Pro Commerce

TED is only 10 minutes

This is just a blog to point out the obvious.

Nearly everyone has noticed that our attention span has become much shorter because of the Internet.

That is not my observation. My observation is that as information becomes more abundant, as intelligence proliferates and as we have ready access to facts, that we have changed the nature of our communication.

We communicate important and useful information in much shorter segments.

To someone who has been reading fiction from  the past few centuries this pattern is visible. The great novel of Moby Dick is filled with long rambling arcane sections on every imaginable type of information that was interesting to someone in 1850. Contemporary fiction, such as is common in Japan, has almost no background, scene setting, or similar baroque digressions.

Business letters by the end of the 20th century were curt and to the point. The opposite of the beginning of the 20th century.  They were flowery and long.

The reason is straightforward. As our common knowledge and education expands, our ability to grasp new information requires less background and support. If we need to know something, we can look it up quickly on our smartphone.

The best example of the institutionalization of this reality is the fact that most TED talks, that are widely circulated as intelligent comments, are only 10 min. long.

Internet friends and dissatisfaction

I have detected an ennui, a dissatisfaction among people I know.

This ennui seems to be unrelated to stage of life, success in business, or any other obvious factor.

My son is leaving the Bay Area with his wife to travel around the United States for three months to see if there is a better place to live. They call their trip "the search for intelligent life."

I think I know the problem.

The Internet is the problem. On the Internet my intellectual companions are readily available and scattered around the planet. One is in Jerusalem, another in Tel Aviv, a third in Calgary, several in Tokyo, another in Venice California.

These are now important friends with whom I am comfortable.  I need my regular contact with them.

Therefore I am impelled to feel that my life in San Francisco is inadequate because I do not have these friends as close physical companions.  I have plenty of friends and a few locals who are really close.  But I’d say half of my vital friends are only via the Internet.

I think that my ennui and that of others is because of the wonder of the Internet.

We can't possibly have the kinds of close relationships that are important and have those relationships be local. The Internet has spoiled us in a strange way.

Auto license and accidents

Since 2005 there has been a dramatic decline in American auto fatalities. Roughly a 30% decline. This is an amazing statistic and very important.

In looking at the reasons, there appears to be one outstanding explanation. Most states are restricting the use of automobile licenses for people between age 16 and 21. Restrictions such as immediate suspension for any driving problem.  Even minor ones.

We should all be pleased with the success that state governments have had in carrying out this humane effort.

We could do twice as well. We could cut the current number of fatalities in half.

We could save 15,000 lives a year and over 100,000 disabilities.  More than all the gun fatalities.

The two countries whose driving habits I have examined, Japan and Germany, have half the auto fatality rate that we have.

The Germans, drive on autobahns at speeds in excess of 150 mph. That is why their cars are so good. The Japanese went from no seatbelts to everyone wearing a seatbelt with no change in the fatality rate.

So how do these Japanese and Germans do it?

Answer: both countries have extremely difficult drivers tests.

The preparation for the test is expensive with roughly 40 hours of training. The drivers test for an automobile are almost as difficult as the tests I took to become a pilot.

When we want better and safer driving in the United States we know how to do it: have a difficult drivers tests.

SLA and Patty Hearst

Do you know any of the history of the Symbionese Liberation Army? Called the SLA.

I had been working at Glide Memorial Methodist Church for several years when the SLA appeared in the media. I had heard rumors on the street that an organization was planning to kidnap a wealthy heiress. The two I knew of at the time were Patty Hearst and Eileen Rockefeller. I phoned them both to let them know about the rumor. They both told me they would ignore it.

After Patty was kidnapped along with her boyfriend, Glide became involved in the negotiations between the leader of the SLA, Cinque, who was in prison and Patty Hearst's father Randy.  The SLA made increasing demands, including feeding thousands of poor people, which Glide arranged and Randy paid for.  The issue finally disappeared when Patty was freed and the rest of the members were burned in a house that was in a shoot out.

There is very little to comment on about my experience. Armed gangs with a half-baked revolutionary ideology are easily defeated if they lack military skill. Feeding the poor in San Francisco did not make them the heroes of the NYTimes and New Yorker, which is what you need to succeed.   Like their incompetent hero, Che Guevara, they were surrounded and slaughtered.

Left and right

My friends always assure me, when I talk about the stigmata of the Left, that there must be something comparable on the political Right.

The basic assumption is that Left and Right are a single dimensional line.

I am here to disabuse you of that nonsense. Hitler and Stalin are not on two different ends of the same line. Stalin is clearly on the left. Hitler called himself a socialist, believed in strong centralized government with government control of capital investment and five-year planning.  That does not put him on the opposite end of a single dimensional line. That puts him on the same side as Stalin. Both killed innocent humans to further their ideology in vast numbers.

In fact, I would argue that the Left is much more homogeneous and well described by a one-dimensional line. The line goes from weak central government with capital controls such as France to countries with a great deal of central planning such as Stalin's and Mao's 100% central planning and still further to the Left the Trotskyite revolutionaries and the North Korean tyrannical extremists.

On the Right-hand side of the line I find no coherent political group. There are, in the United States, moral right-wingers such as Pat Buchanan who opposes abortion and hates Jews, and Ron Paul who favors the gold standard and no foreign aid. In the same cluster are the traditional conservatives who favor business, lower taxes, smaller government and free trade but have no stance on moral issues including gay marriage. It is hard to see that the Right, as a cluster, has anything in common.

