Pro Commerce

Early computer history

My local newspaper regularly runs an article on the history of the Internet.  The most recent article places the origin with some engineers who used a radio signal in 1976 to send text to a terminal that was on ARPAnet and ended up in a Boston computer.

What?  That is ridiculous.  Not even an engineering feat of interest.

I’ve been with the computer since 1962 and have been a user of every element of it from that date.  I’ve seen many of the visionaries projections such as the Dynabook at Xerox Parc in 1972 that foretold a small briefcase sized device that could connect to a computer and have access to an entire Encyclopedia.

When I started the marketing research department at the Bank of America in 1962 I used the IBM 7090 to analyze survey data from punch cards and BankAmericard applications from which I developed the modern credit rating system.  I loved the IBM 360 when it came along and used it in 1972 to invert a large matrix for multidimensional analysis.

By then I was using the 360 at Stanford called SPIRES which was connected via ARPAnet to half a dozen other university computers including New Jersey Institute of Technology where I had an account.  I used line editors on the terminals from then until about 1980 when a simple screen editor became available and was made useful.

In 1973 I put my first book, which was typeset from punch cards online at SPIRES and invited comments.  I got none.  My second book was written on a portable computer, with small floppy disks.  We lost many pages before they were saved.  The technology was not too great.

In 1976 I took my Texas Instruments portable teletype with phone modem to Japan.  I was able to communicate with my office via the NJIT account and a dumb terminal in the San Francisco office with telephone dial-up modem.  I didn’t do anything of importance with the system that I couldn’t do better by phone call.

The simple screen editor that I started using in 1980 was developed by my fascinating friend John (Capt’n Crunch) Draper and modified by another good friend and client Andrew Fluegelman.  It was EasyWriter that became the industry standard under another name.

When Stewart Brand opened one of the first two IPs at the Well, in 1985, I signed on with my early name [email protected]. I still have that account.

In 1987 I tried to create a network of interested thinkers and writers in my circle of friends.  I even offered to post their writings to my network.  I got no support because less than half a dozen had terminals and network access.  

I started using the Mosaic browser in late 1993 when it was made available.  

I created my own blog on the Well in 1999 using a spreadsheet for format.  I moved to Typepad in 2003.

I’d say I have a gut feel for the history of the Internet.  I was there most of the time.

Apple next

I hang out with a bunch of computer people.  Some are IT managers, some run major IT projects, others are managers of large departments in major tech companies and a few just work in tech departments.

Once I said something that suggested I have reservations about the glorious future of Apple.  I was immediately treated as some sexually perverted lunatic imbecile.

That suggests Apple is treated as sacred in my circles.  

I have never held Apple to be sacred.  Beginning with the Ipod I recognized beautiful product design which continues into the Iphone.  It has always been true of Apple packaging and advertising.

The trouble is I put Apple in the category of failure.  Steve Jobs had a proprietary view of the world, that anything inside and connected to an Apple had to be owned operated and designed by Apple.  This assured Apple of 2% market share, even when the product was brilliant and the best in its field.  

The breakout occurred with Itunes.  The Ipod could play anyone’s music.  That was an open system not a proprietary one.

Fortunately, and probably by accident, the Iphone used the Itunes model to add software to the very proprietary phone and the phone became an open system and the first great success for Apple. This carried over to the Ipad.

I don’t think Apple learned the lesson.  The Iwatch, and the Imoney, are not open systems and are getting nowhere.

I really don’t see a great future for Apple, except selling to its large world of devotees.  Especially since China is a major market where Apple has no unique access.

Brooklyn Tech people like Obama

The title of this blog doesn’t make sense.  It doesn’t make sense to me either.

This is a good time to write about the methodology of my blog writing.  

I used to carry a small pen and notebook.  Then as I got accustomed to my smart phone I found ways to write notes.  At about the same time I began writing titles on my smart phone I began putting them in date order in Google Docs.  

These notes, often titles of blogs, would come to me two days at a time in advance of the blog appearing.  Sometimes not at all and I would write the next day’s blog the day before. At worst I would get up in the morning and see that there was no blog and I would write one on the spot.

Sometimes I would get as many as five blogs in advance.  That was always helpful if I was about to travel and knew my brain would be mush for a few days after landing.

Back to the title of this blog.  I wrote this on an app called ‘notes’.  I probably dictated it into Google English three days ago.  But Google English made some grammatical correction that I didn’t see before going on to something else in my life.  These grammatical corrections have left me with a line of English that makes no sense and I can’t remember the subject.

