Pro Commerce

Freak worldview 3

The Freakonomics authors, Levitt and Dubner wrote a book on how to think like a freak.  I read it on a recent visit to my granddaughter in Los Angeles.  A freak is always doing experiments to create data to evaluate the real world.

I’ve been doing experiments as far back as I can remember. See the previous two blogs.

I did one experiment that failed.  It is worth describing.

The hypothesis I was testing was that people who drank alcohol before a fine dinner could not tell a high quality meal from a fast food meal.  

I got more than 40 people to my house and did a pre-test to determine taste sensitivity using five pairs of dishes.  Each pair was unmarked and no one knew which was which. Double blind.  

All the paired dishes had similar textures.  An example was the mashed potatoes and the mashed sweet potatoes of the same color. Similarly the boiled fresh peas and the warmed canned peas.

After rating the difference between the paired dishes on a scale of 1 to 5 the group was divided into four groups.  One group was to get two glasses of red wine, one group one glass of wine, one group grape juice and the last group water.

At this point there was a complete revolt.  Everyone demanded to be in the wine groups, two glasses was even more popular.  

No one would proceed with the test.  I hadn’t seen that coming.  Maybe I should have. 

Several rounds of wine for everyone who came, and no hard feelings.

Freak worldview 2

The Freakonomics authors, Levitt and Dubner wrote a book on how to think like a freak. The core argument is that a ‘freak’ is always doing experiments to create data to learn about the real world.

I’ve been doing experiments as far back as I can remember.

This blog is about a serious issue.  I had created a group called Research in Politics.  Having run several campaigns, I wondered ‘what was effective in campaigning?’.  I got a chance to test door to door house calls on election day, considered very important by everyone in politics.

Jack Shelley a San Francisco Congressman was elected mayor.  That created an open seat in a special January 1964 election in San Francisco.  

I designed a Latin Square research design, often used in agriculture.  It is a 5x5 matrix that allows two issues to be tested at the same time.  On one corner I had 5 random precincts that had intense Republican efforts to get out the vote.  On the next corner 5 precincts with no get out the vote efforts, the third corner had 5 random precincts with intense Democrat get out the vote efforts.  The fourth corner no efforts.  The rest of the matrix was filled in with levels of effort from 2 to 5 by both the Republicans and Democrats.  I personally worked in the intense Republican precincts to make sure every political volunteer was working hard.

I got the Democrats to cooperate because everyone wanted to know the results.  A special election was the best case scenario because the voter turnout was half of a regular election turnout and a personal door to door visit should have the greatest impact.

Everyone was shocked at the results.  No difference between intense get out the vote effort and no effort.

Everyone was so shocked that they cooperated again in an identical test in Modesto for another special election for Congress.  Same results.

Nobody had changed their view of the importance of election day get out the vote.  The sophisticated campaign managers who knew about my research came to the conclusion: ‘we need to use volunteers for something whether it works or not; get out the vote keeps volunteers busy.’

Freak worldview 1

The Freakonomics authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner wrote a book on how to think like a freak.  I read it on a recent visit to my granddaughter in Los Angeles.  The core argument is that a freak is always doing experiments to create data to evaluate the real world.

I’ve been doing experiments as far back as I can remember.  I’m going to describe three in this blog and the next two blogs.  I think it may be important to have a habit of doing experiments.  I believe that 199 out of 200 people have their curious brains turned hard boiled at age 23.  I want to understand what generates that 1 out of 200.  Maybe it is doing experiments.

I did many experiments at my home in San Francisco.  I had a vast number of friends and regularly threw parties so it was easy to get 40 people to come to my house and use them as test subjects. (Except as described in the third blog on Sunday.)

It was widely believed in San Francisco that one pizza joint had the most exceptional pizza in the City. Franny's pizza.  I could say it was universally believed.  Nearly everyone considered themselves pizza connoisseurs in the 1970’s. As they still do today.

For the 40 guests, I had delivered six large pizzas from Franny’s with two different toppings and six from Round Table with the same toppings.  The taste test was double blind.  Even the person in the kitchen had no idea which pizza was which.  Everyone tasted two and rated the pizza’s A,B,...F on a scale from 1 to 5.  When I tallied the data, there was no difference. None.

I won no friends from that test and the people at the party continued to claim star quality for Franny’s for years to come. Popular themes dominate over taste.

The next test was even more harsh on my relations to friends.  At the time, there was a mass migration from New York to San Francisco thanks to the appeal of Hippies and drugs.  Everyone, no exceptions, derided the bagels in San Francisco in comparison to New York.

So I had another party on a Sunday morning, 11 am.  That meant I got a large box of plain bagels from the Upper Westside of Manhattan, still warm, from a friend who flew out with them on a 6 am plane.  And another box from San Francisco’s best bagel shop.  Again, double blind, no one knew which tray had which bagels on it.  Again rated A and B trays from 1 to 5.

In this case, the San Francisco bagels got a statistically significant number higher (tasted better) than the NY bagels.  

Still, after that, no one ever stopped saying  NY bagels were better.  I hear that to this day, forty years later. (Here is an article about the NYTimes that claims the same perpetual NY bagel lie; never test anything is their motto)

I had several bagel bakeries as clients.  Two important historical points about bagels.  

* The great innovations in bagels made with raisins, blueberries and nuts all came from a bagel shop on Polk St. near Broadway, in San Francisco.  

* The first national bagel chain came from Berkeley, Noah’s.  It was bought by Einstein’s.  Noah’s was different because the bagels were softer.  Noah Alper put his racks of extruded dough in a tall box with steam before dropping them into boiling water.

