Pro Commerce

‘I live in San Francisco’ he says

Over the decades I have been flying.  Flying too often and too far.

If the person next to me wants to talk, I’m usually willing.  I learn a great deal.  

Once on a trip from San Francisco to D.C. I was sitting next to a lovely debutante (I know, real ones don’t exist anymore).  There was no way to discuss my reasons for going, it had to do with aid to ‘Third World’ countries.  So we discussed the only subject she knew well: fashion.  For four hours I told her the meals and events I was going to and she told me what to wear.  I listened to her list of events and clothes too. Its true.

The point of this blog is about trips going the other way.  Back to San Francisco.

Invariably in these conversations, I will ask ‘where are you going?’  The response is frequently San Francisco.

As we talk further it usually turns out the person lives in a suburb 30 miles away from San Francisco.  Such as Walnut Creek, Vallejo, Concord or Marin.  

The reason for this white lie is simple.  Everyone has heard of San Francisco and few people have heard of the many suburbs.  It just saves time trying to explain where the suburb is.

I like this conversational ‘condenser’.  

This condensation no longer happens with people who live in the dozens of suburbs that comprise ‘Silicon Valley’.  That is now a place that the world knows about.

I’m being audited by the IRS

Just four days after the election of Donald Trump I received an audit letter from the IRS.

My first suspicion was that is was a vendetta for having written my earlier blog suggesting to our new President that the entire IRS be moved to Detroit. I consider the IRS to be the most powerful and corrupt agency in the government. It needs to be taught a lesson and to help Detroit.

The audit letter only covers my business expenses in 2014.  It is not a hard audit to complete because I keep a fairly reliable calendar and all my expenses are on credit cards.

Several interesting issues are raised for me.  

This is my first audit in 63 years of paying U.S. income taxes.  I have probably paid well over $100,000 in Federal income taxes. That was in unadjusted dollars.  Inflation adjusted dollars would be at least three times that.   Theoretically there should be a point in life where you no longer get audited. Theoretically.

I have never had a single source of income that would make sense of my expenses.  My revenue stream comes from book royalties, lectures, honoraria, expert witness work in a dozen fields, business consulting, publishing books, Internet sales of radio interviews and other miscellaneous sources.  How could a salaried IRS employee be expected to understand the marketing efforts I need to generate revenue in all those fields?  They can’t.

Lastly, as I get older my clients retire from their businesses, die and drift off in many ways.  My expert witness fees come from plaintiff cases where the plaintiff only gets paid if they win and the payment can still be a year after they win.  Thus my annual revenue is erratic, volatile.  But my my marketing efforts remain fairly constant.  So examining expenses has to be done without a direct connection to revenue.

Enough.  These are the standard problems of a small business.  Which is why banks don’t make loans to small businesses.

Minimum wage impact

I’m on the board of a restaurant in San Francisco.  The restaurant has been astoundingly successful.  I was a key founder many decades ago.

San Francisco has a minimum wage with no exception for tip based jobs.  An average server in my restaurant can earn over $70,000 a year, two-thirds are from tips.

As the wage component has gone from $11 per hour to the current $13, the labor costs for the restaurant have risen $350,000.  This wiped out the entire net earnings of the restaurant.  The prices on the menu can’t be raised much.  Not enough to compensate for the rise of the minimum wage.  

The minimum by law goes to $14 next June and $15 the following year.  My restaurant won’t survive.  55 people will be laid off, soon.  A major park that depends on the restaurant rent will be in trouble.

Just because the San Francisco Board of Supervisors are all Democrats, union driven, none of whom have ever been in business.  

The rest of my restaurant board are all Democrats.  Nice people with no willingness to admit what a stupid idea they have accepted.  Ideological hysteria.  I warned them a year ago the consequences of the minimum wage.  They have done nothing and are doing nothing now.  I have to resign.  I could save the restaurant with radical changes but that won’t happen.

Sad.  But this same Democrat theology has destroyed many nations and could have destroyed America if Trump hadn’t come along and led the few Americans who could see the Democrat disaster on the horizon.

It is possible that the new Republican government could pass a law making the national minimum wage the only one.  I see no movement in that direction.

Time to watch a reformation?

It is  customary these days to talk about the need for a reformation of Islam similar to the Protestant Reformation.

I'm not hoping for this.  The Protestant rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church led both groups to drive the Jews out of Europe as scapegoats for their Christian theological weakness. 

Thanks to the Trump victory two weeks ago in the U.S. we get to see the fastest growing most powerful religion on earth, Global Warming Armageddon, confront a large group of people around the world who will now be lead by America to resist. 

This is a 'reformation' like the Protestant-Catholic one.  The Protestant-Catholic confrontation was over the use of bibles by ordinary people and the perverse structure the Catholic Church had created out of its non-biblical theology.

Same thing with the Global Warming Armageddon.  It is created out of the theology of anti-commerce with no basis in data.  Now people of the world will turn to the existing data and demand that real data be used in the name of 'science.'   If you want real data look up MEI timeseries, RSS and Radiosonde timeline.

