Chocolate and Gold Coins

My Father's Paper

2007-02-12T22:03:00.000-05:00

After my last post, I was curious: was there any trace of my father's illustrious career in all of the world wide web? I took some serious googling but I finally found this:

Abstract : Wind-tunnel tests have been performed to investigate the effect of surface heating on boundary-layer transition on a flat plate. The tests were performed at a nominal Mach number of 2.40 and a free-stream temperature of 205 deg F, and the data were obtained at nominal plate temperature levels of 60 deg (adiabatic recovery temperature), 100 deg, 140 deg, 180 deg, and 260 deg F over a length Reynolds number range from 0.475 x 10(exp 6) to 3.93 x 10(exp 6). The identification of the onset and end of transition was made by inspection of the curves of surface-tube Mach number reading as a function of length Reynolds number obtained through the transition region. Boundary-layer-velocity profiles were obtained at points corresponding to the onset and end of transition to enable the computation of critical Reynolds numbers based on boundary-layer dimensions.

The best thing is, I can actually download the pdf! It is amazing to read something my father labored on more than 50 years ago. I was printed out on an old typewriter (with special scientific notation keys). I just wished I had thought of looking for this while he was still alive. What a kick he would have gotten out of seeing this again.

Death of the Greatest Person I'll Ever Know

2007-02-10T22:52:00.000-05:00

It happens to nearly everyone at some point in their lives: the death of the greatest person that you will ever know. Of course, most of you will not know it at the time. The loss will only really hit you years later when you think "I knew that person - too bad I didn't spend more time with him when I had the chance."

Yesterday, my father passed away at age 84. He lived a most remarkable life. I hinted at that in this post from two years ago:

My father certainly qualifies as a great American. He fought with distinction during WWII. He did cutting-edge scientific research on boundary layer behavior and heat ablation for the infant space program. He created numerous inventions for the various companies and organizations that employed him. And when he came home from a long day’s work, we worked several more hours at home creating gadgets for improving our quality of life. He invented one of the very first automatic sprinkler systems more than fifty years ago. He never profited from it, he made it just for our home.

However that post really did not do justice to the man. He was awesome. For example, during WWII, he helped capture more that 50 enemy soldiers in an amusing but very brave operation. And he really did a lot in the early days of the space program.

What really struck me today was that not only is the body gone - and it was mostly worn out after 84 years - and the mind gone - again mostly worn out - but the stories were gone. The stories were gone forever. He could talk for hours about his childhood of poverty in Montana in the Depression, his college years, his military service in Italy during WWII, and his excellent career as a mechanical engineer. I remember those stories. I was occasionally really bored by those stories - he never learn the art of making a long story short although that was one of his favorite expressions which he would insert at about hour 1 or 2 into the story. But usually I was captivated - he really could put you right there where and when the action occurred.

And now all that is gone - forever.

All that is left of this great man is the memories of his life imprinted in the minds of those who knew him and loved him. I need to remember. My son spent too little time with him and I need to share all that my father had to offer with him. I need to remember every detail that I can - because that is all that is left.

Tax Cuts, Minimum Wage Hikes, and Perpetual Money Machines

2006-11-11T00:11:00.000-05:00

The Democrats have come to power and straight away they are going to make a priority of raising the national minimum wage (which has not be raised in many many years). I was wondering why this would be a priority. Usually labor unions support minimum wage hikes because it is the ultimate in collective bargaining (we all stand together and insist on higher wages) plus it prevents firms from switching to cheaper labor. But labor union membership and power have waned in the US and they have very little political strength – so why would politicians care?

Then it occurred to me that the minimum wage to the Democrats is what the tax cut is to Republicans: they are both the financial equivalent of a sort of perpetual motion machine (you could call it a perpetual money machine if you like). The idea is simple: politicians love to give free money to people. But where does one get free money? It is never free- is it? Well it might seem free if you manage to get it without raising taxes or reducing spending. Both a tax cut and a minimum wage hike seem to fit the bill.

For the moment, let us ignore any pro and con arguments for either tax-cuts or minimum wage hikes. Politicians will not be persuaded or dissuaded by any such logic. All they care is: “Will it help me get elected?” And perpetual money machines do work for politicians: there will always be five to ten percent of the electorate that will believe anything – and five to ten percent will swing any election. So politicians would be fools not to try to get the votes of these silly people.

But here is the major problem: politicians creating “perpetual money machines” are politicians not doing their primary job. They should be doing the hard work of both finding legitimate public goods that are worthwhile taxing the common man to pay for and/or finding illegitimate public spending that should be axed from the budget. But this requires courage: some people will be harmed and they will be angry. You cut farm subsidies and the farmers won’t vote for you. You fund a new project and your opponent will call you a “tax and spend liberal”.

Politicians looking to make something worthwhile out of thin air by some alchemy will inevitably succeed in creating nothing out of something instead. I wish more people would send them the message: “Stop this foolishness and get back to work!”

Idea Contests

2006-11-06T22:10:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I mentioned as an afterthought an idea for giving partial protection for creating entirely new types of products that cannot be completely protected by a patent. I gave the pumpkin carving kit as an example, but there might be better examples. Think of the automatic toilet cleaner. People have been waiting for some time for this and it hasn’t come. I don’t expect it to come soon. I’m sure that someone can invent one but what then? You do a lot of hard market research for the guy who will swoop down and steal your business.

Here is a good example: Lotus developed the first really good spreadsheet: Lotus 123. A few years later Microsoft came out with a knock-off: Excel. Excel was a bit better – but they had second-mover advantage (and deep pockets). They took over and made the lion’s share. I’m not against competition but I recognize that Excel would not exist without Lotus 123 and Lotus 123 would not have happened if the developers could have known that they would lose out in the end to Microsoft. New products may never see the light of day without some partial protection.

Sunil asked a reasonable question: “[D]on't you think something like that would be hard to enforce? How does the company prove it was first, and not the knock-off?.” It is an important point – there will always be disagreements about who is deserving and who is not.

My proposal is to conduct a contest for the best such invention that solves a well-defined problem. The winner gets a five-year monopoly. No one is harmed here: there aren’t likely to be automatic toilet cleaners in the next five years anyway so what is the harm in granting a monopoly to something that otherwise would never exist?

In practice, entrepreneurs who already have a prototype that they want to protect will suggest most of these contests. But there will be enough time for someone else to finish their model and submit it as well.

The monopoly gives the entrepreneur the ability to do the vital market research necessary to determine if the market is really there for this product. People need to be educated about a new product that no one knows anything about – like a personal computer. And the firm needs to learn how much people are willing to pay for an entirely new product.

The competition will soon have their chance. Five years passes quickly. But a five year running start gives the first-mover a real chance to make a quality product that can take on the competition. Everyone thought Barnes and Noble would crush Amazon dot com but they moved too slow and Amazon grew into the behemoth we see today. It just shows what a difference a few years might make.

Pumpkin Carving Kit Part II

2006-11-02T21:49:00.001-05:00

A year ago, I wrote this nice piece about my son’s Halloween pumpkin and the nice pumpkin carving kit (Pumpkin Masters) he used to carve it. In that piece, I wrote of the reasons why an entrepreneur might have a great idea (like the idea to create a pumpkin carving kit) but still be reluctant to turn it into a business. I wrote:

It seems easy to believe that this was an obvious winner now but there are always a lot of questions to answer before a person with an idea becomes an entrepreneur:

Is there a market here? In this case the market is extremely seasonal – this makes it risky.

Do I have the lowest cost technology? If a competitor can make hand jigsaws for one-half the cost your supplier charges, you will be out of business quickly.

Do I know how to market this product? Will supermarkets stock this item? You might produce a quality product that languishes in obscure shops for years until some bright fellow sees it, sees no patent, and makes a knock-off that he successfully markets in every supermarket.

Well, just this week I had to buy another pumpkin carving kit (we lost last year’s). I went to store to store looking for this nice kit we had last year. All I could find was a cheap knock-off. It cost only $5 instead of $10 but it wasn’t as good. Some of the patterns were of very poor quality and would have been impossible to create: the pumpkin would have collapsed. The carving saw was not the same quality as last year’s saw. It was just a cheap knock-off that was successfully marketed by CVS (the big drug store chain) and perhaps some other big chains to take over this market.

Next year I will plan ahead and get the real kit if I can find it. But it may be that Pumpkin Masters will be out of business by then. They did the hard work of showing that there was a market for pumpkin carving kits only to find that it will be the knock-offs that will get the market.

I feel that there might be an intellectual property right that is missing here. A firm that creates an entirely new good (not a minor improvement in an existing good) that nevertheless is not completely patentable should be given a short period – maybe five years – to market test their product before the knock-offs sweep in and enjoy the fruits of that hard work. This would give the creators of entirely new markets a brief moment of protection before the competition gobbles them up. Otherwise new markets never get created.

I wrote that there were never pumpkin carving kits when I was a kid. Now I know why. It is only just dumb luck that they exist for my son.

Worst Jobs In History

2006-10-09T15:13:00.000-05:00

From the always excellent India Uncut is this link to a BBC TV show about the worst jobs in history. Here is an example:

As a fuller, you are expected to walk up and down all day in huge vats of stinking stale urine. The ammonia produced by the rotten wee may make your eyes water, but it creates the softest cloth by drawing out the grease (lanolin) from the wool. If you can dance up to your knees in urine for around two hours per length of cloth, you'll succeed in closing the fibres of the wool and interlocking them to produce cloth that is kind to the skin. You will be doing your part, along with the weavers, dyers and merchants, in making it a world-beating export.

You may stink and regularly have to fight back the urge to throw up, but you are guaranteed very clean toenails.

This one was far from the worst. It makes you appreciate the quality of life we enjoy today.

Free Parking and Waiting Costs

2006-08-14T17:22:00.000-05:00

I haven't been blogging regularly for some time and have considered stopping blogging altogether. I will delay that decision for a little while. In the meantime, I have one more post that I would like to make.

Where I live in Northern Virginia near Tysons Corner, parking is always scarce. When there are more cars than spots, cars cruise around like vultures waiting for something to eat. There might be available parking further away, but one would have to walk a ways and time is precious and exercise is unpleasant so people cruise - perhaps for 30 minutes or more - waiting for that open space.

Today I observed this behavior at a place where my son was having a summer camp. There were spaces further away but people insisted on cruising for that premium spot near the entrance. The weather was perfect - avoiding the elements was not a factor. There was plentiful parking on the street about 1000 feet away from the entrance to the building. So one would have to assume that people were trying to save time (which is doubtful because cruising consumes time) or they just didn't like to exercise.

Except the summer camp was at a health club. These people had paid money to exercise. One can only conclude that exercise outside the health club is somehow a different commodity than exercise in a health club. Does this make sense?

Should We Tax Transactions Between Family Members?

2006-06-18T07:25:00.000-05:00

There is an interesting post on Half Sigma about why we should keep estate tax:

The general rule is that whenever money is transferred from one party to another, there's a tax. If a hard working middle class person has a problem with his pipes, and he pays money to a hard working plumber to fix the pipes, the plumber has to pay income tax on the money he receives. So if a child of a rich person receives millions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing, why should he pay less tax than the plumber who actually did something useful?

Actually, there is no such general rule in America or elsewhere. The general rule is that transactions are only taxed if they are between a retailer and a retail customers. Transactions between corporations are not taxed and there are important economic reasons why they aren't. Also transactions between family members are not taxed except for large gifts and estate taxes. This might be one reason why some people would like these taxes removed.

I think it is fairly obvious that we should not tax transactions between a parent and his or her underage child. Obviously children are in no position to earn income for themselves and parents have an obligation to support them. Taxing these expenses twice would be double taxation and extremely distortionary.

However, it isn't so clear to me that taxing transfers between adult members of the same family is wrong. If a working wife decides to quit working so she can stay home and be a homemaker, not only does the GNP shrink but so does the tax base. That decision tends to weaken country - we can no longer afford as much national defense. It might be reasonable to treat "homemaker services" as taxable income. But it also seems quite likely that this is a really bad idea as well. It is one of those areas that requires more thought and perhaps experimentation.

Likewise, I can see that in general that it might be reasonable to tax transfers between parents and their adult children. If the parent has died then the inheritance might seem exactly like "winning the lottery" as Half Sigma suggested. It does seem like money that is easy to tax with really causing any distortion, (if the person decides not to die because of the high estate taxes then that would seem to be a good thing).

But I can see the potential for distortion. If you pay taxes on inheritance but not on gifts then parents will be obliged to give before they die. Maybe the government doesn't really want to interfere in family matters. It is an interesting question but not so clear.

A Gaur

2006-05-25T16:53:00.000-05:00

Here is a picture of a Gaur:

It is a very large relative of the domestic cow - it is not so closely related to buffalos and such.

OPEC Loses Control Again

2006-05-19T22:07:00.000-05:00

Last August I wrote:

OPEC, the oil cartel, has temporarily lost control of world oil production. I say temporarily because I have no doubt that OPEC could quickly increase production by simply drilling more oil wells and sucking the oil out more rapidly.

But this raises a question: “If OPEC is making more money with the higher price, why would they want to increase production and reduce the price?” The answer is that letting the price of oil rise is like taking a submarine down to see how far it will go before the water pressure crushes it. It is a highly dangerous game. I think that OPEC must be very concerned that they might just spawn a monster of an alternative fuel technology.

If you control the world oil production and you want to maximize the present value of your total net revenue stream, then how do you set your price? The answer is that you would want to set the price just below the price where it becomes profitable for others to invest in alternative energy sources. If you set the price too high for too long, you run the risk that some exciting new energy alterative will come along and then you would be force to sell your oil at a discount later.

I went on to predict that the price of oil would soon be under $60 a barrel.

Well, at first, it seemed like I was right. The price of oil fell and gasoline prices came way down. It seemed like the spike in price was just an aberration and OPEC still controlled the price.

But the price of oil has headed steadily upwards lately. Today I read this.

I wonder if perhaps the assumption that OPEC still has 10 to 15 years of reserves is correct. Perhaps they have less. This might be like the slog overs of a cricket match: dwindling resources leads to a “go for broke” attitude. If you have only 5 years of oil left then why not get as much out of that as you can? By the time some exciting technology comes in and takes over, you made your money.

Another possibility is that it might be worthwhile to purposefully let the price spike and fall many times. During the spikes, you make large profits. During the falls, you put any competing technology out of business. Investors prefer to invest in venture with more certain returns. Creating uncertainty helps scare off investments in alternative energy.

I’m not convinced about this argument. I think that the longer the price stays above $60 a barrel the bigger the risk that oil will be replaced by something. But I cannot deny the possibility that the price of oil might spike at over $100 a barrel. But I still think that OPEC will bring the price back down under $60 soon. But it will be interesting to see what happens in the next two months.

Public Goods – Who Should Pay?

2006-05-16T19:31:00.000-05:00

My family saw a silly children’s movie on Sunday: Hoot. It is about some teenagers who fight to protect a group of endangered owls from an evil developer.

The movie was not as bad as you might first think. It was really pretty funny for the most part. In typical children’s movie style, all of the adults are nitwits or comic villains and only the children act like ordinary people. It feeds the ego of children to see other children as more capable than adults.

But the plot of the story was not only a cliché but a dangerous economic lesson as well. The evil developer ignores the protected wildlife that they are endangering by developing the land. In the climax, the villain faced with the prospect of loosing his land to the owls threatens to bulldoze a group of citizens assembled for the groundbreaking ceremony. It doesn’t sound funny, and although it is played for laughs it really isn’t all that funny.

But the message is unmistakable: corporations are basically evil organizations with tons of money that they greedily amass and should be forced to pay for the good of the community. Now, it is true that corporations really don’t care for the environment or any other public good (unless it is built into their profit function) and so they might have incentive to break the law to avoid paying a big fine or, in this case, to avoid loosing their land. But I wonder how many people watching the movie wondered if the law – by forcing the entire burden of protecting the owls on the landowner – might create criminals who otherwise might be honest.

Protecting the environment is a pure public good. Who should pay for that good? A simple and fair method would be to make those who benefit most from that good pay for it. If one could know how much each person was willing to pay for the public good, then taxing each person in proportion to his or her benefit would be fair. Of course, it is difficult to impossible to get people to reveal how much they are willing to pay because they cannot be excluded from the good after it is bought. But it is reasonable that most people’s willingness to pay would be close to the same fraction of income. If the community votes to tax each person’s income (or home value) by a fix amount to pay for the good, then the outcome will be roughly fair.

Why then do people think it is fair that only those unlucky enough to have protected animals on their property should have to pay the entire burden of protecting these animals? It is exactly like a community confiscating a person’s home for building a school or a road and not even paying fair market value as compensation. How is that fair?

I used to think that such a confiscation was a bummer for the homeowner but not necessarily economically inefficient. But I realize now that if you place too high a tax burden on a few, they will have incentive to waste precious time and resources to shift that burden onto others. They will also have much more than the ordinary incentive to break the law.

People support these laws because they enjoy the benefits of the environment without having to pay for it. They like to think that it is fair because the only ones who suffer are “evil corporations”. But isn’t getting a benefit without paying for it basically evil?

Cheating the Bagel Guy, Part II

2006-04-22T03:47:00.000-05:00

A year ago, I wrote a piece about cheating the bagel guy. This bagel guy used to be an analyst at the company that I used to work for. He retired some 20 years earlier to deliver bagels. He would deliver about 10 dozen bagels and 6 dozen doughnuts to the office on Fridays. He would leave out a simple plywood "honor box" for the employees to leave money in. He would sometimes complain with messages that people were cheating him.

I recently found this interesting article about this same fellow in the Freakonomics blog:

He had also -- quite without meaning to -- designed a beautiful economic experiment. By measuring the money collected against the bagels taken, he could tell, down to the penny, just how honest his customers were. Did they steal from him? If so, what were the characteristics of a company that stole versus a company that did not? Under what circumstances did people tend to steal more, or less?

As it happens, his accidental study provides a window onto a subject that has long stymied academics: white-collar crime. (Yes, shorting the bagel man is white-collar crime, writ however small.) Despite all the attention paid to companies like Enron, academics know very little about the practicalities of white-collar crime. The reason? There aren't enough data.

A key fact of white-collar crime is that we hear about only the very slim fraction of people who are caught. Most embezzlers lead quiet and theoretically happy lives; employees who steal company property are rarely detected. With street crime, meanwhile, that is not the case. A mugging or a burglary or a murder is usually counted whether or not the criminal is caught. A street crime has a victim, who typically reports the crime to the police, which generates data, which in turn generate thousands of academic papers by criminologists, sociologists and economists. But white-collar crime presents no obvious victim. Whom, exactly, did the masters of Enron steal from? And how can you measure something if you don't know to whom it happened, or with what frequency, or in what magnitude?

They mention that honesty seemed to fall in the 1990's. But I suspect that he was not holding constant a very important variable: relative bagel quality. His bagels were really low quality and many people might have thought that they were not worth the dollar charged. Of course, it isn't right to not pay for something you have already consumed - infact it isn't right to consume something first and pay for it later - but some people might be more inclined to rip you off if they feel cheated by you.

From the statistics listed in the piece, it is clear to me that he was making essentially nothing from his hard work. If his gross sales after 20 years were only about 1.5 million dollars. His net was maybe a quarter of that (at best). His pay as an analyst was the equivalent of 100,000 dollars per year. He really gave up a lot to deliver bagels. I don't really understand his choice.

I would think that companies would be really interested to know who might cheat the bagel guy. That same person might be ripping the company off in multitudes of ways. But I also wonder how well correlated this kind of crime and other kinds of corporate crime. There are many people who would never cheat the bagel guy but would rip off a big corporation.

1YAT: The Value of Quick Thinking

2006-04-20T02:39:00.000-05:00

One year ago today, I wrote:

Often times I only think of the perfect response to a question hours later, when it does me no good. But occasionally it comes to me right away.

Yesterday, my little boy was practicing his piano lessons. He wanted to quit and do something else but I wanted him to practice the last tune one last time: “Tomorrow is your piano class. Practice that tune again. You want to show your piano teacher that you can play it perfectly.” I only meant “perfect” in the sense that he should be able the play it with obvious errors, not that I expected him to be Mozart.

My wife took offense to that statement. She angrily whispered: “ What do you mean ‘perfect?’ Don’t put pressure on him. What do you do that is ‘perfect?’”

I was in the doghouse now. I needed to think quickly – and I did!

“I married the perfect wife.”

My wife considered that answer for a brief moment as if she might have appreciated that reply.

“Name one other thing you can do perfectly."

“I gave the perfect response to the previous question.”

“Ha, ha. Very funny.”

But then she let the subject drop. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I recall that Rahul Bhatia liked this one. Now he is married, he will have to think quickly on occasion.

My son plays the piano really well now.

1YAT: Magic in the Marketplace

2006-04-14T02:35:00.000-05:00

One year ago today, I wrote Magic in the Marketplace:

The key to wealth is having a magic technology. Technology, in the sense that I’m using the word, is any means that you might use to take inputs (labor, capital) and turn it into a finished product or service that customers will buy. McDonald’s might be considered low-tech, but in reality that have sophisticated technology since it isn’t so easy to take high-school students and transform them into a force that produces a consistent quality product. Likewise, Wal-Mart is a very sophisticated technology. There are lots of people who would like to know how they do it.

Technology comes in two types: clone-able and magic. Clone-able technology can be duplicated by anyone simply be observing the end product. A chocolate-dipped frozen banana is clone-able. A really big paper clip is a clone-able. You don’t make any money from going into business by trying to create a new market with a clone-able technology. If you want to make money, you must have a magic technology – a technology that no one can figure out how you are doing it.

This was easily the best piece I wrote in the month of April 2005.

1YAT: The Tipping Game

2006-04-10T02:30:00.000-05:00

One year ago today I wrote:

I think tipping is a simple example of the problem with non-cooperative game theory. Non-cooperative game theory might do well enough to explain the behavior of firms because firms are so motivated by profits that they are not motivated by what others expect them to do. But individuals would rarely behave in the manner that non-cooperative game theory would suggest is rational behavior, because individual are programmed instinctually to cooperate. We tend to do what we are expected to do.

The tipping game is like a two-stage prisoners’ dilemma game. First the server either cooperates (good service) or not-cooperates (poor service). The customer observes the service and then either cooperates (gives a tip) or not-cooperates (gives no tip). Both would be better off cooperating than both not cooperating but the customer would have more money in his pocket if he doesn’t tip even when he receives good service. But people are hard-wired not to behave that way.

I remember receiving a nice letter about this post.

1YAT: Go Start a Blog or Something

2006-04-08T05:03:00.000-05:00

One year ago today I wrote Go Start a Blog or Something

I love reading India Uncut each day. Amit Varma, the great blogger of India is so entertaining. I have to say, however, it is not a good idea to read India Uncut before meals because some posts might turn your stomach. But most of his post are just interesting.

There was one post he made about traditional sari embroiderers losing their jobs due to cheap embroidery machines imported from China that I found interesting. At the end of post he said:

And if you're a hand embroiderer, well, no one owes you a living. Go start a blog or something.

I have to admit that I loved that last line in part because it sounded so cold. I wrote to him: "I have to say that if Marie Antoinette were alive today, she couldn't have said it better herself." A little context is needed here. I had earlier written to him to ask about whether he thought anybody blogging today was thinking perhaps that it would lead to fortune someday (because nobody could make a living doing a blog today).

Of course, it would be silly for India to protect the jobs of sari embroiderers. They are going to be the principle beneficiaries of the new opportunities created by the new global economy. They need to leave traditional jobs to take advantage of the new jobs be created. Some have already taken the carrot, and the rest will get the stick, but change is inevitable. And we should not, for a moment, lament the loss of the old way of life. Without change, we would still be living in caves.

Anyway, Amit took my comment as a criticism and he wrote a long rebuttal, (and he linked to me, thanks Amit). As for the sari embroiderers, I am certain that they will find much better ways of making a living than starting blogs. Of course, some of them might get rich starting a web-based business, it could happen.

The Big Screen Television Set

2006-04-03T05:53:00.000-05:00

When we bought our new home a year and a half ago, it came with a big screen television set in the basement. It came with speakers installed in the walls and in the ceiling to give a cinema-hall quality sound. We thought that would be a nice thing to have with our house.

Well, we moved in and discovered that the television only played the Spanish channel. I figured that we could reprogram the television so that it would get all channels but it wasn’t at all obvious how to do this. We had the cable television guy look at it and he was no help. Unfortunately, the manual for the television set was missing and the guide for stepping us through the reprogramming was so complex, we never could get it to work.

I spent hours and hours fiddling with it. I thought of connecting the cable wires to the VCR and the VCR to the television to circumvent the problem. It did give us the sound but not the picture.

The television had the logo of a local satellite dish company. I figured that maybe the television was cleverly designed so that it would only work with the satellite dish so that the owner would have no choice but to pay for their service. But we didn’t want satellite dish.