Data on the real world for freaks.

Amazon work environment

The Old Gray Lady is also a nasty bitch.  

The NYTimes published a long and mean spirited attack on the employment practices at Amazon.  Like all reporters at the NYTimes the reporters who wrote this slash piece (Kantor and Streitfeld) knew the works of all the century old ’muckraking’ journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell.  These modern day buffoons live a century ago both in their minds and in their daily employment.

The reason the Old Gray Lady is acting so viciously is that the founder and CEO of Amazon bought the Washington Post to try and make modern newspapers work.  He seems to have a viable plan; and is implementing his plan.  He will exchange local press stories for the Washington Post stories in the digital world.  Sharing the ad revenue in both directions.  That reduces the newsroom and news gathering costs for the Washington Post and all its affiliates.

The trouble with the NYTimes hit piece is that the outdated ‘muckrakers’ have described Amazon as a paradise for meritocracy, hard working people, smart people and people who deserve recognition.  It is a rotten place for sicko Lefties, the lame of brain and the lazy.  Those people need to work for union shops and government bureaucracies; the NYTimes in other words.

One lefty friend who read the NYTimes hit piece, is a successful businessman, he told me: ”Amazon sounds like a place where I would do well.’

So much for the Gray Old Bitch.

Artificial intelligence

If you are interested in artificial intelligence and are young enough to want a $2000 scholarship for a brief essay on the subject, go to this website.

I’m always willing to help someone get a scholarship.

My problem is that I don’t believe in artificial intelligence.  Call me a fool.  I’ve  visited the MIT lab several times and interviewed many artificial intelligence gurus.  I’ve spent time at John McCarthy’s Stanford lab too.

The many programs that appear to be artificial intelligence from great chess programs to Siri to voice recognition are in fact just massive, rapidly accessible data bases.

That is clearly the case for the IBM chess program which  is an algorithm that follows a large number of alternate chess move sequences and assigns values to each route.  What appears to be intelligence is probability applied to massive calculations.

Siri and her siblings are large data bases of routing paths based on human analysis.  Humans constantly examine defective routings and make necessary changes.  These resemble incremental increases in intelligence.  They are really the addition of more human effort.

Lastly, the extraordinary ability of machines to listen to human words and parse the sounds into meaningful dialog is the result of brute force.  There are roughly 50,000 English words in common usage (technically, twice as many are used occasionally).  By using a Google English database of more than 1 million words including mispronunciations, dialect variations and phonetic variations, voice programs are good at transferring sound into print.

So where is the artificial intelligence?  Look up AI in wikipedia and see disambiguated hot air.

I see so little of human intelligence around me; I am invariably doubtful about non-human success.

Get electronics working

I am regularly confronted with electronic devices and systems failing.  The wifi goes off occasionally in my house.  It is occasionally so slow in public as to be useless.  The router goes down and the Internet connection sometimes comes to a complete standstill.  The smartphone is known to slow down, occasionally stop and worst of all the programs can freeze or shut me out for want of the password.   The TV connection to the wifi seems to be whimsical.

So how do you fix these problems?

In the days of mechanical devices I had a whole repertoire of fixes that usually worked.  They ranged from taking the device apart to using graphite or oil on moving parts.  Mechanical and electrical mechanisms were generally easy for me.  And other people, which is why there were repair shops on nearly every retail street.

Now in the electronic era, the steps to fixing a problem are very different.  The skill is not commercially widespread enough to have repair shops in abundance.  

My sequence of restoration usually starts with depriving the device of all power.  Unplug it or remove the battery and reboot.  Then repeat the loading or opening process. Move on to plugging and unplugging.  From there the process gets even more obscure.

In many instances the easiest thing to do is find a teenager to help or call a help line associated with the product.

Quite a difference between our previous mechanical-electrical world and the electronic one today.

Breaking Bad

It has been two years since the TV program Breaking Bad was last on the air.  Since then it has been on Netflix, a streaming video service.  

I find four business issues here.

* First is that we have no idea how many people have watched this 42 hour Breaking Bad video.  We know from some financial reports offered by Netflix, that includes the video in its subscriber service, that Breaking Bad is the most popular program and that it is one of the most important reason customers subscribe to Netflix.  With an estimated 50 million Netflix subscribers and another 15 million people who viewed the show when it was on cable TV the number of people who viewed Breaking Bad could be close to 100 million.  A very impressive number compared to the largest books sales.  It also comes close to the domestic audiences of the top 15 movies of all time.

We don’t don’t how many people have viewed Breaking Bad, and certainly not how many have seen the entire 42 hours.

The lack of information is bad for commerce.  It keeps a star product from being appropriately appreciated and imitated.

* Second, it has ruined TV and movies for me.  Breaking Bad is such good theater that I find nearly everything else inadequate or tawdry in comparison.  I see much less TV and fewer movies these days.  

While TV viewership and movie attendance has dropped significantly in the past two years we don’t know how much this has to due with the high quality of Breaking Bad. The new high bar of entertainment.

*Third, each Breaking Bad segment is 40 minutes long.  Because the TV program had to allow 20 minutes of every hour for advertising.  How much does advertising interruption harm a video product?  Did Breaking Bad become a success without advertising because advertising was a handicap during its initial TV run?

We know from the gross revenue growth of Google that nearly half of advertising expenditure has migrated from print images and TV interruptions to single line notices on computer and smartphone screens.  How much further will this migration go?

