Pro Commerce

Knitters

There are many knitters in my family.  After they have made as many sweaters, caps, socks and mittens as the rest of the family can use, they start all over again.

For the last decade there has been a new focus for the creative talents of knitters.  It has various names, the most common is ‘yarn bombing’ and various combinations of the words  knitting and graffiti.

The photo on the right is from a stop sign in my neighborhood that got a warm jacket on the pole for this current winter.

I wrote a blog on the end of art a while back. Part of my argument is that art has entered everyday life in such a way it can’t be distinguished from any other part of life.

Yarn bombing is a perfect example.  It is not an example that everybody is an artist, it is an example that we can find vitality anywhere.  Art can be everything and anything.  We live in a world where human artifacts are extraordinary.

We live in a commercial world where each human can become fully alive and fully realized.

Destroy ancient cities

As I enjoy watching the Lefty PC crowd demand history be changed to suit their own worldviews I see a parallel.

I’m fine with Woodrow Wilson’s name being removed from a Foreign Policy Institute at Princeton and the Statue of Thomas Jefferson being removed from the campus of William and Mary.  Because I have a strong distaste for both their politics.  To me it is like tearing down a statue of Stalin or Saddam Hussein.  The were strong opponents of commerce, Luddites who envisioned a world before the industrial revolution brought us modernity.  

But Jefferson was a founder of the U of Virginia and that can’t be erased.  The same with the statue of Wilson as president.  He was.

The PC crowd doesn’t stop at things I approve of.  They really want people removed from history for ideas and values that didn’t exist at the time those people lived. Jefferson wasn’t anti-gay, anti-feminist and certainly didn’t object to transvestites. But slavery and urban values were in discussion and he was on the wrong side of both.  

His role in the Declaration and the creation of the Democrat Party and the U. of Virginia are important parts of history and parts of our current world.

What the Lefty PC crowd gets wrong is the belief that historic figures should be removed from memory because of their current fickle opinions. This is a sign of their religious insanity.

Is ‘religious insanity’ too strong a term?  No. because we justifiably apply it to Muslims who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan and the ones who destroyed  the ancient Palmyra Greek structures in Syria.

History belongs to everyone and when a self selected group decides what the rest of the world can see, know or touch they are thieves of the first order.  Downright evil.  

That is true for the PC American college students and faculty who are doing the same thing now, including banning the Confederate Battle flag wherever they can ban it.

Poor sinners

It is hard to realize how deep is American Puritanism.  (Puritanism is the fear than somebody else, somewhere else, is having fun.  They are sinning.)

As a consequence it is hard to understand the Lefty desire to punish poor people.  The two are the same.  Poor people are sinners; we are justified in taxing them heavily.  Of course Lefties ostensibly claim they want to help poor people.  But ‘help’ is usually stopping them from sinning.

Californians are preparing to add new taxes on cigarettes with an initiative next year.  ‘We never tax the poor enough.’

The environmental movement is just part of a larger Lefty-Puritan belief that poor people are immoral.  ‘Punish them’ is the urban Democrat mantra.  And the environmental mantra.

Evidence that poor people are immoral and deserve punishment:

• they smoke more than others, tax cigarettes heavily and ban e-cigarettes.

• they drink much more alcohol than others, tax it heavily and limit the hours it can be sold.

• they drive old cars so we should tax gasoline heavily and we should require lots of expensive smog checks on their old cars, subsidize electric cars because poor people never drive electrics,

• they don’t maintain their housing so we should  make them pay for rich people’s solar and electric car subsidies with high utility bills and high water and sewer rates;

• they enjoy junk food; let’s raise the minimum wage and put junk food restaurants out of business.

• most importantly they have children without getting married.  Sinners. We should punish them any way we can.

The bonus to this Lefty, environmental , Puritan thinking: When we tax poor people we are just getting back the welfare and other subsidies that we give to them with our taxes.

Listen to the Lefty-Democrat-Environmentalists: ‘The poor are sinners anything we do to make their lives more difficult is really to stop the sinning.’

Hippies, the Briarpatch and the current economic malaise

The title of this blog should be ‘I apologize’. But it is hard to apologize for the end of a great boom that I helped cause.

I have caused several great changes in my society.  

* I and only I had the knowledge and was in the right position to have created the modern international credit card. The first international money.  

* I and only I had the math skills and was in the right place to raise bank savings account rates which a decade later brought down the savings and loan industry. Its gone now.

* The greatest force I helped unleash was the economic boom from 1984 to 2006.

I am ironically apologizing for the collapse of American economic growth from 2008 until today; as well as the global impact of the American failure to grow. I caused the great boom that preceded it.

It is very simple.  From 1974 onward I provided business advice to hundreds of small businesses starting out.  I wrote books, taught classes and travelled the country giving lectures.  In the San Francisco Bay Area I organized the Briarpatch which had over 1000 small businesses including some members in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis. This created the greatest boom in small businesses in history.  Here is a chart going back to 1981.

It was my approach to business that spread the enthusiasm for new business and generated a 90% success rate for small business survival (the opposite of the normal 10% survival after three years rate).  

This chart for the U.S. shows that it was my work and the apprentices that I trained that created the economic boom of 1984 to 2006. 

Small businesses create vast employment that is half the total of all jobs. Many of these small businesses ultimately grow to be the big businesses that provide the other half of the jobs.

The proof of my role in this business explosion is that I was invited to create small businesses in Sweden and I created 4,000 new businesses from 1978 to 1985.  My approach was copied in Germany a short time later. I replicated my success.

The chart comes from a paper by Steven J. Davis U. of Chicago. Data is from the U.S. Census.

Islam and Global Warming

We can take the current superficial comparison of these two subjects which is what the cartoon does.  Pretty much explains why the current debate is nonsense.(The U.S. president says Islam is not behind the Islamic terrorists who yell ‘Allah Akbar’)  

Or we can look at the similarities of the worldview of the two.  