We could watch movies with the big screen television – the DVD player worked. But the speakers were useless because the previous owners decided to take some of the necessary equipment out at the last moment (and never told us about it). So for a year and one half we have had a big screen television and speakers and they were only of partial use.

Then this weekend we decided to do something about that. We decided to buy real furniture for enjoying our television. We have been watching television on a screen about half the size of our big screen television. And since we had that television set up in the exercise room so my wife could watch here aerobic exercise videos, we would watch television while lying on the carpet. Lying on a carpet is fine when you are in your twenties but when you reach 40, it really is a pain in the back – literally.

So I went to Best Buy (the electronics store) to ask if about the equipment to make the speakers work and I also ask again (maybe for the fourth or fifth time) if there might be a way to get that television to work. The young man suggested that unplug everything and try to reprogram the channels again. Well – I had tried that before.

But I tried it again - still no luck. I was about to give up for the tenth time when my wife decided to try it again. She noticed that the television was in a slightly different mode than before – at least now the television channel number showed up in the upper right corner but we still only got Spanish channel. She went through the setup a few times.

And then, like a miracle, something happened. The step that I had been looking for literally for years came up and the television began searching for channels. And then we were getting all of our cable channels – right there on the big screen television!

But I feel useless. I don’t know which make me feel more useless: not watching television on a perfectly workable big screen television for a year and a half because I could not figure out how to reprogram it or the fact that my wife was the one who eventually did figure it out. Well, anyway, it works now.

This Blog Did Not Move

2006-04-02T07:46:00.000-05:00

And no one was fooled.

I have thought about a fancier blog template on occasion but I am just too lazy to bother with such things.

This Blog Has Moved

2006-04-01T13:01:00.000-05:00

This blog has moved.

If you are not automatically redirected in 10 minutes, then click here.

Robotic Cameras

2006-03-28T00:23:00.000-05:00

A comment by Patrix in the previous post made me think about robotic cameras. I believe that these will important in the next twenty years in many areas:
1. Remote controlled cameras will allow photography in the most hostile environment and in the very worst weather conditions. They will be able to be everywhere so that a thousand eyes will hunt for the elusive prey and then the operator will move the camera (on wheels or on a tractor tread) to the optimal location. The operator will never have to leave the comfort of his own apartment.
2. These cameras will make the safari even more assessable and more successful. How many people have gone to the wild animal preserve and never saw the lion or the tiger? In twenty years, it will never happen again. The robots will always know where the animals are. And if you cannot afford the trip to the Serengeti, you can rent a robot and go on safari from your own p.c.
3. Guerilla warfare will become as obsolete as the bayonet charge. Robots will find the guerilla hiding in the jungle or in the cave easily. The guerilla’s only hope will be urban warfare.
4. In fact, in the distant future, people won’t fight people. Armies will send their robots out to fight their enemy’s robots. Once one robot army is defeated the country will immediately surrender because you won’t stand a chance against a billion robots.
5. I wonder if people will allow a million robotic cameras to perform surveillance on society to prevent terrorism, crime, and driving faster than the posted speed limits.

What are your opinions on the future of robotic cameras?

March of the Penguins

2006-03-26T09:36:00.000-05:00

I seldom watch movies and almost never write about them, but I wanted to write about this wonderful documentary I saw with my family called, “March of the Penguins.” This small French team spent nine months in Antarctica to film the remarkable story of the reproductive habits of the penguins and the incredible hardships these birds go through just to produce their offspring.

It is just incredible to see all these birds walking single-file in the snow to reach the breeding ground. Once in a while the lead penguin will be lost and they will gather around not knowing where to go. Then someone remembers and leads them on. Eventually they reach the site. And for the males, that is where they will stay for four months.

This is the incredible thing: they don’t eat. They go completely without food for months so that they can help raise one chick. First they spend a couple of weeks looking for a mate. Then they wait until the egg is laid which takes about two months. Then the females – who are in desperate hunger at this point – pass the egg to the male and the females take off to the sea to eat. Sometimes the eggs roll off in the passing and the egg almost instantly freezes and their efforts are completely wasted. They showed some scenes of parents looking at their frozen eggs – just heartbreaking.

The females go to the ocean and eat for two months to build back strength while the male incubates the egg. This is in the dead of the Antarctic winter. Some penguins just freeze to death during the extreme winds and cold temperatures. They need to keep their egg on their feet and keep it warm with their bellies for the entire time – for four months!

When the chicks finally hatch, they give them a little stored food they kept somewhere in their stomachs. It is amazing the sacrifice these birds will go through for a chick.

Then the females return – and not a moment too soon. They take over caring for the chicks while the males return to the sea. Each of these journeys is about seventy miles and when you see the penguins waddle it looks like the equivalent of a human journey of 1000 miles. Many males simply die on the way back to sea – they were just too weak. And many chicks die of freezing and predators. It really is a tough life for a penguin.

After a couple of months, the females leave – often before the males return – because they are so hungry. The males return once again to care for the chick until it is ready to go into the ocean.

And that is the most extreme anti-climax. These parents suffered so much for the chicks and by the time the chicks go into the sea the parents are gone. The chicks swim by instinct. And when it is time for them to mate – after four years – they will go through what their parents did by instinct.

I have to say that the French crew did an incredible job capturing all of this on film. The conditions could not been worse for filming or for just living for that matter. But they persevered. Perhaps they were inspired by the penguins.

In ten or twenty years, such a documentary would not be so remarkable. Robotic cameras (which the French did not use) will allow the filmmaker to film the wildlife in the most hostile environments without putting a human in the wild. But for now I have to admire the French crew’s courage and tenacity in bringing this incredible story

The Consumption Tax, Part II

2006-03-25T06:51:00.000-05:00

One year ago today, I wrote about the virtues of a consumption tax. It is a decent essay and worth reading. I thought I would add to those thoughts but first let me introduce the idea

The idea is that instead of taxing income, which has the problem of discouraging investment since it is taxed as soon as an investment is liquidated even it an investor intends to reinvest these earnings, the government would tax your consumption. The idea is not to tax the goose that lays golden eggs but just the gold eggs.

Here is an excerpt:

My proposal is to treat all flows of money into investment as equal and non-taxable until these investments are cashed in. Flows of money between investments would not be prevented or discouraged in any way.

The simplest way of explaining this idea is to assume that most people have a checking account and a money market account. Any flows of money into the checking account would be considered consumption (in the near term) and would be taxable even if they came from investments. Any flows from the checking account into the money market account would be fully deductible. Any expenditure from the money market account on investments would not be counted since this would be an exchange from one form of investment to another. Using your money market account to pay your credit card bill though would mean you would have to pay tax on that transaction, so you would probably first transfer money to your checking account and then write a check for the credit card bill, but you wouldn't have to.

There two big issues that I can anticipate with this new type of tax. First issue is how to treat the taxation of investments made prior to the enactment of the consumption tax. The second issue is how to treat home mortgage interest deduction.

Read the whole post here.

The idea of a progressive consumption tax (i.e. one that taxes low consumption at a lower rate) has been around for many years but has always been considered impractical. I do not believe it to be impractical at all.

The issues of the progressive consumption tax are many: first there is the issue of transitioning to it, second is the issue of how complex would it be to compute, third there is the issue of tax incidence and who wins and who loses under the new regime, and fourth there is the issue of getting the required information to tax all consumption.

I addressed the first two issues in the essay above. I will just say that transitioning could be gradual and phased in over a decade. Computing consumption is easy if you keep your accounts well. Any money flowing into your checking account is likely to fund consumption. You might write a check to buy an investment – and this would be fully deductible – but it would be easier just to fund investments out of an interest earning money market account.

The third issue – the issue of who pays that taxes and tax fairness – is the real reason I wanted to readdress this issue. There is a big issue here. Republicans are using the issue of tax efficiency to argue for an almost complete repeal of capital gains taxation. Obviously this helps the wealthy. In fact, a wealthy person living solely off of investments might pay less tax as a fraction of his or her consumption than a common laborer – a regressive tax system.

The only fig leaf of respectability for this swindle is that taxing investment income would discourage investment. Basically, you are grinding down investment over time because each transaction requires a check to the government. The government should simply wait until you are finished investing.

But under the current scheme, investors don’t pay much tax on either the goose or the gold eggs. Even if all consumption is liquidated and spent, the investor pays merely 15 percent – a really small tax on a fortune.

The fourth issue is how to compute all consumption. One form of consumption that really should be tax is the imputed rental value of owner occupied housing. Basically, if you were to rent your home out, you could be making a good income. But you are living in it. So you pay yourself the rent. This should be taxable consumption. But how much is this?

The issue of fairly estimating the value of property that never comes up for sale in the market is always a contentious issue. I think the county assessors do a reasonable job – I say this with the knowledge that they have over-assessed my home by 20 percent. Is there a better way?

I thought about a scheme in which owners would simply self-assess their property with a huge penalty if they self-assessed too low. When you sell your home and if you self-assessed for less than the sale price, you pay a penalty based on the difference to compensate for the lost real estate tax. If the penalty is sufficiently high – maybe 30 percent of the difference – then you would want to be honest and reveal the true value of your home. The issue with this, of course, is that everyone will self-assess too low in a rapidly rising real estate market.

Subtle Warning

2006-03-21T17:58:00.000-05:00

Sign seen at a Starbuck's coffee house:

Unattended children will receive complimentary espresso and a free puppy.

I'll have a real economics post up in a day or two.

Three Jokes

2006-03-19T09:26:00.000-05:00

First joke
This joke sits uneasily with these others – it is intended for children. My seven-year-old son read this joke in a magazine and laughed heartily even though he had no idea what the joke was.

Q: What did the cat do when he ate some cheese?

A: He waited by a mouse-hole with baited breath.

Not bad for the genre of seven-year-old humor.

Second joke
Last night we were walking around a furniture store and they were playing an old Bangles tune from twenty years ago. I remember them. A girl band, to be sure, but Susanna Hoffs was a babe. And they had a few hits: Manic Monday, Walk Like An Egyptian, and my favorite: If She Knew What She Wants (He’d be giving it to her). That song had easily the best double entendre in pop music.

I remember hearing the lyrics and thinking it was just a stupid girl song. It seemed to be about a girl who was taking advantage of a guy who was "crazy about this girl". And then I heard it again:

If she knew what she wants
(He'd be giving it to her)

I wondered, “Are they talking about that?

If she knew what she needs
(He could give her that too)

“Indeed, it is about that.”

And indeed there were lots of you men who while looking at close-ups of Hoffs were dreaming of “Giving it to her, giving it to her, giving it to her, yeah!”

Third joke
This one-liner is perhaps the best spontaneous retort ever. I remembered it while reading this post by Greatbong about the remake of Basic Instinct. I’ll just copy what I wrote in his comments:

The all-time best joke that I recall concerning the Basic Instinct movie was from the Late Show starring David Letterman (this was early 1990s). Sharon Stone came on and joked about her role and the infamous scene (which I never saw btw) in which she doesn’t where jettie and the camera see all the way up to her acting ability. She referred to it (inexplicably) as “seeing all the way up to Nebraska.”

Letterman quipped, “Nebraska? I thought Oregon.”

I didn’t catch the joke at the time but years later when I read some info about New Mexico. I already knew that its slogan was the “Land of Enchantment” which makes absolutely no sense. But a little devilish voice made me want to know what Oregon’s state motto was.

Bingo!

Talk about getting a joke years later. One time in my life where ROFL was appropriate.

I'm Feeling Lucky

2006-03-17T11:20:00.000-05:00

Today is St. Patrix Day –um – St. Patrick’s Day. Since some of my ancestors come from Ireland (the Higgins family), I should celebrate this somehow.

Anyway, I was inspired to try a little experiment and I came up with the following list:
1. Gaurav - Yes
2. Amit – No
3. Sunil – No
4. Charukesi – Yes
5. Patrix - Almost
6. Ravikiran – No
7. Michael – are you kidding?

What was I doing?

A Plumbing Issue

2006-03-17T09:28:00.000-05:00

When I met Ravikiran, one of the things we discussed briefly was an idea I had to teach people economics using game theory. I won’t bore people with the idea again – I posted about that here. Rather, I am interested in knowing if there are people in blogland that know enough about computers and connecting them via the Internet to tell me roughly how difficult linking millions of computers together to play a game would be.

The idea is that many people would be playing a game on the Internet. These people would be sending signals – vectors of data – to each other. This information would then be aggregated and fed back to everyone in aggregate form.

You could think of this as a plumbing issue where the data is water and the problem is transferring the water from residence to residence. It is very definitely a solvable problem and many people have solved similar problems. What I want to know is roughly the amount of the plumbing bill.

Let me give a simple example. Suppose people want to purchase some of commodity. People have preference so it would be straightforward to compute each person’s individual demand curve: for each price we could know the quantity demanded. We could adequately represent the demand curve with a vector of data. Taking the price vector as a known given we would just need the corresponding quantity vector. The aggregate demand curve would come from the summation of these individual demand vectors.

I would know how to program such a problem on a single computer. The problem for me is that the vectors of data are on perhaps a million computers and how does one efficiently collect so much data?

My idea is that each player’s personal computer would be the “slave” to some other “master” computer. There might be 10 slaves per master. The master tells the slave that it should send the information to the master’s address. When the slave has the data ready, it sends the data to the master. The master aggregates and sends it to its master and so on. Eventually all of the data is aggregated on the super-master and this information flows back to whomever needs the information.

There are two issues here that I would like to know about:
1. How difficult is it to use the Internet to hook up computers in this way? Is there off the shelf software that would make this a snap?
2. How long would it take for the signals to propagate all the way up to the super-master? We always assume that the computer computes virtually instantaneously, but that really isn’t true. And sending signals between computers is a cumbersome way to do computation. My feeling is that the propagation delay time here would be non-trivial and may require fancy programming.

So, are there any computer gurus among my readers who would know about this?

Update
I should point out that there is another major issue with the master-slave thing. The computers are not always on and some people might play for a while and then quit. The master must wait for a slave that really is playing but must ignore a slave that abruptly quits. And do you want to use master computers that might occasionally quit also? That throws in another interesting complication.

9A.M., CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

2006-03-16T17:05:00.000-05:00

“Your cover’s blown Higgins. You know that don’t you?”

“It’ll blow over.”

“No it won’t. This Sabnis fellow’s smart. He pieced it all together. Northern Virginia location, spends time gathering info, unnaturally interested in cricket. It all fits.”

“Wait, I have an idea. What if I play along with the gag?”

“Play along?”

“Yeah, I’ll just make a joke about it. I’ll pretend that I really am a CIA analyst.”

“What do you mean pretend? You are a CIA analyst. And you can’t admit you are analyst and still work here.”

“You see, that’s the point. They don’t really know, do they? They’re just suspicious. But if I “admit” that I really am an analyst in a lighthearted manner, everyone will know that I’m just joking because I couldn’t admit to being a real analyst and still be an analyst, could I? They will then assume that I’m a just a joker. And I’ll have the perfect cover.”

“You know, Higgins...that’s so stupid its might just work!”

The Best Cupcake Ever?

2006-03-16T15:56:00.000-05:00

My son had the day off today. He spent half the day with Mommy and half the day with Daddy.

Mommy was in a generous mood and said he could have a snack. And, quite fortunately for me, I was able to take him the Starbucks and get him that treat.

He chose the double chocolate fudge cupcake. It looked like pure chocolate overload – lacking the balance necessary to make it a truly delicious cake.

I asked him how he liked it. “Is it one of the ten best cupcakes you ever had?”

He nodded yes with a mouthful of cake and a huge smile. He swallowed and announced, “It’s the best cupcake ever!”

“The best cupcake ever?” I thought. The cynic in me wonders if that could possibly be.

For seven-year-olds, the combination of youth and short memory guarantees that the “best ever” is always just around the corner – and that is an awesome thing.

Once you are old and cynical, you’ll never know that feeling again.

Gaurav Is Incorrect

2006-03-15T06:03:00.000-05:00

The commute from Dunn Loring to Langley is not bad at all.

Freedom To Make Lame Jokes

2006-03-14T19:39:00.000-05:00

I like to kid around. I love subtle humor and I insert it whenever possible. Sometimes nobody gets it. Sometimes people think it's lame.

Oh well, so what? Not everyone can be Greatbong. Like C-Gawker wrote last month – some posts will be lame. And some jokes will be lame. This is what blogging is about: throwing your rough-cut writing to whomever is interested. Often it really isn’t worth reading. But it is the honest revelation of the real person.

Sometimes I look at a paragraph that might cause offense or might cause a laugh and I wonder, “Should I cut it out?” Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. If the joke is not way out-of-bounds I prefer leave it uncut.

Others sometimes post lame jokes also, I might add. For example, India Uncut – as great a blog as you are likely to read – had a rather lame series of jokes on cricketer Monty Panesar. Probably Monty never read them. If he did, he might have chuckled. But he might have taken offense. And Sikhs might have taken offense because they might have interpreted the Ponty series as an example of an ethnic Sikh joke. But I say, “Some jokes are going to be lame. If we never take risks, we become humorless."

Of course, one should make every effort to improve the lame joke into the not-so-lame one. But if it is a choice between cutting it out or not, I would prefer to leave my writing uncut.

I try to be a nice person but sometimes my lame jokes might offend someone. If I were really really nice like Sunil, I would never risk offending anyone. I’m not that nice. Like I said, “If we never take risks, we become humorless.” I sometime post lame jokes in the hopes that others will laugh along but knowing full well some might not like it. It is a risk I take. I’m just not that nice.

For example, the post on the blogger meeting recap had some lame jokes thrown in. The joke about Chetan doing something called “Budginay” and the reference to my wife’s reaction to my meeting Piyush Gupta, (she really did say, “Oh-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo!”) might have caused offense if they were the types who take offense easily. Hopefully they will take this in good spirit.

There was a long paragraph in there about Curious Gawker that was probably a fairly lame joke:

I should mention that the real reason we had this meeting was trap someone: the notorious terrorist Ondiran Khan, number 5 in command in Al Queda. He now lives in Phildadelphia and blogs under the pseudonym Curious Gawker. We hoped to lure him out into the open by the hopes of meeting Arnab the Greatbong and some free food. The Feds were waiting to nab him and send him to Gitmo. But he never showed. Maybe the food court food was not enticing enough. Maybe someone tipped him off. We’ll try to do this again in May or June and see if we can trap him next time. Please, no one tip him off this time.

I don’t think Curious Gawker would take offense to this but maybe. It just expresses in a light-hearted way our disappointment that Curious Gawker was a no-show. Both Arnab and I asked him to come and he seemed interested but he didn’t come. The paragraph makes fun of his anonymity and his Anti-Bush politics by making him into a terrorist “on-the-run”. Hopefully he would have laughed but maybe not.

Suppose not. Suppose Curious Gawker had in fact written to me saying that the joke was lame and offensive, and he feared that others (the government) might really believe that he was a terrorist. Suppose he said that he would prefer that I remove it, (of course, he did not do anything of that sort). I respect C-Gawker. For Joe Blow, I wouldn’t care less. But for someone like C-Gawker, I will go the extra yard and I will edit my post. I would feel bad though. But I would get over it. I might try harder to avoid offense in the future.

I might give C-Gawker a bit of a hard time, though. I might write something like this:

Curious Gawker
I am so sorry; I must profusely apologize. I have removed the offending paragraph and I will post an apology with a post entitled "Curious Gawker is not a terrorist" just to clarify that it was just a stupid joke.

In fact, a very similar incident happened to me. A blogger who I greatly admire and respect took offense to one of my posts and politely asked me to amend it. Like I said, I don’t like to edit my posts but he is a blogger I greatly admire so I would go the extra yard for him. I did so and wrote a letter like the one above. I was kidding about the explanatory post (isn’t that obvious?).

The response…Woof! I saw a side of this blogger I had not seen before and hopefully will not see again. Let us just say that he was not amused.

So there is a lesson here for people like me who like to kid around. Some people will take offense. Some people will not see the humor so well if they are on the receiving end and not the sending end.

So if you post something that turns out to be offensive to someone else, how should you react?

If it is someone you respect, swallow your pride. Just remove the offensive material and apologize. It isn't going to be helpful to point out, "But you make lame jokes too." Just diffuse the situation. If you try to diffuse the situation with a bit of humor – make real sure that the person will laugh.

I will just end this by saying I am really red faced about the whole incident. But I still prefer to take risks and leave my writing uncut.

Update
The person obliquely referred to above writes in to explain that I misunderstood completely the tone of the email he sent to me and that he has no problems with lame jokes at his expense in general as long as they are not intentionally cruel.

5YAT: Laxman and Dravid Batted All Day Long

2006-03-14T06:30:00.000-05:00

Five years ago today, I woke up a bit early and turned on the computer. I wanted to see what was happening in the Kolkata test match.

The previous day, India followed on. From that point, the hope of winning was gone (or so I thought) and the only hope was to bat out for six sessions and draw the match. But Tendulkar fell early and Ganguly was out short of a half-century. India was down to their last recognized pair: Laxman and Dravid. Laxman had scored a century and Dravid, who usually bats third, just had come in at the end of day 3. Unless the two of them batted all day long, there was little hope for anything other than another loss.

I turn on the computer and Cricinfo announced that Laxman and Dravid were fighting back. I look at the scoreboard. Laxman was on 196; Dravid was on 85. It took a couple of overs but I waited until Laxman scored his double ton. India was fighting back! I thought this was incredible.

People later called this Laxman’s knock, but it was really the great Laxman-Dravid partnership. Dravid is the only player in cricket who could say something like, “I have to go to bed early tonight; I have to bat all day tomorrow,” and not make it sound like a hollow boast.

By the end of the day, India had seen a minor miracle: there have been tens of thousands of test partnerships and only 61 triple century test partnerships. This was one of them. And this one came from the last recognized pair India had left. Laxman had set a new test record high score for an Indian batsman (later bettered by Sehwag). It seems ironic that now five years later Laxman has been dropped, but he was the right guy for the team then.

I thought, “Good, Australia won’t win this one.” But I never thought India could win – not against Australia. Not unless Australia was daft and “went for it” on the last day.

But India had one last miracle in store for day five.

The D.C. Blogger Meet Recap

2006-03-13T00:15:00.000-05:00

A gathering of bloggers came to Union Station on Saturday. We had much fun. Let me start with a list of attendees:

Arnab was very much like I thought he would be. He is little chubby (he looks just like the picture is on his blog). He had a big smile during the entire meet. I think he was just having a blast. And he had lots of interesting stories to tell. He is no doubt a brilliant writer and the perfect host of a blogger meeting.

Arzan and Ravikiran came all the way from New York and New Jersey to be there. I cannot know if it was worth it for them but I can only say that I appreciate the effort these two made to be there.

Ravikiran actually does some interesting software development. I wished I could have learned more about that. He doesn’t come off in real life like he does in his blog. In his blog, he seems quite confident, assertive, and certain in a way that others might misunderstand as arrogance. He doesn’t come off that way at all in person. He is actually somewhat soft spoken.

Arzan Sam Wadia in real life is an architect and he told us about some very interesting energy efficient buildings he is helping design. He also runs a blog called Parsi Khabar that blogs about the Parsi community. Recently he linked to an editorial that said that Zoroasterism might make a comeback in Iran. I remember a friend (in the early 1980’s) saying that it would be nice is Communism fell apart and those nations went for a market economy. I thought it was a far-fetched hope at the time. Well, who knows!

The lone female was Seema. She has a degree in (I hope I didn’t forget this) International Relations. She has a popular blog that I’ve never visited before and that is nice about blog meets, you get to see bloggers you never would read otherwise. We need to work harder in addressing the gender balance in future blogger meets.

Piyush Gupta has a website about India politics. I actually recognized Piyush. He comes frequently to the Einstein Bros. Bagel shop on Gallows road where my family visits every Saturday. We always see him discussing politics with his friends. Sometimes my wife has commented about him and the fact that the female friends seem bored out of their minds. When I said that I met him and he seemed really nice my wife’s comment was, “Oh, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo!” I don’t speak Tamil so I don’t really understand but my guess is- knowing my wife- that she really doesn’t want to discuss the political situation in India with Piyush and his friends. Too bad, he seems quite nice.

Sunil Soman talked a little bit about his work in supply chain management. That is really quite similar to work I do (which means it is not too interesting). He worked on a very similar problem for the same client that I worked on, a coincidence.

Ujval Gandhi had wanted to organize a blogger meet for some time. His work is in mergers and acquisitions. He would like to return to graduate school to get that Ph.D. It is essential in life to get education before earning a good income. Otherwise, one finds it hard to return to college life.

Vinay Jain has many blogs and I am too lazy to link to all of them. He is from Rajasthan and he reminds me a bit of Parthiv Patel.

