Pro Commerce

Taking dope

I went to a panel discussion of ‘5 powerful women’ who shaped the hippie era.

It wasn’t true.  The panel was put together by an academic who laid her Marxist nonsense on a great historical event.  Only my co-author, Salli Rasberry who was one of the five, qualifies as a woman who was powerful and shaped the hippie era, on the panel. Rasberry was the mother of hippie.  She is a force of nature.

The whole panel repeated what Rasberry said, so it was a good panel.

Two things came up for me.  The hippie world began with smoking dope (pot).   It was illegal, fun and not addicting.  This truth created the world of pot smokers as a cohort of outlaws.  Hippies became one coherent group of outlaws, with pot as the membership ritual and pot smoking the common symbol of camaraderie.  My son calls this ‘ the hot tub people’.

Pot led to other drugs, psychedelics such as LSD and mushrooms.

Which is an important point.   I took psychedelics so I know what happens when you take them.

You learn that the world we live in is a created world.  We have an agreed upon consensus.  This led to several outcomes for the hippie world.

One was the hippie sense that we can create a better world than the currently agreed upon consensus which the hippies set about creating.  After about 15 years the hippie-created world merged into the previously created consensus world. Both worlds changed significantly.

A few people stayed in the hippie world.  A few others tried to stay in the hippie world and fit into the agreed upon world.  They smoke a lot of pot and hold down day-time jobs.  Still others fully joined the agreed upon world and set out to make changes in it.  That group includes me.

Those who joined the agreed upon world have never forgotten that this is a human constructed reality.  Many of us recognize it as a cultural creation.  This is also a perspective that one can get from meditation.

Just reminding my readers: There are many worlds.  Ours is only one of many constructed worlds.   

At the moment we have two different politically created worlds.  Maybe someone will remind us of that.

American smile

The probability that you have heard of this is effectively close to zero.  I couldn’t believe it when I heard it myself.

There is such a thing as an ‘American smile’.  I learned this on my most recent trip to Tokyo.  I was sitting, in the early evening, with a long time friend of mine who was playing his guitar and singing ‘oldie’ songs.  I took a picture of him and he asked if I wanted an ‘American smile’.  Which he proceeded to show me.

I told him I had never heard of an 'American smile'.  He said it was commonly known and discussed among Japanese who travel.  To prove his point he stopped a young woman who was passing by and asked her if she knew what an American smile was.  She said 'Yes'.  

We both invited her to sit down.  She was taking her dog for a walk and had time.  She noticed his guitar, a miniature, and ask to strum it.   Which she did for a few chords.  I then asked her for a photo with an American smile.

For you who are surprised, as I was, I found  ‘American smile’ in wikipedia when I was in Japan.  I can’t find it now that I’m back in the U.S.  For wikipedia, my computer, connected to the Japanese Internet, said I was in Japan.

One reason I never heard of it is that I’m a deeply happy person, so I see smiles on everyone around me, whether they have one or not.

And yes, beautiful Japanese women will sit down at an outdoor coffee shop with me, a Japanese man, and my American girl friend, if you speak Japanese and don't look threatening.

Drake’s equation for intelligent life in the universe

In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake put together an equation to estimate the possibility of alien life in the universe.  Here is his famous equation.  Most people assume the solution to the equation is non-zero. They assume there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe.

N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L

• N = The number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
• R* =The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
• fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
• ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.
• fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
• fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.
• fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
• L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

I say with certainty that the solution is zero.  There is no other intelligent life in the universe..

I stop at fi of Drake’s equation and put in the following factors:

N=R* • fp • ne • fl • (np • ns• na• ne• st• tm• ys• ye• pt)

•  np= Number of years of life on the earth.  3 billion years
•  ns= Number of species over those years.  100 million
•  na= Number of species with tool making appendages.   Roughly 50
•  ne= Number of the 50 species ever to have lived.  50 billion
•  st=  Species capable of written word (technology). 1 species
•  tm= Total members of that species that ever lived. 8.5 billion
•  ys= Years that species had electrical technology. 170 years.
•  ye= Years those species’ members could generate transmissible electromagnetic             waves capable of leaving the planet.  100 years.
•  pt= Number of members of the species who could work together to produce                      electricity and operate transmission equipment.  1 million.

Now put that into Drake’s equation and you get zero.  Exactly zero chance of getting radio signals from anywhere else in the universe.

The SETI project is based on bad math.

What's happening in Japan?

I get to write this on the way back to the U.S. before jet lag sets in. After a month in Japan talking to more than a dozen close friends in many levels of Japanese life, there is much to report.