Few people doubt that Islam is a religion.  In fact it is different from most other religions on one key point.  Islam has a concept of believers living in a state that enforces religious beliefs and rituals and makes non-believes subservient..  

Oops, I’m  wrong.  Christianity did that for a five hundred year period in a few places from Spain to Italy to Austria and in most of the Catholic colonies.  Ireland and France in my lifetime still banned contraceptives as the Church required of those governments.  Spain treated apostates much worse than Islam, anywhere.

But in most of Europe the Church is dead; replaced by Global Warming  the new religion.

How do we know that Global Warming is the new religion? Two ways.  One, it is not testable; or as Karl Popper has explained, it is not ‘falsifiable’.   With no warming of the earth since 1997, I keep asking ‘when will this inevitable warming be acknowledged as stopped?’  I’ve asked this question 5 years out, 10 years out, 15 years out.  The answer is ‘never’ because Global Warming is a religion.

The other way we know is because the collapse of Mao’s communism in China in the 1980’s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s is what ushered in the new religion of Global Warming.  It is a replacement of the old Statist god.

Of course the Global Warming religion is strongest in Europe because the europeans had to replace Christianity, which killed 6 million Jews, gays and disabled and Communism with a new religion.  Two old gods for one new god.

The new God, Global Warming Armageddon is anti-commerce (based on sustainability, which means living in a pre-commerce world without airplanes and steel).  The old religion, the Catholic Church, was always anti-commerce (listen to the current Pope, Francis) and Communism was anti-commerce (no free market, no free trade).

Modern Islam is awake and attacking modern commerce.  Awakened by the modern commerce of Israel, Turkey and oil wealth.  

Global warming armageddon and Islam are both deeply anti-commerce.  Anti-American.  

If you want to survive the next Islamic attack learn the phrase:  'Allah Akbar, lehi lehi l’allah, Mohammed rasu l’allah'.  I know it. It says:  Allah is god, there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.

If you can pronounce the A in Allah as an ayin, you will be given a gun and told to help kill non-believers.

Commentary 70th anniversary

The Commentary 70th anniversary issue asked 70 modern thinkers to project 70 years into the future.

The benefit of this exercise is to get a group of minds, many of them truly brilliant, to focus on the patterns and practices of our day that will have long term effects.

I once told my good friend Leonard K. that I could take a walk in San Francisco and identify half of the major business trends that would emerge in the next ten years.  They were already in place, just not recognized.  I was right, I did it.

The same is true for major future patterns.  The elements of many of them are in place today.  Good minds can see them.

What I got from this issue was powerful.

• In the U.S. the entire Leftist-progressive movement has reached its end. There are no new leaders.  The whole shambles has collapsed into a discredited old idea called socialism.  From this point on the residue of that movement will be called Obamaism or the followers Obama-ites.  A leftist, pacifist, anti-commerce, anti-American, anti-Jew cluster of anger and revenge.

• While the non-Orthodox American Jewry will disappear along with the similar groups in Europe a new trans American-Israeli secular Jewish awakening can be expected.  It will be an intellectual community already evident in the literary press including Commentary, the Jewish Review of Books, Tablet, Moment, Mosaic and others.  This new intellectual community will be the source of an important new Jewish movement.

• Israel will become an important centerpiece of Indian and Asian trade. Europe is already dead.

• Israel will have many Arab alliances, much like it had with Turkey for 30 years.

• Israel is at no risk of survival. Intelligence and technological superiority will always be important. The West Bank is likely to become part of Jordan.

• The American Evangelicals will be a long term key to the American-Israeli alliance.

I got all of that from one issue of one magazine.

Matt Ridley again

Matt Ridley has published a second great book.  The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge.

I’ve recommended Ridley twice before and summarized his material on commerce in his first book here and in a speech he gave here.

Ridley is a brilliant pro commerce author, maybe the only other one.  He gives credit to Deirdre McCloskey for her comparable genius on this pro commerce issue.

Evolution is a long book.  The greatness about the book is that Ridley shows us that both the free market mechanism and Darwinism are the same evolutionary mechanism.

Neither require a god, a direction, a meaning or a designer.  Both are the same mechanism: survival applied to variation.  

Ridley does a wonderful job of reminding us that evolution is what happens not just with biology but also with nearly everything in the human world.  He goes into detail with free market evolution that creates languages, weapons, cities and businesses that we can all see.  He shows that it also includes morals (look at how arranged marriage has evolved into cohabitation and gay marriage), as well as money, education and most importantly: technology.

The book has done one important thing: made me think about the broad scope of human subject matter that evolves.

Unfortunately, Ridley is not a good writer.  He mixes all his personal prejudices, most of which I agree with, into this broad subject.  That is distracting and weakens his argument.

It is now time to think much more broadly about evolution and especially the limits of evolution.  

Governments, bureaucracies and states don’t seem to evolve, because they survive despite their inept and incompetent and inappropriate functions.  They always fail but they survive despite that fact.  What can we say about that?

Home schooling

I give one of my friends and co-author Salli Rasberry credit for some important part of the current homeschooling movement.  Salli and her husband wrote Rasberry Exercises which was the bible for hippy homeschooling.

Prior to the hippies homeschooling there was a tiny group of religious people who avoided public schools because they were too secular. And private schools because they were the wrong religions and the wrong social classes.  The hippies chose homeschooling because they disliked the authoritarian and disciplined structure of conventional schooling.

Not only did homeschooling grow to be a large movement, now numbering nearly 2 million students out of a universe of 50 million students, but in most parts of the U.S. homeschooling is aided with resources and supplements by the public school system.