There is no global warming based on reliable measurements. It is a cover for an anti-commerce theology. The Roman Catholic Church had only itself to fall back on in the 1500's, but it survives to this day delivering anti-commerce political sermons.

The sad GDP

I often comment on the sad state of the GDP which has not really grown for the past 9 years. 

I have suggested that a real deflation which is covered up by increasing college expenses, health costs and new housing construction (all areas where imports can not drive down costs) should be added to the GDP calculation the same way inflation is deducted from GDP.

I have suggested that the oppressive Obama-Democrat anti-commerce milieu has depressed new business startup. Remember ‘you didn’t build that’?

Now I’m remembering that we have a slowly growing simple living class.  

• This is occurring because the Internet brings us low cost and second hand goods.  Readily available and delivered to our doors.
• We can get jobs that are part time and flexible like Uber.
• We can do odd jobs with good pay and create mini businesses like Taskrabbit.
• We have airbnb to make travel many times less expensive and income from shared space more feasible.
• Hostility to cars is growing while bicycle riding expands.

There is a steady exit from the labor force which suggests that the simple living hypothesis might be reliable.

Simple living expansion may be an important reason for our low GDP growth.

 

 

Bambi is Jewish

I'm travelling to and from the family Thanksgiving gathering.  So I am replaying a three year old blog that continues to be relevant.

"I have on occasion mentioned the fact that movies have no impact on society. No impact or very little impact. (Except for the money the Hollywood pedants give to incompetent Union-Democrats.)

There is one slight exception to this observation. That is the film made by Disney about Bambi. The film itself originally had no effect but when video tape became available in the early 1980s every child in America got to watch their favorite movie at home... which was Bambi.

From that day on you can see the number of hunting licenses in America began a straight line decline. Bambi had an indirect effect on hunting. Children wouldn’t let their parents shoot Bambi.

Because Disney and Bambi seem to be so WASP, it is hard to think of Bambi as a Jew. But Bambi is.

The book about Bambi, on which the movie is based, was written by Felix Salten an Austrian Jew.  Salten was a friend and strong supporter of Theodore Herzl the father of modern  Zionism.  The book Salten wrote simultaneously with Bambi is a book about Jews escaping European Jew-hate and moving to Palestine.

Bambi thus becomes the fiction version of an underdog who is hunted by the Jew-haters of Europe."

Bambi has recently become my favorite movie because America is beginning to adopt the Leftist attitudes of Europe and the universal hatred of Jews that is so prevalent there and in the Moslem world.  We all have a great deal to worry about.  Europe is on a direct line to new Jew slaughter.

It would be nice if we can let everyone who loves Bambi, before their brains become solid concrete at age 23, know that Bambi is a Jew.

Breakfast in America

Call me nuts.  I’ve published a few of my weird behaviors and was surprised to find some of my readers didn’t consider me nuts.  Or maybe me and my readers are nuts together.

I eat salad for breakfast.  I also have a Peet’s cappuccino separately. In a 'Pro Commerce' labeled cup.

So of course I notice that the standard American breakfast is immutable.  Either some variation of eggs and toast or cereal.

I may have picked up my breakfast habit in the late 1950’s on a Kibbutz.  But I doubt it.  Israel was poor and barely surviving with socialism ruling the country.  Breakfast was an egg, shemenit (a sour cream-yogurt combination), eggplant, tomato, olive oil and Russian rye bread.  

I returned to America and ate the standard American fair.

It was after a visit, 15 years ago, that I started eating a breakfast salad.  Which Israelis do too.  Theirs is heavier on cucumber and mine is heavier on cabbage and lettuce.

But I love salad for breakfast.  When in Japan I eat a Japanese breakfast with miso, fish, natto and rice.  Which I can’t duplicate regularly back here in the U.S.  Though I get miso and natto on a regular basis.

So who gives a damn about my breakfast.  It's just to reiterate that Americans are fairly rigid in their breakfast ritual.  And as the breakfast migrates to every meal all day, at fast food outlets, we may be at the end of the foodie era and the restaurants that thrive on it.

Eggs again

Earlier this year I wrote a blog about Japanese eggs upon my return from my annual Tokyo visit.

I am always stunned by the beauty of the bright orange Japanese egg yolks. I learned from a man in the egg business that the color of the yolks was based on the feed the chickens were given.  The Japanese had experimented until they got the color they wanted.  American egg farms only operate on folk mythology.

Now, as a sort of proof, my local San Francisco Japanese grocery is carrying eggs from a local Japanese farm that are the perfect orange yoke.  

The local Japanese egg farm is using the food mixture that the Japanese in Japan use.

So that was the secret.  And all the locavores and natural outdoor eating American folks were as nuts as I thought they were.

Family and Thanksgiving

How does a blog about pro commerce deal with the issues of family, which is the core of Thanksgiving.

Pro commerce is about meritocracy.  Family in the traditional meaning is tribal.  They are classic opposites.  Loyalty to family is supposed to trump merit.  In tribal societies, which still prevail in most of the world, the family would hire a family member in business as a first priority.

Interestingly the family in the modern commercial world is very different. No one seems to have noticed.