It is even harder to see how the Right could be put on any uni-dimensional line representing any coherent value system. Many Righties favor abortion and gay marriage, many oppose them.  All Lefties favor them.

There is no Left and Right. There is a Left and there is a pro-commerce world. Separate from all of this is a moral dimension that is in a different geometric space.

(I recommend the interesting comment by Dvid Boxenhorn below.)

African equality

I have a unique vista on Africa. A 200 year perspective.

As a graduate student in economics I was hired to read every book and look at every map of sub Sahara Africa before 1850 and record all the economic transactions and prices. The project was for a Professor Miracle at the University of Wisconsin. He later published the first book on African economic history.

I also traveled through West Africa examining development projects in five countries for an organization out of Washington DC, where I was a board member.

I can state authoritatively that the entire sub-Saharan Africa has a common behavior. When anyone generates a success, more income than everyone else, he or she is expected to distribute the surplus to tribal relatives. It is always done.

No one is allowed to rise above the equal income level.

You may know stories about rich tyrants. Since you are not there you are not aware that the rich tyrant has always made his entire tribe rich following the core African value of the equality among tribal members.

There are many explanations, by economic experts, of the reason for Africa's complete absence of development despite an often well-educated workforce and vast natural resources.

Except for the fact that it is a sheer rebuttal to Lefty 'redistributionist' ideology, it must be clear that a society or continent that values equality over everything else, is doomed to economic morass.

Ten ways Democrats screw the poor

When you increase the price of goods and services, poor people are more affected than wealthier people. An increase in gasoline price per gallon affects poor people much more than anyone else; the same is true for clothing food and utilities.

Here are the 10 ways the Democrats increase prices for goods and services for the poor.

1. Urban Democrats throughout America try to ban Walmart, Target and many other low-cost stores from their cities. The cost of nearly everything at Walmart and Target is lower than at the stores urbanites have to shop at. Direct effect on poor people.

2. The standard way for Democrats to raise taxes for their many policies is to tax wine, liquor and cigarettes. These products are used disproportionately by poor people. These taxes are a direct levy on the poor.

3. The Democratic Party, in nearly all Democrat-controlled states, increases the number of licenses for semiskilled retailers. Licenses are required for barbers, beauty salons, manicurists, acupuncturists, massage and a long list of semiskilled nonprofessional occupations. The only people hurt by this are the poor. They cannot get inexpensive services and they cannot  easily create work for themselves.

4. The Democratic party has always been a strong opponent of free trade agreements. For over 200 years economists have explained that increases in international trade reduce costs. If Italy can produce leather shoes at a lower price, then free trade will bring lower-cost shoes to the United States. The Italians, conversely, will buy the lower cost architectural engineering services from the United States. The poor benefit the most from lower-cost goods and services. They are hurt the most by tariffs and trade barriers.

5. The Democratic Party is owned and supported disproportionately by unions. Unions thrive by limiting the number of employees the company can hire. This is done by raising retirement costs, health costs and creating unwieldy work rules. The consequence is fewer people get jobs in unionized shops, and the poor people with the fewest skills are the ones most frequently excluded.

6. One party has been the strongest advocate of welfare, food stamps and disability payments. These are essential for people who genuinely need them, but the absence of careful criteria for their usage and the Democratic party opposition to means testing (checking to see if the welfare recipient owns $1 million house) has detrimental effects on the poor community. With a heavy presence of non-working peers in a neighborhood, there is encouragement to young people to choose a life of sloth and dependence. Such encouragement is a disability to the poor in and of itself.

7. The Democratic Party has been a national opponent of school vouchers. Such vouchers are used to escape the lowest quality public schools. Since these schools are disproportionately in poor neighborhoods with low income students, this policy causes direct lifetime harm for the poor.

8. The Democratic Party has been the sole pressure to create and raise the minimum wage. This is because the party is in the thrall of unions and unions know that raising the minimum wage will raise the already higher union wages. In simple supply and demand terms, when you raise the price of a good or service there is less demand for it. When the price of labor is raised by a minimum wage law the number of people employed declines. This is particularly true for young people and people with minimum skills. This hurts the poor more than anything else that the Democratic Party does.

9. The Democratic Party has long been the source of price and cost controls. It was Democrats who allowed wholesalers to set retail prices for decades before courts threw it out. A Democrat administration has reinstituted this rule after a 50-year absence.  The Party sets minimum prices for milk and milk products and many other agricultural products.  The Democrats created the fantasy need for ethanol that dramatically raises the price of corn for poor people in Mexico, Egypt, and the world.  Everything is more costly for the poor, including food. Especially food.

Urban Democrats always support rent control. Since poor people move more frequently than any other population except young people, rent control does not benefit them at all. Most poor people leave the urban center as rapidly as possible if they cannot get public housing. The public housing, of course, is filled with graffiti and is dangerous. A distinctly poor problem.

10. School busing was a necessary policy in the government mandated segregation of the Jim Crow South. In the urban North, segregation was real but not created by government policy. The urban North school busing had two effects: it carried the criminally dangerous behavior of ghetto neighborhoods into all schools, making life for the poor a relentless environment of danger.  Busing also drove middle-class populations out of the cities and out of the public schools. It left public schools with seriously diminished parent support and a rapid decline in quality of education for those remaining in public urban schools.

Summary: the Democratic party is shockingly harmful to the poor of America. That is not the intent of its policies, but that is its effect...unambiguously.

