Pro Commerce

Are political surveys reliable?

Are political surveys reliable?

The answer from a technical point of view is ‘absolutely not’.  

In the early 1960’s I was able to do reliable survey research on any subject.  We knocked on people’s doors, found the right person to interview, and did the interview.  The person to be interviewed was selected from a random number table.   Survey theory supported this methodology, as long as we were getting interviews with close to 80% of the selected interviewees.   The main error was in the sample size.  Even a sample of 25 was often very accurate.

Today survey’s are done with a mixture of random calls to landlines, cellphones and sometimes personal interviews at shopping malls.  The error is entirely in self-selection by respondents.  Who are the people willing to answer the survey questionnaire?  I often hang up in the middle of a phone survey when the questionnaire was clearly designed by ignorant amateurs.

In trying to correct the result to represent the general voting population the survey instrument includes questions about the demographics of the respondent and the location of the respondent (with zip code).  People lie and deliberately distort their responses but in general the lying and distortion remains the same over time.

The problem is that the self-selection bias is horrific.  Past election data is used to estimate current survey results.  The two biggest problems with this is that the responses to landlines and cellphones has been changing rapidly.  On the otherhand people don’t move very much after age 25 so zip codes are fairly useful.

One of the two worst problems is ethnicity.  High turnout in one year by blacks can be a surprise, the same for Latinos.  The other is voter turnout for the leading candidates is variable and no question or measurement is a reliable predictor.

Nate Silver has his own website and funding where he uses everyone else’s survey data and tries to make his own adjustments.  He is doing the right thing.  So I am giving a great deal of weight to his material.

Billionaires against death

There is an interesting article from PBS that many tech billionaires are investing in life extension and anti-death projects.

I have no confidence in the accuracy of the article and I don’t personally know any of the techies mentioned by name.

But in my 45 years of dealing with businesses and modern business founders I have seen a degree to hubris that would make such a position tenable.

Some of the business founders I have known, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area become so confident in their own power that they have a skewed view of life.

Any serious business founder and operator is bound to go to work every day faced with ten serious and intractable business problems. Horrible problems from personnel, to government regulation to changes in industry direction.  Yet, every day the business founder-operator goes home at night having conquered a few of the problems and come to grips with the problems that couldn’t be conquered.

That leads to a very strange degree of confidence.  And in some cases hubris.  I can see where the few that find the stock they have in their company becomes worth $billions would have excess confidence in themselves.

So I’m not surprised that a few CEO billionaires think that they can postpone or eliminate death.

Microsoft is screwing us

The fact that Microsoft is specifically screwing me is of little consequence in the world.  

I have an old Microsoft operating system, XP, which is stable and well designed.  Microsoft is no longer supporting XP which means a video program I was just given for business doesn’t work.

To call a program that is 6 years old ‘old’ is absurd.

I’ll find a solution.  

But the relevance to me and others as investors is that the Microsoft strategy of being a monopoly in the corporate market won’t be working for long.  Microsoft already missed the new emerging computer market which is on our smartphone.  There is no catching up there.

It won’t be long before the Android operating system that is on most phones will find a way to connect the cloud world and the right functions on some form of laptop to challenge Microsoft.

The challenge may not come from Google.  Google has played the political card 100% for the corrupt Democrat party.  That could come back to bite them.  Another company could use Android to compete with Microsoft.

Hillel and Shammai

Hillel and Shammai are the founding scholars of the period of the great Jewish Diaspora. Before the Romans destroyed the great Temple on the Mount above the wailing wall in Jerusalem, in the Christian year 70,  the ruling Jewish organization for nearly two hundred years was the Sanhedrin, a council of the wisest 71 men.  The issues that the Sanhedrin debated were the issues that the two brilliant scholars, Hillel and Shammai debated between themselves and in their respective schools.

The Christian Church was built on one phrase from Hillel who said “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do to you.”  That was changed into a positive admonition, which changes the meaning into an aggressive proselytizing stance.

Hillel and Shammai laid the groundwork for the next two thousand years during which rabbi’s, local synagogues and Torah study became the fabric of Jewish life.  In the second thousand years, Christianity made the Jews of Europe into outcasts and cast them into the world of commerce.  When commerce became modern in the 19th Century, that brought the Jews into their current role as world leaders of modern commerce.  And was central to creating Israel.

We are at a similar historic junction today.  With the creation of Israel some of the worst ideas in the Jewish community came to the fore.  Marxism, unionism and state ownership of industry were national Israeli values.  

Communism may have played a positive role in the kibbutz movement which created cohesive local centers of power, education and military protection.  

That ideology was on net harmful and carried over in Israel until the 1990’s when the leadership of Bibi Netanyahu replaced it with a pro commerce modern state infrastructure. Bibi's pro commerce policies have seen Israel become the second most productive commercial nation on the planet (the U.S. at 50 time the population and 500 times the landmass is #1).  This role for Israel is most likely to be the key survival tool for the future.

Bibi also recognized the Haman like Jew hatred of President Obama and very early, he began to re-focus Israeli commerce away from America-Europe to an India-Asia world and more recently to add Africa.   This is also a change of direction that will have long run positive benefits.

All in all, with the right commercial decisions, Bibi Netanyahu has been an Israeli leader in the shoes of Solomon and Moses.

