Pro Commerce

Data and facts

My life has been very different than most people’s.  Starting as a student at the University of Chicago, I was introduced to the concept of reading original documents. It has shaped me, positively and for a more interesting way to live.

Then while starting two corporate marketing research departments, I learned how to easily handle data. Which I have done for the last 60 years.  I did it often as a court- certified expert witness in many fields. I use data to shape my views of the world.

In 1992, looking at  global population data on a spreadsheet, I was among the first human beings to discover that the population explosion was over.  I threw a big party to celebrate it. 

A few years later I put all the data for global surface temperature on another spreadsheet and found that there was no global surface temperature rise in the past 100 years.  No rise, no way to blame it on human generated CO2.  I’ve followed temperature data ever since.  Satellite data confirmed what I had learned and reported in many blogs.  Then while showing a young friend how to collect the data, he found the most reliable numbers in radiosonde measurements accurate daily back to 1950.  Fifty seven point 4 F (57.4 then and now) no change in the global surface temperature.  Look at this chart, lower right. Surface temperature has gone down in the past 18 years. (Source.)

There is an even better source with daily data. No change from 1950 when global surface temperature was 57.4F.  Here.

Data on Covid

Now we have a reliable source (National Bureau of Economic Research) that has looked at the covid data to see what government policies worked and what led to excess deaths in most states in the U.S. (data.)

• First, closing schools was counterproductive in many ways.  Measurable loss of education and no excess deaths in that age group with or without classes.
• Mandating masks on people who were not potential spreaders, people not dealing with the public, were not productive. The closing of businesses cost millions of jobs and destroyed over a million businesses. Unproductive from a contagion perspective.
• Putting hospital patients in retirement homes created additional excess deaths among the elderly.

That data will hopefully inform governments in the future.  Governments need to act more like Utah and Florida and less like New York and California.

I end up with a unique and different view of the world because I like data and know how to make use of it.  Hopefully more people, over time, will join me.  It is comforting to be in a world of reliable first hand data.

Am I Due Any Credit?

As a business advisor it is rare to get credit for good advice.  It is even rarer to get credit for advice that has a major impact.  Most people forget they got advice and assume they would have done the right thing of their own accord.  Which may be true.  From the advisor's perspective that isn’t how the world looks.  We don’t have alternative versions of life so the issue can never be settled.

I bring this up because I just drove from the East Bay back to San Francisco across the very beautiful rebuilt Bay Bridge.  Could I possibly deserve some credit for that bridge?  I think so.

The architect for the bridge was Donald MacDonald, a client of mine in the 1980s, and also a friend. Donald wanted to know how to get more recognition for his many years of creative work.  

I made sure I was right that he had designed many parts of the spaghetti freeway that enters the San Francisco Airport; one of the most attractive freeways I have ever seen.  He said, “Yes.” I asked if he had done any other government architecture.  He said he had done the pedestrian overpass in Berkeley. Also very attractive.

I said he had a unique talent that virtually no other architects had; the ability to work with governments. Consequently my advice was for him to become a bridge designer. He replied that that field was already taken in the U.S. by Calatrava.  I said “no’” there was plenty of room for him.  Of course he took my advice.

Donald was noted for being a little tight with money.  He often counted the nails on his projects. My bill was $1,500, which he was slow to pay. I went to his office and offered to take a framed drawing of his, on his wall.  Which he agreed to.  It has been in my living room ever since then.

Years later when he had designed the East end of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and it was under construction, I suggested that he hire a person to put all the change orders during construction online with a short explanation of the meaning.  It would have been an incredible success. He didn’t do it.

Again, do I deserve any credit for that beautiful bridge?

The Medium is the Message

That is the title of the first chapter of a prominent book in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan.  The meaning, outside the book, has been widely discussed.  To me it means that the social uses and forms of communication of many media is different from anything in its content.  Light bulbs,  automobiles, TV, books, etc are the media and the message they convey has to do with their impact on the culture in which they are operated.  Usually promoting some elements that were already present.

I have two media to discuss.  One is the Internet, the other is blockchain.

The Internet is a global network of connected electronic nods that transmit sound, text and images in a nearly infinite array of forms. Presently the images are nearly all 2-dimensional. The material is nearly all stored for rapid recall.

The ‘message’ of the Internet is that society will use this medium to reflect its existing social fabric.  Five qualities of the social fabric are promoted by the Internet.

