Pro Commerce

The Great Islamic War

The current war being carried out against America and modernity is dated by me to the murder of Attorney General Robert Kennedy in June 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan.  

Since that time the war expanded to guerrilla mode in Afghanistan.  Islam fought the Soviet Union for nine years from 1979 to 1989.  The Muslim guerrilla’s won and gained control of Afghanistan

The war was operated in a terrorist mode with the bombing of a Marine barracks in 1983 and of the World Trade Center in 1993 and repeated by Al Qaeda in 2001. The terrorist component continues and gets more aggressive. The most prolonged intense terrorist battles were by Palestinian Muslims in 1987 lasting until 1993 and again in 2000.

The combined modes of terrorism and guerrilla converged in 2014 with the formation of the Islamic State army in Syria and Iraq.   The terrorism continues in many parts of the world and guerrilla battles rage now from Libya to Nigeria.

So far, the American government and its allies have not recognized the War as a war.  Thus, we must consider it as just beginning.  Most wars have multiple components of terrorism, guerrilla operations and battle trained armies.  This war is likely to operate on all three levels for quite some time.

How long this war will last is hard to predict.  Religious wars have often lasted centuries.  Wars against modernity (Confederacy, Hitler, Stalin, Palestinians, Mao and Ho Chi Minh ) have lasted decades.

We are now in year 48 of the Great Islamic War.  I have no reason to believe it will be short because it is deeply embedded in a large religious population.

My choice in a restaurateur

Did I make a mistake or did Hassan change?

A few years ago I was asked to help select a tenant for a store front.  The storefront was in a location that had been a small grocery and was suited for a coffee shop or sandwich shop.

One of the applicants was a fellow named Hassan who had a large coffee shop on Fillmore near Haight.  

I was not impressed with Hassan’s operation.  It seemed to have too much old raw wood on the walls and floor (hard to clean) and many of the tables had cracks that looked unsanitary to me.  Simply on the basis of the cleanliness issue, I didn’t recommend Hassan for the new tenant.

The exact opposite is the case with my old client La Taqueria which I described in this blog.  One of the restaurant’s strongest points was its cleanliness.  Not something often found in Mexican restaurants.  In the earlier blog I pointed out that my advice had been right and La Taqueria was still packed to the walls with customers every hour they are open, 40 years later.  Since that blog La Taqueria has been named the best burrito in America.

The point of this blog is that Hassan has since opened three other restaurants.  They are favorites of mine.  All three are immaculate and successful.  The name is Squat and Gobble in the new locations.

Did I misjudge Hassan?  Was his first shop appropriate for the neighborhood and I didn’t understand that necessary funkiness.  Or did Hassan change?  

El Niño correction

San Francisco is having the rainiest December since 1997.  The chart shows El Niño’s in the past.  (The bottom chart) The warmest one before this was in 1997-98.  Based solely on El Niño activity I expect this to be a rainy season.

San Francisco usually gets 22 inches of rain in a season.  In the last El Niño year we got 48 inches. In the 1982 El Niño we got 39 inches in the one before that, 1972, we got 35 inches. We get significant amounts of rain in El Niño years.  

That is not the reason for this blog.

My concern is global warming.

The bottom chart shows El Niño as plus and minus the average as red and blue. The top chart shows the global surface temperature above and below the average based on satellite data.  

You can see that before 1997 the average temperature was flat from the beginning of the data in 1979. The temperature of the surface of our planet was 56 F. After 1998 it has been flat again but 0.4 F warmer.  

So the El Niño of 1997-98 raised the average global earth temperature.  

The big question is will the current El Niño do the same thing again?  

We won’t know for about five years.

Trouble is, the Armageddon fanatics in the global warming religion control the public discussion of this issue.  We will have to look at the data ourselves to see what the answer is.

Parable about restaurant kitchen practices

I’ve consulted with two restaurants where the training at the Culinary Academy and the Cordon Bleu gave the chefs the wrong approach.

Chefs are often trained to look at the returning dishes to determine what menu items are unpopular and are left on the plate.  The theory is that this is a clue that will suggest replacements for menu revisions.

In one case, the client was a high end elegant vegetarian restaurant and the other case was a new, highly admired Italian top quality white tablecloth North Beach spot.

In both cases when they first opened to rave reviews, I was asked for advice on continuing their success.  They had listened to me before opening when I told them to open full and stay full the first month, no matter how many meals they had to give away.

My advice on continuing success was ‘don’t look at the returning dishes’.  Don't use that information to shape your menu.

The reason is that at a table of four, one is the vegetarian that the other three acceded to when coming to a vegetarian restaurant.  In the case of the Italian gourmet restaurant, one diner was the gourmet with refined taste and the other three were deferring to his or her taste.

By adjusting the menu, based on returned dinner plates, you risked being guided by the palate of the three people who did not choose the restaurant in the first place.  Use the chef’s feel for food and the menu. The chef knows what his/her diners appreciate.

Van Gogh

There was a discussion among some friends yesterday about My Fair Lady and the issue of class as communicated by language and vocabulary.

Part of the conversation revolved around black English and the dialect of the Black community which instantly reflects an outcast background.

My contribution to that issue dates from my years as manager of a black church.  I was invited to one black party.  It began at midnight and lasted until dawn when everyone left for work.  Sleep had occurred from the end of work the previous day until the party started.  While I knew black English from my work, I was not prepared for 100% of the conversation to be in black English.  It took some time to get used to it.  

I never list black English as one of the languages that I know.  But it is a new language when you are fully immersed in it.

Which is not the point I was getting to in this blog.

I once had to rent out a family house in the nearby mountains.  My father had built it.  I found that having a weekend getaway was not appealing.  It was in the fog much of the year.  That meant washing the sheets and cleaning the house every visit to the house and extensive effort to close the house up when leaving.  It was never ‘a place to relax’ in my mind, even though it was only a half hour’s drive out of town.