Spotty commerce

A few blogs back, on why Canada has so little entrepreneurial modern commerce, a regular reader, Brian, asked why I looked down the list of the top Canadian companies to position 24 before finding an entrepreneurial modern company.

Here is the reason.  The presence of money creates those first 23 companies.  The money and wealth are created by that 24th company.

Take a look at a small town in Iowa during the boom days of small farm towns before entrepreneurial modern commerce sucked most of the population off to the cities.

The town serviced the people who lived there with banks, financial companies including insurance, media of all sorts, books, clothing stores, gas stations, every imaginable service for automobiles, there were utility companies and food supply companies.  Much the same as I saw in Dakar,  Senegal on the West coast of Africa.  Those are the 23 top ranked business in Canada and most of the world.

The money in this commercial system is created by the companies that generate enough surplus to export.  In the neighboring town, to my example in Iowa, is a company that makes, trucks and mobile homes.  Another nearby town has a company that makes American flags and still another that produces cartoons for advertising.  Those nearby exporting companies, along with all the farming in the area, produce the surplus that generates the money to support all the other locally focused businesses.

Dakar Senegal, in West Africa, generates money from growing and shipping fresh flowers to Europe.  It used to sell slaves to the Atlantic trade. That export flower money supports all the standard local supply businesses.

A few entrepreneurial modern commercial companies create and sell surplus goods and services in excess of what the local market demands.  That generates the money for the local market to buy from the many simple businesses that service the local markets.  These simple businesses can become gigantic as they service multiple local markets.

Brian, does that explain why I don’t treat the first 23 of Canada’s largest as entrepreneurial modern commerce?  Those 23 are really bureaucratic clusters of workers doing their jobs.  Insofar as they are meritocratic, they do a good job and will survive, otherwise they are sustained by the absence of mistakes.

My father and Jew hate

About half of Americans who call themselves Jews are Democrats.  That means they don’t support the survival of their fellow Jews.  The Democrat Party is now run by an anti-Israel majority.  Obama outright hates Jews like his mentor Farrakhan.

Fortunately the real Jews in America are Christian Evangelicals who out number the so called Democrat-pseudo-Jews about ten to one.

Nearly all Reform-Jews and about half of Conservative-Jews are in this not-really-Jews-Democrat category.  How did I escape this ignominious characterization, my father was a Reform rabbi and my mother ran the ACLU of Seattle?

Two reasons.  

• My father, a wander lust, went to Palestine in 1947.  He spent time with archaeologists and traveled most of the tiny British protectorate.  He had been a chaplain in the U.S. Navy and was put on a commission to determine whether Jews could be conscientious objectors. He and the commission said ‘No, not with Hitler's gas chambers operating full time’.  He was very aware of the German-Polish ovens.  As a rabbi on the Mexican border he helped Jewish refugees enter the U.S. illegally.   He supported the state of Israel publicly as a rabbi, when the time came.

Years later in a discussion I had with him, he made a point of telling me that Israeli’s were unusual people: ‘very candid, honest and somewhat abrasive.  The Arabs on the other hand were charming, gracious and would stab you in the back without a second thought.’  

• That may have played a role in my thinking.  When I was travelling in Europe with my future wife, having left the “capitalist dungeon of Coca-Cola-America” I found no solace for my teenage Marxism in Europe which was Pepsi to my young undeveloped mind.  

Reaching Naples with no more Europe left to escape to, we sailed to Israel and went to a Marxist kibbutz paradise.  

Having read Animal Farm and keeping my eyes wide open, I soon saw the problems of Marxism and moved to a suburb of Tel Aviv.  I spent a year working in an aircraft factory in Israel before coming back to America-San Francisco as a Republican graduate student in economics.

After that, I just never could reject my connection to Israel and my fellow Jews.  

My mother had no position on Israel and Jews.  She came from a post Jewish ‘Ethical Culture background’ which never rejected its ties to Judaism.

Over the years, I have visited Israel many times.  It has gone from an impoverished country where I often could only get eggs, tomatoes, Russian bread and eggplant to eat, in 1959, to the most exciting, vital intellectual and prosperous commercial nation on the planet.

Immigration and commerce

I’ve looked at the data and concluded that most types of immigration are good.  

Immigrants from India have been positive contributors to commerce since they first began coming 100 years ago and settling in Fresno California.  Today they are the backbone of Silicon Valley.  Chinese have been coming to the U.S. for nearly 200 years and are equally important contributors to commerce everywhere in the country.  The same is true for Japanese and Filipino immigrants.  

All these nationalities make such important contributions that they should become citizens without any qualifications or extended green cards.  

However it is not necessary to give their relatives any special status (as we currently do).  Genetics doesn’t convey modern commercial benefits.

The same open immigration and citizenship should apply to graduates of American postgraduate programs.  Almost invariably these are productive citizens.

The same was true for farm workers until the farm worker temporary green card program was ended 45 years ago.

What is the problem with immigrants?  Some forms of immigration brings uneducated people who are not productive.  That is a minor cost.  Some bring terrorism.  That is an issue that is currently being voted on in the 2016 election.

The most serious problem is that many immigrants bring their corrupt and socialist political ideas with them from their country of origin.  The best example is Bell, California, which is a predominantly Mexican town and corrupt at a level rarely seen in America.  I  personally know that is true of many Mexican and Latino run cities in the U.S.: corrupt beyond my imagination. 

