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Geology Signs We Need
For years I’ve wanted to post two geological signs. I’m too old now. So this blog is the best I can do. The first would be on Highway 1 that goes between Daly City and Pacifica. The sign going West would say “Leaving the North American Plate entering the Pacific Plate.” The reverse side would
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We Killed the Golden Goose
I wrote about this subject a year ago in June when the Biden Swamp banned American companies from doing business in Russia. The problem with this act of incredible stupidity is best understood with your own knowledge of the internet world that has come into being since 1995. A thousand major American companies have pulled
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Facts for a Lefty
There seems to be one universal reason nearly every Lefty I know says they are a Lefty: ‘the Left cares about poor people.’ I’ve heard this all my life, even from my parents. I know that the opposite is true. The Left actually makes life more difficult for poor people in nearly everything the Left
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Our Geography Has Changed
After the recent pandemic lock down there has been a significant increase in air travel. I see several reasons for this movement. The first was the popularity of college education in America. (Table) The number of people going to college as measured by bachelor’s degrees tripled over thirty years going from 10% of the population
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Epitaph for American Style Democracy
Is it my job to write this epitaph? It looks like it. My basic thesis is very simple. There are two core human value systems: Envy of social distance. Creative human imagination. Humans form tribes for food and other aspects of survival. For the tribe to grow it implements a social system. There are several
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The Future of a Random Legislature
In 1978 I wrote an article proposing that legislative bodies be created by random selection like juries. My friend ‘Chick’ Callenbach then offered to write a book with me on the subject. It was called A Citizen Legislature. Published in 1981, it became part of every political science course on the planet. The original model
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Global News Reading Failure
I have a wide circle of friends in Japan and I read several English language Japanese newspapers. I also have friends in many other countries and follow the press in four of them.. Each country has its own political spectrum. The American spectrum is from Hate Trump to Love Trump. Almost everyone in the world
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Advertising Failure
My best-selling book, Marketing Without Advertising, explains why advertising doesn’t work except on children's products and for tourists. The book explains how to do effective marketing. A wonderful example is in today's Wall Street Journal, (8/3/2023). Bud Light, the most popular American beer, insulted its clients with a frivolous marketing character who is a man
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Fixing San Francisco
Now I’m ready to fix San Francisco. A Japanese friend is arriving with her family and because I can’t handle guests right now I didn’t invite them to stay with me. But then I looked up the hotel they chose. I told them to cancel the hotel and stay with me. The hotel they found
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Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier
I’ve spent my life trying to understand hysteria and made little progress. That means it is at least four dimensional or greater. I’ve solved some very difficult three dimensional social problems. See here. This title ‘Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier’ is something that president Joe Biden says often in public and has absolutely no meaning.
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Reply to Letter From Alex
Alex, is a good friend of mine who lives in Canada. He sent me an article from the NYTtimes on the Japanese stock market. Many people send me Times articles knowing I can’t read the paper because it’s Jew hate is so deeply offensive. After my recent month in Tokyo I bought a Japanese ETF
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Understanding America
I look at my fellow Jews who are Lefty and very close to being self-hating Jews. Their love of the Democrat party is shocking now that it is obvious that the Left wants Jews dead. Academia hates Jews as does the NYTimes and the other mainstream media. Hollywood and the power elite want us dead
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I Was Wrong
A few blogs back I attributed a large part of the current employment dump in high-tech to widespread understanding, from Elon Musk’s example, that more than half of tech employees are a waste. I was wrong. Musk found a commercial truth but his fellow tech managers are not smart enough to appreciate his discovery. What
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Business in Tokyo
The effects of covid on Tokyo are minor compared to the U.S. Their schools were not impacted; education is far more important to the Japanese. Working from home on computers and Zoom was anticipated. The Japanese firm where I was the key partner (Dynax) did the research on distance working in the mid-1990s. The clients
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Why We Are Divided
What had to be gone first, what was in place already and what was new that brought this division about? Over fifteen million Americans served in the military in WWII. College graduates usually became officers. It was a source of civil behavior and meritocracy. The rest of society accepted civility as a military necessity. When
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Let Me Try
