Pro Commerce

Technology vs science

This issue has risen its head again in the form of an article by Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal a week ago.

I always say in my blogs that technology is the relentless source of technological progress and science is merely a system for coming up with explanations of what technology discovers.

Ridley says pretty much the same thing but adds two components that are different from me.  First, he argues that the vast government subsidy of science is a waste of money because science does not advance business or technology.  Second, that technology is always based on incremental improvements.

Three cheers for the first observation.  When I hear so many people who suck at the teats of government science funding say that ‘basic research is the core of new technology’ I know it is probably wrong.  

Many of my tech friends complain that university research with government funds is not original and often puts new products on the market that have onerous patent protections. Putting businesses in the same field  in the open market at a great disadvantage.  

I watched bidding for 23 battery technologies at Livermore Labs (pure government research).  None of them worked in the real world and two that were useful kernels of ideas created university patent barriers to market development.  

Thanks Matt.  Science is a good place to cut the budget.

Matt’s second observation is ‘right on’.  I’ve  never discussed how technology works.  It is always incremental.  My favorite is the theory of superconductivity at absolute zero.  Scientists developed theories that stopped superconductivity from occurring  above 5 degrees absolute.  So technologists kept experimenting and moved that number up to 90 degrees.  Sometimes it is best to ignore science.

My point is that technology keeps improving machines and these machines keep making finer and finer measurements possible which in turn create new data that science has to explain.

Technology is incremental because it is driven by basic human drives: simpler, faster, cheaper, more accurate and more reliable.  The same human elements that drive cost reduction in commerce.

Volume and magnitude

It is hard for people to understand core concepts in mathematics.  

There are two concepts that are particularly hard and they lead to the current hysteria about armageddon caused by human forced global warming.

The first is volume.  The second is order of magnitude.

Let’s start by ignoring that CO2 is what we breathe out 600 times an hour.  We breathe it out at 100 times the concentration that we breathe it in.  Yet we can barely detect it at that level (4% of the air).  In a room with 3% CO2  or a coffin, we will start breathing faster, slight panic.

Most people can’t picture volume.  Go into an average size room (16 feet wide 20 feet long 8 foot ceiling).  Now form a rough ball with your hands that is 5 inches in diameter.  That ball represents the percentage of the air in that room that is pure CO2.  Now make the ball with a 1 inch larger 6 inch diameter.  That is the amount of CO2 that is projected to cause a dangerous increase in global warming that could end human habitation.

Now take this math lesson and laugh at the next person who believes in human caused global warming hysteria.

Next, let’s take a chart with a zero degree line on it and show what the global temperature change looks like over the past 135 years.  Roughly 57F degrees for the whole period.  I’m ignoring that the data is very unreliable until 1979, because on this chart it is irrelevant.

The variations of global temperature are several orders of magnitude smaller than is of any consequence.

We are living with an hysteria born of people who can't understand volume and magnitude.

Evolution in public school ‘theory’

For my entire life I have been subject to a ferocious debate between Lefties and Fundamentalist Christians over teaching Darwinian selection in public schools.  There are countless books, endless school district battles and a famous play and movie about the Scopes Trial and Clarence Darrow.

The Fundamentalist Christians argued that Darwin should only be taught as a theory of human development, not as an historic fact.

The shoe is now on the other foot.  The Leftie Fundamentalists (as I call them) are arguing that human caused global armageddon is a geological climate fact. The rest of the world, including the old coalition of Christian Fundamentalist argue that the climate armageddon is only a theory based on inadequate computer models and should be taught that way in public schools.  Not as a fact.

I'm so glad to see the shoe on the other foot in my old age.  Darwinian selection is only a theory, with many variants, but a very good theory supported by lots of data.  Global climate armageddon is also a theory, but a bad theory refuted by most of the the reliable data.

Armageddon out of here

This is the punch line of a joke two friends invented on a plane returning from Hawaii.  It sounds more like ‘I’m a gettin outa here’.

My point in this blog is not a joke.

I want to call your attention to the idea that an entire generation, a president that calls it the greatest human problem, a pope and a globe full of people who believe in human caused armageddon, is a problem.

I inherently prefer theories that explain human behavior based on demographic, economic or technological trends.  I’ll buy the thesis that some populations are getting taller because of a Darwinian selection process, if I’m shown the data.  I will not accept an explanation based on will power or ideology.

I’ll admit a love of Max Weber and his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  Weber likes the Ethic that uses a view of an afterlife and an invisible state of grace to promote savings.  I like Weber but I’ve always sought a better explanation. See this blog for my version of the same subject.

There is one area where I would prefer a tangible, measurable causal force rather than the one that I am resigned to accept.

We have had substandard economic growth in the U.S. for a decade and substandard growth of new businesses.  For the world economy it has been substandard for a longer period.

Business start-ups is something I know well. Having consulted several thousand small businesses. Business start-ups power economic growth. People only start businesses in a positive economic emotional environment. That is what the hippie revolution in creating new businesses was all about.

Therefore I have to theorize that the pervasive belief and promotion of the impending global armageddon is thwarting business start-up and is consequently the reason for poor American economic growth and as a result for the even poorer global economic growth.

A personal horizon of armageddon is not one that encourages optimism and economic vitality.

When you and your friends are thinking about the end of the world, it is hard to have children and to start a new business.

Parable of Tokyo cleaning service

 

In the mid 1970’s I had one of my favorite painting contractors develop a technique that has become a standard in the painting contractor industry.  

I looked at the individual estimates he made for prospective clients and saw that he could use one standard checklist form.  He did.  The form emphasized the interconnectedness of many paint issues.  Fail to repair gutters and the lifespan of the painting job goes down.  Use a darker color and the lifespan of the painting job goes down. Cut back shrubs and the job costs less. There were a whole range of job components that had an impact on the total price and quality.

