Pro Commerce

Tips for service and opening day

Someone noticed: taxi drivers get tips but are seldom as nice and helpful as Uber drivers who don’t get tips.

The fallacy that tips induce better service behavior seems to be one that is stuck in the brain of many people for whom the brain doesn’t work very well.

Tips, in case any one of my readers didn’t know it, are to make the manor class feel better about the slave and servant class.  You never tip people who had modern or responsible service responsibilities like: auto mechanics, plumbers, electricians, lawyers, dentists, hygienists or bus drivers.  None of those occupations were filled by slaves or servants.

Which made me think about the place where we are most likely to tip, other than hairdressers, restaurant wait-people.

I found a way to create successful restaurants more than 50 years ago.  The one most frequently associated with me is Greens in San Francisco which is 35 years old and still full with over 230 seats.

Tell anyone you want; I haven’t had a paying restaurant client in a long time.  The restaurant must open ‘full’ and stay ‘full’ for a month.  It doesn’t matter how you do it, with invited friends, with confidential discount coupons to your mailing list, with lavish free drinks.  It doesn’t matter.  If it is ‘full’ when it opens and stays ‘full’ for a month then it will be successful.

The only caveat is that it must be an above average restaurant in its class.

Now you can feel sorry for all those restaurants you pass that are empty and started out slowly. People in the restaurant business don't know the secret.

(Photo: recent line at a restaurant I advised  40 years ago.  The line is like this all day.)

Goodbye Tom

The Tom I’m referring to was Tom Hayden who died last week.  His great contribution was to have married Jane Fonda famous as Barbarella and  Hanoi Jane.

I met Hayden once in the Green room before some TV show we were both on.  He was a really unpleasant looking guy.  Our conversation was superficial.  

Tom was your ordinary mindless Lefty with no saving grace that I ever heard of.

Which is my jumping off point to talk about politicians in general.  I’ve known many.  I was a legislative analyst in Sacramento in the early 1960’s.  I ran many political campaigns, over several decades, created a group called Research in Politics and was close to a number of office holders.

With few exceptions I would say that all were of average intelligence or slightly below.  None had any curiosity or a good sense of humor.  None were really caring or warm people.   All were self-selected egomaniacs.  An observation which explains why I was the first person to come up with the idea of a randomly selected legislature.  Ordinary people are very different from politicians.

The exceptions to my ‘average intelligence or below’,  were Bill Bagley a long-ago Assemblyman from Marin County, Jerry Brown and Huey Newton.

I also knew and liked Richard Nixon but he was not an exception.

Chipotle and Wells

Be careful what you wish for.  Chipotle Mexican Grill wished for customers who cared for fresh, local and organic vegetables.  They got what they wished for.  Then had outbreaks of E. coli, norovirus and salmonella.  Just what many people associate with Mexico.

There is really little reason for Chipotle to open its doors everyday.  It is more than a year and a half since the food poisoning disaster.  There is virtually no longer any profit and a quarter of the customers have never returned.

The Chipotle management tried giving away free food and heavy advertising.  To no avail.

What is this all about?  Ask any man or woman who had a lover who had an ‘affair’ and lied when confronted.  Once trust is gone, it’s gone.

What should Chipotle have done?  And what should Wells Fargo do now?

In business you have to start fresh.  What Chipotle needed to do was close (in the U.S.) for a week, completely change the restaurant interior colors, plates and layout.  Bring in UV lights for the serving counter.  Change the name of the restaurant to ‘Chipotle Texas Brand’ and add some new drink to the menu like a free lemonade tea.  (A symbolic astringent.)

Wells Fargo needs to do something similar.  A new name, maybe ‘Wells Fargo B.’ Put a ‘Recourse hotline’ with phone number on every object including autos, ATMs, the back of checks and employee badges.  

Rapidly convert all retail customers to Wells Fargo B and include a small one inch diameter metal token to symbolize the change.

This is marketing that works when your core trust has been lost.

Nobel Prize in literature

We all know who won this years Nobel Prize in literature.  It was a good choice because Bob Zimmerman is more interesting than most of the others on the list of winners.

I looked at the list.  The ones I’ve read who are outstanding and deserving are:  Rudyard Kipling, Luigi Pirandello, Herman Hesse, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Shmuel Agnon, Samuel Beckett, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Czeslaw Milosz.

The ones I’ve read who are communists or boring are: G.B. Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck, Andre Gide, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Boris Pasternak, John Steinbeck, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, Doris Lessing and Alice Munro.

The ones who were deserving and never got the award: Vladimir Nabokov, Ted Hughes, C. P. Cavafy, Alfred Kinsey, David Landes, Wallace Stevens, Jonathan Israel, Ron Chernow and Stewart Brand.

Others who are outside of literature but got the award are: Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill.

I’ve read many of the other Nobel Literature winners who just aren’t worth commenting on.

I can tell you I heard Bob Zimmerman live in concert but there is not much more I can say.  All the songs sounded alike to me but people near me could hear a difference.  He never moved the whole performance except maybe his hand over the guitar strings.

Go ahead and say nasty things about me.  I know many Dylan lovers who think I’m an idiot on this subject.

What would happen?

What would happen if you put several of my recent blogs together?

Take one spoonful of the radical changes the hippies made in our society, especially their emphatic love of business, honesty, optimism and openness. A generation of hope, pleasure and Dionysian energy.

Take one spoonful of the fact that they were young, under age 23, the point where the brain loses its ability to create new thinking and becomes hard boiled.

