Pro Commerce

Suffering

Most religions focus on suffering. Christianity and Buddhism for sure.

I have people come to me for advice and some complain that all the 'spiritual practices' focus on suffering that is not relevant to them, while others complain that their suffering is not the kind religion or 'spiritual practices' address. Modern suffering is largely from stress, insomnia, depression and anxiety.

Folks, we live in a post-suffering world.

Of course there will always be suffering. But since about 1955 the nature of suffering has radically changed.

Beginning in 1850 in Massachusetts, sanitation began to improve. Most of the world suffered from sanitation illnesses before then. That has rapidly disappeared.

Sanitation related suffering included most of the fatal plagues of mankind and death related to serious wounds and post-surgery. Now gone because of anti-biotics that became widespread in the 1950's. Innumerable deaths and unbearable pain have been ameliorated since then.

One of the most horrible pains was suffered by women who died in childbirth before sanitation began to spread. Women had lifespans with a median of age 35 before sanitation was improved. Not only did death from childbirth create a pain known to everyone but the misery of infant and childhood death was pervasive. Death in family formation was everywhere experienced by everyone.

Even the act of sexual intercourse included the terror of death from childbirth for women and the horrors of living a life with syphilis for men and women.

Great suffering surrounded every human from birth defects, leprosy, tuberculosis and polio which plagued everyone before the mid-1950s.

When I saw the film They Shall Not Grow Old (reconstituted film from WWI) I could see the terrible teeth of the British soldiers in the trenches. The pain of bad teeth and infected root canals was everywhere. Persistent pain, unbearable daily pain, was partly mitigated with heavy alcohol consumption. Often dental pain was so bad, the life in the fetid swamp of the battlefield was minor in comparison.

In ordinary life, pain was so common that most people drank alcohol four or five times a day, starting early in the morning. Even among the prosperous men at the American Constitutional Convention there were five breaks for alcohol.

We are living in a world unknown to our forebearers, a world of post pain. A world with a fraction of the daily death. A world of post suffering.

Suffering today is as different for us compared to our ancestors as night and day.

Benevolence

I am uniquely qualified to write this blog. In 1978 I created a park in San Francisco at 5^th St. and Minna, for 'street people'. Also called 'homeless,' 'winos' and 'bums'. The park had grass, toilets, a basketball hoop, benches to sleep on and large beautiful boulders next to the street to keep the park residents from begging from pedestrians. I saw these fellow humans as needing a safe comfortable place. No one else alive seems to have done this.

My park lasted 3 years. until Puritanism decided these people needed to be 'rehabilitated' (the popular euphemism).

Benevolence has arrived in San Francisco. The city is now, 40 years later, creating spaces for street people to camp; providing toilets, safety, showers and food. About 35 tents. Photo: Old McDonalds's camp.

What are other currently operating solutions? None, for this population.

I was hired, by a consultant to the State of California, in the late 1980's to provide advice on management of the community homes for mentally retarded adults. The correct term for mentally retarded at the time was MR/DD, Mentally Retarded and Developmentally Disabled. The non-technical definition of this community was people who could not dress or feed themselves without help. This group is currently taken care of and is a tiny proportion of the 'homeless'.

A national study of this MR/DD population was done in 1987. At the time the estimated population under care, in six representative states, was roughly 55 per 100,000 of population.

I argue that there are two other larger and more functional groups to consider along with this benevolence needing population. One is the 'homeless', based on national data in 2019 at 170 per 100,000 of population.

Based on San Francisco, I can directly measure myself, it would be 120 per 100,000.

The other less functional population needing special care, not necessarily benevolence and is an order magnitude larger are prisoners and ex-prisoners. Prisoners and those under criminal supervision were 3,000 per 100,000 of population.

The total of the three, MR/DD, 'Homeless' and prisoners-recent prisoners is roughly 3,300 per 100,000 of population, or just over 3%.

My guess, based on recidivism data, is that the percentage of the total population that are ex-prisoners and less than fully functional, is equal to the number of prisoners. These people probably need benevolent consideration. Totaling prisoners and ex-prisoners this comes to roughly 6% of the adult population.

I would argue that the combined population of the U.S. today that can't or won't work is roughly 6%. This does not include a large adult population that is not in the labor force voluntarily, roughly 35%, many of whom are taking care of families and some of whom are rich enough to be in the leisure class.

This still leaves the problem that I want to address. The 6% that can't work or who need income but won't work.This last group includes heavy drug and alcohol users.

The problem here is that this is a growing population because jobs for this low skilled population are declining. Many low skilled jobs have been automated such as farming, trash collection, household work, bridge toll collection, gas station attendants, elevator operators, street cleaners and many more. We've also made most paying jobs for teenagers illegal.

