Pro Commerce

Berkeley free speech

I have a connection to the current rioting at U.C Berkeley.  A strong connection.  

There is nothing new going on here.  Berkeley has been a haven for the communist Left my entire life, which began before WWII.  When I was a graduate student in economics in 1962 to 1964 the faculty was almost wholly owned by the pro Castro faction.

I was an organizer then, as I have been ever since I was 13. I organized the Graduate Student Association. It had been dead for years.  The administration was so desperate to have some political vitality on campus that they gave me anything I demanded. There had been five straight years with no student activity.

I demanded everything I could think of: GSA membership on the bookstore board, the student housing board, the newspaper board. I even got membership on the Hospital board because I had brokered a deal with the administration and an Israeli female who tried to commit suicide in the hospital.

One of my friends who was the treasurer of my GSA was a math grad student, Mario Savio.  We had a few beers together.  Mario was a quiet guy with a serious demeanor. Nothing else in our relationship.  The following mid-winter he became famous for a speech he gave at the beginning of the Free Speech movement.

I had left U.C. by then and had started the marketing research department at the Bank of America. I had also been elected president of the San Francisco Young Republicans. When I visited the campus during that wild heyday I was struck by the vast number of activists.  This was the leading edge of the baby boom who had just  entered college.

Lefties all.  The most common demand I heard was to be free to use the word ‘fuck’ which was on signs and banners everywhere.

That doesn’t make it into Wikipedia.That is Berkeley.  

I have been predicting on Facebook that Berkeley is now the scene of the first voluntary civil war as pro-Trump people show up to face off with the black shirt leftists while the police sit in their cars and watch. I could be right.

Saving shopping streets

I was invited to a northern Japan town to see the beautiful museum where a close friend has become the director.  The town has built a lovely modern building with a great permanent collection.  The theory is that support for the arts will revitalize this nearly dead town.  I’ve heard similar ideas proposed for Detroit.

Towns usually live, grow or die because they have all the ingredients of modern commerce. A qualified and relevant labor force.  Good local government and necessary resources for the lowest cost production.  Which is usually a traffic nexus.  Towns in agricultural areas are mainly for shopping.

Bad government and high taxes will destroy a city.  Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore are examples.  

Small towns all over Japan and America have died because agricultural production got more efficient without labor.  Global agriculture.  Farmer’s children moved to cities for jobs and conviviality.  A two century long process.

The issue I saw in the Northern Japan town was that the main street in town was dead.  Abandoned. In the photo you can see the sidewalk area is covered with overhead plastic, the last time an effort was made to save the street from death.

There were shopping centers and retail businesses scattered around town.  The question was whether the older shopping street, four blocks long, could be revived.

I have watched shopping streets in all sizes of towns and city neighborhoods for decades.  I’ve seen a few revitalized.  

Union Street in San Francisco was brought back to life in 1964 by a wise commercial group and a good architect.  Beverly Willis  developed some design and color schemes that gave the whole street a continuity.  Empty stores were given several years of low rent.  A few good bars and restaurants brought life to the street.  

After 25 years, the street died.  Two main reasons.  Strong opposition to chain stores and bad night-day balance.

Chain stores are vital for tourism.  Tourist only feel safe and comfortable if they see a few chains that they know well from home such as the Gap, Wendy’s, Walgreens, etc.  Global brand names are signs of safety.

Also a balance of daytime shopping and night-time entertainment is necessary to keep street traffic high.  Too many jewelry stores with too many make-up stores and too few bars and restaurants changes the balance and traffic becomes inadequate for every type of store.

Twenty-fourth Street in San Francisco came near death and remains on life-support after the main local organic grocery store had an employee strike demanding a union.  The owner closed the store and two decades later it is still closed.  The store was the main source of foot traffic.  Every idea the Lefty city planners have tried to save the street have failed.  Outside chairs, trees, a weekend farmers market have all been futile.

The opposite can happen too.  On Sacramento and Presidio in San Francisco a small boutique with brilliant original hand made women’s clothes opened.  It was so good that rich women inundated it.  A dozen stores opened nearby within a year.  Including restaurants. The problem here was that street traffic increased so much it caught the attention of a bank.  The bank paid high rent for a corner location and consequently raised the rent at the next door  original magnet store.  When the magnet store closed the street entered a slow decline.

Lots of lessons.  The main one being the delicate nature of shopping streets.

Union addendum

I don't want my brilliant readers to think I have a carte blanche hostility to unions.  I don't

I have great sympathy for police and prison unions.  The public has an ill informed-sandbox view of the world.