It is also true of immigrants from much of Europe: automatic socialism which is bad for America.

This can be solved in the Americanization teaching and testing.  You shouldn't get citizenship unless you can write a paper on what makes American enterprise so powerful and show data as evidence.  The new citizen should know at least five great American entrepreneurs, such as Theodore Vail,  John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Sam Walton, Walt Disney etc.

That is my take on the commerce and immigration issues.

Why not Canada?

My readers know that I have been struggling with the history of modern commerce for a long time.  I accept the founding location and time in Holland in the 1600’s with a major thrust in England in the late 1700’s due to rebellion against the hereditary elite, agriculture experimentation and steam technology.

My focus is on the way that meritocracy has been able to become a major force in society.  That means that modern commerce got a great thrust from the meritocracy that grew out of the far reaches of the British Empire where powerful individuals escaped the British hereditary upper class.  That also puts an important focus on the explosive population growth in the westward expansion of the American colonies.

One question that arises has to do with the control group: the 50,000+ loyalists who left the American colonies in the 1780’s and went to Canada.  This is before the rise of modern commerce.  The loyalists comprised close to half the total Canadian population at the time.  (Reliable numbers don’t exist, these are my estimates.)

Today Canada is an almost 90% extractive economy based on lumber, mining, oil and agriculture.  

The only two large modern commercial entities in Canada are Magma International that makes auto parts and has gross revenues of $32 billion, started by selling to American auto companies immediately across the border.  Founded by an Hungarian immigrant in the late 1950’s. And Bombardier with $20 billion, founded during WWII, making snowmobiles (until the 1970’s).

How is it possible that this country, Canada, is right next door to the U.S., the greatest modern commercial society in the world?  Magma is the 24th largest company in Canada and would be the 600th largest company in the U.S.

Where is the entrepreneurial drive in Canada?

I suspect that the strong anti-elitist anti-royalist enthusiasm of Americans and the ability to leave the Eastern hereditary elites behind, is far more important than we have understood before.

Lose weight pill

I keep expecting to hear about a real pill that makes weight loss possible.  It would seem to be such a potential profit center that many labs would be working on it.

Please don’t write to tell me about something that works.

My thinking has led me to a strange conclusion.  The potential weight loss pill has two draw backs.

The minor one is that it will raise the average lifespan in the U.S. which will be ever more costly until we learn how to adjust our retirement benefits systems.

The major one will be that a whole new part of the population, roughly a quarter, will start having sex like bunnies.  I doubt this will increase the number of children, it will more likely reduce the mores of the society still further.

Just thinking.  All the men and women over 25 who are unappealing now will be far more appealing sexually.  We’ll know it and so will they.

The outlaw city of Hong Kong

On one visit to Hong Kong in the late 1970’s I ran into a friend from the clothing firm Espirit  at the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon.  He was Peter Buckley, later CEO of European Espirit. He  invited me to the local guest house.  I went with my girlfriend, Carole.  I knew the place would be crawling with clothing models, and it was.  

We arrived after lunch.  After hanging around for a few hours, Peter mentioned the Forbidden City in Kowloon.  Peter had heard that it was a square block that neither the British nor the Chinese lay claim to and therefore was a truly outlaw world.  He said no foreigner was known to have come out alive.

I wanted to see and explore it. Peter joined me along with my girl friend and two gorgeous clothing models who were staying at the house.

We walked half way around the Forbidden City block and finally found a tiny entrance that opened into a small narrow passage way. We were told over 33,000 people lived here.  Some parts of the building were 16 stories high.

The passageway was three feet wide and seven feet high with fetid sewer pipes hanging from the ceiling.  

The floor was slimy. Big rats ran away from us in every direction. Most of them did.

I have a good memory for directions.  I could remember our route in the maze for about 20 minutes.  Peter took over for the next fifteen minutes.  The passage-way stayed below ground level with iron gates that had stairs going up every 30 feet.  We passed iron gated rooms every five feet, lighted with men playing card games, doing other gambling games and smoking hash.  There were many rooms with racks of people doing opium. There were occasionally rooms under construction with heavy beams holding up the ceiling but no obvious use of architecture or engineering.

After 35 minutes we decided not to take a chance on getting lost in the maze forever and having the women sold off.  Fortunately within five minutes we saw a shortcut that opened to the outside that was evident from the inside but had not been visible to us when we were walking around the outside.

 

Outlaw city....I've never forgotten it.  The photo above is where we were.  A good set of photos is found here.  Its gone now. 

Can you imagine a city without any architecture, law or governance?  It existed.

Old Hong Kong

Hong Kong is always in the news.  

England gained control of this island after the first Opium Wars in 1842 and part of the mainland after the Second Opium War in 1860. England was forcing China to buy opium.

It started as a military outpost and rapidly became the main British trading post for the Pacific.  It remained under British control until 1997 when it was ceded back to the Chinese on the condition that it would remain a commercial outpost for 50 years.

Hong Kong was settled by Chinese displaced from many areas of China particularly from the frontier such as the Hakka. There were also some Tanka settlers.

The current political environment is always a contest between the Communist Central government and the commercial people in Hong Kong and the mainland, Kowloon, who want more commercial independence.