One of the people who wanted to rent the house claimed to be an art dealer.  I asked him about the art he sold and about his favorite art.  The weird thing about art is that knowledgeable people know how to pronounce the names of important artists, while people with book learning don’t.

This potential renter pronounced Van Gogh wrong and the same for Manet, Seurat and Degas.  

People in the art field and those who took college art know how to pronounce these names.  It is an insider vocabulary.

I didn’t rent to him. His vocabulary said he wasn't who he claimed to be.

Trade, what is it?

One of my close friends is thinking about commerce like I do.  Commerce is divided into three distinct categories.  Trade, Industry and Clientry.  The objects of each are different.

The object of trade is to sell each single object (it can be a ship, a forest, a diamond mine or a flower arrangement) at sufficient markup to replace the inventory and stay in business.  Trade can use any financial instrument from a loan to a letter of credit.

The object of industry is to reduce cost.  Costs can be reduced in production by increasing the scale of production, by increasing the market, introducing technology and improving management.

The object of clientry is to generate a lifetime relationship with the client.  This means maintaining the level of skill, product and service that is appropriate for the price.  Lawyers, dentists, graphic artists and banks are clientric.

These are not easy to understand and apply.  The problem with understanding trade is that it is often associated with small local business.  A coffee shop can be trade, but not when it is part of a chain.  My client,  Itochu, is called a 'trading company'. It is global but located in Tokyo.  It is larger than all but a few of the largest industrial companies with $150 billion in sales last year. Apple was $180 billion.

Itochu buys in astronomic lots and does three way trades most of the time.  It will buy the entire April sardine production from Norway, trade that for the entire May kiwi harvest in New Zealand and then sell those to a buyer in China.  All financed by short and medium term loans from banks and international credit organizations. Even on that scale it is trade.

Clientry is often confused because many clientric businesses don’t behave as if they know you exist.  Banks are a good example. So are credit card companies and utilities.  If the company acknowledges how long you have been a customer it is clientric.  If it should acknowledge how long you have been a client it is clientric.  

In this classification, there is no place for government entities or religious operations.  But it can include non-profits.  Non-profits are just a tax classification of an otherwise normal business.

One way to see the difference between clientric and industrial is to imagine the breakup of an airline company into two components.  One component, the industrial part, would operate  the airplanes and associated physical equipment with staff and would sell its services to the passenger side of the company.  The physical airline would do everything it could to reduce operating costs and increase efficiency.  It would carry a large amount of cargo as well as seek many small feeder routes.  

The second part of the company, the clientric part,  would focus entirely on passengers to give them the best service possible at every price range.  It would operate lounge facilities and emphasize long term relations with clients.  All customers would feel like the current 100,000 mile club members of existing airlines.  

Trade, industry and clientry; how the world works.

Tel Aviv party capital

There was an article out of Hollywood that pointed out that Tel Aviv has become the vacation destination of choice of the celebrity world.  No surprise to me.

I went to Japan in 1970 and have returned every year since then.  I am wildly in love with Japan and Tokyo.  My passion in that case spread to others rapidly over the next few decades.  I found that nearly all interesting, artistic, creative and highly intelligent people were in love with Japan.

I had been to a kibbutz in Israel in the late 1950’s, visited again in 1990.  It was my visit in 2003 that showed me what a fantastic place Israel is and how exciting Tel Aviv has become.  

On my 2003 visit I discovered the incredible beaches of Tel Aviv, the dancing, the all night life, the incredible business start-up environment, the coffee shops and most of all the wonderful people.

The big change was the pro commerce vitality that Bibi Netanyahu brought to Israel in the early 1990’s when he and a few others discarded the oppressive backward looking socialism that made Israel a boring place.  

I’m glad the world is discovering Israel and Tel Aviv.  Like Tokyo, it is one of the greatest places on earth and there are very few.

Symbol for positive sum

Here is the problem.  One of the most important ideas available to humans is ‘positive sum’.  The term comes from game theory. It came into common use after the Korean War.  But it describes the greatest human invention of all: commerce.

Commerce is uniquely a ‘positive sum’ process.  When two people voluntarily carry out an exchange, the outcome is a ‘positive sum’.  Both people are better off.  The same is true for nations and for the entire planet that participates in commerce.  

Virtually nothing else that humans do is positive sum.  Not religion, not government and not statecraft, not language, not anything.  Knowledge can be voluntarily exchanged and it is.  This is especially true in technology.  

However, as I have argued many times, technology without commerce is irrelevant.  The Greeks and the Chinese had brilliant technology millennia ago.  But it was meaningless because it was not in a commercial society where it could spread and attain market value.

I have found that most people might know the term ‘positive sum’ but they don’t understand the concept. Deep in their bones, virtually no one understands ‘positive sum’ otherwise my pro commerce campaign would be irrelevant…. everyone would be screaming about how wonderful commerce is.

Positive sum means the more everyone voluntarily exchanges and participates in commerce, the better off everyone is.  Better off in physical, financial and emotional terms.

Therefore we need a new term for ‘positive sum’ that communicates the idea effectively.  Positive sum is a tent pole idea.  It holds up an entire worldview of health, happiness and prosperity.

What is a new and appropriate term?

Is there also a symbol that will convey the same idea?

Perform weddings

I won’t surprise any readers to learn that I perform weddings.  I got my license to be a minister in the mid-1970s from a mail order church.

I’ve only performed a few weddings but after decades they are all still married.

I did something unusual in each case.

I used the pre-marital counselling session to give the engaged couple an eye opening perspective on marriage and divorce.

I asked the couple to tell me what they knew about divorce laws in California.  Most knew very little.  So I gave them a quiz:  Johnny and Susan were a high tech couple, married for 3 years.  Susan earned considerably more than Johnny, roughly $300k.  Johnny earned about $175k.  They shared household expenses and the mortgage on their home in proportion to their earnings.

