Pro Commerce

Landlines

Verizon is trying to sell its landlines to Frontier Communications.

Frontier is largely an operator in the Pacific Northwest service area.  The Verizon landlines for sale are in California, Texas and Florida.  

This would be a significant expansion for Frontier.   It would get a declining business out of the hands of Verizon.  Up until now, nobody is trying to sign-up for a new landline. Frontier's interest is the high-speed Internet service mixed in with the Verizon landlines.

I am in favor of ‘reverse innovation’ in this case.  I’m hoping that the regulatory bodies that are needed to approve this purchase require Frontier to make their newly acquired landlines appealing enough to create a new market for all the old landlines around the country.  

I’m guessing that most landlines are still held by older people, rural people and a few inner urban minorities.

What would it take to make an old landline service more competitive with smartphones?

First the pricing.  Landlines still have local area and zones with different rates and still other long distance rates.  Change this.  Include all phone calls in the current single rate.  Add a bonus, such as free calls to two international phone numbers.

Second, include all the features that are currently possible at the computer-switching end of the landline: 3 way calling, call forwarding, call return and caller ID.  Add a bonus with a free ID calling device that also allows the subscriber to privately block any number they wish.  

I have a landline and it rings 2-4 times a day with junk calls.  When these can be blocked the landline gains a significant advantage over smartphones.

Add to this a networking capability.  When a large percentage of customers are blocking a specific number, then the whole network blocks that spam number.

That is what I call 'reverse innovation'.  Making a generally outmoded technology competitive with a new technology. 

Regulators. It is now up to you.

Michael Morell and the CIA

I finished reading Michael Morell’s book The Great War of Our Time: (Islamic)Terrorism.  Morell for the past 15 years was the top man at the CIA with four different politically appointed bosses.

He wrote the book to clear his name from the many known failings of the agency.  He failed.  

George Bush was blamed by the rabid Democrats for the WMD intelligence prior to the Iraq War II.  The CIA provided all the wrong information due to their lack of spies on the ground. Bush's other intelligence sources had the same wrong information.  

The Democrat Party is really to blame; Democrats and their insider allies are responsible for the countless leaks of top secret information, especially to the NYTimes, with the names of American spies and informants, making the jobs of spy impossible to fill with competent humans.

Morell tries to cover up the CIA’s complicity in the Benghazi debacle.  He makes it worse.  He clearly lied to Congress to protect the State Department and Hillary.  Even worse he leaks the fact that the CIA military staff was two block away from the American Embassy in Benghazi and yet took an hour to get there after the danger became apparent.

Morell never explains why the vast arsenal of weapons in Libya, which were known to every government and terrorist, were left in plain sight. The CIA made no effort to hide or destroy a vast array of weapons sitting in the open.

Morell, because his book was censored by the CIA has a single throw away affirmation about Israel ‘our closest ally’ and Obama ‘brilliant and friendly in private’.  Otherwise in a 384 page book about terrorism, he never mentions Israel again.  The CIA like the State Department and the current White House is run by Jew haters.

Morell loved George W. Bush whom he saw nearly every day of Bush’s first year in office and frequently thereafter. Morell says Bush was kind, decisive and wise.  Things all intelligent people have known.  

Obama, on the other hand is completely ignored by Morell after the day following Obama’s election when Obama rejected Morell’s intelligence briefing because Obama’s sidekicks couldn’t be in the room.  From other sources, I know Obama rarely got daily intelligence briefings.  Morell never mentions this.  It confirms what I know about Obama; he is uneducated, has below average intelligence, is innumerate and is incurious.  Obama’s main interest in the world is sports including golf.  Morell is an avid golfer and was often physically present with Obama, but was never invited to play golf with him.

Overall, the CIA viewed from the top ranking insider is incompetent and highly political.

Dollar

I got an email for a man who seems to be doing a doctorate on the subject of money from an anthropological or linguistic vantage point.  He had read a portion of my article on the subject, which is summarized in this blog.  Money is language.  There are within this language, many money languages each with their own syntax and rules of construction.

This gentleman sent me three references that dealt with money from an academic perspective.  To be frank, they are infantile, childish and ignorant.  I would be happy to see someone beginning to think about the subject of money language that I thought about 35 years ago.  But it hasn’t happened.  I haven't even seen anyone think creatively about money in daily life which I covered 45 years ago in The Seven Laws of Money.

Reading the three references carefully, I found one of them just comparing general linguistic patterns to words about money.  For example, how the abbreviation for $100 became a ‘dime’.  Generally irrelevant material.

What I found interesting was the selection of the word ‘dollar’ to be the term for American currency in 1785,  It was done by Alexander Hamilton (who the feeble-minded mean-spirited Democrats now want to alter on the $10 bill).  Hamilton’s proposal was widely accepted because the term was in use for the common American peso and it served well in defiance of the British pound.

According to linguistic sources the word dollar is derived from the name of a silver mine in Bohemia in the mid 16th Century.  The mine was in the valley of the town Joachimsthal; valley is thaler.  Thaler in central Europe migrated to the world of active trade in Holland in the next century as ‘daler’.

The Dutch brought the ‘daler’ to New Amsterdam, whence it entered the American realm. Alexander Hamilton was a New Yorker.  The idea of the dollar was almost automatic in the colonies.  It had respect and more than a century of use by 1785.

Thus, our national currency, the dollar.

Apple continues to be wrong

Apple is running ads on TV that their products are better because the physical product and the software are done by the same Apple designers.

This is supposed to be a selling point.  Maybe for the Apple faithful but not for investors.

Apple, via the arrogant self centered Steve Jobs promoted this inclusive idea at a time when they had the best personal computer on the market.  The Apple II personal computer.  They got 2% of the global market.  IBM and Microsoft with software that was public and compatible with everything designed by non-Microsofties got 90%+ of the market.  Then open source software came along and got 33% of the global business from Microsoft; Microsoft still had roughly 2/3rds of the global market.