I visited Hong Kong many times from 1970 until 1990.  My first memory was from the early 1970’s on the island of Hong Kong which was already a colossal finance center with many skyscrapers.  

I walked leisurely around the poorer part of south end Hong Kong.  I saw a line of a dozen women walking at a slow pace with one arm on the shoulder of the woman in front of her.  I asked my knowledgeable friends about this.

These were blind prostitutes from a local brothel out for some sunshine and fresh air.  I had to deal with the idea that blind women would be perfect prostitutes because they would not be judgmental about the male clients appearance.  

Now you, my readers, who never heard of this have to confront the morality of that issue.

One more bullsh-t facial communication

I had a girlfriend who had dated Paul Ekman, the man who developed the field of facial micro expressions.  So I found out about the field.

Ekman had done work at U.C. Med school in San Francisco to use panels of viewers to look at videos of subjects facial and physical expressions to build a catalog of the expression's meanings.

For example when a person puts both hands behind his head and leans back he is saying: ‘I’m not listening’.  When he is talking and covers his mouth, he is saying: ‘I don’t believe what I’m telling you’.  

Ekman went further and explored micro-expressions.  He became so convinced of his experimental reliability that he tried to apply his findings to other cultures…. Latin America.  It didn’t work.  

The CIA tried to use his techniques to detect lying.  They couldn’t make it work.   So Ekman went off to help the Soviets.    

I never considered the field meaningful.  Ekman had too many possible meanings for the physical expressions he studied.

Now I see that the world of digital geniuses are going to use facial expressions and body movements to improve language understanding in the computer world.

More nonsense as far as I can tell.

What about Wells Fargo?

Is it possible to know what happened without knowing any details?  I do.

In the early 1980s my minority community clients began getting phone calls from their members that farm workers who didn’t speak English were getting $30 monthly phone bills.  The same was true of Chinese who didn’t speak English.  The problem was reported in all parts of California where Pacific Telephone operated.

I was hired to do surveys in both communities to find out how widespread the problem was. What was happening was that Pac Tel. had a sales contest inside the company.  When a salesperson reached a customer who didn’t speak English they gave them a full package of phone services which included call-forwarding, conference calling and call return.  My research showed that the full $30 package had been foisted on 200,000 people who didn't speak English.

The California Public Utility Commission order Pac Tel to refund all the money.

Pac Tel was an established company that had never done sales promotion.  The same is true for Wells Fargo (150 years old).  Now aggressive sales were required nationwide for job promotion.  The new accounts people were responsive and opened credit card accounts for new checking customers and opened multiple accounts for customers who had families.

Wells Fargo had to reimburse more than half a million customers about $5 million.  Unlike Pac Tel, Wells had to pay the government fine of $185 million which went to charities that the Democrat Party favors.

I have created several sales promotion award programs for clients.  The first, simplest and most important rule is: in a short time the participants will figure out how to cheat.  Be prepared to change the rules often enough that the cheating can’t be figured out by the participants.

Signing their surgery

I had heard over the years that an occasional mistake is made in surgery.

The resolution of the problem was to mark the site of surgery with a big X.  Like on the left leg if that is the site.  On the right hand, if that is the site.

Turns out that surgeons these days sign the site of the surgery in advance with their initials.  Makes even more sense.

I also have always heard that when multiple surgeons work together that they have a talk session afterwards where they use utter candor to discuss everything that went right and wrong.  

It might be in these conditions of utter candor where surgeons learn how to correct mistakes that some of the data about medical errors are reported. Or over-reported.

I hope that none of these confidential discussions with utter candor are used for data collection.  Everyone should have a session of utter candor if it is a situation where techniques of understanding can be improved.

Everyone needs improv

I was talking to a professor of communication yesterday, just casually at Peet’s coffee.  We got to talking about the necessary skills for her field.

Turns out the first skill she listed was improv.  And it turns out further that we had both taken the same class of improv with Keith Johnstone who wrote the textbook on the subject: Impro.

I would consider this a skill that everyone can use.  

The three things I remember from the class is that the way for a conversational reaction to provoke more conversation is to respond with a positive, usually an affirmation and a statement that moves the conversation along.  “Hey, beautiful morning?” “Yes, it’s so beautiful that a Zombie would feel like skipping rope”.

That most humor has to do with relative status.  The pompous person standing up talking to a person sitting down suddenly gets on his knees.

The most powerful way to get attention is a to use mystery.  “Yes, the bulge in my pocket is what he gave me for breakfast.”

I love improv.  There is a good improv show on TV called Who’s Line is it Anyway?

Democracy and commercial representation

When the United States was formed it was more than 60 years before the development of the modern corporation.  No accommodation was made for corporations or similar institutions to have representation.

Corporations and similar associations, like industry organizations, have genuine interests.  A University has the interests of its students, faculty and alumni among other groups, that need representation in those capacities.  The same is true of an auto manufacturer or a duck hunting club.

How do these entities get representation in a democracy and how are the conflicting interests mediated?

Right now, these entities have two modes of influence in the political process. They hire lobbyists and they contribute money to campaigns.  Unions also provide manpower to the Democrat Party directly.

So how should commerce be represented?

My answer is that citizens should have one mode of representation and commerce should have another.

The House of Representatives should have no funding or money representation.  That means selecting legislators by a random process.  Sortition.  See my book on the subject here.