1. There is always a structure to grass roots communication such that some people whose opinions are representative of large groups, become visible as informal leaders. So we get Internet opinion leaders. More obvious and more common than outside the Internet.
2. Our society and many other societies have a large array of ‘factions’ (Madison’s word) which become more visible as they are able to organize with a good peer-to-peer communication system. The Internet is therefore fractious.
3. Many people behave badly when they are anonymous.  Which is true of criminals in general and is true for a larger part of society than just the criminal class. Lots of nastiness from anonymous people on the Internet,
4. Wire-limited communication misses the conviviality and gentleness of actual live person-to-person communication. The Internet provokes interpersonal hostility and fighting.
5. People with political opinions that favor top-down changes to society (the Left and some other religious people) are intolerant of differing opinions and try to enforce censorship on disagreement. 

Blockchain refers to one sub-Internet quality, a medium in itself;  the ability to send copies of digitized material to multiple geographic locations at one time and have the material available for referenced review quickly.

For simplification I picture this as a fax machine that sends copies to several locations where the faxes are time-stamped and numbered in order for easy retrieval. 

This medium is suited to all legal and bureaucratic functions. The ease of retrieval will allow much greater access to the realm of laws and regulations, possibly reducing the role of lawyers and encouraging paralegals.  It may also reduce the onerous nature of laws and bureaucratic regulation. A great new policy objective established by President Trump.  It could play a political commentator role like I.F. Stone played in the 1950s and 60s.  There could be many I.F. Stones of many persuasions.

I.F Stone was “a liberal, politically outspoken reporter from the American left wing, Stone often had to work in ideologically hostile environments (military, diplomatic, business) where information was controlled, making verifiability the essence of his journalism, corroborated by facts in the public domain, which the reader could verify. About his style of work as an investigative journalist, Stone said:

I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own — particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these [political] pressures.

“The journalistic professionalism and integrity of I. F. Stone derived from his intellectual willingness to scour and devour public documents, to bury himself in The Congressional Record, to study the transcripts of obscure congressional committee hearings, debates and reports. He prospected for news nuggets — published as boxed paragraphs in his weekly newsletter — such as contradictions in the line of official policy, examples of bureaucratic mendacity and political obscurantism. Stone especially sought evidence of the U.S. government's legalistic incursions against the civil liberties and the civil and political rights of American citizens.”  (Source en.wikipedia)

The earliest widespread use of blockchain has been for bitcoin, a currency.  Currency can be any medium that is popularly accepted (cowry shells and cigarettes.)  The widespread use of blockchain as a currency has occurred because conventional currency is controlled by governments and governments are not universally popular.  Bitcoin’s future use is dependent on its continued level of popularity.  Which in turn is dependent on the size and locale of its users.

Stupid and Lucky

I know the history of San Francisco because I started the first unlicensed bus tours of the City in 1972 (Third World Tours). I had to develop the spiel for the tours and train the bus drivers.  So I know that San Francisco has a long history of extremist, stupid, legislation that has often resulted in positive outcomes; lucky.  

Because the City has long had 500 appointed commissioners, nothing really gets done. The number of police officers was limited by charter to 1,500; meaning the police never even tried to be effective.  There are dozens of more legislative stupidities which is why the beatniks then the hippies settled here and why my Briarpatch had over 600 members of new small hippie businesses in San Francisco.So what is the latest legislative stupidity?  Right here: this sign is on the door of an empty restaurant and the empty grocery next door.

Our brilliant Board of Supervisors, all woke, are taxing empty retail businesses for being empty.

I can’t tell you how stupid this is.  Any business person will tell you this will not lead to any more retail rentals, it will lead to more retail rental space converted to residential and office space; the lucky outcome is different..

With more than a million square feet of retail rental space empty now because the of Covid lockdown and the perpetual homelessness destroyed retail business, much of that space will be sublet for a $1 a month to artists, dancers, yoga teachers, short term-schools and temporary office space for people who are tired of working from home.  The For Lease signs will still be up, maybe not on the store fronts but online.

That is great for the thousands of people who will get short-term nearly free space and for all the pedestrians who will now see life in the retail spaces.

Stupid new taxes will lead to the lucky outcome of more street life.

Stewart Brand Biography

Stewart has been a friend for 50 years.  We last saw each other in the early 90s when we had a 20th anniversary of the Point Foundation founding. At my home.  Our reunion was not joyful. 

The whole former board of five men had gone in different ways and had little in common in our respective lives.

I was on the Board of Portola Institute in Menlo Park for many years starting about 1967;  Portola was the parent organization for most of Stewart’s projects for more than a decade. Stewart and I ran into each other regularly.