A few years later I got a building cleaning service client in Tokyo.  The fellow was just starting out.  That is uniquely difficult in Tokyo where corporate loyalty is deeply ingrained.  Fortunately there was a building boom in Tokyo at the time and some new buildings were potential clients.

My client had a few buildings to clean as a start.  I modified the painting contractor idea to fit this Tokyo client.

I had his workers complete a checklist for each office that was cleaned to be left in the office every month.  The checklist showed all the detailed and intricate cleaning functions that my client’s workers performed.  Japanese are the most fanatic cleanliness people on the planet.

These cleaning checklists became very popular and resulted in countless letters of recommendation for my client as well as frequent conversation in the buildings with employees expressing their thanks.

In less than two years, my client was a major cleaning service in Tokyo.  He is now, decades later,  one of the top three maintenance companies in Japan.

Fallows is always wrong

James Fallows recently gave a talk in San Francisco and I read a summary.  He argued that infrastructure is often under invested in in the modern world.  I know that Fallows is always wrong so I have thought about this issue.

My history with Fallows goes back to the 1980’s when he and a friend of mine were Japan Foundation Fellows for a year in Japan.  Fallows was a terrible guest who demanded that the Foundation provide a chauffeur and car to take his children to school every day.  Ever since hearing that story along with a few worse ones, I have known him to be a simple minded cad.

I’ve never met him.  

The issue of infrastructure is interesting.  America has under invested in airports and intra-urban highways, especially automobile tunnels.  There is a reason.

We have laws of all sorts making this kind of infrastructure investment too costly for the past half century.  First, union wages are always required and costly.  Second there are U.S. tariff barriers around construction materials and heavy equipment significantly raising the costs.  Most importantly, environmental barriers are enormous and can triple and quadruple the cost of any infrastructure.

I’m sure Jim Fallows, a Lefty fundamentalist, never dwelt on these central barriers to infrastructure investment.

On the other hand, America has built an extensive telephone cell system, microwave, water system, electric network, natural gas pipelines, oil transport network and most importantly a fiber optic network all with private funding.  Superb infrastructure.

The government usually fails on infrastructure, like our imaginary high-speed trains and congested airports.  Meantime private investment for private corporations builds the necessary infrastructure rapidly and quietly.

Fallows wouldn’t notice that.

Marrying cousins

This is a very touchy subject.

It is common in the Arab world to marry cousins, sometimes first cousins.  This is part of creating and maintaining a tight intimate family structure.

There is a genetic component to the issue of consanguinity.  It leads to biological defects in the offspring.  This genetic defect consequence is important in many fields. It determines the minimum size of any animal population that can survive.  It is also the source of tribal warfare as a way to get brides from tribes of different gene pools. African slavery was also good for the gene pools of Africa.

Too many defects, reproduced too often and the population dies out.  For humans, we don’t know this minimum population size.

For Arabs this presents a different issue than it might for a population in a prosperous developed society.  In an Arab village there are many jobs, occupations and functions that can be performed by a developmentally disabled child.  Feeding animals, herding, roof maintenance are just a few.  In urban Arab areas it is more of a problem.

In Palestinian society a mentally retarded child can be groomed as a suicide bomber.  This is often the case.  Not a satisfactory solution to the problem as seen by modern Westerners.  

Such young people are being used extensively in Daesh confrontations in Iraq and Syria.  This article shows the high correlation between successful Daesh recruiting and the rural Arab areas, where consanguinity is high.

The whole issue of Arab consanguinity and assimilation to the modern world is one that will have to be discussed someday.

Parable of the sawdust spa

One of the Briarpatch clients that presented a difficult marketing problem was a spa in a small town in Sonoma County about 60 miles north of San Francisco.  Distance was irrelevant.  This is an area filled with health resorts and health treatments.

The problem was that the spa baths were filled with sawdust and mixed in with the sawdust was an enzyme that was eating the sawdust and making it very hot.  So the customer climbed into the bath of sawdust and relaxed in a hot but very light surround of delicate pine chips.  Not something that Americans  were accustomed to.

How to help potential customers understand that this was not only non-threatening but actually beneficial.  The treatment is used extensively in Japan and has been for a long time.

Solution:  send a free coupon to every health practitioner within a 50 mile radius. The coupon was included with a color photo brochure of the beautiful spa and a letter encouraging the health practitioner to come and discover this new health spa treatment.

The marketing assumed that health practitioners are the key nodes in a vast network of health conscious consumers.  If they found something they felt was healthful they would recommend it.

And they did.  Business has been great for many decades since.

Find the key gatekeepers and trusted advisors in your field of business and get them interested in what you have to offer.

Pens everywhere

I was recently teaching a class in working as a voter registrar.  I noticed that I had brought a box of pens and mentioned that the students I was training would need to have a box of ball points with them when they were registering voters.

Why?

We treat pens as free goods.  While banks still have delicate chains on their pens, nearly everywhere else pens are treated as trivial.  Restaurants lose a lot of pens to people who are signing credit card receipts.

Part of the reason is because ballpoint pens are very cheap.  But we are not so generous with other cheap items like water and air at gas stations (in Calif. they require $.50 in coins) or ice in bags, or soap in public bathrooms.  

We are generous with cheap items when they are part of complete transaction such as a coffee shop where we give napkins, sugar, cream and paper cups.  Or gas stations where we give paper towels, window cleaning fluid and sometimes coffee.

It could be pens are treated as free because they are cheap AND they are not usually part of another transaction that is being bought.

Parable of lotions and smells

One of the first oils, soaps and lotions stores in the U.S. was opened in the Castro district in San Francisco in the early 1970s.  The store was very small but had hundreds of small bottles of fragrances and even more variations of soaps, incense and body lotions.