I wouldn’t hire a member of my family for a real job (as opposed to cooking, helping with family matters, etc) over a more qualified or appropriate person.  And they all know it.  They are lawyers, doctors and indian chiefs.  I did hire my son to teach me Chinese martial arts for over a decade, because he was the best teacher I knew.  It was a good decision. He came to my house, weekly, and we kept up to date on our lives.

Family today has another function.  It is for continuity of life.  In my family we take care of the elderly.  Most importantly, we provide protection and comfort for the young.  The young know there are family members who will care for them; always.  The family provides support.  Everyone knows they can find a family member who will help when help is needed.

That is continuity.  Intergenerational continuity.  It is a valuable quality of family.  And a sad missing element in many parts of our society.

Japanese and obesity

On every trip to Tokyo for the past 25 years, since global obesity has been an issue, I have counted the number of people on a full subway car who are clearly obese.

The number has barely changed over the 25 year period.  There can be roughly 60 people in a subway car at any time of day, any day of the week.  My count has gone from barely one to slightly more than one per 60 people.  In the U.S. the number would be 1 in three.

So how do I account for this startling discrepancy?

It can’t be food because the Japanese have changed much of their diet over the 25 years.  There is plenty of fast food and younger people eat a lot of it.  The Japanese always eat plenty of food at any meal.   No change in exercise, they walk plenty.  No change in traditional food which they eat when not eating fast food.  A slight decrease in smoking.  

I can only conclude a rather horrifying explanation: the potential for obesity is in our genes.

Good lord.  How can this be?

Essentialism

Another issue my son brought up.  Essentialism defines the brain dead idea that two weeks ago lost the Democrats the election, up and down the ticket.

Here is the way wikipedia defines it. “In social and political debate, the critique of essentialism arose from post-modernist theory, according to which the essentialist view on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or other group characteristics is that they are fixed traits, discounting variation among group members as secondary.”

Of course wikipedia has other definitions of essentialism that are quite different and wrong or irrelevant.   Note that this definition came into academia from the French post-communist idolatry.  It now pervades American academia.

The Democrats have come to believe in essentialism.  They believe that women will vote for a woman, that what defines the voting patterns of blacks and latinos is the Party’s campaign promises to those categories. 

That is nonsense.  The majority of white women must have voted white because they didn’t vote for a woman candidate (54% for Trump).  How did women know to vote their skin color rather than their genitalia?

The question is as stupid as the idea of essentialism.

What is the relevance of this issue to commerce?  

Commerce depends on meritocracy and meritocracy seeks the most competent person.  Merit has nothing to do with Democrat Party categories.  Commerce seeks diversity of skill, competence, insight, talent and vision.  Nothing immutable or written in the genes. Nothing ethnic, gender or nationality about diversity.

Native Americans

I struggle to communicate my ideas.  People usually close their ears the minute I try to offer anything new about commerce, human sexuality or street people, areas where I have years of experience.

So please excuse me as I try to refine my material in old age.

Street people don’t want to join our society.  No matter how compassionate the society, such as Japan and Israel, there is a group of people who don’t want to join society and are willing to live under nearly any circumstances to avoid joining society.

Who else fits that definition?  Native Americans (and native Canadians and the Ainu in Japan).

So what do we do with Native Americans?  We acknowledge their unwillingness to join our society and give them their own land to live on.  Far away.  So we can’t see their living conditions.  Recently many American states have given Native Americans the right to open gambling casinos.  Which is a great source of wealth.  But it hasn’t changed tribal living conditions much.

Can’t we use our long history of government failure in getting Native Americans to join our society and apply it to street people?

The answer should be ‘Yes’ for the few people who have open minds and can think about this.

MasterCard redesign

I read an article recently on designers who are trying to redesign everything important and rarely finding a new design that replaces a powerful existing design.

One failure reported was a re-design of the MasterCard logo.  The designers succeeded in changing some element of one of the colors and using lines in the overlapping circles for low grade reproduction circumstances.  Trivial changes.  Insignificant.

Of course I was involved in the original design and naming of the card.  “Involved” is a misnomer or a braggadocio mistake. The advertising man on the case, Bob Footman at Foote, Cone and Belding was powerful and made all the decisions himself.  He used a little focus group research and asked close business allies their opinions.  The reality is that Bob made the decisions.  I was a close friend who always supported him.

Bob’s logic, with which I concurred, was that we were targeting a new market for charge cards: women shoppers.  Previous general purpose charge cards had been aimed at travelling business men: American Express, Diners Club and Carte Blanche.  

Therefore the card had to be white, the symbol of female, virginity and weddings.  It had to show the other symbol of female too: female genitalia.  Two overlapping circles.

We agreed on the design and never flinched in explaining the symbolism to the few higher ranking decision makers.  

With that kind of thinking and candor, no wonder the design had held up globally so well.

New media is like University of Chicagp

What I have to say about the new media landscape is not the least bit original.  

It is obvious that the vast print media has been in decline for decades.  I have followed the influence for over half a century, during which time I spent many decades in active politics.  Local newspapers never once had any impact on an election.  Never.  I doubt that the NYTimes had any national influence on an election.  The fact that the print press is rapidly going out of business is irrelevant to direct action politics.