Take a third spoonful of college attendance.  Most hippies didn’t go to college.

Mix thoroughly over a 35 year period and what do you get?

You get the first 20 year period 1980 to 2001 with the fastest growth in recent American economic history, a period that started out with stagflation and then began a period of revolutionary technical innovation, much of it originating with the hippies.

You get the next 15 years to the present where the zombie minded group that went to college slowly becomes the controlling elite of universities, the media and the political world.  They create a counter revolution that is anti-American, anti-commerce, Luddite and angry, morose, populated with the walking dead.

They also go to extremes to avoid ever studying the hippie era except for pot and rock music.

Is that what happened?  Some young people avoided college and created a vital world, the others went to college and are now boring us to death?

Office design

Several decades ago I saw a bank office at WestAmerica where nobody had an assigned desk and all papers were stored at night in assigned lockers.  The desk phones of those days were routed to whatever desk the employee chose.

Bloomberg News is treating this as the ‘hottest new office idea.’

Thanks to smartphones these days no fixed phone is needed at all.  Desks and everything in the office can be temporary and all the elements of the office can be assigned based on the activities (meeting space, relaxing space, phone talking, computer screens and conferencing space etc.)  

This could be an astounding tool for shrinking bureaucracies.  Already, giant newspapers and magazines have sold their skyscrapers and moved to single story buildings with large parking lots.  Reporters file stories, they don’t write them in the ‘office’ anymore.

If Trump wins this election in a few weeks, I have made arrangements to get the office idea to him.  I don’t think Clinton is interested in drastically reducing government.

My suggested approach is to take  bureaucracies like the IRS and the EPA and move them to Detroit.  Detroit can use the $billions in government salaries and new home buyers.  

The new offices of these bureaucracies would all be the ‘no-assigned desk’ types and all smartphones would be department issued.  

My guess is that half of the employees would quit, retire or retire early rather than move to Detroit.  Without an assigned desk.

Which would give the agency the right size to operate in the new more efficient environment.

Time to try this on a large scale.  I personally believe most bureaucracies could operate more efficiently with half the number of employees.

The National Football League

I am only an occasional pro-football watcher and I only watch on television.  I pay enough attention to have seen the original Kaepernick offense.  Colin Kaepernick, is an S.F. Giants quarterback, who kneeled down during the National Anthem in protest to police killing blacks in self defense.

What pleases me most is to see an old Arab curse play out.  The curse is: ‘may your enemies always think that they are your closest friends.’

For the four weeks after Kaepernick became news and was joined by other football players the NFL saw its TV audience shrink stunningly, nearly 25%.  With the drop in all age groups.

With great uniformity, the NFL and all the major football sports announcers gave a week by week explanation of the falloff in viewership based on five agreed upon reasons: cord cutting of TV, good players benched or retired, competition with presidential politics and a couple of other absurdities.

This is a case of deliberate blindness by the NFL and sports commentators.  'America' and football had become synonymous as had baseball in earlier days.  So a deliberate insult to America by Kaepernick and others was a direct insult to football fans.  Everyone but the closest paid friends of football knew this.

But the NFL, their team owners and players deserve this financial blow.  They have become the enemies of their fans for not stopping the Kaepernick behavior the moment it started.  

Cowards and their blind arrogance deserve the consequences.

The law of perverse revolutions

Yesterday’s blog has some relevance to this one.

The hippie movement that created the modern world, started in San Francisco.  It is no surprise that the strongest anti-commerce, Luddite world is now centered on San Francisco. 

San Francisco had one of the first business destroying minimum wages, required business health plans, laws against national companies opening outlets in the City and campaigns to keep major businesses out of the City and to drive away most of those that started here.

San Francisco hates businesses even those recently started here like Airbnb, Uber and Athleta.

Why?  My core rule of human group behavior.  All revolutions have a counter revolution in the same place.

I learned this from Coyote.  Coyote was a pro-prostitutes organization started by Margo St. James.  I helped Margo with money, office space and regular support. It started in San Francisco and grew to be a worldwide organization.  It was very effective at getting the message out that money for sex is not a crime.  Laws against prostitution are an attack on women’s rights and independence.

Lo and behold, to my great surprise, less than ten years after Coyote started and grew to immense size and importance: an anti-prostitution campaign started in San Francisco.  The anti-campaign succeeded in getting the police to arrest ‘Johns’ and publish their names in the daily newspaper.  One of my friends was among the first males humiliated.  Of course the only Johns arrested were those who use inexpensive cheap street hookers who could be imitated by police women.

I have many more examples saved for a later date.  The law is simple: Counter-revolutions occur right where the original revolution started.

Our world

I’m putting together some of my blogs that tell stories about Briarpatch businesses.  There were over 1,000 businesses and I have over 6,000 blogs to look through.  

It makes me think.

I woke up this morning realizing that much of our modern world was created by we hippies.  No wonder the perpetual anti-hippie sentiment is so great. A very American rejection of our parents.

Think about the current world and the important business categories that came from hippies.  