The store was a member of the Briarpatch so I was asked to visit it often as it was growing.  After a year and a half of solid and impressive growth the growth slowed down noticeably.

When I got there I checked the financials, something I have always required of businesses I consult with.  Indeed the rapid growth of revenue has slowed down to a crawl.

I looked around to see what changes had been made.  Only one stood out.  A white soft toilet seat had been placed in a central spot above eye level on one wall.  It was there because it was soft and luxurious by the owner's standard.  His view was that the store was about ‘pleasuring yourself’.

I suggested the store was about a conceptual world of 'smell and scent'. In the conceptual world of smell, a toilet seat was associated with bad smells.  The owner wisely took down the white soft toilet seat.

On a visit two months later, revenues were growing rapidly again. The consumer conception of the store was primarily about smells and scents.  Maybe pleasure secondarily.

Business is often built around mental constructs.  A brilliant audio on this is Eviatar Zerubavel.  He explains why hamster food is in a section of the grocery far away from the rat poison.  And why we eat herring but not goldfish.

Microaggressions are good

Out of sheer courtesy I will say what ‘microaggressions’ are, though I am certain all my readers know what they are.

They are the trivial acts where whites (usually males) are accused of ignoring hostile references to non-whites and non Americans.

Examples are: using a scale of 1 to 10 graphically and making the 1 to 5 black to gray. Signalling that black is inferior.  Making a monster or the bad character in a story wear black clothes or costumes. Or wearing a woman’s wig.  Again signalling that black and female are negative.  Or referring to the leader of a group as chairman, implying that women are not leaders.

So why do I consider this focus on microaggressions to be good?

The focus on microaggressions is apparently rampant on college and university campuses with classes on the subject and faculty complaining about their mistreatment because of the issue.

If this is a modern day real concern then the important old issues of racism, patriarchy and a whole range of phobias (homo, islamo, etc) are no longer evident in our society.  

You don’t complain about too many flies and gnats when there are wolves, lions and poison snakes in your neighborhood.

Parable of motorcycle marketing

I went to see an old client a few days ago.  The man who prompted me to start writing parables about business.

Michael is a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area.  After many years of doing auto and related insurance cases, Michael concentrated on motorcycle accidents.

He did so because there was a large market where a single lawyer could become a well known leader.  And because he loves motorcycles.

Michael’s reputation rapidly spread.  I even found myself describing one of his cases where the client ran his motorcycle into a telephone pole.  Michael collected a large settlement from the phone company for the client.

Michael recently outfitted a  Mercedes van with a luxury interior and standup room.  He has to drive to many courthouses around the Bay.  Traffic is so bad that a half hour trip can sometime take an hour and a half.  Most lawyers go early and then go to a Starbucks or a Denny’s to work and pass the time.

Michael has a modem, refrigerator and tables in his van.  He can sit in luxury and enjoy himself or work, on the many occasions when he arrives at a courthouse early.

A  friend suggested that Michael put an advertising skin on his van.  The side designs were pretty obvious. A motorcycle and name of the firm.  It is on the back that Michael’s marketing genius came into play.  He put the image of the back of a motorcyclist giving the universal ‘go around’ sign.  

In the first week he got a motorcycle accident client who saw the back of the van. That single legal fee paid for the van. 

Great marketing is always an act of insight.

Bus exhaust debate

Most buses I see have their exhaust outlet at the roof level.  This has been true since the early 1970’s.  This was a brilliant but simple invention that everyone loves and benefits from.

It is meaningful to me.  I have invented, discovered and created many original products, devices and ideas.  It is rare that I get the appropriate credit for my originality and contribution. (List of 15 original ideas).  There are two arguments I confront.

One is that the idea I came up with would have come to someone, anyone, with more time.  Maybe within a few more years.

The other is that I got my idea from a milieu and someone else might have gotten it too.  The time was ripe.

A few years ago I tried to demonstrate for one of my granddaughters the power of original ideas.  We were at a street fair in Seattle and we came across a design school with a few students displaying their designs.  I asked my granddaughter to watch what I did.

I challenged the students to design a modem.  I said that nearly every household in America had a modem but they were usually hidden because they were so poorly designed and generally ugly.

The design students promptly drew a half dozen pictures of new modems.  Most cute, like ceramic cats or bedroom clocks.

I told my granddaughter that this challenge would quickly get into the thinking of the whole design world and within three years we would we see some attractive modems.  

Three years is up.  I sent her the image of a new, well designed modem that just came on the market.

But that doesn’t show cause and effect.  My cause.

The bus exhaust does show cause and effect.  The idea is so simple and powerful that it could have appeared anytime in the prior 35 years from the time when buses became common and spewed exhaust on every street level human being.

But it didn’t.  It required one person in the right place to come up with that idea.  I don’t know who it was, but it was one person.  Thank you sir or madam for showing the world that good ideas, often obvious, do not occur spontaneously.

Genius is important and original ideas are vital for modernity.

Parable of Michael

I think my readers owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Padway.  

Michael is a long  time friend and client.  We often have a chance to relax and chat about his latest brilliant business exploits.

I sometimes add a few stories from my several thousand business clients to the discussion.

Yesterday, Michael suggested that these stories are parables.  People whose parents are in business get to hear stories like these at home and at meals.  Michael’s parents were both in business.  With Michael’s introduction, I once did a job for his father’s insurance headhunting firm.  

Others, without business parents, may need parables like these to succeed in business.

The first parable is about Michael’s law firm, which he ran with his brother.  The firm did auto liability claims.  Usually a victim of an auto accident was the plaintiff against an insurance company.

Michael ran a powerful ad on post-mid-night TV that generated many responsive phone calls every day.  The firm had lawyers on the phones full time screening callers to see if they had viable lawsuits.  This phone answering was costly to the firm, because it required expensive lawyers to do the screening.