* Fourth and last, does the fact that the storyline of Breaking Bad focuses on the success of Walter White’s meth business and his evolution as a businessman and his stunning accomplishments in generating $millions, play a role in the reason for the video’s runaway success?

Those are my questions about Breaking Bad and commerce.

Making enemies

I don’t like making enemies when I’m trying to build a political movement that is pro commerce.

On one current issue, I have not choice.  

Many conservatives believe that religious values are in conflict with personal freedom when a business owner can not refuse to sell to a gay couple that wants a wedding cake, wedding flowers or wedding photos.

There is one simple and clear pro commerce concept.  It dates back to the earliest laws of commerce in Roman times. It is the law of common carriers.  It first applied to ferry boats carrying loads across rivers.  Societies needed open access to these ferries for commerce to function.  So no restrictions on ‘who’ could be a customer became the law.  This concept of the common carrier is the oldest in English Common Law, clearly derived from the Roman occupation of the British Isles.

This concept has grown to apply to all businesses.  If you are open for business you can not discriminate among customers.    The historic ‘no Jews, no colored, no Irish and no dogs’ clearly violated this basic commercial rule and offended many people.  It was anti-commerce in many ways.

This has nothing to do with restrictions that relate to the effective functioning of a business.  ‘No pets’ makes sense in many situations, so do dress codes (I have often been required to put on a tie and a jacket) and restrictions such as ‘no excessive perfumes’ ‘no more alcohol if you are drunk’ etc are related to the business functions.

Refusing service to a class of people, particularly a protected class is illegal.  That legal issue is superfluous.  The fundamental law of commerce is: when you go into business then you agree to serve everyone who can pay for your product or service equally (if the use of your business product or skill needs to be legal, of course).

Being an American you do have rights contained in the Bill of Rights.  You can put in (or on) your business a sign that says “The owner agrees with St. Paul that gay sex is a sin”.  Putting such a sign may be offensive to many.  But it does not violate the concerns of commerce.  Commerce requires a business to serve everyone.  The Bill of Rights protects the freedom to say or print just about anything.

Say or write what you want under the 1st Amendment but don’t refuse to serve any legitimate customer if you want commerce to function.

Surge pricing

One of my friends objected to the surge pricing that Uber and other free market transport systems use in their pricing.

Surge pricing means on a rainy day or during heavy transport periods, such as a Friday afternoon rush hour, the prices can increase 1.5 times or 2 times.  I’ve seen periods in San Francisco when a big outdoor concert finished and the surge price was 4 times the normal.

The goal and result of surge pricing is to draw more drivers into the pool of vehicles available.  It works.  Transport is always available when the customers need it and want it.  Unlike fixed pricing where rationing occurs and the passenger doesn’t get transport unless he/she is ‘lucky’.

Of course, as a pro commerce person,  I favor flexible pricing in any market situation, with one stipulation.  The price is available to everyone.  No bargaining, no bias.

I think my friend is confused about surge pricing because he spent a lot of time in a Middle Eastern bargaining society.  I hate bargaining and probably he does too.  The person with the greatest value to their time or the least time to waste pays the most.  

Even more important to a pro commerce person, fixed pricing created our modern society as much as industrial efficiency.  All consumers wasted their time bargaining in industrial society up until roughly 1860 with the advent of the earliest department stores that had fixed prices marked on every product.

Fixed pricing became common in major city department stores after the Civil War and spread slowly.  By the 1880’s and the advent of the visible cash register, managers could watch the sales as they occurred and could effectively supervise the fixed pricing.  By the late 1880’s fixed pricing was the dominant quality of retail shopping in America.  A major source of the subsequent increase in consumers spending.

Fixed pricing gave us great wealth.  Surge pricing gives us great service.

The steady recovery

I know my business cycle history.  I know nearly all the cycles from the period before the Civil War until the present.  The current expansion period is the longest and most steady in that entire period with the exception of the two business cycles from 1960 to 1969 and from 1901 to 2001.

It is reasonable to ask why?  

I can explain the two earlier cycles.  The 1960’s saw the most rapid expansion of American imports and exports and foreign competition in our recorded history.  The 1990’s saw the most rapid period of commercial innovation and productivity increase in our history due to computers.

So what is happening now?

The current expansion period is the slowest in history.  That may keep excesses from playing a role.  Imports and exports are not exceptional nor is productivity, though it should be with the extraordinary potential productivity impacts of the smart phone.

I identify three factors that are causing this long slow growth period:

• American companies are keeping their profits overseas.  This is because U.S. corporate taxes are the highest in the industrial world. This reduces potential domestic capital investment.  Unreturned capital is over $2 trillion.  For the past 6 years the capital spending in the U.S. has averaged  $1.2 trillion.  If that unreturned capital had been invested it would have increased capital spending by 25%.  A significant amount for a central factor in economic growth.

• The Federal Reserve inflated the dollar by 3% per year with its QE1 and QE2 bond purchase programs.  This has reduced imports and exports, what would have benefited the economic growth.

• The Democrat controlled Congress and White House have increased the regulatory burden by roughly $1.2 trillion in the past 6 years.  Definitely dampening economic growth.

That is my explanation.  It makes sense to me.

A little late on immigration

The Republican Party and the incumbent Democrats and their president have been fighting on the issue of immigration for the past six years.

There have been three significant points in the immigration battle since the 1924 Alien Exclusion Act.

First was the Kennedy immigration reform act of 1965.  This opened immigration to all nations.  Previous immigration favored only Northern Europe.

Second was the Reagan 1986 amnesty act.