Got the message?  A message I first learned from observing RCA  records in the 1950’s and Phillips cassette tapes in the 1960s.  I have been preaching open systems since 1974, wherever I go.  I’ve given speeches on the subject in France, Sweden, Denmark and England.  And everywhere in the U.S.  I wrote about it in Honest Business published in 1981.

Apple still hasn’t got the lesson.

Apple is today worth more than 2/3rds of a $trillion.  Utterly amazing and they don’t understand why.

The Apple Iphone was introduced in 2007 and was popular but had little effect on the value of the company because of a global financial market fall.  As the market recovered in 2009 the Iphone became a success.  Joined by the Ipad in 2010, together the two Apple products created an increase in Apple stock value of 800%.

Both the Iphone and the Ipad are OPEN SYSTEMS because tens of thousands of contractors design the content of the two products.  The hardware and software may be closed proprietary systems but the product benefits from the vast array of non-Apple contributors.

Apple is worth a fortune because it is an open content system.  The company still doesn’t seem to understand that.

Might I remind my readers, commerce is the greatest institution in the history of man because it utilizes meritocracy and diversity.  Those are the two attributes that Apple and any other business gains by being open.

Ethical Culture and Manhattan

One rather striking observation is that nearly all Jews in Manhattan and most of their intellectual allies around them sound like the friends of Felix Adler who founded the Ethical Culture Society in New York in 1877.

There is a High School called Fieldston in Upper Westside Manhattan and several elementary and middle schools that are part of it.  Fieldston is owned and operated by the Ethical Culture Society.

It is my contention that Liberal-Democrat New Yorkers, especially NY Jews, are Ethical Culturists in thought and behavior. (By definition they all read the NYTimes and the New Yorker.)

What did Felix Adler teach that is now political and social wisdom among New Yorkers?  

• Adler taught that morality and good behavior are independent of theology or religious teachings.

• Modern capitalist societies have deep and serious problems that need to be corrected by social activism.

• Self-improvement and new behavior are integral to social change.

• Educating young people in these values is essential for social change.

Since Adler was a Reform Jew, these principles are most obvious among modern New York Jews.  

Nearly all these people are Jews in name only.  They vote Democrat even when the Democrat President hates Jews, almost daily attacks Israel and uses Nazi language to describe Jews.

They don’t identify with the Jews in Israel nor support Israel politically.

Their politics is always current Democrat anti-commerce, they believe:

• The top 1% doesn’t pay its fair share of taxes.

• Unions should be actively supported.

• Socialized medicine is good and necessary.

• American society is deeply racist and imperialistic

• People are poor because of economic repression.

• Police and the judicial system in America are racist.

We should blame Felix Adler for his malign influence on Manhattan.  Unfortunately my maternal family were active in the early Ethical Culture movement, founding their primary schools and summer camps.  I inherited some of the blame, if blame can be passed on to later generations.

More ideas that don’t work at all

I must lead an atypical life.  I don’t encounter real humans who talk about ‘appropriation’ ‘‘white privilege’ or ‘racism’.  These seem to be campus terms appropriated from the Marxist lingo of old white academic Lefties.

I saw the term ‘appropriation’ used by students in Boston to complain about a Monet painting displayed along with a kimono and fan for visitors to try-on.  Supposedly ‘appropriating’ Japanese culture.

With this meaning of ‘appropriation’, the inadmissibility of any one culture using the the artifacts and symbols of another culture, we get a Luddite version of the 14th century.  Even then many herbs, spices, minerals and fabrics  travelled vast distances from one culture to another thousands of miles away.  Retrospectively modern academia demands that that must be stopped.

Eliminate appropriation and the world starves without modern industrial agriculture that comes from a few Northern latitude cultures, the world dies of myriad diseases without modern multiculture medicine and pharmacy (primarily from the United States) and has only candle light with running messengers for primary communication.  Most reading technology and writing technology has been appropriated from a few advanced cultures.

‘White privilege’ refers to the fact that people called ‘white’ developed most of modern industrial commerce and continue to be the most proficient people at the skills involved with that technology, such as running corporations, developing and introducing new technologies and understanding the theory, math and abstract concepts that produce more of modern industrial commerce.   

So the modern Lefty academic won't take his/her Maserati or Lexus to be repaired at a Mexican auto repair shop.  He won’t take his Cessna 180 airplane in for its 100 hour servicing to an Arab or Kenyan run airport hangar.   Are such academics invoking White Privilege or are they just not stupid?

My readers will recognize my rude appropriation of Asians and Indians into my language of ‘white privilege’ because most Asians and overseas Indians are competent at all the managerial, technical, theory, math and abstract faculties that create modern industrial commerce.

Which brings us to ‘racism’.  A term used by Lefties to discredit anyone they disagree with except Lefty American blacks who are the only people exempt from being labelled ‘racist’.  (Non-Lefty blacks are of course ‘racists’.)

I worked at a black church for 11 years.  The black church leaders in a private ceremony made me an honorary nigg-r.  At the same time they explained that my reaction to being called a ‘racist’ should be to say ‘yes, I am’.  They explained that no other response existed.

Of course in our ‘racist’ American society as defined by blacks in the White House, the Attorney General’s office and the Black Caucus in Congress we must ignore the fact that Asians and Indians dominate American college and university admissions our tech industries and our world of small business.

Racist’ only has one meaning: all non-Leftist non-black Americans. It has nothing to do with descendents of slaves.  Barack Obama, half black with only a non-slave father is not racist, but Clarence Thomas raised by a family of all former dirt poor ex-slaves is a ‘racist’.

Roughly 6.7 billion people are born ‘racist’.  Not a very good term for making demographic or ethnic distinctions.