Moreover, I would argue that an important part of the charter school movement is related to the homeschooling movement.  There are slightly more students in charter schools than are homeschooled, 3 million.

Combined homeschooled and charter school students are over 10% of American K-12 education. Another 10% of students are in private religious and nonreligious schools.  A shrinking 4 out of 5 students are still in traditional public schools.

Thank you Salli for your contribution.  Public schools today are a dangerous loci of Lefty anti-commerce hate and environmental armageddon religion.  At least nonpublic school children have a sense that education can be different from the authoritarian teacher/classroom public model.

When Safeway is the best

Of course I am surrounded by self righteous Lefties in San Francisco who hate big businesses, love organic, expect armageddon and celebrate their own divine goodness.

What I love to do is find something that creates a little turmoil in their smugness.  It’s fun.

The most recent is my discovery that Safeway, the chain that all my Leftie friends hate, has the most delicious fresh corn in the Bay Area and likewise the sweetest most extraordinary grapes I have ever had.

What my Lefty friends could never understand is why Safeway could have these two incredible fresh foods.  The reason is that an agricultural crop is expensive to plant, grow and harvest.  Traditionally farmers get loans to cover the crop and repay the loan when the crop is sold.  The bigger the crop the bigger the loan and the greater the risk.

When an entire large crop can be sold in advance to a single buyer, the farmer welcomes the chance to get out of a risky weather dependent business.

Safeway is able to buy two crops. The entire crop of corn from Brentwood California in Contra Costa that supplies the entire West Coast with the freshest most delicious corn anyone has ever tasted. Safeway gets the best of it with its significant capital.

And Pretty Lady seedless grapes from the Dulchich farm. 2,800 acres in the Calif. central valley.

Again Safeway, a giant single buyer gets the best of the crop.

Eat your hearts out you religious Lefties. We get the best fresh corn and seedless grapes in the world.

Democratic consequences for blacks

Black Americans have brought disaster upon themselves with their voting practices.

For 100 years, American blacks voted 90% Republican because the Republican Party was formed to end slavery.  During that entire century the Democrat Party supported slavery, the KKK and Jim Crow.

When the Republicans in Congress finally got enough Democrats to join them and got a Democrat President (Johnson) to join them, the two main Civil Rights bills were signed in 1964 and ‘65; the Black community gave the Democrats credit.

• Since then, the Democrats have created a welfare system that destroyed the previously stable black family and gave us a single parent nightmare of 72% black babies born to single black mothers.

• This in turn has given us a permanent black criminal class of nearly 3 million black male criminals to wreak havoc in the lives of American blacks.

• A worthless public school system where 31% of blacks never graduate from high school.  All in urban areas controlled by Democrats.

• A crime rate in Democrat urban areas that are five times higher than comparable crime rates for non-blacks.

• And most recently a Democrat campaign led from the White House to punish law enforcement; making sure that the black communities that need protection the most don’t get it.

In spite of this the black community that votes is voting 90% for Democrats.

Admittedly the Jewish community votes heavily for the Democrat Party that is run by a president who hates Jews and has waged an open war with Israel.  Jews are voting against their self interest but nothing compared to the Black community.

National Geographic

Since the mid 1990’s the Murdoch organization has been slowly taking control of the National Geographic TV and Magazine.  In September the Murdoch organization took full control and made the former nonprofit a for-profit operation.

The background for this takeover was the steady decline of the magazine and the pathetic ratings of the TV program with guaranteed revenue on the cable networks.  The magazine went from 15 million subscribers when Murdoch got interested in it to under 3.5 million currently.  You could call that suicide in the magazine business.

The press for the past few weeks has been at near hysterical levels of clothes rending and outrage about the rightwing takeover of their sacred institution.

I’m here to tell you that the National Geographic was far from a sacred institution in my experience.

I knew one National Geographic photographer and one writer.  I joined the photographer and his wife on a trip to the mountains of Idaho where he had previously shot a story on bighorn sheep.  The photos were incredibly beautiful, and the reality even more so.  

The way Geographic operated with photographers in the 1980’s was to send a suitcase with the cameras, lenses and film.  The photographer labeled the rolls of film as they were shot and sent the whole package back undeveloped when finished.

In this instance, my friend the photographer was an environmentalist and wrote an article about the winter grazing range problems of the bighorns.  

National Geographic picked the most beautiful photos to illustrate ITS OWN article about the beautiful sheep and how interesting they are. Nothing about the environmental problems.

My writer friend wrote an article on the Islands of Palau.  Remember the photographer and writer are usually separate and often don’t meet each other.  The writer told about the capital city of Ngerulmud and the American efforts to write a constitution for this American protectorate.

She was emphatic about the extensive native slums, the ruthlessness of the tourist industry and the widespread poverty.

The final article was about the beautiful natives.  All the shots of housing came from shots of a panorama at a local museum with no mention of the source.   No native houses existed anymore.

That’s not the worst of the National Geographic fraud.

Over many years Geographic has done stories with beautiful photos of ‘Palestine’.  The coverage is always pure Lefty pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli.  

I am happy to see a decent business (Murdoch) take over this scandalous misanthrop of an organization.  Farewell to an evil publication.  Hello to a hopeful respite.

I’ve never seen the TV part of Nat. Geo.  So I have no comments.

Idolatry

Zenzi (an hypothetical restaurant)  is the oldest and finest high-end vegetarian restaurant in the U.S.  It has a view of San Francisco bay from every one of the more than 200 seats.  It has been a success since it opened more than 25 years ago.  It was designed and started by a key member of a local Zen group.

Zenzi has been popular and crowded throughout its life.  It is always listed in the top 100 San Francisco restaurants and the top dozen most important.

The restaurant and its location was my idea.  I started the ball rolling to create a Zen restaurant in that location, so I have always had an attachment to it. Fifteen years ago, I was put on the Board to deal with some problems and have remained on the Board because it is fun and I like the people.