The third was the large cross border migration of Mexicans and Central Americans from 2002 until 2010.

That leaves the U.S. now with over 42 million people born outside the U.S. to non-U.S. parents.  About half of these are currently American citizens.  This is out of 320 million Americans.

In California, 27% of the population is foreign born.  In New York 22% are foreign born.

My blog title ‘A little late on immigration’ refers to the fact that 13% of Americans are immigrants.

This is the highest in a century.  At mid century 1950 we were dropping from 7% to the low of 5% in 1970.

We have never had trouble with immigration at the current level.  For much of the 19th Century, until 1910, foreign born were roughly 14% of America.

This is a pro commerce blog.  I am particularly welcoming of people who want to live in America.  They are entrepreneurial.  Foreign born are 13% of America's population and they own 18% of America's businesses.  They start 22% of all new businesses.

Our foreign born Americans are 20% of the top 500 CEO’s.  The proportions are even higher in high tech and high tech top management.

I concede that we have a Southern Border problem, where we don’t control entry into the U.S.

That lack of a functional border presents many problems including crime and potential terrorism.

I wrote this blog to remind all my pro commerce allies that immigration is not just an issue about our Southern border but a bigger issue about American commercial vitality.

We need immigration for commercial vitality.

Trump and Sanders at the same time

We know that the pendulum of political affiliation swings on a regular basis in most democracies.

I therefore conclude that with the presence of Trump on one side of the political alignment and Senator Sanders on the other, that we are at a major inflection point in the pendulum swing.

These two are men of extreme politics.  Trump has a history of personal political chaos with no particular partisan leaning.  He has picked out a political posture that pushes the extremist policy stand in a range of issues.  As of the end of August 2015 his positions are still within the Republican domain.  But he choses the extremist elements of those policies.

Senator Sanders is by far the most extreme Democrat to run for president in American history.  An open 19th Century socialist. He is explicit about his position.

I believe that when the two parties have swung into such extreme domains, that coincides with the inflexion point in the society.  The public is ready for a major directional change.  

In the past the Republicans have had extremists like Pat Buchanan and the Democrats have had Barbara Jordan.

The country has been shifting in the moderate range from 1990 until 2008.  Then came the election of a 2/3rds Democrat congress and an distinctly different and unqualified president. The pendulum has now moved against the Democrats to a very strong pro commerce, anti-union, anti-statist position.

I make predictions so I can learn.

Education for the future

Like most people, I think about the education of my grandchildren.  The only genuine model I have is my own life.

I know from meeting the children of famous people, that their children seldom follow in the paths of their parents and often rebel.

I don’t see that with grandchildren.  On the other hand, each grandchild has several grandparents and seldom see a reason for listening to one over the others unless there is a very strong distinct bond.  (As was the case with my daughter and my mother.)

The two things, educationally relevant, I can see into the future of America with confidence are 1) the regular pendulum movement from anti-commerce Democrats to 2) pro commerce Republicans.  2) the survival of America as the commercial engine of the world.

A pro commerce person can survive in the Democrat periods, however long they may be, by being immersed in the commercial world.

With those two visions of the future I see the benefits of an education that focuses on a thriving commercial world. 

Math and statistics are core competencies in a commercial world.  If one can use a modern spreadsheet with confidence and use a goodly number of the math functions; then one is well prepared for the future.

Commerce also rewards merit.  Among the categories of merit that can be stimulated and reinforced by education are an independent mind, an analytic mind and a person with strong enough character strength to express a unique individuality.  That includes the drive to seek rewards.

So use your education become a pro commerce, original thinking, uniquely talented individual with drive and persistence.

Do you agree?

Plenti marketing nonsense

Occasionally I see a marketing campaign that is sheer stupidity.  I’ve already pointed out that this is true for debit cards and the new chip embedded credit card.

Plenti is a card and program for earning points at several notorious marketing losers: Macy’s, Exxon, AT&T, RiteAid and Alamo.  At Macy’s, where I tried it, it was worth one point per dollar.  That meant 2700 points on the purchase of a sofa, but only when I presented the Plenti card AND my Macys card.  That 2,700 points is good for $27 off future Macys purchases.

What nonsense.  I get discount cards from Macys in the mail every week and in the newspapers worth more than the value of Plenti points for a $2,700 purchase.

The amount of time at the transaction site, the bother of keeping the card in an accessible place, and the requirement to use the Macys card and the other special purpose cards are never going to be worth it.

I wrote a book on marketing.  I can not see logic or business sense to the Plenti card.  The promoter must be a con artist who has marketing friends who are fools.  

Maybe it has already succeeded in Nigeria and someone wants to try it in the U.S.

The 44 miles with the greatest difference on the planet

I’ve been to Tel Aviv many times over the past 55 years.  It has gone from a sleepy town where the main food was falafel, pita and eggplant sold from small windows to the most successful tech startup city in the world.  Tel Aviv is a booming city which rivals San Francisco for the most tech start-ups, the best restaurants and Tel Aviv out does San Francisco for fun and innovation.  For productivity and first rate infrastructure Tel Aviv outdoes Singapore.

Israel, with much of its tech offices in the greater Tel Aviv metro area is the second largest tech center on the planet, with more tech companies listed on the New York and German stock exchanges than any other location in the world outside the U.S..  

This happened with virtually no natural resources including water or a natural harbor.  Nothing more than Jewish immigrants.  Israel also overcame the burden of a hundred million enemy neighbors who have started ten wars against Israel in half a century.  Just as bad has been a socialist-union run government for its first 40 years.

