plates, dinnerware and other accessories.  The menu was largely non-meat with mostly exotic dishes and more exotic spices.  

In the atrium the sign on the wall made it clear that guest behavior excluded stealing the place settings.  That each table was to respect the privacy of all other tables.  Courtesy was the order of the day, with no odors or fumes to disturb others.

Of course Disney went for a Buck Rogers fantasy for Tomorrowland.

I was closer to the reality of the future that we are living today.

Spurious data

My years of being a professional statistician run into conflict with the opinions of my close friends and family on occasion.  Usually around medical issues.

When blood test results come back with some potentially alarming news, or the same is true of an Xray or MRI, most people treat that as a serious reason for distress.  I must admit that medical doctors tend to act more like me.

My reaction is that all mechanical or biological tests, and most medical test are a combination of the two, have a normal level of spurious outcomes.

I've worked with data for 50 years.  The larger the data set, the more random and spurious data there is in the data set. Show me 20 of anything and I will expect at least one error.  Show me 40 and I will be confident there is one error.  Show me 80 and I’m willing to bet on the presence of an error or some spurious data.  Xray machine images of humans and MRI’s and CAT scans are running all day, all week.  I expect some spurious data.  

With a lifetime of experience with spurious data, I wait for confirmation of most data I look at.

Who becomes a policeman?

For more than 30 years we have had black leaders blaming every black death at the hands of the police on police racism. The same with white on black rape.  Ann Coulter cites the evidence in her book Mugged: Radical Demagoguery.  The earliest and most prominent lying black leader was Al Sharpton in the Bernhard Goetz and Tawana Brawley public trials.  

Sharpton is now the closest black leader to Barack Obama according to Wikipedia.

The din of the press always blaming police for black problems is never ending.  There is never an apology for false charges or outright malice.

So what person 20 years old from 1985 to now would join the police force knowing that the police are universally hated and vilified in the black community?

While most police forces in urban America have a higher percent of blacks on the police force than in the general population, the black community hate gets stronger every year, never abating.

Looking at the life a policeman, black or non-black:  the majority of the criminals they arrest are black.  They get 8 times as many blacks resisting arrest as non-blacks. The worst and most dangerous neighborhoods are black.  Most criminals are dumb, mean and disproportionately dangerous.  That is the population police deal with everyday.

I suspect that the type of people who have always been attracted to police work have had authoritarian personalities, who like uniforms and hierarchy.  The same people who can be influenced by the values of seniority, rank and grade promotion.

The people who don’t fit in are washed out in police training.  One of my friends who tried to infiltrate the San Francisco police, Gary Warne, was killed in police training. 

I've watched pairs of police viciously beat a helpless drunk in an alley and worst of all brutalize a woman disability rights protester in a wheelchair beaten while loading her into the paddy wagon.

Police who feel uncomfortable in this environment find a way out.  Either going to a suburban or rural police force or finding a way to get a disability pension.

My guess is that the attitude of the black community expressing hate toward the police will attract and appeal to police recruits who don’t like blacks.  Not what most people want.

Nissan

You can read this article.  The French passed a law giving them double the voting rights on shares of stock the government owns in private companies.  Since France controls Renault, the auto company, which also owns the Japanese Nissan, that means that the French government controls Nissan now.

The CEO who took Nissan from a minor auto company to a major competitor, by now more than twice the size of Renault, tried to retain his control with a proxy fight.  Carlos Ghosn, lost the fight a few days.

Now what have the French accomplished?  Most French companies are minor players in the world because the government rules for employment resemble the rules of the old Soviet Union.  Seniority, union rules and lifetime tenure; the basic rules of a negative sum anti-commerce world.

A giant incompetent government bureaucracy is trying to control a single autonomous individual. That individual is a commercial genius who can not be replicated.  If he leaves Nissan, it will continue for awhile on the momentum of his genius but headed for failure in due time.

We get to watch a government try to control a free individual in the open market.  Lefties can place their bets on the government, as they usually do.

The origins of American gun rights

My Dutch bias hasn’t been part of this blog for a long time.  You can go way back and find that I trace the origins of modern commerce to Holland in the 1600’s.  I also locate the American facility with commerce in the Dutch colony of Manhattan and Alexander Hamilton, a Manhattanite.

In reading a history of the English people I was reminded of the peace treaty that William of Orange signed with the English parliament soon after he conquered England.

First the back story.  What the British have long called their ‘Glorious Revolution’ was in fact the Dutch military marching across England, defeating the troops of James II, on their way to seize London. 1688.

The Dutch were responding to James’ provocative Catholicism and his close ties to the Dutch main enemy: France.  

The Dutch leader was William of Orange. He commanded the largest naval fleet ever assembled, until 1944.

William proposed a new election of parliament.  He negotiated with the new parliament that he and his wife, Mary Queen of Scots become the new King and Queen of England.  The negotiation included a Bill of Rights proposed by Parliament which the new King William agreed to.

The Bill of Rights of 1689 became a model for the American Bill of Rights in 1791 that were the first ten amendments to the Constitutional Convention’s drafted constitution. As in England, where it was demanded by Parliament, the American Bill of Rights was demanded by the states.

James II had disarmed Protestants and armed Catholics, so the 1689 Bill of Rights upheld “certain ancient rights and liberties” including allowing Protestants to “have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.”  Not subject to control by the King.