GMO labelling crud

A group of Lefties, environmentalists and food fetishists in California recently put an initiative on the ballot to label foods as being genetically modified (GMO), when they are.

More than 20 years ago I started an organization called the Project to Label Gene-Altered Food.

I began the organization after listening to a number of Boston intellectuals tell me that genetically modified food was the same as all previously developed foods using selection and breeding.

I knew that was nonsense. No breeder could put a pig gene into a banana. But there were genetically modified foods with that combination.

Because the metaphor being used was so ridiculous I decided it was important to warn people that they were eating genetically modified foods in order to follow the actual population risk of genetically modified food. To follow it  for several decades. That would be the only way to detect serious problems if there were any.

I learned the genetic food and animal field. I met all of the important activists on all sides of the issue.  I influenced the Japanese legislation on the issue of genetically modified organisms.

At the same time, the Department of Agriculture was examining the definition of ‘organic’ in order to create a national standard. A national standard was intended to replace the many state organic certification organizations.

My organization immediately joined the campaign and got my allies to do the same. (Here is the letter my organization sent.)  We realized that by excluding genetically modified food from the term organic we would accomplish our goal of having a category of food (page 12) that had no genetically modified components.

The campaign to label organic as excluding genetically modified food along with irradiated food and urban sewage waste was joined by several hundred thousand people. The largest public campaign in the history of the Department of Agriculture.

For the past 15 years, organically labelled food automatically excludes genetically modified foods.

So, what would legislation  labeling all food with genetically modified organisms do that is beneficial.? Nothing. It increases the cost of all foods.

In the twenty years genetically modified foods have been on the market no problems have been detected.  The issue is now moot.

Increasing the cost of foods, of course, impacts poor people more than anyone else. But environmentalists, Lefties and food fetishists don't care about anyone else. And they are not willing to shop for all their own products at Whole Foods.

That is the source of the title of this blog.

At least until now my efforts have been successful. ‘Organic’ in the U.S. still excludes genetically modified food and we are not burdened by additional costs of labelling all other foods.

I regret Socially Responsible investment

In 1971 I believed in a concept called corporate social responsibility.

I played a major role in getting the socially responsible investment movement going.

I paid for and convened a conference in Inverness California of the 30 leading organizers in the corporate social responsibility field. We used that conference to create common plans and joint projects.

As a foundation president, I funded research into the 'social-issues-behavior' of public corporations and funded publication of the results. I funded and supported many activist proxy battles.

I solicited funds for the newly emerging socially responsible mutual funds to help them get started.

As a corporate treasurer and foundation president I personally visited all of the major foundation managers and treasurers in New York to encouraged them to use their portfolios to support their programmatic values. In every case, the treasurers laughed at me. They said ‘if you don't like the corporation sell the stock’.

Over the years, I have come to regret my involvement in this movement. Corporations have absolutely no social responsibility. As Adam Smith so wisely pointed out, by seeking to lower costs,  creating jobs and expanding their markets they're doing everything that anyone should expect of them. They are doing more for more people than any other entity or institution on the planet.

Over the years, the core problem of the corporate social responsibility movement became obvious to many others. The socially responsible causes had multiplied and changed. In the early 70s it was napalm, Native Americans, baby harp seals, women and minorities on boards of directors and investment in South Africa. Over the years, new causes were added from food safety and health issues to animal testing in cosmetics, animal products in pet  food, LGBT, investment in tobacco.....  and the list goes on and on.

What is socially responsible corporate behavior is chimeric.... it changes with the month. It is trivial, flippant and irrelevant to business.

Does big business kill small business

I hear this from people who are not anti-business. It is taken as a truism.

I wish there was such a term as ‘falsism’.  This idea that big business destroys small business is definitely false.

I have worked with bookstores when Borders and Walden's were becoming a problem. Once again when Amazon appeared to be a problem. I worked with clothing stores and bagel outlets when new chains appeared to be a problem.  I worked with coffee shops and tea shops as Starbucks grew and expanded.  I also worked with large retailers that faced incoming Costcos and Walmarts.

In each of these cases, without exception, if the management was willing to make the necessary changes and innovations that were appropriate for their clientele, they had no problem continuing to succeed in business.  

For bookstores, they were going to lose some of their top 10 best seller sales. But they could much better acclimate their inventory to their clientele, if they knew their clientele. They also began having readings and events that interacted with their customers.

I showed the numeric benefit to existing coffee shops when Starbucks arrived, with proof in an earlier blog.

The same was true for every kind of business. Greater interaction with their clientele community, more selective and highly specific inventory improvements were all that were needed. In a few instances, the local businesses needed to lower their costs by joining cooperative wholesale buying groups.

I saw a few businesses fail. The reason was simple and the public will never understand. These people were exhausted. They were tired of running the business. They did not have the energy to make the appropriate changes.

Big business does not kill small business. It makes it better.  

Cheaper to import a child than raise one

I just did a simple calculation in my head.

The social cost for raising a child who is born in the United States up to the age of 25, when presumably they have left their home and got a job, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The cost of importing a child who has already demonstrated physical and mental health and who is younger than 25 is less than $10,000. A big difference.

Since the United States remains a magnet country for immigrants from the entire planet, it will always be possible for the United States to grow vigorously by importing desirable young foreigners.

I know there are some drawbacks to this observation. Some of the money these new Americans would earn would be sent back to their families. Some of these new immigrants would be supported by our welfare structure. Hopefully not many.