Please excuse me.  I’m 78 and I admit many failings.  Not correcting a Google correction is a new one in my life.

Arrogant tech CEOs

My clients regularly deal with the big tech organizations top management; Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce and Uber.   The subject is usually the complete lack of effort by the companies to hire non-Indian Asians and other local minorities as employees or in contracting services and to make efforts to seek them out.   

For the past 30 years, financial organizations have been aggressive in recruiting in these demographics and found a competent class of workers. They also use a wide range of contract services from these groups. Tech would find the same results, especially since most jobs are not engineering.

My clients get one reaction from these giant tech companies and have been getting the same reaction for six years.  ‘Get lost.  You can’t do anything to us.’  

The reason for this arrogance turns out to be that these rich techies have found the corrupt channels to the Democrat government.  The obvious corruption of the Clinton Foundation is an example of the top of the Democrat iceberg.  The rest of the Democrat Party organization and its associated bureaucracy is just as easy to buy as the State Department.

I understand that businesses must take advantage of any monopoly influence available legal or not.  Now I understand how these giants have used our current banana republic for their own gain and protection.

If there is a change in government this Fall, it will be interesting to watch the change in behavior of these arrogant men (and Meg Whitman).

Olympic nations

It would be a waste of breathe to say that the United Nations is a disgraceful organization.  The amount of Jew hate alone disqualifies the organization as having even one iota of decency.  

There is one UN operational organization that builds schools and clean water sources in war torn areas.  Possibly that is a positive for the UN.  Most of the construction is destroyed within months by rival tribes.   The world is still mostly tribal and will be for centuries.

The point I want to make is that the Olympics are largely a reflection of the UN.  The UN has over 190 member nations.  The majority are the same size or smaller than San Francisco in population, area or economic output.  Think Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua and Aruba just in the A’s.  

The UN General Assembly is a meaningless body.  Remember it excludes Tibet, the Basques, Scotland and a Kurdish nation.  It doesn’t represent anything known to man.  Except the politics of the Cold War and who the U.S. or the USSR wanted to have as voting members.

The member nations of the Olympics are the same.  No definition.  The people on the Isle of Man and the Island of Vanuatu can compete on the same grounds as China and India which have a 1,000  times more people.  AND the playoffs at the Olympic games are designed to give small nations extra points to keep them in the higher ranks.

The whole issue is trivial.  But it is a reminder of the inherent stupidity of the UN and the need for a more functional global body.  At present the UN represents the Cold War power structure dating from the second half of the 20th Century.

So do the Olympics.

Early memory not structured

I have trouble remembering anything before age three.  I am especially dubious about others claims to remember further back.  Of course the existence of photos, videos and films makes earlier memories possible, but I doubt the personal recovered nature of those memories.

There is a reason I think this age is particularly relevant and important.  I don’t think we can have memories before there is structure in our mind.  I have no idea what structure in this case is, but I know it represents some organization of images, experiences and language that allows specific memories to to be filed and retrieved.

I only know this from watching infants learn.  I see infants cogitating the world around them long before they can interact or interpret it.  I see that period as the formation period of the mind in which categories and classes are being created and sorted.

Because our mothers are generally central to our learning language, I also see our mothers as helping shape our mental structures.  

I was raised by several Mexican nannies, one a young beauty.  I wonder what impact that had on my mental structure.

When I was in college I found her.  She had left my family when my father was in the Navy in Virginia and got married at age 16.  She was living in Richmond with a prosperous husband and two children.  She was still beautiful and very sexy.

National science button

Back in the early 1980’s I received a beautiful lapel button in the mail.  The envelop was from the National Academy of Science.  It looked like the Diet pin in the middle of this image.  The outer ring was silk.

I was honored.  The envelope had no letter or information.

Since it was clearly addressed to me, I assumed it was an appropriate honor.  At that time I had been giving thought to my role in the world.  I knew that I would never be appreciated because the realm I worked in had no metrics (like the number of citations in published journals) and most of my impacts would not occur until decades or centuries after my death.

At the time I knew I had founded the first multi-bank credit card, been president of Point Foundation, written articles on many novel subjects including random legislature and done a dozen other consequential things.  But even then I was hardly started on the important contributions I've made since.

I accepted the anonymous honor and have wondered to this day what that was all about.

Burning man again

Many of my friends and a few acquaintances know that I am given credit for the origins of Burning Man by the founders.

The subject comes up now that Burning Man is happening and the owners are doing TV interviews with an imaginary ‘origins story’.

I have written about the origins many times.  Here is one blog I did.

