Calvin and Hobbes ran for only a little over 10 years — from Nov 18th, 1985 to Dec 31st, 1995. But what an amazing success of a comic strip.
The wiki says,”At the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbes was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide. In 2010, reruns of the strip appeared in more than 50 countries, and nearly 45 million copies of the Calvin and Hobbes books had been sold worldwide.” Continue reading “Calvin and Hobbes”
An hour of listening to Stephen Kotkin provides more insight than is contained in the average big fat book. So here he is answering five questions that Peter Robinson had for him —
Listen.
Charlie Munger is not a fan of India. In February of 2017, the then 93-year old vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway said this about India in a speech. Anyone who cares about India, and understands what India is, will find his view hard to take. But Munger accurate in his assessment. Here’s a bit from his speech: Continue reading “Charlie Munger on Lee Kuan Yew”
Hfta sounds like the Hindi word for “week” but it is short for “hauled from the archives.” Hauled from the archives is this Jan 2007 post “The Utility of Suffering.” Worth a read.
When I wrote that piece, I had not met Shri Arun Shourie. As it happened, around 10 years ago, I had the immense good fortune to meet him several times at his home and in various other cities, attend his talks and share meals with him. He is one of the most inspiring people I have ever met.
I love our trickle-down economy. Meaning, in our economy good things start at the top and trickle down to the bottom surprisingly fast. But before going any further, we have to talk about “trickle down theory” which is quite a different animal.
From time to time, proponents of cuts in tax rates argue that that would cause changes in economic behavior which would increase investments leading to increased employment, incomes and consequently greater total tax revenues. Therefore, cutting tax rates actually benefit the poor since the increase in tax revenues can be used for more social services. Continue reading “Trickle-Down Economy”
The number of cases of Covid-19 shot up rapidly and is now decreasing fast. Among my friends and acquaintances, many got the virus. Fortunately no one got seriously sick.
With a bit of luck, perhaps this will be the end of the pandemic. Here are three charts showing number of confirmed cases per million from Our World in Data. Note that confirmed cases are lower than the true number of infections due to limited testing. Continue reading “Covid-19 Data”
Today’s minimum is 11 degrees Celsius below zero, maximum 3 degrees below zero. It’s sunny. We had a bit of snow the past week. But nothing like this — in Nebraska. New Brunswick, Canada.
From the notes to the video:
Canadian National Railway locomotive 2304 (ES44DC) plows through huge snow drifts and gives me a big ass snow shower as it leads the daily CN manifest train 406 West (Moncton, NB to Saint John, NB) at Salisbury, New Brunswick.
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” Continue reading “Aldous Huxley on Servitude”
I am a 2nd Amendment fundamentalist. The right to life and liberty is not something that one has because of the benevolence of one’s potential aggressors but because one has the power to resist aggression and tyranny. The greatest danger to one’s right to life and liberty is from the state because the state has a legal monopoly on the initiation of force, which it frequently exercises without any moral or ethical justification.
The primary reason for having arms to protect oneself is not because it deters the garden variety burglar (although that is a definite benefit) but because it puts the state on guard that it better behave or else. Continue reading “Opposing Gun Control”
Baransam1 asked in response to the latest AMA:
In the past, conquering Islam has broken many temples and erected mosques over the ruined temples. What should be our ideal stance in modern India? Shall we remove all those mosques and resurrect the temples? Or shall we let the mosques stand because the original criminals (breaking those temples) are all dead? I am not comfortable punishing descendants for their ancestor’s crimes. Instead of breaking and building mosques/temples, shall we remember and remind future Hindu generations of the atrocities committed by some violent rulers in the name of Islam? That will enable the future generation to be on their guard without committing new crimes (like the forceful demolition of Babri Masjid).
Let’s begin with an issue that is not as emotion-laden for Indians as the destruction of thousands of Hindu temples that accompanied the Islamic invasion of India, beginning with Muhammad Bin Qasim’s invasion of Sindh in 712 CE. Let’s begin with the loot by European colonial powers in the more recent past. Colonialism and looting go hand in hand. The British, as the most successful colonizers, are understandably the most successful looters. The British museum is the world’s largest receiver of stolen goods.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 