Chetan Kulkarni was very nice. He gave me a nice card thank me for organizing this meet. That is nice. He majored in journalism but unfortunately he is unemployed right now. He keeps himself busy doing something called “Budginay” which I think is some kind of job search regimen.

Eswaran Baskaran doesn’t have a blog but comments on Sepia Mutiny and writes to India Uncut. He took the photos below. I should really ask permission to post these photos but I figure the good Lord wouldn’t have let me come into possession of these photos if I were not chosen by Him (Her) to post them. I get selectively religious about some things that coincide with self-interest.

I was originally intending to augment the turnout by having phone-ins. We had some A-list bloggers who were going to let me call them and we put them on speakerphone and chat briefly with others. I hoped it might work. Well it flopped. Union Station is underground and has lots of concrete and the signal failed. Sunil tried to call but could not get through. He lives in Seattle; my parents live near Seattle.

But at least we avoided the problem that Anand had in his first blogger meet. He came to a blog meet looking for bloggers but didn’t see anyone who looked like one (what do bloggers look like – people?), and he left disappointed. I avoided such a problem by posting little signs.

Also some kind person remembered to bring a birthday cake. It was, in fact Ravikiran’s birthday. Here is the cake – with chocolate coins on it. It was an excellent quality cake from this pastry shop.

Here is a photo of Ravikiran’s birthday present. Some context is needed here. He had complained about American toilet paper and how it was inadequate for the task. So, as if to show that in a well-developed free market all needs are met, I found these excellent flushable wipes. He declared that this was, “The best present he had ever had.” He might have been just being polite.

Here are some group photos:

Ravikiran is cutting the cake. From left to right: Vinay, Ujval, Michael, Ravikiran, and Chetan, (with perhaps Seema in the background – she did not want to be photographed).

From left to right: Sunil, Ujval, Michael, Arnab, Chetan, Ravikiran, Piyush, Arzan.

Far right: Eswaran.

I should mention that the real reason we had this meeting was trap someone: the notorious terrorist Ondiran Khan, number 5 in command in Al Queda. He now lives in Phildadelphia and blogs under the pseudonym Curious Gawker. We hoped to lure him out into the open by the hopes of meeting Arnab the Greatbong and some free food. The Feds were waiting to nab him and send him to Gitmo. But he never showed. Maybe the food court food was not enticing enough. Maybe someone tipped him off. We’ll try to do this again in May or June and see if we can trap him next time. Please, no one tip him off this time.

Both Arnab and I think the blogger meet was a nice success. We hope to make it a regular event. We will probably have four of them a year.

Update
I was trying to recall some pithy things that people said and then I remembered what Arnab told about Suhail Kazi. He actually met Suhail once in Maryland. He said that whenever he writes about religion and Islam he always thinks, "How would Suhail react to this?" If he thought that if Suhail might take offense then he knows he went overboard.

The interesting thing about that is that although I have never met Suhail, I know he is a prominent blogger with an Islamic-sounding name who reads my blog from time to time. So I have often wondered myself if something I have written about religion might cause offense to someone like Suhail.

So maybe there is a business opportunity for Suhail: giving his Good Housekeeping seal of approval for incendiary blog pieces; Just a thought.

Update 2
Arnab explains in the comment section that the issue of "How would Suhail view this" applies more to how he comes across in the comment section and how he deals with his many critics than with the original post. Arnab does get a really lively debate in his comment section and it takes quite a lot of work to keep it from getting out of hand.

Also, Chetan has an excellent account of the blogmeet here. Also here is Arnab's.

Update 3
Here is Arzan's version and Ravikiran's (with links to more photos).

5YAT: WWW

2006-03-11T06:42:00.000-05:00

Five years ago today, perhaps the most remarkable test match in that last 20 years started. It was Kolkata: India vs. Australia. The match didn’t start well for India at all. Australia tore into a fairly weak and inexperienced bowling attack and laid a solid foundation for a great innings. After two sessions, Australia were 193/1.

I turned on my compute and checked Cricinfo early in the morning. It was the 72nd over of the match. The score was 252/5. The scoreboard read:

.W

Ponting had just fallen to Harbhajan; Waugh was on 14.

I thought, “Oh well, at least India has 5 wickets. Maybe they can hold Australia under 400.” But I was disappointed that they had once again let Australia get a good score.

I checked the scorecard. I saw Hayden had scored 97 and Langer got a half-century.

I went back to the scoreboard half expecting Gilchrist to rip the game wide open. The scoreboard read:

.WW

Gilchrist had just fallen first ball to Harbhajan.

“Wow! Harbhajan is on a hattrick.” I just stared at the screen hoping I would see another W come up.

I remember one other time I sat looking for something to happen. I was following a match on Cricinfo: New Zealand vs. South Africa. It was just one of a 6- match series of ODI’s. South Africa need 7 runs off of the last two balls and Klusener was batting. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be incredible if Klusener hit two boundaries in a row and won it for South Africa?” Needless to say, Klusener did it. He was awesome.

But a hat-trick is really rare. In fact, no Indian bowler had ever bowled a hattrick in a test match before. I just looked up at the screen wondering if it could happen. And then I saw it:

.WWW

Harbhajan had just gotten Warne for a first-ball duck!

I nearly fell out of my chair.

Later, I bought the video just to see that hattrick. It was a stunning catch by Ramesh (who was a decent opener and should have played longer).

A few overs later, Kasprowicz fell to Sourav Ganguly (he would get only five more wickets in the next five years). It seemed then that India was going to hold Australia to a gettable score.

But that was just day one.

Sticky Post: D.C. Bloggers' Meet Update

2006-03-11T06:08:00.000-05:00

D.C. Bloggers' Meet Update. Click on the link for any changes or updates. See you there.

Vending Machines and Rationality

2006-03-10T07:30:00.000-05:00

Sunil has a hilarious post about his confrontation with a vending machine. It made me recall some incidents I have had with vending machines.

How often have you seen this: you go to the vending machine and you see a snack dangling by one corner on a hook. You know that if you pay 60 cents, you could get two snacks for the price of one. But you have to wonder why the previous customer left the snack just dangling like that. Here are some possibilities:

1. She just put her last 60 cents in the machine, she had to abandon her hope for a snack
2. She used to assume that the probability of getting a snack was 100% if she placed the coins in the machine. Now that she sees that it clearly is less than 100% she Bayesian updates her prior and decides that now the probability is closer to 50%. Buying candy from a vending machine is no longer cost effective at this low payout.
3. She went to the vending machine out of combination of hunger and moral weakness. She knows she should not be snacking. When she sees the snack dangling from a hook, she sees that as an omen and repents.
4. Her preferences are really variable over time. By the time she sees the snack is just dangling from a hook, she wants something else and ends up buying another snack instead.
5. She was willing to pay 60 cents for one snack but not 120 cents for two. So she decides to cut her losses and go back to her office.
6. She only wants the snack that she paid for and if she tries to buy it again, she will be stuck getting two and eating two, (since she cannot bear to throw food away) and she knows that this would be wrong.

Some of these arguments are reasonable and some are just plain stupid. Which ones do you think are reasonable? And do you think that the average person who leaves the snack on the hook does so for reasonable reasons or stupid reasons?

The Habits of Very Old Men

2006-03-09T06:40:00.000-05:00

I used to work in an upscale apartment building for seniors. I was a night security guard. Occasionally I would have to help a resident who had fallen and could not get up. Sometimes I would have to make a minor repair like fixing a stopped up toilet (never fun). But mostly I just studied all night long.

When I came in at the late evening, the daytime guard would tell me things that happened that day. He told me of this odd fellow Mr. R. Morton who would stand behind the mailman and make sure that he delivered no incorrect mail in his mailbox. Apparently, the mailman had placed something intended for Mr. Morton F. in Mr. R. Morton’s box by mistake. Well, mistakes happen. But it really bothered Mr. R. Morton and he insisted on pestering the mailman everyday thereafter to make certain that it never happened again.

Well, it turns out there is more to the story than just that. I have a guess about exactly what it was that wound up in Mr. R. Morton’s mailbox and why it bothered him so much.

First, I will give a little background on the two “Mortons”. Both of them were in their 80’s and both had lost their wives (or maybe divorce – I don’t really know). R. Morton was a lawyer and rarely talked to other residents. Morton F. seemed a gentle old man who shuffled along in baby steps. He liked to chat with the elderly ladies. He later fell and broke his hip.

Mr. Morton F. called down one evening saying that his toilet kept running. This was a common problem because the toilets still had the old chain stoppers. The chain would get tangled and then the tank valve would not close and water would run forever. It was important to fix this problem right away or else literally tons of water would be wasted.

I went up to fix his toilet. I just had to lift the lid of the tank. But I had to remove the things that Mr. Morton F. put on the tank first. And I could not believe what Mr. Morton F.’s had on his toilet lid: something like this. I had to suppress a huge urge to smile.

Leaving Mr. Morton F.’s apartment I had mixed feeling about him. On the one hand, I thought Mr. Morton F. was a dirty old man: why would someone in his 80’s want to look at the mammaries of the 20-somethings featured in the magazine? It seemed revolting. But on the other hand, I had to admire the fact that he could keep the flame of desire burning all the way into his declining days. I am only in my 40’s and already I am more inclined to fondle a chocolate cake.

10YAT: My First ODI

2006-03-08T23:06:00.000-05:00

Ten years ago today I saw my first ODI. It was an excellent introduction to the world of cricket.

Actually, I had seen parts of a test match on television in India when my wife and I visited in 1995. It was, in fact, the famous Sri Lanka vs. Australia test match in which Muralitharan was no-balled. But I didn’t understand any of that. I just noticed that they played all day long and only a handful of wickets fell. It seemed a dreadfully dull sport. I couldn’t see the point of watching the same game go on for 5 days – especially if there was a good chance that even after so much time there would be no winner.

We came back to Minnesota and I forgot about cricket. But then the World Cup started –and that year it was being played in India! My wife was sorry that she would miss all the games. She read a little about them.

We went to the Indian store on the evening of the 8th of March. There were two Indian stores in Minneapolis and they were located 50 yards away from each other. This seemed to be actual example of Hotelling’s Theorem. We went to the store closer to our house (by 50 yards).

Inside, they were advertising the India-Pakistan quarterfinal. My wife exclaimed, “Oh, I wish I could have been in India to watch this.” The grocer said that they were selling tickets to watch the match at a local motel. When we left the store, my wife said, “I wish I could have seen that match. India-Pakistan matches are always so exciting.” I asked her, “Do you want to see it?” I expected my ever-practical wife to say that we needed to go home, study, sleep, etc. But she surprised me. For one time in her life she was truly spontaneous. She looked at me and said, “Yes I would.” So I said, “Let’s go back and get those tickets – you will remember this match for all of your life!”

We went straight to the motel as I recall. If we bought any frozen dinners, we just kept them in the car. It was freezing cold in Minneapolis at that time.

The motel was really not-so-nice. The room we had was flooded with toilet water because the toilet had backed up. My wife perched on the bed as if it were an island surrounded by sharks. We shared this with some other people who came to see cricket.

There was an English gentleman there to see the Sri Lanka-England match. He was disappointed, of course. I saw a bit of Sanath Jayasuriya’s innings and was enthralled. This seemed infinitely more exciting than the test match I had seen a few months earlier! Six after Six flew out of the stadium. It was a glorious innings (although a bit brief).

Then the big match started. Tendulkar opened with Sidhu. My wife was excited about seeing this Tendulkar fellow play. He had been with India for many years, but my wife hadn’t been following cricket and would only occasionally hear about it from her father. She heard a lot about Tendulkar.

Tendulkar started cautiously and began building a partnership with Sidhu. Just when it looked like India might start accelerating, Tendulkar fell. But Sidhu kept the pace going. India lost some more wickets. They were scoring at a little less than 5 per over. My wife told me that the last 10 overs were called the “slog overs” because the batsmen were always more aggressive then. At the time, I could not understand why they waited until the last 10 overs to start “slogging”.

Then Ajay Jadeja came in. This was his great cameo. He scored 45 from just 25 balls including 22 off one Waqar Younis over. The Indian supporters began getting really excited. They scored 96 runs off of the last 10 overs.

Then we had to wait. Pakistan had a target of 288 – a tough ask. But first there would be the interval. We got up and walked around. My wife felt sure that Pakistan could not chase down 288 but she was still nervous about it. It was really early in the morning and we hadn’t slept. We got some snacks to eat and something to drink – we were getting hungry.

Then Pakistan started – with a bang! Sohail and Anwar (always Anwar!) were leading the charge. They put on 84 in just 10 overs but after Srinath got Anwar, Pakistan began losing its way. Wicket after wicket fell and the asking rate started to climb. My wife and I joined another room that had a bigger crowd of Indian supporters. They cheered loudly at the fall of each wicket. Then there was a partnership between Salim Malik (the match-fixer) and Javed Miandad (the destroyer of India in years past). When Malik fell, that people could sense victory was near. The run rate simply rose over the Pakistanis’ heads. And a huge collapse saw 4 wickets fall for just 7 runs as panic took over. It was glorious!

India won!

My wife was thrilled. And I was thrilled to share a special moment with my wife. My wife exclaimed, “And best of all – we beat Pakistan!” She doesn’t like Pakistan too much.

I drove home with my wife. We were both exhausted and exhilarated at the same time.

I have been hooked on cricket ever since.

My wife has never seen another game.

The Night My Wife Was Almost Attacked

2006-03-07T19:10:00.000-05:00

My wife tells the story of a terrifying experience she had as a young lady in India. She is coming home with her mother on the bus. Why her father isn’t around, I cannot recall and it doesn’t matter. They are alone. It is late.

A man on the bus starts eyeing my future wife. She avoids eye-contact but she can feel his stare. Eventually they get off and begin to walk home. Then they notice that this man has just gotten off at the next stop. He starts walking briskly towards them. They walk faster and he walks even faster. Their home was not far- just a quarter of a mile further. But my mother-in-law-to-be decides to take an auto.

They get in the auto and begin to move when the strange man runs and shouts at the auto to stop! The auto brakes. Her mother shouts frantically, “No, keep going, keep going!” The auto takes off just before the strange man comes.

What was the strange man thinking? Was he really going to attack three people in an auto? Maybe. My wife will never forget it.

Street Harassment and Gender Segregation

2006-03-07T18:54:00.000-05:00

I have been reading a variety of interesting and disturbing stories about a form of sexual harassment in India: Charu, Ash, Sujatha, Sunil, Vulturo, and (via Greatbong) Premalatha and Blank Noise. The guys are just strangers who act inappropriately in public toward women. Two questions arise immediately: 1) “Why does this happen so often in India?” 2) “What can India do to prevent it?”

Suppose you are a young attractive female riding on a bus. The seat next to you is empty. A man enters the bus and looks at you in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable. Maybe he looks a little like this…you know the type. Then he moves to sit next to you. Your heart maybe beats a bit faster as you wonder, “What will he do?” You might wonder if he will leer at you, or even touch you, or worse – grope you! Is there anything you can do?

I believe the situation of two strangers sharing a seat on a bus is always going to be a bit uncomfortable – but it will be extremely uncomfortable for a young lady who has to sit next to a strange guy. This is somewhat unavoidable and both will feel awkward. It might be made worse if the woman really makes the guy feel awful by looking down and scrunching up next to window as if he smelled foul. You cannot make people like you. You just have to make the best out of an awkward situation.

But for a woman, what can she do if the guy is some kind of jerk who gets his jollies out of making the woman feel bad? Maybe he will purposely touch her and then smile sadistically. She can leave the bus, but the guy still wins. And what if the guy gropes her?

There is really only one effective method to fight back: using Mace spray or pepper spray. Do most women in India carry it? Definitely, the perps will think twice if they think women carry pepper spray.

Another method to prevent inappropriate contact is to segregate the genders. But I think this is exactly the wrong approach. This just reinforces the idea that men cannot be with woman and act civilized.

In fact, I believe that gender segregation in the schools is the answer to the question, “Why is eve-teasing so common in India?” Boys need to develop social skills in order to mature. One of those skills is to interact with females who are not family relations and not be goofy. Another skill is to learn empathy for people who are different than you. These are not things that you can learn by reading in a book.

The problem in India is that society has become so concerned about the problems caused by having boys and girls together that they never have them experience cooperation with the other sex until marriage. Even then, the boy and the girl are not allowed to get to know each other in private. Boys/men just don’t know how to act appropriately around girls because they lack positive experience. This is why separating the genders causes the problem it intends to cure.

It probably is not a good idea to place teen-age boys and girls together and let them get too friendly. They might discover more about biology than you want them to know.

However, it might an excellent idea to have boys and girls do at least one major project together a year to help build social skills. And it might be even better if the project focuses on sexual harassment so that these young adults get a double lesson.

In general, I think that eve-teasing is simply a function of poor socialization. If boys and girls could learn to cooperate through each stage in life, the idea of acting inappropriately in young adulthood will seem less natural.

P.S. My apologies to the random person whose picture I took off the web as an example of an "eve-teaser". Of course I have know way of knowing if this person has ever done eve-teasing. He just looks like the type.

Update
It occurred to me (after reading Sunil's blog) that Vikrum Sequeira's post on gender segregation is a nice companion to this post.

1YAT: Indian Call Center Employees Get an Earfull

2006-03-06T06:54:00.000-05:00

Indian Call Center Employees Get an Earfull :

Trin! Trin! The phone rings, and Stephanie (an alias used by the call center employee taking the call) has 20 seconds to get ready with her headphones and chant her opening script.

"Thank you for choosing *** (the name of the company). My name is Stephanie. How may I help you?"

Guess what she hears in response? "Oh my God! My call has been routed to India. Hey poor girl, do you understand English?"

[...]

" 'You Indians suck!' an American screamed on the phone," recalled a soft-spoken Manzoor, 25. "He was using a lot of four-letter words, too. He called me names left, right and center."

In this post, I looked at the growing rudeness that Americans exhibit towards Indian call center employees. It is still relevant.

1YAT: He Only Drinks American Beer

2006-03-04T06:15:00.000-05:00

He Only Drinks American Beer:

I was standing in the checkout line in my local supermarket when the old man behind me began quizzing me.

“What kind of beer is this?” he inquired. Before I could answer, he positioned the box so he could read the label.

“Bass Ale? Where does that come from?”

“England,” I responded.

“England? What does it taste like?”

“It tastes like…beer.” I admit that wasn’t very helpful. I admit I wasn’t really trying to be helpful.

“I only drink American beer,” he announced.

“When I was in Germany, I tasted the German beer and it was pretty good. If I lived over there I suppose that I would drink it,” he said.

“I think it tastes the same over here,” I said to him.

He stared at me as if I were some kind of idiot.

I eventually stopped drinking Bass Ale. I found out that there is something fishy about it. They use some sort of fish-based additive to filter the beer. Here is a Sepia Mutiny post with links to these non-veg beers.

Talking about Sepia Mutiny, check out their new desi-news site. You can add stories yourself. I added one.

Indian Movies and All-Arounders

2006-03-03T07:12:00.000-05:00

In this previous post, I posed a question, “Why are Indian movies mediocre?” and I gave some hints: the Indian cricket team in 1999, and Milli Vanilli.

No one tried to solve the puzzle. It reminds me of my years being a TA in college: the student always came to recitation looking for answers to homework problems not insight.

Well, so be it. Here is my answer.

The problem with Indian films is simple and many have noticed it: they are all musicals. After Satyajit Ray, the idea of making a two-hour movie with real actors and no song-and-dance has just died. And that is a pity because the musical is not just not well suited to address serious issues.

But there is a more important reason a film industry based on making musicals will have problems producing high-quality films. It has to do with the labor demand that these musicals place on the market for actors. Before I go in to that, let me explain why the genre of musical died out in the west.

The musical was invented in Hollywood. I believe Busby Berkeley made the first musicals and I think he had an impact on Indian musicals as well. Soon came Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers who made some of the best musicals of all times. I love this assessment from Astaire's first screen test:

"Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little."

Later came Gene Kelly who made the greatest musical ever: Singing in the Rain. But the genre died when Kelly and Astaire retired. Basically, it was just too hard to find people who could act, sing, dance, and looked handsome enough to be a film star.

The problem is familiar to any cricket enthusiast: the musical required an all-arounder. And it is obvious why the genre didn’t die in India. India discovered Milli Vanilli before Frank Farian did.

Who or what was Milli Vanilli? A german music producer named Frank Farian had an insight: there are many great singers who lacked dancing ability and many great dancers that lacked singing ability. Maybe if these talented people specialized, then they could produce really high-quality music videos. Farian didn’t let the paying public in on this little insight: he packaged Milli Vanilli as if the dancers were the ones doing the singing on the record. Milli Vanilli one a Grammy and then famously had it taken away when the scam was revealed.

Of course, Indian films have always used the Milli Vanilli trick. They use actors who can dance and lip-sync to the words of professional singers. This trick enabled the Indian musical to survive because they didn’t require a complete musical all-arounder. They just required actors who could dance - they didn’t have to sing.

But Indian films typically required little true acting ability so most famous Indian film stars were dancers first and foremost and maybe interesting personalities but not really actors. The all-arounder of a true actor who could dance well enough not to provoke laughter was hard to find. This is the analogy to the 1999 Indian cricket team: today’s actors are one-dimensional.

To make serious movies you need serious actors and screen writers who have skill in writing serious drama. Bollywood doesn’t have this kind of talent. I think there is a need for serious films and serious acting but it definitely a different commodity that the typical masala film.

My feeling is that there is a market for serious movies and it cannot be satisfied by making slightly more serious song-and-dance movies. If you have dance, then you will have dancers, not actors. I think a there should be a separate genre of film where there is absolutely no song-and-dance. This will force a premium on acting ability and create a new form of artistic expression in India – one that is greatly needed.

I think it would be wise to make the movies in English. Yes – you throw away 90% of the potential movie going population, but most of them what masala films anyway. And making serious movies in English allows the potential to carve a niche in the greater English-speaking movie market – a huge industry. I really believe that there is an untapped potential here. Of course, it could be that I am just tired of reading subtitles.

D.C. Bloggers’ Meet

2006-02-28T18:18:00.000-05:00

Are you interested in meeting Arnab the Greatbong? If you are, then there will be a great opportunity to meet Arnab-da and other D.C. area bloggers on March 11.

Where? Union Station (on metro red line) lower level food court near Aditi. (directions in link).

When? March 11, (Saturday), from noon until whenever. We will try to keep it going until at least 3:00 to accommodate late shows.

Will there be free food? No, but there are plenty of non-free choices there.

Will there be free beer? No, demand always exceeds supply at that price, (gratuitous economics angle thrown in), but non-free choices are available. If Arnab brings kool-aid I recommend not drinking it.

Who will be there? Good question! We are trying to get everyone to come to this thing.

Certain - Updated

Arnab the Greatbong

arZan

Chetan

Madhu

Michael (me)

Piyushgupta

Ravikiran

Rubbersoul

Ujval

Interested - Updated

Ganesh

Sajit

Vishnu Pavan

Lots of other people

Plus, as an added bonus, you might have the opportunity to briefly chat with famous bloggers from around the world including:

Phone-Ins - Updated

Gaurav

Jai Arjun

Saket

Sujatha

Sunil

Vikram Arumilli

Perhaps some other people

We need to add to this list. If you are interested, please comment. If you have friends who might be interested, please e-mail them. The more, the merrier. It should be really fun.

1YAT: Stuck Working on Saturday Evening, Mumbai

2006-02-28T07:08:00.000-05:00

Stuck Working on Saturday Evening, Mumbai :

"Sniff," she sniffed into her handkerchief. "Why are you standing over me? Sit down." This was a friend, and I wasn't standing over her. I was leaning on the door frame of her tiny office.

The room was airless, and bloody silent. The stale smell meant the air conditioner hadn't been switched on for a while. Muffled music pumped away from speakers outside.

"My glasses broke, "she said, squinting at a laptop. "Just like that. One glass just popped out and landed on the table." She half-smiled and sniffled.

"You not well?"

"Just sick. But I have so much work to do." Her eyes were half open now, slowly giving in to the misery of her situation. "Calling up people, handling complaints about the trainers, the helpers in the restrooms, taking care of promotions. I wish I had your job."

This is an excerpt from a nice post from Rahul Bhatia. I added a bit of commentary here.

1YAT: Free Food: Why Do Americans Love It?

2006-02-25T05:33:00.000-05:00

Free Food: Why Do Americans Love It?:

If one were to take a box of week-old donuts—so stale that you would feel bad about feeding them to your pet—and place them on a tray and leave it in near the coffee maker in any office in America, those donuts will be devoured in just a few hours. Why does that happen? These people are not underfed (quite the opposite). These people wouldn’t pay even 5 cents for those donuts. These people might be making 6 figures and can afford gourmet donuts for 10 dollars apiece. Why would they even give these inferior goods a second look?

