Source

Source.

Once the peak is passed, oil production begins to go down while cost begins to go up. In practical and considerably oversimplified terms, this means that if 2005 was the year of global Peak Oil, worldwide oil production in the year 2030 will be the same as it was in 1980. However, the world’s population in 2030 will be both much larger (approximately twice) and much more industrialized (oil-dependent) than it was in 1980. Consequently, worldwide demand for oil will outpace worldwide production of oil by a significant margin. As a result, the price will skyrocket, oil dependant economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode.

The issue is not one of "running out" so much as it is not having enough to keep our economy running. In this regard, the ramifications of Peak Oil for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water. The body of a 200 pound man thus holds 140 pounds of water. Because water is so crucial to everything the human body does, the man doesn't need to lose all 140 pounds of water weight before collapsing due to dehydration. A loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him.

In a similar sense, an oil based economy such as ours doesn't need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10 to 15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.

If a 5% drop in production caused prices to triple in the 1970s, what do you think a 50% or 75% drop is going to do? Ultimately, the energy-intensive industrial age may be little more than a blip in the course of human history.

Source.

Today's economics ensures that the average family, more often than not, comprises a married couple, their children and the husband's parent(s), all living together in not-always-companionable equations. For such a unit to not merely survive, but also do the job it was meant to in the first place — serve as an emotional bedrock — all its constituents will have to co-exist in a state of mutual respect. And being respectful does not mean veneration but engaging in a mutually beneficial relationship of openness, honesty, understanding, tolerance and regard for each others' needs, boundaries and limitations. In attempting to relate better to our elders, we often find ourselves at one of two poles: deification or vilification. And until we start actively searching for a middle ground, harmony in our family lives is going to remain elusive.

The key to respecting our elders lies not in ‘serving' them, but in relating to them with dignity as individuals, as companions and as one adult to another. To make this happen in your life, just remember the basic axiom — neither a vilifier nor a deifier be.

Source.

A "menu engineer" based in Palm Springs, Calif., Gregg Rapp works with restaurants across the country and around the world to transform innocent lists of meals into profitable, user-friendly sales tools. Although his clientele includes such prominent chains as Chili's, his daylong "menu boot camps" have helped bring sophisticated marketing know-how to mom-and-pop diners and corner pubs. The objective for eateries big and small: a menu that grabs the customer's eye and steers it to high-profit dishes and moneymaking add-ons (like the side salad that is only $3.99 extra when you order the entrée). Rapp is so sure of his menu makeovers that he offers a money-back guarantee that his menu will raise profits--and in his 25 years in the business, he has yet to issue a refund.

The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. "This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get wrong," he explains. "If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheapest thing." It's better to have the digits and dollar signs discreetly tagged on at the end of each food description. That way, the customer's appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whetted before he sees its cost.

Also important is placement. On the basis of his own research and existing studies of how people read, Rapp says the most valuable real estate on a two-panel menu (one that opens like a magazine) is the upper-right-hand corner. That area, he says, should be reserved for more profitable dishes since it is the best place to catch--and retain--the reader's gaze.

Cheap, popular staples--like a grilled-chicken sandwich or a burger--should be harder to locate. Rapp likes to make the customer read through a mouthwatering description of seared ahi tuna before he finds them. "This is akin to the grocery store putting the milk in the back," he says. "You have to walk by all sorts of tempting, high-priced items to get to it."

The adjectives lavished on a dish can be as important as the names of the ingredients. What would you rather eatplain grilled chicken or flame-broiled chicken with a garlic rub? Scrambled eggs or farm-fresh eggs scrambled in butter? "Think 'flavors and tastes,'" Rapp says, repeating a favorite mantra. "Words like crunchy and spicy give the customer a better idea of what something will be like." Longer, effusive descriptions should be reserved for signature items. Especially the profitable ones.

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www.duke.edu/~dandan/stories/Saffron.pdf

“See how the larger colored plate beneath the smaller one provides an appealing background and the illusion of a larger portion? You would only serve on the smaller dishes but the customers would still feel like they are getting more food. ”

Turning to a rack of glasses, Renu continued, “Ma what kind of drink makes Homefood the most money?” Never having considered this before, Sunita though for a moment before replying, “Mango lassi, I guess. It costs $4 and all I need to make it is yoghurt, mango and cardamom.”

“Great. So include lassi into every lunch or dinner order you take. Make it a staple that you serve will all meals, like you give your customers naan with their dishes. This way, it would be like every customer ordered lassi. Look at these gorgeous cocktail glasses, they would be great for lassi. Which ones do you like? The taller the glass, the more the customer thinks he’s getting.”

