“When you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.” That’s what George W Bush said in a press conference on May 2nd. The NY Times reports:
In response to the president’s remarks, a ranking official in the commerce ministry, Jairam Ramesh, told the Press Trust of India, “George Bush has never been known for his knowledge of economics,” and the remarks proved again how “comprehensively wrong” he is.
Whenever I come to Boston, I recall the song by Dave Loggins (I like the Joan Baez version best)
Please come to Boston for the springtime
I’m stayin’ here with some friends and they’ve got lots of room
You can sell your paintings on the sidewalk
By a café where I hope to be workin’ soon
The weather is rainy and cloudy. I am staying with friends in Acton, MA.
What else? Read the commencement address by PJ O’Rourke, “Fairness, idealism and other atrocities: Commencement advice you’re unlikely to hear elsewhere” from the LA Times of May 4th. (Hat tip: Sushant.)
PJ makes four excellent points. Of course I think they are excellent because I believe in them precisely. The short version:
1. Go out and make a bunch of money
2. Don’t be an idealist
3. Get politically uninvolved
4. Forget about fairness
The other two points I only partially agree with.
http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf
(Click on the picture to go to the Picasa album with larger images.)
I got a master’s degree in computer science from Rutgers University. Visiting Rutgers was a trip down memory lane. Mega dozes doses of nostalgia.
Google says it is building the Indic web. Now they support transliteration in 5 languages — Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. I checked out their automatic English to Hindi translation. I typed “What is your name” and got back “kya aapkay naam” — not terribly impressive.
Someecards are funny. I like the way they put a tiny label on top of the ads. The top banner ad says “Some advertising” and the side banner ad “Some more advertising.” And at the bottom of the page:
Someecards.com is possibly to probably the best site on the Web for free, funny ecards. We have greeting cards for every occasion – from important to utterly pointless. Send greetings for apology, birthday, baby, breakup, congratulations, encouragement, farewell, flirting, friendship, get well, sympathy, thanks, thinking of you, wedding, workplace, and holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We suggest you e-mail them to friends, family, coworkers, loved ones, liked ones, and anyone else with fingers.
How much would you spend on your home if your net worth was estimated by Forbes a few months ago to be around $43 billion? If you were Mukesh Ambani, you would spend a couple of billion dollars on a place you’d like to call home. Sounds reasonable to me. For most people, their home is the most valuable possession, often accounting for a very significant portion of their net wealth. Mukesh Ambani is spending a very small — almost insignificant — part of this wealth in building a home.
Continue reading “Mr Ambani’s Home”
Ramesh Menon’s article “India’s Talent Crunch” in DNA makes shocking reading but is news only if one has not been in touch with the reality of the desperate situation that employers face in India in their search for employable people. Continue reading “India’s Desperate Talent Search”
A few pictures from Chicago. I was there 30th April — May 3rd.
http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf
Mouse-over the picture to see the controls. Clicking on the second icon from the left at the bottom shows the picture captions. Note especially the Art Institute of Chicago building where Swami Vivekanand gave his famous talk in 1893. What looks like a huge drop of mercury is The Cloud Gate:
Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor’s first public outdoor work installed in the United States. The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above. A 12-foot-high arch provides a “gate” to the concave chamber beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected back from a variety of perspectives.
It is easy to argue that energy is the binding constraint that faces all of humanity, not just the developing economies. Of course, given the projected increase in demand and the decline in the supply of fossil fuel energy, the price of energy will continue to move up–with predictable adverse effects on the growth prospects of the emerging economies.
Continue reading “Solar or Nuclear: Which is the better option for India?”
Hi all from JP’s place.
No sooner do I arrive in Edison, NJ that the NY Times calls it a place where Indians (now New Jerseyans) thrive. [Hat tip: Maria]
Oak Tree Road [in Edison, NJ], which runs through this sprawling town of 100,000 people and into neighboring Woodbridge Township, may be America’s liveliest Little India, with 400 Indian businesses that attract Indian immigrants from across the region. But the impact is more than just commercial. Indians make up from 20 to 25 percent of the population, and they have spearheaded the transformation of Edison — an overwhelmingly blue-collar and middle-class white community a generation ago — into a town with a decidedly Asian flavor.
Edison is next door to New Brunswick where my old alma mater Rutgers is located. On Saturday afternoon I drove briefly through Rutgers. Those were the days my friend, we thought would never end . . .
The weather is cold and rainy.
So that’s the story. I am alive though not totally well. I got a bad stomach ailment and was laid up most of Sunday and today. I hope to get well enough to travel to Chicago tomorrow. More later.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 