If they were using the donuts for bird feed or for creative sculptures or for paperweights, it might make some rational sense. After all, free stuff is free, and you can always throw it away later. But these people are eating this junk. This food might be free, but it isn’t costless. Extra calories either have to be burned with exercise or they add on to the flab around your waist. Why would people want to risk obesity for something so unappetizing?

My guess is that most people just don’t think about food in a way that is even remotely rational. They treat food as if the only cost associated with it is the monetary cost. This would make sense if we were 20 pounds underweight and desperately searching for food. But if you are already 20 or 50 or even 200 pounds overweight, the monetary cost of food is less important than the opportunity cost of food. The opportunity cost is simply that one will have to forgo some other food with that many calories or gain weight. It makes no sense to forgo a good meal to eat someone else’s garbage.

I have to admit to this insanity in my past. I used to love free food. But I’ve had a lot of time to consider this and other things while riding my exercise bike. Maybe I think too much.

I still don't have an explanation for this phenomenon. Is this an American thing or is it just as true in India and elsewhere? I believe Europeans have a more muture attitude about food.

I know that if there is food lying around, I tend to eat it. Or, as I tell my wife, such things, "tend to get eaten." My wife was intending to give boxes of chocolates to her parents in India. We forgot all of them in our refrigerator. We bought replacements in Germany on a layover. When we got home, I scarfed them down in less than a month. One day, my wife noticed that they were all gone. She was not happy.

I need to get back on that diet.

Picking the Green Fruit

2006-02-24T07:48:00.000-05:00

India, land of the mango, prefers to pluck its fruit when it is a little green and not fully sweet. The BCCI selectors do the same thing. They pluck the talent before it is fully ripe. They hope that international exposure will ripen them up quickly. But it might just as easily lead to a ruined career and a squandered talent.

The latest example of the deplorable tendency to pick the unripe fruit is the selection of Piyush Chawla. He is a great talent and he might soon be a star for India. But he is only 17, he has only played one season of Ranji, and he just isn’t ready yet. Sreesanth and Vikram Singh also look very raw. A couple more years in Ranji league would be very beneficial. But for some perverse reason, the selectors seem to think that if they don’t choose these young colts, in a few years these talents will be lost. And there is some reason to worry about that: the idiot selectors three or four years from now will overlook these seasoned professionals for the next U-19 flash-in-the-pan.

Examples of choosing talent too soon abound: Parthiv Patel, Ajay Ratra, Tinu Yohannan, Avishkar Salvi, Amit Mishra, Agit Agarkar, Laxmi Shukla, Amit Bhandari etc. There are several problems associated with choosing players too soon:
1. You might guess wrong and pick a no-talent.
2. The players might fail, and worse, cause the team to lose a big game and feel a sense of having “blown their big chance” for all of the rest of their careers. A little maturity can help deal with the emotional part of the game.
3. The players might not be fully talented yet. Agit Agarkar had some batting ability but also a flawed technique. A few years of Ranji might have helped. Instead, he went to Australia and came back damaged goods.
4. Choosing your U-19 stars over your Ranji stars robs Ranji of its significance. If the only way to make it into the team is to be 18 and super-talented, then you know that if you are already 20, you might as well give up.
5. You need to give them a chance to taste failure and really dislike it. These U-19 players have succeeded at every level in their brief careers. They come to the main team and see failure for the first time. Worse, they see their own inept performance caused the failure. Dealing with failure is a part of the learning process and choosing them too young denies them the opportunity to learn.

If I were the BCCI head, I would make a blanket rule: no one gets selected – no matter what – unless they have played 4 seasons of Ranji. Suddenly success in the Ranji league will be all-important, as it should be. The league will be more competitive and older players will not lose heart. And younger players will not become so impatient because they know that there is no way to make it to the team in less than 4 seasons. The benefits of such a strategy would be enormous.

But here is the rub: the credit for these benefits would go to the next board president. Maybe that’s why the board always seems so keen to pick the raw fruit.

Why Are Indian Movies Mediocre?

2006-02-23T07:57:00.000-05:00

I had an insight today. I know why Indian movies, by western standards, are mediocre. The reason is similar to the reason why the India cricket team in 1999 was mediocre despite having the best batsmen (Tendulkar and Ganguly) and some great bowlers as well (Kumble and Srinath).

Hint: the answer has nothing to do with match-fixing. It has to do with labor supply.

Hint number 2. Milli Vanilli.

I will give the answer next week.

Lottery Technology for Prison Overcrowding

2006-02-23T06:56:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I reposted “Lottery Technology", a post about how one might use this idea of a lottery to solve the problem of old age health care. It is an odd idea but I thought it was worth a second look in another context.

Suppose you have lots of prisoners who either face the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole. Actually executing those on “death row” is extremely expense because of the appeal system. So the state is stuck with a huge cost either way: either they pay maybe $50,000 a year for life to incarcerate them or several million dollars to execute them.

It might be tempting to pay the prisoners to kill themselves. But how much would you have to pay to get someone to do that? The lottery technology enables this to happen. You can pay someone to kill himself. And it might be economical (although somewhat expensive).

The idea behind the lottery technology is that people will take small risks of facing death in exchange for money. Suppose you create a one minus a million sugar-pills and you place one identical looking pill with a lethal dose of cyanide in it. You mix them up and now no one could know which pill is sugar and which one is poison.

A prisoner might be willing to take such a pill in exchange for a dollar or the equivalent in merchandise. Prison life is miserable and this would allow a little better standard of living. But these small risks add up. If each prisoner spends $40,000 a year, then one in 25 prisoners will die each year.

I don’t doubt that this system would “work” in the sense that it would cause some people to kill themselves – especially the suicidal (obviously!). But I think it might lead to a really abusive prison system. The problem here is that it creates perverse incentives for the prison. The prison will want to make life hell for the prisoners unless they pay for an upgrade in conditions. Soon, prisoners would have to pay exorbitant amounts for just the basics: food, water, light, and air.

Another issue is that it reveals in some sense the waste in not trying to get more labor out of prisoners. If you think of prisoners as a pure liability of course you want them dead. If they were working and producing enough so that the liability was small or even zero, then it wouldn’t be worthwhile to try to pay them to die. I don’t think that prisons should be making a profit (like a gulag), but they shouldn’t lose too much money either. Then the incentive to kill the prisoners disappears.

Suppose You Hate Your Religion

2006-02-21T06:04:00.000-05:00

Suppose you hate your religion. How should you destroy it? You would do very little by telling the faithful that you don’t believe.

You might do much more damage by subverting it. Suppose you can brainwash some nitwits and convince them to do something outrageous in the name of the religion you hate. Something like

Hijacking an airplane and crashing it into a building

Assassinating the leader of another religion

Blowing up a giant ancient statue of some other religion

Threatening people of other religions who dare say anything about your religion, or

Rioting on trivial issues relating to your religion.

Your hope is that you can tap into a deep-seated self-hatred in your religion. You want to send people into the streets with blind rage – a rage at the death of the respect that your religion once had, a rage at the death of the peace that your religion once offered, a rage at the death of the faith that God loves you.

The hope is that you would eventually make reasonable people of your own faith defensive and even a bit ashamed at what people of your faith do. You would want to show the world that your religion is unreasonable.

But no matter how unreasonable you act, there will be some people who will think, "If they are upset, it must be our fault."

What do you do then?

Hey, it’s fun to burn stuff.

1YAT: Happy Birthday Dad

2006-02-20T15:09:00.000-05:00

One year ago, I wrote Happy Birthday Dad:

I saw that the date today is February 20th and I remembered that today was a great American’s birthday, but I couldn’t recall whose. Was it George Washington’s birthday, or Abraham Lincoln’s? Then it hit me: "Oh it’s my father’s birthday, and I forgot to send a card." It happens each year.

My father certainly qualifies as a great American. He fought with distinction during WWII. He did cutting-edge scientific research on boundary layer behavior and heat ablation for the infant space program. He created numerous inventions for the various companies and organizations that employed him. And when he came home from a long day’s work, we worked several more hours at home creating gadgets for improving our quality of life. He invented one of the very first automatic sprinkler systems more than fifty years ago. He never profited from it, he made it just for our home.

Anyway, I just wanted to show my appreciation to this great American, my Dear Old Dad (DOD). And Dad, I wonder what the Post Office did with your card?

By an odd coincidence, it happens to be my father's birthday again this year on this day. And even more odd, the post office seems to have lost my card to my father again this year.

My father's health is not as good as it was last year. This year, we are not asking him to travel to spend time with us during my son's spring break. We'll have to make a trip to Seattle some time.

1YAT: Lottery Technology

2006-02-20T03:06:00.000-05:00

One year ago, I wrote possibly my best post ever. It was certainly different. It combined some genuine economic theory with a little drama and even some humor.

Lottery Techonology:

During the 1990’s in Minnesota, the Deparment of Economics was dominated by the theories of Prof. Edward Prescott, who won the Nobel Prize in economics just last year. Prof. Prescott was famous for real business cycles, and for furthering the theory on rational expectations and dynamic general equilibrium. But he had other pet ideas as well. One of them was the lottery technology. Like many ideas of brilliant academics, it was an idea that was both brilliant and daft at the same time. It was brilliant because it nicely transformed a nasty economic model into a nice one in which a bunch of theorems would apply. It was daft because a lottery in the way that Prof. Prescott envisioned it would be nothing you would ever see in a real marketplace (a small detail in the world of economic theory). I'm not saying that Prof. Prescott is daft; I'm saying that the idea of a lottery technology is academic. But I always wondered if someone could find a practical application for this idea. [Link]

Read the whole thing.

My Son’s First Hypotheses

2006-02-19T06:45:00.000-05:00

“Daddy, I think there are more Asian elephants than African elephants.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“All African elephants have ivory tusks and only male Asian elephants have tusks. Poachers want to kill elephants for their tusks. So they probably kill more African elephants than Asian ones.”

I thought that was really very good coming from a seven-year-old.

Remembering Lalu

2006-02-18T00:01:00.000-05:00

One year ago, Amit wrote this interesting account of a discussion he had with someone who lived in Bihar under Lalu.

One tight slap under your ear

I was chatting with a gentleman who knows Lalu Prasad Yadav fairly well. He told me:

You know, Amit, there is one word that you should never mention in front of Lalu Prasad Yadav: development. If you even whisper "development" in front of him, he will give you one tight slap under your ear. He hates that word.

If someone says to him, "Laluji, let's build a road," Lalu will reply, "you build a road in your house if you want. No roads will be built in Bihar." Lalu is in power because Bihar isn't developed, and he knows it. It is in his interest to keep the people uneducated and poor.

So at villages, he will tell the people this: "So you want a road? Ok, I'll build a road. Then the big men will come from cities and build factories here, and they will take your land and they will exploit you and make you work and you will be like slaves. So tell me, do you want a road? If you want a road, I will build it."

And of course, all those people in the villages are uneducated, who know of industry only from hearsay and myth, so they say, "No roads. We don't want roads." And Lalu says, "Janta doesn't want roads. No roads."

Hopefully when the election results are out, Lalu's reign will end.
But, I ask this gentleman, will the next guy try to develop the state, or will he make the same calculations as Lalu? The gentleman sighs, gently. We stare into our respective glasses of beer, which glisten under artificial light.[Link]

I recalled reading an earlier post in which Amit had said that kidnapping was a growth industry in Bihar, (and not rocket science – who would have guessed with a genius like Lalu running the state).

Anyway I wrote the following joke in an email to Amit:

Those Bihari kidnappers lack imagination. They should kidnap that famous politician Lalu Prasad Yadav …and hold Bihar ransom lest they release him!

A Modest Suggestion Toward Gender Equality

2006-02-17T08:48:00.000-05:00

How do you feel about gender inequality? Do you think that if that is a part of some other culture we should respect it make no comments about it? Or do you think that gender inequality anywhere is reprehensible and cultures that practice it are fundamentally flawed?

In the previous post, some commenters suggested that I was insensitive to other cultures by joking about it. I suppose that is a valid criticism. But I really wish that women in all cultures could enjoy freedom and it bothers me when I see women discriminated against. I sometimes use subtle humor to make my points instead of direct arguments.

My feeling is that gender inequality is unjust. I would want women everywhere to have the same rights as men. But I understand that various cultures have their taboos that make it difficult for gender equality to be a reality.

In some cultures, the men apparently have too much testosterone running in their veins. They see a woman’s uncovered face and they cannot help ravaging her. This is a serious problem for gender equality. One potential remedy for this situation is to place a sheet over the women so no man can see her. But this is absurd. A much more practical solution is just to put blindfolds on the men.

This is my modest suggestion for these testosterone-challenged societies: on even numbered years, the men wear blindfolds and women wear whatever. On odd number years, women where burqas and men wear whatever. It is fair – there is no gender discrimination over time.

But you might say this is an asinine suggestion. Possibly, but is it any more asinine than forcing half of the population to wear something like this:

1YAT: Too Much Ravioli

2006-02-16T18:08:00.000-05:00

Too Much Ravioli:

My six-year-old son only likes a few foods: muffins, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pizza, and ice cream. This makes it difficult when we travel since my wife and I have grown tired of eating pizza. We have persuaded him that ravioli is kind of like mini pizza, but he still greatly prefers the real thing.

Last night we went to a very nice Italian restaurant and he ate a small portion of ravioli. Afterwards, we went for dessert and my son had ice cream, which he greatly enjoyed. Later he complained that his tummy hurt. “Did you eat too much ice cream?” I asked. “No, I did not eat too much ice cream. I ate too much ravioli.” I beamed with fatherly pride: already he understands the concept of opportunity cost.

On a completely unrelated subject, I found this photo of Irfan Pathan and his family. I am struck by the enormous resemblance between mother and daughter - I literally cannot tell them apart. I wonder if Irfan's sister does any sport?

Health Saving Accounts

2006-02-16T05:54:00.000-05:00

President Bush in his State of the Union address pushed for Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) to help reduce medical expenditure. HSAs have gotten a mixed reception from the blogosphere. The current way we do health care in the U.S. is very expensive and a move to put more of the burden of spending on the individual should reduce costs, but it also might increase risk.

The main health risk that individuals would face if they self-insure is chronic disease: diabetes, HIV, cardio-vascular, and cancer are the big ones here. These diseases pose a serious problem for private health insurance. I wrote an essay about that last year.

A year ago, I wrote Dual Insurance for Health Care. It is a good essay about the problems associated with private medical insurance and how we could mitigate those problems. Here is an excerpt:

A good example of private insurance as it should work is private automobile insurance. If I have a car, I am required by law to provide proof of liability insurance. I just show up at the insurance office and ask for a quote. They type in the information into their computer and determine what premium would cover my expected annual automobile insurance cost. Private insurance does one thing well, computing my expected payout. They charge this amount, plus a little commission, and they pay out the actual payout. Simple.

Now suppose a person comes into the insurance office and says “I need auto insurance.” “Why certainly, what type of car do you have?” asks the agent. “I don’t have a car anymore. I totaled it this morning. That’s why I need auto insurance.” This guy isn’t getting any private insurance. He needs social insurance. [Link]

Coincidentally, there were some interesting articles on Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) recently in the Washington Post and on Econlog.

Washington Post:

Health savings accounts are ostensibly supposed to fix the health system. Right now, tax rules subsidize company-provided health insurance, but they're less generous toward out-of-pocket medical payments; as a result, company health plans pay most bills and patients have no incentive to shop around for the best bargain. Health savings accounts end this tax bias. Anyone who buys an insurance policy with a deductible of $1,050 or more can open an account and save $5,250 a year toward out-of-pocket health costs, tax-free. This will shift control of medical spending into the hands of consumers, who will discipline overpriced hospitals and clinics.

Or so goes the theory. In practice, probably less than half of all health spending outside Medicaid and Medicare would be affected by the new consumer-driven discipline. Many hospital stays cost more than any deductible, so consumers would have no incentive to bargain; emergency-room patients aren't in a fit state to negotiate prices with their doctors. But consider an even more basic question: Is the ostensible reason for health savings accounts the real one?

[…]

In sum, health savings accounts are not just about ending the tax bias in favor of traditional company health plans. The administration is proposing a new kind of 401(k), and using it as an inducement to quit low-deductible insurance. Rich people, who gain most from the tax breaks on saving, will be first to sign on; healthy people, who subsidize sicker people in company health plans, will be right behind them. Their exit may force traditional health plans into a death spiral. The loss of the subsidy from healthy workers will drive premiums up, which will drive more healthy people into health savings accounts, which will drive premiums up further. [Link]

Econlog:

First of all, when he says that $5,250 is too much money to shelter, I totally disagree. To start with, I think that deductibles ought to be at least $5000. Moreover, I think people need to accumulate a lot of money in health savings accounts if they're going to be able to afford health care when they get old. Unless you want to count on Medicare, which if it were a private firm would be declared bankrupt, with its CEO under investigation for financial fraud.

And if traditional health plans--which are not real health insurance--go into a death spiral, why is that not a good thing? Let people buy catastrophic insurance instead. Let the government focus on paying for health care for the poor and the really expensively sick, instead of doling out tax subsidies for employer-sponsored prepaid health plans.

Another point that I would make is that the more you make a fetish out of taxing the rich, the more likely you wind up being opposed to anything that might increase private saving. You can preach about progressivity and you can preach about the need for increased saving, but not in the same sermon.

My problems with HSA's are more that I have a general aversion to programs that are beloved by wonks and operate through the tax system. Maybe that makes them politically clever, but I think you lose a lot in terms of consumer clarity and economic efficiency.

Finally, I worry that special savings buckets might create more substitution than net saving. People who would have saved the money anyway in other accounts put the money into HSA's because they get a better after-tax return. Not whole lot of net benefit there. [Link]

Also there is the Becker-Posner blog - a good discussion but not very quotable.

The current American health system, where most people get insurance from their employers, is the Ferrari plan (based on this analogy). Single payer health care advocates are pushing for the Yugo plan but most people see this as a really bad idea. I think it would be best to go something closer to the Accord plan, with a Bajaj plan for the poor, but I think the free market will not work so well for health care unless some provisions are made. I will explain.

The idea of HSAs is that we can self-insure most of the less expensive medical conditions. In theory, this is exactly right. We could be much more economical about health care if we each paid for it out of our own pockets. We could force health care costs down by shopping around for a better deal.

But opponents of HSAs have a valid point: these accounts might make it easier for firms to basically dump health care. What might happen is that firms will economize by raising the deductible. Since HSAs give the same tax benefits that employers get for offering health care, this would seem to be a move from the Ferrari plan to the Accord plan. But wait! What if you get a major disease like diabetes? What happens then? You’ll be paying maximum co-pays and deductibles every year for life. You’ll end up paying $100,000’s more than your neighbors. It will be exactly like not having insurance on your house and seeing it burn. It would be very bad indeed.

HSAs would work okay for minor medical problems but not for major medical conditions (like cancer) or chronic problems (like diabetes). We still need insurance for these types of problems. Now ordinary health insurance would work fine for short-term medical conditions like broken bones or non-chronic diseases. But I don’t think a private company will do so well in insuring against chronic problems for several reasons:
1. They won’t cover pre-existing conditions. If you are already diagnosed with diabetes, they won’t want you or they will want to charge you more - which is effectively like not having insurance against diabetes.
2. They will want to discriminate against you if you have a bad family history or bad genes. This is reasonable from the company’s point of view – they need to know their risks.
3. Once they know you have a chronic disease, you become a liability to the company. I don’t know about you but I would hate to deal with a company that wishes I were dead. Most of the nice experiences we have with companies stem from the fact that they are profiting from the relationship. Once they are losing money on the relationship – the relationship sours, (think landlord and tenet in a rent controlled apartment).
4. Insurance for chronic disease is an extreme risk for the insurance company. They run the risk that some chronic disease that would just kill you today will be treatable in the future with obscene amounts of money (much like AIDS). This risk could bankrupt the insurance companies.

My feeling is that chronic disease insurance is basically social insurance - it's like the guy above asking for insurance on a car he already destroyed. This is a type of risk is best treated with risk pooling: everyone puts in a piece of his income and each will get back money from this pot according to his medical state – if you have a chronic disease this money will cover (most of) that. If it sounds vaguely Marxian – “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” – it is. But I think this is what most people would want. They don’t want to run the risk of getting a chronic disease and not be covered for it. And this leaves the entire medical industry to be free from government intervention.

This is an important point: we can make a basically free market for health care if we separate the social insurance aspect of our current health care system. We can be free to contract directly with the insurance company of our choice and find the plan that fits our budget: the Accord plan.

Where do HSA’s fit in here? They could be used to cover co-pays and deductibles. Your social insurance would not cover 100% of your medical bills so you might need to add some of your own money. But I agree with Arnold Kling and others: why not just end the deductions for health care and make everything taxable? This seems easier and better than making a new class of savings account.

There is one potential advantage of a special medical account could have (but that the HSA's don’t currently have): the ability to give virtually unlimited credit. The account could be like a credit card with either positive or negative balance. Unlike ordinary credit cards that would limit your debt, this one could be virtually unlimited since presumably no one would really want to run up a huge medical debt unless they needed to. The advantage here is that in an emergency, people could get immediate care without the hospital needing to find out how the patient would pay for this care (an important consideration). People could just show their medical credit cards and get immediate care.

Milton Friedman on Types of Spending

2006-02-15T06:04:00.000-05:00

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. [Link]

Via Nuggets and Aphorisms.

I will make analogy based on this classic piece by Milton Friedman about types of spending.

Suppose you want a new car (or motorized vehicle). What kind of car do you get?
1. A buys a car for A with A’s money: Honda Accord – a good quality car for a nice price.
2. A buys a car for A with B’s money: Ferrari – a great quality car for a ridiculous price
3. A buys a car for B with A’s money: Bajaj – a nice vehicle for the money for a ridiculously low expenditure
4. A buys a car for B with C’s money: Yugo – a piece of junk car worth nothing and costing much more than it is worth

In most cases, the Accord plan works best and the Yugo plan is one of the worst. But you got to watch out for that Ferrari plan: it will really bankrupt a nation!

I am planning a post about health care and this will be part of it. The current health care system in the U.S. is definitely the Ferrari plan.

1YAT: The Exercise Bike

2006-02-11T06:37:00.000-05:00

One year ago today, I wrote the Exercise Bike:

The Exercise Bike

I was riding on my exercise bike trying to solve an economic problem of a personal sort involving over consumption when a thought came to me: “Wouldn’t it be nice if the bike dispensed a twenty dollar bill when I finished exercising?” Perhaps I was thinking that because I was beginning to feel a drop in motivation and money always motives me. But then I thought, who would put the money in the bike? Who would pay me to exercise? My wife might. But then I thought that I might do it myself. Is that rational?

You see, maybe I have a time inconsistency problem. Sometimes I feel very motivated to lose weight and would pay to achieve that goal. Other times I feel lazy and think it’s too much work. Maybe I would rather eat pizza. I call up the pizza guy and ask for delivery. Then I realize “Oh no! All my cash is in the exercise bike!” So I furiously race the pizza guy on my stationary bike to get the cash out before he comes. And months later, when I’ve gotten all of the cash out of the exercise bike, my rational self declares “See, I exercised and I lost weight. The money works!” So do you think people would buy an exercise bike that dispenses cash if they had to put the cash in themselves?

Today, the exercise bike mostly sits idle. Believe me, my wife would gladly put a fortune in an exercise bike like the one above.

From time to time, I might recycle a good post from one year ago with a 1YAT title. Recycling is good for the blog environment.

Altruism in Marriage

2006-02-10T21:55:00.000-05:00

Here is an interesting tidbit:

Altruism may breed better marriages, a new study suggests.

“That’s interesting,” I think, so I read on:

Study participants were asked whether they agreed with statements that define altruism, such as, “I'd rather suffer myself than let the one I love suffer.”

Those who agreed with [this statement] tended to also report happiness with their spouses.

Hmm. What do you want to bet that the ones who didn’t agree with the statement had spouses who weren’t happy with them?

Why Farming is No Fun

2006-02-10T06:43:00.000-05:00

A recent post on the new “The Other Half” blog raises an interesting question: “Why is farming always no fun?” Farmers around the world are always miserable. Many are poor. The rest are destitute. Why is that?

It has to do with the elasticity of demand. The demand curve always slopes downward: people buy more of something if it costs less. But demand is elastic if they buy a whole lot more of something if the price is a little less. For example, the demand for computers has been very elastic. As the price of these things has come down many more people have bought them. The computer industry is relatively fun to be in.

The market for oil is inelastic: if the price drops 10% then people aren’t going to run out and buy SUV’s just like that. So it is much better in that situation to be a monopolist and actually restrict supply. This is what OPEC does and they have lots of fun. If you face an inelastic demand for your product you want to be a monopolist and you want to reduce the quantity of your commodity that is for sale. You sell less but you make much, much more money.