After I created these gigantic bonfires on the beach at the ocean, my friend John Law organized his own post-New Years tree burn at China Beach.   John, in addition to being a flagpole climber, makes and repairs neon signs.  So for his bonfire he added a neon outline of a man to his wooden structure.  

John’s bonfire grew.  He had a partner, Larry Harvey who worked with him as the crowds grew into the thousands and the whole affair was moved to Summer and Nevada.  In the mid-1990s John and Larry had a strong disagreement over the direction of Burning Man.  John is a hippie anarchist and Larry wanted a formal organization. Oil and water. There was a settlement a few years later.  

Larry has subsequently made up his own version of the ‘origins’ of Burning Man.

Africa

My daughter was just in East Africa for some medical research work she is doing.  She described the three ‘cities’ she visited in Kenya and Tanzania.

I know West Africa, but have never been to the East.  I loved many of the places I visited, urban and rural in Senegal and Mali.

She saw poverty, illness and urban filth.

I was there long enough to see the lives of people and tribes beyond that.  I also knew what African life was like when the first non-Africans arrived. I had done the primary research, as a graduate student on the economic history of Africa.

What we have in Africa is the application of the fruits of modern commerce on top of an unchanged tribal world.  Africa is tribal in everyday and every way.  Modern commerce doesn’t fit on top of a tribal life any better in Africa than it does in most of Arabia or the tribal areas of Latin America.

Modern commerce when experienced as a porridge of goods and services is bizarre and cruel in some ways.  

Africa is not the by-product of European imperialism.  Europe tried to create a world that would buy European exports and produce a few local exports.  The century of European contact was basically a failure because few Africans could fit into an industrial work schedule or a life as an individual self motivated being.   Even without meritocracy, the European ideas of work and individual self motivated being are fundamental for local people to accommodate to modern commerce.

Africa is a case of vast explosion of population because of new food sources laid on top of a tribal world that never changed.  Having non-African materials and products has changed local life very little.  

What my daughter saw in East Africa is an example of a person who puts on a European suit over tribal underclothes, with no shoes, driving an auto he could never repair on his way to an all night tribal dance in preparation for a distant cousin’s ritual coming of age ceremony three days away.  

The suit and the auto are superficial and largely irrelevant.  They will still be irrelevant centuries from now.

Bronze engineering

In dealing with my question about the fragility of modern commerce and whether it can survive the continued onslaught of Lefty anti-commerce hatred, I have had to look at a bronze astronomical computer from the period of roughly 2,300 years ago in the era of Greek civilization.

The computer is named for the sunken ship it was found in: the Anti-kythera.  It was in a wooden box.  Wikipedia has done an extraordinary job of summarizing and describing the computer.  It is worth looking at just to see what a good job Wikipedia can do if good people care.

My interest is in three facts of the Greek computer.  

First, our real knowledge of these engineering feats is the result of the interest of Derek de Solla Price in the mid 1950’s.  Without his understanding and interest the whole issue would be unknown.  I have always considered him brilliant. Fact, very few extraordinary people are the source of nearly all important knowledge and institutions. Like Alexander Hamilton.  

Second, the computer shows that in the Greek circles of people knowledgeable about calendars and astronomy there was comprehensive knowledge of Babylonian, Hebrew and Egyptian calendars.  The knowledge of these men covered several thousands of miles connected by commerce.  There were several important libraries, one at Alexandria and one at Pergamum.  Both destroyed by the Romans in an era before books made knowledge widely dispersed.

Third, the Greek computer was made of bronze.  Copper and 5% tin were used to make the precise and delicate gears.  This technology is found again in clocks in Italy, France and Great Britain in the 1300’s.  Most importantly, bronze gears and wheels were used for scientific instruments in Amsterdam in the early 1600’s.  

The technology of bronze gears seems to have survived for 1700 years even though scientific knowledge was lost.  Technology may have survived in China and parts of the Arab-Indian networks during this time.

All of which is re-assuring about the potential survival of modern commerce.  The technical knowledge and skills may survive a long time.

Whether the institutions for innovation and business life survive is not so clear.

Censorship

I seem to take online censorship pretty hard.  On Facebook I have found five personal friends censored and five prominent writers whom I trust have been censored and two have been banned.

I have been censored for one Facebook item and kicked off a neighborhood commercial daily news group.  Both times for pointing out that blacks create 5-6 times as many homicides as any other group.  That is 500% more murders.  Of course that is a fact, not a political opinion.

Since the banning is being done by a commercial entity it falls into the subject matter of this blog.