In the second year of the marriage, Johnny got an inheritance of $2 million which he put in a separate bank account.  He used the money to buy a condo a few months before he asked for a divorce.  He moved out of the house he shared with Susan which now had about $350k in net value after the mortgage.  

Johnny moved in with Mark in his new condo.

I now ask my pre-marital counselling couples: “who gets what in the divorce?”

This is not idle speculation.  It has happened to two of my friends.  Johnny gets half of the net sale price of the house $175k because California is a community property state and he gets to keep the new $2 million condo too.  The reason is that he kept the inheritance in a separate bank account.  It was never ‘commingled funds’ with Susan so it is all his.

Maybe that sort of reality check is why the couples I married are still married.

Another role for survival?

It is very discomforting for me to discuss genetic inheritance.  Most people believe that high intelligence parents will have high intelligence children because intelligence is genetically embedded.

Intelligence isn’t embedded in genes because it can’t be.  The reason is simple.  ‘Intelligence’ can’t be clearly enough identified for a large population to use breeding selection to produce the qualities of ‘intelligence’ over many generations.   

Therefore, like random breeding in apples and dogs, each generation of new humans is born with the same random genes and behavior that are found in the general population.  To say this about my own children and grandchildren is difficult, but I do.

That leaves ‘intelligence’ as a purely cultural characteristic, which it isn’t.  Many intelligent couples have kids who aren’t.  But it might be a small part cultural.

I would like to suggest that there is a parental selection process that explains the outcomes we see around us.

Each new child comes with an array of behavioral characteristics that cover a wide range.  Parents can select the characteristics they want to emphasize and the ones they want to de-emphasize.  

Since we don’t know what constitutes intelligence it is not possible to reliably select the behaviors that will compound to create ‘intelligence’ in the adult.  Much of it might be luck.  Some of it might be cultural.

Japanese and Jews may have cultural parental patterns that encourage child-rearing behavior that responds well in many offspring and later shows up as intelligence.

I see a selection process at work here on top of random attributes. Parents encourage attributes they believe will generate positive adult behavior and discourage other attributes.   Maybe some have to do with bed wetting, toilet training, cuddling, singing to the infant, bathing or god knows what else.   

Selective reinforcement by parents, over a random array of infant behaviors, is my most likely explanation for intelligence in successive generations.

Is this an original idea of mine?

What politicians all know about blame

Ten years ago I wrote a blog about warning the public about a pending disaster.

In the blog I wrote that all politicians know about Sam Yorty when he was mayor of Los Angeles. Yorty evacuated 80,000 people whose lives were at risk because they lived below a dammed lake (Van Norman Reservoir). The dam didn’t break.  In the next election the district at risk voted against Sam Yorty. Lesson: it is always better to let the voters die.

I am reminded of that because the LA Public School System closed for a day, last week, due to an emailed bomb threat.  The next day there was a tsunami of complaints about the false alarm  

NY got the same email but didn’t close the schools.  Said the authority in NY: ‘the note spelled ‘allah’ without a capital A, I knew it was phony.’

In the same blog, ten years ago, I also mentioned the brave action of Ariel Sharon in evacuating the Israeli residents of Gaza.

In retrospect that brilliant and politically unpopular move was a failure.  Without Jews in Gaza, the local Arabs became much more dangerous.  To this day, Gaza is an example that appeasing Arabs is a bad idea.  It makes them behave worse.  A friendly hand to an Arab is met with a knife attack.

Political lessons.  No wonder politics doesn't resemble a sandbox. 

Don’t click '1' or ‘unlist me’

I still have a landline phone which is on a recorder that tells the caller my email address, in case it is an old friend.  My wife wants us to keep the landline because she believes it might work after an earthquake when cell phones won’t.  The last big earthquake in Tokyo doesn’t support that theory.  Two cell companies failed and one kept working as did the Internet connections.

The landline gets an endless stream of junk sales calls, often with a machine generated message.  Increasingly my cell phone is getting these annoying calls.  They often offer to take your number off their list, or give you that option when you call the number back.  Don’t respond.

The same applies to the myriad emails I get that get through the spam filters.  They offer to take you off their email spam list.  Don’t respond.

The reason is: they are sending this junk to millions of phone numbers and email addresses of which a small fraction are real people with real numbers and email addresses.  When we respond, they put us on a ‘known recipient’ list.  So we get more junk.  On your phone you can just block the number and on email you can put it in the spam box.

Ethics?  Isn’t modern commerce being unethical by allowing these greedy spammers to intrude on our lives and waste our valuable time.  Sometimes they interrupt something important that we are doing.

I don’t blame modern commerce.  There are governmental barriers to simple market solutions.  

In one recent regulatory hearing, I proposed that Verizon be allowed to sell its land lines to a separate new company on the condition that the new company build up a consumer created anti-spam network.  No regulators expressed interest.  The entire phone system is regulated by the government, so new businesses to block spamming have no chance in that environment.

On top of this the national Chambers of Commerce and similar federations protect the spammers, simply because they are businesses.  Screw the Chambers.  If this were an open market, rather than a government created monopoly, spammers and similar frauds would be insignificant.

Look at the Internet,  I have spam blockers on my Google Chrome browsers and they work beautifully.  The same with Google email.  The open market can protect us from spammers and it does where the government doesn't meddle.

We are stuck on phones with spam because they are government regulated utilities.  No ethics here.  Just traditional crony politics.

Big data

Maybe my blogs are biased because the coffee group I hang out with is so far Left and so heavily populated with techies.  I could be answering questions of no concern to real people.

The techies all seem to believe that robots and computers are going to eliminate all jobs and that this is a serious political problem.  They also believe that ‘big data’ is going to revolutionize the way business is done.