Farmers face inelastic demand. That is good because otherwise the drop in farm prices would mean that people would eat 10 times as much and everyone would weigh 1000 pounds. But it means being a farmer is no fun at all. Over time, farming, like all industries, has become more productive. Farmers can produce more food from a given plot of land with less labor input than their fathers could. This has been great for consumers. This has been hellacious on farmers.

Economics would suggest that farmers should consider other lines of work. Farming is bound to be a declining industry for years to come. Fewer and fewer people will make a living off of the land, and this is good for the economy. This frees up labor to do other things. But it doesn’t do the farmer any good if he was completely unprepared to do anything else.

This was my point of my post on Fallow Minds some months ago. I felt that poverty in India could be drastically reduced if more farmers were able to retrain into skill crafts. And firms might be willing to finance this transition if the former farmer could pay back this investment out of his future earnings.

Aphorism of the Day

2006-02-09T07:50:00.000-05:00

"If you serve a feast of broccoli and carrots, don’t expect many guests."

From The Ergodic Set.

The Ergodic Set

2006-02-08T21:25:00.000-05:00

In a Markov process, an ergodic set is a subset of the measure space that maps to itself. Once you’re in there you cannot escape. All hope is lost.

Somehow, this is the feeling I get when reading some of the posts of the new group blog: How the Other Half Lives. With famous bloggers like Dilip, Uma, Vikrum, Anand, and Shivam, this new blog is bound to attract a lot of attention. But the subject matter seems - well - a bit depressing.

Here are some recent posts:
Suicides of farmers in Vidarbha
India’s newest import: toxic waste
People who eat less that $10 of food in a whole month
Dowry deaths
How to treat beggars

It’s not that these stories are wrong or that they aren’t blog-worthy. It is that taken collectively, there seems to be complete dearth of hope about the “other half” in India. And this is a lie. Many poor people are making a better life for themselves in India. India, which has been a poor country for at least 400 years (and maybe 4000 years), is rapidly becoming a middle class country. This is an amazing story, when you think about it. But there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this transformation in this blog.

I can understand the frustration of a person like Dilip who states, “[In] a rapidly changing India, some people have seen very little change. Strike that: a lot of people have seen very little change.” He wishes that the change would be faster. I wish that too. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make everyone at least middleclass.

Wait – I don’t want that. I don’t want that power. I wouldn’t want anyone to have such power – especially a politician. So maybe we should not be so impatient – it could be worse. The poverty that India has that might be gone in a generation might instead be with India for centuries to come if India asks its politicians to help out the poor.

My complaint is that this blog should, at least once in a while, show the other side. They could occasionally show the Indians who were poor but are now a little less poor: The rickshaw driver who saved up to buy his own Ambassador, the housemaid who sent her daughter to college, the delivery boy who starts his own ramshackle delivery business. These stories do happen. There are stories like this in every nook and corner of India. This is the other half of the “other half”.

I am not saying that stories about dowry deaths and such have no merit – not at all. I think these stories are important and it is important that we read about them. But it is sort of like saying vegetables are important and we should eat them. If you serve a feast of broccoli and carrots, don’t expect many guests.

So please, give us the occasional gulab jamun. Remind us all that poverty is not an ergodic set.

Coordination Failure and Energy Policy

2006-02-06T21:42:00.000-05:00

Should the government have an energy policy? Shouldn’t the free market decide these things? Well there might be a reasonable economic argument for having some government leadership, but it might not be completely convincing. For those who believe that all that the government touches turns to gold, they’ll be easily sold. For those who believe that all that the government touches turns to mud, they’ll be very skeptical. But before I give the argument, let me give some examples of coordination.

A few weeks ago, I noted in this post that workers in India didn’t use shovels because they lacked boots. And no one bought boots because there was no market for shovels. Selling shovels in India was a tough task because you needed to coordinate the market for shovels with the market for boots. I would not say that it is impossible to sell both; it is just more difficult.

Another example of coordination failure comes from the computer industry. People who are familiar with software are probably aware that the Fortran programming language lasted about 20 or 30 years longer than it should have. It wasn’t that there were no alternatives, there were too many. Fortran had an established position. Many people knew how to use it. All computers could run it. There was a big body of canned software that could be inserted into your program. These three factors made Fortran hard to beat. Other languages could have been better if more people knew them and used them but not many knew them and used them.

I remember that Pascal was supposed to be the new language. People were split into various camps. Some believed that Pascal was the next new thing and learned it. Others believed one of the various competitors would be the next new thing. Many people felt the next new thing would be coming in a few years, (which reminds me of a cartoon that went, “I’ll buy a new computer when they stop changing them.”) And some people insisted that some version of Fortran was always going to be the standard. Without coordination, Pascal didn’t really stand a chance and the people who invested in learning it got burned. They produced code that was essentially hieroglyphs later.

Of course, the market eventually did shift. Now, I believe (I am not an expert on software) that Fortran has largely been supplanted by C++. So the market worked in the long run. But like Keynes said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” The transition was slow and it might have been that the transition would have been better if everyone knew when and where the transition would occur. As it was, a lot of people invested in Fortran because they just didn’t know that it would become obsolete.

Suppose for the moment that there were no laws on which side of the road you must drive and people were free to drive on either side. This is kind of what happens in India (at least it seemed like that with the drivers we had). People will spontaneously figure out that they better stick to the most popular side of the road. But then it helps to have right hand drive if you are driving on the left side. And if everyone else in the world drives left hand drive, it might be unfortunate for your auto industry if you drive on the left side.

Well Sweden faced exactly this situation in the 1960’s. The government picked a day (February 3, 1963) and said from that day forward, “we’re driving on the right side.” And that is what happened. It probably was really good for their automobile manufacturer (Volvo). But is this heavy-handed government intervention good public policy? The wiki article explains that one motivation was to reduce the accident rate (Sweden drove left-hand-drive vehicles on the left hand side of the road). This produced a modest short-term benefit and no long term benefit.

We can model the coordination problem as n-player game where n is large. Suppose each play can choose either technology O (original) or technologies A, B, C, D, E, or F. O is old and gives a payoff of 5 units. The other technologies all seem equally promising (but each person has a personal favorite) but you really don’t know what you will get if you play it. If at least 50% play A, the payoff will be between 5 and 15. But the same is true for B, C, D, E, and F; and if you don’t get the 50% threshold, your investment is wasted and you get nothing. You can see that people will stick with the “devil they know” rather than risk getting burned. They all might be much better off if everyone knew to pick any one of these alternatives – but which one? If the government chooses then the risk is that not only will they back the wrong horse, the government will kill any chance to back the right one in later years.

Brazil decided to do something interesting in the 1970’s. Like other countries, they were hit hard by the oil shocks. But they didn’t just sit back. They invested heavily in the production of ethanol. Now it is easy to see the coordination problem associate with ethanol: they needed production plants, they need specialized distribution sites (ordinary gasoline stations had to be modified to prevent water absorption), and they needed to modify the automobiles as well.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, Brazil’s ethanol policy was a big government boondoggle. Oil prices were well below the level needed to make it pay (roughly $50 to $60 a barrel). But now that oil is above $60 a barrel (I read it was up to $66 today) it looks like Brazil lucked out. Or maybe Brazil was smart all along. Or maybe Brazil is still stupid and will find this out in 20 years when they discover that they backed the wrong horse.

On the other hand, we see that Japanese auto makers have developed hybrid technology with their own investment money. This is exciting technology that might evolve into electric cars in ten years. This might be much better than using ethanol. Or maybe hybrids will go along with 8-track tape into the museum of “almost technologies”.

Question 1, “Is it better to say ‘hands off’ and let the market resolve any coordination problem or is it better for the government to show leadership, at least once in a while?”

Question 2, “Should India be trying to copy Brazil’s ethanol production system.” India has the climate for sugar cane – and it is much easier to adopt a proven technology.

My comment is that there is a real difference between ideal government policy and real government policy. In the real world, the government prevents the importation of Brazilian ethanol to protect its investment in corn-based ethanol. Basically, it shows that governments, once shown to have backed the wrong horse, will knee-cap the competition to guarantee that their horse wins anyway.

Other interesting articles: Marginal Revolution, Knowledge Problem, Coyote Blog, Wikipedia on ethanol.

The Stand-In

2006-02-06T05:10:00.000-05:00

My wife was talking to my son:
“While Mommy is away, you have to listen to Daddy and do whatever he tells you to do.”

“Yes, Mommy, Daddy is your stand-in.”

My wife thought that was quite funny. I thought he understood the situation quite well.

One Year Ago

2006-02-05T06:53:00.000-05:00

One year ago I wrote:

On Chocolate and Gold Coins

After deciding to start a blog, I had to think of what to name it. Naturally, the really good names have been taken. For example, I thought the name Instapundit would be a good one for a blog but it turns out that someone already took that one.

Chocolate and gold coins are two of my favorite commodities. And naming a blog that deals with economic issues after commodities makes sense, especially commodities that symbolize consumption and income. However, the name “Chocolate and Gold Coins” refers to something else. It refers to types of writing you might find on this blog. Gold coins are something with intrinsic value. You might find something like that here buried deep under the rubbish if you search long enough. Chocolate is another commodity altogether. It is something to be enjoyed briefly and soon forgotten, like a frivolous but fun piece of writing. There will be more chocolate than gold in this blog. In any case, I hope you find something you like here.

Thus started my decline into madness.
I also wrote this:

Thanks, Amit

Before I post anything else, I must thank Amit Varma [my wife curses him] for encouraging me to start a blog. Who is Amit Varma? I don’t really know...some guy in India I guess. I’ve never met him, but he seems really nice.

Actually, I know quite a little bit about Amit from the several blogs that he keeps. He is a poohbah at Wisden/Cricinfo and writes an excellent blog on cricket (a sport involving a bat, a ball, and lots and lots of time) called 23yards. He also has a blog called The Middle Stage that deals with politics and culture that usually has something interesting that Amit trolled up through his search of the Internet. But Amit’s crown jewel of his blog empire is his blog on India called India Uncut. It is an enormously entertaining site filled with good writing and good links. If you’re curious about India and Indian blogs, that’s the place to start.

Mostly, I know Amit as that fellow who writes back. I have written many letters to many people, always very polite, and rarely do they respond. Oh well, people are busy, and I probably write to the busiest people. Amit is very busy. Yet he almost always responds with a nice note. I appreciate that.

There is much I don’t know about Amit. He plans to write a blog about cows. “A blog on cows?” you ask. I have no idea. I could ask him I guess…but it is much more fun to speculate. My conjecture is that Amit likes excellent cappuccinos and excellent chai. He is a connoisseur: he must have fresh milk. Therefore he keeps two cows as pets in his Mumbai apartment. And naturally he would want to blog about something like that.

Update: Amit has generously supplied his blog knowledge to the task of upgrading the look and feel of this site. Doesn't it look great? What a guy!

Yes indeed, Amit Varma of India Uncut designed my blog template. Who else (besides Amit and maybe his wife) could say that?
I wonder how his cows are doing.

Yes, this is my blog-anniversary. And I should thank everyone who ever commented on my blog or ever linked to my blog. Here is a partial list of people who did at one time or other comment on my blog. If I left you out – just leave a note and I’ll gladly amend. I you have never commented on this blog and I accidently included you on the list then leave a note in the comments and I will puzzle over what to do.
There’s one or two in this list that might surprise you!

Half Sigma

Steve Levitt of Freakonomics Blog

Abhi of Sepia Mutiny

Amit of India Uncut

Arnab the Greatbong

Charukesi Ramadurai many times

Curious Gawker many times

Gaurav Sabnis a few times

Nitin Pai a few times

Patrix many times

Ravikiran Rao

Saket Vaidya a few times

Sujatha (Bangalore)

Sunil (Seattle) many times

Vikram Arumilli

Anand of Locana

Arzan Sam Wadia

Ashish Hanwadikar

Dilip D'Souza

Kaps

Kunal Sawardekar

Sonia Faleiro

Sourin Rao

Uma of Indiawriting

Vikrum Sequeira

Aditya Bidikar

Anand of Locana

Andrew of Anyletter

Ashish Gupta many times

Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan

Chandon V

Deba (Chennai)

Jai Arjun of Jabberwock

Jwaala

Life - More or Less Live

Madhu Nair

Adhisht Khanna

Minal of Granger Gab

Mihn-Duc Phan

Rahul Anantharaman

Ravi (Gujarat)

Sameer Marathe

Sandeep Menon

Saurabh Jayawant

Sourin Rao

Shrikanth

Spanish in India

Sue at Dutch Diary

Suman Kumar

Truman

@mit (Minneapolis)

Sometimes It's Peaceful

Saket Vaidya

Patrix

Suhail Kazi

T. A. Abinandanan

Anil Kandangath

Suman Kumar

The Common Room

Ravisez

Ranjit Shinde

Ravi of Carpe Diem

Aishwarya of Dehli

Ravikiran Rao

SloganMurugan many times

Nilu

Thennavan

Rajeshwari
Raj Mehta

Froginthewell many times

Sean of Australia

Emily Oster of Freakonomics fame

And who could forget Yum Yum

I believe Sunil holds the record for the most (and best) comments but an accurate tally might surprise me.

There have been many occasions where I have been very close to chucking the whole blog. Even yesterday, I thought I should spend my time doing more productive things. But maybe some friendships will eventually form. I need to make more effort in that respect. Anyway, it will be a day-by-day decision.

Thirteen Years Ago

2006-02-02T06:56:00.000-05:00

Thirteen years ago, I had just finished taking my macro mid-term exam. I was in a relaxed mood. Some other students were going to go out for beer. I did not care to join them.

I had another idea. I decided to go up to the prettiest girl in class and say, “I know of an Indian restaurant near where I live. Would you like to go?” It was quite out-of-character for me to do such a thing. And maybe it was quite out of character for her to agree.

We walked together to the bus stop. I was eager to learn more about this lady from Madras. I made some small talk. I asked her what the game of cricket was like. I’m sure now she wished she had said, “It’s a big bore. Don’t ever watch it.”

We went to the house where I was boarding and got my car. I loved my car. It was just two years old and in mint condition. I was proud that I had a decent-looking car. I opened the door for her like a gentleman. Then I we went to “Delites of India” (sic) on Lake Street (Minneapolis).

I am forever grateful that Delites of India turned out to be the right kind of Indian restaurant. It was a nice mom-and-pop type of place that served very nice food in a homey atmosphere. Well, homey might not be exactly the right word. It was decorated with pictures of Guru Nanak Dev and Sai Baba and they played bhajans non-stop. But somehow I thought the place was quite charming.

I had no idea what to order. She was very reluctant to recommend anything for fear that I might not like it. She recommended something safe in the end: alloo channa. They made it very well. I've never seen that dish anywhere else.

We talked for two hours that evening. We talked about Madras and St. Louis and friends we had years ago. She talked about the nice times she had on the beach in Madras and how nice it was to be near a large body of water. I told her about the crazy Indian roommate I had years ago and the many battles he fought with his Chinese suite-mate. We had a splendid evening.

Then I drove her home. She didn’t know how to get home so we got lost. She told me later that she was very nervous. But I found her street on the map and got there with no more problems. I smiled and said that I had a very nice time. She smiled and said she did too.

I drove home feeling just wonderful.

Update
As you might have guessed, my wife and I always do something special on the anniversary of our first date. At first, we always went back to Delites of India. After moving here, we usually went to an Indian restaurant. Last night we did something different: Lebanese take-out.

Take-out doesn't sound romantic but my wife had it all planned. I orderred the food. She picked it up on the way home. She asked me to go get a bottle of wine. She laid out the nice tablecloth and put out some candles. And we had a very nice meal together.

She remembered a detail from that first date that I had not. Usally the waiters were the owners: Mr. and Mrs. Arora. But that night it was their daughter who waited on us. And she kept coming to take our order and we were so busy chatting about this and that we had not looked at the menu so we kept saying: "another five minutes, please." That apparently went on for a half an hour. She was probably getting annoyed with us, but well, who cares.

She thought the picture on the wall was this Sai Baba, but I clearly remember the other fellow. Maybe both were up there (I don't recall the other picture). There were also many pictures of deities on the wall: Krishna, Shiva, and others. This along with the clearly Hindu religious music probably made this restaurant very Hindu (and Sikh with Guru Nanak). I doubt many muslims came to eat there.

But I have to admit that this was one thing I really liked about the Aroras: they were comfortable as they were and were not going to "please the masses" by compromising. They were vegetarians and they served only vegetarian food. They were Hindus and they only played Hindu religious music. If others didn't like that, they didn't care. They weren't profit maximizing, they were utility maximizing. I respect that.

Update 2
With a little googling, I discovered that the waitress that night was Teena Arora and she teaches Indian cooking in San Mateo, CA. I hope her parents are doing well, they were such nice people.

Missing Markets

2006-02-01T07:50:00.000-05:00

My post last week on restaurants had one interesting aspect: the market for restaurants was missing for centuries not because of some missing technology but because the culture did not accept it. People are sometimes unwilling to pay for services that they benefit from if they feel that these things should be not be sold in the marketplace.

What markets are missing today because people just won’t pay for these things even though they might benefit from having them? I can think of a few examples:

1. Pay toilets. This is a business plan that has been floated and failed a few times. It seems obvious that if there were money in maintaining the toilets, we could all benefit from having clean ones on demand for a fee. But people think: “Why should I have to pay to go to use a toilet?” Also, people fear that they will pay the coin and still get a dirty toilet. I did see this system work (on a small scale) in Zurich, Switzerland in the 1980’s.
2. Toll roads. Yes, they exist, but the model is not popular. People want free roads. The inconvenience associated with paying to toll is a great factor here: I hate to stop and wait at a booth just to pay a 50 cent toll and then I need to fish around form some loose change. A more efficient payment method might make this a workable business plan.
3. Medical care in the U.S. People have money to buy medical insurance but wish that some employer would just give it as a “gift” instead. Tax incentives partially explain this situation but not entirely.
4. Middle-class private secular schools. The local government in each district in the U.S. taxes the local residents and provides schooling for no charge to everyone. Some of these schools are not that good. It would seem that many people would be better off forgoing this “free” education for their children and simply sending their kids to good private schools. However, this market has never really gotten off the ground.
5. Career guidance. There are people you can hire to help guide your investments but there is no market for people who can help you choose your biggest investment: your career choice. I think that there could be a service for people who look at your abilities and try to guide you to a good choice of profession for a fee. But this business plan has never gotten to the runway.

Can you think of other business plans that have failed because people just won’t pay for that sort of thing even though maybe they would benefit if they could and did pay for it?

Foot Massage

2006-01-27T07:17:00.000-05:00

Parents always take great pride in their children. But the things that give rise to that pride might be hard to explain. Perhaps it helps if you understand that a parent naturally wants to see a bit of himself or herself in the child.

My son is a very nice child. My wife worries that he is just too nice. She says, “He’s a sadhu. He needs to learn some street smarts or people will take advantage of him.”

My wife is suspicious of his friend H. She thinks that H very short and seems to have “small boy syndrome”: a tendency to whine about being picked on and a desire to pick on others. H is the type of boy a mother will worry will take advantage of a nice boy. He will start asking favors and then making demands. I think H is just a pretty normal boy and a good friend of my son’s.

The other day, an incident happened between my son and H (not a bad incident as you will see). My son told me about it and I told my wife. My wife was incredulous. She asked my son to explain. She came back positively beaming. She was so proud of my son.

So what happened? My son’s ankle hurt (growing pains). He asked H to give him a foot-massage just like daddy would give him. H did not know how to do this but my son taught him how.

Compare with this story of what made me proud of my son.

So here is a quiz: which parent –me or my wife–likes getting foot massages and which one is most likely to overeat ice cream?

Caste Mobility and Trickery

2006-01-27T05:33:00.000-05:00

The other day, Half-Sigma posted a link to an older post of his about Jewish people in Europe in ancient times. He pointed out something obvious: no one really needed to be Jewish.

During the 2000 years of the Diaspora, it sucked to be Jewish. Not only were you discriminated against by the Christians, you also had to follow strict Jewish laws that took all the fun out of life. Yet it was pretty easy for Jews to simply give up the faith and blend in with goyish society. Remember, this was the old days before there were zillions of records about your existence. All a Jewish person had to do in the old days was just walk to the next town, tell everyone he was Catholic, and that was it.

[Link]
Of course, most Jewish people never did that or else there would be no Jews today. Most Jews put up with the mistreatment because they believed in their religion and because they were loyal to their family and extended family. But some people did leave.

This raises an interesting question: why didn’t outcaste Hindus simply move to another village, change their names, and become high-caste Hindus? Obviously it wouldn’t be that easy, but then there was enormous incentive. Was the punishment for impersonating someone of higher caste death? Otherwise, why not go for it?

Sure, people might have been suspicious of that outside person. Who really knew what his background was? Maybe he brought his mom and dad along but who knew about them either. But if he was marriageable and a high-caste Hindu had a daughter and no money for dowry, there might be a deal. The trickster might be willing marry someone of high caste for little or no dowry, and he gains a wife and a family of people who will back his case as a bona fide high-caste Hindu. In a couple of generations, everyone will have forgotten that the trickster was of dubious origin.

When Islam came to India, low-caste and outcaste Hindus had the opportunity to simply leave Hinduism altogether. Therefore, why did some stay? They weren’t allowed into the temples. They were treated badly and had the worst jobs. Why put up with it?

Some obviously did leave and others stayed. The curious thing here is that even if there were no actual difference genetically between high-caste Hindus and low-caste Hindus thousands of years ago, after thousands of years of self-selection there might actually be differences. On the positive side, low-caste Hindus might be intensely loyal to family. On the negative side, they might have inherited a lack of ambition- if this is inheritable- since that would be one characteristic that their ancestors seemed to have had. And for high-caste Hindus, there might be a tendency to be ethically challenged because some of their ancestors were probably cheats. But, then again, Australia was founded by convicts and look where they are today.

The main question I have is, “What really kept the low-caste Hindus from pretending to be high-caste.” What was the enforcement mechanism and how effective was it. My guess is that more trickery took place than you might have guessed because trickery, if it is any good, is always unseen.

Greatbong’s R-Day Post

2006-01-26T06:54:00.000-05:00

Today is Republic Day in India and since I have nothing much to write about I might as well point you to an excellent piece posted by Arnab the Greatbong.

He must be very proud to have had a grandfather who was a hero of the independence movement and feel a great sense of indebtedness to him for all that his grandfather suffered so that Arnab the Greatbong and others in India could be free.

A Brief History of Restaurants

2006-01-24T06:52:00.000-05:00

Ravikiran Rao who writes an interesting blog called the Examined Life wrote to me to ask about the origin of the restaurant in the west. He wondered how it came about. He could think of several cultural roadblocks that would hinder the starting of restaurants in India and he wondered how it evolved in the West.

There were restaurants in ancient Roman times. There is evidence in Pompeii of some restaurants. But there were no restaurants in Europe after the Roman times until about 250 years ago and they didn’t really become popular until after the French Revolution.

What factors hindered the formation of restaurants? A restaurant doesn’t seem like a high tech business. Anyone who can cook could set up a few tables in and sell food, right? But this business plan was a tough sell initially.

First, restaurant cooking is different than home cooking. You need to operate at a much larger scale and being a chef is specialized skill. However, there were chefs in Europe dating back many hundreds of years ago. They could have been employed by restaurants (at least in theory) but they were not. Many belonged to guilds that specialized in catering. Caterers would cook for special events like weddings and royal events. So people would have opportunities to eat restraurant-quality food. They just would not pay for it.

This is an important point: the tradition was that the diner never paid for food – the host pays. People might have liked to “eat out” but they were expecting an invitation. There are many examples today of markets that just don’t happen because people expect someone else to pay. For example, we expect someone else (an employer for example) to pay for our health care. Also, we are not comfortable with paying for an adopted child or for a vital transplant organ. Food seems to us to be a natural thing to pay for but people rarely (maybe never) paid for food 250 years ago.

Inns served food but I believe it was always included in the price of the room. This came with the culture of “host pays for food”. I think you can kind of understand this issue if you have ever flown on an airline that asked you to pay for your food (which some do). You think, “Hey, I’m captive here. I have no choice. It is unfair to make me have to pay for something like that.” So I doubt Inns really sold meals to the locals because they really weren’t in the business of selling food.

One factor hindering the restaurant model was that in the absence of restaurants, alternatives sprung up. Many people with disposable income hired their own cooks. Then they wanted to invite friends and family over because the cook was paid for, they might as well use him. This lead to a culture of “food barter”. People would invite business associates and politicians to dinner frequently.

Another establishment that served the purpose of a restaurant was a private club. Clubs were male-only and were by invitation only. Clubs were designed for meeting and drinking and discussing politics, but they later started serving meals as well.