When I look at this option, which is politically possible, I can see that the American population has a long-term positive growth rate, regardless of domestic reproduction.

Asian wave

There is a steady drumbeat in the political world about the growing importance of Mexicans and Latinos.

I think these projections overlook a much more important demographic population that is growing rapidly: Asian Americans.

This rapidly growing population has several advantages over other immigrant groups.

First this population does extremely well, better than the rest of the American population, in intelligence tests and in academia.

Second this Asian-American population is also very successful in business. Both Silicon Valley businesses and private retail stores. At this point in California, several Asian-American populations are becoming dominant in medical, elderly healthcare, electronics, engineering and accounting.

Third, and most importantly, with my own eyes I am seeing a vast number of couples dating and married in public who are a combination of Asian-American and non-Asian American. This type of intermarriage seems to be proliferating which means that assimilation is moving at a rapid pace.  I don’t see a similar pattern of rapid interracial activity among Latinos and Blacks with others. I live in California.

I call the subsequent assimilation and rapid commercial success rate of the Asian-American population the coming Asian Wave.

Our taxes dollars made Walmart

A new Lefty friend asked a question that gave me great pleasure to answer.

Why is Walmart able to offer such low retail prices? 

The answer is: government subsidies. Does a Lefty like to hear that?  They don't.

Here's the story.  During all your life and mine Federal tax subsidies to farmers have been in the range of $30 billion current dollars per year.  That money just poured into the farmlands of America with virtually no place for farmers to spend it.  In 1962 Sam Walton started his retail shop in rural Rogers, Arkansas.  The farm money started to role in because Sam had plenty of interesting items that farmers had always had to drive into big cities to buy. The farm money kept pouring in and Sam kept opening rural department stores.

If you want to see a fascinating video, here is one that shows the expansion of Walmart stores from one in Rogers, Ark. to the entire farmland of America and then into adjacent suburbs.

With this kind of size and buying power Walmart, thanks to nearly thirty years of $30 billion a year in Federal subsidies to farmers, just did what any large retailer would do: improved distribution and started outsourcing.  The distribution system is a marvel of standard business, the outsourcing to China came earlier than everyone else and owes to the brilliance of Walmart management in seeing the future of China.

P.S. Mall of America tapped into this same ocean of money in 1992. It has over 500 stores in southern Minnesota.

Capitalism is a bad idea

I do not support the idea of capitalism.

Capitalism is a term developed by Karl Marx in opposition to socialism and communism. It has a uni-dimensional focus on the issue of ownership and government.

It is a one-dimensional line from 100% private ownership of all goods and services to 100% ownership of goods and services by government.

That has exactly no relevance to commerce.

Commerce exists in worlds that are completely dominated by the communist party. North Korea and Cuba. Commerce is small and modest in these harsh environments but commerce does exist. Even without the legal concept of private property.

On the other end of the scale we have commerce in tribal societies where no one could say there is government or ownership of any sort.

Commerce thrives wherever people need to make exchanges because the exchanges result in personal and social benefits. I give you my box of beets in exchange for your chicken... that is commerce. And we both benefit. It has nothing to do with ownership or government.

The idea of capitalism is nothing but a flimsy construction on the part of Marx to sell his antiquated anti-industrial  ideas.

Nobody lives in a capitalist society.

The government owns a great deal in some instances, such as natural resources in the United States, and it has nothing to do with other areas such as music. That doesn't mean that a national park is in any way related to socialism or communism.  Nor does the absence of government in dealing with a popular tune have anything to do with capitalism. The tune spreads around the world outside any notion of government or ownership.

If you wish to think clearly, get rid of the word capitalism and start using the word commerce to describe the world we live in. The world of the industrial revolution and modernity is the world of commerce.

Is there really a ‘market’?

One of the mistakes people who look at my pro commerce arguments make is to assume that I worship the power and effectiveness of markets.

I am here to tell you that commerce is not based on the ‘market’. The market concept was first understood by Adam Smith and has always been central to the thinking of economics.

The classic concept of a market does exist locally and globally. These markets are primarily in the world of commodities and tangible products. Markets are an abstract idea in most other areas of commerce.

There is nothing resembling a market in houses and apartments. In China you get a rental unit from postings in your own family (tong).

Housing sales and rental transactions are based on the most complex possible details. The objects involved are not comparable one to one.  A single house is rarely like another especially when you include location. The same is true for apartments. Yet there are prices for houses and apartments. There are transactions. These highly incongruous objects (including their locations) compete with each other in an environment that is not a traditional market. They are not identical they are only competitive with each other in the most abstract sense of a market. 'Transactions in a category of goods and services' would be a more accurate description than market. Reserve the term 'market' for objects that are fairly comparable and have a narrow price range.

The same absence of a market is true of services, whether the service is legal representation or healthcare. You do not choose the institution to handle your money, your legal work or anything to do with your health based on the lowest price available. In this sense these choices do not occur in a market, they occur in a 'category of services'. In such cases the term ‘market’ is truly an abstract and impractical notion.

Most choices of what car or mode of transportation to use, are far too complex to be considered part of any ‘market.   Especially since many of these choices have to do with statements of individual values and style's. People are saying who they are.

The strongest argument about the lack of importance of classic markets, in the economic sense, is that we make complex decisions every day, the more advanced the society, the greater the income involved  the less price is a determinant. The idea of a traditional market is primarily centered on price.

Commerce is about technological innovation, complex interpersonal relations and most importantly about individual development of our most personal attributes: our identity and our authenticity.