One of my longtime readers objected to a statement a few blogs back where I called the Democrat Party the ‘party of hate.’ I apologized for using such intemperate language, and explained what drove me to it. There is no excuse. My explanation was that it is my reaction to the rising and very dangerous
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Arrived in Tokyo
Four years of covid have kept me from my beloved Tokyo. I have been coming to Japan for nearly 50 years, usually for two months; once longer and now mostly for one month. What is the difference between Tokyo and San Francisco? The food is spectacular here, every meal. In the past I’ve had horse
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Bohemian Club
Evil fools have brought the Bohemian Club into the news recently. The hatred that the Party of Hate (Democrats) has brought to Justice Thomas has boiled over to the Bohemian Club, where he was invited to visit, claiming it to be some domestic version of Davos. It isn’t a domestic version of Davos. In fact
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Nearly Everyone Fails to Understand
I never see anyone mention the most significant revolution in our society that is a central cause of the major changes in the past half-century. The hereditary elite of America fell apart in the 1960’s. The cause The cause was the rise of the officer class in the military in WWII. The U.S. military, which
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Looking Disaster in the Eye: The Good Side
It is readily apparent that America without oil and gas energy will be forced to reduce its living standards. I ignore the race and gender wars provoked by the ‘woke’ and the absurd anti-merit elements of the woke agenda because Americans will survive the turmoil of the first two and will never accept the anti-merit
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Looking Disaster in the Eye: The Bad Side
There are many ways to put this but the simplest and clearest for all my readers who have never left the U.S, for those who probably never will and for the few who will leave the U.S. but will not visit the two thirds of the world that is never seen by tourists: what Americans
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Joel Kotkin Again
Kotkin has again come through with the most brilliant and clear statement about our current state of world affairs. The Ukraine has made three new world alliances visible. Here is the final sentence in his dire but vital prediction: “Until the West wakes up from its self-referential slumbers, the tide of history may turn out
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The Longest Boom
I was actually trained as an economist but the U.C. Berkeley econ department was so Marxist that I was saved from the misery of becoming a PhD econ professor. My special interests were the definition of capital and business cycles aka Wesley Mitchell. In earlier blog posts I’ve pointed out that the current inflation was
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My Friend Dick Rosenberg
Another obituary; Dick died a week ago. The other obits I’ve seen about Dick are accurate but lack the personal elements. I knew Dick when I helped start the Marketing Research department at the Bank of America and then started a national organization of my fellow bank marketing officers. When I started my new job
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I Knew the Key People
It's time for me to start commenting on my history with the key people in the history of the modern computer. Start with Doug Engelbart. I knew Doug from my monthly board meeting of the Portola Institute in Menlo Park. Doug was part of a circle of Menlo friends, most of whom were runners. I
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Judy Heumann
I knew and loved Judy, who died at 75 a few days ago. Her obituaries fail to mention Ed Roberts, her partner in the Disability Movement. I give Judy credit for being the mother of the movement but never has the role of a father been clearer; Ed Roberts was the father and the prime
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My Big Date
I am reminded of my big date, when I recently cleaned and washed Miners' Lettuce. In the early 1970s I attended a casual soiree at the San Francisco Zen Center (relevant later) where I met an attractive woman and invited her to my house for dinner. I then asked around about who she was. It
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City of Anarchy
There is no leading anarchist theorist that I can refer to. I know many of the anarchist writers, a few of whom wrote in the post-Civil War period. Anarchy theory has always assumed that small groups of people, size of the groups is seldom specified, will self-organize and that a government structure, whether kingship or
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Medieval Cleaning
There is an online fact site that seems to be very popular, Quora, which is consistently wrong on one point. I just wanted to set the matter straight. Quora is consistently asked whether people in the Medieval period took baths or cleaned themselves significantly. The answer is always ‘yes’ and the readers are told that
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What Happened?
Elon Musk happened. Nearly all the big tech companies laid off workers in large numbers within the past few months of 2022 and 2023. This seems to be a big secret. None of the media reports what just happened. I want historians to know first- hand. Two things happened. The first was that Elon Musk
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Bed Bath Bad Marketing
Bed Bath just escaped the second threat of bankruptcy. But it won’t survive. “At its peak in 2017, Bed Bath & Beyond had 1,560 stores with 65,000 employees, bringing in $12.3 billion in revenue. But in the nine months through November 2022, it posted sales of just $4.2 billion, and its headcount dwindled to fewer