The other house, the Senate, should have open elections with money and every other form of commercial pressure, including unions, having full access.

The reason for separating the two houses is to give actual individual citizens a form of representation that truly represents the citizen quality of the population.  A citizen exists in many dimensions, only a few of which are commercial.  Citizens are parents, artists, sexual beings and much more.

We need corporate and institutional representation but we also need pure citizen representation.

(The photo is a kleroterion for Greek random selection).

Really bitter in need of sweet humor

This election is the first I can remember where the dread of the ‘other side’ is as great as it is.  Both sides are terrified of the consequences of the other side winning the presidency.

The best evidence of this is the arrival of a modern Noel Coward on the scene with a great sense of humor.

Hillary Clinton invented a force called the Alt-Right as a group who opposes her and promptly my new hero, Milo Yiannopoulos anoints himself queen of the alt-right.

Here is a short but adorable interview with the newly created queen.

 

Walls

Did you know that the Norwegians have built a wall along their northern border with Russia to keep out refugees?

These are the same Norwegians who have maliciously attacked Israel for building a wall to keep Palestinians from killing them.  Of course the Norwegian government is not alone in the world of hatred of Jews.  Exemplified by the attacks on Israel’s right to build a wall of self defense.

The Israeli genius for doing what is necessary and ignoring the jet engine loud blasts of hatred around the world is really a light unto the world.  

We are long familiar with the communist walls to keep people inside their dungeons of ideology.  The Iron Curtain, the bamboo curtain, the Cuban destroy-all-boats curtain, the North Korean walls and now the Venezuelan barriers.

Keeping dangerous people out, like the Israelis do, is not really new.  The Great Wall of China and all the walled cities of the world had the same purpose. The Indians have new walls to keep the Pakistanis out; the Thais have walls to keep the Southern Moslems out, the Hungarians are keeping Syrians out and Americans are voting for Trump to keep Latinos out.

It seems to be catching on.  The world really has some gradients of ideological, educational and economic differences that are too great to treat gently.

Is it possible to downsize government agencies?

I had one personal experience and followed two others.  

A friend of mine became head of a major California state agency.  After he found serious corruption and rooted it out with an aggressive team of fast moving prosecutors, he wanted to shut down several departments within the agency.  He didn’t listen to me and proceeded to cut the budgets for the departments and freeze hiring.

That didn’t work.  The youngest and newest employees were let go and the managers gave themselves raises. Just like the IRS has done in the past two budgets.

In Jerry Brown’s first term as governor he wanted to dramatically change the department of the deaf and blind to include major disabilities.  He did that by appointing Ed Roberts who was on a respirator in an electric wheel chair.  Ed, with authenticity and charm completely changed the department to the Department of Developmental Services.

In Jerry Brown’s election to governor 30 years later, after being a mayor of Oakland, he was determined to eliminate the departments of urban renewal in every town.  He cut the state budget for those agencies, which was 12% of gross expenditures.  Every city and town tried to keep their local agency alive but gave up after a few years.

With that experience I would advise the incoming President Trump on the way to eliminate or weaken the malignant agencies in Washington.  

I would move the IRS and the EPA to Detroit. A big show of helping poor Democrat Detroit.

 Tell the agencies to find rental space and move most of their furniture there. Give them two weeks to plan and one month to move.  Less than half of their staff would go with them.  They would never bother anyone again.

The rest of Washington would get the lesson.

For those who missed the lesson, Trump should send all the FBI agents who were on the team investigating Hillary Clinton’s home email server to form a new office in Baltimore to investigate black crime in public schools.

You’re welcome Mr. President.

Tech world and Dems

Just for the historic record, the current period has seen more government corruption than any previous period in my lifetime.  For the past nine years the corruption has been most extensive in the Democrat Party on a federal level.  

This article makes clear that the Silicon Valley tech leaders are aggressively Democrats and two fistedly pouring money into the Democrat Party corruption.

I believe that corporations must have significant influence on government for protection if for no other reason.  Governments are usually piranhas trying to harm businesses. Especially in the international playing field.

However, through most of the past century corporations gave nearly equal amounts to both parties and played both sides of the fence.  That is a rather fair way for corporations to operate without seriously distorting the political process.

The current prostitution of government for one party and for one set of corporate donors seems a little unbalanced and potentially harmful to me.

Strategically, as an investor I worry that when the Republicans gain control of the government they may be vengeful towards the big Democrat tech donors. (They are Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google.....  Salesforce and Amazon; on Wall Street the nickname is FANG).

Kill college futures

Among the many anxieties that the current Democrat administration has created for me, one of the most depressing is the deliberate, calculated and successful campaign to eliminate the most valuable part of higher education.

The Democrat Party is not solely to blame.  The traditional non-profit academic world may be 95% made up of Democrat faculty and 100% dedicated to a Lefty anti-commerce ideology, but academia has strong claws into the Republican Party too.

First the Obama administration wiped out the for profit Corinthian Colleges, with about 80,000 students nationwide, recently it has gone after the for profit  ITT University with 70,000 students and next on the list is for profit  DeVry University with 45,000 students.  ITT was 50 years old and DeVry is 75 years old.

Disclaimer: in 2006 I invested in three for-profit universities because I saw the enrollments top 500,000 while growing rapidly.  I tripled my investment in less than a year.  