The same is true for TV.  So far as having a direct impact on national politics, we know that the first TV debate between Obama and Romney was a disaster for Obama, but he won the election anyway.  In 2016, the TV media created Donald Trump with lies, distortions and nasty bias.  The TV media created a strong backlash in favor of Trump. It was a perverse consequence of bad behavior and horrible bias.

What I want to point out is that the voting public knew how badly the TV media lied because it learned the substantive truth from four sources: talk radio, Twitter, Internet video of speeches and Internet news sources.

These four  new media are now what counts in America.  These are the trusted, often original, sources for the American public.

• Talk radio reaches roughly 25 million Americans every day.  The most powerful voice is Rush Limbaugh for 15 hours a week.  Rush never makes a mistake and is deeply trusted.  After him is Sean Hannity who is an original source who interviews political newsmakers daily on a vast radio network and on Fox TV cable news.
• Twitter is an original and direct source.  It comes directly from the newsmaker.
• Internet video is an original source, usually a short Youtube clip of a video subject that has been distorted by the mass media is then available accurately.  Youtube clips are circulated widely, often in the millions of views.
• There are many news sources on the Internet ranging from the most powerful, the Drudge Report, to the newest Breitbart News, which now surpasses the NYTimes digital edition in daily viewership.

I went to the University of Chicago where all teaching material was the original source (in English translation).  It looks like genuine Americans (not Lefties) prefer original source material for their lives as well.

The new technologies are bringing original sources to everyone.

Will this bring Trumpism to the world?  A question for another day.

The new elite

In the past election Wikileaks produced over 2,000 emails from John Podesta concerning the Clinton Foundation, the sitting Secretary of State and the Democrat Party.

The level of corruption in the two Clinton Foundations is a subject I have treated before as a former manager of several 501.c3 foundations.

I am opposed to any Trump legal campaigns against Hillary Clinton.  She has already paid a heavy penalty.  No need to make unnecessary enemies.  But I strongly support IRS enforcement of laws regarding the criminal behavior of the two Clinton Foundations.

The Podesta emails tells us something much more horrible and something I have worried about for years.

The American hereditary elite disappeared in 1962.  I have worried, along with David Brooks, that it will be replaced by a new elite.  It has been.  John Podesta was a central figure in the new elite.  He directed CEO’s in the media, pop culture and every realm of Democrat controlled government including many Democrat controlled corporations to hire his loyal friends.  Just like the old hereditary elite did.

John Podesta used his political position to create a new rich and powerful Lefty elite.  It is horrible.  It is a direct attack on meritocracy and American values.  

The Podesta Democrat elite must be dismantled by every tool available from lawsuits with prison time to brazen and candid exposure for the next decade.

Hanke-Henry after 60 years

I wonder why I never thought of it.  I’ve been a pilot for nearly 60 years and pilots use UTC.

UTC is Greenwich mean time.  You can just put “UTC time now” or “GMT time now” into Google to get your local time.  It should be in military 24 hour units, but Google still uses am/pm.

What has become obvious to anyone who thinks about it now is that we should all be using 24 UTC.  For me that means I get up at 1400 hours, have lunch at 2400 hours and go about my life with no concern about daylight savings or daylight wasting time.  In Tokyo I get up at 2000 and in Tel Aviv at 0400.

The 'no time zones' model is currently being called the Hanke-Henry model.

Turning points in history

The pharaohs and Moses were the first step to creating modern commerce.  The Pharaohs, like the modern Left, had become so onerous and oppressive, that a man rose up to lead the children of Jacob out of Egypt to form a new nation.  That nation became Israel.  The first literate people with the first great work of literary history and unique  new human beings.

The Roman emperors and Hillel were the second step to creating modern commerce.  The Roman efforts to stamp out this unique new nation evoked the wisdom of the Sanhedrin and Hillel to form a state of mind (rabbis and synagogues)  that kept the children of Jacob together in exile for 2,000 years.

The Protestant Reformation in rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church drove the Jews as scapegoats out of Europe.  Decades later the princely class realized the damage that expulsion had done to commerce and brought the Jews back to many cities including Amsterdam.  Which is where the seeds of modern commerce were first sewn with a bond market, salaried tax collectors, insurance partnerships for international trade, the scientific enlightenment and astounding individual freedom.

The American rebels, in the late 1700’s,  were forced to drive out belligerent native Americans and hierarchy worshiping Canadians to form the U.S. Constitutional government that enshrined a Republic with strong individual freedom and rudimentary  meritocracy.  This was followed by the vast continental land expansion which destroyed hereditary hierarchy by letting the meritocratic escape their local social traps.

The remaining plantation class in the American South pushed their power too far, trying to move slavery to the vast freemen of the West, causing a civil war which unleashed the extraordinary military expansion of modern industrial commerce in the American North.

Finally, after victorious America harnessed the industrial society to defeat the first wave of German socialism, then Russian communism, it fell victim to the residual anti-commerce anti-American forces still hidden in academia and the Democrat Party.  The revolution of 2016 brought the American rebels back to life with a new sustaining revolution in the Trump Party.