On robots destroying the labor market, this argument was common in the 1840’s and every year since then.  The cotton gin was villain of the day, after the sewing machine and the Jacquard loom.  

It has never happened and it can’t happen because we modern commercial people keep inventing new tastes, desires and ‘wants’ for which we simultaneously create new jobs to satisfy our vast unfulfilled wish list.  In rebuttal to the robots eating jobs, I ask my morning coffee group: ‘Where did all these yoga teachers come from?’ Answer: new tastes new jobs.

The ‘big data’ issue is one I can’t deal with easily because these people have no idea about statistics or how business really works.

I worked in bank marketing research for a decade and have been a consultant to many businesses for many more decades and an expert witness in related fields for even more decades.

I use statistical analysis all the time on data of all sorts.

Here is the reality.  I can do research on an old telephone directory with a half million names, I can research the entire housing stock in the San Francisco Bay Area for the tax base and the utility using habits of millions of users over thousands of days.

In one study I personally did, I collected all the locations of stop signs in San Francisco and their density by block over a 45 year period.

How?  By sampling.  

As the sample population gets larger, if it is a random sample, it quickly comes to represent the total population.  Regardless of the size of the total population.  This can be true when the sample is only a few hundred, or a few thousand if one is looking for fine details about the total population.

So the size of the data batch has never been an issue.  ‘Big’ data is a meaningless tirade. A sample can be a perfect representation for any data batch size.  

As more business data is digitized, monitored and recorded, more can be done with the data and the analysis.  Not because of the size of the data, but because of the automatic nature of its collection.   If I could compare the flow of purchases between buffalo meat and beef in a few large stores in the S.F. Bay Area it would be fascinating to me. especially over the last five years.  That would be 'granularity' in the data, not 'bigness'.

But the issue is data collection and the ease of collection, not the size of the data base.  

Reading in the Wall Street Journal

Last week I read two articles in The Wall Street Journal that had a big impact on me.  So I want to give them to you with commentary.  I saved them to my Google Docs file, since the WSJ hides them behind a paywall.  Completely inappropriate when I want to comment on them for educational purposes.  

The first article is on the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp’s (DTCC) request for $50 billion from its members in backup reserves for bank repurchase agreements (repos). The article  has a number in it that has had me terrified for a year.  There are $2 trillion in repos outstanding at any one time. We don't know the current DTCC reserves.

I got out of the Stock Market last year when I read that the Fed was planning to act as the backup system for the repro market.  That terrified me.  In a financial emergency the entire repo market will be swamped with the short term needs of everyone getting out of the market when there is no market for their securities.  The Fed can move as fast as a Mature Sperm Whale on a clay tennis court using its backhand.  

My comment is: $.05 trillion is not an adequate backup for $2.1 trillion in repos.  Regardless of the current backup. This is not reassuring to me.  The article also suggests that the DTCC may not get approval from its members for this backup reserve.  I’m not going back in the Stock Market yet.  I may have to learn how I can make investments in the futures market and avoid the stock market risk.

The second article in my Docs file is about Netflix keeping its viewership secret.  The reason is so the companies that own the original releases, like AMC Networks which created ‘Breaking Bad’ doesn’t know how much money to charge for the permissions it sold to Netflix.

I faced this problem when trying to evaluate the price of Netflix.  I could only roughly estimate the price of the stock as the company became an original producer.

I’m out of the market right now.  When Nielsen begins measuring streaming programs I’ll be able to estimate the value of Netflix and might again buy the stock.

The effects of denial

If you are raped and a doctor, nurse and medical aide tell you ‘you weren’t raped’ what is your likely reaction?

If you are a normal American you become angry.  That much is likely and predictable.  That much we can say about human nature in our culture.  

I’ve picked a highly volatile and provocative example.  But the reality of rape makes it a good example.

It has long been a complaint of rape victims that they were told that * they were provocative in their clothes and behavior,  * they encouraged consensual sex before they changed their minds too late,  and * they gave misleading clues when they were drunk.  There are other excuses that have been used long before now.

Anger is the predictable reaction to these denials.  What the ordinary American does after hearing these denials and has the angry reaction. Is not predictable.  

Some victims shut up and become long-term angry people. Some become depressed and self destructive.   Some strike out at the deniers…. verbally, legally, vengefully and violently.

What I am saying is true.  It is reality, that every American knows.

But somehow a vast number of American Lefties can’t understand why 60% of Americans are very angry these days.  They have had reality denied to them by the mainstream media and the Democrat leaders for nearly a decade.

*Americans know that Fundamental Islam is attacking them.  

* That gun control doesn’t influence criminals and mentally ill angry people.

* That global warming is not a big issue, if it is real at all.

* That blacks kill blacks in astounding numbers and that the police rarely act racially.

* The out of marriage children cause poverty and many other problems that the government can’t fix.

* Etc.

Yet, the American public hears these false stories everyday.  What can we understand about Americans from understanding ordinary human beings?  Americans are angry.

Muslims will have to get used to it

We have entered a new era.

Ordinary Americans are becoming aware that Fundamentalist Islam is at war with the modern world.  Especially the United States and Israel, the great success stories of modern commerce.

At the moment the squishy Left is complaining about pronouncements of the need to carefully supervise all Muslims and be cautious about admitting new ones to the U.S.

The trouble is we are at war, when we finally realize it.  In past wars we have suppressed the enemy representatives who live among us.

In WWI with Germans as our enemies, every domestic person with a German accent got rid of it quickly.  I know that from my father who was an American born in Berlin who returned to the U.S. in 1917 and had to immediately lose his German accent.

The hundreds of German newspapers went out of business because no one would be seen in public with one.

In WWII the same thing happened to Italians.  In fact several thousand suspect Germans and Italians on the East Coast were rounded up and interned as potential spies.  Similarly with the entire West Coast Japanese-American population. They were sent to Manzanar, Tule Lake, Gila River, Heart Mountain, Topaz and several other internment centers.