This blog is about the effect of the San Francisco minimum wage law on a successful operating business as seen from inside. The law was passed two years ago raising the minimum wage from $10.74 per hour to $12.25 on May 1st of this year.  So we have had 6 months of the new minimum wage.

Next July the wage goes to $13.00, then to $14 the following year and finally to $15 in July 2018.

So what does this current 14% increase in the minimum wage do to wages?

I just saw the October financials which show the effect of 6 months of the new wages.  The effect on a restaurant is significant because wait staff is paid minimum wage, but gets 3 times that income in tips.  The dishwashing and related staff in the kitchen is also minimum wage and shares in the tips.  

With the $10.74 wage, there was a gross revenue of $5 million with direct labor at $2 million and benefits of $.5 million.  Net revenue last year came to roughly $.5 million.  With new wages for 6 months at $12.25, the labor and benefits cost went up $.2 million for the half year and 2015 net revenue went down by that amount to $.3 million. (All these are approximate figures that a person in the restaurant business could estimate.)

I pointed this out to the other 10 members of the board.  They are all Democrats and they promptly changed the subject.  They believe in a political policy of raising the minimum wage. I pushed harder and the answer I got was: ‘How do you know what the future will be about?’  I said I relied solely on addition, subtraction and multiplication.  The next effort to change the subject was, ‘Bring this up at the next budget meeting in April.’  Since this net revenue impact is large, my response was: ‘If you are going to lose your job, do you want to know it early or late?’  Still no acknowledgement of the impending problem.

So I made a motion that considered next July’s wage raise to $13 per hour, which will be on top of the 2015 increase and will increase wages and benefits by another $.2 million by year end, clearly wiping all of the net revenue. Nobody seconded my motion, but I got my calculations in the minutes.

From that point in the meeting a few people humorously referred to ‘Michael’s armageddon future’.  But the Board went ahead and authorized a $160k remodel based on a $200k bank loan. And ignored the impending future problems.

I call this worship of the Democrat golden lamb of a minimum wage ‘idolatry’.  Two things to keep in mind about this idolatry: (1) all three Democrat candidates for president endorse a high and rising minimum wage, and (2) many of these Zenzi Board members are Buddhist.  Saying a lot about the extent to which Zen meditation opens one’s mind. Not.

Why businesses merge?

We are in a period of merger frenzy.  

The modern world of mergers was created in the 1960’s when International Telephone and Telegraph showed that a giant conglomerate could run profitably with a wide range of disparate holdings.  Harold Geneen was the man who developed the accounting and financial statement based management system that made it work.  

Business people began to see that any viable businesses could be packaged for sale to the growing market of companies that wanted to expand by buying other firms.  What was needed was an excellent accounting and financial system, a president who had a team of managers who formed a coherent cluster of experience and a structure that was working well together.

Why merge?  In the 1960’s a major reason was the volatility of stock prices that made some firms very desireable when bought in a low market.  All that was needed was for the purchasing company to have a higher multiple of earnings to stock price.  Adding a new company with good earnings, even from fields where such multiples were historically lower, meant raising total earnings and consequently the stock price of the purchaser.

That is less reasonable today because management of a diverse conglomerate is much harder when there are more competent managers in the market who can run independent companies well and aggressively with independent sources of capital.

Mergers today make sense for several new reasons.  First and foremost, in the U.S., government regulation is so intrusive and odious that a corporation needs to be very large to cope with the cost of fighting a bureaucracy.  That is true in the banking world and most true in the pharmaceutical world.  It is now, thanks to Obamacare, true in the medical, hospital and senior care world.

Second, large companies need mergers in any industry that is prone to labor harassment and perennial lawsuits (autos, international construction).  This is because the legal department has to be big in real numbers but small as a percentage of the total expenses.

Third, mergers are an efficient way to buy research.  Often creative people and entrepreneurs develop new products and markets on their own better than in a large company.  So they are bought after they have developed and tested new products.

Fourth, American corporate taxes are among the highest in the corporate world.  This means mergers with overseas corporations in lower tax domains can increase the merged company’s after tax earnings.  More commonly it means that a large lobbying operation within the business budget can get specialized favorable domestic tax treatment.

Finally, but not lastly, some volatile industries are ripe for mergers into bigger firms to create some form of stability.  True in advertising and food products.

The current merger frenzy comes at a time of gross government bureaucratic expansion and low domestic economic growth. 

Cars and passion

I have a number of friends and acquaintances who are car collecting fans.

Their choice of cars to collect is often related to cars they drove in their youth or cars that were symbols of power in their youth.

This started me thinking about why cars are such a passion for these people who came from several generations that were passionate about cars.

I don’t see the same passion in the current generation.  Though I do see noveau riche buy fancy cars because they don’t know how to invest their money in anything but houses and cars.

What I have concluded is that cars before the 1980’s required a great deal more attention from the owners.  Oil checks and adding oil to the engine and transmission.  Radiator checks and radiator fluids.  Air in the tire and tire changing with older cars. Manual car washing and waxing. Cleaning spark plugs.  Pulling the choke to get the car started.  Windshield fluids. Cars didn’t turn off their own headlights when the driver left the car.

Most expensive cars since 1985 and most other cars since 1995 come with several years of auto maintenance.  No need for the owner to do all the things previously demanded by car ownership.

I think that our relationship to cars, much like our relationship to lovers, required focus and attention that older cars demanded but newer cars don’t.

Is this the reason car passion is declining?  Not enough neediness on the part of the cars? 

Why not go for big business?

There was a point in my life, as a successful young banker, where I was offered two jobs as a bank president.  I was also offered a prestigious and important ladder of success job at a major national financial consulting company. I turned them all down to be at the center of the hippie cyclone.