One of the greatest revolutions

Modern commerce has been saved.  Thanks to the people who rose up to save her and the great leader who emerged, Donald Trump.

We have just lived through an historic revolution this past week.  Sixty million Americans rose up to overthrow an anti-commerce movement that had gained a stranglehold on the first and greatest country of modern commerce.  They/we rose up against a global anti-commerce religion (global warming armaggedon) and a tight knit elite of wealthy and powerful Lefties who had gained control of the mass media, pop culture and academia.

It can be hoped that this movement will overthrow the evil anti-commerce forces that have sprouted out of the failed 20th Century communism.  If not entirely successful, it will have forged a common understanding and cohesion among the millions of rebel heroes that will survive another generation.  Much like the original moral uprising that created the Republican Party with Lincoln to throw-off the plantation Democrat Party, today the Trump Party has risen up with Donald Trump to throw-off the Republican-Democrat Party of the 20th Century Luddites.

Universal culture

My son has raised the question, with me, of whether a universal commercial culture is evolving without our noticing it.

I have strongly rejected the Lefty European idea of the end of nationalism and the emergence of a global polity.  That is mushy thinking that ignores the cohesion, uniqueness and vitality of nation states.

But a different kind of culture may be emerging globally.  A modern commercial culture.

• Most of the world has encountered movies, television, even a single television show, NCIS.  
• Most of the world wears similar clothing and much of the world wear similar footwear.  
• A great deal of the world recognizes the technology associated with airplanes, combustion engines, metallurgy, thermometers, glass and metal cooking objects.
• Electricity and various combustible gases are ubiquitous.
• The same is true of pens and writing instruments, as well as watches and clocks.
• Today, even portable computers and cell phones are widely known as are automobiles, trucks, bicycles, farm equipment and motorcycles.

What distinguishes a third world urban scene from Des Moines is the absence of paved streets, lack of recently painted buildings and missing drainage systems.

Trade and commerce seem to be understood everywhere with markets, standard fixed pricing and currency.  The Phillips Global Currency (Visa and MasterCard) are nearly universal.

One of the most unusual phenomenon is the global presence of hotels and restaurants.  These are very recent, only one century old, in most of the developed world. Fairly clean and sanitary.

The same is true for some sports such as soccer and swimming.

Writing, reading and math are becoming normative and expected nearly everywhere. Yoga and martial arts, too.

All of these phenomenon are able to exist in societies that are tribal.  Maybe we have a low grade of commerce worldwide which will slowly expand and bring some of the main modern commercial attributes with it: meritocracy and openness.

Jews in early commerce

I’m reading a history book about Jews in Europe before the beginning of modern commerce.  Jonathan Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550-1750.

What is astounding to me is that before 1580 Jews were expelled from nearly every European country.  We are all familiar with Spain in 1492 and Portugal a few years later.  What we are not familiar with is that Jews were expelled from France, Italy and every other European country in the next 75 years.  Jews were forced to settle in Poland, Ukraine and Eastern Europe and the Western realms of Russia.

The cause of this great forced Jewish exile was the Protestant Reformation. Everywhere in Europe, Calvinists, Lutherans, Huguenots and every other imaginable Protestant rebel group was at war with the Roman Catholic Church.  Jews were the victims as religion inflamed intolerance. And popes and bishops directed the flames of hatred toward local Jews.

What I didn’t know about was that starting in 1580 the princely class saw that Jews brought commerce to their kingdoms and invited Jews back to most parts of Germany, Venice and surrounds, the Netherlands and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jews became the backbone of European commerce, including commerce with the Balkans and the Turkish empire.

What was it about Jews that created this success in commerce?

I call it the horses, the harness and the carriage.  

• Like the horses, which have unique talents much better than mules or donkeys for speed, Jews had more than a thousand year history of being literate.  Jews could read, write and deal with numbers.  They were surrounded by populations where few people could do any of those things. That gave Jews a natural advantage in commerce.
• Like the harness, Jews were connected to each other by strong ties to their historic state of Israel.  Jews had unique common foods, rituals, Hebrew, a common history, literature and a ceremonial calendar.   This was a much stronger bond than families, villages or tribes.
• Like the carriage, Jews were not tied to the land.  They had never been allowed to own land, be farmers or landlords since their expulsion from Israel 1,500 years earlier.  So they were living nearly everywhere.  

Jews were in touch with each other over great distances, over language differences and yet they had mutual trust and common experiences and skills.

The overseas Chinese in the modern world have many of these same qualities and they do well in commerce.

Israelis have all these qualities and are rapidly becoming the backbone of modern commerce, globally.

Does any of this have to do with the widespread Jew hate found among Lefties, Europeans and Muslims?  No.  Jew hate existed before Israel. It can be found in Egyptian documents soon after the Exodus.  Jew hate is found in the Persian Empire after Jews were first driven out of Israel.  That is the story of Esther and the ceremony of Purim.

What you can see for yourself about commerce

I have made very little progress in teaching the world that modern commerce is the only source of wealth, health and prosperity.

So now I am looking around me to try and teach simple lessons about modern commerce.