Michael’s solution was to make a high quality professional video tape (an important medium in the days before DVD’s and the Internet) and sent it immediately to everyone who phoned in with a case.  The video helped the potential plaintiff decide if they had a viable case.  If they did, they were given a quick pitch on why Michael’s firm could be good for them and what they could expect on the way a lawsuit would progress with medical exams and legal filings.

It was a brilliant screening, selling and training mechanism and increased the number of viable cases while reducing legal hours in getting good clients.

With that success in hand, Michael added an even more brilliant video.  

He created a video to prepare his plaintiffs for depositions.  Depositions with cross examinations are part of nearly every lawsuit.  They require preparation time that is expensive; most clients are anxious about being cross examined under oath.  The deposition video was a stunning success in preparing plaintiffs.

Such a success that Michael’s firm was able to sell the video far and wide in the legal profession.

In-house money saving option becomes outside revenue producer.

Oh it hurts

I was just looking at an old folder that I had put in a box of expired drivers licenses, credit cards and old business cards. I had put an envelop in the box of emergency cash and traveler's cheques. Some of the cash was French Francs. Some was Canadian dollars.

This says a number of relevant things.  

This stash must be more than 16 years old.  I haven’t used traveler’s cheques in thirty years, even for travel in Africa.  The world has come to accept my invention (the multi-bank) credit card, Visa and Mastercard.  It is nearly universal and has pretty much replaced travellers cheques.  Though the cheques are theoretically still cashable.  But only by me; and I’m old.  

I tried to put them in my checking account.  So far I have failed.  My local Wells Fargo had no idea of how to process them.  I will try several other approaches.

The Canadian dollars have been for a ride. I probably created this box in the mid 1990’s when the Canadian dollar was $.73.  A few years later by 2002 it had dropped to $.63.  Then it began a steady rise to over $1.00 from 2010 to 2013.  At one point in September 2007 it was worth more than $1.10.  Now it is worth $.77.

The French Francs took a more tortuous journey.  I had over $1,000 worth when I put them away for safe storage in the mid 1990’s.  Along came the Euro in 1999 when I had forgotten I had the francs.  

When I just looked up the value of my francs I found they are now worth $0.00.  The French Francs had been redeemable in Euros up until February 2011.

I will hold on to them.  Despite the solidity of the Euro during the crash of the Greek economy and the near crash of the Spanish and Portuguese economies, there remains the possibility of dissolution of the Euro in the next financial panic.  The Spanish and the Greeks are not likely to change their siesta-and-bribery lifestyles.

Old hookers folklore

Back in the wild hippie days, I helped Margo St. James found a hookers organization called Coyote.  I gave her an office and some foundation money to get started as well as abundant operational advice.  

For the first five years, until Margo was seduced by the anti-male feminists around her, Margo gave me full credit for my role in founding her organization.

This is by way of introducing a subject my readers will never have encountered anywhere else.  I got to meet many hookers (street working prostitutes) as well as call girls and others in the trade.  I met them in  unthreatening, none business social situations.

One old tale that was widely believed was that sex with many men would keep a woman from getting pregnant; that men’s sperm would fight each other’s.

Years later, when I was involved with the research done for the Institute for the Advance Study of Human Sexuality I learned that the old tale from hookers was probably right.

There are three kinds of human spermatozoa.   One aims just to impregnate the ovum.  One aims to attack spermatozoa from other males.  The third is intended to create a more acidic vaginal environment to thwart other males' sperm.

The ratio of these three types of sperm varies with the occasion; it depends on frequency of ejaculate, time of separation from the female and other situational contexts.

The other related sperm phenomenon that was passed on from old hooker tales and was confirmed with recent scientific methods is that sperm success is sometimes related to female orgasm.  In careful studies it has been found that after a female organism the cervex is likely to dilate and allow entrance to more sperm.  In some instances the uterus also displays a pulsating movement that moves the ejaculate toward the ovum.

If you are looking for the original research on these issues add the term ‘academic’ to your google search and be prepared for paywalls around every article.

Here is a good summary of the research.

Accreditation agencies

Recently Senator Marco Rubio offered some new ideas for reducing the costs of college.  He proposed some national experimental accreditation agencies.  He also made clear that accrediting agencies are a primary source of the astronomic and rising costs of higher education.

Who am I to jump into this debate and even suggest that part of the horrible anti-education anti-Jew Lefty bias of colleges may have the same source?

I was on a specialized accreditation committee.  The State of California accredits colleges to operate.  This occurs long before the same institution is eligible for accreditation by the standard six self-perpetuating accrediting agencies.  

The educational group being accredited was the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.  It only gives postgraduate degrees.  I was on the committee because of the financial issues that needed review.

The basic goal of accreditation in all academic circumstances is to make sure that an educational organization that offers degrees or certification is capable of taking the students money, offering the course material that it promises and surviving long enough to deliver the degrees or certificates.  It is a fraud prevention function.

An aside.  The the accreditation agency for community colleges decertified the City College of San Francisco, after giving three years of warning. I was stunned to find a Superior Court judge who stopped the decertification.  The decertification notice was issued because the college could not survive based on its incompetent and bankrupt financial management.  How in the world could a Superior Court judge decide that the finances were adequate to keep the school going?  He, Curtis Karnow, couldn’t.  Judges are often corrupt. Too often.

The accreditation committee I was on looked at the financial reserves to make sure that the Institute could pay the faculty, the rent and all administrative costs for enough years to survive in business till the last student graduated.  We made sure the faculty had sufficient educational and professional experience to deliver the subject matter.  Many Ph.Ds on the faculty is the usual measure.  The building maintenance levels were checked. And lastly that all the course descriptions fit the amount of video, audio and print reference material available.