We take jobs without primary concern for the highest possible wages or the lowest possible costs. We take jobs that suit our needs and desires most. The most important decisions do not occur in a 'market'.

Commerce is concerned with a  wide range of human needs and desires. It is only occurs in a ‘market’ in an abstract sense.

What is pro commerce?

Earlier this year I wrote several blogs on the meaning of pro commerce. It is time, again, to cover the subject because I am constantly dismayed by the world around me that doesn't understand what I'm talking about and has no grasp of the world of commerce. (Here is an earlier blog as well as the previous two blogs in the same month.)

Commerce became a growing and vital force with the industrial revolution. Commerce, uniquely in history, has promoted an unending expansion of technology. Technology in turn has promoted the entire world of sanitation, medicine, surgery, food abundance and dental health. (A lot of pain is gone.)

To say that one is pro commerce, is to really accept the world of the industrial revolution that has brought us our modern world. It is to celebrate modernity... the opposite of Ludditism.

When I think about the world that has been brought to us by commerce, the world I live in,  I am celebrating the joy and happiness of myself, my friends and my family.

Those who condemn commerce, who resist it at every turn, number in the billions. 

They find that their unhappiness can be projected on the world around them. They see greed as triumphant; they see success as an evil byproduct of the exploitation of other humans and Nature

None of these things are true.

* Adam Smith explained how personal greed creates the modern commercial world. Many people get up in the morning to bake our bread, not because they love strangers, but because commerce brings them personal products and bountiful other rewards. 

Smith understood this before the industrial world exploded with its generous life-giving abundance. Read Adam Smith.  Understand how the motivation of individuals when combined in the large institutions of commerce results in healthy and positive abundance.

* Think for a moment about how people voluntarily work for salaries and for self-generated income and you can see that ‘exploitation’ is not a byproduct of commerce. Where exploitation exists it comes from the harsh power of government and the suppression of commerce. Only in pro commerce countries can people take any job and learn any skill they are competent to undertake.

The widespread anti-commercial sentiment includes hostility toward big companies.  The hostility is the result of poor reasoning.  Many, if not most, of the global 2000 companies have gained their stature because they reduced the costs of goods and services for everyone around the world. They introduced significant efficiencies in manufacturing, distribution and marketing. Think IKEA, Caterpillar and Starbucks. They introduced meritocracy around the planet. That alone has created so many wonderful human byproducts. 

That is why I call on everyone to clear the blinders from their eyes and join in celebrating the bounty and healthfulness of commerce.

* Lastly, those who believe environmental degradation is due to business are ignoring the reality that the USSR and communist China were the worst offenders of environmental degradation. The United States and Japan are the heroes of environmental improvements in every domain from clear air to clean water.

We need to celebrate the world of commerce. The industrial revolution, its handmaiden, has been a true godsend.

College resources

I have received some emails from a woman who wanted me to mention her graduate school reference index in my blog.  

The Index includes several thousand university graduate programs including online schools. It has a number of components on which you can create filters to identify the schools or programs most relevant to your interests.

I genuinely wonder if this index is broadly useful for domestic college students. The traditional way to find a graduate school is to ask your peers and the professors in your field of interest.

For many, the specific faculty members at the graduate school you will want are highly specific to your needs. You find out where they are or you already know where they are.

In the two fields that I know, economics and statistics, any undergraduate with a modicum of competence will know exactly where he or she should go.

To all of this I would add a very serious reservation.  First, many graduate schools are run by ideological Lefties and everyone needs to be warned about the deleterious environment that Lefties create.  For better or worse I would have been a PhD economist except that my graduate school at UC Berkeley was a pro-Castro hive of Lefty malice. By the end of two years, I had finished my course work, I realized they would never give me a degree. The PhD index does not give any warnings about Lefty hellholes.

Second, it is increasingly common to find out how many of your doctoral peers will be Asians and Asian-Americans.  Asians are attracted to the top schools and their choices reflect the popularity of the PhD's in their home country. They have a significant influence on academic issues. The PhD index does not give a measure of Asian students.

Most of what I consider important about graduate schools and programs can only be learned by discussion with your peers.

Indentured servants

For the first few centuries of America's existence it was common for Europeans to earn their boat-fare by agreeing to work for seven years for the person who paid their transportation fee.

The way history is taught in the United States this is treated as something that was important to eliminate.

We still have indentured servitude because it is very effective.

We have very generous immigration policies for overseas doctors who are willing to work in rural communities in America. These tend to be five-year terms. But they are indentured servitude nevertheless.

We have the same policy for teachers. They can have their college loans forgiven if they serve three years in a rural community. Again, this is indentured servitude.

It works. It is a voluntary relationship.

It is time that we stop thinking of indentured servitude as a negative. It isn't.

Government under Reagan compared to Obama

Obama is trying to prove his puerile thesis that 'chicken little is right': when you cut the Federal budget 5% the sky will fall.

Major airline terminals across the country are facing serious passenger disruptions because Obama told his pinhead bureaucrats to punish the public as much as possible with budget cuts.  

The Sec’ty of Transportation, Ray DaHood and Michael (affirmative action) Huerta, chose to reduce major air traffic hub controllers working time by 10%.

In 1981, a president who was competent, Ronald Reagan, was faced with an illegal strike by the 9,000 air traffic controllers.  He fired the 8,000 on strike and replaced them with supervisors and military controllers. There was no disruption in passenger or freight traffic.

How did a Reagan do what Obama can’t do?