Lesson 1.  Modern commerce is the superior human mechanism for social improvement.  It is built on the fundamentals of Darwinian evolution.  There is constant change underway and the best survival traits are the ones that survive. Businesses that serve your needs survive.

Walk down the street with your eyes open.  You will notice many retail storefronts ‘for rent’, a few new businesses being built and remodelled and a few storefronts converted to other uses such as apartments or garages.

What you are seeing is small sample of the constant and vast churning of new business being formed and businesses failing and going out of business.  Now consider the fact that the retail businesses you are seeing comprise about 4 million out of 8 million businesses. Every year half a million of these are started and half a million go out of business.  That is Darwinian evolution.  Survival of the ones that serve customers the best.

Lesson 2.  No government operations ever go out of business.  They just grow like cancer.  

In 1941 there was 1 government employee for every 30 Americans.  That includes Federal, State and Local.  Now there are 2 government employee for every 30 Americans.  Nearly double the number of government employees per person. (excludes military).

Summary: modern commerce is evolutionary, constantly adapting to the environment. Government is cancerous, malignant with unstoppable growth.

Crooks and lefties

It would be terribly rude of me to suggest that all Lefties have a strain of crookedness in them.

So I won’t.

I will just mention my experience.  In the first years I was business manager of Glide Memorial Methodist Church, I expanded an earlier practice of Glide of renting all of our large rooms (about 5 of them of several sizes) to any group that wanted them.  No questions asked.  Low rent.

The consequence was that most modern activist organization of the 1970’s were first organized at Glide.

I quickly learned a lesson.  The various communist local organizations wouldn’t pay their rent, wouldn’t clean up after themselves and would steal chairs and tables.  Slowly I developed a list of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Marxist, Trotsky and Anarchist groups that I would no longer rent to.

Why are these Leftists groups crooks?

I can only speculate.  Their ideology is based on theft.  1) Steal from the social classes that have wealth and resources. 2) Steal enough from everyone and you will break down the social order of trust. 3) Show potential converts that you are brave and defiant of social norms.

Of course, the Lefty world hasn’t done very well in the past century.  Their saving grace is that the petty Leftists in Europe and those coming out of American colleges are ignorant of recent history.

Better Safeway marketing

I live in a City where half the population is Asian or Jewish.  Both categories have a genetic intolerance for the lactose in cows milk. There are a high proportion of Blacks, Latino’s and American Indians who are also lactose intolerant.

The consequence is that many of the people in these categories know about their lactose intolerance and, for the past decade, have found a milk product in their grocery store that has no lactose in the milk.  The best known brand is Lactaid. Now Safeway and others have their own house brands of milk.  About 10% of the milk I see in my local stores is lactose free.

The Lactaid company and a few others are now making additional dairy products that are lactose free.  Lactaid makes six flavors of ice cream, Breyers makes three flavors.  Several companies make lactose free yogurt, cottage cheese, cream cheese and sour cream.

So what is my problem?  I can rarely find any of the other lactose free products in stores that are selling 10% of their milk lactose free.  And when I do find them, they are hard to recognize.

Safeway and other big grocery chains seem to be: 

 * too big to notice what products sell well unless they are pressured by their wholesalers,

 * spend all their time buying other large chains and shuffling management,

 * are really not in the grocery business but are in the real estate investment business.

If one of these big grocery chains ever gets into food marketing I would suggest a display or a single refrigerated compartment that has all the lactose free products in one place so their customers can find them. 

Half your customers, in some markets, will buy them.  The big coffee chains should notice this issue too.  People are drinking soy milk in lieu of 'lactose free'.

"Management" was bad

What an incredible change in the meaning of a word over nearly two centuries.

I was doing research on the Adams-Jackson presidential campaigns of 1824 and 1828.  I found Jackson complaining in broadsides about Adams 'management.'  Of course I was looking because the election of 1824 went to the House of Representatives where it was rigged.

‘Management’ had a strange negative connotation.  Further research determined that ‘management’ two centuries ago referred to secret deceit.  And in the 1828 campaign it specifically referred to Adams’ secret deal with the Speaker of the House, in 1825, to make him, Clay, Secretary of State.  A position that went to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Obama election.

So the accusation by Jackson that Adams was guilty of ‘management’ was referring to an actual secret deceitful deal.

This was in a period before the rise of modern industry.  The largest organizations at the time were the Church, militaries and a few plantations.

It wasn’t until spinning and weaving mills emerged and railroads were under construction that new forms of organization were needed to generate efficient output.  Large scale production didn’t come until the Civil War.  It was only 20 years later, 1881,  that Joseph Wharton created a school to study productivity.  Joseph Wharton was a Quaker who believed strongly in ‘waste not’.  His first industrial experience was in zinc metallurgy, then nickel and finally gold and iron.  He was the first big shareholder in Bethlehem Steel.  Early on he was a hands-on manager of his industrial operations.

The more contemporary meaning of management evolved from the point where many people had the experience of large entrepreneurial operations and the need for planning, organizing and systematizing workers.

By the early 1920’s the term management had the meaning related to organizing work.  Pretty much where we use it today.  Although management remains invisible and subject to a world of theories half baked and three-quarters baked.