• The smartphone is a direct descendant of the personal computer which came from the two Steves who got their electronic and marketing start at the Briarpatch member Homebrew Computer Club.
• The whole organic food world from farming to marketing.  Every large food store, including WalMart has an organic section.  Purely a hippie invention coming out of hippie paranoia about the ‘bad things’ in their food.
• All the food innovations from tofu and kefir to herbal teas and non-meat sausages.  Also all the fancy and elegant breads.
• The vast realm of sports starting with the pre-eminent world of bicycles. Started with the hippie mountain bikes. The hippie hang gliders created a new world of boards including ski boarding.
• A whole clothing industry was developed by hippies.  Not just the dominance of jeans but more importantly nearly all sporting wear and outdoor supplies.
• Charter schools grew out of secular home schooling, specifically Rasberry Exercises.
• Then there is the whole world of Armageddon.  Hippie paranoia created the ‘end of the world’ industries of solar panels, wind generators, heavily insulated housing and the entire related world that has grown out of this energy fantasy and the associated recycling.
• Then we have what hippies brought back from our world travels. Thai food, yoga, martial arts, Buddhism, anime.....

There is so much more that I can’t think of now.  In each of these cases I worked with one of the founding businesses including wind generators and comic publishing. My first book, The Seven Laws of Money, was designed originally to help homeschooling groups.

Thank hippies for the parts of our modern world that you like.

Politics

An insider’s observation from my political experience.

I noticed that in this election the Democrat Party has relied heavily on the words: racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobe and Islamophobe.  In some ways it resembles a mental illness to be so heavily reliant on a limited number of words.

Speaking about the California part of the Democrat Party I have a secret to reveal.  The man who was Speaker of the California Senate and Chair of the California Democrat Party, John Burton, has Tourette's syndrome.  He has had it despite being voted into the high positions he has held.

I have known John since the early 1960’s.  He may have gotten Tourette’s from his heredity; but more likely from all the drugs and alcohol he has consumed.  John can not say three words without two of them being swear words.  Petitioner “John, should we send $2 million to the Lake County campaign?” “John: “Fuck, shit, yes”. Or John: “Shit, cock, damn ask fuckin Bob Konitz”.

You know this is true and the Democrat Party members and the Press keep this a secret because John lost a lawsuit.  From Wikipedia: “In 2008, Burton settled a $10 million sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Kathleen Driscoll, then the executive director of his charitable foundation for homeless children. Driscoll claimed Burton repeatedly swore at her and directed lewd and suggestive comments regularly.”

So my second sentence is based on the California Democrat’s tolerance for a few words repeated endlessly.

Swimming in UV water

I have been swimming several times a week for the past 17 years.  Before that I was a runner, running every weekday for 25 years with roughly 6 friends at 6am.  My total distance was from London to Singapore and back.

A quick aside about exercise and health.  Of the six of us, I had a heart attack at age 75 requiring a stent. One male runner and one female (a wonderful lover of mine) died before age 65 from cancer. One beautiful woman is still beautiful and healthy, another is very healthy, she is now a swimmer.  The last one I’ve lost track of.   For the sake of my blog readers I will contact her and see how she is.

My swimming pool just recently converted from chlorine to UV light.  I love it.  The water is much cleaner and the visibility is great.  No burning eyes.  San Francisco is slow on public health which is why this old technology is finally getting used.  

How bad is San Francisco public health technology?  I have been on both ends of chlorine.

From 1961 to 1965 I swam in a freshwater pool at the corner of Market and Van Ness (Oak St).  It was a freshwater pool fed by an underground river from the Hayes Valley Aquifer.   I loved the fresh unchlorinated water.  

The city demanded the pool be chlorinated so the pool was closed.  Now pools are allowed to have UV light in the recirculation system to kill all the biologicals that humans don’t like.  An interval of 45 years.

Miscellaneous.  I was on a kibbutz in Israel in 1959 where I helped build a swimming pool in a lovely small river.  The water flowed through the pool without chlorine and no one ever seemed to have a problem.  The pool in San Francisco at Market and Van Ness never had a reported problem either over half a century.

Sutro tower

In yesterday’s blog I mentioned electromagnetic radiation from Sutro Tower located on the highest point in San Francisco.

After 45 years the tower is embedded in San Francisco’s self image and landscape; an image without it would be hard to imagine.

Two people opposed it.  Only two people.  Pete Ashen and me.

We were the only two people to testify at the only public hearing on the proposed tower in 1968.

Pete objected that the 1,000 tower could damage homes falling in an earthquake.  So the engineers added more concrete to the base with no real technical benefits.

As a private pilot I argued that the tower was not visible enough for small planes.  So the designers and engineers added cladding to the outside. 

I also said that aesthetics supported removing the existing radio-TV towers.  The committee chair promised that would be done.  It still hasn't.

Unexpected and harmful consequences.  You can find a photo at the bottom of this page that shows the tower before the cladding.  It was more attractive and delicate than the final version.

Blame me.

Electricity

My brother came to see me yesterday because he was doing some wiring in his house and had to deal with some old knob and tube wires.  I have an old house too and am used to knob and tube.  He is used to three line Romex.

I have been doing household wiring since I was twelve and my father wanted a light switch in the garage and one in the house.  But there were only two wires from the garage to house and a switch at both ends would have required three wires.

I made it work with an electric relay that made sure the two wires were always hot.

In all honesty I still don’t understand electricity after more than 65 years.  I know the U.S. has an earth as ground system but the Scandinavian countries have a wire as ground system.  That means that only two wires come to my house from the main line in the neighborhood.  At the junction box on the house, the electrician drove an 8 foot copper bar into the ground and made it the ground wire for the house.  I also know to connect a ground wire to a cold water pipe when a ground wire is needed.  Moreover, I have a sump pump that is turned on by two probes that use the groundwater ground as part of the sensor system.