An Idea that doesn’t work at all

Back in the early 1990’s when I was trying to make the ideas of ‘small is beautiful’ work in third world development, the meme ‘sustainable’ began floating around my circles.  

My friends and I tossed the word around and concluded that it was just a fashionable term of no significance.  There was no possibility that solar panels, wind generators or organic farming had any relevance to our constituency.  

The world we live in, the world where I drive to meet friends in the morning for a cappuccino, is based on vast extraction of non-renewables.   The world uses 100 million gallons of oil PER DAY. We use nearly 1 million tons of iron ore PER DAY and consume energy other than oil at the rate of 200 million tons of oil equivalent PER DAY.   In this environment nearly every one of our 7 billion fellow humans lives a fairly full 60-70 year life without hunger.

In a sustainable world we would be comparable to 1850 when the globe had 1.3 billion humans and three-quarters were hungry most of the time and half died of starvation regularly.  Most people died at birth, few survived past age 21 and women who survived that long had a high likelihood of dying in childbirth.

That is sustainability.

As for ‘running out of the extracted resources we use now?’  Commerce is a survival system and it always finds a replacement for inputs.  We don’t use horses for transport anymore, or oxen for plowing, or mail for primary communication, or wind for ocean transport, or tallow for lighting or...etc.

The end of capitalism

It seems to be the time, right now, for the media world to announce the end of capitalism and our entry into the postcapitalist world.  It could be because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party have done so much damage to the formerly thriving commercial world that its demise is evident to many in a near decade of American and European stagnation.  

Or it could be that the vapid and irrelevant nonsense of Lefty theology has become so obvious that many are seeing any alternative as the next phase of modernity.

Or, it could be pure romanticism that sees smartphone apps, Uber car sharing and Airbnb home sharing as a return to the imaginary cooperative world of the past.

I see all of these explanations for our imaginary postcapitalist emergence.

Regardless, it is a mountain of absurd fantasy.  

None of these prophets has the vaguest understanding of commerce and the modern world.  If they call it ‘capitalism’ you know they can’t think.  There is not now and never has been ‘capitalism’ except in the Marxist worldview.  There is ‘commerce’ in its trade, industrial and clientric forms.  Commerce can be stifled and thwarted by political systems and governments, as is the case in Europe, but it can not be suppressed out of existence.  It is inherently a weed that will always survive given soil and rain.

Commerce has become inherent in the worldview of hundreds of millions of people.  They will always find ways to turn a tree into many saleable products, to rent out their cave and to work as porters and messengers, healers for those in need.  When someone can make and sell two products they will always, now, find a way to make hundreds to sell. They will find ways to finance their projects and create outlets to expand distribution.

Commerce is now our way of life.  We can not remake our outmoded extended families, clans or tribes.

There is no 'post-commercial' world.  Commerce always includes cooperation, in fact nearly 95% of commerce is voluntary cooperation and commerce always welcomes innovation. Commerce is here to stay and it is able to accommodate better to all new circumstances than any other human institution.

Love and commerce II

The historic parallels of Industrial commerce and the Romantic era are important. Of greater importance to the issue of love, is that the ‘authenticity’ characteristic of commerce has allowed ‘love’ and many other emotions to flourish, for the first time, in history.

How do we know? We have most of the world to examine, where modernity is only superficial, and tribal life is the reality.  The difference between our modern world and the rest of the planet is significant.  ‘Love’ is only a small part of the difference.

The elements of commerce that come together to create, or rather, ‘permit’ authenticity are meritocracy and diversity.  Both meritocracy and diversity exist only in a world where individuals thrive.  In most of the world, the family, clan or tribe are the dominant daily concerns.  Each person has a role to play, usually a standardized role.  In an Arab, Chinese, African or Latin business, (even in Italy and Greece) your first cousin becomes the business accountant or head of marketing; they get the job because they are family and have modest inclinations in that direction.  

In a commercial world meritocracy dominates. The head accountant or head of marketing is the person most qualified for that job, regardless of social ties or ethnic similarities to the person doing the hiring (diversity).  In the commercial world the individual stands on his own.

It is that focus on the primacy of the individual and that person’s talents that permit the emergence of ‘authenticity’.  Each individual in the commercial world has hundreds, thousands, of opportunities to make use of their talents in the marketplace. Only in the commercial world, not in government, not in the military and not in the tribal world.

Those talents can comprise the ability to feel and express emotions; commercialized in theatrical and cinematic fields; the ability to move in expressive ways for dance, martial arts and somatic training.  All these developments of individual authenticity, or nearly all, are welcomed and utilized in the commercial world.  

That is where ‘love’ comes in.  

* First, because most forms of passion can be utilized and rewarded in a commercial society, the society can let passion be developed and made public.  

* Second, since family, clan and tribe do not play a role in the marketplace, passion that develops between pairs of people is not a serious threat to the commercial world.  Love is one of those non-threatening passions.

Love and commerce I

The good news.  The idea for this blog came from my son Scott.  What that means is that my contributions to thinking about the Pro Commerce world will be continued after I die.  Only two other people have indicated a deep enough understanding of the issue that I can be confident that this vital thread of human thought is kept alive.  My son clearly understands and is contributing actively.

Clearly love and commerce are connected.  The Romantic era coincides exactly with the beginning of industrial commerce.  

The roots of industrial commerce are most closely connected to Holland in the 1600’s and the conquest of England in 1689. Whatever was fermenting in the following century in England was seen by Adam Smith in the 1770’s and by Alexander Hamilton by the 1780’s.  The explosion of Industrial commerce came with Wedgwood’s marketing of chinaware, English agricultural improvements that freed labor to leave the farm and the first mobile steam engines.