I do not believe that any business open to the public has the right to discriminate in any way.  To me all public businesses are like the original Roman ferries.  You either transport everyone or no one.  Censorship is discrimination.

How do we get around Facebook?

I have a friend and reader of this blog who has designed a facebook system that is decentralized, like bitcoin.  It uses a blockchain distributed computer system.

We need to get this decentralized facebook working.  If you know someone who wants to invest in this project, which is nearly done (in the final testing and early marketing stage) contact me.

Of course a no-censorship facebook will be filled with awful Nazi, ISIS. Lefty and lunatic material.  Do we prefer censorship?  Not me.  I favor free speech.

If someone makes a Jew hate remark within my hearing, I will punch the sonofabitch in the face.  Hard.

Parcour is childhood lost

The title of this blog says it all.

I love watching parcour, people running, jumping and bouncing off of everything.

That is what I did as a kid.  I did it well into my 20's.

Now kids have ultra play safety in a bubble around them.  The playgrounds are rubber and netting.

I’ve watched kids find whatever part of the playground has rocks, high places and any danger they can scout out.

Kids want danger and reality.  Parcour is what they have to wait for to get a taste of life.

I hear some parents are letting their kids take parcour classes.  But a class is not a place where a kid can experience real life.

George Leonard once argued that fear of lawsuits is what has turned our nation into snowflakes.  He may have been right.

Can modern commerce survive?

My readers know this is a question at the top of my mind these days.  

I’ve seen that an anti-commerce political party (Democrats) can bring economic growth to a complete halt in the U.S.   So I worry whether a continuation of Democrat power can permanently destroy this fragile world of modern commerce that seems to have only thrived in my lifetime.

I look at England.  Permanently destroyed by the Labor party in power for only four years after 1945.

I look at New York, a center of American innovation until the 1960’s and nothing there since.

Today, only the U.S. and Israel are sources of modern commercial innovation.  A century ago both Britain and Germany were part of this club.  

Holland was the home of modern commerce in the 1600’s but never again reached that peak.

I still have some hope because Americans will always find a home somewhere in Idaho or Utah.  Will that be enough to keep the flame of modern commerce alive or is a larger playing field necessary?

As far as I can tell less than a dozen people understand the many elements that are needed for modern commerce to thrive.  Meritocracy, diversity, openness, egalitarian spirit, individualism, love of markets and the institutions to support all of this.

Have I lived in the only period of human vitality?

Ann on economics

Ann M. has asked me to write about why economics is so wrong.

She was particularly incensed by how wrong economic academics were in failing to see the disaster that is Obamacare.

My perspective is different.  My focus is business.  Which presumably has some connection to economics.

I spent two years in economics graduate school before realizing that economics didn’t make any sense.

I originally went into economics to study the work of Wesley Mitchell on business cycles which appealed to me as a fundamental way to grasp the economic system.  Turns out that business cycles exist but are not understood by anyone.

I then mastered the whole field of economics and was disappointed to learn that every part of economics was based on fantasy.  

• There is no such thing as a market based on the convergence of supply and demand around a price.  Nearly everything is a fuzzy connection.  Every price and exchange is based on a Transaction with many, often dozens of converging factors.  The price of a house or rental of a condo are based on taxes, interest, contracts, liens, condition of repair, maintenance, and much more.  There is no convergence of supply and demand.  The same is true for hiring a lawyer, shopping for food and nearly every other transaction. I wrote a long article on Transaction Based Economics.
• There is no reality to the concepts of ‘capital’ or ‘labor’.  Capital is really a physical representation of knowledge.  The Mississippi is constantly changing depth.  A good captain originally had it all in his head along with soundings every few hundred feet.  Then maps became better and were kept up to date.  Then sonar came into play, followed by radar.  All of it is still knowledge in different forms.   Since capital is knowledge, post war cities can be rebuilt to functioning levels in only months after being totally burned down.  Labor is even more obtuse and inexact except where unions eliminate the vast differences in productivity of each human in each situation.
• The basis and origins of modern commerce are never investigated in economics.  Ever hear of an economic study of meritocracy?  No, yet it is the core of productivity.

There is much more that is fantasy and vapid arcana in economics: too much to waste my time on.

Putting it all together

We have had virtually no economic growth in America for eight years.  Why?

I think the answer is simple: connect the dots.