It is a miracle.  It is even more of a visible miracle when one looks 44 miles to the south of Tel Aviv.  

44 miles south you will find an independent land with a larger area and a larger population than Tel Aviv that is a war torn ruin and has been a ruin for the past decade with no exports, virtually no local industry, no local power supply or water sources and almost total unemployment.

Gaza is a client state entirely dependent for food and survival on European and Arab nations.  Gaza represents what an Arab land looked like 2,000 years ago, with the minor addition of a few combustion driven vehicles, military weapons and electricity.

Only 44 miles from the best of the modern commercial world with wonderful people and a wild nightlife to the worst self inflicted anti-commerce human misery on the planet.

JournoList

The video material about Planned Parenthood selling fetal tissue from abortions is a strong indictment of Planned Parenthood.  I don’t know if it will have any long term effects on Planned Parenthood.

My problem, and the problem of 20 million people who feel the mainstream media are biased and holding back any material that harms their Leftist ideology, is that we see examples of this bias too often.

In the Planned Parenthood case, the NYTimes had their first article on July 20th and claimed that the video was edited to present a false story about the fetal tissue sales.  That wasn’t true.  The edited version was released at the same time as the full unedited version on the website of the Center for Medical Progress.  

The NYTimes did five more articles on the subject and never corrected the original error.  It even repeated the lie in an editorial.  Two weeks later, on August 6th the Times corrected the story in its corrections section.

This sort of dissembling happens every day and it may be the cause of so much national distress and our sense of a civil uprising.

I take the dissembling and deliberate obfuscation as a fact.  I remember the JournoList that had 400 Lefty writers and editors of the mainstream media daily comparing notes on the news they planned to publish.  Every big name was on the List.  JournoList operated from mid 2007 to mid 2010.

I am willing to believe that a similar black site remains in existence.  It continues to protect Obama and most Democrats from harmful news reports.  

The recent EPA arsenic and mercury spill into the Colorado River was a complete cover-up.  The EPA took two days to tell local governments about the problem. It took a week for the EPA director to fly-out and look at the disaster.  And President Obama never missed a stroke on his golf vacation to publicly acknowledge the seriousness of the problem.

What happened to the wonderful journalists who reported on every daily failing of President George W. Bush, real or imagined?

(See the first comment and reference below.) 

American conservatives vs the whole world

Look at the world today with fresh eyes please.

A third of the world’s population today is pre-modern and has nothing to do with the operation of the world. Another third is Indian, Islamic, Russian and Chinese; largely anti-American.  

When it came to a phony nuclear control treaty that threatens the U.S. and Israel with annihilation by Iran, all of Europe, Russia and China signed on happily. Then the United Nations voted to support the agreement.  The General Assembly of the World would have voted to support the agreement if they had been asked.  

Put this together and the only people who clearly don’t want the modern world to be destroyed are the American conservatives, Israel, a few Sunni Arab countries and the conservative part of Canada.  

In raw numbers it is about 60 million people,(one percent of the world) nearly all conservative Americans.  

Hey folks, we stand nearly alone against the rest of the world.  We stand alone for the modern Pro Commerce world.

Help.

(See the first comment below.) 

My cable bridge and fountain

I have proposed several designs for San Francisco.  I usually do a drawing with an explanation and send it to the Chamber of Commerce and a few political leaders.  

None of my suggestions have born fruit so far.  I just want to point out that I always see the world around me with possibilities.  Part of the repertoire of a good activist.

• My first suggested design was in the early 1970’s.  I considered the Alcatraz prison and adjacent buildings to be ungodly ugly.  I had visited it several times.  I stayed over night a few times when a close friend was the guard after the prison was closed in 1963.  I visited it in my sail boat to deliver food to the Native Americans who occupied it in 1970.

I suggested a 200 foot fountain of Bay salt water.  I calculated the amount of power and the annual cost, which was minimal.  My goal was to wash away the prison over a century and have a beautiful landmark with the streaming cloud from the fountain stretching miles to the East toward Berkeley.

• My second suggestion, in the mid 1970’s for San Francisco was for a spherical building in downtown right next to the TransAmerica pyramid.  I wanted it to have a mirror surface on the sphere to light-up the downtown streets.  It would have formed a visual memory of the Trylon and Perisphere of the New York 1938 World’s Fair.

• My last proposal in the early 1980’s was for a 1.5 mile stand alone woven bridge for pedestrians and bicycles that would stretch over the center of the city from Nob Hill to Corona Heights.  See photo for a similar woven bridge.

These ideas are pretty much dead.  Alcatraz makes money with over one million tourists a year.  

Preservationists politically own the land next to the TransAmerica pyramid.  

Every Luddite in the city (nearly everyone) would have a reason to oppose the stand alone bridge.

The Chinese rose to power in San Francisco

My readers probably know a great deal about the history of San Francisco.  

The Chinese who settled San Francisco when it was a Spanish Franciscan outpost took over a French restaurant at Sacramento St and Wharf St. (originally Foundation St.)  in about 1825, twenty five years before the Gold Rush.  That restaurant is still the SW corner of Chinatown 190 years later. Wharf St. is now Kearney St., probably named after a Civil War hero.

The Chinese were vigorously hated in San Francisco for over 120 years.  There are too many stories to tell about the level of hatred.  In 1877, The Workingmen’s Party, led by Denis Kearney led a march against Chinatown.  They killed Chinese and burned as many buildings as they could.  Later Kearney led a political campaign leading to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

After the earthquake of 1906 which burned down most of Chinatown, the Chinese community set up camp on the flat land just North of Chinatown, now Fisherman’s Wharf.