This was the same time the Romantic era emerged. I identify it with Goethe and Wordsworth, both in the 1780’s.  The Romantic era, to me, comprised a rebellion against Enlightenment and a focus on feminine sensitivity to emotion, to Platonic views of the original world behind our world and to individual connections to nature.  The American wild West, individual hero and our founding documents are permeated with Romanticism.

Romanticism brought with it the modern notion of ‘love’.   ‘Love’, in this sense, refers to unbridled passion between two people, maybe sexually driven but not sexually relieved.  Not a big subject in an era when nearly all marriages were arranged and marriage was always between two families.  We see Romeo and Juliet as a tragic ‘love’ defeated by blind family loyalty. Viewers for the first two hundred years saw it a rebellious youth defying their families for vanity and selfishness.

‘Love’ relates, since the beginning of the Romantic era, to intense passion, particularly focused on the elevation of women to sanctity and totally internal emotions found in self driven individuals.  None of this relates to the era of tribal life and strict social hierarchy the existed  prior to Romanticism.

(Continued tomorrow)

 

The only explanation for the Left

I am constantly being asked for an explanation of why the Left exists, particularly in America. The Left is anti-commerce; America is the shining example of commercial genius.

The 20th Century saw the failure of Leftist centralized government to feed people in any country where it was dominant including Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela in the 21st century.  

The Left saw the desire to diminish income inequality lead to the death of millions of prosperous people and tens of millions of peasants. And the Leftist hatred of free market commerce lead to the death of 6 million Jews and 10 million others in the USSR, Laos and Mao’s China.  

In addition, the 20th Century saw the brilliant minds of Isaiah Berlin, Milton Friedman, Joseph Schumpeter and George Orwell.  These men explained the extraordinary benefits of commerce and the free market for humanity.

So how can there still be a Left?  Only one explanation makes sense to me.  Nearly all human brains freeze, become hard boiled and incapable of new original thought after age 23.  Humans are stuck with the ideas, worldview and ideology they have when they are 23.  Stuck for life.

Nearly every university in the world is, today, controlled by Leftists who gained control during the global USSR, Mao China reign of Leftism.  They continue to provide the intellectual framework that gets frozen into the brains of all the modern Lefties.  None of these academics or Lefties over 23 years old are capable of learning the lessons of the 20th century.

That is the only explanation I have found.  Sad.

What century are we in?

This question came to my mind when Pope Francis quoted favorably a 4th century bishop who hated commerce.  

So the Pope who hates commerce himself and vilifies it every chance he gets also recognized the state of Palestine (does that include Gaza in his flat world theology?) along with the perennial Roman Catholic Jew hate, it is clear that Pope Francis has brought the world back to the 4th Century.

Much of the world, all of Latin America, the Philippines, parts of Africa and a few other places that are in the Roman Catholic Church are still in the 4th Century. There are also Eastern Orthodox countries wallowing in that milieu.

Then we have the Moslem Brotherhood, Hamas, Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State promoting Muhammad’s world of the 7th Century.  Aggressively with tens of millions of supporters and modern weapons.

We have the Shia State of Iran with values from the first Shia State in the 8th Century.  The Shia parts of Iraq and Lebanon are in the same century.

The world has a Papal constituency from the 4th Century, openly warring states from the 7th and 8th Century.

We just finished a century were the world battled the Germans with a 19th Century ideology that was a combination of Marx, Hegel and Joseph de Maistre. We also survived the Soviet Union and Mao’s China that were pure 19th Century Marxism.

Today, after defeating nations with the 19th Century ideology we still have a European and American Democrat Party and a President Obama in the thrall of 19th Century Marxism.

So what Century do we live in?  We few who embrace commerce and the modern world have yet to get our own era.

Chips in credit cards

In most or Europe and Japan credit cards now come with a chip in the card. These are slowly being rolled out in the U.S.  The chip can be used to verify a 5 digit passkey.

If I were still in the credit card world this would not be happening.  There wouldn't be debit cards either.

I invented the modern multi-bank international credit card.  I convinced the bankers I worked with to do it and to do it right.  They always wanted to do it wrong.  Several independent bank credit cards were tried, one in Chicago, and they failed immediately.

The bankers around me always wanted to have a debit card.  As long as I had influence, they didn’t get anywhere.  When I had been gone from banking for a few years, the old farts introduced debit cards.

Debit cards are not an improvement over credit cards in any known way.  For use in auto rental, hotels and large purchase items the seller has to phone the bank of debit card origin to get approval.  Stupid.

The new passkey imbedded chips are no benefit either.  Bankers think they provide better security.  They don’t.  Losses in Europe where the chip is widespread are no different than in the U.S.  It is just a bankers fantasy that increases the cost of the cards, the card readers, the entire system, for no benefit.  Perfect banker think.

Why Latin American immigration?

The entire world is experiencing a movement from tribal life to commercial life.  

• This is happening as the Black and Tan moslems move from Africa and Arabia to Europe.  

• There been a steady flow from the old Soviet Union countries to Europe.  

• The Chinese and a few other Asians have been leaving their tribal world for a century and a half.

It should be no surprise that the tribal peoples of Latin America are moving to the commercial world.

The tribal world has a magnetic hold on most people.  It provides a lifetime of certainty, stability, a loving and supportive family network and a comprehensive worldview that has evolved over millennia to fit the human psyche.

The commercial world is difficult because it lacks exactly what the tribal world offers.  It is made up of very diverse peoples who interact on an impersonal transactional basis.  Networks of support are weak and improvisational.  Laziness and incompetence are penalized.

What the commercial world does offer is ephemeral and transient.  Meritocracy and individual authenticity are rewarded. It also rewards hard work and offers extraordinary rewards in the form of pleasures.  In the commercial world each individual can flourish to their full extent.  

A person immersed in the commercial world can pursue arts, dance, science, technology and any other positive human attribute.

That is why people come to U.S.America from Latin America.