I was not surprised, one day, when the local electric utility guys dug a hole in the street and pounded in a 40 foot copper pole as a systemic ground.

I also know that the high power lines that come into the neighborhood at the top of the tall poles have an electric field around them that is a few feet in diameter.  You can hear it buzz on foggy days. I learned about that in high school physics class; the left hand rule of thumb about the electric and magnetic fields that surround an electric wire.

I also learned that the power of the electric field around the wire diminishes as the square of the distance.  So the electric radiation at street level from the high power wires is the same as from the small battery in my pocket flashlight.

I had a hippy neighbor who often claimed that the TV tower about a mile away in direct sight was harming us.  So I got a friend with several EMF meters to come to my house and measure.  Sure enough there were high frequency measurements outside the house but it didn’t penetrate glass or walls.  

The low frequency radiation was found near electric plug outlets in the house but it was trivial.

The last report is about a ten year battle with raccoons who always ate the small fish in my fish pond.  Finally I put a metal screen just under the surface of the water for one wire; I put a small open copper wire just above the surface around the perimeter of the pond for the second wire.  I put a transformer on the household current so the voltage to the raccoons was only 40v.   I also put a tiny light on the line so I would know it was on or off when children and pets were around.

The low voltage kept the raccoons away all night.  But they could see that the tiny green light went off at 6am.  So that is when they would go and eat the fish.

Electricity for today.

Early voting

Today I’m going to vote at City Hall in San Francisco, where I vote in most elections.  It happens in the Registrar of Voters office.  A strange sensation, like going to the spring for the water that gets sold as bottled water.

I mention this because an old friend wondered about my politics and read this blog going back quite away.  She says I am very anti-Lefty but couldn't determine my politics.  Good.

This blog is about commerce.  I talk about commerce when it collides with politics and I talk about politics when it relates to my many years as a campaign manager and political operative.

Commerce has been strongly impacted by President Obama’s foreign policy of global military retreat, but the worst consequences are yet to become significant.  I also comment when tech billionaires support the politics of unions and anti-commerce.  Again, the consequences are a long way off.

The issue of an old friend also raises another interesting self observation.  I went to a party for a friend whom I’ve known for over 50 years and there were several other friends of that duration at the party.  

Two were friends I had had for over five years as a close buddy.  In thinking about the fact that I have always had one or two very close male friends during my life, friends with whom I spent time every week, I thought about what ended those friendships.  

It was that I grew uncomfortable with their dishonesty in business in each case.  I hadn’t learned about this behavior earlier, because business dishonesty is not necessarily pathological, it can be contextual.  No wonder I wrote a book about the Briarpatch businesses and called it Honest Business.  It seems to have been important to me.

Braces and pants

I have long used the more British term ‘braces’ because that is what they were called in my college and army days.  Most people now-a-days call them suspenders.

The issue is that my pants, Dockers, cost only $40 on sale at Macy’s, online, while the six buttons to hold them up cost $5 each to sew on at the cleaners.  The six actual buttons cost a total of $3.00 at the sewing supply store.   That seems a little weird. $33 work on a pair of $40 pants.

Most importantly this weirdness is due to the times we live in.  Manufacturing the pants, anywhere, is about 95% machine work from making the fabric to the cutting to the sewing.  There is a little hand work and a little time for inspectors inspecting and engineers repairing machines.

The whole point is that machines are highly productive and semi-skilled labor in San Francisco is very expensive.  That is where modern commerce has brought us.

That is good.  Why should humans do any work that machines can do?  The religious Armageddon folks that are so prominent around the media these days say there won’t be any work left for people as machines get smarter.

I say that is nonsense having lived in the hippy era where nobody had to work, but the hippies invented thousands of jobs and dozens of new industries to keep busy.  See my earlier blog.

How neighborhood business grows

It is interesting to notice how neighborhood business clusters grow.  I have about six good examples in San Francisco.  We’re not talking about a new neighborhood on the outskirts of a city, we’re talking about inside a healthy and dynamic urban area.  Nor are we talking about a shopping center.  Such centers could learn from looking at the organic growth of business neighborhoods.

There is always a magnet store or several magnet stores.  These stores appeal to a large and economically prosperous market segment.  

In the most bizarre case I know, the Urban Farmer opened during hippie days with an urban farming segment that was organic and committed.   The store had a vast inventory that was unique and high quality.  The store is still thriving 40 years later.  It is next to the largest Asian food market in San Francisco which opened shortly after and is still flourishing.  Other stores have followed these two magnetic stores with their heavy car traffic and good parking.

In another case a women’s boutique opened in a dead old business neighborhood with a nearly dead movie theater next door.  The street was near an upscale neighborhood and safe. The boutique only carried the lines of six local original coutures.  The traffic of rich women was so great that ten stores opened within one year in the several nearby vacant stores.  One of which was a first rate art gallery with ceramics and jewelry.  It became a new magnet store for the same market.  Several restaurants opened to cater to the high end foot traffic.

The neighborhood went back to its zombie status about five years later when a bank opened next to the boutique and drove up rents.

In two other neighborhoods, two very good new restaurants have brought new vitality to dead shopping neighborhoods.  Both restaurants served meals from 7am to 10pm, which is important to maintain foot traffic.