The first restaurant in modern Europe opened in Spain in the early 18th Century. A. Boulanger started the first French restaurant in 1765 and also coined the word “restaurant” which derives from a French word for “something that restores” (a refreshment). His business was immediately sued by the trade guilds for copyright infringement. Apparently almost all recipes were copyrighted by these food guilds. But the court ruled in Boulanger’s favor and his business survived. And it proved to others that there could be a market for this kind business.

The French Revolution had an enormous impact on the French restaurant scene. Basically, it put out of business many hundreds of chefs who worked for the nobles. It also destroyed the food guilds. So many chefs with enormous skills needed some way of making a living. The restaurant model was already in existence. The revolution acted like a great supply shift. It lowered to cost of chefs and made it profitable to open hundreds of little restaurants. And like Say’s Law: supply created its own demand. In this case, the supply of restaurants effectively marketed the idea of dining in a restaurant and the culture of “host pays” was replaced with “diner pays”.

Apparently, these restaurants quickly spread throughout Europe and to America as well. The first restaurant in the U.S. started in Boston in 1794. Naturally, it was French.

Once restaurants came about, there was a natural venue for restaurants: the hotel. You had the captive guests that you had to feed anyway, so why not get double duty out of your dining hall by offering it as a restaurant to the locals? So once the culture of paying for food developed, it began replacing the older barter for food system and “host pays” system.

As disposable income rose, more people had the money to occasionally dine out. The culture of taking a girl to a restaurant for a date didn’t start until the early 20th century. A big factor for the growth of the restaurant industry was cheap transportation.

Book Learning and Common Sense

2006-01-22T10:45:00.000-05:00

My son is extremely gifted in the ability to learn from books. He reads something once and he has memorized it. He reads books about whales and dinosaurs and can rattle of names and facts about 100’s of these creatures that you have probably never heard of before.

In general, he is gifted academically. He does well in all subjects.

However, my son seems curiously deficient in common sense. This became painfully obvious when I observed him yesterday play a game of basketball. As my wife put it, “He just doesn’t get it yet.” If we gave him a book on basketball, he would probably be an expert in the strategy in no time. But in just playing the game, he is not picking it up at all. He lacks the ability to see the world around him and make some sense out of what he sees.

Let me give some examples:
1. No one would ever pass the ball to him because he would never make much effort to be “open”- free of a defender; and he was always in a faraway corner too far from the other player to pass to him.
2. He would never get a rebound even though he is the tallest child there because he wouldn’t get up close to the basket. Also he wouldn’t jump up as the ball fell to get above the other kids who were jumping.
3. He never seemed to figure out that if he simply threw the ball in the air, the chance that the other team would get it was better than 50-50.
4. He didn’t figure out that if he spread out his arms, he would make it harder for other kids to pass the ball.

Surely he will learn over time. He isn’t stupid and he can learn easily. But what I thought was odd is that he would need to be taught all of these things. I would have thought that he could pick some of this up from seeing what other kids were doing and what things were working for the other team.

It occurred to me that there might be two kinds of intelligence going on here. One kind of intelligence helps you learn in a formal setting but another helps you learn in an informal setting. A person who is excellent at extracting information from books could be a great academic but a person who is gifted with the ability to simply observe and make reasonable inferences might be better at running a business. I also would guess that a pure book-learning academic would probably never win any major prizes since that spark of genius seems to start with a great intuitive hunch.

I hope that over time my son begins developing the kind of common sense that will aid him in situations in which his book learning doesn’t help. I think common sense is something you can probably learn over time. But maybe one has to have a bit of natural ability in this area to be truly gifted.

Well, in any case, I will love my son just as much.

Pathan is Now An All-Arounder

2006-01-21T07:09:00.000-05:00

The second test at Faisalabad has started and something interesting has happened. No, it isn’t that Pakistan is clobbering the Indian bowling attack – that was expected. And I expect the Indians will return the favor when their time comes to bat.

No, what is interesting is that India, for the first time since facing Bangladesh in 2000, has gone in with a 5-bowler attack. This means that Irfan Pathan is now an all-arounder: he will bat seventh and take the spot of a specialty batsman. And guess which specialty batsman?

The test also, in effect, marks the end of Sourav Ganguly’s illustrious test cricket career. If India continues with Pathan as all-arounder, there will be no spot for Ganguly in the squad.

Now this is speculation, but I can guess what the row between Dravid and Ganguly was in the last test. Dravid originally selected Ganguly to open and Ganguly felt he should have been warned that he was been put into this new position before the eve of the Test (like Ganguly warned any of his makeshift openers?). Dravid sensed that if Ganguly failed as opener, Dravid would be blamed for ending Ganguly’s career. He simply decided then and there that he would open. And then it dawned on Ganguly that he had copulated with himself. That is when he got into the big argument with Dravid. But Dravid had made up his mind: he didn’t really think Ganguly could respect his authority so he wasn’t going to change his mind.

But now Dravid has painted himself in a corner. If Yuvraj does well at number 5, can Dravid get back into the middle order? This is very interesting.

Love on a Railroad Berth

2006-01-20T15:53:00.000-05:00

I am reading an interesting and sometimes funny book about India by novelist Khushwant Singh called We Indians (1982). I am skipping around a bit and, for some reason I skipped to the chapter titled, “Sex in Indian Life.”

Mr. Singh doesn’t really give much insight in this area; he focuses on one remarkable anecdote from his experience. He was riding in a sleeper car probably similar to the one my family took to Mysore. A newlywed came on board and requested that he move to an upper berth so they could sleep together. He obliged. And then he gives a pretty graphic description of how one couple spent their wedding night.

The couple was apparently both well educated. He was a junior professor and she was a teacher. Neither was particularly good looking, but that might be in the eye of the beholder. They were complete strangers: they spent at least an hour trying to get to know one another and their parents and such.

Then it was time to “get down to business.” They did the nasty right there in the bottom berth while Mr. Khushwant Singh was looking the entire time. Note: if you ask strangers in India to kindly look away while you and your spouse perform sex acts, they will likely sneak a peek at you anyway. Don’t expect privacy.

The scene he describes is possibly the least erotic consensual sex act in literature. It was more like going to the bathroom. No clothes were removed – no need. I learned that women who wear saris often went without undergarments at that time (1980’s). The “hai Ram” at the climax was a curious touch.

At 3:00 A.M., the conductor rudely awakened the couple: they had come to their stop and had to disembark immediately. He had fallen asleep with his bare bum exposed. She was similarly indiscreet. They quickly dressed and left; and then stopped the train to reboard and find a lost earring.

Another male passenger on the adjoining berth sighed, “It is love.” Mr. Singh argued with him: “What kind of love is that, they are strangers.” He also expressed disgust at their free sex show. But the other passenger was in no mood to argue. I got the impression that the other passenger also viewed the free sex show and greatly appreciated it.

I am sure that the incident he describe happened but I have to think that the couple was perhaps a bit odd.

So here is an ethical question for you: if a couple joins you in a railroad berth or some other public place and asks you to look away while they do the nasty and you agree, do you have the ethical duty to look away or are they being silly for even asking the question?

When Does the Past Become Irrelevant?

2006-01-20T06:57:00.000-05:00

The comment thread in this previous post took a decidedly negative and disappointing turn. I was reminded of something I read on Suhail Kazi’s blog just a few days ago about Godwin’s law: “As a comment thread gets longer, the probability of someone making a reference to Hitler or the holocaust approaches one.”

But ignoring this for the time being, the question is, “Do things that happened very long ago matter?” For example, in the sentence: “5000 years ago, X happened, and it this is relevant for us today,” what statement could we place in the “X” box and make the statement truthful? While I agree that knowing history is useful, what fact from 5000 years ago, if we knew it, would change our ideas or our opinions about anyone living today?

If, for example, the high caste Hindus came from Siberia 5000 years ago and enslaved everyone else and their descendants still are the high-caste Hindus and the descendants of the enslaved are still the low-caste Hindus, then does this fact have relevance to caste relations today? My feeling is that whether these people came from outside India 5000 years ago or 50000 years ago (when India was empty) is not so important. Intuitively, I think that things long ago are just less relevant.

But what is exactly is the rule here? When does the past become irrelevant? Or how quickly does the "relevance factor" decline with age?

Invasion of the Bread People

2006-01-19T06:23:00.000-05:00

Here is a fascinating post (Sepia Mutiny) and discussion of some genealogical analysis of castes in India. Before I discuss it, though, I would like to make some points about the “Aryan Invasion Theory”.

There are some people in India who, for some reason, think it really matters to India today what might have happened to their culture thousands of years ago. And, for some reason, many of these people have their hearts set on a notion of denying that India was ever invaded and conquered by some Proto-Indo-European people (henceforth referred to as the bread people). We know that India was conquered by the British, and by various Moslem people, and even invaded by the Greeks (Alexander) so why would it break your heart if you found out that the bread people invaded and conquered India?

I don’t have a dog in this fight but I do have an opinion: at the end of the day, there is no way to deny the invasion of the bread people. Why? There are two reasons: there is bread in India and there is the bread people’s language.

These deniers like to create a straw man argument: there is no archeological evidence for any invasion. You mean there is no archeological evidence for bread making in India? There is no archeological evidence for Sanskrit in India? What else would you be looking for? We don’t really know what else the bread people had besides bread and Sanskrit so absence of anything else really proves nothing.

The genetic evidence above seems to suggest that most of the distant ancestors (I think about 95%) of all caste members in India can be traced right back to India. This is presented as a counter argument to the idea that the bread people invaded and conquered India. This is nonsense. In fact, I would bet that 75% of the genes of the bread people – once they got to India – could be traced to India. Let me explain.

Let us suppose the bread people discovered this wonderful new grain and new food that gave them a nutritional advantage over other tribes. Over time, the bread people would have grown more prosperous and numerous than other tribes in the area. There would have been the temptation to conquer the neighboring tribes and take over their land so they could grow more wheat and make more bread.

Suppose they succeeded. Typically, there are more conquered people than conquerors. The conquerors would have wanted the land but there would be too few of their own people to work that land. There would have been plenty of the conquered to work the land. But if they didn’t speak the same language, how could they work together? It could be that the conqueror would think, “There are more of them than there are of us, let us learn their language.” Or he might have thought, “If I keep whipping him, he will eventually catch my meaning.” My guess, “Everyone learns the language of the guy with the whip.”

So the language spreads and the knowledge of wheat growing and bread making spreads. Does that mean that the bread people just wiped out the other people? No. It never happens. The conqueror counts on the conquered to be his peasants and other jobs as well. What happens is that the conqueror begins noticing that some of the younger female peasants are kind of cute. As Amit would say, fun happened, (from the conqueror’s viewpoint). Mixing of genes happened. After a few hundred years, a new ethic group happened. If you don’t think that could happen – just look at Mexico.

This process repeats itself many times over. One fine day, the bread people arrive at modern day Pakistan. By this time, they have already crossed though all of Persia. Already, there has been much mixing of genes and maybe mixing of cultures as well. By this time, the bread people look to everyone like just another Indian ethnic group and most of their ancestors could be traced right back to India. They would have had tanned skin. They would have had dark hair. They would look very much like Pakistanis do today.

The invasion deniers will argue that maybe the bread simple passed from one people to another by trade and the language along with it. Both of these are far-fetched but the second claim is ridiculous. Can you image a people saying, “Our language stinks. Let’s learn their language?” But even the idea of trade leading to bread making is not so likely – there is no evidence that this happened in ancient times. Just look at how reluctant South Indians are to eat bread today when they can get it in the market. Can you imagine how hard it would be to convince a people who never ate bread before to change their whole economy from some other grain production to wheat and bread production?

Here is an interesting point: if there is no bread in south India and since the Dravidian languages are clearly not the language of the bread people, why do people think that the high-caste Hindus in the South were bread people? It is ridiculous. If these people were bread people they would have brought their bread and their language with them. There ample evidence that they brought neither: the South still speaks Dravidian and they still don’t eat bread (for the most part). Therefore, I would guess that the high-caste Hindus in the South are as Dravidian as anyone else.

There is really no evidence that the bread people brought the caste system. First, they didn’t bring anything like a caste system to any of the other places that the bread people conquered. Second, the caste system exists in the South where the bread people never came. My guess is that the caste thing was always an Indian thing. The bread people were unable and/or unwilling to change it much like the British.

Also, there is little evidence that Hinduism, as it is practiced today, originated outside of India. In fact, quite the contrary, it almost could not have originated outside of India. What ever was the religion in India 5000 years ago, it has vanished long ago. The Hinduism of today is probably a complete rework of the ancient belief as a reaction to Buddhism. And since Vishnu and Shiva are both worshipped in the South, which the bread people never conquered, my guess is that these two are both 100% Indian deities (if that matters to you).

So who are the Dravidians and where did they come from? Their dark skin indicates that they have probably been in India a long time – maybe 30000 years. Their round eyes indicates that they are not related to any of the east Asian people and are probably related to the people who later settled in Europe. But not too much can be made of this – the Europeans and the Indians probably don’t share any common ancestors for 30000 years.

If anything I have written breaks anyone’s heart, I apologize. But I think that if Indians spent less time thinking about where they have been and more time thinking about where they are going, they would be further along by now. (This last idea was suggested by this comment).

Medical Condition

2006-01-18T19:05:00.000-05:00

Ever since I have come back from India, I haven’t been feeling well. I have frequent headaches. Sometime I feel shortness of breath. And there is always a persistent discomfort in my abdomen: it is a sharp pain in my lower waist.

The only time I feel okay is when I take off my belt and loosen the button on my trousers (which I cannot do at work). I think my problem is that I ate too much in India.

The only cure for me is diet and exercise. Oh dear.

Credit Card Ouch

2006-01-16T12:24:00.000-05:00

We received our credit card bill and we were in for a terrible surprise. We were charged 3% for all of our purchases overseas. I should point out that this isn’t unusual but I was not expecting it and I might have saved some money by shopping around.

Credit card companies have always charged a fee for transactions in foreign currency but until recently, they have been completely hidden in the exchange rate. You would never have guessed that they were actually charging a special fee for using your credit card overseas. One or more states sued the credit card companies and now they have to disclose their fees. Well this is the interesting part: the actual credit card company only charges your bank (the one that issued the card) 1% on foreign transactions. But the bank turns around and passes on that 1% charge and adds an extra 2% (or more) on top of that. What do you get for that extra fee – nothing. The 2% is pure profit as best as I can figure out. It is a fee for a service the bank didn’t actually have to perform – a swindle by any other name. And let me tell you, I am not amused.

Why hasn’t competition driven this transaction fee down to the 1% that the credit card companies charge? I’m not sure but I guess that it really isn’t a big factor in determining which credit card people choose. They choose the credit card for the low annual fee and the low interest rate but never think about the transaction fee on foreign purchases. But it would really pay to shop around if you plan to use your credit card overseas. I can tell you one bank not to deal with: Citibank. They have given me nothing but grief. I would be very happy to read some day of the CEO of Citibank going to prison for a long time. He deserves it.

Should you use traveler’s checks? I’m not sure. I think the credit card companies actually provide a really good service by negotiating an excellent exchange rate, but the extra fees largely negate this effect. It is a real bother to use traveler’s checks and I think it might be better to find a bank that only charges a 2% transaction fee or less.

Here are some links to some news articles on the subject. Link1, link2, link3, link4, wikipedia.

Peons and Pooh-Bahs

2006-01-13T06:33:00.000-05:00

Here is an excellent photo from Greatbong (this post was inspired by another post by Greatbong here). It is a photo of that a senior police officer in India being carried on the shoulders of a junior one. The photo looks as if – perhaps – the senior officer is exploiting his position at the expense of the junior officer.

Of course, we don’t really know what is happening here. It could be that the junior officer’s greatest wish in life was to carry a senior officer across a flood on his shoulders and the senior officers is merely indulging him. Or perhaps the senior officer will melt like the witch in the Wizard of Oz if he should ever touch water, (in such case, a double reason to pity the poor sap underneath). But it would seem that the senior officer had a very nicely pressed uniform that he just did not want to get ruined by the floodwaters. Indeed, he does look nice in his pressed uniform. It would be a pity if the junior officer would happen to trip and fall and send the senior officer headfirst into the muck, wouldn’t it?

This is something that seems different between Americans and Indians. It isn’t that Americans don’t abuse their authority if they have some to abuse. It is that we lack the imagination to abuse it in this way. When faced with a flood, the thought that, “Maybe I could avoid getting my clothes wet if I have one of my peons carry me,” is just not a thought that would naturally occur to most Americans.

The peon and pooh-bah culture is not unique to India. Europe in the seventeenth century was in many ways the zenith of the peon and pooh-bah culture. Consider Louis XIV of France. He spent everyday the entire day thinking of new ways for people to make him feel more important. This was his life’s work: being the great pooh-bah of France. His greatest accomplishment was inventing new positions to assist him in the lavatory. After using the facilities, one really wouldn’t expect a royal to sully his hands with “paperwork.” No, Louis XIV merely said, “Let the royal bum be wiped,” and it was – with a smile.

You tell this story to a classroom of American kids and you will get a very predictable response, “Ewww Yuck!!” The idea of strange hand touching this area does not appeal (well, not to most people). But they fail to understand the real value of having such a servant. The real value comes in the art of conversation or more precisely the art of belittling others in conversation. A monarch from a lesser nation comes visiting. Louis XIV deftly steers the conversation towards lavatory servants (great skill is needed to steer polite conversation in this direction). The other royal politely and innocently inquires, “What is a bum-wiper?” And at this point, Louis XIV exclaims, “You mean, you wipe your own?? Mon Dieu!”

This is where Louis XIV and Bill Gates would differ. Both would love to flaunt their wealth. But Bill Gates would naturally think to do so by buying some expensive toy – like his own aircraft carrier. That would be cool – I would like my own aircraft carrier. But he wouldn’t see any point in having a bum-wiper. He lacks the imagination to see the value in such a servant. Servants merely serve, and if you could do it yourself, why bother having a servant do it. But the pooh-bah thinks, “Why should I do it if I could get a peon to do it for me?” In fact, the most important things for a pooh-bah to have a peon do are the things the pooh-bah could do for himself: that shows true power.

I would not say Americans know nothing of the peon and pooh-bah culture. Everyone in the military is a peon and almost everyone is simultaneously a pooh-bah. But civilian life isn’t much like that. Most Americans just aren’t very good at acting the role of the peon. And most Americans don’t like pooh-bahs and would not want to be seen as one. And most Americans lack experience acting in the role of being the one served: service is just too expensive here. Other than getting a plate of spaghetti slung in their direction, most American hardly know what service is.

Let me give a trivial example. I was having breakfast at the Accord Metropolitan in Chennai (very nice hotel). They have an excellent breakfast buffet with a variety of western and Indian breakfast items. I liked getting the fresh toast. You can easily spot an American if there is a breakfast buffet with a toaster. The American will always insist on toasting his toast himself. He wants to control the little darkness control knob and the thought that maybe he really isn’t allowed to mess around with the knob never occurs to him, “I promise, I’ll set it back to the old setting once I’m done.” He wants to see the toast slowly move on the conveyor belt and smell the bread being toasted. And he insists on having it on his plate the instant it is toasted; cold toast is like stale donuts: all of the calories and a fraction of the taste. The Indian would never bother – I never saw any toasting his own toast. They would prefer to say, “Let there be toast,” and be satisfied when it emerges miraculously at the table.

I don’t get the whole pooh-bah thing but my wife does. She would love being a pooh-bette. She loves being served – it must be in the blood. She called for room service almost every day we were in India. She loved the idea that people would just come to deliver food to the door. She loved having her clothes professionally washed and pressed, “Oh look, I have pressed underwear; I’ve never had that before.”

At the end of the trip, she looked at me and said, “It’s all your fault.” She could have had servants: maids, cooks, gardeners, and chauffeurs. She could also have lived in a house the size of our living room, but she would have had servants to clean it. So which is the better life: having the fancy car you drive yourself and the fancy house you clean yourself or the tiny house with a maid and auto-rickshaw service at your beck and call?

But the peon and pooh-bah society definitely has a dark side. Some people like the officer above want to abuse what little power they have. Greatbong relates a story of a sadistic art teacher he had when he was 12. The teacher viciously ripped up the work of one unpopular student for no reason other than “I don’t like your face.” In a classic Greatbong piece, he images what that teacher might have said to his wife:

Wow what an achiever. Today he is going to go his dingy Bhowanipore hovel and over a dinner of rice and daal tell his fat wife--Guess what I did today! I made a 12-year-old boy cry. While his wife would reply---"Ooh you hunk of a man you. Come to bed bobba and ride me like a rickshaw".

Yes even at age 12 I was having such thoughts.

As Amit would say: read the whole thing.

But to some extent we can guess that the art teacher was being the ugly pooh-bah because he was the unfortunate peon to someone else. It is an endless cycle of abuser and the abused.

Indian culture seems to perpetuate the roles of peon and pooh-bah. The whole caste thing was based on the idea that some people were born to serve and others were born to be served. The classic literature tends to reinforce the roles as well. Remember how Drona treats Ekalavya (who loses his thumb). Drona is not the villain in the story, Ekalavya is. He was a tribal with no right to learn the art of archery from a pooh-bah like Drona. Ekalavya “steals” the wisdom by creating a statue of Drona to learn his wisdom. But Drona cleverly foils the “upstart” Ekalavya by using his own peon nature against himself. The lesson: there are peons and pooh-bahs – know which one you are and don’t make the pooh-bahs angry. In fact, this could be the lesson from nearly every piece of ancient literature.

Let me relate a little anecdote about how the peon-pooh-bah culture. In 1995, my wife and I and her family went to a craft fair to buy a bronze icon (a very nice piece we still own and treasure). We met some government official there and he invited us to chat with him. I think the only reason why he was mildly interested in us was because I was American and not that many Americans came to craft fairs in the early 1990’s. He was definitely acting out the role of the pooh-bah: lounging in his chair and giving the others who wanted to talk with him the, “I don’t have time for you,” look. Then a minor film star showed up. He immediately transformed and went into pure peon mode. He jumped out of his seat ran after this film star and treated him like the pooh-bah. My mother-in-law couldn’t understand why he would care so much about a mere film star. I said, “This is Tamil Nadu, land of MGR and Jayalalitha. A film star today maybe his boss tomorrow.”

And talking of politics, there is a clear connection from a peon-pooh-bah culture and socialism. Europe went down that road and so did India. But America was never into that. You see most people in a peon-pooh-bah culture are necessarily peons and peons always silently resent their pooh-bahs. They always wish for the day when they can turn tables. So when given a vote, the people will vote for the politician who wants to turn those tables. There is a terrible irony here: the vote makes the peon feel like a mini-pooh-bah but he uses that power to vote for conditions that guarantee that his children and grandchildren will always be peons.

One final note: The first test between India and Pakistan started today and Ganguly is in the team. Ganguly was pooh-bah for five years. Dravid was his peon and Ganguly made him keep wickets, something Dravid clearly was uncomfortable with. But Dravid was a good peon. And he thoroughly deserves his time as a pooh-bah; all the great players have this opportunity: Bradman, Lara, Gavaskar, Miandad, Tendulkar, you name them. So how will the former peon Dravid treat his former pooh-bah Ganguly? If you understand India, you know that Dravid has to make Ganguly know that he is the peon. He has to serve Dravid. What role will Ganguly have? Well…Jaffer and Gambhir are out, who will open?

It can imagine the conversation:

Dravid: “You know Saurav, I have a very special role for you.”

Ganguly: “Really?” (a little unsure of what this role might be)

Dravid: “I envision you as our new opener.”

Ganguly envisions a 100 mph bouncer from Shoaib Akhtar aimed straight for his head (so does Dravid but they the images give different emotive responses).

Ganguly: “I’m not really comfortable opening in tests. I’ve never done that before. Is there some other role for me?”

Dravid: “Well, that’s too bad. But there is one other role I can imagine. I need a personal assistant of sorts. (dramatic pause) Have you ever read about Louis XIV?”

Trip to Mysore

2006-01-12T06:27:00.000-05:00

Two posts that I read recently convinced me that I should blog about a trip to Mysore (home of the Mysore bonda) that my family took. The first is this post from Kiruba Shankar. The connection between that post and this one will be obvious very shortly. The second post is this old post by Vikrum Sequeira. The connection between that post and this one is not so obvious and you will have to wait to the end of this post to find out.

We spent nearly a week in the state of Karnataka in Southern India. We were there primarily to visit the Kabini River Lodge in Nagarahole National Park. That stay deserves a post in itself, so this post will describe the journey.

The start of the journey was leaving our nice hotel room at the Accord. We checked out very late (7:00 P.M.) but the Accord gave us permission to do so. This is something different in India: hotels and other places really go out of their way to accommodate people, (well, people like our family with some money). We then boarded a sleeping train for an overnight journey to Mysore.