Reagan and his team closed 60 minor airport control towers, but left the radios on.  That freed hundreds of controllers to work in large airport control towers.  He also asked the commercial airlines to help. They were glad to help and did a thorough job of rescheduling pasengers.

As any half-way intelligent person knows, a commercial organization can cut 5% of its budget without disrupting customer service.  A Democrat run government can’t.

I flew my single engine plane often in 1981-82 during the Reagan era of closed towers.  There was no problem, there were no accidents.  We pilots talked to each other on the designated radio frequencies and had orderly landings and take-offs... just as we always have at the hundreds of airports that never had a control tower. Obama and the FAA could do that too.

Two other points.  * Reagan banned all the striking controllers from ever working for the Federal government.  Pussy whipped Bill Clinton rescinded that order in 1996.  

* Since Bill Clinton signed a Republican bill that took millions off welfare and put them in jobs, the Democrat Congress of 2008, in revenge, emasculated the Welfare-to-Work bill.  

Lessons from the sequestration:

* A malicious goverment can act with incompetence if it wants to.  Voters are not customers, Democrat voters are ideologically blind.  

* Democrats believe government is incompetent but they want more.

* Barack Obama is arrogant and meanspirited... he is no Ronald Reagan and never could be.

Authenticity

Don't waste your time looking up the word authenticity on Wikipedia. They are stuck in a debate that I had to listen to 60 years ago when Erich Fromm and David Reisman were the last word. Since then Charles Taylor has moved the debate further along.

 

My view on authenticity is that it is an emergent function.  You don't know what you're authentic qualities are until you explore and fully develop them. That development occurs in an environment that has direct relevance to your authenticity.

Who you are (identity) is not stable nor clearly definable either. Once again it is emergent in an environment. You can be a father, a lover, a liar and a dangerous driver plus hundreds of other things. Your 'youness' emerges in each environment.

So when you combine the issue of who you are with what is authentic about you we have a pretty large set of overlapping circles. Many of which are emergent when you live and explore. Some qualities, like a sense of humor, are in a circle at the center of all the circles.

My interest and concern about authenticity as a pro-commerce issue is that only in a commercial environment can someone find their authenticity.

The world of commerce gives each of us a vast array of skills and talents to explore and develop. A few of which can act as our rightlivelihood.

In a non-commercial society, such as Cuba, Saudi Arabia or North Korea we become whatever the society demands. That has little or nothing to do with our authenticity or who we are.

The absence of a commercial world is what dooms people to a stilted ...  zombie like existence.  This is ultimately my strongest argument for a pro commerce position.

I have enjoyed a full life, I have explored my personal attributes as fully as possible, throughout my life and it is the commercial world that made that possible.

Mechanics Institute Library II

I told this story five years ago about an event that happened nearly 15 years ago.  What I didn’t mention is now included at the end of the story.

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We have a private library in San Francisco: the Mechanics Institute Library. The Mechanics was started five years after the leading wave of the 1849 gold rush by the technically minded men of that era....most of whom called themselves mechanics. I have been a library member for over 50 years.

I have a horror story to tell you about the Mechanics which always held a fond place in my heart because it was such a comforting place to go....big leather chairs, clean bathrooms and open stacks to browse.

In the mid-1990s a couple of the top staff members came to me and asked for my help.  Why the staff picked me, I don't know.  They were after-all librarians and must have done their homework.

The story they told was horrific.  The executive director of the Mechanics Library was stealing money on a large scale and the staff was distraught.  The executive director had three ways to steal money. First she would invite the three antiquarian booksellers in San Francisco to search through the stored books to find the valuable ones. The valuable stored books they found were taken to sell with Louise, the executive director, getting a large cut. Louise would mark the books as sold out of outmoded

 inventory for trivial amounts of money. 

Second she would sequester donated collections in boxes in her office and invite the same antiquarian booksellers to scour the books for choice items that were marketable and split the profits with her.  The remainder of the donated collections would be recorded as donated books.  Lastly Louise would skim 25% off the daily cash box of fines and copier fees.  The last was small but was immediately noticeable in the recorded data when Louise was on vacation.

 

I proposed to the staff that I go with the lead staff member to a prominent and respected attorney who had previously been on the Board of the Mechanics Library and explain the situation to him.  He listened carefully, understood the situation and agreed to go to the Board and ask for a confidential personnel meeting.  The lawyer proposed that staff members be allowed to testify secretly to a personnel committee of the Board..

The Board heard the proposal and rejected it.  The Board was totally controlled by Louise.

That left me one option, to run a group of Library members for the Board.  With the staff giving me surreptitious  access to the membership lists, which were not otherwise available, I was able to run a solid campaign of proposed new board members for the Board.

The Board fought back with a well financed mail and phone campaign and my slate lost.  Nearly all the staff left for other library jobs. Louise continued her embezzlement for several more years until she retired early from illness and died shortly there after.

The Mechanics Library Board has never publicly acknowledged its sleazy role in the theft of valuable library property and public irresponsibility.

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I could have won the election easily if I have brought the fraud issue to the press and media at the time.  One journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle was interested in the story.  

I did not make the issue public because I wanted to protect the Library.  The Library at the time was in precarious financial straits because of the incompetent Board and the fraud of the librarian.  It could not have survived a scandal.

Worst case

There has been no substantial evidence or data to support global warming, much less human caused global warming, for the past 15 years.

The worst example of ideological BS was published a few weeks ago in the Journal Nature Climate.