But why?

Both my parents were hard core Lefties.  My mother’s brother, Fred, was a Marxist who kept the National Guardian newspaper alive with his own money for 20 years.

My mother knew wealthy people in New York, parents of her friends.  She took me and my brothers to the The Plaza for lunch, once, in our jeans and said ‘don’t worry, the staff assumes we are rich if we dress this way.’

My father was friends with many rich business people but considered them de classe.

The attitude of both my parents must have rubbed off on me.  I concluded, from a young age, that I could do anything I wanted, money was irrelevant.  I never saw any barriers and I never encountered any (except being a Jew kept me out of some snotty private clubs).

In retrospect, that is probably why job offers on the ladder to financial success never had great appeal to me.

High goal people to Japan

A friend I see for coffee most mornings, Liu, was in Japan in the 1970’s when I was also there.

Liu is gay and dated many Americans when he lived there and went to University.

The thing Liu remembers most is that the Americans working in Japan then, were well educated, ambitious and highly competent.

There are two reasons this particular group of Americans were there at that time.  Japan was a new frontier of intellectual, business and artistic ferment.  The innovative class of young Americans had to go their to see for themselves.  That is one reason I was there. Everyone Liu knew came back to become successful and often prosperous.

That matches my experience.

The second reason is that curiosity and adventure are characteristics of the meritocratic elite in our society.  These are the kind of people who learn by experience and then make major contributions to our society.

The other Americans there were the hippies.  Many many.  Many of them came back to be great successes having brought Japanese uniqueness back with them ranging from Zen and tofu to computer games and esthetics.

Japan in the 1970's: a magnet for the meritocratic.

The three cultures

A brilliant article by one of my favorite writers, Joseph Epstein, on the passing of High Culture.

What Epstein does in this article is remind those of us old enough to remember the time before the hippy revolution, that there were three cultures:  High, Medium and Popular.

High culture was based on a knowledge of the arts, literature and history of the past.  It was complex, humane and based on a pyramid of knowledge.  It included a reverence for Greek philosophy, European chamber and orchestral music and most art post 1400ce as well are major English, European and Russian literature.

Middle culture was created and covered in the Reader’s Digest and educational television.  Popular culture needs no explanation.

So where did it go?  Very simply, middle culture disappeared when High Culture  disappeared because it was derivative.  The disappearance of the arts is different from the rest of High Culture.

I explain the disappearance of High Culture art in this blog.  Simply: the world around us has become so extraordinarily beautiful in architecture, technology, sound, taste and smell that a distinct High Culture of Art can not be continued.  Though the previous cultural artifacts and creations remain as distinct art.

The rest of High Culture forms, Literature and Theatre have succumbed to a different issue. Literature is no longer taught as literature appreciation; it is now a highly politicized subject matter analyzed by a morbid class of academia that thinks only in Marxian terms.  It has a deep hatred of commerce that makes the teaching irrelevant to the lives of current students.

The same disfiguration has swallowed theatre and all its accompanying arts.  The only such art being produced is Marxist hate.  There are no artists creating and writing about the miracles of commerce and celebrating the pro commerce aspects of life that are now the core of meaning to living beings.  A full life is a full appreciation of modernity.  That doesn’t exist in art, so their can be no such thing as High Art or High Culture.

High Culture may return someday.  First it requires artists who create with a pro commerce love and a love of modernity.  Second, it also requires and an academy with a similar appreciation.

Gift money

I written often about the problem of large gifts of money, such as the lottery.  My first published comments on this subject are in The Seven Laws of Money published first in 1974 with sales and readership ultimately reaching in the hundreds of thousands. It still sells.

What provokes this blog is that the NYTimes finally has an article on the subject.  It makes a trivial comparison between MacArthur Fellow grants and published Lottery winner material.

What I want to comment on is my increased pro commerce understanding of the issue.  In terms of the Seven Laws of Money, laws five and six say you can’t give money away or receive money without recognizing the implicit expectations that go with the money.  

The implicit expectation of the MacArthur Fellow grants is that you will do more of the good work you are doing.  The implicit expectation of the lottery is that you will become a constructive member of society.

Most MacArthur Fellows find it easy to meet this expectation.  They are selected for their previous commitments and public behavior.  Continuing the behavior is no problem.  Their lives are already committed in nearly all circumstance.

Lottery winners are just randomly selected people, 96% (that is a guess) who have no meaning or direction in their lives.  No amount of money can give their lives direction nor can it help them understand how to make their lives constructive in the world.  So they squander it all in most cases.  A few have churches or causes to give their money to and they do.  The rest face misery.

This never took insight on my part.  One’s life is either meaningful or it isn’t.  I never found a way to help people find meaning.

My pro commerce understanding that adds to this is that commerce creates the possibility of having a meaningful life with its infinite options for livelihood. The MacArthur type of award only makes sense in a pro commerce world.

Winning the vote but losing the battle

You may have followed the vote in last week’s San Francisco election where Airbnb was on the ballot.  The ballot initiative was designed to put Airbnb out of business.  The ‘no’ vote was exactly 55% which is technically a victory.  It was a sad loss.

Airbnb has been dealing with politics from a Lefty perspective.  The political leader is Chris Lehane who believes in sandbox politics.  Chris is a goody-goody in a field where that is a prescription for disaster.  It has damaged the half dozen other well established home rental businesses that have been thriving in San Francisco for decades. The others have intelligently remained below the political radar.

Airbnb started active political work about four years ago.  They worked with Lefty politicians to craft legislation that would have Airbnb paying the hotel tax.  The people they worked with wanted far more stringent restrictions and put them in the legislation we now have.  The legislation easily passed the Maoist city council a year ago.  It was so stupidly written that it turned out to be unenforceable.  So a new law was crafted to create two new city government agencies.  