Muslims, including black Muslims will stop wearing head scarves and men with Arab mustaches will shave them off.

It’s obviously coming.

Why communism failed

There were plenty of communists and Lefties in my family.  They always said that communism would work if it were given a good chance.  This was a recognition that Russia, China, Cuba and a few other places were flawed versions of communism.

I personally came to a different conclusion after living on a pure communist kibbutz at the same time as Noam Chomsky.   Chomsky decided that people were not good enough for communism.  I concluded that communism was not good enough for real people.  Chomsky has made a living and become world renown on his observation.

Paul Krugman has come up with a new variation on my old family line and Chomsky’s.

Krugman says that Russia and China failed because the workers fell out of love with communism.  That at first they worked hard and built solid industries and agriculture.  But over time they lost their passion and wouldn’t work hard to support their great nations.

I know my readers can see the absurdity of that.  Russia and China and Cuba killed and drove out so many people who didn’t support communism, that everyone around them could see that communism was not driven by passion for hard work but pure evil fear.

The best way to understand the issue of modern commerce vs communism is to listen to all the Lefties around me in the morning for coffee.  They hate ‘capitalism’, love equality of income, hate big business and love environmental regulations designed to tax everyone and restrain business growth.  Yet, everyone of these people have jobs where they work hard for 60 hours a week.  And they are proud of the good jobs they do.

Give me the system where people work hard do a go job and complain endlessly over the ills of modern commerce. We all benefit from their hard work and only a few of us hear their stupid complaints.

 

The Zuckerberg charity

If there were a charity that had explored nearly all avenues of charitable giving that should be of interest to any new charity.

Not true, at all.  I was president of Point Foundation created by Stewart Brand with money from his Whole Earth Catalog.  Point tried every imaginable form of charitable giving and left extensive notes.  To my knowledge no one in the charitable world has ever looked at those results.

There is a good reason no one has looked at Point’s experience.  Everyone, no exceptions, is certain they know how to ‘do good with money’.

That is the fundamental false premise of charitable giving.  

If one started with the opposite proposition they would be better off: ‘there is no way to use money to do good’.  Start with that challenge and you will find that charitable giving is a bad idea to start with.

Zuckerberg is starting with the idea that mixing profit businesses with tax exempt projects will be an improvement over existing structures.  That is strange nonsense.

Profit businesses always do good because they are ultimately selling to individual consumers who buy because they find benefit.   In that sense the Zuckerberg Charity is merely an investment company like any other.

Charity to tax exempt projects is the exact opposite.  Money doesn’t fix anything.  It can promote corruption, laziness and self deception.  But doing good is itself a flawed idea.

We can all think about a few uses of money that was positive.  Carnegie's libraries.  The Rockefeller sponsored research on rice and wheat that has had bountiful results.  Some commissioned pieces of art, music and dance.  From that point on, the list gets shorter.  Very short.

What we at Point found was that the people who used charitable money effectively were people who were already effective in their work.  These people were rare and far between.  They could raise money in any case without Point.

When you really do good, you will find ferocious opposition.  I didn’t learn this from Point.  I learned it from 1978 to 1981 when I built a park for street people in a bad neighborhood in San Francisco.  The street people loved it.  Freedom from hassle.

But every force in society sought to close the park.  Social services wanted people to be clean, sober and get jobs.  So did nearly everyone else.  The project was so good and made a few vulnerable people very happy… so it had to be stopped.

When you really do good, don’t expect support.  Expect opposition.

The gun issue

O.K. confession time.  I’m about to lose all my anti-gun readers.  

I bought a rifle in 1974 because the two black leaders of the Prisoners Union threatened my life.  I cut off their use of a rental car because they no longer had foundation grants to cover the rent of their office in the building I managed or their other expenses. So to them, I should obviously be killed.

I went to Sears and bought an M1 rifle and ammunition and rode home with it on the back of my motorcycle.  After a few hours of thinking about it, I returned the rifle to Sears.  I decided I was much smarter than the two black thugs and could out smart them on this threat to my life.

About 2 years ago, 2013 I decided again that I needed a rifle.  My view of the coming civil war suggested that it would begin soon.  It is still in its incipient stages.  I expect my neighborhood in the Gay Castro district to be a central battle zone.

Just reading the online requirements for me to buy a rifle was shocking.   In California all transactions involving firearms must be made through a dealer of record.  Even passing on a firearm to a child after a death requires a dealer of record..  

The dealer will charge for any transaction, usually $75.  The dealer requires proof of age (over 18 for a rifle), proof of residence such as utility bills and a driver’s license.

Also proof is required of a Handgun Safety Certificate.  Then you have to wait 10 days.  If you order a firearm online it must be sent by the online seller to the address of a dealer.

I read the pamphlet for the Handgun Safety Certificate which makes all the state laws and punishments explicit.  

I found a dealer outside of San Francisco who could receive a rifle for me from an online store.  It could not include a cartridge holding more than ten bullets and had to be on an approved California list of acceptable rifles.  Many gun manufacturers won’t make weapons to sell in California.

I met my dealer in a Starbucks outside San Francisco after he notified me he had received the rifle.  It took half an hour to fill out the paperwork including a thumbprint and a photo.  The rifle was in his new Mercedes trunk.

Getting the rifle home required a locked case which the dealer sold me.  Once at home I needed a more secure locked case under San Francisco law.  

For ammunition I had to have the online seller send it to a friend outside San Francisco.  San Francisco doesn’t allow the delivery of ammunition to its citizens.  The last and only gun shop in San Francisco closed this month.

After this massive rigamarole I decided that California gun laws were too stringent.  What criminal would bother with this bureaucratic nightmare?  So I sent a donation off to the National Rifle Association political wing, their Institute for Legislative Action.

 You can stop reading my blog if this offends you.