• we  have dramatically increased poverty and the number of people who are non-productive parasites.  That occurs because of all the women who have children without being married to a father.  There are now 18 million kids under 18 without a two parent household. And 9 million of those are living in homes below the poverty line.
• all new construction or remodelling in the U.S. requires an Environmental Impact Report which dramatically slows down development and radically increases the cost.
• city budgets and local tax increases are going to 100% non-productive uses in the form of union pensions.  In most cities this component now exceeds one third of all expenditures.
• government subsidy to higher education loans creates a vast labor force that has so much debt it can not start small businesses or be self employed.
• the national milieu is strongly anti-commerce (the president says ‘you didn’t create this business’) so young people are not innovating and starting new businesses.
• local government is totally controlled by unions in every city, creating a vast class of lazy people who are unproductive.
• the number of regulations of business increases geometrically without slowing down and more self-employment occupations require expensive and irrelevant licences.

Connect the dots.  We have nearly killed commerce in America.

Traffic calming

The hot new theme among city planners and traffic engineers are bumps in the roads and streets that say “Slow Bump’.  The erroneous euphemism that describes these auto hazards is ‘traffic calming’.

That is terribly wrong.  If I am human and similar to other humans in autos, these bumps are ‘asphalt inflammatories’.  I get furious because I am trying to get somewhere.  These are malicious impediments intended to slow me down at the expense of bicycle riders who are already going much slower.

This urban planning bias towards bicycles is downright evil.  Evil is when a person or group deliberately harms a vulnerable person or group.  The people who need autos and can’t ride bicycles include older people, invalids, families with children and people with high stress demanding work.

Years ago 1997, I measured the increase in stop signs versus the increase in autos and traffic in San Francisco.  Stop signs increase perpetually and slow down traffic everywhere for no rational reason and with no rational limit.  It is evil because it creates lawlessness.

Traffic bumps are just the new ;stop sign' version of government malice. Only good for bicyclists and no one else.

So screw your traffic calming.

No infrastructure at 0 interest

We have screwed ourselves.  There is a classic economic model called Lerner Real Interest.

The idea is that interest rate actually measures the needed return on an investment.  Market wide, all investments can be compared to each other based on the interest rate of return and for the society as a whole the level of interest determines where investment flows.

Therefore when interest rates are high for the society, investment is only made in high return short period capital.  When the interest rate is low, investments are made in long term slow return capital.

Therefore in the current near zero interest rate period, investments should be made in very long return capital.  That would be infrastructure.  A bridge can take decades to pay off.  While a small retail shop can pay off in a few years.

But that isn’t happening in the U.S.  Why not?  It is happening in Japan where low interest rates for 20 years have resulted in massive infrastructure build out.

I observe two factors:  the first and most serious is the EIR.  The entire U.S. is under the control of the environmental anti-commerce Left that requires all building, improving, fixing and changing to have an Environmental Impact Report.  

These EIR’s are costly and usually require an arcane and obtuse form of change of construction.  They always increase the cost of building by a factor of 3x, 5x or 10x.  So infrastructure becomes much too expensive to warrant starting in the first place.

The second factor is union pensions.  Local municipalities are the main source of funds, via bonds, for infrastructure expansion.  Local municipalities have been stuck with unfunded and rapidly growing union pensions.  These pensions have been growing so fast that they suck all the funding out of local budgets.

Leaving no funds to cover the vast costly infrastructure.   The enviros and the unions have totally screwed us.  

Definitely no SETI

SETI is the extravagant science project to search the heavens for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Imagine the arrogance of a human being able to say that there are not and never will be signals from ‘intelligent life’.  I am that arrogant that I can say for certain there are not now and never will be another species capable of sending signals out into the universe.

How can I be so certain?  Because I am one of the few living people who understand how we came to be.

• We modern humans, who can send signals to each other over great distances are the byproduct of modern commerce which barely exists on this planet and is very fragile.

• Among the trillions of species on earth for several billion years there are only 7 billion humans alive today.  The total is 100 trillion species years. And we are the only ones with the potential for technology.

• Of that 7 billion, since the beginning of modern commerce in 1800 there have been less than a few billion such humans in only a few million square miles who have participated in modern commerce with sufficient competence to read, write, do numbers and create technology necessary for long distance communication.  Maybe one billion.

• Of that billion, only a tiny fraction had the social attributes necessary to generate technology and operate it.  That fraction needed to operate in
• a meritocracy
• with a non-tribal group of peers,
• in an environment that supports individual initiative
• supports free markets
• operate in a nation with a weak, free individual oriented government
• and in a large collection of friendly cooperative members of the species.

Even today that number of people of our species may be under 100 million.  And we have been at this level of technology and functioning for only about 100 years.  