Having awakened the child eating Lefty dragon that thrives in San Francisco, the dragon put an initiative on the ballot to kill Airbnb for a last time.  

When the initiative lost by only 55% the dragon knew it hadn’t lost.  If the loss had been 60% the dragon would have been slain, never to put another initiative on the ballot and forced to standby as the earlier legislation was unenforced by the city government.

That didn’t happen and the true Luddites who want to stop all tech progress are fully armed and ready to fight more and more often.

We are very fortunate

I read a brilliant piece by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal last week (11/2). He backs up this statement, the core of the article: “Modern liberalism is best understood as a movement of would-be believers in search of true faith.”

My reaction was ‘I’m incredibly fortunate to be living in a time when such brilliant minds are publicly available’.

We all are.  And those of us who read these superb thinkers are the most fortunate.  Of course there are many people who are alive and don’t read any of my heroes.  But they are still fortunate even if they waste their good fortune.

The other extraordinary thinkers and writers I see regularly are: Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer, Matt Ridley, Victor Davis Hanson, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell and a few others I can’t think of this moment.

Finley and AFSC

I wrote an obituary for a former friend while she was still alive.  I figured that writing an obituary would be easily found for her name in a google search.  It was.  She had a terrible time getting foundation grants after the obit was posted and she begged me to take it down.

After a very poor mediation where she didn’t concede any ground, I still modified the obit to give her a little less opprobrium.

The problem that led to my writing this harsh material about Finley and putting it on the Internet was that she was a Jew hater and a very internationally effective organizer.  Had she been a Jew hater who led a trivial life, I wouldn’t have bothered.

What bothered me then and bothered me until I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal was my internal question ‘what made her this way?’  

I had known her for decades and we had worked closely together.  I never saw this deep mental illness until it burst on the scene when she attended a Jew hate conference in South Africa.

Finley was a member and devotee of the Quaker activist group AFSC (American Friends Service Committee).  What I didn’t know until the Wall Street Journal article was that in the late 1970’s the AFSC had become a Jew hate organization.  So how did this account for Finley’s state of mind?  

Ironically I learned why years earlier from Finely herself.  She had a rule which I accepted:’no one can be in a group unless they accept 80% of the group values’.  Put another way ‘no one can have values that differ from more than 20% of their group values.’   So Finley had to conform to the values of her primary AFSC affinity.

I never noticed Finley’s Jew hate until it was written in an article in one of her newsletters.  I had two earlier glimpses that I missed.  One was that she had been allowed to accompany Israeli troops when they invaded South Lebanon in 1978.  

The Israeli troops always announced by leaflet and loudspeaker that all non-combatants should leave a village they were approaching.  This of course puts Israeli soldiers lives at risk, but Israelis are the only army in the world to do this.  Finley still expressed hatred for the Israeli army, in her ignorance of other armies and battle tactics.

Second, she was a vocal opponent of the circumcision of a mutual friend’s son.  Which I can only now understand as Jew hate, having listened to all the absurd arguments against circumcision.

It all fits together now.

Sympathy for the pathetic rich

Bill Gates opened his mouth this week and changed the dialog in the world for decades to come.  

Gates claimed that free markets and democracy could not effectively be counted on to fight human caused global armageddon.  

This says two things:

1. No matter how rich you are you can be stupid.  Half the world now knows it.  Half the world doesn’t think human caused global warming is a big issue.  That half lives in India, China, Russia, Islamistan and all the other non-Lefties in the world.  Most know Gates is very rich and goes everywhere by private 747.  Rich and ignorant of the false hysteria about climate armageddon.

2. For decades we will have a prominent example of anti-commerce hypocrisy.  The true brainless Scarecrow from the  Wizard of Oz:  that is Bill Gates.  He made all his money in a free market democratic society.  He could not have become rich much less mega-rich in any country lacking a free market and democracy.

So Bill Gates, without even understanding what he has done to himself and his progenitors has given us a true ‘icon’ of super rich ignorance and hypocrisy.

I’ve pointed out his Lefty ignorance of development economics in an earlier blog.

Which dictionary?

One year, 1971, I decided to fly around the world.  I had never been to Japan, which was my first stop and a life changing event.  I have returned to Japan every year since then usually for 6 weeks to two months.  I flew on to Seoul, Bangkok, Kathmandu, Kabul and Tehran.

In Kabul I met up with my father and stepmother.  I spent a week with them living in their travelling home, a sort of camper.  I remember Kabul vividly.  All dirt streets with only a few two story mud brick buildings in the center of town. It was electrified.  I got to see a man use an oxy-acetylene torch to work on cars.  The oxygen was from a high pressure tank, but the acetylene was from charcoal shaped material burning under a hood, fanned by an apprentice.

The last King of Afghanistan, Zahir Khan  had left a year or two earlier.  He was officially deposed in a coup a couple of years later.

One day my father decided to drive into the nearby mountains to visit and swim at the American Embassy resort.  It got dark and we couldn’t find the right road.  The road we were on ended at a large one story mansion with a lovely garden and empty pool. The mansion was entirely empty.  It never had had windows, unnecessary in that climate.    We parked the van and stayed the night.

The next morning while we were nearby washing up and shaving (ablutions) a man dressed in an Arab robe with a suit jacket came yelling at us with an 1890’s Enfield rifle pointed our direction.  We put up our hands.  All three of us.

My father reached for a Pashto dictionary.  The man with the gun didn’t understand Pashto.  My father tried the Urdu dictionary.  Still didn’t work. There are a dozen secondary languages in Afghanistan.  Then the Farsi (Persian) dictionary.  He understood a little of that.

My stepmother went into the camper and brought out four cups of hot tea.  The man put the rifle down and we all sat down.  It turns out, the mansion was the King’s.  He was the guard. He liked the tea.  Told us we had to leave, which we did, having walked the whole area the evening before.