The U.S. milita and the San Francisco police found this an opportune time to drive the Chinese out of San Francisco. Most went to Oakland.  

Most returned to Chinatown as the rebuilding got underway.

Now, one hundred years later, the Chinese are a political force in San Francisco.  They took most of that time to become a unified force under a leader, Rose Pak.  The Chinese elected a mayor and four of the eleven district supervisors. They control seats on nearly every commission and are the heads of many City departments.

When unified, they are the second most powerful political force in the City after labor unions.

It took 30 years of active campaigning to create this unified Chinese power.  Now it is beginning to split.  But that is a sign of the community's power.  Its fundamental success comes from money earned by the historic Overseas Chinese capability in commerce.

Three cheers for commerce.  That is the way for a hated minority to gain respect and political power in America.

Our modern religion

I have a brother who is deeply religious.  He calls himself an outspoken atheist.  How is this possible?

Simple.  His religion is environmentalism.  How can I wantonly call environmentalism a religion?

Simple: because it is wholly embraced by the most powerful church in the world.  The Holy Roman Catholic Church which has a pope capable of reporting the direct message of god, says so. These days, without relying on the direct infallible word of god the Pope is stating that the world is facing an environmental armageddon due to human caused global warming.  That fits into religion like a clam in its shell.

He is also reminding us that the classic Church theology says that commerce is bad.  I claim that this anti-commerce anti-Americanism is also religion, held worldwide by Lefties of every stripe.  Anti-commerce and environmental armageddon are one and the same religion.

To prove that he is part of the 1,800 year tradition of the ‘true church’ he also recognized the State of Palestine that includes Gaza. This fits in perfectly with the Church’s historic Jew hate that the Pope so happily finds in the Palestinian constitution.  Palestinians reject the Jewish State of Israel.  As his long religious tradition says "kill the Jews". (Check on the pre-Pope Francis reaction to this theology by Spain and Portugal. Amnesty 500 years later.)

So if the Catholic Church considers environmental armageddon to be part of its religion, I don’t know how my brother or any other global warming environmentalist can claim that their environmental religion is not a religion.

Remember your class in logic.  ‘A’ is a large old established religion.  ‘B’ is environmentalism with its belief in human caused armageddon.   ‘A’ claims to totally include ‘B’ as a religion: therefore environmentalism-with-human caused armageddon IS religion.

Ronda Rousey and the Victorians

This is a wonderful video.  Ronda makes it clear that women should consider the importance of their own strength and determination as desirable qualities.  She denigrates the common view that women should use their bodies to marry rich men who will take care of them.

 

I personally subscribe to both positions.  Women should be proficient in weapons, especially handguns and martial arts self defense.  They should never tolerate being physically or mentally subdued by a stronger person.  Victimhood is not just embarrassing and mentally demeaning it is primarily a condition that is self inflicted.

I also want to add a caveat.  The first rule of self defense is ‘escape if it is possible’ I also know that many women who are strong are able to intimidate an attacker far better than most men.

Now on to the Victorian part of the blog.  Victorians are improperly associated with feminine acquiescence.   This docile role for women in the modern world comes directly from the Romantic Era in philosophy and worldview.  Woman, in this view, were perceived as having special senses of the ‘world behind this world’ when they exercised their dainty and delicate nature.  (That includes you wimpy New Agers.)

For most of the world and world history women have been subservient to men because of physical differences.

That ended with the advent of commerce and the bullet firing pistol.  Women in modern commercial societies have the ability to generate their own living income and escape debilitating dependence on men.  And women now have the ability to defend themselves in most serious situations.

I’m with Ronda.  It is time for women to reject their subservient position and accept their powerful freedom in modern commercial society.

They should also be Pro Commerce, if their intelligence is sufficient to escape the ‘angry, women as victims’ ideology of the Left.

Palestinians are a bad example for the world

The Basques are trouble makers, why doesn’t Spain give them their own autonomous region?  Why don’t the Turks, Iraqis and Persians do the same with the Kurds?  Why don’t the Chinese spin off Tibet and the rebellious Muslim regions?

The same is true in nearly every part of the world.  Rebellious regions could be split off as autonomous regions to mollify the rebels.  And reduce domestic expenses.

Where we have democracy and the rebels have a choice; we get votes such as Quebec and Scotland. The rebels don't end up  leaving the larger nation.

I won’t examine a separate question, the reasons ‘states’ are so reluctant to make themselves smaller.

What I want to point out is that there is now a global glaring example of why allowing rebels to have their own state can be a terrible mistake.  Gaza.

These witless fools in Gaza could have had a prosperous successful state of their own after Israel withdrew in 2005.

Instead the Gazans burned down most of the important export businesses and declared war on one of their neighbors, Israel. The Gazans have spent full time since then trying to provoke war with Israel.

Most recently the Gazans have similarly start war provocation with their other neighbor, Egypt.

Gaza has become the global example of why a rebellious territory should not be given independence or autonomy.  The rebels will become a dangerous malignant cancer not a productive neighbor.

Allsides.com

A fellow named John Gable was disturbed by the social and political dichotomy that we are all immersed in, right now.

He decided that the main problem is that we all  create our own news universes which become echo chambers of homogeneous ideas and ideologies.  We surround ourselves with people we agree with, in jobs, living locations and media sources.

John created a consolidated website that has all major news items put into three categories, Left, Middle and Right.  You can go to his website and see what a wonderful job he has done. (allsides.com)

John is just getting started, so it will take time to see if his focus on the news media and fixing it, will have repercussions in the larger society.