For the thousands of colleges and universities in the U.S. that are accredited by the six accrediting agencies, each pays $millions annually for their accreditation.  No one can get into this private elite club unless they are just as expensive and just as Lefty and just as a academically zombie ridden as the existing institutions.  The six accreditation agencies are a pure zombie maintenance system.

With Senator Rubio’s proposal, a new  innovative and inexpensive academia could arise and flourish.  Private colleges and universities might even be formally accredited.  God forbid (Sarcasm). 

American origins of commerce

Why has commerce thrived in the U.S. for 170 years and why did it thrive in England and Northern Europe for the 80 years prior to WWI?

Modern commerce requires four elements to thrive.  Meritocracy, diversity, openness and markets.  

‘Markets’ is not in my blog title because it is assumed in the meaning of commerce.  But most people don’t understand that centrally planned societies like the USSR, Mao’s China, Cuba, and North Korea can not exist in a world without the open markets in the outside world around them.  Central planners can not allocate resources without knowing the relative demand for goods and services.  They know this from looking at world prices.  These prices include the cost of production and a measure of the demand.  Which can not be figured out, guessed or known outside of a market price system.

Meritocracy doesn’t work in a tribal world or a strictly hierarchical world.  In both a member of the family is given the job of bookkeeper and director of logistics, in preference to a non-family member.  When that is widespread it stifles meritocracy.  

England and Northern Europe had the U.S. and the global colonies as refuge for the meritocratic members of their society before WWI.  The U.S. had the great West.  A talented but stifled young person in Boston could go to San Francisco. A stifled youth in Edinburgh could go to Bombay or Sydney.

The same was true for diversity.  All of America was an open society with immigrants of every talent and skill arriving.  The same for the global colonies.  A retail shop in San Francisco or Bombay was staffed with people from everywhere in the world with an infinite array of talents.  Jews worked next to Muslims, next to Scots, next to a Chilean monk, next to a Jain, next to an old Samoan sailor.  Diversity has to do with diverse talents, skills, worldviews and experience.  It is not based on gender, sexual tastes, ethnicity or age.

Openness is the bi-product of non-tribal people having to work together.  Dishonesty, misdirection, obfuscation and sophistry don’t work in these circumstances.

The great American West and global colonialism were the fertile ground for the growth of modern commerce.

Getting to random legislature

Those of you who are knowledgeable are aware that I wrote the first article proposing the use of random selection for legislative bodies in 1977 and published the first book on the subject in 1985.

Can we get a selection of randomly selected real human beings in the House of Representatives without an amendment to the Constitution?  Yes.

Article 1 section 2 of our Constitution tells how Congress is to be created: "No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen..”

Therefore any state can could create a lottery of citizens with seven years citizenship over the age of 25 and send them to Congress.  The selectees could be sent every two years on any repetitive cycle.  If the term chosen was was to be six years, one third of the Congressional delegation from the state would be newly selected every two years with the older members returned.

California has 53 members, Texas has 36 Florida has 27 and Wisconsin 11.  Several states could create the movement to create a random U.S. Congress. The 'real representatives' would far outshine the elected foggies making their desirability obvious.

We will see this kind of movement in 2021 as more states adopt the California district apportionment method of randomly selecting the citizens for the apportionment committees.

Early American heart removal

I visited the Cahokia capital city on the east bank of the Mississippi recently.  The museum is well funded, excellent dioramas and outstanding collections of artifacts.  

The site includes dozens of tall mounds including the major central mound around 90 ft. tall.  It looks like the Aztec pyramids I saw in Eastern Guatemala.

The site was nearly empty on a Sunday morning.  It could have been crowded with a little honesty about the archaeology of the site.  The top of the main mound was used to sacrifice young virgins.  We know this because the mound (#72) is the mound of honored burial that includes the powerful dignitaries AND hundreds of young girls.

I know that the girls were virgins whose hearts were removed while they were still alive because all the artwork in clay, copper and stone have the same graphics as the Aztec.  To me, and most people with a brain, that means the culture and religion were the same. The gods were the same and they wanted living virgins.  A little Islamic, don’t you think.

So why isn’t this aspect of Cahokia a prominent public fact?  Heart removal of virgins in the heartland of America?  My daughter, the archaeologist-anthropologist, says that publicizing that aspect of Cahokia would be strongly opposed by local tribes. We are so politically correct.

The connection to the Aztecs is also omitted.  For no obvious reason.  Again, one would have to be blind to miss the myriad identical features.

The most important omission from my perspective is the Lefty-Fundamentalist denial of Cahokia as a product of the Medieval Warming Period.  There is some discussion, in the museum plaques, of the environment that created abundant nourishment for crops and the later crop failures.  Along with claims that leadership failed and local warfare brought the large capital to an end.  Probably true, but the main cause was the global warming starting in 800CE that ran three hundred years before it ended, called the Medieval Warming Period.

This is the same time the Aztecs built their pyramids, the great Chaco Canyon Culture thrived, the Vikings settled Greenland (that is what they named the ice covered island we see today), explored Northern Canada and the East Coast as far South as the St. Lawrence and apples and oranges were grown in Scotland.

The Lefty-Fundamentalists are trying to promote an armageddon view of global warming to stifle our great commercial society.  The fact that there was a recent global warming that only lasted a few hundred years and brought bounty to many parts of the world, contradicts their nonsense.  So it is suppressed.

Now you know.  Cahokia is a great site to visit.  Keep your eyes and your mind open.  We live in a period of hysterical Lefty blindness.

What happened to St. Louis?

I recently went to St. Louis for the wedding of a young friend of mine.  While there I went across the Mississippi to see the 1000 year old Cahokia capital which will be the next blog and drove around St. Louis extensively. Also took an helicopter ride.