The evil people that the police and prison guards have to deal with daily are almost universally sub- human.  The police and guards have to live in the evil criminal world and rapidly become immune to their sub-human surroundings.  Occasionally the police have to respond to the evil creatures in whatever manner is available.

When the public learns about the treatment of those criminals creating the awful events, the public reacts ignorantly, inappropriately.

That is where police unions enter the fray to protect the decent police who behave appropriately given the circumstances.

How much of the public knows the extensive world of feces that criminals inhabit?  They frequently shit on the carpets of the homes that they rob.  They usually cover their prison cells with feces, and often themselves.  The public is ignorant of this common criminal behavior.

The public also has no idea that an ordinary sized man on PCP requires 6 policeMEN to hold him down, while he spits at them.  Tasers are a joke in these circumstances.

Thank goodness for police unions.  Death to the few Black Lives Matter fools who wreak havoc on the lives of the many decent blacks.

Unions are the main opposition

My book on the sources of modern commerce is still in the editing stage with many very helpful comments from family and friends.

So far, I have not included material on the forces opposing modern commerce.  But I think a lot about it.

Most of Europe has gotten off the track to modern commerce which was thoroughly encouraged up until 1914.  World War I may have terrified everyone with its massive scale slaughter.

I think otherwise.  I think the anti-commerce force was unions.  Unions grew rapidly after WWI.  Unions have always been close to Socialism but I think it is deeper.

Modern commerce is based on meritocracy.  A society that deprecates meritocracy has very little chance to promote modern commerce.  The absence of meritocracy is a fundamental blockage to imagination and productivity in the workplace.

The definition of union structure is to promote seniority and stifle meritocracy.

Unions are very old organizations.  First found in Europe as guilds in the 1600’s.  Most skilled craftsmen learned their trades in an apprentice system.  The quality of the trade skills was maintained by the guilds which established rules and training procedures for apprentice programs. The guilds were usually made up of one trade; carpenters, tailors, hat makers, weavers, printers etc.  

Little changed until the mid 1800’s when guilds became unions and the level of skill incorporated entire classes of educated workers.  Mechanics and engineers were members of unions as were engravers and ship captains.  

Unions to this day promote seniority over merit.  In the school systems where merit can be necessary unions go to the other extreme of protecting incompetent teachers.  Unions support anti-merit.

Europe is run by unions and has no future.  American cities are all run by unions and the future is Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans and Baltimore.

Fortunately in America, since the Trump election, meritocracy may survive.

This is not to say that other institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church, Marxism and modern global news networks are not also anti-merit.  It is only that unions have operational power and better organization than the others.

Glaser bullets

    I have been occasionally distressed in watching action films on TV to see gunfights on airplanes. I assumed that the bullets piercing the airliner hull would result in immediate decompression catastrophe. It never happens.

I learned why, at a gun training session where I was introduced to Glaser bullets.

Invented in the late 1970’s specifically to deal with the air marshall problem of shooting while on an airplane, the Glaser bullets tear a big hole in the first object they hit but don’t go any further. So they won’t hurt the airline skin if they hit something like a person first.
.

If they miss a person, they may stop after damaging the inner airliner skin.  

I also learned from a European airline maintenance inspector at breakfast in a Tokyo hotel that modern airliners burn rather than rip. I don’t know what relevance that has.

Do all the bad guys in the world know about Glaser bullets, or are they just willing to die for their cause whatever it is?

P.S. Done on an IPad so the layout is still not the way I want it. 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Survival and genes

I’m getting older these days. For those of my readers who aren’t there yet, many of my peers complain about every imaginable pain or physical disruption. I try not to complain.

From my point of view, having read nearly every Stephen Jay Gould book on human evolution, most evolutionary forces don’t act on populations after reproduction age.  The exception seems to be where the tribe benefits from the knowledge of the elders there can be positive selection for old age.　Also men can reproduce with younger women which can pass on positive survival traits for aging in men.  It doesn’t explain the greater lifespan of women.

That being the case, my attitude is that everything that I have working is a fortunate blessing. It is amazing that anything works. Since memory seems to work best for issues that are long past, it is hard to connect that to the Gould material.

I asked Gould about this and the question of the minimum population for tribal survival.  His answers for both were unsatisfactory to me. Radio interviews are here.

 

PS This photo has no meaning.  I am on a new computer and still can't figure it out.