The press release was circulated by the AP and many other Lefty official voices. A group at East Anglia college announced that high altitude turbulence would be increasing over the next decades because of global warming.

Let us examine the preposterous nature of this press release.

First, East Anglia college is where Climategate originated.  Climategate was the offensive publication of deliberately falsified global warming data intended to overlook the fact that real global warming was not occurring.

The Climategate scientists did everything possible to deny publication access to people who disagreed with them.

Second, the announcement about high altitude turbulence is based on a computer model. All economists know that computer models don't work. But the most serious complaint about computer models in climate issues is that they are colossally wrong about global warming... already.

Third, there is no measure of high-altitude turbulence. No data, no measurement, no metric.

Fourth, we don't know what causes high altitude turbulence. There appears to be a connection to changes in the jetstream. That is all. There is an appearance of a connection.

What could be more preposterous than releasing this example of a future problem that cannot be measured or tested whose mechanics are unknown...released by a group with a history of fraud?

Do you still believe in global warming?  Even with bozos like this providing most of the data?

Is there evil?

I don't propose to answer my own question. While there is a narrow definition of truth, it is a syllogistic definition, there can be no definition of evil.

We need another conception. A different word. The deliberate killing of innocent people in order to express a political goal strikes me as something that is an abomination. I just don't have a word that has a broader meaning. Obviously if the innocent people who are killed for a political goal are Jews riding on buses and the killers are Palestinians most Europeans and Lefties don't give a damn. And Israeli defense against these the killers is considered unacceptable.

To me, terrorism is an abomination.

The issue comes up at this point because I am two thirds finished reading Max Boot's spectacular history of guerrilla and terrorist warfare.

Since Mao rode to power on the support of Lefties and Communists everywhere, particularly in America, terrorists have regularly succeeded. They begin by killing innocent people. They announce their ideological goals. If they are to be successful they get funding from allies. They then proceed to promote their cause among the Lefties of the world and finally when all three elements are in place, they succeed.

That is what happened in Vietnam. That is what happened in Algeria. That has happened in many other countries ranging from Cuba to Lebanon. In the end, the Left, the New York Times and most European governments end up supporting the terrorists.

That is what leads me to ask questions about evil. There needs to be another word so that I can pronounce the evil of leftism in a clear and effective manner. The Left's perpetual support of killing innocent civilians is an abomination. But that is not enough. It must stop.

(I wrote this before the Boston bombing.  Terrorism requires ideology to succeed as well as outside allies.  The Lefty American press denies the Muslim ideological component of the Boston terrorism as well as the outside allies.)

College admission bias

It is a broken record. We hear it repeated endlessly. Four percent of those admitted as students to the three high-performing high schools in New York City are black or Hispanic and 72% are of Asian backgrounds.

It makes me sick to see the New York Times and every god damn Lefty voice complaining about the cultures that do not promote education or hard work or ambition. Of course these kids don't do well academically. Four percent is probably high.

In San Francisco there is one high-performing high school and the percentages there are comparable to New York. Lowell is 3/4ths Asian American.

To me the great injustice of this ratio is that it is not represented at the college or university entrance level.

There is absolutely, without question, terrible bias against Asians at all elite and prestigious schools. The consequence is that Asian students at Harvard and Berkeley and Chicago are much brighter and more competent than everyone else.

The other consequence is that Asian students are forced to go to the thousand of other colleges and universities in America where their options for better education are dubious. I have grave doubts about most college and university education. I'm certain that most state colleges are like ordinary high schools and offer very little challenge to highly competent people.

I find no organizations that are screaming, suing or otherwise protesting the obvious barriers to higher education for Asian background students.

Environmentalism increases the economic divide

There is the obvious way that environmentalism increases the economic divide. When you raise the price of coal or oil or natural gas, you make sure that people with low incomes have less of it and rich people have as much as they want. You increase the ticket price for commercial airlines where it affects ordinary people but the same plane carries rich people in 1st Class for whom the price makes no difference.

The less obvious way is in daily behavior.

In a fancy hotel or bathroom in an expensive setting you will find pressed cotton hand towels.  In an ordinary public place you will find the hand blower to dry your hands.

On a private jet you'll find all sorts of environmentally expensive arrays of food services and supplies that will never be found in the coach cabin of a commercial airline.

Environmentalists make sure that San Francisco airport has people waiting for hours because the airport cannot be expanded. Expansion is banned for environmental reasons. But successful travelers either have their own plane timeshare or own a private plane or they can land at another nearby airport and have a limousine transport them to their destination.

The list is long. The gist of it is that environmentalism falls hard on ordinary people but has virtually no impact on the rich. Environmentalism increases the economic divide.

German smoker and freedom

I was standing outside on a cold evening with a smoker who was complaining about the absurdity of making her stand outside. She explained that she had been born and grown up under Hitler. Her adult life was nearly all in East Germany under communism. She said that had either government been so harsh and restrictive as the Americans were about smoking, Germans would have rebelled.

I think she was right.

There is a reason we do not rebel against the daily intrusions on our freedom, especially in the Left insanity driven cities like San Francisco. Smoking is banned in private apartments, and department stores cannot give bags to customers, apartment buildings cannot be built with a parking space for each unit, high schools cannot offer ROTC, goose liver cannot be sold in restaurants, stores for poor people are banned (Walmart) etc. etc.

The reason the Left can restrict our choices so readily is that commerce has given us far too much freedom. We have so much freedom that we do not mind, we in fact welcome, decreases in our freedom. Intrusions on our private choices.