I personally have suggested on my many blogs that the dichotomy we see in our society has multiple sources.  That the news media reflects a change that had already occurred.

• I see that our fraternal institutions withered away after WWII.  The Lions, Rotary, Odd Fellows and Masons.  These were the key bulwarks in keeping America convivial and socially integrated.

• Women left the homes for jobs; they left the neighborhoods and the non-work social world.  They had been part of the social glue.

• The hereditary elite disappeared (around 1960).  Their deep and broad social connections had been a vital source of social harmony. As well as preserving the status quo.

• As unions took over cities along with the Democratic Party and the Left, we got geographic social sorting with Lefties going to the cities and being reflected in impregnable Congressional districts.

• With the end of the Cold War, the failure of communist countries and the decline of domestic unions, the Left faced a hopeless future and became the Party of Despair and Anger.  The penultimate act of anger was the passage of Obamacare (a 19th Century dream) without a single Republican vote.  Political division became rampant and deeply embedded from that point on.

That is where we are today.  Only when young people get out of the clutches of academia where the angry Left dwells and the Lefties die off, will we see more comity in our society.

Dynamics, knowing it can be changed

I look at myself as a lifelong activist.  You can see my biography here.  What makes me different?

From my earliest teen memories I saw the world as different in my mind from what my eyes delivered.  I saw futuristic visions of automobiles, I saw neighborhoods without phone lines and people being energized by new entertainment forms.

By the time I was 16, I was being recruited as a leader of every group I visited.  I saw that I could get people to respond to my vision.  In a few short years I was learning how to make change.

I first learned how to influence people: share my vision with them. A simple talk or speech and I had supporters.

Take simple steps, one at a time, always one step at a time. Divide projects into simple single steps one at a time.

Years later, as a business advisor, I found the problem many business people had was that they could have a vision but they couldn’t see the single series of concrete steps to get to that vision.

Most importantly I began to see what could be changed and what couldn’t.  I also saw how long some forms of change could take.  

When I created the first universal credit card, what I did was to help the people around me see what simple, legal and logical steps we had to take.  I also, by that time, age 28, had a strategic sense: get top management involved early.  The new card was in customer hands within eight months.

When I saw the need to make our democracy work better, with true representation by legislators selected at random, I saw that the process would be slow. I wrote an article and published a book.  The first actual steps in the political realm (a British Columbia initiative) took 15 years.  We are still probably 10 years from the first real random legislature, somewhere in the world.  50 years from conception to potent execution. Longer than 8 months.

It took me 3 months to create a national public radio program; which ran for 9 years.

Somehow, I learned this.  I also learned that the tools to bring about change are always readily at hand; the right person, the right group or the right medium…. find them and figure out how to make use of them.

The end of tea

I am not prescient.  To the the extent that I can see the future, about 50% of the time, I always get the timing wrong.

In the late 1980’s I was invited to give a speech to the National Tea Association on marketing.  I did what I usually do, gave them a candid speech.  If I had any desire to make a living as a business speaker I would be humorous and not give speeches with grim pictures of the future.

I suggested that tea could not compete with coffee in the modern American world.  It could compete on providing energy on comfort and flavor.  But there were serious drawbacks to tea that could not be overcome.

I saw no future for tea in America.  Now, a quarter century later, my projection is becoming more evident.

The problems I outlined for my tea audience were as follows:

• The pricing of tea needed to be simple.  Three grades of price.  Low, medium and high.  

• All prices needed to be for the same units: ¼ pounds or ½ pounds.

• The categories of tea needed to be simple and in few categories: black, green, herbal and special.

• Each of these standards needed to be available on an instant basis.  Get a hot cup of black now.

• There was a need for ‘instant tea’ in a powder form.

Tea needed to compete with coffee head-on; which is what the above suggestions are all about.

Little or none of the changes I suggested were undertaken.  Tea in America will soon be insignificant, if it isn’t already.

Where have all the teachers gone?

Every year, for the past four years, I see a plea from public school systems for teachers.  Apparently the number of newly available teachers is shrinking faster than existing teachers are leaving the field and retiring.

I can't even pretend to know what is happening in this field.  I was a revolutionary activist in education in the 1960’s. I made significant changes in classroom teaching in a few schools in San Francisco.  All the good parts washed away in a few years.  The bad part, black integration, still remains and has done immeasurable damage.

I have several teachers in my immediate family.

Still, I can only speculate on what is happening in the teaching field.  I suggest the following:

• Young people see a more interesting world where they can work in other areas that are rewarding.  The digital world opens new realms of interesting work.

• Internet education and Wikipedia have changed the role of teacher and learner significantly and the role of teacher has been greatly diminished at every grade level.

• The public school system is such an abysmal failure in every educational regard that young people rarely see heroes in the form of teachers.

• The idea of a future driven by unions, incompetent teachers as your peers, and no rewards for excellence only appeals to a dwindling segment of the population.

That is what I see from my desk.  What do you see?

 

Future of educated and lazy people

It is very obvious that TV has changed its focus.  Today, more and more popular programs are focused on intelligent and educated characters.  

The most popular global program is NCIS, a police procedural with a major focus on a forensics lab.  Followed by a comedy, Big Bang, about 4 scientists.  There are several other police procedurals that are very successful and several popular new programs such as Scorpion about a team of whiz kids.

Being smart and having access to a lab is now positive in the pop culture.  Being smart or at least ‘educated’ is now highly touted in our society. 