Since only a few people, maybe 100, understand what created this extraordinary time in modern commerce and hundreds of millions of people (Lefties worldwide) are trying to destroy it, I don’t think we can expect this miracle to occur anywhere else in the universe.

I can say with certainty that it hasn’t and it won’t.

Reagan Library

I recently went to the Reagan Library which is only an hour out of West LA.

I saw the Library from the point of view of a museologist, which is how I look at most museums.  The Reagan Library is superb from this point of view.  

Each room is dedicated to a single subject and the visuals and objects are perfectly suited to the subject.   Every age group and visiting category will find something of interest. There are some of Nancy’s clothes, there are videos with plenty of action and there is a re-creation of the Oval Office.

One room was particularly poignant.  This room has a short video of the shooting of President Reagan and a woman opens a door to the room to allow a small group at a time and to tell people to not look if they are disturbed by the video.

The day I saw the video was the day Hinckley was released from a mental hospital.  I asked the woman if she would mention that.  She said ‘no’.  The subject matter was too disturbing for many people anyway.  I noted that she was on duty for only half an hour.  All docents continually rotate every half hour.

I haven’t seen any other Presidential Libraries, but I’m sure they are all upbeat and melodramatic.  The trouble is that Jimmy Carter is hated more every year by Jews, Evangelicals and people who follow his trips to visit tyrants.  Ronald Reagan was vehemently hated by Lefties: vehemently.  That is nowhere recorded or presented.

That would help people put in perspective the hatred of G.H.W. Bush, G.W. Bush and his VP and Sec’ty of Defense, candidates McCain and Palin, candidate Romney and the extra special hatred of Donald Trump.

Some notice of that hatred would be historically important.

Help everyone

Those of you who listen to Rush Limbaugh have heard him say half facetiously that his ‘talent is on loan from God’.  

I actually concur with Rush and have led my adult life that way.  I know I have an extraordinary ability to help people run their business better… much better.  Since I consider this talent a ‘gift’ I feel that I must make this gift available.

Consequently, I often adjust my consulting fees to fit the pocket book of the person or business I am consulting.  If I am charging an hourly rate I adjust the number of hours to be comfortable for the client.

If the client is in a business I disdain (for example, I doubt that astrology is helpful) I will still consult with the business wholeheartedly.  

I view my ‘gift’ as a gift to mankind not to me.  I suspect that many talented people feel the same way.  It is just rude and maybe pretentious to say this out loud so it is not said.

Why is US executive comp so high?

I am an expert witness on executive compensation.  I usually testify on the need to relate the executive’s performance to the company performance.  I also point out that indefensible compensation results in poor top management relations and costly mistakes.

What I forget sometimes is why the U.S. has such high executive compensation compared to other countries.

The reason is straightforward.  The business market in the U.S. was the first to develop: we have a marketplace for businesses.  By the mid 1960’s corporations in the U.S. were buying and selling companies.  Today there are over 200,000 corporate sales a year in the U.S.; over half of all such deals in the world.

Over time, the buyers and sellers of corporations began to detect the fact that some CEO’s could make a newly bought company more successful while others couldn’t.  It was the mobility of corporation ownership and management that made the importance of CEO competence visible.

So, over decades corporate boards began to realize the financial value of an effective CEO and top management team.  Now, if they can detect those skills they are willing to pay for them.

The market is not perfect because the right connection between a CEO and a company and an industry are not always evident.  Even worse, some companies, like regulated utilities, run the same way with good and poor management.

Germany probably has many companies with highly paid executives but we won’t know about it because the biggest and best companies are family owned.

SVN and Josh Mailman

You may know of the Social Venture Network.  It is people in the grant making world and entrepreneurs who are joined together around the idea of socially responsible business.

SVN, as it is known, grew out of a group called the Doughnuts.  The Doughnuts were started by Josh Mailman a trust fund heir.   I just wanted to record for history my role in the origins of the organization.

In the summer of 1981 Josh came to house to find out how I made my very ‘organic’ hot tub.  While we enjoyed the hot water I explained that the tub was an old 6 foot diameter redwood wine barrel.  The circulating water went through an old discarded hot water heater, with a simple fish pond pump and baking soda as the sanitation chemical.  The water cycled between 112F and 125 so no spores could survive.  Cold water brought the temperature of the water down to a comfortable bathing temperature which for me is about 107F.

I asked Josh about his life and he told me how desperately he wanted to start a group of people like himself to help fund socially responsible projects.  I told him how.