That is the story. 

My father

I found myself writing about my father because I used London to Singapore as half the distance I ran during the 20 years when I ran every weekday.

I picked that as a measurement because that is the route my father, Wendell and my stepmother Lu took on their post retirement trip. They stopped in Jerusalem for two years.  I met them enroute for a week in Kabul in 1971.  I’ll tell the Kabul story in tomorrow’s blog.

Here is the story of the island in Malaysia.  You can google the island they bought near Mersing called Pulau Setindan.  The resolution is still inadequate.  

The bamboo house they built would not be there.  My father was over 6 ft tall which doesn’t work in a Malay house.  So the first floor where they lived (second floor was the bedroom), was dug out about 1.5 feet deep so he could stand up straight.  

I used to lie in a hammock outside and ponder the probability of a coconut falling 40 ft and hitting me on the head.  

Here is the earlier blog:

"My father claimed to have been conceived on a train because he always wanted to travel and he did all his life.  When he was in his late sixties he set off from England in a British Ford camper van. He and his wife, Lu, spent several years traveling as far East as one can go driving.  For those of you who know geography, that, in 1968, was to the tip of Malaysia.  Along the way he taught cultural anthropology. He was also a rabbi.

When he could drive no further he bought an island on the coast of Malaysia off the town of Mersing.  I visited him there as did most of my family and many world travelers.  He knew that an island on the South China Sea, at the equator, would bring many visitors.  Some years there were 90 visitors who arrived by plane in Singapore sixty miles away.  He had to go to Singapore every two weeks, anyway, to get his Malaysian visa extended.

My father and Lu lived on the island for seven years.  The local fishermen sold them fresh fish everyday from their boats. They had a garden and coconut trees.  He used to joke that he was the only farmer in the world with a two week visa.

I wanted to see what had happened to the island since they left 25 years ago.  Google images barely shows the island, but not anything closer to the ground.

(Photo on the left looks like the right island and the right beach.)

Is it funny?

I’m too old for this story to be embarrassing.

When I was 13 years old, in what was called junior high and is now called middle school, I walked past this bar on my way to and from school.  

On three occasions, when walking home with friends, I recall sticking our heads in the bar door and yelling ‘Daddy please come home we are hungry and we miss you.’  

We thought it was hilarious.  I don’t know where we got the idea for this.

I now know that the whole temperance movement was based on arguing that alcohol made men irresponsible.

Yelling into a bar door doesn’t look funny from my current perspective.  It seems sad.  

I don’t know how many men were in the bar at that time of day (roughly 4pm) and I had no idea why anyone would be drinking alcohol at that time of day.  I still don’t.

Should I feel guilty for my behavior at this point?

Four thousand times

This is a photo of a location below the Golden Gate Bridge that I ran to every morning for nearly 20 years.

I was a runner (I swim now) who ran with a group of friends every weekday morning at Crissy Field next to San Francisco Bay for roughly 20 years.  The run was 3.5 miles.  We started promptly at 6am.

I’ve run to the site in the photo over 4,000 times, passing each point along the way 8,000 times and traversing over 14,000 miles.  More than halfway around the world.  Running the equivalent of the distance from London to Singapore and back.  I pick that route for comparison because when my father and stepmother retired they bought a mobile-house-van in London and drove it to Singapore.  They stopped for a few years in Jerusalem.  On their travels I met them for a week in Kabul.

They bought an island in Malaysia about 60 miles  northwest of Singapore where they settled for a decade.

I wish I could say something about the health benefits of running so far, so often, but I can’t.  I am a sample of one with three brothers who are all athletic and all younger.  So health and lifespan are hard to compare.  I had a heart attack at age 76.  

If you believe in the 3 billion heart beats for a lifetime theory, I got many extra from running.  Every running event raised my heartbeat from 60 to 130 per minute, for a rough total of 12.6 million extra beats.  But I have medical records (as a pilot) to show that running decreased my average heart rate from 70 to 60.  That gives me a decrease in heart beats from the beginning of running of 300 million. 300 million fewer heartbeats; a 10% increase in my lifetime heartbeats.  So running is good when looked at from the finite number of heartbeats theory.

If it does anything else, I am not evidence for it.  I did it for the pure pleasure and the evident benefits in having a clear mind, much like the same amount of time I spent in sitting meditation.

I have friends who have led sedentary lives who are my age.  Quite healthy.  What is the health meaning of exercise?

One of my favorite bloggers

A blog I never miss is called Bookwormroom.  I know the lovely woman who writes it.  She stays anonymous because she lives in Marin County just North of San Francisco, has a Lefty husband, two children in public school and nearly all her neighbors and friends are Lefty Fundamentalists.  As are mine.  

It is dangerous for a parent to be openly pro commerce in our environments.  The children are bullied and harassed.  People sneer, hate and certainly won’t help with babysitting and extra household projects if you ‘aren’t one of them’.  Lefty Fundamentalists in big cities are downright nasty people.

That is all beside the point and off the issue.  

Bookwormroom is candid about the days she can’t do her blog.   Sometimes it is work, sometimes it is her invalid mother who needs help, or the kids or the whole family.

So she just tells the truth and marches on.  We readers are happy to wait until she can get back to blogging.

Would that be possible for me?

I have blogged everyday for more than 16 years, that is nearly 6,000 blogs.  On this blog engine the number is 5,200.

Could I go a few days without blogging if I told you the reason?  Just asking.

Democrats evil treatment of the poor

Many of us who follow retail business were alarmed by the Democrat Party's efforts to directly punish poor people a few years ago when the EPA banned a whole range of childrens toys from second hand stores.  The ban was effected by requiring a lead content test for all toys that could possibly have lead in the paint.  Since that included just about  all toys second hand stores carried, they stopped carrying used toys.  Hence: poor people either bought new toys or bought no toys.  