Maybe it was the demographic changes in California

The last blog made me think about how San Francisco became this perfidious swamp of evil.  And how California became this craven home of Democrat venom.

Before 1958 California was the most healthy and vital state in America with the best public schools, the best highways and the least corruption.  Before 1966 San Francisco had Republicans holding important elective offices. Today neither is true.

What was the change?  I think part of it was proposition 7 in 1952 that began the process of eliminating our nonpartisan elections.  The most vital consequence of this change began in 1961 with the election of Jesse Unruh as speaker of the Assembly.  Jesse used his speakership  power to force business contributions into Democrat Party coffers and slowly win elections for Democrats.

The biggest change has to have been demographics.   For California it was clearly the immigration of Mexicans and Latinos to the Central Valley and their forced adoption of citizenship after the end of the bracero program in 1967 by my close friend Bob Gnaizda while working for California Rural Legal Assistance.  Hispanic population went from 2 million in 1970 to 7 million in 1990; from 10% of the population to 25%.

There was always a steady migration from the East Coast to California especially to San Francisco.  I think that San Francisco was finally swamped by Lefty New Yorkers and other East Coasters by 1996 who then had the votes to pass Prop A in 2002 which created district elections and gave the city a radical socialist Board of Supervisors.

The pernicious migration of East Coast Luddites has continued unabated from that time on, creating a perfect storm of radical Lefty malice, a cataclysm evil.

Big pharma argument

I am so proud of myself.  I was sitting next to a typical San Francisco matron recently.  I got into a conversation with her about the many miracle drugs and surgeries that are saving lives.

I particularly cited Harvoni and its predecessor Sovaldi which cure Hepatitis C.

I mentioned that two of my friends had been cured of Hep C.

This typical San Francisco harridan immediately responded “the price of a lot of drugs are too high, poor people can’t get them.”

I said one of my friends cured of Hep C was a member of Kaiser and is very poor. The harridan replied that Kaiser was only on the West Coast.

I said, that “there was no way to know if life saving drugs would be created and marketed if people like her set the prices.

"Chances are that millions of people (all kinds) would die from her idea of good price setting policy”.

She stopped talking to me.  I’m proud that in this mean spirited Democratic city someone got their arguments rebutted.

Enough drugs

My readers know that in the remaining 14 months of the Obama presidency that immense damage can be done to modern commerce. More damage.

My personal concern is the field of medicine and surgery (which I consider separate).  We are in the era when all major diseases are being conquered and the Luddite Democrats have an axe to grind to destroy that supply of lifesaving medicine.  

I’ve talked to two people who are very knowledgeable about the current research in pharmaceuticals.  Both assure me that there are enough miracle drugs in the pipeline to provide new miracle drugs every year for the next ten years.

Thank goodness.  That should make sure that my biggest fear about the anti-commerce radicals can’t screw up MY life (I'm old).

Getting rid of a girl friend

This has nothing whatsoever to do with my blog subject.  

The subject came up recently and I had to tell my experience.  The issue was how to breakup with someone without making the ‘breaking-up’ feelings worse.  

If the person doing the breaking up can be characterized negatively that can relieve some of the pain.  I was willing to be the bad guy.

I  wanted to break up with a girlfriend, Dixie, who had become too aggressive.  While I was still a banker, she threatened to involve the bank in our relationship if I broke up with her.  

Immediately after leaving the bank to join the hippy revolution, I had my chance.  Dixie phoned when my brother was visiting.  I gave him the response I wanted him to use.

“Michael can’t come to the phone right now.  He is in the waterbed with two hippie chicks.”

Dixie hung up and never called back.

How important is the American lesson?

I spend a lot of time thinking about modern commerce, both currently and in terms of its history.

Since I start out with a different perspective I am generating a different origin.  As can be seen from the title of this blog page I find no comfort in the words 'capitalism' or 'free market'.  To me the former is Marxist haberdashery and the second is ideology.

Modern commerce has three components: trade, industry and clientry.  Each with a different history. Industry began roughly two hundred years ago.  Trade and clientry are as old as cities. Though both have evolved to suit the modern industrial world.

Modern industrial commerce requires four sub-systems to work effectively: meritocracy, diversity, openness and a preference for markets.

It is on these observations that I look back at history and see a different story than most others.  

While I have focused, in the past, on the institutions that came out of 17th Century Holland and migrated to England for the 18th Century, I have moved on.  All the institutions created in Holland were vital.  Holland gave us Amsterdam, with a Protestant optimism,  with a high level of meritocracy, a great sense of egalitarianism,  an extraordinarily high level of diversity with Jews from Spain and traders from everywhere in Europe,especially the liberal Hanseatic lands, a high level of honesty in trade dealings and many original open markets for goods of all kinds including financial goods.

I also recognize the importance of the Masonic order and the innovations in food and husbandry in England.

Nevertheless, it is the three outrageous lessons of America that I look to as the source of modern industrial vitality.  First in the 19th Century then again in the 20th Century.  America and only America brought us this vast treasure of modernity.

• First meritocracy needed a fertile ground.  America and the English colonies  provided that. America and the colonies are where the dissidents and children who didn’t gain from primogenitor moved. They were heavily meritocratic.
• During the 19th and 20th Century they have come from every land on the globe to America.  The meritocratic escaped the feudal, static and tribal societies that constitute most of the earth.
• By 1960, America had dissolved the hereditary elite.  They and their ‘blue books’ were replaced at the tops of corporate America by the meritocratic men who rose to the top in the WWII military.

------

• Second, meritocratic families enjoyed the vast open frontiers of America.  They could leave the hereditary elites behind in Boston and New York and move to Seattle, San Francisco, Salt Lake City….everywhere in the West.  There they found the greatest freedom on the planet.  No government, just opportunity.  They slowly created government, democratic government, from the ground up.  Unlike the kingdoms of the world, the grass roots of American democracy favored meritocracy and commerce.
• This happened again in the 1970’s with the confluence of expanded immigration, reduced tariff barriers and the outlaw world of hippies who loved commerce and openness.