As a pattern emerges, I see magnet businesses, in one case a new industry such as espresso shops in North Beach in 1960, Alfred Peet’s in Berkeley in 1965, and Blue Bottle in Hayes Valley in San Francisco, and another industry is now growing: fresh baking.  These can generate enough customers to create foot traffic, pedestrian safety, lawyers, dentists and therapists in residential buildings nearby, then takeout food cooked in a market, followed by taverns, and clothing stores.  Clothing includes boutiques, shoes and jewelry.  The smaller stores in between are filled with cosmetics, hair stylists and personal grooming.  By the time the neighborhood has specialized service stores, which used to be FedEx and copy shops, it gets bank branches and realty offices.  

A neighborhood dies when the magnet stores die, change dramatically or are not replaced with new versions.  These days an Apple store is a magnet so is Forever 21, both chain retailers.

Sorry Steven

The Steven in the blog title is Steven Pinker a professor of Psychology at Harvard.  The ‘sorry’ deals with the connection between yesterday’s blog and Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature.

A number of researchers into the issue of historic violence discovered a dramatic decline in homicides in countries where data could be found, since the 1600s.  And even more dramatic in a few countries in the past 150 years.

Part of that is nothing less than the fact that homicides were measured over a much shorter lifespan.  

• Lifespan began increasing in the 1850’s due to better sewer treatment communicated globally by modern commerce.  
• Another is the improvements in treatment for previously fatal wounds with more hygienic surgery, again due to the spread of medical hygiene by modern commerce.  
• Those improvements in trauma surgery and survival have continued into the past 50 years as trauma technology has spread in modern commercial nations.

You can go to wikipedia to find the main explanations that Steven Pinker gives for the decline in homicides in his Better Angels book.

Pinker’s litany of explanations are pure Lefty ideology.  More government, more trade, feminization, urbanization and the spread of reason.

A little confusion in that list. Of course governments have been the source of homicide on the colossal level.  That’s what warfare is about and the work of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and a few others is hard to overlook.  The rest can not be defended with anything but Lefty ideology.  There is no useful data much less usable definitions of something like 'reason'.

What can be understood as the reason for a significant decline in non-war related homicide is yesterday’s blog.  The workplace in modern commercial societies is the safest place to be in terms of homicide per hour of the day.  We are 20 times safer each hour at work than anywhere else.

“At work’ is a synonym for the modern commercial environment in my blog title where people cooperate because they are respected for merit.  In a meritocracy we ignore tribal and family links and give priority to merit which automatically means the workplace has a diversity of people who MUST cooperate to make the business function.

When I mention the 20 times safer to people they immediately think of the workplace of the post office where we have had a few well publicized massive slaughters.  That folks is the government.

The ‘work place’ is mostly commercial.  But the government in all its forms does employ about 14% of all workers.  Government jobs are probably as safe as commercial workplaces because the same civil service requirements exist to punish absence of diversity.  And other norms of commercial work environments are also transmitted to government jobs.

Summary: Professor Pinker and the rest of those who have noticed the dramatic historic reduction in homicide over long periods of time, should look at the workplace environment.  Look at modern commerce as the reason.  Modern commerce is the single best explanation for the decline in homicide with one twentieth the homicide rate per hour in the workplace compared to all other activities.

Got it? Modern commerce, the most under appreciated of all man's creations, is the most civilizing of all human endeavors.

The safest place

I am the champion of modern commerce for many reasons.  One I have never mentioned is that commerce has brought us the safest place to be.

The average number of homicides per year in the workplace is 700, of those that are gun related there are 400 per year.  These homicides occur in the workplace where 140 million American’s spend 250 billion hours.

So how much time is spent outside of the workplace?

There are 200 million Americans between ages 15 and 64.  Of these 15,000 are killed a year with 10,000 gun related murders per year.  This number of homicides occurs during the 1,450 billion hours Americans in this age group are not at work.

So 700 Americans are killed annually with 400 killed with guns at work where they spend 250 billion hours.

The rest of the time where we spend 1,450 billion hours sleeping and not working 15,000 are killed, 10,000 with guns.  

Summary: outside of work Americans spend roughly 6.0 times the number of hours in their lives.  When not at work Americans have 23 times the likelihood of being murdered. And 28 times the likelihood of being murdered with a gun, each year.

Go to work.  Work more hours if you want a lower chance of being murdered.

The nature of modern commerce is that while at work diverse people learn how to co-operate.  Work is cooperation. And while working Americans are relatively peaceful compared to their time outside work. (We spend 16.7% of our lives at paid work).  23 to 28 times more peaceful.

We are one twentieth as likely to be murdered each hour spent at work.

Vin Scully

Over a week ago I attended a baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the LA Dodgers.  The game honored Vin Scully for his last broadcast as radio announcer for the Dodgers.

Scully had been the baseball radio announcer for the Dodgers from 1950 until now.  Sixty-seven years.

I am conscious of this 67 year period for its revolutionary historic importance.  Vin Scully himself may not have been aware of much that happened in America around him.

The 1950’s saw a dramatic economic growth around the world under American suzerainty.  The U.S. was the undamaged victor of WWII.  Therefore the U.S. established airplane routes around the world and made English the language of flight.  It also made English the lingua Franca of the commercial world, the world of entertainment, and science-technology.  American domestic standards spread around the world for tools, radio, TV, film, auto technology and nearly every other technical usage.

The home and the automobile were changed with washers, driers and automatic transmissions.

1960’s saw the end of large semi-monopoly retail U.S. commerce as manufactures lost control over retail pricing (‘fair trade laws’ were ended) and consumer vitality exploded.  The same was true for global tariffs and import barriers which fell dramatically bringing new competition to retail business from Volkswagens to Marimekko to Cost Plus.