These for-profit universities are directed at students who want technical training.  The most common graduates are in the health field followed by mechanical repair and business related technology.  Mostly middle-class blue collar jobs by our old definitions.

The Department of Education along with the Justice Department and a few states Attorney’s General have used the most disgraceful and odious legal strategy.  They target the schools for enrolling students with federal college loans and attack the high rate of loan repayment failure as evidence of fraud.

The only defense the for profit universities have is to compare their loan repayment rates with the gigantic world of non-profit universities.  The comparison is unfair because the for profits have a far higher proportion of minority, immigrant and low income students than the non-profits.

The for-profits include the University of Phoenix which is on the academic-government hate list.  But the University of Phoenix enrolls a higher social class of students and is academic not trade oriented.

I recently looked at a school course catalog from the University of California at Santa Cruz while sitting in a VA medical office.  Lo and behold.  Santa Cruz now offers a full range of courses and certificates that were formerly offered by Corinthian and ITT universities.

Does our society need trade schools? Of course.  Is this government pogrom a disgrace.  Absolutely.  

Should the government bureaucracy be used to destroy private businesses?  I’ll let you answer that question.

Open space for new movements

A few days ago I was writing about my role as treasurer and business manager of the Glide Memorial Foundation.  The foundation owned an office building with several large rooms including a dining hall a multimedia room and a large general purpose meeting room.

When I arrived there was already a laissez faire policy in place regarding who could rent the halls,  always for trivial amounts of money.

For the previous ten years, before arriving at Glide, I had formed and operated many activist organizations.  I always had a terrible problem finding a place for groups to meet.  Schools and parks had such unwieldy demands for insurance and clean-up deposits that is was rarely possible.  Hotels and conference centers were usually booked far in advance and only nice to conventional activities. Usually expensive with requirements for deposits and expensive clean-ups.

There were a few churches with open space but always biased toward their own interests.

My groups were political, sexual and revolutionary (at the time) including feminism, environmentalism, international provocation and planning for demonstrations.

My first act as business manager at Glide was to open all our available meeting rooms to everyone at a low price.  No judgments.  No harassment.  Everyone.

Two consequences.  Most of the important political movements that got started in San Francisco did so in the open spaces I made available, ranging from Native American and prison reform movements to land use and environmental organizing.

I learned that the various traditional Lefty groups: Trotsky, Socialist Workers and Workers Solidarity were flakes who never paid their bills and never cleaned up after themselves.

Open non-judgmental meeting spaces are vital for political vitality.

Accelerators, incubators and hot houses

It is widely hoped, around the world, that a start-up environment can be created with a group of talented people, office space, production facilities and funding.  There are several thousand of such entities everywhere with tens of thousands of participants. Good studies of their effectiveness is hard to find, if it exists at all.

I’ve seen five or six of these, up close.  I’ve seen a few small businesses develop out of them. Very few.  I’ve seen people connected because of these clusters; but I don’t know what would have happened in their absence.  

Everyone seems to love this model of business start-ups.  My own experience is that there are many possible outcomes, mostly unrelated.

Many funders use these to start businesses in fields they know are already successful.  That works.

Many talented people use these as a way to meet people, get access to equipment and technology.  This works.  But again what would have happened in their absence.  The hundreds of business people I know would have made it anyway.

The similar operation I started in Sweden was based on finding interested people, getting them together in accounting classes, keeping them in cohorts for several years with constant mentor support.  4,000 businesses came out of that.

That was based on my experience starting the Briarpatch which ultimately generated thousands of American businesses.

The reason any of this works is because people who are open and cooperative get to work together and get the modest skills of business: accounting, record keeping and a supportive cohort.

The general environment for small business to thrive are: a social acceptance of business failure, a support for meritocracy, a diverse and honest group of people cooperating and lack of regulations or of enforcement of regulations.  Those conditions don't exist in most of the world.

Given that groundwork, accelerators, incubators and hothouses are only frosting on the cake.

 

Me and charitable foundations

Two foundations are in the election news these days.  One is the Clinton Foundation, the other is the Clinton Family Foundation.  The Clinton Foundation is a tax exempt public non-profit chartered under the IRS rule 501c3.  It gets special treatment as a Presidential Foundation and has an annual report online.  The Clinton Family Foundation isn’t found with a Google search.  ‘Family funds’ are subject to other IRS rules mostly regarding a required high level of distribution. The first is an operating foundation which means the staff does the charitable work.  The second is supposed to be pure charitable giving.  I doubt it should give funds to the first, but it does.

I know a little about 501c3 foundations.  I was the corporate treasurer and business manager of the the Glide Memorial Foundation for eleven years and ran two other foundations.

I had several problems in connection with protecting the tax exempt status of the Glide foundation.  The first occurred when one of the lead staffers married his secretary.  Another when this same staffer hired his brother.  Still another when the brother was found embezzling.  Lastly on my own staff I had many Yemeni maintenance employees; who because of the bizarre Arab family structures could all have been close relatives. (The embezzling brother was fired but not prosecuted.)

The problem that I was dealing with is an IRS prohibition on ‘self-dealing’.  Having family members being paid by the foundation in any capacity, as consultants, grant recipients or employees presents a question of self-dealing.  The solution was to get a ruling in writing from the lawyers and to discuss the matter with the Board of Directors and put it in the minutes.  The Board was legally expected to make sure that no one with a close relationship was getting extra benefits that others would not be entitled to.