Pick a place and a date and invite everyone.  That is how you start something.  

Josh picked a date in the next month in Colorado, convenient for his peers. That is how Doughnuts started and later became the Social Venture Network.  Josh is now ‘one of the old men of the organization’ which is being run by a whole new group of younger folk.

Disclaimer: after having been a key organizer of the whole corporate social responsibility movement, I announced my disagreement with the idea.  Everyone has his own idea of ‘social responsibility’ and it is always a fad.  Business can only pretend to be interested in the ‘fad de jure’. 

My son’s book

My son has written a book, a wonderful book.  I can recommend it to everyone who is in the world of martial arts and Chinese studies. 

It is about the likely origins of Chinese Martial Arts.  He has been teaching all the major Chinese martial arts for over 25 years and now teaches all over the world from Chicago to London, to Berlin to Jerusalem to Ramallah.  

The book is about the origins of the Martial arts in theater and Chinese religion.  It is an in depth history.

Every tribe on the planet has its own martial art and that art is often connected to ritual performance and dance.  My son shows the origins of modern Chinese martial arts in the core arts of China’s folk lore and theater.

The book is even more powerful if you have seen any of the standard Chinese performances of the Journey to the North, Outlaws of the Marsh and Journey to the West.  Much of the overlap of the arts is visible.

My son is a good writer, so it is easy and fascinating reading. The references and annotation are impressive and valuable.  The book is also in hard copy, but I read it on Amazon Kindle.

Long Now clock

I was looking at an article about the problem of storing radioactive waste far into the future when the future is so uncertain and language is known to be unstable.

Stewart Brand faced the same problem in his plan to build a 10,000 year clock, to encourage long term environmental thinking.  You can read about this project at Stewart’s site.  

There is also a bar at Fort Mason, next to Greens Restaurant in San Francisco which displays some of the clock parts.

Stewart and his gang and the radioactive waste think tanks seem to overlook two obvious sources of information about preserving information over long periods of time.

One group that has been transmitting detailed technical knowledge and biological information is the Japanese team that is part of the Imperial Household in charge of rebuilding the Ise Jinja every 20 years. It takes eight years to build.  This group of less than 5,000 people maintain the skills and supports a forest of perennially replaced pine trees that grow to 200 years old before being used in the Shrine.

Japan knows how to retain knowledge and skill over long periods.  They are never consulted on this issue.

The real experts on retaining knowledge over long periods are my tribe.  Jews.  We have reliable information on our tribal founding and detailed history dating back 3,000 years.  I even know my patrilineal family name passed on to me by all my forefathers going back 90 generations.  Millions of my fellow family members can speak and read the same language my great ancestors spoke and read at the time we left Egypt three millennia ago.  

I know why Stewart Brand never looked to my family for guidance on his Long Now clock.  One of the first members of his Board was a man who hates Jews, Brian Eno.

That may also be a reason that information on the European’s quest to solve long time radioactive problems don’t mention Jews.  Europeans have spend one millennia trying to rid the earth of Jews.

Russia vs China anti-Kissinger

I think now is the time for an anti-Kissinger foreign policy.  Obama, in his ignorance and malice has almost created the right conditions.  Trump can reach out to Russia as an ally.

America today faces a slowly growing China.  China has a millennia long history of foreign policy.  As it gains power it ‘probes’ to see what response it gets from its neighbors.  Each probe measures the power and direction of the neighbor.

Today China has claimed millions of square miles of vital ocean to the South and East.  The Obama government has responded meekly.  A few ships traversed China’s claimed territory and a new base is being built in the Philippines.  The message to China is 'take it... maybe a new administration will care.'

The obvious next step is to empower Russia in the Far East.  This can be done, by using American oil field skills to expand Russian production.  America can help build gas pipelines from Russia to Japan.  Now is the time to build nuclear power plants in Taiwan.  

Henry Kissinger tilted the power table toward China which required the USSR to build up forces on the Chinese border.  It is now time to do the opposite.

Build up Russia to require more Chinese and more modern Chinese troops on the Russian/China border. 

I don’t support my party

While I have a long history that goes back to my early 20’s when I was elected president of the Young Republicans, the largest YR club in America, I have been so offended by the behavior of the Republicans since they gained control of Congress two years ago, that I can no longer associate with the party.

The Republicans conspired to bring back the Export-Import Bank and lay supine in the face of the criminal behavior of the IRS, the Department of Justice and with the State Department spending tax money against Netanyahu.  Those are unacceptable to me.  I haven’t sent them any money for over a year, in any form of the party apparatus.