By 1961 the historic hereditary elite of the U.S. had lost its cohesion and influence at the top of major corporations.

1970’s was the explosion of the hippie world and associated new ideas of religion (Buddhism, EST, ecology etc), sports (mountain bikes, hang gliding, ski boarding), health (acupuncture, yoga, meditation) music, pleasure drugs, rampant sexual exploration and a radical explosion in foods (bread, tofu, organic and Thai).

1980’s was a dramatic increase in the pace of business with fast delivery from container ships, Fedex, tape messages on telephones, faxes and home video tapes.

1990’s was the beginning of widespread use of computers in business and the revolutionary rise of China and the Mexican border as suppliers of consumer products.  Along with cable television and espresso.

2000’s the explosion of the Internet and personal computers.

2010 the smartphone became universal.  The rise of a new American citizen’s political rebellion with the Tea Party Patriots.

Vin Scully’s radio career covered a radical change in American life including a replacement of baseball with football as the preeminent national sport.

Columbus Day

I’ve been thinking about Columbus Day since it occurred on Monday.

Why do we celebrate Columbus Day?  This is not a Lefty, eco-PC blog.  It is a serious question that intelligent people can ask.  And answer.

• The first discoverer of the American continent was Jansong from Siberia in 9,000 bp when he crossed the Aleutian chain of islands with his tribe of more than 100 men women and children.  He didn’t know he was on a new continent or even what a continent was.
• Then the next discovery was by Lillikarsh from a fishing village in West Africa who landed near the Amazon in 2100 bp.
• After that appears to have been Li Liu, probably a Buddhist monk with a group of his fellow monks from China in 1650 bp. The ballast from his boat has been found near Long Beach.
• Followed by Jesus De Marsco a Portuguese fisherman in 1500 bp who regularly rode the great Gulf Stream Current, stopping for water in what would later be called Cuba.
• Then came Eric the Red from Greenland in 1000 bp. He stayed a few years with 30 or so men who didn’t know he landed on a new unknown continent.  He is described in one of the Viking Sagas.

So why is Columbus celebrated for his discovery of this same place?

Because Columbus came from a society with a few thousand literate men who also kept records.  They were able, using their literacy to write letters and carry the story of land thousands of miles away to the West. The story was spread to the thousands of other literate people who described the story they heard in written documents.

Importantly, Columbus was able to return to his home country several times.  Others who followed Columbus explored the area he had found and recognized it as a large land mass that was unknown to their fellow Europeans.

That is why we honor Columbus.  Literacy makes a big difference.

My sound

This weekend in San Francisco was fleet week.  Honoring the Navy which has always been close to San Francisco.  Nothing the local socialist fanatic government can do to disrupt this historic affection.  They try and try but have consistently failed.

One of the many highlights of fleet week are several aerial shows.  One of which is the Navy precision fighter jet display, the Blue Angels.

I live on the side of hill that is a natural amphitheater.  So sound in this half-mile diameter amphitheater is warm and mellow.

Several times over the past weekend I got to sit outside in the traditional late San Francisco Summer reading in a rocking chair.  

The Blue Angels flew overhead.  It is a deafening roar of jet engines.  I let the sound reverberate in my chest and enjoyed the loud, deep power.

The awesome sound of jet fighter engines overhead can not be matched by any other species.  

That is my sound.  That is the sound of modern commerce and technology.  And the military that is so dependent on both.

International banking

Hitler and most other anti-Jews have always believed in an international Jewish banking conspiracy.

I am happy to tell you that there is no such thing as “international banking”.  

This notion comes not from commercial banking but from “merchant banking”.  The Rothschild family had bank offices in several Continental nations and towards the end of the 19th Century they had representatives in many nations.  

Only two problems.  They didn’t accept deposits, they used their own money.  They only made loans to sovereigns by buying government issued bonds.

Several large banks have tried to create international banking, Chase, Citi, Bank of America.  At various times in the last 40 years they had many overseas offices where they accepted deposits and made local commercial loans.  B of A closed those in the 1980’s and Citi was the last to close in the past 6 years, partly driven by the American bank reporting laws.

At this point only a few banks have actual full banking operations in multiple countries.  One is HSBC, another is Rabobank, Canadian National and Deutsche Bank.  Many banks own banks in other countries such as Sumitomo which owns Union Bank.  And the EU has many banks in multiple parts of the EU.

What confuses people is that banks often buy large tranches of foreign bonds and also join with groups of banks to make loans to international businesses.  We read about these when they become 'problems'.

Today, you will see many foreign bank offices in the United States.  There is a reason for that.  But you won’t see real foreign banks, banks that accept local currency deposits and make local commercial loans in Shanghai, Tokyo, Moscow, Mumbai, Sao Paolo or Cairo.  At most you have local offices that service their own international clients.

Why?

Because every nation presents the risk of controlling the foreign bank out of business.  That is too big a risk for bankers, since it happens all the time (it doesn’t make the local news).  The United States has been very lenient in this regard for the past decade.  But that may not last if the American major banks feel a threat at any time.

Where to for the media?

A good friend asked what will happen to the major media streams in TV and print.  

I can only point out that media seems to survive in new forms.  When TV came along and displaced the centrality of radio, it took radio about 20 years to become the medium of auto travel with a lot of pop music. Then another 20 years to invent conservative talk radio where radio thrives with a bigger audience than any other medium.

I also recognize that the current TV, newspaper and Public Radio media world is divided into everyone on one side of the political spectrum and the rest on Fox News.  A similar situation exists in the movie medium.   