St. Louis looks like Detroit.  You can drive several miles in the inner ring of the city and see block after block with one abandoned house on the block and the rest of the land empty. Actually a half slice of the northern part of the city. Great for raising chickens or goats. You will occasionally come to a cluster of small buildings that are a liquor store, smoke shop, barber and mini grocery. A few blacks hanging around.  Sometimes there is a black chain fried chicken outlet.

The only riots I can find were last year’s in Ferguson which is a suburb that is an extension of this inner ring of abandoned lives.

The only explanation is that the black population grew and drove out the whites who abandoned their homes. At some point there were no home buyers left that could afford to pay ‘anything’.

The sight is shocking and sickening.  St. Louis is nearly all suburbs with thriving businesses ten to twenty miles out.  The perimeter is thriving.  The inner ring is a black nightmare.

I know many American cities, none that I frequently visit looks like St. Louis or Detroit.  Which others are like this?  Baltimore?

Population growth and America’s urban decline

Leftism is a grim future.

Most of the industrial world has been facing a population decline.  The reproductive rate for nearly all developed countries is below the 2.1 level needed for sustained population.  Many countries are in the 1.2 to 1.4 range meaning rapid population decline.  Here is a table that compares three different sources.

The data for Japan is correct.  The population peaked a few years ago and the decline is visible all around the country.  The data for the U.S. is lower than the reality.

One important lesson from the chart is that it explains the willingness of the Scandinavian countries, Germany and the Mediterranean european countries to take in Muslim immigrants. They are well below reproductive survival rate and they hope new immigrants, young ones, will support their aging populations.

In most non-developed countries families are large because the children are needed for the family workforce and to support the elderly in the family.  Less so in developed countries.

The United States is usually at 2.1 and Israel is at 3.0, the two exceptions to the global pattern.  The U.S. is the only large developed country with a healthy reproductive rate.  Israel is wealthy and growing from children as well as from significant immigration.  Israel’s growth is not due to a religious population or domestic Arabs.  Why.

I can identify only one reason.  In Israel it is obvious: the social hierarchy is weak and social advancement is straightforward.  Therefore the people are optimistic about their future and their own ability to triumph from their own efforts.  This may look like multiple reasons but it is one reason.  People are optimistic because they can create their own future and succeed.

This is true for parts of the U.S.  It is true for new immigrants.  It is true for Republicans and suburbanites.  America completely lacks a social hierarchy and geographic movement is easy.

It is not true for urban Democrats who have few children or none.  They are not optimistic and don’t see a positive future.

Many countries are trying incentives to get their young population to reproduce.  None have succeeded.  My explanation is that their is no optimism in a hierarchical society nor in a socialist society where individual merit is scorned.

England boomed during the 19th Century when industrious and hard driven individuals could go to the colonies.  The same was true for Europe when people were free to go to the United States and the global colonies.  The end of WWII was the end of hope for most Brits and Europeans.

Population growth ended. 

Obama and the black cargo cult

Preachers in the black community are much revered.  When they wear bling, gaudy clothes and drive pimped-up cars, their parishioners are supportive.  Why?

Barack Obama gives speeches when he wants to enact policy in the U.S.  He talks about his policy in half a dozen speeches around the country.  He does this for everything.  When he wants to raise taxes on the rich, he gives speeches on income inequality.  When he want to increase the budget for infrastructure, he gives speeches in colleges on the subject. He always gives the same speech for the same reason on gun control with no policy recommendations.  To change foreign policy, he gives speeches in foreign countries. He then insults the Republican Congress, the only people who could create action. Why?

Its cargo cult behavior.  Americans came to know about cargo cults after WWII in the Pacific.

The American military drove out the Japanese from the islands of Vanuatu and then used the islands as a base for supplying forces in the South Pacific.  Airbases and military compounds were created and vast supplies of medicine, food, arms and clothing was transhipped.  Some was given to the natives and some was leftover after the war.

When the Japanese and Americans left the natives tried to re-create the wealth and abundance of the military period.  They dressed in military clothes, marched in formation with sticks, cleared landing strips, and built buildings, control towers and airplanes out of bamboo.  It was a form of magic that the natives believed would bring back the wealth of the foreign military.  It has since been named a ‘cargo cult’.

Much of the American black community believes in a similar form of magic.  It is the belief that a good speech inviting action will result in that action.

This form of magic is evident in nearly every black church.  The preacher, who is eloquent, implores God to treat his congregation with good health, prosperity and well being.  A chorus of loud singing and hurrahs is part of the invocation from God.  Most black parishioners believe that a good sermon and a vigorous church response will inveigh benefits.

That is the black tradition that twenty years in Jeremiah Wright’s congregation taught Barack Obama.

If you doubt me, go to an authentic black church this Sunday.  Non-blacks are always welcome.

'I want to go back to prison'

Back in the days when I was the manager of a black church, I had a good friend, Jackson, in his late 20’s, who was an ex-felon.  He committed a new crime because he wanted to go back to prison. 

We never talked about his desire to go back to prison.  Most of what Jackson was doing, while out of prison,  was having sex with big (heavy) white women.  His interest in that seemed to be wearing off.  He didn’t find much else of interest to him.  He really didn’t like the chaotic life of a free man.

The story that relates to this Judge Judy video is that my friend committed theft from an auto and ran and hid nearby, where the cops found him.  On the day of his trial, the lawyer that I hired to defend him was sick and sent another attorney from his office.  The alternate attorney had not been briefed on the case and certainly didn’t know that Jackson was guilty.  

 The prosecutor from the DA’s office recited the facts of the case.  The lawyer turned to Jackson expecting to get a different version of why he was found hiding.  Jackson said ‘no, that’s pretty correct”.   Whatever defense he had worked out with the main lawyer, the new lawyer didn’t know anything about it.  Jackson went to prison, which is what he wanted.

