Pro Commerce

Miscellaneous blogs

Four blogs I didn't get around to writing:

*Cultural appropriation is not possible

The whole idea is absurd and comes from a failure to understand 'culture'.  A culture is cohesive.  It includes family structure, language, hierarchy, judicial systems, expressions, emotional ties, daily behavior. Cohesive and deeply integrated from millennia of evolution.

You can copy any part of another culture and the rest is unaffected and certainly not demeaned. Americans are eating Japanese sushi on a widespread basis and many Americans are using a toilet butt washer from Japan.  The sushi has expanded the Japanese sale of fish to the world and the Tsukiji market, while the Japanese eat the same amount of sea food. Nor have the Japanese used more older dirtier toilets and become as dirty as Americans while the Americans get cleaner.

If the rest of the world hadn't copied most American technologies including sanitation, the African lifespan would be half, and most of the people alive in the world would have died of disease by the mid-1960's.

*VR and mental problems

The first beneficial use of Virtual Reality that I have encountered is its use in therapy to help patients relive trauma with a therapist at their side; comforting.  That applies to VR of battlefield horrors and helping a patient cope with fears such as height or flying.

*What to do about Google and Facebook censorship

Do nothing.  The market is global and dynamic.  Competition will offer alternatives fairly soon without government interference.  I have already seen alternatives to Facebook in a few start-ups and I already use an alternative to Google search: DuckDuckGo.com

*In a Seattle High School

One grand daughter is in a standard Seattle high school history class.  I looked at her reading material and homework.

The history text is Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the U.S.. I read it years ago. Zinn hates America like every communist.  Still it is OK if the students already know history from a non-hate America perspective.  But they don't.

They also read Michel Foucault's Power/Knowledge. Which uses a Marxist view of class power to explain how nations create privilege for the top class and invisibly oppress lower classes.  Foucault studied the brilliant anthropologist Max Weber and misappropriated ideas by combining them with Marxism.

Standard American high school history classes are trying to turn out students that hate America and everything about America.

Projecting Trump’s first year for the coming two generations?

When I look at Trump’s first year of campaign promises and accomplishments I come to an outrageous conclusion: The Democrat Party will not be significant for a sixty year period.

The conclusion is not so outrageous on the face of it.  The Democrat Party was out of power for sixty years from its defeat in the Civil War until the Franklin Roosevelt election in 1932.  The reason is that the Democrat Party had no popular issues to replace its central issue in favor of slavery.  During that sixty years of exile the Democrats became the Party of the working man with support of silver, unions and social security,

Democrats returned to power when the party became the champions of the economic victims of the 1929 financial crash and the economic collapse that followed along with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff barriers. Democrats rode that tidal wave of change for the next sixty years.

Now the Democrats are out in the cold once again with no popular political positions.

Their two 2016 presidential candidates and national leaders have campaigned on anti-wealth, ethnic and gender divisions and support for illegal aliens. The Democrats also support an Armageddon anti-commerce theology. Those are not core American views.

Trump’s party, which hasn’t coalesced yet, is running on some very deeply held American platforms:

• America is a meritocracy and immigration should be based on merit.
• Americans are not envious people and accept great disparities in wealth ( but not class differences).
• Americans don’t identify or categorize other Americans based on race, ethnicity, or gender.
• Americans have great disdain for government bureaucratic rules and restrictions on commerce.

This distance between the Democrat Party’s positions and the Trump platform is as great as the divide between the 1800’s Democrat party of slavery and the new 1860’s Republican party of pro-commerce and triumphalism.

The name Elon is now powerful

What do you call a visionary who makes his visions hyper real?

Minerva Schools

Several decades ago I advanced an idea for a college based upon a small student body with small discussion classes and instruction by occasional remote faculty. Including many international faculty. This was before the Internet and the necessary technology.

My vision was the byproduct of my own experience at the University of Chicago at the tail end of the ‘Hutchins Era’ (1954-1957).  The undergraduate Chicago school had about 500 students and most classes were 20 students, all participating, with a faculty facilitator.

That is how I learned.  That is how I learn.  So I wanted more people to have this experience.

However I could never figure out how to make such a school financially functional.  I had been the consultant to several colleges and saw how the administration could be minimized.  I had been on a university credentialing committee so I knew the criteria for credentials. But my model never came together, despite my experience.

By accident, reading about the founder of a new Internet startup, I read that he was going to a college called a Minerva School.  And damned if the main Minerva School wasn’t in San Francisco, where I live. I’d never heard of it and it is already more than three years old.

The school has my ideal small class discussion groups, an international faculty and much of the pedagogy is on the Internet.  The tuition is lower than the University of California or the California State colleges, at $12,000.

See for yourself at Minerva Schools and look at the early history on another site for academics.

The Minerva Schools are a part of an extensive academic network (Keck), a minimal administration, 20 person facilitated classes, a small student body, a global faculty, a global student body and global classroom locations. The tuition is lower than the University of California, lower than nearly every American private college and most universities in the country.

The future of a good college education has arrived.

Trump's interesting contributions

Looking at President Trump’s first year in office, I notice a few things that will have large impacts on the world and on history.

He is the first man to call out the role of bureaucracy in stifling modern commerce. He did this in a major address in Warsaw in July 2017.

He has shown, on a large data scale, that reducing corporate taxes is one of the most powerful acts of government toward prosperity. Done in December 2017, the main effects are still 2-4 years off.  Most other modern commercial nations are bringing their taxes into line with the U.S. which will also have global effects.

He has signaled the importance of business based optimism for modern commercial advance. This is most apparent in financial responses globally.  I never had confidence in this idea, until I lived to compare the Trump first year to eight years of President Obama's anti-commerce era (Obama said "you didn't build that business on your own..") From a speech in 2012 in Virginia.

Trump has recognized the historic importance of Israel in the modern positive sum world. Israel is the greatest generator of important and innovative new businesses on the planet; other than the U.S., all with a tiny population. There are 100 countries with larger populations than Israel.

He has been a uniquely powerful voice for the value of merit in a modern society. Merit in a society without an hereditary elite is the single most important driver of modern commerce.  Trump has demanded that merit be the prime basis for new immigrant status in the U.S.