My first experience was explaining the Trump victory to my Japanese friends. Last year, in March, I told everyone that Trump had an 80% chance of becoming president. They all remembered.

In their 2200 year recorded history there has never been a revolution.  So they have no basis for understanding what is happening in the U.S. The closest they came to a revolution was in the 1860’s when, under direct military pressure from the U.S. Navy, the country was forced to modernize.  The pro-modernity victors in Tokyo, set out to copy everything in the U.S. and Europe that they thought was modernity.  At the same time, the Japanese Army fought a ‘quiet’ civil war with the rest of the country to force modernity on the resisters.  The civil war lasted 30 years.

I explained that Trump led a popular revolution against the media and academic coastal elites.  The media still controls the global information so they would need the Internet to know what is going on.  I pointed out Trump’s Twitter account, Drudge and several other websites to know what is going on.

In Pacific politics, Kim Jong Un has created his own problem.  He gave Trump and the U.S. military, with coward Obama no longer in office, an excuse to put 'defensive' missiles in South Korea and station 'defensive' U.S. Naval forces in the Japan Sea.  Two nightmares for China.  China now has no choice but to pressure N. Korea.  

Russia is trying to enter the picture.  Trump and his gang think like Kissinger and Nixon and want to play China and Russia off against each other.

America now has a great ally in the Philippines.  Dutarte is the unpredictable rogue who makes everyone in the Pacific review their plans.  Especially around the issue of East Timor where oil has recently become an issue.  My friends say that the Filipino’s don’t consider Dutarte to be unpredictable, they like his show of strength.

Old China watchers know China always moves tentatively and the move in the South China islands was entirely predicated on Obama’s cowardice.  They will pull out as soon as Trump is ready to force them.

The Japanese navy continues to grow and become more efficient.  With a declining Japanese national population, the Navy is what counts for protection.  The Japanese ‘peace constitution’ will be changed in 3 years. Allowing a more active military.

The Japanese population continues to decline but they are putting great hopes in robots who are much more common in Japan than anywhere else.  They also know that financial incentives of free and abundant child care will turn the population decline around when they want to.

The population is declining outside of cities but growing in major cities.  Baby carriages are everywhere in Tokyo. The whole country is becoming more efficient.

The two stories about Japan in the American news are shibboleths.  The Japanese are dying from overwork and young people in their 20s aren’t having sex.  These two statements are just the Japanese bragging.  They always overwork, and sex is prolific everywhere.

Construction continues in Tokyo.  Now the cranes are found more in residential building than in commercial towers. But plenty of towers are still going up.

I saw some new Japanese clothing designers. They have now far outpaced the rest of the world.  Japan is the capital of fashion.  Which should have been visible with Uniqlo.  Which is the leading global force in clothing.

I’m back.  The U.S. and San Francisco look particularly filthy and third world.  Hatred is virulent if you whisper the name Trump.

Starbucks premium

The photo on the right is the outside of a Starbucks Premium store in the Hatsudai part of Tokyo.  It is the first anniversary of the store.  I was at the opening a year ago.

This store is the 8th in the new category which has a leisure interior, high prices, better coffee and pastrami sandwiches along with apple pie and ice cream.

The first premium shop opened in Seattle on Capitol Hill.  I was there for that one too, since my brother and sister-in-law live two blocks away. The other first 6 are in Tokyo.

This Starbucks chain subsidiary is of importance because the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, was driven out of the Chairman's job for the second time and he has taken on the role as leader of the new Premium chain.

This blog is about two things: Schultz being kicked out and the Premium chain.

Schultz is a Lefty Fundamentalist and tried to force the tens of thousands of the U.S. Starbucks employees to swallow his backward Lefty ideology.  At one point he asked the employees to discuss the Black Lives Matter ideology.  Outside the U.S. the inherent foolishness of that proposition was too obvious to even try.  Inside the U.S. it was a failure since employees know better than to discuss racial issues  in a convivial business environment.  China bans movies with American black actors so you can imagine how that ideology would do in Chinese Starbucks.  In Europe, the Schultz demand to local stores to hire Syrians was a very unpopular idea.

Significantly, major U.S. stores have had bad sales results from embracing Lefty ideology.  Target was hit worst for its transgender bathroom policy.  So was Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus for their anti-Trump stands. Schultz was sensibly dumped by his board.

So Schultz took over the Premium subsidiary.  From what I see, it isn’t much of a success.

Schultz lacks self critical faculties.  Otherwise he would have learned by now that his global coffee success was driven by a speed-up of business that made coffee a more useful stimulant.  Business speed up was due to the advent of delivery services, the Internet and portable phones.  That explosion of stimulus-stimulant has probably come to an end.  He now heads a high price white elephant.