While we are at it.  I have long known that the recidivism rate is 66% from State prison.  What I didn’t know was that is the rate after one year.  After 3 years it is 85%.  Most ex-felons don’t stay out of prison. Nearly all go back.

So much for prison reform that the Left talks about so much.

Quinine

I became aware of the uses of quinine in my graduate student research on the economic history of Africa.  Every European explorer in the 19th century used quinine to protect against and treat malaria.  Quinine comes from the bark of the cinchona tree.  An overdose of quinine is called cinchonism.

I recently learned from a friend, Roger H., who was the pianist for the San Francisco and New York City ballet companies that dancer’s leg cramps were treated with liquid quinine.

When I decided to try it on my bedtime leg cramps from old age, I found that it had been banned by the FDA for commercial use since 1994.  It is now only available in effective medical dosage via prescription.

The FDA made this judgement based on 157 reports of problems over 23 years with 23 deaths.  As usual with the government, we are being protected from an irrelevance by people who have no sense of statistics or proportion.

Over 23 years roughly one million people performed ballet and used quinine for leg cramps an unknown number of times per year.  

That gives us a harm report of less than one person per 100,000 uses per year.  More people are killed by mules kicking them in the head worldwide, than are harmed by quinine.

(The deaths from mule kicks to the head is a standard statistical number based on millions of mules used in WWI.)

Good lord, government can be ridiculous.

You can use tonic water before bed at about one quarter the dose level that works quickly.

Rethinking the tenacity of commerce

There are four attributes of commerce that resemble the Darwinian aspects of nature.  

The first is the creation of the modern commercial income distribution.  As I have calculated on an earlier blog commerce generates one billionaire per million workers.  That resembles a Darwinian world with one giant sequoia for every million bushes.

The second is that for life to grow, new living cells must replace dead cells.  New organisms replace dead ones. That is part of commerce (not part of government which is more like cancer that Darwinian life). where new businesses replace dying businesses. Thanks Hans D.

The third is that commerce thrives on meritocracy.  The best suited person for every job or function is given that job or function.  Not a relative or fellow tribal member. Meritocracy resembles Darwinian selection of ‘most fitting’  the core to species survival.

Fourth, diversity trumps homogeneity of species and niches for species survival.  Diversity is a core value of commerce.  Not ideological diversity of race, ethnicity or gender but real diversity of skills, imagination, values and competence.

This similarity of human created modern commerce to Darwinian processes gives me some hope for the survival of modern commerce against the current cancerous hysteria of Lefty fundamentalism.

Entire species do get wiped out regularly.

Why San Francisco is so sick

My son and several friends have moved away from San Francisco.  Has San Francisco changed?

Moving away from San Francisco is not new.  All my friends in public school left the City when they grew up.  

The reason was best explained by my good friend Catherine who said San Francisco was a calderon where people come to find out who they were.  Nobody introduced themselves based on their job; they said what they were working on or their ‘sign’.  

So the people I grew up with knew who they were and they moved to where those talents and inclinations were appropriate: Marin, the Peninsula or the East Bay.

San Francisco was settled by cosmopolitans from everywhere and particularly from New Orleans circa 1850.  Many Jews came to this wild west and completely ‘new society’.  This was an egalitarian city for the first 50 years.

The world’s first hippies settled here in the 1880-90’s and again in the 1960-70’s because the City was infinitely tolerant and the city government was incompetent.  The government was deliberately made incompetent by the large anarchist population from 1875 to 1925.

When California invented the Progressive movement in the 1905-20’s with civil service jobs, non-partisan elections and the initiative process, San Francisco voted against it.  A contrarian population.

San Francisco was so radical it had the first and only ‘General Strike’ in America in the summer of 1934. The Longshoremen started it. Later the Longshoremen elected an open communist as their leader; Harry Bridges (I knew Harry).

While San Francisco had an hereditary elite, (from 1900 until 1963) social structure was never powerful here.  A.P. Giannini, an Italian immigrant was able to build the giant Bank of America in San Francisco. 'Society' was always convivial and tolerant.  That is why the gay men dishonorably discharged from the military after WWII stayed in San Francisco in such large numbers.

This friendly, tolerant and weakly governed City survived until the 1990’s.  The national demographic shift that polarized American society geographically had a dramatic effect on San Francisco.  The City rapidly became a 100% Lefty socialist city controlled by labor unions.  Lefty socialists moved here and gained political control by late 1990.  

Over time, these newcomers have changed the character of the City.  Their view of tolerance has become individual irresponsibility.  The homeless population has grown and the City government now spends $100,000 per year per homeless person.  The City is filthy, with light poles falling over from the pee rotting the bottoms of the poles.

The City government spends all its bond revenue money on street maintenance because the operating budget goes almost entirely to retirement benefits for the vast army of union city employees who earn 150% of private market wages.

The City is no longer friendly, it is Democrat-angry and Democrat-class-envy ridden.  The city, once noted for its formal dress, women’s hats and gloves and men’s double breasted suits is now a shambles of Friday-dress code every day.  

Hippies introduced the casual dress code for the City and it has become the norm today.  The hippies also created the right to sleep on the sidewalk, now enjoyed by the street people.  The street people rudeness is so outrageous that it is mentioned in surveys by over 70% of all tourists.

The out of control prices of houses and rents are due partially to the large native Chinese population that makes the City a comfortable investment destination for wealthy Chinese from China.  The IPO winnings from new computer and Internet markets explains the rest.  More than one third of expensive houses are empty because the wealthy only spend a little time here.  They avoid the high California taxes.

Crime is returning to the streets of San Francisco despite the shrinking of the black population from a high of 14% to the current 4%.  Almost all the crime is due to recent State of California legislation and practices plus to the local police response to the national Democrat war on police.