Romanian dish washing

Understanding 'culture' is very rare, though we use the word casually.  My readers are smart so I expect many of you to understand what culture is the way I do.  One of my daughters who is a biophysical chemist says I don’t understand science so I would guess my other daughter, a cultural anthropologist, would say I don’t understand culture.  I think they are both wrong, we just disagree on some specific science and anthropology issues such as global warming where my background as a statistician is what counts.  Enough family gossip.

I definitely have my understanding of culture based on having spent several months a year in Japan every year for over 55 years.  My view of culture is closest to Sapir and Whorf two men who are banished outsiders in anthropology.  They argue that cultures are mutually incomprehensible.  Or nearly incomprehensible because they are large complex structures that don’t make sense when examined piece by piece.  I think they are very close to Clifford Geertz the leading anthropologist whom I interviewed; but most anthropologists disagree with me about the similarity of Geertz and Sapir-Whorf..

For example, we American English speakers have pictures of rainbows and words for the colors.  Somehow or other we see each word related to color to a segment on the rainbow where all segments are seen as being of equal width.  The Japanese on the other hand see two colors of blue and have two words for the segment that we call 'blue'.  Japanese images of rainbows have a wider spectrum for the area we call blue and they call it light blue and dark blue.  The cones in our eyes are the same.

Over 55 years I have slowly come to observe hundreds of differences between my American perception of the world and what the Japanese see.  We can communicate just fine and we can be good friends.  But we can never comprehend each other’s  world.  

For example:  I gave a speech to a graduate school class on international marketing at Waseda University in Tokyo.  Afterwards about 14 faculty members from different faculties were invited to join me for dinner.  Few knew each other.  

In the 20 minutes before dinner they mingled and got to know each other briefly and exchanged business cards.  When it came time to sit down at a long table where I was seated at the head of the table, everyone knew where they were to sit. In hierarchical social order.  In a few cases where the correct seat was not clear the two people talked to each other for a minute or two to figure out who was higher on the social hierarchy.

Not credible that such a person by person hierarchy exists?   Another time, when an important guest was visiting me and wanted to eat at a 400 year old tofu restaurant, I called a friend to make the reservations.  This woman is high in the hierarchy and went to highschool with the crown prince.  When my group got to the restaurant we were taken to the third floor to a giant tatami room with one table.  The service was impeccable.  I wondered if the restaurant might be empty or having a bad night.  On the way out I checked the second floor.  Packed.  And the first floor was also packed with a long line waiting to be seated.  

I think it was because of the phone call to make my reservations.  Just my friend's voice and language were enough to send a message of her place on the hierarchy.  We got royal treatment.

Where did the first question about culture enter my mind and what was it?  

When I was young and living on a Kibbutz I had kitchen duty.  We washed everything first in cold soapy water then rinsed in cold clean water.  The kitchen staff was Romanian and they said that is how it is done in Romania.  Nobody (out of several hundred) got sick on the kibbutz from that dish washing practice which seems impossible from my American germ theory ideas.

The same was true of the soda drinks sold on the streets in Israel at that time.  The one plastic cup we all drank from was communal and was merely rinsed in cold water briefly.  I never got sick and never heard of anyone else getting sick from those plastic communal cups.

What do we believe because of our culture and how different can it be from other peoples worldviews?

No longer daily

I have been writing this blog every day for 5914 days in a row.  Yesterday was the first day in 16 years that I didn’t write or post a blog.  What is going on?

It is not my health.  I am healthy and still swim every week and still go to Tokyo for a month every year.

Two things converged.  First, I realized that I was responsible for the ignorance of modern commerce that surrounds me, worldwide, and makes me angry.  So I wrote a series of blogs over the past few weeks that comprise my monograph on the origins of modern commerce.  You will see the whole monograph in a short while after a few close critics get to read it.

In some ways this is the penultimate of my lifetime experience.  I no longer feel the need to think so persistently about the subject of modern commerce.  I am free to move on to other things.

Secondly this freedom has allowed me to think about my blog.  At one point in the first decade of writing I had 66,000 monthly readers.  That readership covered the world.  There were 3,000 readers in Saudi Arabia.  That alone was an incentive to write the blog.  That number has dwindled to 2,000 monthly readers today.  Much less pressure.

The decline in readership coincides with the rise in YouTube followers and YouTube channels and the vast expansion of podcasting.  Aside, I have over 300 podcasts on a stand alone website, Social Thought Radio, that virtually nobody visits.  

I myself only follow one blogger (Bookwormroom) so I understand how people have changed their online habits.

I will blog when the issue arises, from now on.