I’ve personally investigated the teaching of ‘management’ at American graduate schools and found it wanting.  In my view good managers learn directly as apprentices to good managers in a managerial environment.  The only thing taught in business management schools is how to read a financial statement.

Criminal jury trial

I got to sit through the most agonizing judicial ordeal imaginable.  A prosecutor tortured a jury as part of his deliberate strategy.  Really weird and it would have been painful if it hadn’t been so unusual.

A small ugly looking black street vagrant was on trial for carrying a loaded .22 rifle in a vehicle and peddling on the street without a license.  Both misdemeanors.

A jury panel of 24 people were seated and questioned on voir dire.  Thing is, the voir dire took 3 hours on the first afternoon and 3 more hours the next morning.  The plaintiff’s lawyer took about 20 minutes twice, focusing on racial prejudice, bias in favor of cops testimony and the nature of innocence before evidence is presented.  I assume the plaintiff’s lawyer was a public defender, we were never told.  Three jurors were dismissed after saying they knew the defendant from having seen him on the street.

The prosecutor took all the rest of the time to give long lectures on trial procedure and asked questions with a show of hands and then a specific follow-up.  Usually very open questions such as: ”is the judicial system fair”, “can you make a finding of guilt without knowing the consequences?”  and “do you consider gun laws too harsh or too lenient?”

“Did you have any thoughts overnight about this trial?” After 6 hours, that brought the response he wanted from a prospective juror: “Why do 75 people and an entire court have to spend so much time and money on a case involving two trivial misdemeanors?”  The judge and the two attorneys went into an immediate 30 minute private conference.The same thing happened again about a half an hour later when a dozen new prospective jurors were impaneled. Altogether 50 people were impaneled before a jury of 12 with 2 alternates were chosen.

Now, about a jury in San Francisco, that is so fascinating.  I saw it because of this incredible strategy of endless time wasting.  Just to provoke the question about why a jury trial for 2 misdemeanors.

There is a big problem with firearms in the City.  The city hates guns.  The last gun shop was deliberately put out of business by the Board of Supervisors.  Residents can’t have firearms or ammunition mailed to us.  Of the total of 50 prospective jurors interrogated only 4 owned firearms.  Two rifles, one antique, one shotgun and one pistol kept on mountain land as protection against bears and bobcats. I don't know what the fourth one was.  Dozens expressed their hatred of guns and nearly all considered the current strict gun laws insufficiently strict.  

There were no blacks among the 50.  There were 3 in the remaining jury pool.  This city has less than 4% adult black population.  Two of the three blacks, the men, were taken aside after the jury was selected and something told to them.  Probably explaining that the 50 out of 75 were the result of a random process.  No black discrimination intended.

The issue of potential bias in favor of a police officer’s testimony was addressed.  Again, this is San Francisco.  More than a dozen people said their bias would be against the police officers because of the media portrayal of police shooting blacks and the Black Lives Matter activism.

In the first hour during a short break, one woman found her bicycle had been stolen.  She was angry at the police.  The judge explained that the police were no longer in the same building as the courts.  The Sheriff's office provided the security.  The woman was still angry and was dismissed from the jury.

After the jury was impaneled I was dismissed with 25 others.  I talked to a few of the most beautiful women on the way out of the building.  We speculated on the issue of why a whole court had to deal with a 2 misdemeanor case. We had each concluded that it was because the plaintiff faced a 3 strikes law and a 25 year sentence.  While the charges were misdemeanors the one involving a gun would have invoked the 3 strike law for a former 2 strike felon.

Interesting?

Homeless aren’t

I’ve written about the ‘homeless’ so often that I wonder why it is still an issue that grates on me.

The problem is that I’ve never found a way to talk about it.  Whatever I say, falls on deaf ears.  

I created a park on 6th Street in San Francisco variously called Wino Park and Drunk Park.  The park had all the amenities that the street people, mostly black, wanted.  Benches to sleep on, a basketball hoop, a grassy area, two clean chemical toilets and safety.  The park was built in 1979 and lasted until 1983.

The term ‘homeless’ appeared before the park closed.  The term migrated from New York.  It has ever since been applied to street people, our urban hobos.   Housing is not an issue.  The number of street people in 1980 is the same in San Francisco today as it was then.  Roughly 6,000.  In the meantime nearly 12,000 people have been given free housing.  But the number on the street remains the same.

San Francisco now spends close to $100,000 per street person per year on medical, ambulance and social services.  Nothing changes over 35 years.

Yet I find people around me constantly bemoaning the inability to the City government to ‘do something’.  Everyone of them is an expert on the subject.  The Democrat view that the government can solve all social problems is never phased by this never ending problem.

I’ve worked on many social issues from mental illness, to family poverty to adult mental disability.  Our society does a wonderful job in handling all these cases of the truly needy. But our society gets no credit for fixing what can be fixed.

We can’t fix alcoholism and we can’t fix a group of people who like drugs and don’t want to work.

People who like living on the streets.

There, I got it off my chest, again.