Glide had 50 employees, the Clinton Foundation has 2,000.

I was careful to make sure that the Board understood and recorded all major grants received to make sure we weren’t being used as a coverup for self-dealing.  That was only a potential problem when Warren Buffett’s wife gave a large donation.  But she didn’t get any special treatment in return.  After she died her husband turned the donation into an auction for a lunch with Warren.   Again, the donors never knew they would win. Self-dealing wasn’t a problem when the only reward was discussion at a lunch with a person not connected to the foundation.

The Glide Foundation supported many radical causes, and a close friend in the IRS told me about the entire file cabinet on us and an entire file drawer on me.  It was true when we finally got the material under the Freedom of Information Act, but it was 100% lined-out; redacted.  We never broke the law.  

Of course I followed IRS rules and was very careful knowing we were a radical operation. The Nixon IRS team of six came out to San Francisco to look at our file and discuss the level of scrutiny by the local office.  But the Nixon team was broken up after 3 months of its short life.

None of my type caution appears to be the case with the Clinton’s or the Clinton Foundation.

What if Jews were ahistoric?

Roman viaducts are the subject of this blog.

I am concerned these days about the survival of modern commerce.  The world is mostly populated by tribes who are not capable of generating or sustaining modern commerce.  The rest of the planet are in the thrall of a Luddite eschatological religion and an anti-commerce Leftism.

No more than a dozen humans understand what unique institutional traits are required for modern commerce to survive.

The several thousand of homos who went to the island of Tasmania several millennia ago lost all of their technology for comfortable survival in a few generations.  They no longer knew how to make fish hooks. The tribal structure doesn't work for maintaining technology.

The engineering genius of the Greeks who produced a brass calendric computer was lost.  The Roman genius that produced aquaducts, sewer lines and a coliseum with a weather protective dome was lost as was their road building prowess.

We have the great contrast between the Rom people and the Jews.  Jews are the most pro-historic people on the planet.  For three millennia they have taught their children to read, write do numbers and study history.  The Rom people only emphasize their tribal integrity and are otherwise ahistoric.  

We Jews integrated fully into modern commerce when the time came.  Jews created the most dynamic vigorous country in history when the time came.  Jews have been successful in modern commerce and are the most productive group of contributors to the science, technology, arts and medicine of the  new era.  Thanks to their focus on history.

American universities have entirely eliminated history, as you can see by perusing any and all of their degree requirements.  Based on my examination of the issues, this spells doom or serious decline for American based modern commerce.

The Dutch beest

I got to see an exhibition of a few of Theo Jansen’s actual art pieces called Strandbeests.

They are wonderful art and exciting engineering.

The exhibit had Jansen doing some videos and wall exhibits where he compared his work to evolution.  Since his art pieces kept changing in response to his new techniques and new designs he made the analogy to evolution.

BS

Evolution doesn’t work on individual non-reproducing objects.  Evolution is based on change (both constant and abrupt), pretty much random, with pressure on the reproducing population based on death and failure to reproduce the next generations.

Many classes of objects evolve in this way, but not Jansen’s Strandbeests.  

I have pointed out that modern commerce is based on evolution.  New variations of existing businesses and industries are occurring constantly.  Human investors and creators are the reproducing organism.  Some new variations survive.  Others die.  That keeps modern commerce evolving.

I interviewed Stephen J. Gould the great publicist for evolution.  He understood it beautifully and wrote many peans to the genius of evolution.  The one thing he didn’t understand was that evolution works on reproducing groups.  I asked him what was the minimum number of homo sapiens that could reproduce.  A critical data point in understanding homo evolution.  Was it 20, 40 or 200?  Without sufficient gene diversity the group would not survive.  Most tribes know this (except Arabs) so they steal women from other tribes and encourage exogamy.  

Gould didn’t understand the issue or see its centrality to evolution.

You, my readers do. And that is why the Strandbeest is not an example of evolution.

We were lucky

I was born in the best place and at the best time in the history of the planet.  1938 in the United States.

That means my entire life I was protected by antibiotics. Starting in my teenage years I was protected from polio.  By the time my teens were nearly over girls (then women) were protected from pregnancy by IUDs and birth control pills.  College and University was so reasonable I never had to borrow any money.

I just missed the era of Jew prejudice and became a Vice-President of the most elite bank West of the Mississippi.

I got to enjoy the out of control sexual freedom of the hippie world.  I was in the middle of the middle of it at Glide and Whole Earth in San Francisco.  I got the benefit of the hippie love of small business when I started the Briarpatch Network and wrote and published some of the hippie bibles.

I lived with the computer revolution from the IBM 7090 to the smart phone.  It was the end of the hereditary elite and 45 years of the greatest economic growth in world history.  

I lived to see Communism defeated in the USSR and China.  Breast cancer for women past menopause was cured, emergency room procedures were mastered and the modern catheter lab installed widely for heart technology.

In the few jobs I had, my talent and competence was so widely appreciated, I was free to do whatever I wanted.  By the time I was 30 my income was all self generated.  