The tragedy, worldwide, is that tribal people get to vote for government in their new commercial world.  They invariably vote for the Leftist parties that promise the outmoded and inappropriate tribal values that they left behind. 

They kill the golden goose because they think they can make their chickens lay golden eggs in a commercial world.

Internet bubble?

I hear speculation regularly about a new Internet bubble.  

The reality is that it would be ‘new’ because we haven't had a first Internet bubble yet.

Everyone I know is wrong when talking about the first Internet bubble in 2000 on Nasdaq.  Stocks on Nasdaq rose rapidly over the year 1999 and 2000.  They fell no more rapidly in 2000 and 2001.  In a bubble the fall is abrupt as in 1929 and 2008, where 40% of asset value disappears in three months.

What happened in 2000 was that investors were investing in a business model that had reached a peak.  What was called an Internet business was in fact an HTML business.  Over one million companies needed a web page, just as they had previously needed a Yellow Pages listing.  

Small companies were formed to create these web pages.  The web pages were nearly all static, like a business card.  When every relevant business had a web page, the business was over.

Starting in 2002 companies began to see the need for interactive websites where products and services could be bought.  A very different business that required new data bases, more complex programming and IT staffing for maintenance.

There are two kinds of businesses on the web today.  Those that are supported by advertising such are Google, Facebook and Yahoo.   The global world of advertising is finite and when that world is reaching its limits the advertising supported businesses will peak and level out.

My rough guess is that the advertising supported web businesses are valued at $1.5 trillion dollars on an advertising base of $100 million.  We are reaching the end of growth in that domain.

The rest of the web is based on actual sales revenue for products or services.  That would be Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce and Uber.  That also includes programming firms like Oracle.  My guess is that market is over $5 trillion in market capitalization.  That is growing and will grow as the global economy grows and it will grow as a percent of the global economy.

The web is an integral part of the telecom world these days.  That doesn’t seem to be directly tied to web revenues.  

I see no Internet bubble.

Computer watch accessories

There seems to be a great deal of hype these days about computer watches.  I am watching this with interest.  I don’t wear a watch and haven’t for the past 45 years so the allure of a watch passes me by.

We are a society, fortunately, that loves gadgets and seems to have unlimited money to spend on gadgets.  If the computer watch were interesting enough, I imagine it would sell millions of units.  Maybe even tens of millions.

So far, I see it operate as a mechanism to notify the user of changes to the smartphone such as the arrival of an email or text.  It can remind the user of appointments and other time related functions.  Beyond that I'm blind to its other desirable potential uses.

For the time being it is a negative product.  Like smartphone payment systems.  The customer still has to carry a credit card.  Very little gained, with a radio signal connecting to a card reader rather than using a piece of plastic inserted in the reader.

The watch computers have short battery lives and charging becomes a daily new burden.

I’m watching and listening to the sirens of ‘new gadgetry’.

Internet money

The holy grail, these days, is some form of money that can thrive on the Internet and be independent of national currency; it is a dream that looks like a permanent fantasy.  Just like the personal jet pack or the flying car; which have been fantasies for 65 years.  These last two ideas never go away despite the physics that makes them impossible.

I have written two explanations why Bit Coin can’t work.  Here, why the positive arguments for Bit Coin are meaningless to a real business person, and here is the fundamental problem; money is language.

I have been involved with two international money transfer systems designed for people who use them heavily, overseas family members; I understand the issue.

I have worked with Filipino-Americans who send money to their families and Brazilian-Japanese in Japan who do the same.  There are two approaches.  One is to open an account at each end in both countries in the same bank under the names of the parties on both ends.  Then put money into one account and draw it out on the other end.  Very small charge compared to wire transfers or money exchange services.

The second method is to send prepaid credit cards. This is much more expensive than using intra bank account transfers but it works and the prices can come down when the systems improve.  

Neither of these work outside of families or for large amounts of money.  For that you need to move money inside an international business.

Monopsony

A term you might want to use when discussing a big problem of our time.

The largest health insurance companies are merging and forming a small group of giant companies with limited competition in the United States. The first two, the largest are Aetna and Humana.  Already Health Net and Centene are talking merger as are Cigna and Anthem.  Expect the same from UnitedHealth Group and WellCare.

A monopsony is economics for ‘a single supplier’.  Where a union controls all the workers that a company or industry can hire, that union is a monopsonist.  That is the case with the Teamsters union and the trucking industry.  It is true among steel workers and for American auto companies.  A monopsony generally creates monopoly conditions.  Where the monopoly is the business that sells the goods or services produced by the monopsony.  

In the utilities world, the government is the monopsony.  It is a case where the government agency buys the utility’s output with the money that the government controls from the consumers.  The government sets the prices acting on behalf of the consumers. Utilities are usually monopolies.

What we have now is that the federal government controls the healthcare market with Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid.   Since there is one giant buyer of medical services from the insurance companies, they benefit from consolidating.  They don’t need separate billing, marketing, accounting and human resource departments so they consolidate.  Ultimately, in the not too distant future, unless Obamacare is completely rewritten, we will have one or two large health insurance companies as the sole suppliers of health insurance.

Monopsony is not your friend if you like competitive pricing and a dynamic tech market.  Remember Ma Bell.  Think of Comcast.

Ibo and Fulani

My college roommate and long time friend (poet in my first book The Seven Laws of Money) Charlie, sent me this fascinating article about the Ibo in the delta area of Nigeria.  

Turns out the Ibo have been the tribe at the center of metallurgy for several thousand years.

I was at Berkeley grad school in the early 1960s before the Western World had any idea about African history. One job I had was to record all written material on trade in Africa pre-1900.  It became the basis for nearly all the future material on the economic history of Africa.

I was well aware of millennia of trade in copper, gold and iron across the continent before I read this article about the Ibo.  The trade  was done by the Fulani.  They are still the street vendors in NY.