San Francisco is still beautiful because houses at the street level don’t change much over a century and the hills and water change even less.  The people are less appealing, less friendly, less personally responsible every day and the artistic vitality seems to be draining away.

I can’t see the future.  What I see now is somewhat grim.

Added to the debate

This is the most exciting presidential primary in my life.  New ideas, new issues. Of course I’m talking about the Republican primary.  The Democrats have nothing new and they haven’t during my adult lifetime.

What have the Republicans introduced into the American national debate?   

• First was the issue of anchor babies.  Mothers coming to the U.S. for a short time to have their babies and get the newborn American citizenship.  I had to reread the 14th Amendment to see that Congress could pass a law requiring a modest residence requirement on this strange activity.  

• The question was raised whether a Sharia believing Muslim could be president. This harkened back to the debates of the 1950’s about a electing a communist president. Sidney Hook made the cogent arguments against such a president.  Then in Algeria where a communist was elected, his actions against democracy were so horrific that the military threw out the communists.  We saw the same with a Muslim president in Egypt.  He had to be thrown out.

• North Korea is not an autonomous state.  It is a puppet of China and all restraint on North Korea must be applied to China directly.

• Women are not fools. The democrat campaign to put a woman on the $10 bill was called out as an overt patronizing act.

• Several Republicans have shown that the biased Leftwing media can be handled best by attacking them with clarity and forcefulness.  The bulk of America loves to see the media skewered for its blatant and intrusive Lefty bias.

My personal thanks to all the Republican presidential primary candidates.  I am sure there will be many more innovative and positive new debate issues on our national scene.

Torque

There are two aspects of torque that affect daily life that I want to comment on.

The first deals with my Army specialty dating from the early 1960’s.  I was in a railway repair unit.  (No railroads in Vietnam.) None of my fellow enlistee reservists were interest in our railroad training during summer camp.  It was a time to drink and sleep for them.  I used the time to drive locomotives, repair diesel engines and learn welding.

The engines then and now were diesel electric.  A giant 6 cylinder diesel was running all the time at the most efficient RPM, turning a generator.  The generator was used to run electric motors connected to all the wheels of the engine.  Why was a diesel engine driving an electric power system?

You only needed to look at the load an engine pulls.  100 freight cars in a line.  A heavy line.

The problem is to get the load moving in the first place, from a dead stop.

An electric motor has its greatest power between zero and one mile per hour.  That is when the electromagnet in the motor pulls its first fraction of an inch of iron.  That pull becomes rotation.  Power applied to rotation is called torque. You know how a magnet can snap something nearby.

Torque is why electric cars are so zippy.  They start with immense torque to go from zero to moving.  That is why hybrids start off with electricity before they go to gasoline motors at higher speeds. Electric has the most torque at starting speeds.

Our other daily encounter with torque is the human body.  I learned this from my son  when he taught me Chinese martial arts 15 years ago.  I soon got to see the plastinated bodies on a tour from China.

Our bodies are entirely torqued to get movement.  Every muscle has a twist to it to get maximum strength.  The same is true for bones, ligaments and connecting tissue.  It is with torque that we are able to move and balance.  

Chinese martial arts focuses on twisting and torque movements for power and leverage.  I use all the twisting exercises and movements to remain limber.  

I see myself as a vast infinite collecting of torqued connections.

Labor shortage

Read this article that I got from my essential friend Alex.

It suggests that we have been in period of cheap and abundant labor for two decades and that that has come to an end.

I love grandiose theories.  I was attracted to Marx at age 12, to Freud at 14 and Wesley Mitchell at 18.  I still love grandiose theories but I know they are not applicable to humans or human societies.

This article is based on data I don’t have.  The baby boom provided much labor for the 1980’s and 1990’s,  China has been drawing in workers from the farms for 25 years.  The fall of the USSR brought cheap labor to Europe and the world.

Sadly the Arab influx these days can’t be considered cheap labor, too unskilled; the same is true of African immigrants.  Virtually no useful skills in either group.  

Mexicans and Latins coming to the U.S. are useful labor.

Abundant labor may be a good explanation of the past 25 years of deflation, zero interest and the initial jump in productivity.  And it may have come to an end.

I know the cheap Chinese labor is over.  I went and looked.  But the remaining shortage of labor is not evident to me.  Nor is the consequence of inflation returning and labor costs rising.  

Japan has done a wonderful job dealing with this for 25 years.  They moved factories to low wage countries.  There are plenty left: Indonesia, India, Philippines, Malaysia and other S.E. Asia.  

Japan also used robots and better administration.  These have vast potentials in the U.S. where about 10% of the labor force works hard and competently.  The rest is  marginal.

I love the cheap labor observation in this article but I don’t see it as coming to an end with a return to inflation.

Obesity ratchet

I’ve advanced my own idea of the reason for the almost global obesity issue.  I argue that the Darwinian competition at the retail food shelf has increased the appeal of fattening food to the point that they are individually tailored and irresistible.

I have broadened my view to include every explanation that is circulating.  I accept them all.

I now recognize my daughter Cynthia’s observation as the core fact of obesity.  Cynthia says that once you gain weight you can’t lose it.

I have been to Weight Watchers three times.  The first two times I lost massive amounts of weight.  And gained it back over a few years.

The best U.S. study of weight loss found that Weight Watchers had the best success of all weight loss programs.  But only 3% of graduates kept their weight off for three years.

Understanding the ratchet reality of obesity gives us a full understanding of the issue.  You can gain weight for any reason; sugar, corn syrup, fat, lassitude, stress, cheaper food…. any reason it doesn’t matter.

The whole population gains weight because their is a ratchet effect.  We go up, but we don’t go down.  Awfully simple.  Three cheers for Occam’s Razor and Occam’s hatchet.