Just so you know where the second amendment to our Constitution comes from. It came from the English military loss to the Dutch.

Artists and politics

There are currently several big art shows in my area.  The shows have political themes such as ‘political dissidents’.

My problem is I've never seen the work of an artist who had any political sophistication at all.  Artists are just plain lousy at understanding politics. That includes Bruegel and David.  So I avoid political art.  I even question whether it can be considered art.

My definition of art is simple: art changes the way we perceive the world.  That of course is good art, whether it is Paul Gauguin or Richard Serra.  The rest of ‘art’ can have a decorative effect and tells us what era we are in such as 1875 wall paper or gives us a sense of place like Las Vegas carpeting.  Or enters the language like ‘gaudy’ from Antoni Gaudi.

The one thing art doesn't do is make a useful contribution to political dialog or political understanding.

 

Pianos and rugs

If you have been watching, stores that sell pianos have been closing steadily for the past 50 years. The exception is probably Miami where old folks use pianos as decoration.

For the past 25 years that is also true of rug stores and rug cleaners.

I had two small Tibetan rugs that need cleaning.  The rug man came to pick them up and talked about his business.

In the San Francisco Bay area, 25 years ago there were 5 rug cleaning businesses processing about 28,000 rugs a year. Now there are 2.  One is retail and processes 5,000 rugs.  The other is wholesale and does about 4,000.

Ikea is one reason for the change.  People buy their rugs at Ikea and later throw away their Ikea rugs.  Wooden floors and carpeting are also replacing rugs. The wooden floors are suitable for all the new found allergies.

Businesses come and go as people's tastes and behaviors change.  It is a good thing the government isn't trying to prop up these businesses.  Fortunately they were never important to unions or political opportunists.

Chained cars

Much of my life I've thought about social improvements.  One obvious need is for better transportation.  

The best I have come up with is a chain of cars.  The chain part gives individual drivers time to read and work on a long freeway trip instead of paying attention to driving; leaving them with their private cars to uncouple and drive to their myriad final locations.

I thought the technology would require electric cars.  Wrong.  Sensors are now good enough to control any car regardless of motive power.

The freeways in most of America have long ago passed their functional peak.  What will it take to get us some chained car systems?

I couldn't find a photo of chained cars. Which leads me to some doubts.

Why haven't the Japanese done this already?  They are the global engineering leaders.

Is there a physics problem as there is with flying cars?  

Is this why Google went for the autonomous car?

Ad future and new definition of an ad

Two major changes are happening in the ad world.  First, it is shrinking.  The best evidence of this is the steady and unceasing merging of international ad agencies.  It is hard to get exact data on advertising just as it is on movie attendance.  As the price of movie tickets increase it covers the dramatic drop in movie attendance.

Nevertheless advertising, in total, is declining.  

In my book, Marketing Without Advertising that has been revised 6 times since its first edition in 1984, I make it clear that advertising doesn't work.  Or more correctly, it works in only the most limited circumstances.  Tourists and children pay attention to advertising.  Neither group has reliable alternative sources of information.  Employees also pay attention to their own company ads in order to answer questions from their friends.

What does work is what I call ‘listings’.  Listing is what a potential customer is looking for.  Signage, mention in a local directory and a display in professional journal; those are ‘listings’.

The Internet, particularly Google is listing. The business name and website comes up for the potential customer while she is actively searching.  This is where ad dollars are going and have been moving steadily for 15 years.  For businesses of all sizes.  For businesses that never advertised before because advertising was so useless; they now have an effective sales tool.

What is now evolving is a new type of advertising that needs a new name.  Ads, like listings, are being placed in the exact place where target customers are looking.  The Internet has given websites the ability to gather useful information on visitors and buyers.   Example, you can now buy space on a hedge fund database website that is read primarily by 21 to 30 year old single, male, college graduates, if that is your target market.  That kind of precision is still advertising because many people who don't care about your business will still be intruded upon, but a high proportion of the viewers will be potential customers.

What can we call the new type of advertising?  It is no longer like dog poop in the street, something people learn to avoid.  It is now closer to listing, available to people who are likely to be interested.

I'll think about a name, I hope you will too.

Accommodating

Sometimes there is not a good solution.  That is when we need to learn to accommodate. One meaning of the word is to accept a situation as it is.

To me that is clear in the West Bank-Israel situation.  The situation will remain unchanged for a century and it is the best that can be done under the circumstances.  The same is true in the North Korea situation.

I had one experience when I was young and single that taught me that lesson.  An attractive woman I started dating had me make a promise on our first date.  She said that every man she had dated ‘died’ when they broke up.  They never phoned or contacted her again.  That had always been my practice with women I dated a few times, unless we had some other working relationship.

It was a new and interesting proposition so I said ‘Yes’.

The time came a few dates later when we were having dinner and I fell asleep at the table.  I knew the end had come and I kept my promise.  I told her it was time to break up.

She must have thought we were getting more connected.  She unleashed a torrent of  words at me from selfish and egotistical to worse.  I ‘had no feelings and didn't care about other human beings.’

That was the last time I told a woman I was breaking up with her.  From then on I had to live with the accommodation that the woman assumed I was dead.

This was never true of women with whom I had developed a long term close relationship.  Nearly all of them are still close friends whom I still see.  As my close friends and family know.

Just a little story about accommodating.  Something we all need to do some of the time.