We are often told that a college degree means a high probability of creating a stable two parent family and having a respectable income.  Conversely, low education is associated with weak families and low incomes.

It should be obvious that our country and many other modern nations are heading toward a great divide.  The educated, the uneducable and the lazy.

We already sort our society, generally into a concentric circle pattern.  The further a person lives from the urban center, (except for the black ghetto) the less competent and more dysfunctional they are.

I think this pattern will continue with a low education and lazy population moving even more obviously to the outermost ring of urban areas.  The financial subsidies for this group will be most useful in such low cost locales.

We are headed toward a divide of education and competence in the inner urban circle and the uneducated and lazy on the outer circle.

Wall Street Journal

Many of my friends only rely on the Lefty media, TV, PBS, NYTimes, New Yorker etc. for news.  They are uninformed about our world.  

A few friends have added the Wall Street Journal to their information sources.  They too are uninformed about our world.

Only if one uses the Internet, with a variety of blogs and newsfeeds is one likely to be informed on world news and directions.

Why doesn’t the WSJ add a needed dimension?

It could add a needed dimension with its interesting op-eds, especially a few greats like Bret Stephens.  But most of the people without Internet news sources, don’t read WSJ op-eds.

The WSJ brings a different perspective than the Lefty media.  It doesn’t see everything through the lens of a political Lefty American. The New York Times has the Herald Tribune in Paris, but that only adds more material to the existing Lefty American political lens.

The WSJ has a large and important Asian WSJ which helps provide more Asian news than Americans would get otherwise.  And the WSJ has an American perspective but it is more about global business impact on America than about seeing the world through an American political lens.  Most Lefties who read the WSJ never notice this different perspective.

I always ask serious and knowledgeable people what sources they read on the Internet.  I think I will write more about these lists.

So far, most look at Drudge.

New foreign policy

There is no question that President Obama has brought to America a new direction in foreign policy.  

On the surface it seems to be summarized as a redrawing of our definition ‘of strategic interest to the United States’.  We now seem to care very little about aggression by rogue states in the middle east, the Russian attacks on her periphery or China’s expansion in south asia.  We won’t even complain about Russian attacks on Sweden for selling oil to Estonia. Or Chinese support for Venezuela and Ecuador.  The U.S. doesn’t even mention regular Russian military flights 50 miles off our Western state borders inside of American airspace.  

This has created a petri dish to see how bad the world can get when America pulls back its strategic borders.  

In the past the borders of American strategic interests have excluded most of Africa.  That meant more than a million Africans killed each other and more were displaced: without our concern.

Now it means that more than a million Arabs are killed and displaced and we don't act seriously to prevent it.  

This new policy helps me understand more about America’s strategic interests.  President Obama and the Democrat Party are generally indifferent to commerce.

This indifference results in a disinterest in finding new commercial markets, protecting our major trade allies and protecting global shipping routes.  

I learned one thing.

The piracy off the coast of Somalia was left to private companies and mercenaries to solve.  That worked.  

I don’t believe it will be the same when state actors are involved such as China’s use of its air force to harass commercial airlines.  Or when Russia actual shoots one down.

I think we have now seen that our definition of ‘strategic interests’ in prior years was too great.  Now under Obama it is too limited.

Its primal

Like any Jew who is a thinker, I have felt a personal need to understand Jew hate.  I am particularly thinking about it now that two of my granddaughters are scouting colleges.  

There is a good chance that my first two granddaughters and the five that come after them will be exposed to open, virulent Jew hatred on any American college campus they attend. The academic Left is now disproportionately a world of Jew hate.

My contribution to understanding Jew hate is two fold. I have discovered that:

• All the societies that are infected with Jew hate have a strong and powerful hereditary elite that promotes Jew hate as a self defense mechanism.  Powerful hereditary elite correlates well with high Jew hate.    

• Fear and hate are biological and can not be suppressed once loosed.  They come from the lower, older brain, the medulla that releases gases and hormones that permeate the rest of the brain.

At this point I’d like to add another observation.

• Humans have an hereditary object of fear, (and hate) like snakes, sharks and spiders.  These specific objects of fear are culturally transmitted in humans.  The particular objects of fear (and hate) have been culturally selected as Jews for Europe, Latin America and Arabia.  

Cultures that are older than Europe, such as India, China and Japan already have their objects of fear.  Four hundred years of contract with Europe have not contaminated these older cultures with Jew hate.

What happened to the Black community?

I was completely shocked when half the black caucus in the American Congress boycotted the Israeli Prime Minister in March at the urging of a half black president who hates Jews.

This reflects the growth of an evil cancer in the black community. I repeat, evil.

The American black community has always been close to the Jewish community and it has been the Jewish community that has been uniquely supportive of American blacks.  

The relationship dates back to before  the founding of the NAACP one hundred and six years ago.  The founders were mostly Jews and nearly all the funding came from Jews.  Support for Martin Luther King Jr. was disproportionately from Jews in manpower, advice and funding.  King regularly expressed his gratitude for that support and his love of Israel.  

All the people I personally knew who went South on the Freedom rides and voter registration projects were Jews.

I personally made one of the biggest contributions to the Black community in the first and most important employment discrimination case I brought against the Bank of California which did more to open the door to blacks in finance, than any other action; a field where blacks are still the most integrated.

There was only a small Jew hate community among blacks in 1960, the Black Muslims in Chicago and New York.  Today somewhere between a third and half of  the whole black community are Jew haters.

That is sick, stupid and a sign that the Black community has a bleak future in America.