With a Trump victory, I expect to see a new Republican Party formed.  It had better be much more pro commerce if I am to gravitate in that direction.

Lehman Brothers

There is some Great Financial Crash of ‘08 revisionism going on.

Lehman Brothers was not faced with being underwater. It was just illiquid at the moment when it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008.

This does not surprise me.  I have a client who was a lead account on Lehman Brothers in Japan.  The company spent three years unwinding their accounts.  That means selling off their assets to buyers at market prices.  When the final unwinding was done Lehman Brothers in Japan and worldwide was solvent.

Lehman had more assets than liabilities.  There was no reason to let them fail.

Plenty of knowledgeable people knew that at the time.  The Federal Reserve just wanted to teach someone a lesson.  And we all suffered.

Privilege

I’m sure you all have a good response when you hear the evil cliche ‘white privilege’.

I first say: “Correction, you don’t mean the millions of whites in prison?”

Then I say: “I deserve my white privilege.  My ancestors could all:

• read, write, do numbers, understand technology and most were self employed back 4 generations.  
• my ancestors who came to America did so to be strong independent individuals not tribal pawns.  
• they escaped tyrants, kings, class warfare, religious warfare and tribal organizations for freedom and they used that freedom to build modern commerce, health and prosperity.
• they were all part of the great world of modern commerce. 
• I’m proud that my ancestors earned the white privilege I have.

What do you tell the boobs who say this around you?

My church offering plate

As the business manager of a mixed white and black Methodist congregation I had to deal with the Sunday collection plate.  I always designated two people to count the money.  I just looked at the total revenue from each of the two services (called ‘Celebrations’).

Early in my time on the job I noticed that the collection was far under the amount I calculated would be reasonable for San Francisco, young people with mixed middle class and blacks.

So I did an experiment.  I had the ushers reach over to each congregant to get the donation and had them go to the middle of the pew when people were standing up.  Hard to do, but we did it once.

The collection plate revenue increased nearly 200%.

So I had special collection bags designed (still red velvet) and made.  A person could not reach into the collection bag to TAKE OUT MONEY.

These collection bags may have been used in other churches before.  Now I see them in nearly every urban church I visit.  

The Google images and Amazon only have short offering bags, one foot deep.   Mine were two feet deep.  Mixed churches must have to make their own.

Where will the Rino’s go?

The Republican world is being shaken by an intellectual earthquake.   RINO is Republicans in Name Only.  Which is a term used by the conservative side of the Republican Party.  It refers to the fact that moderate Republicans have been placid in the face of bold Lefty predations on American life.  While the Republicans have controlled the House for 6 years and the Congress for two years, they have done nothing to oppose the steady Lefty progress.

In the House, the conservatives have thrown out a Rino leader, largely as the primary campaign made it clear that Rino’s were a big issue among the rank and file voters.

Now that the primaries are over, the Rino’s have made it clear that they have no influence and they are refusing to participate.  So what will happen?

I can see two earlier parallels in the Democrat Party.  

First, in the early 1950’s the anti-communist wing of the Democrat Party became dominant.  These people gained and kept power for the duration of the Cold War.  They never defeated the pro-communists Democrats but they kept them under control.  When the Cold War ended, the pro-communist Democrats regained full power over the next 20 years.

Second, the pro-black part of the Democrat Party, which had been a minority for 40 years, gained control in 1964 after the assassination of Pres. Kennedy.  The anti-black segment spun off, joining the Dixiecrats and formed a functioning third party.  They later became non-voters and Republicans as their black neighbors became fanatic Democrats.

With these examples in mind, it would appear that the Rino’s will spin-off over several years, possibly try a third party approach and finally blend back into the mainstream Republican Party to try and wrest control.

Converts to conservative

I met a couple who had gone from flaming Lefties to Trump conservatives.  In San Francisco.

The woman had been listening to NPR on her radio during a regular drive to the Southern Peninsula.  It got boring.  So she started listening to conservative talk radio.  Originally to Dr. Michael Savage.  This woman is well educated and bright.  Savage’s program began to change her mind.  Now she says 'she is closer to reality'.

Her husband doesn’t openly brag about his new found conservatism.  But he has become even more conservative than his wife.

I’ve watched this progression in several cases of friends.  I’ve also seen conservative friends hold out against the depredations of their Lefty spouse.

I am not surprised at this anecdotal observation.  The slightest opening will destroy a Lefty position.  The Left is a repository of arcane ideas that have universally failed and a deeply unreal zero sum mentality in a positive sum world.