Since the explorers who wrote books and drew maps that were accessible to me in the Berkeley library, couldn't get into the Niger Delta, I didn't know about the Ibo.  And archeology hadn't started in that area.  The Ibo story is new to me.

When Europeans arrived in Africa, there was no African interest in their iron until well after 1850, when European steel first arrived.  Ibo metal, available everywhere, was far superior to European.  The same was true of machine made fabric compared to native hand woven varieties.

When you read the article, note the much higher measured IQs of the Ibo compared to the rest of Africa and how they compare to other continents.  I will deal with that in a different blog at an other time.

Convention delegate vote counting

I ran into a fellow who knew people from the Republican Party in the 1960’s when I was active.

I was president of the San Francisco Young Republicans in 1963 when it was the largest club in California and one of the largest in the U.S.; 4,000 members.  It was large because of all the young single hetero men and women flocking to the city.  They joined because we had great parties and the young Democrats were bores, boors and boars.

I went to several state Young Republican conventions where each county delegation (58 counties) voted as a block.  A few of us acted as ‘intelligence central’ finding out how each delegation was planning to vote and letting our candidates know.  I got to be a good vote counter.  

Trouble is, that skill was last used in the national conventions of the 1950’s when states had uncommitted delegates.  That changed with primary voting in most of the country and caucuses in the Democrat Party.  States become committed to candidates long before the conventions which are now public revelries and campaign kickoff events.

Geology markers

In California, geology is particularly visible.  I would like to see some effort put into making the visible more accessible to the public.

Let me give you some examples. There is a major freeway that goes from South San Francisco over a hill to the town of Pacifica.  I’d like to see a large sign in both directions.  Going West it would read: ‘Leaving the North American Plate, entering the Pacific Plate.’  Somewhere it might be possible to say “The Pacific Plate is moving North at 8 feet per century.’

At Lake Merced on the West side of San Francisco, a few hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean, I would like to see many signs saying ‘Lake Merced is a depression filled with water created by a crack spreading on the surface between the Pacific Plate and  the North American Plate. Lake Merced emptied in the earthquake of 1864.

We have many visible folded rock outcroppings everywhere that roads have been cut through a hillside.  I would like to see signs showing that some layers come from the mid Quaternary, a million years ago, some from the Pliocene 2 million years ago and that when they were formed some in California were near central Mexico and others were near Panama.

Maybe this movement of the earth would make people nervous.

I have never been able to get a science museum to have a demonstration that we have earth waves twice a day raising and lowering the surface beneath us two feet.

War on religion

I have posted a blog on the Democrat’s war on police.  To me that is the big national issue for Republicans to win the presidency and the Senate next year.  For every Ferguson, Manhattan and Baltimore there will be several more riots during next years election cycle.

There is a secondary issue that is emerging.  The Democrat’s war on religion. This takes the form of demanding that religious people use their businesses to serve gay marriages. That currently seems to deal with bakeries, photographers and florists.  We already had a battle along those religious lines regarding abortifacients and Obamacare for businesses owned or run by religious people and groups.  That issue is far from settled and will continue to come up next year.  

The war on religion is not particularly a national issue. It is an important issue in the key states that are both swing states in the presidential electoral college and have a vulnerable Republican senator: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida.

These are all states where religion can be a political issue.  I already see Evangelical Christians and Blacks angry about the gay marriage issue.  These groups will not change parties but the marriage and religion issue will suppress their voting turnout.

Homeless budget costs

San Francisco is filthy and smells like shit and piss almost everywhere.  Don't thank the homeless, thank their enablers, the Democrat union voters of San Francisco.

In earlier blogs I’ve reported that the homeless keep tourists from coming to San Francisco. Tourists bring jobs and workers.  I’ve shown the data.  Each visible homeless person keeps 125 people from living in the Bay Area with work and housing.  Over a quarter of a million people are not moving here because the smell of 6,000 homeless drives them away.

The other day I saw the current City budget with a specific allocation for homeless housing and counselling.  $90 million.  That is a large number. We are spending $15,000 in housing costs and counselling for each homeless person every year.  And the population of homeless has remained the same since 1980.

That $90 million is the direct budget amount.  The rest of the budget includes hospitalization cost, excluding the higher wages to emergency room and emergency ambulance specialists who put up with the homeless filth and stink. Then there are all the extra services that homeless require from welfare to direct social services support and rehab efforts and police.  The City spends $600 million on these other homeless expenses.

That comes to over $100,000 per year per homeless person the City spends.  Outrageous.

Since I created a park for street people (what the homeless were called before 1981) I know what can be done.  

They can’t have an area of their own to just do nothing but hang out and get high.  Puritanism objects to that.  They must be ‘reformed and become productive members of society’ say the Puritan voices in our heads.  

I suggest: we can have several areas in the City set aside for the homeless to live and set up camp.  What we must have to deal with our Puritan obsession is some commercially productive work for them to do at these camps, that pay modest amounts for piecemeal work.  Simple backstrap looms for weaving.  Simple leather working for belts.  Recycle sorting on a small scale.

Anything to appease the Puritan desire to reform the homeless.  At least symbolically.  We can get them off the streets.  

We can stop making our city a third world cesspool.

When many people believe in nonsense

In my blog two days ago, I report that my nephew Jason was confronted with the data that shows that the global warming story is pure fiction.  A fiction contradicted by data but widely held by hundreds of million people, probably billions of people. He wondered how to reconcile this widely held belief with the data.

Jason is young, smart, very good at business, but new to the world of controversy.  What would you say to him?

This is my email: The problem with widely held beliefs that are not supported by data is that it applies to every field.  Not limited to science.  Science sure has many horrible examples ranging from anti-evolution during Darwin's life, earth tectonics pre-1955, astrology, Russian biology, 75 years of believing superconductivity could only occur below 4 degrees of absolute zero, believing outer space was at absolute zero, to global cooling in the 1970s. Contrary evidence and data were ignored and scientists changed their minds at a glacial pace.