If you think that was the most evil mean spirited thing the Democrat Party could do you need to read this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Rhea Riner started a children’s clothing consignment store in her home.  It grew into a national consignment business with a major Internet component.

The business uses physical operations to display the merchandise twice a year.  Rhea uses volunteers to help set up the shows and run them.  As a reward for the help the volunteers get early access to the show.

The Democrat run Labor Department said that the use of volunteers in the business was unacceptable and the reward was completely unacceptable.  All volunteers had to be paid the local minimum wage.

Definitely an evil punishment for poor people who use businesses like Rhea’s to keep their costs down and have a more rewarding consumer life.

Parable of Sara and Pat, both newbies

Sara was the founder and manager of a very successful ice cream store with many new and interesting flavors.  Her business had many employees because she was open long hours during the eight warm months and there was always a crowd in line.

I gave Sara some operations and marketing advice.  Before doing so, I looked closely at her ‘books’.  They told me two things.  One was that she had a dip in sales two months earlier and no explanatory change in weather.  I asked her about it.  She had lost an employee who was very popular in the neighborhood and was much loved.

The other was the absence of a line item for unemployment insurance.  Sara’s was a new business and she hadn’t yet done much in the way of getting all the details organized.  A very common experience of new businesses.  

Her explanation was that her employees all loved her, they knew she couldn’t afford unemployment insurance and no one was going to be fired.  I told her to get it, quickly.  She did as I told her to.  Fortunately.

Two months later, she was invoiced by the State Labor Board in Idaho for a former employee who had moved there and who listed Sara as one of several former employers.  A very nice former employee who needed the unemployment coverage while she looked for a job.

A similar situation with Pat who ran a successful and growing cheese wholesale business.  Pat hadn’t paid any income taxes or even filed any, ever.  Fairly common for a young person starting out in their own business.  So when do you start filing income taxes?

Pat had been in business for nearly four years.  I asked him if he was losing any sleep over it.  He said he occasionally woke up about the issue.  I said: ‘ when you actually can’t go to sleep because you are worried about it, then start filing and paying income tax.

This is a common issue with young people who start a successful business.

Seattle minimum wage

Both Seattle and San Francisco are on a path to have a $15 minimum wage in 2017.  San Francisco’s will hit in May of that year.

I am on the board of Greens restaurant, a 230 seat business with revenues over $5 million and 40 employees who are directly affected by the minimum wage (wait staff). Greens will not show a profit by mid-year next year and will have to consider going out of business the following year.  Along with about 8,000 other viable retailers in San Francisco.

So far I’ve only seen two studies of the actual impact of these minimum wage laws.  One is of the Seattle-Tacoma airport which has a $15 minimum wage.  No visible effect there.  The airport is a monopoly and the retailers merely raised the prices of everything.  The closest business is miles away. Irrelevant test.

The other study is of Seattle while its rate was still at $12.25 per hour minimum wage.  The employment results are shown in a chart that compares retail employment for the State of Washington to Seattle.  They were both going up until Seattle introduced the minimum wage.  Now the State of Washington employment in retail is still rising and Seattle’s is declining.

How anyone with a brain can assume this isn’t going to result in fewer employees and more unemployment for marginal workers (read black and young) I don’t know.  But being a Democrat with a zombie brain and someone who drinks union poured hysteria can explain a lot.  

 (I wrote a 4 part series on the San Francisco minimum wage a year and a half ago.)

Shoe Goo

I met a couple at the next table at dinner in a neighborhood restaurant.  They had owned a shoe repair shop nearby since the early 1970’s.  We connected when I mentioned being one of the founding partners in a business called Shoe Goo.

A group of us founded Shoe Goo in 1973 in Menlo Park California.  A group of us were runners who ran together on the track between the Portola Institute and the Stanford Research Institute. I was one of four board members of Portola, an education research group.  The chief was Dick Raymond who was a key runner (Dick died a few months ago).  Others included Doug Engelbart from SRI now noted for inventing the ‘mouse’ and Bill English, first manager of Xerox Parc where the modern computer screen interface was invented.  Another runner was the founder of Runner’s World magazine who moved to Portland and helped found Nike.

The importance of this running group has to do with the shoes we all wore: sneakers, also called tennis shoes. Sneakers, when used for running, wear out quickly.  We were running long distances in those days.  I ran 6 miles around Golden Gate Park every Saturday and Sunday with friends, in sneakers.

The solution was found by Dick Raymond who created a product called Shoe Goo.  A black plastic gel in a tube that we used to put on the worn out heels of our shoes.

We started marketing Shoe Goo in the same designed tube that still carries its name.  Another friend who was a hot shot in marketing, Paul Hawken, offered to be one of the partners and do the marketing which was becoming hard for Dick who had plenty of other things we were doing.  Sales grew rapidly for two year, then Paul announced that we had to sell the product to Kiwi because we were in too vulnerable a spot with only with one supplier of our raw material.  

We all took double or triple our investment (a few thousand dollars) and thanked Paul.  Dick was not so obliging and held a grudge against Paul for years.

Our new friends in the shoe repair business told a story that I had never heard about Shoe Goo.  They said Shoe Goo was great for creating an adhesive surface.  If you couldn’t get a new sole or heel to attach to a shoe bottom, put Shoe Goo on the surface and leave it overnight.  The next day anything could be glued to it with traditional shoe repair glues.

Now you’ve read my story.  Look on Wikipedia.  You’ll find a product of the same name with the same design with a completely different history from Southern California.  It is in the top hundred products by sales volume on Amazon in sports goods.

Kiwi had a similar product on Amazon called Kiwi Shoe and Boot Repair which now has a different label.

What is the real story about Shoe Goo?