My son absolutely loved the sleeping train. He loved climbing on the bunks and looking out the window and maybe just the fact that this was like a hotel on wheels. I absolutely hated it. It was one of the worst nights I have spent in years. I didn’t sleep more than an hour: the bunk was so hard and uncomfortable.

I’ve gotten soft over time. Ten years ago, I didn’t mind but now I do. I told my parents later that I’m getting too old for that type of thing and my father (who is 40 years older than me) laughed and said, “welcome to the club, but I didn’t think you would join so soon.”

One thing I didn’t like about the train was the toilet. It really reeked. And my son had an accident trying to use it (on a shaky train) and needed to change clothes. I tend to overreact in such situations and get all flustered. My wife gets irritated: “Why are you telling the whole train that he had an accident?” It never occurred to me to care what other people on the train might think.

We then went to the Lalitha Mahal Hotel. Here is a picture of the Lalitha Mahal Hotel (via Kiruba Shankar).
It turns out that Kiruba visited the same hotel just this week so there are many other views of this hotel there. We saw all of those places – excellent photos.

The hotel used to be the summer vacation palace of the Maharaja of Mysore. The main palace is in the heart of Mysore and we visited that as well. The hotel was nice but the room was only comfortable – a big step down from the Accord. The room had a funny odor that bothered my wife a lot. I think it was the bed covers. I don’t think they had been washed in years. We learned to remove those immediately and keep them in a drawer. A curious custom in Indian hotels is to come around at 6:00 and remove the bed covers. Well – we already had done that.

We spent much of the day just recovering from the (terrible) train trip. I think it would have been more sensible to fly into Bangalore and take a car to Mysore. But, anyway, I eventually got up and walked around the nice gardens at the hotel.

The food at the hotel was good. We ate the Mysore Thali that offered an excellent sampling of local foods. My son tried the spaghetti – which was a mistake.

In the afternoon, we visited the palace of the Maharaja’s. It is enormous. Obviously, being a Maharaja was a good life. Here is one photo and a link to a description of the palace.

We went to the Kabini River lodge, had a wonderful stay, and then returned to Mysore to the Lalitha Mahal Hotel. We then spent the day doing some shopping. We spent much of it in a government run handicraft store. The government subsidizes the local artists so that the crafts do not die out. But I saw no need for a government intervention: there was plenty of market in the U.S. and other places for this artwork. You could get nice carved elephants, furniture, paintings, inlaid wood scenes, and other wonderful things, for very good prices. If anything, the government intervention here seemed to be stifling competition and variety (the artists seemed to be in a rut in terms of themes).

On the way back to the train station, the driver could not find room for our luggage in the car so he put it in a rack on the roof (which is not at all uncommon). What was odd and made me very upset when I found out is that he had not bothered to strap the luggage down. He told my father-in-law that it was just a short trip to the train station and he would be careful driving there. Well, luckily for us, none of the luggage fell off, but I saw no reason to take such a risk. But one reason why he was lazy was because he lacked bungee cords (the big rubber-band like straps that hold luggage). India still tends to use rope and rope takes time to use. I did see one car with bungee cords but that was the exception. They cost more, but they save time. It is interesting that the idea of paying a little more for a device that save a little time each trip is not popular in India but taking a risk (with someone else’s very expensive luggage) to save some time is something Indians will consider.

I slept a little better on the train back to Chennai. Going back to the Accord, I felt all disheveled since I had not shaved or bathed and had slept in my clothes. I joked with my wife that I was reminded of the scene in the film “Die Another Day” in which James Bond walks into a swanky Hong Kong hotel after escaping from prison. He has a long beard. He is only wearing pajamas and looks like he hasn’t bathed in years. But with his normal James Bond swagger and aplomb, he just strolls into the hotel like he owns it. The fact that he has no way to pay for anything bothers him not a bit. My wife appreciated the analogy.

This is where the post from Vikram Sequeira fits in. He describes how people from lower classes in India are excluded from places like Barista (a coffee house chain much like Starbucks). In many cases, the people themselves feel they don’t belong in there. I think is somewhat natural to ask the question, “Do I belong here?” if you are not dressed appropriately or if you haven’t bathed recently. But I didn’t really feel that way entering the Accord. I knew that I was welcome in there even if I didn’t smell very pleasant. After all, the showers were right there in our room. But unlike James Bond, I didn’t have to bluff about paying for it.

The Homework Option

2006-01-10T05:19:00.000-05:00

My son came home with some homework and a curious option. It was a slip of paper from his teacher excusing him from one homework assignment, which my son could use at his discretion.

“I won’t use it now, Daddy, because this homework is easy. I will save it for a really hard homework.”

“But what if you use it for a really hard homework and the next day the teacher gives an assignment that is three times harder. You would have wasted your option.”

This made me think. How would one use such an option optimally? It is like an option to marry someone or to buy a house or take a job opportunity or some other decision that is nearly impossible reverse (at least in the short term). You never know what better choices might lie ahead, but you also may be throwing away great opportunities in the present.

There is a theory that deals with such options. You never exercise the option early on. You use the first few opportunities to create an estimate of the probability distribution of future opportunities. Once you have an estimated probability distribution, you then can make a decision rule which is always: accept the option if the opportunity is better than or equal to x(t). The variable x(t) declines with t – at some point you accept almost anything.

The curious thing about the homework option is that the distribution of homework assignments is not random. The instructor creates the homework and decides how hard to make it. He might, in fact, purposefully hide a really hard assignment way near the end of the semester just to trip everybody up. Students who still had the option would then avoid the trap.

I have been trying to convince my son that this is exactly his teacher’s strategy. Even if it isn’t, I don’t really care: I just want my son to do all of his homework.

Time Out

2006-01-10T05:17:00.000-05:00

When my son acts up, we might put him in a “time-out” for as many minutes as his age. He is supposed to be silent for seven minutes. He has not needed a time-out in a few months.

In December, I was supposed to renew my car’s safety inspection. I should have done it as soon as I came back from India, but I forgot. Yesterday, I got stopped and got a ticket. My son was in the back seat.

While we were waiting for the officer to fill out the paperwork, my son said, “We’ve been waiting a long time.”

“Yes.”

“Do we have to wait for forty-three minutes?”

Why Are They Doing It That Way: The Answer

2006-01-06T05:57:00.000-05:00

A week ago, I wrote this post asking, “Why are they doing it that way?” It is a basic question: “Why would people in different countries perform the same task in different ways?” It isn’t just about technology: even if we insist on low tech tools, they way Indians and the way Americans would approach the same task would be different. Why is that?

Here is the observation and the four questions again:

The task was to remove the sod from about 400 square feet of lawn. Six workers worked the entire morning doing this task. …

There were six people to remove the sod. Two were older and were clearly supervisors. They did no physical work whatsoever. They only passed a few comments. In the late morning, both of the supervisors left and the work proceeded as before.

All four of the workers had nice shoes (not sandals). They all removed their nice shoes and placed them in one corner of the garden before starting work.

Of the four workers, two had the task of removing sod with a tool that looked a bit like a pick. Actually, it looked like a cross between a pick and a shovel: it was a tool you lifted and brought down with a pick motion but the blade was wider like a shovel’s. The tool looked thoroughly inefficient for removing sod and it did take an enormous amount of effort to use this tool as evident by the sweat the two workers were generating in the cool morning.

The remaining two workers picked up the sod with their hands and placed it in wok-shaped bowls. Each bowl was about 18 inches in diameter and could hold about 15 to 20 pounds of sod. They would lift each bowl to their shoulder and carry it 20 yards away to the dumping area. The two workers will bowls could not keep up with the two workers with picks.

As I observed this, I had four questions:

1. Why have two supervisors?
2. Why use bowls to move the sod?
3. Why use picks instead of shovels?
4. The picks looked very dangerous with bare feet. Why didn’t these workers protect their toes from injury?

1. Why two supervisors? The clue is the age of the supervisors: they were too old to do manual labor anymore. Chances are that there is an implicit contract here between the lodge and the workers that if they work diligently for many years, eventually they will become supervisors. This policy might lead to an excess of supervisors but so be it; it serves the purpose of motivating the workers to stay with the lodge.

2. Why use bowls to move sod? Why not use wheelbarrows? This one is partly a mystery because I cannot think of a really good explanation why the lodge would not use wheelbarrows. But a partial explanation is that wheelbarrows might not be very common in that part of India (or in other parts of India for that matter).

Wheelbarrows don’t work in mud, and India tends to be the land of mud during the monsoon. Therefore there must be some other tool that the locals use instead of wheelbarrows when the land is muddy. I haven’t seen the tool but I imagine that it might be two horizontal poles with either a cloth or a tub between them. This tool would require two people to use but it would be otherwise ideal for transporting heavy loads over marshy ground. A poor people cannot afford a tool for good weather and another for bad, so the make do with the two-pole-tool for all twelve months of a year.

The reason these workers weren’t using this tool on that day might have been partly a miscalculation. The supervisors thought that two workers with bowls would do about as well as the two workers with the two-pole-tool, but they were wrong. One person with a wheelbarrow could have done the work of the two people with bowls, so the lodge really should think about buying some wheelbarrows.

3. Why use the pick tool to remove sod? Why not use a shovel? The clue here is that the workers didn’t work with shoes on. It would be impossible the use a shovel with bare feet. Shovels are not popular in India because boots are seldom worn in India, and no one has a need for boots because shovels are not sold in India – it is a classic vicious cycle. And it is a pity that boots and shovels aren’t used in India because shovels use leg power and our legs are many times stronger than our arms (if you don’t believe me, imagine trying to pedal a bicycle with your arms).

Europe was lucky that the weather was colder in a way. They needed heavy boot for the cold weather and tended to use them year-around. So tools that could be used with boots (like shovels) could evolve in Europe but not in India.

4. Why don’t these workers try to protect their toes? The risk of injury is real. But it isn’t certain and it apparently isn’t high enough to motivate the workers to wear any protective gear for their feet. To understand why not, we should ask, “How much would you be willing to pay to avoid a 1 in 10,000 chance of losing a toe?” We in the west might pay $50 or $100 to avoid such a risk because it sounds really scary. But in India, the people cannot afford to pay so much and the risk of losing a toe might be less scary. I am not saying they don’t mind it; I’m saying they don’t fear it so very much because their life is already hard and pain is not uncommon. They can take some more pain. So they might pay a $1 to avoid such a risk. Well, what safety device for your toes can you get in India or anywhere for $1?

To some extent, it could be that safety, or disregard for safety, might be part of the culture. If others start wearing safety equipment, you might think you should have it also. In other words, safety needs to be marketed in India, and no one is doing it yet. It might be a tough sell at first, but there are definitely some safety devices that Indians would like to have.

The interesting thing about this exercise is that it reveals a lot about markets. For example, you might be able to market shovels in India to people who make their living digging, but only if you market the boots that go with them. Also the safety aspect of the boots might be a bit of a selling point as well, although maybe not so much initially until many other people start buying boots. Also, there might be more of a market for wheelbarrows in India if properly marketed.

Also there is another point: tools in one place might have a use in another place. For example, the two-pole-tool seems to me to be a tool that would be useful occasionally when wheelbarrows really wouldn’t work: like taking things up staircases or across marshy land. Is there a market for such a tool here that no one has tapped?

I would like to acknowledge the help from Kunal, XC-135, and Ravikiran in answering these questions.

Three Views of Cricket in India

2006-01-05T07:03:00.000-05:00

View 1.
I am sitting in a wonderfully luxurious hotel suite in Chennai (the Accord Metropolitan) flipping through to channels on the television and really wishing for the day that computers with Internet access become standard in hotel rooms. There’s really nothing I want to watch. A Bollywood song and dance is entertaining for a moment but I surf on.

Then I see a cricket match. I recognize the teams as India and Sri Lanka in their ODI uniforms. “But that series was over weeks ago”, I thought. Then they show a close-up of former coach John Wright. “This must be from years ago.” Then I see that the bowler is Ashish Nehra. Then there is a commercial break and there is an announcement that this was ESPN’s “Glorious India” series. Then I figure it out: this is from the NatWest series in England from three years ago.

I just thought, “how pathetic.” I mean really, how cricket crazy must someone be to sit and watch a match from three years ago that you already know the result?

View 2.
My wife and father-in-law have to run some errands and I tag along. We stop in a travel agency to pick up some tickets for a flight to Kerela. There is a little television on in the back and we can hear the audio. It is a test match between India and Sri Lanka. I imagine productivity in India plummets during the World Cup.

View 3.
I am in a car with my family going from Kabini to Mysore, a journey of maybe 100 kilometers (60 miles). It is Sunday and the children are playing cricket. I count the matches going on. There was one in every village we passed. I counted 10 matches on the way.

I could see that in the small villages, these cricket matches were the biggest form of entertainment and fun around. Life was hard so the cricket was pure joy. And the kids could play too. I saw one budding Tendulkar lace a scorching drive right past the bowler and across the field and across the road just after our car passed. Believe me, that was a solid shot.

I believe the talent in Indian cricket will blossom like anything in the coming years. That is because they will be able to tap the enthusiasm in these village cricketers. At one time, one-third of all the major league baseball shortstops came from a tiny village in the Dominican Republic. Why? - because there was nothing but baseball and sugar cane in that village. There’s nothing but cricket and rice or wheat for most of these Indian village children as well. They might as well dream big dreams because that is one luxury they can afford. And some of those dreams will come true.

Why Is It Taking So Long?

2006-01-04T07:15:00.000-05:00

I am sitting in the hotel restaurant. There are only two other tables with customers. There are five waiters to serve us. I ordered a South Indian filter coffee 20 minutes before and I am wondering, “Why is it taking so long?”

The service in India is actually very good in general but often on the slow side. If you have a special request, they will bend over backwards to satisfy it. We wanted applesauce for our son when he had an upset stomach: they mashed the apples up and prepared applesauce from scratch. They were always extremely polite and courteous. But they did take their time and often we had to remind them that we had orderred something.

I observed the wait staff and it was humorous to see that most of them often didn’t know what they were supposed to do. They would stand around but in a way that they wouldn’t observe the customer if he had a request. They were always very quick to remove your plate (often before I had a chance to finish) but if I wanted to order coffee or tea, or get the bill, I had a hard time finding anyone who would look my way.

What occurred to me was that there might be a tendency in India to squander labor in the way we in the west squander water. We think, “Water is cheap; I’m not going to waste time trying to find ways to conserve it.” In India, if a problem with service can be fixed by either hiring more servers or by using existing servers more efficiently, they will usually opt for the former. Labor is cheap; why waste time thinking about how to conserve it?

But it seems a bit jarring to an American. We tend to think of wasting labor in the way people in India might view wasting food. We think that labor is precious and shouldn’t be wasted. But labor isn’t precious in India.

Over time, this will change. Firms will not squander labor because labor costs are rising over time.

One good thing about Indian hotel restaurants is that there were buffets for breakfast and dinner in most cases. This meant you didn’t have to wait for your food and the variety was wonderful. But since these meals were included in the tariff, there was a strong incentive the store up food in your “hump” like a camel in the morning and try to make it last until evening. The problem with this strategy is that the “hump” has great staying power and I took mine back to the U.S.

Carnival of the Capitalists

2006-01-02T20:15:00.000-05:00

Update
Please look for this post under business (I overlooked it before) and this post under investing.

Here it is. Finally.

This took forever. I'm not doing this again - ever.

Thanks to Jay Solo for letting me host this and I apologize for not letting you know sooner that I was in India last week and was not going to be back before Jan 1.

Most of the posts were interesting but some were less so and I am very bad at hiding this. I could not resist inserting a bit of a comment in here and there but hopefully people will not be (too) offended. In general, these posts are well worth reading.

I tried to include everyone but I refused to look at the two posts labeled "sex" on the grounds that I am at home and my wife might have come in and found me looking at objectionable material. If I had done this a the office during company time, it might have been different.

I also refused to include one post that seemed to be merely a link to an online gambling site. I did include another similar post that made a half-hearted attempt to write a post about gambling simply because it was so pathetic it had humorous value.

If I forgot your post, I apologize. Please leave me a note. I'll probably forget it as well - but I assure you that it is nothing personal, I'm just that way.

Lighter Posts

These are posts that made me laugh or just didn't make my brain hurt.

Blog: Interested Participant by Mike Pechar
Post: Overstock.com Attacked by Sith Lord
For some reason, Overstock dot com is seeing sales fall and its stock price plummet. Is the reason possibly related to the fact that the CEO thinks that a "Sith Lord" is plotting to overthrow the company? This is a thoroughly entertaining piece and perhaps a warning not to entrust your company to your not-so-reliable son.

Blog: Big Picture, Small Office by Big Picture Guy
Post: In Wine There is Truth
The author relates a humorous anecdote from a company party and finds that too much wine can "deconstruct" the office toady. We all know people like that.

Blog: Political Calculations by Ironman
Post: The Perils of Marketing
The author gives a list of humorous marketing mistranslations. Compare with this list from Snopes.

Blog: Multiple Mentality by Josh Cohen
Post: “Holiday” “Spirit”
Here is a nice light rant against the half-hearted attempts retailers make to subtly market Christmas without offending non-Christians. This post reminded me of another post by Sepia Mutiny (an excellent blog).

Economics and Regulation

Blog: Sophistpundit by Adam Gurri
Post: What Can We Hope to Leave Our Children?
The author asks a big question: will the future better better or worse for our children? He clearly believes that it will be better and that there is no reason to fear "peak oil" or any other exhaustable resource will stop our growing prosperity. This is a thoughtful post.

Blog: The Roth & Company Tax Update by Joe Kristan
Post: The Tax Gap and the Schmuck Factor
The author fears that lax enforcement of tax laws will lead to more people cheating on taxes and other people feeling like "schmucks" because they didn't cheat and their neighbors did and got away with it. Over time, the "schmucks" will learn to cheat also.

Blog: Daily Dose of Optimism by Ed
Post: Against Public Sector Unions
The author takes a hard look a public sector unions, and the potential problems they pose to the economy through higher taxes. There are some interesting economic and moral issues raised by the potential conflict of interest between government and government employee unions.

Blog: Different River by Different River
Post: They’re All Wrong!
The author doesn't want to take sides on the new California law regulating violent video games: the author thinks that all sides are wrong. This post raises an interesting question about what is the appropriate regulation of violent video games.

Blog: Chocolate and Gold Coins by Michael H. (me)
Post: Signs of India's Development
The author (me) compares the India he saw in 1995 to India of 2005 to see signs of development. India is developing but trend is subtle. India is a great place to visit, by the way.

Blog: Gongol by Brian Gongol
Post: Ages of the World's Largest Companies
Here is an interesting hypothesis: does more government regulation mean that older established firms have an unwarrented advantage in the marketplace? If so, the average age of firms should be higher in more regulated economies. Here is some evidence.

Blog: Marketplace Monitor by Chris Rossini
Post: Why so down on Dividends?
The author argues that the double taxation of dividends encourages firms with profits to make unwise purchases of other companies.

Blog: Searchlight Crusade by Dan Melson
Post: The Economics of Housing Development
The author believes that we spend too much on housing and gives a long and detailed explanation for why this is so. People who like this post might like to read this book.

Investing

Update - I forgot this one
Blog: All Things Financial by JLP
Post: Making Financial Resolutions for 2006
The author gives a list of financial resolutions you should follow for the next year. Indeed, if you do not follow number 2, Santa will put coal in your stocking next Christmas (and you'll need it to heat your home).

Blog: Personal Finance Advice by Jeffrey Strain
Post: The Worst Investments You Can Make
Here is a nice post listing some of the really bad investments people might make. People in India might want to consider the advice about not investing in jewelry. My wife's family invested a fortune in buying jewelry in anticipation that she would eventually have a traditional Indian wedding. It still languishes in some safe deposit box.

Blog: Econbrowser by James Hamilton
Post: Who's afraid of the big bad yield curve?
The author provides some detailed analysis of the link between interest rate inversion (short term rates higher than long term rates) and economic slowdown. The former doesn't always predict the latter, but there is correlation, (nice graphs).

Blog: Financial Methods by Michael Cale
Post: Will 2006 Be the Year of Japan?
The author provides some nice graphs to show how well the Japanese stocks performed in 2005. He believes this might be a harbinger of strong economic growth in Japan in 2006. He believes "2006 could be the Year of Japan for equity investors." Either that or 2006 is the year investors invest in Japanese equity a year too late.

Blog: Small Business Trends by Anita Campbell
Post: Top Ten Promising Small Business Opportunities for 2006
The author provides a list of what she clearly believes will be the hot new business opportunities for 2006. If you are a contrarian, this is the list of business to avoid or sell short. Something for everyone here.

Blog: Capital Chronicle by RJH Adams
Post: The Baltic Dry Index: 'I fear thee, Ancient Mariner!'
The author shows some nice plots comparing the rates on 10-year Treasury notes and the Baltic Dry Index (a shipping rate index). The author feels that maybe equity investors ought to be paying more attention to what shipping rates are doing, as reflected by the Baltic Dry Index.

Blog: Mover Mike by Mike Landfair
Post: Gold Mining and Non-Recourse Loans
The author looks at the merger between two gold mining companies and discovers that much of their gold is presold at below current market prices. They will not be able to fully profit from any future price increase as well, (of course, this also means they won't lose as much if the gold bubble bursts).

Blog: Early Riser by Early Riser
Post: 401k Versus Roth - A New ER Ratio!
The author provides some calculations to help you determine whether you would be better off investing more in your 401k or in a Roth IRA. Basically, it depends whether your marginal tax rate is going to be higher or lower at retirement than it is today.

Blog: Free Money Finance by FMF
Post: Getting Rich is Simpler than You Think
The author believes that getting rich is easier than you think: just save a portion of your income in mutual funds and compound interest will grow your investment. This is undoubtable true if "getting rich" means accumulating about $100,000 to $200,000 in wealth (remember what you paid for this advice).

Blog: Financial Options by Tom Hanna
Post: Market Wrap 2005
This year the Dollar was up 11% against the Euro, Gold was up 20%, the Dow was down 0.5%... If you like this sort of thing, this post provides lots of statistics.

Business and Business Practices

Update - I forgot this one (sorry!)
Blog: Okdork by Noah Kagan
Post: Death of a Startup: Online Video Sharing Website
The author gives an interesting account of what went wrong in a startup involving online videos. Even the combination of a great idea and talented people doesn't guarantee success.

Blog: Businesspundit by Rob
Post: Should You "Spy" On Employees Through Social Networking Sites?
The author gives an interesting example of how one manager found out a whole lot of potentially damaging information on his own employees by logging on to a social networking site. The author asks: "Is this ethical?" Um, no. Are businesses going to do it anyway? I wonder.

Blog: InsureBlog by Henry Stern
Post: Death of a Salesman (and his business)
Here is something many small business owners never consider: what happens if the owner dies? Often, the business dies also, even if it was profitable and has several employees. The author argues that a simple buy-sell agreement would likely prevent an unfortunate demise of a good small business.

Blog: Fire Someone Today by Bob Pritchett
Post: Sorry, we're closed...
The author reminds us that it is never good business to close ten minutes earlier than the posted closing time. Warning: it might not be a good idea to read the blog titled "Fire Someone Today" at work.

Blog: Photon Courier by David Foster
Post: Railroads: The Next Phase
The author gives a thoughtful and detailed look at the next generation of railroad technology.

Blog: The Big Picture by Barry L. Ritholtz
Post: Annual CD Sales Slide Resumes; Down 8% for '05
The author looks at sales of CD's a discovers an unmistakable downward trend. It could be those MP3 players. The author adds a rather amusing observation about Mariah Carey and her success in recording No.1 hit singles.

Blog: Kicking Over My Traces by cehwiedel
Post: A Little Analysis, Please
The author does some nice and simple analysis of data from BigStockPhoto and quickly concludes that not many photographers are using commission sales from BigStockPhoto as their sole source of income.

Blog: Blueprint for Financial Prosperity by Jim
Post: Ten Real Estate Mistakes
The author offers some sound advice for people looking to buy a new home. Curiously "location" only shows up at number 7 under "remember the little things."

Blog: Crossroads Dispatches by Evelyn Rodriguez
Post: Teach Him to Fish
The author takes a look at charities that helped in the wake of last year's tsunami. She finds that the ones that were most effective combined donations with skill building.

Blog: The Browster Blog by Scott Milener
Post: The Click Fraud Effect
The author looks at the problem caused by fraudulent clicks on online advertisements. The author feels the problem might be cured by combining a price per action (a sale) with a price per click. This post left me wondering what exactly is "click fraud".

Blog: Ego by Martin Lindeskog
Post: Highflying Business
The author looks at the success of Budapest (Hungary) Airport. Perhaps it is related to deregulation/privatisation of Hungary's airlines.