I've lived through the 'end of the earth due to the population explosion'.... that purported explosion ended in 1990 based on good data; millions of children were being reported as kidnapped in major media including the NYTimes in the early 1980s, almost uniformly believed by nearly all Americans; hundreds of children in daycare were universally believed to being tortured in the late 1980's; all these were front page in the NYTimes and Time magazine. Completely phony.

Now we have 'blacks are disproportionately incarcerated' reported in all the major media  No, not true.  Blacks commit 5 times more crimes than everyone else and are actually under represented in prison.

Now we have the widely believed statement that 'GMO in our food is not labeled... so it can't be avoided'.  No, 'organic' means no GMO by Federal law. Buy organic if you want to avoid GMO.

Now we're told 'the U.S. has the highest murder rate and the worst income inequality in the world'. No.  Every country south of our border has worse numbers.

Many widely held beliefs are contradicted by solid data.  It is a fact of life and always has been.

What would you say to your young niece of nephew?

What scuba divers know

In the last blog I showed a chart that indicates that the oceans of the world drive atmospheric temperatures.  I’m sure I will hear from people who tell me the opposite.  That the atmosphere determines the temperature of the oceans.

I have problems with this for two reasons:  I am a scuba diver and a regular lap swimmer.

As a scuba diver I had the opposite of an ‘out-of-body’ experience.  I had an ‘in-body’ experience.

The weight of the entire atmosphere above us, if viewed as a column of air, is the same weight as a column of water 32 feet high.  In the ocean, being down 32 ft. is called being at one atmosphere.  

If you are pulling up on a hose from a pool of water, you can close the top of the hose and lift it 32ft in the air before the hose will stop taking water with it.  That is the weight of the air pushing down on the pool of the water.

As a scuba diver in my first deep water training dive, I was taken down to about 35 ft. and told to disengage my breathing mask and exhale bubbles while I slowly swam to the surface.  I went up slowly, exhaling all the way.  I could not believe that air was still coming out of my lungs after 4 minutes.  I couldn’t believe it.

Of course my lungs had double the amount of air in them at 32ft. under water, so I was exhaling twice as much air as I would if I were just holding my breath and releasing on the surface.

As a swimmer I have been in many pools, some with incredibly high ceilings over the pool.  The one thing I can be certain of is that the air over the pool (water averaging only 6 feet deep) was always influenced by the pool temperature NEVER the reverse.  I’ve been in cool pools with hot air above them and vice versa.  I’ve never seen the air influence the temperature of the pool.

So, from my personal experience, I infer that the ocean temperatures of El Nino and La Nina influence the atmosphere but very unlikely the other way around.

Climate change and interesting data

A beloved nephew, Jason, sent me an email with some conventional climate change graphs.  He suspected I considered the issue nonsense.  So I sent him the numeric data I had collected in spreadsheet form for US satellites going back to 1978.  

Then I emailed my friend who had done most of the work in creating the data and running statistical tests on them with me, Josh.  We both agreed that there was no warming of the earth from 1978 to 1996 when the average temperature of the planet was 56F.  In the period from mid-1996 to early 1998 the temperature jumped anomalously 0.2F and has remained steady from 1999 until now at 56.2F.  

Josh concluded that some long term rise in temperature was possible but trivial.  I concluded there was no long term trend, just a one year anomaly.

So, with the email from my nephew Jason I asked my friend Josh to help me make a graph of the two summaries of the satellite data.  It is shown here on top.  

In looking at many new sources of data in trying to understand the 1997-8 anomaly (found by my museum curator daughter)  I was sent an interesting chart used to keep track of El Nino and La Nina, MEI.  That is added on the bottom.

You can see the satellite charts and the MEI on this page.  It looks like the Pacific Ocean is the driving force in determining global atmospheric temperature.  So what drives the El Nino and La Nina patterns?

There turns out to be a global ocean circulation cycle that creates the El Nino-La Nina patterns and that cycle in turn is most influenced by the eccentricities of the earth orbit and solar activity.

Since the precise interaction of these eccentricities are not yet predictable, we don’t know what will happen in the future but we do know that humans aren’t important in causing it and certainly can’t stop it.

Grand Juries

A grand jury was in the news last year when it was used to dismiss potential charges against a policeman in Ferguson, MO.

I am not knowledgeable about grand juries.  I have had two experiences with the civil grand jury in San Francisco.

In the first, a few of my San Francisco friends decided they wanted to see what a grand jury was like from the inside.  So several of us applied.  The others were Lefties, well known in politics but not allied with the Lefties in power at the time.  I would not have been selected by anyone in San Francisco politics.  We all had resumes that made the finally selected jury look like a kindergarten class.  Everyone selected was a political hack for the administration in power at the time.

Later a friend of mine was actually put on the jury.  She found that no one else had a mind of their own.  They were content to let the lawyers running the jury do everything for them.  At the time she asked me for some facts about the rising oceans.  I reported back to her that oceans had been rising at 8 inches per century since 1800, so the rise was not connected to human habitation in any way.  

I later found that the first data was exaggerated and the rise had been closer to 4 inches per century.  Since the water in San Francisco Bay rises as much as 6.5 feet above average and falls as much as -1.5 feet below, an 8 foot daily variation, a change of inches is not a major worry.

Also we are on the edge of the San Andreas earthquake fault, so the earth in the Western part of the city is moving North at the rate of 6 feet every century.

Nevertheless that grand jury wrote a report on the dire need to prepare the San Francisco shoreline for the rise in the Pacific Ocean.

I don’t see the need for the grand juries I’ve dealt with.

Why are cities Democrat since the 1960’s?

Who runs things?