------

• Lastly, from the earliest days of the 13 States to the great Western expansion, government in America has been weak and grass roots in nature.  This was true in the hippy home of San Francisco too.  This has always been true in America and it allows for incipient new businesses to emerge.

• We can see from the treatment of Uber and Airbnb around the world that government is hostile to modern commerce.  Weak government is an important ingredient in the prosperity of commerce.

God bless America.  She is the fountainhead of modern commerce and global wealth.  Not one iota of the American ‘grace’ was planned.  It was mostly good fortune.

Has commerce been suppressed before?

This question continues to plague me as I watch Lefties and Environmentalists make every effort to kill modern commerce.

I won’t live to see the devastation that these blind ideologs  are doing to the world but my life work will have been a failure if they succeed.

We know that modern commerce can be suppressed in an emerging environment.  That was true for Russia, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.   Russia has not survived the socialist suppression to become a modern commercial society, but China, India and Israel have.

Can a full flowering modern commercial society be stultified?  I believe it can.  The best example for me is Germany.  Before National Socialism in 1933, Germany was one of the most active participants in the modern commercial world. It had I.G. Farben, Bayer, Agfa, Krupp and Daimler-Benz. Important global companies.

While Germany today remains a powerhouse in modern commerce, Germany lacks commercial vitality.  Seriously stultified by union control of boards of directors a socialist economy, an hereditary class hierarchy and a deeply ingrained Lefty-Environmental-Socialism.

Germany is an example of a country that became socialist and has gone from a vital modern commercial society pre-1933 to a lame duck after WW 11 with good workers but only a driving power in the stagnant pond of the EU.

It is worthwhile fearing for the United States with the prospect of a socialist Democrat Party in our future.  It can't stop modern commerce but it can stifle it.

Jessica’s argument

Another conversation that provoked a blog.  

I was arguing that it is modern commerce that provides our opportunities to be authentic people who love what we are doing.  In Jessica’s case, she is in the most arcane of occupations, a designer of custom motorcycles.  

Her argument is that she would have been content 100 years ago when she would only have been a housewife and mother.  And that would have been sufficient.

So, can one be content in any circumstances, without the opportunities offered by modern commerce?  My answer would be clearly ‘yes’.  A few people would.  They can be content anywhere under any circumstances. I might be one of them.

My experience with people is two fold.  

• Even in the most rigid stable hierarchical tribal society there are many people who are not ‘content’ because they know they have far more capabilities that are not being used.  
• Having a few people who are ‘content’ is not a viable goal for a society.   A viable goal is for as many people to be ‘content’ as possible.

The Russian Orthodox Church has aspired to keep as many members as ignorant as possible as a religious goal to help those people achieve their personal contentment.  

This doesn’t work in the real world because other societies begin offering appealing forms of authenticity and the ‘ignorant’ find out about it.  They read about great women writers (Jane Austin).  They hear about societies where robust health is abundant and they needn’t suffer from tooth pain, failing eyes or a deformed limb.

Therefore it is necessary for the world to have modern commerce as an option for the many people living who will seek their own authenticity once they know their development is possible.  

An ordinary boy born and raised in Adelaide Australia, inherited a local newspaper.  He was able to turn this tiny newspaper into a global media empire that includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic and 21st Century Fox.  Worth over $15 billion.

The transition for that talented boy needed a world of modern commerce. Rupert Murdoch found his authentic self expressed in a brilliant adventure and we have all benefited along with the hundreds of thousands of his employees.

Personal contentment is not a good measure for a social system.  A better measure is authenticity for as many people as possible.

Move to pro commerce

There has been a general trend in my lifetime.

Beginning in the mid-1950’s I saw the emergence of a conservative intellectual world.  I became aware of William Buckley and his National Review.  I became aware of the arguments against communism by George Orwell in Animal Farm and  Sidney Hook.  By the early 1960’s I was writing a Master’s thesis on selling the Post Office into a private form.  

I watched the Young Republicans in California split into the Liberal Northerners and the Conservative Southerners.  Then I watched the same battle play out in the 1964 Republican primaries between Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater.  

By the next state election. 1966, Ronald Reagan had become so strong on the shoulders of the California South that he won the governorship.

His crew and their efforts gradually prevaded the Republican Party to win the Republican convention in 1980 and they elected Ronald Reagan President.

The next big win was by Newt Gingrich who created a successful Congress based on a very conservative platform.

In 2010, when the Republicans won Congress it was because of a conservative reaction to an out of control House that passed Obamacare without  Republican support. There was a conservative wave against socialized medicine. A new movement was created: the Tea Party.

Most recently a conservative slate with the Tea Party won 14 governorships and a strong majority of Congress,  The conservative majority of the Republican Party is now in control of the Party.  All candidates, who are viable, are conservative.  Very conservative.  Pro commerce.

The movement is steady, durable and deeply rooted in the American psyche.  Pro commerce has a solid place American politics.

Gorilla suit

A granddaughter was in town for Thanksgiving and I was asked to tell the story of Koko.  

I wrote a blog about Koko in 2005 and I repeat it here.

The reason for the earlier blog was that Iris Rivera, Nancy Alperin and Kendra Keller had sued Koko. Koko was accused of sexual harassment in the workplace for asking to see Iris, Nancy and Kendra's nipples. Iris went along with it.  The other two didn’t.  All three were fired at some later date.

Koko is a female gorilla who knows more than 1000 words of American sign language and responds to 2000 words of spoken English. Iris, Nancy and Kendra are some form of female homo sapien Puritan whose knowledge of English or reasonable human behavior is unknown.