The Lefty mind is a mind that hates freedom. Lefties love GAza and Cuba. I had a friend who explained to me that people's lives are so empty that they will fill in with melodrama: unpleasantness, disagreements, fights, sex with the neighbors, sex with fellow employees.... anything to fill up their time and avoid the availability freedom.

Lefties take advantage of the enormous freedoms commerce gives us to take it away; out of their own selfish fears of life fully developed by other people. Life full of opportunity that other people find and enjoy is anti-Lefty.

The definition of Puritanism is: 'objecting to anyone else finding pleasure'. That is in fact the modern definition of Leftism.

To apologize

socia

I'm waiting for a good book on the subject of apologies.

One of the best subjects on a issue was a Seinfeld program that took three different perspectives on whether an apology was genuine.

I feel the issue is straightforward. Alcoholics anonymous has a requirement that a full apology be made to all people that the alcoholic has harmed. Before Rosh Hashanah it is also expected that Jews apologize to anyone they have harmed in the previous year. The ruling on whether an apology is accepted is that the apology can be left unaccepted after three attempts to offer it.

I think that both of these examples make it clear that an apology deals with a real transaction. Some genuine harm must have been caused by one person to another or to a group of others. This automatically disqualifies the standard political bullshit 'I apologize to anyone who may have been harmed". You cannot apologize for all harm that did not occur or is imaginary.  You must apologize for real harms.

The other element of apology deals with sincerity. There is no way to define sincerity anymore than there is a way to define truth. That is why the acceptance of an apology is so important. The person or group harmed must accept the apology as evidence that the apology was offered sincerely. The Jewish rule of three offers of apology without acceptance is sufficient is a good measure of how the issue can be resolved.

An apology must relate to a real harm. It must be perceived and admitted by the person who did the harm and spelled out so there's no ambiguity, as is so common in politics. The apology must be accepted as evidence of his sincerity. However the upper limit is three apologies. After that the apology is accepted automatically whether treated as sincere by the recipient or not.

Apologies are very important. They are an acknowledgment of efforts to behave without harming others and efforts to improve

 behavior by self reflection. Apologies are important.

The reason we teach children to apologize is for them to learn self-reflection. They need to reflect on the situtation that generated the apology.  This is true for all apologies, society needs people to have self-reflection skills.

2.1 is an arbitrary number

It is common to talk about a stable population that has a total reproductive rate of 2.1 children per woman.

I want to point out that 2.1 is an arbitrary number that cannot be right over time or geography.

Such a number must be vague because women have a reproductive life that begins probably at age 12 and can last in many instances well into the 50s.  The number of actual children that a women will have in this period depends on when they begin and when they end.  This number changes significantly.  In the US, first child average age has moved from 23 to 30 over a few decades.

The number of generations of such women reproducing determines an additional population factor. Reproduction beginning earlier means more generations born in a fixed century.

Then there's the issue of number of fathers who are being reproduced by the children. Multiple fathers require multiple offspring. This relates to the number of women who actually have a father that needs being replaced versus a sperm bank where one father may be replaced many times over.

I have looked extensively at the actuarial efforts to estimate this number for reproduction and have not succeeded in finding a reliable equation with comparable reliable measurements for the variables in the quirky equation.

We can use 2.1 but it is rough not accurate.

Insane museum

How can I call a museum insane?

 

I saw such a museum made up of 7000 items from the University of Tokyo. The museum is in a brand new elegant mall.

There was some coherence in each cubicle of items. Such as 10 devices used 100 years ago to exemplify the principles of mechanical engineering. All displays were beautifully designed and constructed. The museum itself was of the highest aesthetic quality.

Right next to the engineering display were a dozen articles used for fabric pattern making design. There were insect collections.  Collections of bones. The entire museum was a cluster of such independent unrelated objects covering a 150 year time frame.

I call this 'insane' because it resembles the kind of collection that one of my neighbors has that fills his house from floor to ceiling and only allows for a narrow path in the middle from the bedroom to the bathroom and kitchen. I have seen several such houses where the collection comprised 98% of the interior space. These people are insane but allowed to walk the streets.

Having seen such a collection in an elegant museum format I realize that the insanity has nothing to do with the amount in the collection, nor the aesthetics. It is solely because of the lack of a visible organizing principle or meaning. That defines insanity.

This is by way of reminding my readers that I have long been a proponent of Social Thought.

Social Thought teaches that all institutions are organized around a pillar that is an idea, image or metaphor. Insanity is the absence of such a pillar.

Kyoko and Akio

I don’t know why this is significant for my blog about commerce.

I know two women in their late 50s early 60s who had never been married but did get married.

I find this unusual. 

In one case it was a San Francisco neighbor and friend. She left her work as a postal delivery person to become an accountant.  After many years of working as an accountant she retired in her late 50s. She met a man in her volunteer work via a telephone client who turned out to be a perfect husband. They were married within six months. He moved from Oregon to a new household they selected in the North Bay of San Francisco.

The second case is a Japanese woman with whom I worked as a translator and editor. To my complete surprise she found and married a high school classmate, recently. She and the classmate had seen each other about twice a year at the reunion of their high school volleyball team. Neither had left the area they had grown up in... nor married.

In both cases, the men and women had remained unmarried until very late and were professionals.

They are also very close in age. I find this unusual and so different from mainstream storylines that I mention it here.

Have you had any similar experiences.