TV worldwide is American with NCIS the most popular program (police procedural).  It has a military and conservative aura.  

The Internet seems to be a medium for all views and channels.  It is a new and powerful replacement for every other media at this point.  In some sense the Internet is not a medium, it is a large bandwidth that carries all media.

There is an interesting Internet location, allsides.com, that tries to present the news from a Left, Right and Middle perspective selecting from the main media channels.  Look at it and give me your reaction.

I find news from multiple perspectives to be boring.  I prefer a bias such as the Drudge Report.  It seems that most Americans are like me, in this regard.

Local licensing

I’m sure my readers are aware of the problem of state licensing that has been proliferating for a long time.  As I look at the directory of the building where I have coffee in the morning I see listed attorneys, financial consultants, accountants, acupuncturists, body workers and head hunters.  They are all licensed by the State as are the businesses I walk past.  The barbers, florists, nail care specialists, pharmacists and morticians.

We have all read the absurdities about one state that requires 1,500 hours of training to be a barber and another state that licenses people who do hair braiding.  

If you are the spouse of a military service person and you change states regularly, the State requirements for licensing are an onerous burden on you. You get licensed in one state and can’t practice in most others.  The same is true for the large number of people who are married and move between states during their lifetime.

This is not American.  This is preposterous and unconstitutional.

As I have explained in the previous two blogs, this kind of commercial oppression violates Article I section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.  The Constitution prohibits one state from favoring its inhabitants in commerce and penalizing citizens of other states.  The Courts have upheld this interpretation of the commerce clause.

Time to take this case to the Supreme Court.  Any trade or commercial license should exist only at the Federal level.   

Some specific local issues such as State Law might warrant a State test; but it should be a simple, short, online, and open-book test at most.

Local hours, wages and leave limits

San Francisco, where I live, and many cities that copy it, are introducing a myriad of laws and regulations governing the operation of local businesses.  San Francisco mandates the amount of time for sick leave, minimum wages and a wide range of working conditions including overtime and family leave time.  Most of these laws are written to exclude businesses with family members or less than 20 employees.

For the same reasons given in the previous blog, these laws violate Article I section 8 of our Constitution, the “commerce clause”.  

The commerce clause and subsequent court cases have made it clear that no laws shall be enacted that favor local commerce over non-local commerce.  

That is certainly the case where laws only apply to large businesses.  That is certainly the case where a large business has to manage its labor and operations locally under different and more stringent conditions than for the nation as a whole.

It is time to take these intrusive and unconstitutional laws to the Supreme Court to get local malefactors out of the business of harming the conduct of American commerce for the benefit of their local regressive socialist ideologies.

Local chain store limits

My local San Francisco Democrat government has intruded its control into every aspect of business.  It is all an expression of Lefty hatred of modern commerce.  It is occurring in every city as they copy each other.

One of the most obvious Lefty absurdities is that any new business with more than 11 stores must undergo special zoning scrutiny before being allowed to open.  Meaning neighborhood opposition can ban any chain retailer.

Many large retailers have originated in San Francisco, including the Gap, Old Navy, Esprit, Levis, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Charles Schwab.  All would be penalized when seeking to open new local stores.

I believe this law is unconstitutional under the ‘Commerce Clause’.  The commerce clause is found in the beginning of the U.S. Constitution, Article I section 8.  It says “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

From Cornell Law School: “Of particular importance here, is the prevention of protectionist state policies that favor state citizens or businesses at the expense of non-citizens conducting business within that state. In West Lynn Creamery, for example, the Supreme Court found that a Massachusetts state tax on milk products, in conjunction with a subsidy program for in-state dairy farmers, functionally violated the dormant commerce clause as it impeded interstate commercial activity by discriminating against non-Massachusetts citizens.“

I believe that any local laws penalizing businesses that are large while favoring small businesses is a deliberate violation of this section of the Constitution.  Time to take this case to the Supreme Court.

Why the AI armageddon of robots and no work?

As I said in the last blog, I am surrounded by people and media who are convinced that artificial intelligence and robots are going to eliminate jobs and employment. The AI robot Armageddon.

I disposed of that nonsense in the same blog.  It is hard to believe that anyone with a modicum of brains could keep expounding that tripe. So where does that overflowing cup of fantasy come from?

My answer is that we live in an era that has replaced traditional religion that believed in an afterlife and a variety of saviors who would create heaven somewhere and even here on earth.

That religion is gone, for the most part in Europe and the English speaking world. It has been replaced by a pseudo-scientific Armageddon.  

Look at global warming.  An impending earth destroying, commerce annihilating ‘scientific fact’ about human caused CO2 rising and a global temperature increase of horrible proportions.  Along with a morality that demands the suppression of modern life and modern commerce.  

These godless creatures that surround us are determine to recreate a religion.  The coming global disaster of no work for humans because of artificial intelligence and robots is just the next blind pseudo-scientific paranoid fear they are getting ready to believe in and use to suppress modern life and modern commerce.

It is rude to say,  the believers in global warming and robots replacing humans really can not be reasoned with.   They are the current version of Luddites through and through.

AI and armageddon

I am surrounded by people who believe that computers and robots are going to eliminate nearly all jobs.  The media is swamped with this brilliant prognostication.  Even if it is ridiculous.

To see how ridiculous this projection is you can either look at history or ask yourself a simple question.   In 1840 nearly everyone, 85% of all workers, were employed directly in agriculture.  American agriculture is now done by robots and computers and less than 1% of workers are in agriculture.  Does that tell you something about ‘work’ and ‘workers’?