We worked closely because of the quarterly board meeting of the Point Foundation from 1971 to 1974.  Stewart made me President of Point in 1973.  I ran the Point office in my Glide building during that time.  I supervised the only staffer who had been a previous bank employee of mine.

We also saw each other regularly when we played outdoor handball in Golden Gate Park in the following year.

I am very grateful to Stewart.  He encouraged me to write a dozen or more articles for his magazines and encouraged me to do illustrations.  Several of those articles were quite consequential.  One was about my original idea for a lottery legislature which led to a book and an entire political movement.  Another was about the anti-whaling movement and my problems with it.  That led to the end of the anti-whaling movement in the U.S. as described in the blog here.

I was always a great admirer of Stewart and loved the time we spent together.  He is an original person in every way and a genius by any standards. He had a big influence on my life, my thinking and my circle of friends.  We had many common friends and many of them are mentioned in the book.

Because of my strong feelings for Stewart I am a little saddened by the recent biography.  I’ve dealt with the author John Markoff, on several occasions and helped him write several earlier books.  He took copious notes, used many of my ideas but never gave me a shred of credit. The worst thing about John is that he is 100% a NYTimes journalist in his values.  (Not something nice I would say about anyone.)  Consequently his biography of Stewart represents the worst of the NYTimes view of the world (though John lives near me in San Francisco.).  John has a Lefty distorted view of the world, of history,  and is New York-centric.

That means he never describes the people he mentions as fully developed people. For example, Dick Raymond, Huey Johnson, Mike Murphy, Paul Krassner and Dick Baker Roshi are important and fascinating figures in Stewart's life but they are all treated as 2- dimensional cardboard cutouts, like everyone else in the book.  The powerful fascinating qualities of these people are totally ignored.  A very shallow way to write a biography.

Markoff uses the book to simply make lists of prominent people Stewart knew or worked with.  Because he lacks a realistic sense of history, he can never put Stewart’s actions in their important context.  Much of what Stewart has done is historically important.  But not to a dyed-in-the wool Lefty who is New York-centric.

The saddest part of John's biography is that he exaggerates Stewart’s falling out with people he worked with.  Early on he worked with Zack Stewart and they had a falling out.  But nearly everyone who ever worked with Zack had a falling out with him.  It needs to be balanced with reality.  

Stewart also gave John access to his personal diary which records the many self-doubts and emotional turmoil in his life.  Most of this is entirely internal in Stewart’s mind and is contrary to the very strong, bold and confident man that the world around him knows of him.  It does a great disservice to him much like getting a biographical account from a person's angry ex-wife days after a tumultuous divorce. Stewart is very open and in this case naive in letting Markoff use the diaries.  Unfortunately Stewart put the diaries in the library of his own accord.

Of the many things left out of the book, the two most frustrating that I know about are (1) the many important and interesting grants made by the Point Foundation and (2) many of the original and fascinating articles in the Whole Earth Catalogs and the follow-on magazines.

One of the private conversations I had with Stewart was about life choices we had already made by 1970.  I had chosen to be largely invisible to the media because I knew that a good community organizer never takes credit for what he does, he gives credit to all the people around him.  Stewart felt the opposite.  Being in the bright light of the media would give him access to many of the people he wanted to deal with and a way to promote his ideas.  This biography shows the consequences of that position.  The good and the bad of it.

One regret I have is that in the mid-1980s Stewart and I became interested in the same subject; how institutions work.  I was influenced by Mary Douglas, Stewart by Gregory Bateson.  Stewart began studying large corporations and global entities.  I began interviewing thinkers on the subject for a public radio program that was broadcast widely for seven years in 300 half-hour shows. Now on the Internet. We never compared notes.

Two footnotes:

• I don’t get credit in the book for the man-made planet that was important in Stewart’s relations to the environmentalists.  I found Gerard O’Neil, the physicist who conceived the man-made planet.  I gave O’Neil his first grant (Point Foundation money) and taught him how to get attention for his project.
• In the early 1980s Stewart heard rumors from NASA about the issue of global warming and asked me to look into it.  The only public temperature records going far enough back were in the Harvard Library of water temperature measured by ships from 1825.  I told Stewart that the noise in the data was greater than the signal and no evidence of warming could be found.  The variance was too great to run an average. If I had run an average, I could have found slight evidence for warming but it was due to the opening of the Panama and Suez Canals which allowed fewer ships to go to the Antarctic waters in the 20th century.