Most paranoids are close to being right when they say ‘the Jews run everything’.  If they said ‘the best organized group of people run everything’, they would be right.  In most of the world, we Jews are not at the top of the ladder of organized groups.

Probably the best example of this 'best organized' rule is the former Soviet Union.  When the communist party fell apart in 1991, we had a short run of political chaos until the second most powerful group after the communist party took over: the KGB and their new incarnation of the secret police.

It happened in China too.  After Mao died and his immediate military elite lost control, the second most powerful organization, the communist party took control.

So how did Democrats come to control American cities?  

The American hereditary elite fell apart in 1960 after their control of American corporations passed on the the managerial elite of the WWII officers who rose to be the new corporate powers.  Until 1960 control of most American cities was in the hands of the hereditary elite.

For a few years after that we had political chaos, until the second most powerful organized group of people in urban areas took over control: the labor unions.  They had power in the police, fire departments and teachers that were unionized.  They have been in control ever since.

It is worth noting that the unions are beginning to lose control to new groups.  In San Diego the unions and Democrats lost the mayor’s race to a coalition of Filipinos and Evangelical Latinos.  

We may see similar patterns elsewhere as the second best organized people move up in rank to contest the union dominance in cities.

American Jews in the 1950s

I often meet people who think American Jews, as a whole, have always supported Israel.

Completely false.  I know it personally. Most American Jews didn’t support the founding of Israel. And didn’t support Israel for many years afterward.

I remember my arguments with the mother of my closest friend, David Stern, at their summer house on Puget Sound where David and I used his small racing boat. It was 1955.

Mrs. Stern, as I had to call her, was on the board of the American Jewish Committee and president.  She said she was national president.

Her organization had not supported the creation of the state of Israel and in 1955-56 still was distancing itself from Israel.  The organization emphasized in its press releases that Judaism was a religion and American Jews were loyal Americans with no conflict of interest.

I argued with her, to no avail.  On the other-hand, I now wouldn’t expect a 15 year old to win an argument with the mother of one of his buddies.

Here is a statement from the AJC in 1956 “AJC's approach to the Israel situation: "While friendly to Israel, we seek, as Americans, to advance our basic national American interests as we see them; and when we aim to be helpful to Israel... it is only in situations where we consider it to be within the framework of American interest.”

American Jewish support for Israel grew after Israel defeated Egypt in the war of 1956.  (I was in Israel three years later and worked with a young Israeli tank commander from that war.)

In 1955 I could never believe that I would someday sit in my home and read the 1955 executive committee minutes of the American Jewish Committee in their original.  Surprisingly, I could find no record of David Stern’s mother.  

Footnote 2015: David's mother was part of the American Council for Judaism an even stronger opponent of Israel.

Ally, my review

When I put down Michael Oren’s Ally, I had a heavy heart.

A short aside to remind my readers that fear is created by dark shadows and blowing curtains, not by showing the actual monster.  Fear is even greater when the audience sees an innocent child at play in the path of the monster.  The contrast of horror and delight.

Michael Oren is the child.  A sophisticated, brilliant historian, who was Israel’s Ambassador to the United States from the beginning of the Obama administration until Obama’s re-election.

Oren had an American childhood of complete disfunction, both athletically and academically.  By his teenage years he overcame both handicaps.  With incredible determination he became an Israeli paratrooper.  As ambassador he was friends with everyone, a man of light and charm.  In the book, he retains the gloss of a diplomat and says warm things about disgusting people like Sen. Barbara Boxer, Sen. Harry Reid  and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. This is not a ‘tell all’ though it covers every event accurately and faithfully.  The worst about people is omitted.

My heavy heart comes from Oren’s meticulously accurate reporting on Barack Obama, his White House staff and the American media.  Barack Obama emerges from this historian’s description of events as heartless, duplicitous, perpetually dishonest, charming and down right evil.   Everything this evil president does is trumpeted by the morally corrupt people around him and a broad American press that is saturated with Jew hate.

I put this book down with a heavy heart.  If you don’t have the stomach for the reality of evil at the top of our government; beware.

For everything else about a book by an American historian who became an Israeli ambassador, this book is magnificent. Magical.  It describes Israel with panache and love.  Oren loves America, too, and shows it every day in many extraordinary ways.  Obama is as cold toward America as would be any man with no innate warmth.

I closed this book with more gratitude to Michael Oren and Bibi Netanyahu than I could ever have known I had.  Two men who will be ringing biblical heroes in the long future of the Jewish people.

Global war on Uber and Airbnb

Hundreds of cities around the world already are part of the apps Uber and Airbnb.  Uber is a ride-sharing service that allows ordinary people to use their own cars, on their own work schedule, to pick-up passengers based on their smartphone location and charge online to their credit card.  Airbnb lets ordinary people rent space in their own property, sometimes just a bed other times an entire house, with all the arrangements over the Internet.

In these cases, and many similar apps, the service becomes wildly popular long before the local government and local competitors figure out what is going on.  Since nearly every city in the world is an extreme Lefty cesspool of hate and run by local unions, the cities finally become aroused to resist this tech innovation.  In Paris the taxi opposition has become violent.  In Tokyo there was no opposition because the taxi service is already high quality.

We are now in a Lefty Luddite era, where the Left and its main patrons, the unions, are resisting Uber, Airbnb and every other popular improvement in life that is coming with new technologies.

In San Francisco the Lefty haters may have gone too far.  They are putting their hatred on the ballot for November.  It seems likely to me that the people who love the new technology may outvote the union haters and their Lefty supporters and set an example for the world where the people who appreciate the new technology will defend their benefits at the ballot box over the union-Lefty haters.

The lesson here is written in the title of this blog.  Much of the world, far too much, is anti-commerce.  We need to help the few intelligent and the many with above average intelligence to understand the benefits of a pro commerce world.