I had three healthy children who grew up to produce five healthy grandchildren.  The three children are kind, smart and successful.  Their mother and the many women I have lived with were all astounding, exciting and wonderful.  All products of America and public services from education to health care.

Now the dark clouds of anti-commerce, eschatological enviro-religion, Jew hate and Ludditism have settled over the world.  It is beginning to look like I lived in the best time and place in the world and history. So did you.

Bowling alone

Is a book by Robert Putnam, expanded from an article of the same name, Bowling Alone,  Putnam calls attention to the decline in important membership organizations.

In the early 1950’s large majorities of Americans belonged to ‘civic organizations’ such as the Rotary, American Legion, Lions, Elks, Masons and associated clubs.  Many still belonged to Odd Fellows, Red Cross, PTA and other older organizations.  They also belonged to mainstream churches which all had large civic roles in healthcare and senior services.

Nearly all these organizations were hierarchical with positions of responsibility going from sergeant at arms to treasurer, secretary to vice-president and president.

This structure and associated ascending ladder of responsibility was metonymy for the larger social structure with an hereditary elite.  

What is our current version that teaches membership in our society the rules of social behavior and the rules of appropriate personal behavior?  

There are none.  Modern American life is focused on the work environment which is secular and anti-political in daily functioning.  

The closest structures I see to formal structures designed for civic life are meritocracy clubs.  Four of my granddaughters are in swimming or rowing clubs that start before age 9 and require up to 2 hours a day, often every day of the week for membership. This intense commitment carries over to college.  The social coherence resembles that of an orchestra.  It is meritocratic and requires deep commitment.

Will there be more meritocratic clubs and forums in the future?  Could be.

The fireplace issue

On Facebook a friend recently posted an article by Sam Harris that cited wood burning fireplaces as a major source of environmental toxins.  Harris compared the blindness of people who don’t understand the facts of fireplace smoke hazard to people who believe in religion.  Both, he claimed, ignore data and evidence.

Since I have long considered the ban on residential fireplaces to be pure Puritan nonsense I decided to enter the argument and look at the data.  Puritanism is the belief that ‘if anyone else anywhere is having a good time, it is bad’.  

What could be a better time than sitting around a roaring fire with an intelligent group of friends deep in conversation?

So I challenged the Facebook experts who cited dozens of studies and meta-studies.

I looked at all of them and none of them were scientific.  They consisted of a pile of studies showing that dozens of constituents of burning wood are toxic.  That is not science.  We would need a double blind controlled study.  I suggested several.  Such as a comparison of hospital visits for breathing problems in San Francisco and Oakland on a day when the wind blew all the smoke to Oakland.  Or a study of Boise for breathing illness based on people who live on the leeward side of the city versus the windward.

Of course no such studies have been done.  We just live in a world of Puritan envy and evil Lefties running the politics of our lives.

I pointed out a similar piece of scientific crap regarding tobacco.  In a large Japanese study of married couples who lived together for a lifetime where one smoked and the other didn’t, the non-smokers had no higher incidence of lung cancer.

Science that produces data under reliable conditions is not the friend of the Left or the Puritan environmentalists.

 

How did my world become so awful?

What is so ‘awful’?

• I grew up in a country where major cities elected Republicans and Democrats.  Now it's only Democrats.
• I grew up in a country where the opposite of communism was the ‘free market’ and the American government was proud to support modern commerce.  Now major candidates promise more regulation of commerce and openly attack successful industries.
• I could buy a rifle and ammunition at Sears and walk out the door.  
• The driver's handbook was 16 pages long; now it is 96 pages.  
• My local government didn’t tell businesses what health plan to use, didn’t require a minimum wage that excludes all starting jobs. Didn’t require retail businesses to charge for shopping bags.  Didn’t specify the number of days of sick leave and maternity leave.
• A lifetime open socialist runs for President on the Democrat ticket and would have won if actual voters had prevailed.  
• The president of the United States regularly attacks wealthy people and Wall Street.
• Most of the prominent nouveau riche are Democrats.
• The power elite in America have become anti-commerce.
• A religion of Armageddon is the most powerful religion in the developed world.
• Jew hatred controls the United Nations organization and dominates all of Europe.

Does that sound awful to you?

I have the answer to why this happened.

Our cities all became Democrat because they are all controlled by unions (police, fire, teachers and government unions).  That came about because the hereditary elite disappeared in 1960.  Without the hereditary elite to provide money, power and balance in government the second most well organized group came to power… that was unions.  

(Why the hereditary elite disappeared is explained here and in many earlier blogs).

The other half of the issue is how did the ideology of anti-commerce pro-socialism become dominant in America?  How did nearly all of academia become racist-Foucault disciples?

It is the same mechanism that allowed unions to become powerful with the demise of the hereditary elite.  When I went to college and university, the underlying ideology was Marxist.  The absence of the hereditary elite, which was powerful in academia, allowed the hostile underbelly to gain control.

The Marxist underbelly gained academic control and quickly gained media control.  The two are closely connected.

What we have now is an ahistoric academic.  No history to ground thinking, no history to reject the stupidity and teach the failure of communism. No history to ground individual identity.  Only the flags of oppressed imaginary identity groups.  

The hereditary elite had strong reasons to teach and advocate for history.  History is a lesson in the longterm success of hereditary elites.

It looks like my misery in old age is the result of the end of the American hereditary elite in 1960.