Category: Random Draws

Warren Buffett is an extraordinary man. His annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway share-holders is worth reading even if you aren’t one. Here’s an excerpt (below the fold) from an edited version of the letter published in Newsweek: Our Country Has Faced Far Worse Travails. Continue reading “Warren Buffett: “Our Country Has Faced Far Worse Travails””

There’s an interesting news article in the Times of India, “Congress counts 8 Oscars as part of UPA `achievements’” (Hat tip: Sudipta Chatterjee.)

Keen to be part of the euphoric `Slumdog’ bandwagon, Congress has counted the eight Oscars as part of the UPA’s `achievements’. The party lost no time in claiming credit for the `Indian triumph’ and hinted that good times had come with the UPA government.

Danny Boyle is not Indian though the slums most certainly are. So I suppose anyone claiming credit for the Oscars won by a movie set in the Mumbai slums is proudly displaying their role in creating the slums that made the movie possible.
Continue reading “Slumlord Billionaire”

A well-written rant warms the cockles of my heart. And when the rant is against gross stupidity, crass ignorance, and idiot politicians pandering to the mindless bigotry of the public, I feel envious and wish I had written it. Here’s one for you — A Letter I’d Like to See (But Won’t) — if you like that sort of thing. But first, the background:

The Olympic swimming sensation Michael Phelps, who was photographed inhaling from a marijuana pipe, has lost a major sponsorship deal and has been suspended from competition for three months. [Feb 5th, NY Times]

Below the fold is an extended excerpt from the rant, for the record: Continue reading “A great rant from The Agitator.com”

Here’s a graph from the Pew Research Center which shows the percentage of people of various religious backgrounds (living in the US) who agree that evolution is the best explanation for the origin of human life on earth.

Continue reading “Who agree with Darwinian evolution”

MyToday is a set of opt-in SMS services from our company, Netcore. MyToday has around 3.8 million subscribers. Since you cannot receive the SMSs from MyToday without first sending an SMS to MyToday requesting the service, you cannot get spammed. Stopping the service is as simple as sending a “Stop” SMS to the same service.

Vodafone, one of the bigger mobile operators, has blocked the MyToday SMS alerts since today morning, as this Business Standard news item reports. I suppose the MyToday free SMS services is hurting Vodafone’s paid services. My blocking MyToday’s services, Vodafone is doing what any profit-maximizing firm does — kill competition.

See Rajesh Jain’s post on this matter for more on this.

My analysis is however in the larger context of competitive markets and their welfare implications.
Continue reading “Vodafone Blocks MyToday”

This six-year old, Ethan Bortnick, is pretty astounding.

The world has 6+ billion people. Even six-sigmas away from the mean, you are likely to find a pretty huge number of extremely extraordinary people. Makes you wonder how many don’t have access to what it takes for their various talents to flourish. This kid is not just talented — he is lucky. As Stephen Jay Gould had said, “I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

Energy security is not something that a country that is not energy independent can ever completely achieve.

India has to import energy — whether it is oil, or natural gas, or even nuclear fuel — and therefore it can never in the conceivable future be anything but be at the mercy of suppliers. Which necessarily means that India has to think really hard about how to mitigate the risks of disruption of its energy supplies from abroad.
Continue reading “The Risk of Gas Pipelines”

I was at the Skoch Summit 2009 Jan 22-23 held at the India Habitat in New Delhi. It was one of the better conferences that I have been to of late. Aside from the usual sponsors such as Microsoft and HP, consistent with the theme, “India: Challenges & Policy Responses,” it was co-organized by the Planning Commission, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, the National Institute for Rural Development and the National Disaster Management Authority. So naturally the discussion panels were packed with lots of bureaucrats from these institutions.
Continue reading “Power and the Skoch Summit 2009”

From a review of the movie Slumdog Millionaire by Dennis Lim in Slate:

A slippery and self-conscious concoction, Slumdog has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy. It ladles on brutality only to dispel it with frivolity. The film’s evasiveness is especially dismaying when compared with the purpose and clarity of urban-poverty fables like Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, set among Mexico City street kids, or Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, set in inner-city Los Angeles. It’s hard to fault Slumdog for what it is not and never tries to be. But what it is—a simulation of “the real India,” which it hasn’t bothered to populate with real people—is dissonant to the point of incoherence.