The upwardly mobile delay conception because they seem to want to enjoy the life a little more. This means delayed child birth and hence fewer kids. This is a generalization based on a few people i know. So do not hang me for it. Point is i see more and more couples in their late twenties delaying a child by at least two to three years. This could also be a direct result of inflation which makes things costlier or they just want to have a longer span of “good-times” before they throw in the towel in exchange for responsibilities and parenthood.

Many people in India wail about India’s population being the main reason for our troubles, truth is the problem lies in lack of production rather than in consumption. Here you have so many feeding mouths and potentially large number of people who will want to have a better lifestyle at some point in time, and you complain they being more than necessary?

The problem lies and i have always maintained this, is that more children are born in unproductive households rather than in productive ones. By productive i mean people who contribute directly to the GDP and/or, hence are definitely above sustenance level, pay their taxes and so on. A beggars household inadvertently generates more beggars and not the other way around. So you have more and more consumers but hardly any producers.

Here is Japan, where prices have fallen for decades after their peak. The newer generation prefers to save than to consume. Since prices are falling anyway there is no point in building an asset like a house for e.g. This means people are holding much of their assets in cash. Since you have no consumption, you have no growth. This might seem quite a contrast to an earlier essay where i argue for more production viz a viz consumption but it really is not. The greater the population, greater is the potential consumption. Now all you need to bring those teeming millions into the national fold where they can actually contribute directly to the gross revenue by way of taxes.

So you are producing more and more for your own population. Japan has a case of more products for very few customers. Supply > Demand. Their population is aging and decreasing. If Japanese companies abroad have been doing extremely well over the past many years, subsequent governments eventually will want to throw them out to support their own internal economies. Honda/Toyota in US anyone? This leaves Japanese companies without a market or a shrinking market. Japan now needs India, China and Brazil more than ever for their products to be sold. This will the only way they could pump in money into their deflation ridden economy.

Idea here again, is to produce more and seek markets for your products.

NYTIMES Article

We wanted T Shirts for everyone. Choice for colours ranged from Blue, Dark Blue, White,Off-White, Red, Green, Striped, Plan. The list went on and on. I went crazy with just 10 people!

I apologized for asking everyone’s opinion and decided on the spot. Sometimes autocracy is a blessing!

The Facebook investment deal is likely to stir up a debate about what the company would be worth in the public market. Though it does not disclose its financial performance, analysts estimate the company is profitable and could bring in as much as $2 billion in revenue annually.

So you are valuing 25times annual revenues. Have we never learn’t anything from 1999 dot-com boom? or the world wide recession where companies were valued far higher than they were actually worth? Quite a gamble!

Chaos throws up leaders faster than any situation. The beginning always seems a little distorted as less skilled leaders struggle until the right one steps in. Amidst strong individuals, you could have factions created immediately. But in a longer frame a clear one emerges depending upon

1. Who garners support; Again a function of Leadership
2. Who yields to whom; More a function of maturity, “vision of the end” and a desire to avoid conflict than real leadership

Often leaders who come up during chaos are not the most desirable ones; They just are the ones who took initiative with no or little challenge. Key thing they did establish a direction where none existed. This sometimes, is a bane, at other times, a boon.

Most people who follow are ones who want to be part of a herd. They are really are the cows listening to the farm dog. The dog does not know better about safety from wild animals or being lost, but he has his direction set for the time being by the farmer. Herd them into their sheds.

If the “farmer” here is “past experience and emotion”, they combine to form bias. So the leader’s vision is clouded. It becomes a function of probability. A game of chance. This would mean successful leaders have no vision and that their direction was purely luck. Not entirely true.

Successful leaders will minimize the probability of a loss with logical reasoning and adequate preparation. So it really is a function of “Also Luck”. Logical reasoning involves real, quantifiable and accurate data. Discrepancies in data can change your direction sometimes for your good and sometimes for the worse.

It really is, a group of people trying to find the best way out of a forest. You could hack your way out even with a wrong direction or slip and fall into a valley following the right one. Too far fetched, i know; but …. what if iam right?

National Geographic Photography Contest

Now this is against the law in domestic markets, which would mean i can take a moral high ground and judge every one of you and because i make my money blowing your deal covers and i gotta screw you. But we are still friends right?

Michale Arrington … not cool at all!!

There was the AMD vs Intel processor speed wars. Did it really matter to 90% of the users? If i have to type out a document the speed depends upon my typing speed not on the processor.

The browser Javascript speed wars. It would take us 70s to actually detect a few millionth of a second difference. Does it really matter to have such great browsing speeds? Most of the tabs i have opened up remain unread until am through with my current page.

So how much does speed really matter? Sure it does speed up your access to email, and it does bring us closer to newer ways of presentation to the web. But its only my first tab which made the difference.. really …

I think i promote Opera a little too much now!