Benevolence suggests we should be accommodating a large part of this growing population.

One popular view is that a minimum income payment is a solution. The problem with a minimum income payment is that it rewards the lazy and reduces the number of available low skilled jobs. Studies show that people earning near the minimum income payment prefer to quit their jobs and not work. Neither outcomes are desirable in a large heterogeneous population like the U.S.

Another approach is the current San Francisco solution. Special purpose camping in urban areas, like the Old McDonald's Camp. This seems much more feasible than we currently envision. The upper limit of this solution is the same as public housing which creates low income and dangerous populations nearby the housing or camping.

I think the solution for the next half century until a better solution is found, is a careful expansion of the San Francisco idea. Small protected urban camping populations with showers. This creates a safe but non-appealing environment when kept on a small scale. Unappealing for the population that is willing to work.

Safe, when the population is small, based on my personal experience.

We already have housing facilities for the sub-class of these people who have families so their children can go to school.

A flat one-time subsidy could be paid to neighbors to compensate their loss of market value.

This may be a benevolent long-term solution; at least for the next half century.

Addendum: About 5 tents within a block of this camp because of the toilets and showers.

My new hero

Nobody could be a greater advertisement for modern commerce than my new hero. The man who did this:

No government and no socialist country could or would ever put a sports car in orbit. The orbit is similar to earth's but reaches out to Mars.

Only commerce could make enough men rich enough to have one of them be a technical genius, an innovative rebel, an artist at heart and a person with a sense of humor all rolled into one. Elon Musk.

This is the clearest message to Lefties that they are on the path to boredom, stasis and a world of gray monotony.

Bill and Huey

Two good friends died last week. I want to share my experiences with both.

Bill was William English. He is the real father of the modern computer. But New York is so arrogant and blind to the rest of the world, his obit could never convey that reality.

Bill and I served on the Board of the Point Foundation for three years along with Huey. Point was the final money from the Last Whole Earth Catalog.

Bill ran the Xerox computer lab called Xerox Park. Xerox Park developed everything of significance about the modern computer. The mouse is mentioned in the NYTimes obit. The really important things were the software for editing writing, the software for drawing and painting and the entire screen-user interaction. Steve Jobs admitted that everything in the early Apples came from Bill's Xerox Park.

Bill developed a typing systems for Japanese and Arabic. Xerox joined with Fuji to promote the Japanese typing system. I stayed at Bill's (and Roberta's) house in Tokyo. Roberta had great taste and later opened an art gallery with plenty of Japanese art. Bill's typing system was never adapted by the Japanese. I don't know what happened to Arabic.

Bill was a quiet engineer. Subdued, gentle, attentive, energetic and deeply honest. My girl friend and I had dinner at Bill and Roberta's home on the side of Twin Peaks. At the time they were on the mouse diet. Mice fed only 30% of a normal diet lived longer. I left very hungry.

At that time Bill was on the Board of Sun Micro Systems which was jointly, with Apple, suing Microsoft for stealing the technology of screen-human interaction. Bill was widely known in the tech community as the father of the technology. I suggested that Bill was now in the position to force a settlement of the lawsuit. He did.

Huey was Huey Johnson. The four stories about Huey, give you a good sense of the man. In the first, Huey wanted me to see an elegant garden on a cliff over the Pacific. The matron wanted to donate it to the Nature Conservancy which Huey was running at the time. She pointed out some esoteric flower that Huey later told me she got wrong. I asked why he didn't point out the error. He said he dealt with donors all the time and it was always best to let them believe they were the experts.

In the second story, Huey outlined his idea for an urban-suburban land trust. I told him how to start it and explained the legal details. He wanted me to help him pick out his treasurer. I did some interviews and found the right man. It is the Trust for Public Land, and is gigantic.

In the third story Huey took me wild pig hunting on a private reserve near Santa Rosa. I went off on my own into a beautiful hillside at dawn's light. A pig ran past me and I shot it through the heart. I walked around and couldn't find it. When we met later I told Huey about it. In his mind he doubted I, an intellectual banker, could shoot accurately. He didn't know I had earned a Sharpshooters badge in the Army with the same M1Carbine. He told me that wild pigs can run a quarter mile after being shot in the heart. Now he tells me. He also may not have been willing to walk far down the hill to look for the animal because we didn't have the equipment to haul it the mile or so up the steep hill.

Huey loved being a greenie but always bugged fellow greenies with the fact that he loved hunting.

Lastly, Huey met me, in the early 1990s with my coffee group in North Beach when he was running Resource Renewal. I told him I had recently figured out that the population explosion was over and invited him to the party I was throwing to celebrate. He turned red and told me not to mention my findings to anyone. The fear of the population explosion was his most potent fund raising tool.

I miss both Bill and Huey.