If not, ask yourself the question: ‘If a large group of people didn’t like the jobs in the job market and didn’t want to work in the first place and they didn’t need to…. What would they do?  Think Hippies.  20 hippies living together could live on the income from one of them working, and they did.  And plenty of them did and stayed home smoking pot the rest of the time.

Hippies were Americans.  The truth is we used our free time to create a new world.  We created home-schooling, comics,  bakeries, organic farming, organic groceries, cheese, new sports (mountain bikes) and thousands (yes thousands) of new businesses including the home computer industry.

The point is: when Americans don’t HAVE to work they find countless forms of money earning things to do.  And always will.

Let’s put another rock in that absurd no-jobs-foam-cake.  Computers and robots can solve problems.  That is not thinking.  To understand what thinking is look at my Original Thinking site. That's thinking, nothing to do with problem solving.

Getting paid online

Just to let you know I am paying attention to the issue of how you get paid online.

We have always had the option of charging one’s credit card.  That is well established.  Paypal has had that option from the beginning so have Amazon and EBay.

An advance deposit is also a well established form of payment.  Google and Skype have used this approach for a long time.

What I am seeing now is are many additional approaches.  Banks and near-banks are offering more and better online payment services.  Including one-time only payment options.

Paypal allows payments among its customers.  As do many other systems where you can have a pre-established account.

The most recent innovators are systems like WePay and 2Checkout which are built into sites where you already have a customer.  An example is Evite where you create the event, class or sale and then collect the payment through Evite.

Each of these services have their own way of collecting fees for the money transfer.  You can compare fees on a site like this.

6 year old tranny

A television show has introduced a character who is six years old and claims to be transsexual.

I spent many years in the human sexuality field and am given much undeserved credit in a documentary film on the subject.  I was a minor figure in creating the field, but I do know the subject.

The idea that someone knows their own sexual orientation before the end of their teens is blithering nonsense.  After the fact, say a 25 year old gay woman, can say she knew she was gay at age seven or eight, which may be true, but another person with the same experiences could have changed orientation at 12, 16 or 21.  Looking backwards is not a meaningful measure.

It is simply necessary to look at how one ends up living, over a long period of time.  It is very common for a married man or woman to become interested exclusively in their own sex late in life.  Too common to say anything about pre-adult orientation.

None of this is much of a problem, except where surgery is used to change genitalia.  In the early days of successful transgender surgery the doctors involved required the prospective surgical patient to live three years in their new gender category.  Before surgery. 

There are some cultures where androgyny is the highest state of sexuality.  This is true in some parts of the Philippines.   Many people in this culture aspire to androgyny and live that way.  Surgery, at an earlier age, may be suitable in these cases with a fair degree of confidence that the change will be stable.

The issues of when transgender surgery (it has many names) is appropriate are being fought with great ferocity.  I’ll stay out of that debate.  I will say that surgery for ordinary Americans who have not lived as adults in their desired sexual category strikes me as a field fraught with pain, anger, misery, danger and lawsuits.

Generating wealth

I have gone on record as having discovered the three types of business (trade, industrial and clientric).  My careful readers noticed that I am dealing with a separate subject when I talk about the rare ‘entrepreneurial modern company’.  What is this all about?

Let us start with the fact that the rare entrepreneurial modern company can be any of the three types of business.  It is unlikely to take the ‘trade’ form because the trade form of business is only determined to sell enough to continue in business.  It can be gigantic like Mitsubishi Trading Company but the goal is always ‘just to make the next sale’. Margins are tiny and good credit deals are very important.

It is unlikely to be ‘clientric’ where the goal is to maintain the client relationship for life.  The operational goal is to be current in the industry, offer highly appropriate service to the client and provide the service for a lifetime.  There are national law firms and banks, there are international accounting firms and ad agencies that are (or should be) clientric.  But they are exceptions.

It looks like most entrepreneurial modern companies are ‘industrial’ types of business with the goal of reducing costs.  

The only distinction between an ordinary company and an ‘entrepreneurial modern’ company is that the entrepreneurial ones are changing the status quo over a large area.  As opposed to being local.  

Everywhere there are people with money, there will be a cluster of businesses, effectively a shopping center, to service those people’s needs and desires.  The entrepreneurial modern business is one that introduces a new product or service to this market and usually to multiple markets.  The multiple markets can be all small towns close to American farmers, like the original Walmarts.  

It can be the unique cosmetics with a ‘natural orientation’ like the first Body Shop that opened in Berkeley, a home to many ‘organic’ ‘natural’ businesses.  It was local in Berkeley and became local next in San Francisco and in a third Bay Area location.  It sold the name and designs to a global ‘industrial scale’ company that took it international.  It was an ‘entrepreneurial modern company’ when it innovated locally, and again when it opened in new locations around the world.  But then it became part of the status quo.  A local shopping mall store serving local needs and desires everywhere.

There is nothing novel in this concept.  What distinguishes my observation from the trite political saying that ‘we need to support small business because it generates the majority of new jobs’?  Which is BS.

The distinction is that the entrepreneurial modern companies begin with a new or novel product or service; and then grow and create new markets that in turn create new jobs.  Helping every small new startup is a separate and fairly unrelated issue.  Most innovative new startups fail.  As they should.  

Only a few startups create new markets and still fewer have the managerial talent to grow or sell out to a business that will grow.