I know Koko and her human trainer, Penny Patterson, from the mid-1970s.  Penny came to me for help. Penny is so good looking she didn't need to ask ... I was willing no matter what she needed.

Penny had borrowed two apes from the San Francisco Zoo and taught them how to use American sign language and to interact with images on a computer screen.  After more than a year, the apes knew enough language to tell Penny that they didn't want to be returned to the Zoo.  Imagine not wanting to go back to a cage in a zoo?

Penny wanted my help in getting the S.F. Zoo to free the apes for research, indefinitely. She was willing to pay and I was willing to raise the money.

I knew the Park and Recreation Commission, which spoke for the Zoo, would not listen to the pleadings of two disgruntled great apes.  So I mounted a campaign with hundreds of young school kids, two hundred of whom showed up, in a packed hearing room, to testify at the Park and Rec Commission on behalf of the ‘monkeys’.  We won.  Penny and the apes were grateful.

I occasionally took friends down to meet Koko.  Koko was most affectionate with a bull dike friend of mine.  Koko was most affectionate with females.  How she knew my friend was a female is beyond me.

One of the things about Penny that I liked was that she named one of the monkeys in her lab (not an ape) Noam.  Noam Chimpsky. She chose the name for the simple reason that the great Marxist Noam Chomsky was famous for the linguistic position that humans (specifically humans) are hard wired for speech. Also hard wired for class hatred and greed.

The lawsuits (split into two separate suits) against Koko were settled soon after they were brought and the settlement amounts were not published.

The absurdity of such lawsuits was never addressed, but the tongue in cheek coverage by every national media suggests that sexual harassment by apes is not taken too seriously in America.

Problem client parable

Honesty in business yes, candor no.

Mona is an architect friend who had a problem client.  The client, Betty and her husband, had a small job remodelling their garage.  After the garage was finished Betty and her husband planned to make it into an illegal apartment.  Mona did some drawings, got little feedback and no response to an invoice for the next four months ago.

Mona is busy, doesn’t need a small job and doesn’t like projects that are intended to be illegal.

Betty phoned recently to ask about the garage job.  Mona, the architect, asked my advice.

My view is that honesty is important to business but candor isn’t.  Candor would mean saying: ‘your invoice is overdue, you are wasting my time and I don’t want to work with you, fuck off.’

Since many people have no understanding of business, especially sole proprietor businesses, we can’t expect them to understand that sole proprietors only have their time to support themselves with.  I’ve never found explaining that issue of any value.  Education is not something businesses can afford to do; big or small businesses.

To me the solution is to phone the client back, I always recommend phone calls because writing emails can be misunderstood too easily.  Mona can explain that she never got paid for the last invoice.  Then explain that she is too busy now to do anything on the job for the next few months (that is true).  Mona  would appreciate getting paid and be happy to discuss working on the project in a few months.

The best outcome is to get a check in the mail and never hear from Betty again.  

The best outcome happened.  The invoice was immediately paid; the client never called back.

Shia future: self flagellation

Interestingly, President Obama said that the convening of the Paris conference on global warming armageddon was a rebuke to our Middle Eastern antagonists,  (Of course he made no reference to Islam, since he doesn’t believe that any of the myriad of terrorists who act in the name of Islam or Allah are muslims.) He didn’t mean that holding  the conference in Paris was a show of courage after the tragedy of Nov. 13th.  

What he made clear was that the Paris conference showed a positive view of the future which would discourage terrorists who believe they will give the world a fear of the future that can only be resolved by submission to Islam.

What I want to point out to Obama and future Obamaites is that the Paris Climate Armageddon view of the future is the same as many Shia muslims.

Most shia muslims observe the Day of Ashura on which muslims self flagellate with chains, knives and whips.  They are commemorating the suffering of Hussein a grandson of Muhammad who was killed along with his tribe.

I see Obama’s Paris conference on Climate Armageddon as the same as Shia self flagellation.  Everything the environmentalists at the Paris conference do is about bringing pain and misery to the world.  

They are firmly against modernity, most common sources of energy, use of resources for commerce, health and for such things as travel.  The Paris crowd wants taxes on industrial production and even cattle farts.  They want nearly everything to be more expensive or banned altogether if it is on their taboo list.

To put it simply, they are self flagellating the Western World, just as the Shia muslims do during Ashura.

The environmentalists are aligned with Shia in their self flagellation.  In some ways that is further antagonism to the Sunni among the terrorists.

Democrat party future

I think the Paris massacres by Islamists was a turning point for the American Democrat party.

I’m not taking sides in this blog,  I’m observing and making some projections on my observations.  

The Democrat party as we know it is dead.  The evidence is the last three elections where the Republicans won 14 new governorships in 2010 and held on to them in 2014.  Won a majority of the House in 2010 of 235 seats and added 17 more in 2014.  While also taking the majority in the Senate.

The Democrats have no new young up-and-coming candidates anywhere.  They control every large city (except San Diego) but many cities are headed for pension driven bankruptcy in the next few years or at the next recession. The cause is the union control of the Democrat party.

Democrat issues are: socialism, Obamacare, income inequality, climate armageddon, 'Global warming is the greatest threat to America', 'police are killing innocent blacks', 'Islam is not our enemy', 'the IRS has not become politically corrupt', Wall Street is a major source of harm to America, Planned Parenthood is not selling baby parts,  Gay marriage is good for America, Israel is not our ally she is a threat to the stability of the Middle East, raising the minimum wage will not increase youth and black unemployment, unions are good for public education while charter schools aren’t and we need a smaller military.  The majority of Americans don’t agree with Democrats on any of the issues.

So what will happen to the Democrat party? It will fragment into two major components.  The Obamaites, followers of Obama who will worship Obama for the rest of their lives and go to his speeches and gatherings.  The moderate Democrats who will spend 4 to 8 years finding a new leader.

Divided into two segments and effectively dead.