Marking-Pen Sized Nukes

None of this material is secret and none of it comes from secret sources.

I have concluded that the major militaries of the world the, U.S., Russia, China, Europe and Israel in the past few decades have developed a marking-pen sized nuke. Other belligerent nations are not currently able to make these weapons, but they might be able to steal or buy some.

Two technologies made this possible. Mechanical devices on a chip and the ability to bring molecular sized nuclear matter together to a fissionable size to create a mega-ton weapon. 

Richard Feynman in a book told about seeing a pile of nuclear dust at Oak Ridge Atomic Labs in 1944 that he said could create a fissionable hazard.

I know that researchers have developed cricket sized devices to measure and transmit data about all chemicals that the cricket can find. I know that nuclear sized devices made for use on artillery were developed and placed on front lines in the 1980s.

Now with the widespread advent of drones, these marking-pen sized nukes can be delivered to any site on the planet.

This means that ICBMs are no longer important. That detection and defense against drones is now much more important. More over, as seen in Beirut, explosive and military sites can no longer be near populated areas.

This is all signaled to me by the massive explosions in Iran, more than a dozen so far, and in Beirut.

Three things that are highly speculative lead me to suggest (1) that the close personal relations between Donald Trump and the Israeli cabinet would make an unconventional weapons attack on Iran and Iranian proxies possible. (2) that recent threatening behavior by Iran makes this response necessary. (3) Iran has been driven into an alliance with China for its protection.

After the Iranian explosions, North Korea announced major changes in its military posture.

I know that Israel, in preparation for this scenario has been decentralizing its military for nearly a decade. A very expensive and difficult task. The U.S. has been carrying out the same military decentralization of explosive material for more than a decade.

This expensive and difficult decentralization of explosive material maybe the reason for the Iranian-Chinese alliance.

I saw a nuclear weapons surface depot in the San Francisco East Bay emptied out in the late 1990s.

My advice: if you live within 15 miles of explosive material storage it is time to move. Now. Explosive material includes oil refineries, gas storage and rocket fuel material.

I repeat, I have no secret information. Only information readily available to an intelligent reader.

 

I Know: Two

In an earlier blog  about why so many retail outlets are empty I explained how ordinances and regulations kept a wide range of businesses from opening and made survival impossible for many others.

It is worthwhile reading the earlier blog first in order to see the connection between ordinances and commerce. In this blog I make recommendations on the type of deregulation that will permit commerce to thrive and economic vitality to prosper.

Federal

• Abolish all standards for EPA, OSHA, FDA , DOT and similar agencies. Replace them with two standards. 1) Does this rule restrict a responsible adult from deliberate bad behavior? (Same as the financial 'reasonable man' standard. 2) Does this rule prohibit adults from voluntary risky behavior excluding accidents. An accident is defined as 2 deaths per 100,000 uses.

Bad examples of over regulation in my own life:

• A hot tub maximum legal temperature of 104F. Japanese customarily bathe at 108F and live longer than any large population.
• A leg cramp over-the-counter medicine was banned because 10 people per decade died, but several million dancers were not harmed by regular doses.
• Many second hand stores closed because of the requirement for testing children's toys for lead. Poor families, and especially poor children, are the big losers.
• Abolish the national minimum wage. Simple rule for laws: individuals helped by the law divided by individuals hurt can never be less than 50. A law is bad if more than 50 people benefit while 1 person is harmed.

State

• Prohibit lawsuit payments for 'psychological or emotional' damages. Human beings can choose to live with a positive worldview or not. At most, permit two paid months of positive counseling so the victim has someone to talk to. Vast insurance costs are wasted in this area along with unnecessarily high premiums.

• Many lawsuits are based on 'not the current level of greatest safety'. Correct criterion should be 'greatest safety engineering standard at the time of installation'. Vast losses to lawsuits can be eliminated.
• All licensing for occupations should be abolished except for the criterion of: 1) Humans would die if malpractice occurred. 2) A test standard would be set to fail the prospective licensee if a similar person failed who formerly had gotten a C grade [or the median grade] five years after training.

• Chemical prohibitions for use in commerce must allow exceptions where safety precautions are adequate.

Local

• Zoning and building codes can not be applied retroactively. All zoning and building codes must allow 10% of each new construction element to be exempt to allow experimentation. Currently ten million Americans carry on business in their homes despite residential codes prohibiting home business.

• All zoning code restrictions must meet the same 'accident' standards as above; 2 deaths per 100,000 uses.

• Abolish the local minimum wage. Simple rule for laws: individuals helped by the law divided by individuals hurt can never be more than 50.

• No tax or restriction can be placed on a business based on its size. San Francisco penalizes all 'chain retail stores'.

• Retail businesses must serve all customers unless they disrupt or damage the business.