Marketing is traditional again

I found myself giving marketing advice to a small business the other day.  What surprised me is that most elements of marketing your business haven’t changed.

There is that big thing: the Internet.  Yes, I acknowledge that.  In some ways the Internet is like the old phone book.  You must have a presence.  You need to be found in a Google search, you need an URL, you probably need Facebook and Instagram right now, and Linkedin.  Maybe a few very positive recommendations on Yelp or Amazon, but those are a two edged sword where a negative review is calamity for years.

In general, marketing is back to the traditional aspects that Rasberry and I cover ( Salli Rasberry) in Marketing Without Advertising.  Good social networks, good recommendations, good recourse and regular stimulus for your network of clients.

Surprise?  I am surprised we have returned to this point in only about ten years.

Maybe we can get a publisher to do a new edition.

How to teach pro commerce issues

I have been trying to teach the core issues of modern commerce for nearly 20 years.  I have to think back about what I’ve learned.

I have seen some movement in the intellectual world in the direction I want.  So I can offer a few minor observations.

Nobody understands the necessity for using the phrase ‘modern commerce’ or ‘pro commerce’ so we have to be patient with the misnomers capitalism, business and the free market.

The two ideas that are getting through to the understanding of modern commerce are the connection between individual freedom and meritocracy.  That is an important step that has taken 20 years.

Fortunately these are both positive values for Americans.  Americans consider their personal freedom to be a unique and desirable quality of living.  It has many meanings which need to be fleshed out.

Individual freedom should slowly grow to be understood as living with the ability to lead a complex, multifaceted life that is self organized.  That really doesn’t exist for most of the world, nor does it have meaning for the many Americans who see life as a job or a career with the freedom existing on weekends and in retirement.

The notion of an authentic person is also a growing concept but it hasn’t been connected to the idea of a self organized life. And the need for modern commerce in a society with individual freedom.

I am delighted to see the concept of meritocracy emerging among thinkers, recently.  It is probably the strongest value that Americans can connect with that is a core part of modern commerce.

Most people have no idea how narrow the world of meritocracy is.  It simply doesn’t exist anywhere that tribal or family cohesion is paramount.  That includes all of Africa, Islam, India, China and in the hereditary elites in the rest of the world.  It is good to connect meritocracy to modern commerce but it may be impossible to get people to understand that it is limited to very few societies.

Lastly, the idea of modern commerce as a Darwinian form of evolution is still limited to the phrase ‘creative destruction’ without any sense that thousands of businesses are merging, failing and expanding every day.  The dynamics are not visible. Only one or two of the top 100 companies of 1960 even exists today and only a handful are still in the top 100.

Hopefully, progress in understanding more about modern commerce is underway.

Love and marriage

I recently got an invitation to contribute an article to a publication about ‘love and money’.  So I have been thinking about it.

It calls to mind a summer in the mid-1970’s when I was in Kyoto for a few months. I had visited Japan several times already and was growing curious about arranged marriages.  When I talked to Japanese friends most of the women said they had a ‘love’ marriage.  Most of the men said that their own family knew the family of their wife before the wedding.  Everyone acknowledged that arranged marriages were common.

I was in a coffee shop (they had them in those days in Japan) near Kyoto University with about 15 students scattered around the room, mostly in clusters of males and clusters of women.

I stood-up and loudly asked for everyone’s attention.  Americans were highly respected back in those days.  Then I asked them each a question going around the room.

“Are you going to have a ‘love marriage’ or an ‘arranged marriage’?”   

The women, with no exceptions, said a ‘love marriage’.  The men all gave vague answers usually of the nature: “My parents will handle that, I don’t care.”

In the intervening 40 years I always check on that issue; nothing has changed.

From this I conclude that ‘love’ in selecting a mate is something 'modern', it is an accommodation to the modern commercial world.  It appears that a traditional tribal-family society maintains its stability and hereditary social structure with arranged marriages.

Since I am a champion of the modern commercial world, I am consequently a fan of ‘love’ as the basis for family formation.  ‘Love’ in mating supports meritocracy over hereditary social class.

Moreover, as a mature male who has had many lovers during my life and a few wives, I have also observed that it is always the woman who selects the man, even though few men know that or even believe that.  So the 'love' part of selection is a cover for a meritocratic choice.

Clawback National Guard

There has been a news item recently about the National Guard paying large ‘re-up’ bonuses a decade ago when getting new soldiers was hard to do.  The bonuses were often $15,000 an amount more than allowed by the government.  

Apparently thousands of soldiers got the bonus.  Now the government wants its money back from the soldiers who served.

Funny?

My friend Bob went to work for the IRS when he was just out of law school in Los Angeles in the mid 1960’s.  

Bob was much smarter and more competent than any of the other IRS hires at the time.  His first assignment was to retrieve $500 in overpayment that the Navy had made by mistake to several thousand sailors.  The sailors had been dunned for a decade and few had returned the money.

Bob, without authorization, sent the sailors a letter on IRS stationary, saying the IRS was dropping the matter and signed it personally, wishing the sailors ‘well’.  

Bob lasted one year on that job.  

And you know people who vote for more government, like voting for Hillary and Bernie?