Blog: Mensa Barbie Welcomes You by Mensa barbie
Post: Interdependent Outsource
The author gives her (or his) opinions on outsourcing. The author seems to be concerned that outsourcing will lead to loss of skill in our country (I'm guessing). I admit that I don't think I understood whatever the author wrote. Maybe I should have outsourced this task to India.

Blog: Online Casino Bonuce by Alexander Volskov
Post: Casino Games
The author provides a brief history of casino games. I am suspicious that the real motive of this post is to entice readers to click on his links to online gambling.

Sales and Marketing

Blog: The Common Room by DeputyHeadmistress
Post: Buying the Guitar
The author gives her experience with two different musical instument stores. One store made no effort to sell anything, the other did. The Common Room is actually a very good blog and in might be worth a second look. I might be biased: they recently linked to this post of mine.

Blog: Business & Technology Reinvention by David Daniels
Post: Paying for Performance and Customer Service
The author provides his own experience shopping for a computer for his father at three types of stores: Full service, discount, and warehouse. He found that the discount store provided more helpful service in part because their sales staff are on commission and not pure salary. Compare with the previous post.

Blog: Blog Business World by Wayne Hurlbert
Post: Blog visitor traffic: Boost your readership numbers
Here is some advice in bringing some more visitors to your business related blog. Good advice but I would add one more: make sure your content is worth reading.

Blog: Pro Weblogs by Mariano Di Biase
Post: How to carve for a niche blog for tomorrow, today
This post explains why it is important to start early if you plan to start a blog with a finite lifespan (e.g. a blog on the 2006 Soccer World Cup). This blog is published in both English and Spanish.

Blog: Small Business Branding by Yaro Starak
Post: Small To Medium Business Branding
This post explains the need to protect your brand when a solo enterprise transitions to a multi-employee enterprise.

Blog: Lip-sticking by Yvonne DiVita
Post: Jane Markets Blogs
The author gives credit where credit is due, and points out the human-value in blogging. The author gives an end-of-year thanks to all of her blog buddies - a nice thought. I should give an end-of-year thanks to my blog buddies: Sunil, Vikram, Charu, Amit, and all those other people on my blogroll.

Politics

Blog: The Skeptical Optimist by Steve Conover
Post: Reflections on 2005, and a list of things I’m not
The author explains why political labels like "libertarian" "supply-sider" "left-wing" or "right-wing" don't accurately describe his views.

Blog: Don Surber by Don Surber
Post: Bush Cracks Down On White Collar Crime
The author believes that President Bush is doing a significantly better job of cracking down on white collar crime than his predecessor. This post made me wonder what would have happened to Osama Bin Laden if, in addition to his other crimes, he embezzled a company.

Sneek Peek at Next Week

I will be submitting the answer to this question.

Later Today: Carnival Time

2006-01-02T10:51:00.000-05:00

If you are wondering whatever became of this week's Carnival of the Capitalists, it's coming. I'll have it done by this afternoon or this evening or maybe sometime. I need to run some errands and I'll get back to work on it.

Note to future hosts: it's probably not a good idea to wait until the last moment to compile this. It takes some time.

Well, I have an excuse. I was in India all last week.

Why Are They Doing It That Way?

2006-01-01T06:19:00.000-05:00

I have to write a whole post on the wonderful stay we had at Kabini Lodge in Nagarahole National Park near Mysore, India. On the last day of our stay, I observed some yard work. I don’t like to do yard work but I have a lot of experience observing my parent doing yard work and know how it would be done in the U.S. These Indian workers were doing it very differently. It made me wonder: “Why are they doing it that way?”

I will describe the task and how these workers were doing the work. The task was to remove the sod from about 400 square feet of lawn. Six workers worked the entire morning doing this task. In the U.S., obviously we would use power equipment instead of hand tools and it would take two workers an hour to complete everything. But my father would have done this very differently, and he only had hand tools for doing gardening.

There were six people to remove the sod. Two were older and were clearly supervisors. They did no physical work whatsoever. They only passed a few comments. In the late morning, both of the supervisors left and the work proceeded as before.

All four of the workers had nice shoes (not sandals). They all removed their nice shoes and placed them in one corner of the garden before starting work.

Of the four workers, two had the task of removing sod with a tool that looked a bit like a pick. Actually, it looked like a cross between a pick and a shovel: it was a tool you lifted and brought down with a pick motion but the blade was wider like a shovel’s. The tool looked thoroughly inefficient for removing sod and it did take an enormous amount of effort to use this tool as evident by the sweat the two workers were generating in the cool morning.

The remaining two workers picked up the sod with their hands and placed it in wok-shaped bowls. Each bowl was about 18 inches in diameter and could hold about 15 to 20 pounds of sod. They would lift each bowl to their shoulder and carry it 20 yards away to the dumping area. The two workers will bowls could not keep up with the two workers with picks.

As I observed this, I had four questions:

1. Why have two supervisors?
2. Why use bowls to move the sod?
3. Why use picks instead of shovels?
4. The picks looked very dangerous with bare feet. Why didn’t these workers protect their toes from injury?

I thought about it and came up with reasonable explanations for three but not four of these questions. I thought it might be fun for you to try to think about this yourselves and see what explanations you might come up with. I will post my answer to three of the four questions next week.

Signs of India’s Development

2006-01-01T06:08:00.000-05:00

I visited India in 1995 and exactly ten years later in 2005, so it might be interesting to compare those experiences. Before I write anything else, I should say that I had a wonderful time in India and look forward to returning in less than 10 years.

In 1995, there were signs that India was at the cusp of some development. My wife went on and on about all of the changes she saw. Now in 2005, I could see some changes first hand. While some things have changed, the change is really pretty subtle to me. Most of Chennai looked much like it did in 1995. But there were a few obvious changes.

Cell phones

This is obvious: everyone in India seems to have cell phones now.

Motorcycles

I was expecting to see a lot more cars in Chennai. What I saw was a lot more motorcycles. Now at first glance, this might seem to be retrogression since motorcycles would seem to be an inferior good in the West. But a motorcycle is definitely a step up for someone who previously had to walk or ride a bicycle. It is obvious that the motorcycle is a good that is now affordable to the majority of Indians. Even in small villages, I saw lots of people with motorbikes.

Prepared foods

In 1995, my wife’s mother prepared idly and dosa mauva (dough) in a blender. Today, she just buys mauva from the store. She buys yogurt from the store instead of making it herself. She used to grind her own Sambar powder; now she buys it from the store. There may be something lost in the process, but the switch from homemade to store-bought is an unmistakable sign of development.

Price increases

The most obvious sign for me of India’s development is that the price (in dollars) for many luxury items is considerably more expensive, even accounting for inflation. I will give three examples:

Dakshin
One of Chennai’s finest South Indian restaurants is Dakshin at the Park Sheraton Hotel. My wife and I took her parents there in 1995 and had an absolutely wonderful experience. I remember the price very well because I used that as an example for how inexpensive India was in many conversations. The restaurant in 1995 was only half-filled and the price for an outstanding meal was only $36 dollars for 4 people. In 2005, the restaurant was packed and the bill for the same 4 people (plus a child who only ate rice and Indian bread) was $85. This might be partly a story of Dakshin’s success, but generally, we found that prices for restaurant food everywhere was much more pricey.

Raymond’s
In 1995, I bought several shirts, slacks, and coats from Raymond’s, a premier clothier in Chennai. In 2005 we walked in, looked at the prices, and walked out. In 1995 you could get a fine dress shirt for $10; today it is $30. In 1995, fine dress slacks were selling for $20; today they were selling for $70. It was not much of a bargain today.

I did get several nice but simple shirts and chinos from another store for a reasonable price. The big price increase seems to have hit primarily the upscale market.

Carpets
My wife and I shopped at CIE for a nice carpet for our house. The salesman said the price of carpets has gone up by a factor of 4 since 1995. Of course, he might have just been saying that but my wife’s parents who had bought some carpets ten years ago thought that this seem to be accurate. In 1995, you could get an excellent quality silk carpet 4’ by 6’ for less than $1000. Today, they start at $3000.

The price increases probably reflect the new purchasing power of the Indian upper middle class. But the cost of labor has probably increased considerably as well. In the case of the carpets, I think it might reflect the success of reducing the amount of child labor used in making these carpets, or at least one could hope that this is the case.

Counterexamples

Although I saw some examples of India’s development, I saw several counterexamples as well. For example, there was a small village near the lodge we stayed at in Nagarahole National Park that we passed through on several occasions. The children there lacked any footwear and the women had to collect their family’s water in a pot from the common well to carry it back to their homes.

Some of the roads we drove on in 2005 seemed fairly nice but there still are no freeways in India. And some of the roads we drove on in Nagarahole were some of the worst in the world. They purposefully avoided repaving the roads there to prevent too much traffic and disturbing the animals in the National Park. But this is simply decision by indecision. The road through there is the main road connecting Mysore to Kerala and something needs to be done.

In 1995, my wife’s parents said that a public transit was being built for Chennai. In 2005, I saw no evidence of it at all. In 1995, my wife’s mother cooked using a propane tank because there was no natural gas utility in Chennai. In 2005, there’s no difference. Prior to 2005, there was severe water shortage in Chennai and my wife’s parents suffered much hardship because of this. The only reason 2005 is different is due to the rain. The city has done nothing.

Basically, none of India’s development has been aided by any observable government good or service. India is developing despite the lack of government services. But good government services like dependable water supply and other services would be welcome.

Happy New Year, I’m Back in the U.S.A

2006-01-01T06:05:00.000-05:00

I had a wonderful time with my family and my wife’s family in India. We visited Kabini, a wonderful lodge in Nagarahole National Park. I will have to write about that. And we later went to Kerala to a nice beach resort. And we had lots of fun in Chennai as well.

Everywhere we went, service was wonderful and the people were very nice.

There were many things we didn’t get a chance to do. I guess we’ll have to go back.

The Accord Metropolitan in Chennai

2005-12-11T20:22:00.000-05:00

I have to hand it too my wife, her business acumen is very sharp. We needed to find a hotel to stay at and we wanted a nice place. Well, hotels in India of the quality of the ones my wife and son enjoy are about as expensive as the one in the Washington D.C. area. We really had not planned to spend that kind of money (but we could afford it).

She had a driver take us around to check out some hotels. We really liked the Accord Metropolitan in Chennai (35,36,37 G.N. Chetty Road, T. Nagar, Chennai 600017 Tel (91 44) 2816 1000). The hotel room was about as many sq. ft as my wife's parents' house. It was recently built and they spared no expense. Marble is everywhere.

What my wife figured out immediately was that the hotel was nearly empty. They had troubles marketing themselves (no web page is a clue) and the price was too high for the demand the marketing had produced. So she sensed (correctly) that they would cut her a deal. She got them to reduce the tariff from $400 down to $260! At that price, it was merely expensive, but well worth it.

My son just loves the new hotel.

My son has been so good. He did not complain on the long flight. During dinner, he was so jet-lagged that he fell asleep in his chair. When I'm that tired, I am really a bear, but he hasn't acted up at all.

The restaurant at the Accord has the dumbest name I have ever seen or heard for an Indian restaurant: Indiana. If you are going to name yourself after a U.S. state, at least choose one someone might want to visit, (my apologies to any readers from that fine state but my impression from driving though it many times that it was simply a place you needed to drive through to get to someplace you wanted to go).

The restaurant was nice and inexpensive and the service was very attentive. However, I remember Madhu Menon (the famous Shiok restauranteur) writing once that Americans prefer if the service is prompt but more invisible - and he's right, I don't like people spooning food on my plate. Really, there is no value-added to having someone spoon food on your plate.

One thing that has struck me as very odd (or atleast very different) is that I cannot leave a tip on the bill. I'm sure the wait staff expects a tip after serving us but when I got the bill, there was only a space for my room number. I expected that I could add a tip onto the bill and leave it that way. Perhaps that isn't the way it's done in India. I didn't have a chance to convert any dollars into rupees, so I have no cash to tip anyone. I feel bad about this. I will figure out something tomorrow.

That's a Great Idea

2005-12-10T16:05:00.000-05:00

"That's a great idea! Don't breath a word about this to anyone."

"This is your best idea ever. I can see real possibilities here. I didn't like your other ideas too much but this one is really good." She had the look of someone just hearing "can't miss" business idea.

What had I just told my wife? Something like this.

Why is it that she never found that post but she did find this one (I should have heeded @mit's advice) from a week before a whole month after I posted both of them? Or is that a dumb question?

Culture Shock

2005-12-10T15:16:00.000-05:00

It was 2:00 A.M and we had just reached my wife's parents house in Chennai after a long journey. We were trying to put my son to sleep in a bed upstairs. He was crying.

"What's wrong?"

"I didn't think it would be like this."

"Like what, dear?"

"I thought it would be nice, like our home in the U.S."

The flight was long and uncomfortable. The Chennai airport was unimpressive and crowded with people. The city itself was recently flooded and is actually in good shape considering that but by U.S. standards it is very definely "underdeveloped". And my wife's parents house has seen better days.

I somewhat feared that this would be his reaction. Actually, my wife felt it too. We have been living the good life and it has spoiled us somewhat. We live in a very nice single family home about two miles from Tyson's Corners, at the heart of Fairfax County, America's wealthiest county (by far) of one million residents or more. My son has never seen run down homes in his life. All he knows is the life of the upper middle class in the U.S. And then he comes to my wife's parents home at 2:00 in the morning. He cried all night.

My wife's parent's house was decently nice in 1995 when we last visited but maintenance has been neglected a bit. The recent flood did not help things, and now the home has a kind of malodor about it. My wife's parents have not purchased any new appliances or other goods in a long time so the home looks a bit like a time capsule of 1980's India. And the home is only 1/4 the square feet of our home in Virginia. All of this was bound to hit my son very hard.

Anyway, a burst pipe forced us to relocate to a hotel a quarter mile away. It is very posh and my son is ecstatic. But it is troubling to think that my son will never be happy in life if he doesn't have the posh life. It isn't guaranteed.

Trip to India

2005-12-07T18:29:00.000-05:00

I will be visiting this lodge with my family.

Here is a picture of a guide inspecting tiger dung. Maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see something as exciting as that.

No blogging for three weeks.

So if you want to read something, you can read my archives. In particular:

May (for the week ending 12/17)

June (for the week ending 12/24)

July (for the week ending 12/31)

would be good choices, IMHO.

I will come back and host the Carnival of Capitalists. That should be fun.

Contests and Idea Spam

2005-12-07T04:58:00.000-05:00

Recently, I submitted several ideas to this contest. They received more than 22,000 entries for a total cash prize of $200,000 so that works out to $9 per entry. Obviously, most of these entries are just bad ideas but since entry is free and there is an infinitely better chance of winning with a bad idea than with no entry at all, there were lots of entries.

The organizers of the SSB contest have a huge task to select 21 finalists from 22,000 entries. A knockout system similar to the one I described in this post might be workable here. Of course, it would be ten times easier if there were one-tenth the entries.

There is an interesting thing here. Good ideas are a pure public good. Once someone thinks it up and shares it with others, it has the potential to spread around the world and help others. But most ideas really aren’t that good. If a good idea is like a long e-mail from a good friend, a bad idea is like spam. Only it’s like spam that looks just like a real e-mail from a good friend that turns out to be something else only when you get into the middle of it.

I like the idea of having contests to generate good ideas in general. You could have contests for new business ideas or for new public goods or other things. But if you give a large prize for the winner and keep entry free, you will inevitably get a lot of idea spam.

Charging a fee to enter the contest would cut down on the idea spam, but it would raise a lot of legal and ethical issues. It would turn the contest into a lottery. And it would bring forth a multitude of lawsuit possibilities from disgruntled losers.

Another possibility along the same lines is to insist that each entry is matched by a sizable charitable donation. This might avoid a lot of the legal and ethical issues since the charity and not the contest organizers would be getting the money. It might be an excellent way to help a good charity.

But I have had a complete different idea. I’ve been thinking that good ideas really aren’t any good until someone really begins seriously advocating them. I am saying that essentially 100% of the value added of any idea is in the marketing of it. Good ideas need to be sold.

Why Do We Vote for Bad People?

2005-12-06T18:23:00.000-05:00

I thought about this question in reading a couple of posts about Laloo of Bihar by Greatbong here and here. But it isn’t just Laloo. Some constituency elected Prakash Karat as well. Who would vote for a communist? Who would vote for Mayawati or Jayalalita or Karunanidhi? Or in the US, who would vote for Jesse Helms or for Huey Long or Richard Nixon?

If no one had voted for Hitler and his Nazis, then he would have been unable to seize power in Germany. The same is true for Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Chavez in Venezuela.

We vote for bad people by default. Good people opt out of politics, calling it a “dirty game” which, of course, it is. But why is it so dirty? Why? because honest people choose not to play it.

Another reason we vote for bad people is that we get sucked into their logical trap. They always turn a group of blues into dark blues and light blues. They will tell the dark blues, “I’m one of you. Either you vote for me or one of THEM.”

I had this idea once. Suppose everyone, by law, had to run for office. Suppose the election were run like a gigantic knockout tournament – like Wimbledon with 30 rounds. We could not all vote in every election but maybe 50 could vote in each of the first round elections and then 60 in the second and so on until you got to the last few round and then everyone votes. You would have to vote in maybe 80 elections, but it would be possible.

Who would get elected? If Laloo came up against your mom, I doubt he would stand a chance.

When He Grows Up: Royal Class

2005-12-06T05:37:00.000-05:00

My son is excited by the upcoming trip to India.

He asked my wife, “Are there beds on the plane?”

“No, there are no beds in economy class. We will just sleep in our seats. We would have to travel by business class to have a bed.”

“No beds? Why can’t we travel by business class?”

“It’s very expensive. People have to pay a lot to fly business class, but it’s nicer.”

“Is there something nicer than business class?”

“There’s first class.”

“Oh, boy, I want to travel ‘royal class’”

“There’s no royal class. Royals have their own airplanes.”

“That’s what I want!”

I wonder if children in India naturally want to travel by ‘royal class’ or if that is an American thing. Anyway, it is reassuring that his preferences seem to be strictly monotone.

Queues and the Government

2005-12-02T04:07:00.000-05:00

In the previous post, I talked about the long queue for a visa. But it isn’t just the Indian Consulate that makes people wait in a long queue. Basically queues are a common feature of many government agencies that serve customers. But in the private sector, there is seldom any queue. It is curious that there is a completely different perspective of what constitutes an efficient queue in government and in the private sector, and this explains why your trip to a government agency can often be an ordeal.

Actually the worst queue I have been in over the last couple of years (I cannot really remember before that) is the one at the Department of Motor Vehicles here in Virginia. The wait time can easily stretch for three hours.

In the private sector, companies have to compete so they figure out something very quickly: customer wait time costs you a customer. If customers have a choice, they will not wait, or they will pay quite a bit to avoid a wait. So if the wages of the server are less than the value of time for customers, it doesn’t pay to make customers ever wait. If servers occasionally wait for customers, this is acceptable; you can have them do something in the meantime. Even if the value of wait time for a customer is about the same as the server’s wages, it makes little sense to allow the queue to extend beyond a few minutes because then you can hire another server and guarantee he will keep busy.

You might see a long queue at a few private businesses, but only when it makes a little sense. For example, the queue for the roller coaster is always long but I believe that it helps build anticipation plus if the unfortunate father had to ride the roller coaster ten times in an hour, he would never ever come back to the amusement park. And parks are getting smarter about avoiding queues and allowing customers to wait in ways that allow them to shop around and do other fun activities.

The government thinks about a queue in a different way. They don’t worry about losing customers. They do worry about explicit costs like the wages of employees. If the government accountants see that the cost per customer served goes up, that agency will get dinged. So the government learns that to be “efficient” and to keep costs down, they need to make certain all of their servers are perpetually busy. This means that the customer always waits.

Obviously, the government is forgetting something here: the opportunity cost of customer wait time. Most customers, if given a choice, would gladly pay to avoid a long wait. I would have paid at least $50, maybe $100 to avoid the long queue at the Indian Consulate. This cost never enters into the government accountants’ calculations. It could easily double or triple the cost of a government service, (actually the visa was not cheap, it was $180 for the three of us, but the high cost doesn’t pay for service).

I think that government could greatly improve their operations by offering more options. There should always be a “no wait – expedite” option. Even if it costs more, some people would prefer this to waiting.

The Visa Office

2005-12-01T04:47:00.000-05:00

If you want to see an inefficient bureaucracy in action, just visit the Indian Consulate on Massachusetts Ave in D.C. There in the basement is a small room where you get your visa. What a madhouse that place is!

Before I visited the consulate, I called to see if they would be open the Friday after Thanksgiving. I dialed the phone three times. Each time the phone rang for 100 rings (Yes 100!) and then went to a voice mail that said, “Sorry, you cannot leave a message, the voice mailbox is full.” I have an idea: Indian call center!

So we took our chances by visiting the consulate. We had to park a few blocks away and walk there (actually, the consulate is located in a very posh neighborhood). I saw a sign for visas. I went to the basement and knew instantly I was at the right place: it was standing room only!

I took a ticket. I was number 66 and they were on 15. It would be more than an hour to get to our number. That wouldn’t be so bad if we could sit somewhere but there few only 40 seats for 120 people. Luckily, my son got a seat.

There were only two clerks to take care of so many people. It was just ridiculous. And if that wasn’t bad enough, people who had questions were always bothering them. These were people who:
1. Didn’t understand the concept of taking a ticket and waiting for their number to be called,
2. Had specific difficult questions that should have been answered by someone on the phone if there had been such a person,
3. Had specific difficult problems that should have been dealt in another office if there had been one.

Luckily, I had read the web page carefully and came completely prepared with the proper cash amount and the forms filled out. If everyone was like that, they could have processed 200 applications an hour. As it was they only processed 30 applications an hour.

The day before yesterday, I took my ticket back to the consulate to pick up the passports with the visas. Again, it was standing room only. This time, there were no tickets, just a long queue the snaked about the entire room in a completely haphazard manner. All we were doing was picking up our passports and leaving but it was going very slowly. There were people who were panicking because they didn’t get their visa and their flight left the next day. There was only one lady to take care of everybody and she was completely overwhelmed.

I guess I cannot complain too much about my experience – at least we got our visas! But I cannot help thinking about the family that needed their visas and their flight left the next day. The overwhelmed clerk just sighed and said, “There is nothing we can do.” We could have been that family just as easily.

We will be leaving in one week. After we leave, there will be no blogging for the rest of December. (Well, I’ll try to sneak in a post somehow).

The Tyranny of the Status Quo

2005-11-30T05:56:00.000-05:00

What ever is the situation you happen to be in, there will those in society who will insist on maintaining that system, even if it is obviously flawed. Why is this?

One reason is that many people have learned to adapt to the system, with all of its flaws. People who have managed to do all right in the current system will fight to keep things as they are.

But even people who don’t have any interest in the status quo are reluctant to change things. People are always suspicious of change. They fear it even though most change in the last century has probably been for the good. People are comfortable with things as they are and risk-averse about the prospect of a new society.

These thoughts occurred to me as I was reading some comments the Indian Economy blog and elsewhere justifying a mixed economy for India. It would seem to me that nothing was so obvious as the incompetence of the Indian government, and people would be happy to see it get out of as many areas as possible. This should be especially apparent since the only prosperity India has seen in the last thousand years has come as a direct result of some modest market liberalization. But people fear change. So right now, India has made less progress in transitioning to a market economy than several Eastern European nations.

I am reminded of this when thinking of the U.S. medical system. It is really a strange mixture of market forces, regulation, and de facto socialism. It covers some people and not others. It is extremely expensive but it does provide good care to those lucky enough to have it. No one would have designed such an odd system, but no one seems too intent on really changing it either. The only reason anyone would support the current system is that it is the current system.

Bureaucracies are essential unchangeable since all of the people who work for a bureaucracy owe their jobs to the status quo. Anyone who was really bothered by the status quo probably became frustrated and left. People with a lot of energy and bright ideas about how to make things better soon figure out that bureaucracy is not the place to be – the market is the place.

We should understand that one of the costs of creating a system is that it will be hard to impossible to ever destroy it if we later discover this system has outlived its usefulness. I read somewhere that the U.S. still had a strategic helium reserve for our blimps until a few years ago, (maybe we still have it).

The free market’s greatest virtue is that it has no tyranny of the status quo. It reinvents itself daily to provide the goods that people want today, not years ago. Old established firms that have been around for ages still have to prove themselves against new ones that have just come into the market a year ago.

But this constant requirement to “prove yourself” applies to people as well as firms. Maybe that is why people aren’t so enthusiastic about the market. They hate to think that they might be poor when their old because their skills have become obsolete. Or maybe they just wish that life would give them the goodies without having to earn them in some way. Whatever the reason, we should back ourselves a little more. I know that when I’m 60, I’ll easily beat any 25-year-old at my game. Luckily for me, I don’t play cricket.