“They’re the same dishes Ma, I just renamed them and filled in the details, it adds to their appeal. Read it, you’ll see. It’s the same food you’ve always cooked for us.” Sunita’s eyes scanned the menu. Surprised, she asked her daughter, “Where are the prices?”

Pointing, Renu explained, “Look right here Ma. They’re under the description of the dishes. That way, decisions in ordering will be made based on how appealing the item sounds and not based on its price. See how I removed the dollar signs and only left numbers, this serves the same purpose.”

Puzzled, Sunita continued to stare at the menu, her eyes focusing in on a dish for lamb crème sauce. “Fifty-three dollars!” she exclaimed. “Renu, this was the price of an entire meal for a family at Homefood. How can I charge this for a single dish? Besides, lamb curry is not my specialty.”

Nodding, Renu replied, “Ma, don’t worry. Almost no one will order this dish, but having it on the menu willallow customers to justify ordering the next most expensive item. Overall, you’ll see that people order higher priced dishes more consistently.”

Finally, Stunita’s eyes began serarching the menu for Gaon-Ke-Aloo, the potatoes she had learned to cook in her small village outside of New Delhi, the only curry she had served each day at Homefood, her signature dish. On the second page, third from the bottom, she saw something similar.

Saffron Potatoes
Roasted Potatoes, laced with Saffron and Spiced with Turmeric
and Fresh Dill, Served in a Tangy Tomato Purée 14

“I know you don’t put saffron in your potatoes, Ma. But just put in a pinch, ok? With the yellow of the turmeric, no one will ever know how much is in there. I get paid to do this every day in LA, trust me, it works. Saffron is a hot word for food in general, and coupled with it being the new name of your restaurant, it’s bound to be a clincher.”

Source.

My research was making me crazy. In the old days, maybe you’d call ahead and reserve a spot. You’d arrive and they’d tell you where to park. That was that. But now you know what you’re missing.

It occurred to me that I was suffering from information obesity. Prosperity has caused most of us to go from problems associated too little food to problems associated with too much food. Until you adjust to the change, hoarding and binging can make you fat, sick, and miserable. Once I started thinking about information the same way, I could just picture the greasy fat folds in my brain.

There’s nothing wrong with data as such, but please! Lay off the carbs and get some exercise. Make decisions and move on. And remember to wipe down the equipment before you leave.

Source

As I mention in Predictably Irrational, this predicament has to do with our inherent Jekyll-Hyde nature: We just aren’t the same person all the time. In our cold, dispassionate state, we stick to our long-term goals (I will lose ten pounds); but when we become emotionally aroused, our short-term wants take the helm (Oh but I am hungry, so I’ll have that slice of cake). And what’s worse, we consistently fail to realize just how differently we’ll act and feel once aroused.

Fortunately, there’s a way around the problem: pre-commitments, or the preemptive actions we can take to keep ourselves in check. Worried you’ll spend too much money at the bar? No problem, bring just the cash you’re willing to part with. Afraid you’ll skip out on your next gym visit? All right, then make plans to meet a friend there. And so on. Pre-commitments can take many a form, and some get pretty creative.

Source: WealthPathfinder

Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) ”Turgid Truth”

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires.

The slightest observation however might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situation may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with the passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice. Whenever prudence does not direct, whenever justice does not permit, the attempt to change our situation, the man who does attempt it, plays at the most unequal of al games of hazard, and stakes every thing against scarce any thing.

Now you need to publish every movement
And every single thought to cross your mind
I’m told the Twitterverse is full of rubbish
But most of us are actually quite refined

We validate each other’s insecurities
And brag about the gadgets that we’ve bought
We laugh out loud at every hint of jolliness
And try to self-promote without being caught

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

As one's mortality swings into view, be thankful for life -- and whiskey.

LATimes Article by P.J. O'Rourke

I looked death in the face. All right, I didn't. I glimpsed him in a crowd. I've been diagnosed with cancer, of a very treatable kind. I'm told I have a 95% chance of survival. Come to think of it -- as a drinking, smoking, saturated-fat hound -- my chance of survival has been improved by cancer.

I still cursed God, as we all do when we get bad news and pain. Not even the most faith-impaired among us shouts: "Damn quantum mechanics!" "Damn organic chemistry!" "Damn chaos and coincidence!"

I believe in God. God created the world. Obviously pain had to be included in God's plan. Otherwise we'd never learn that our actions have consequences. Our cave-person ancestors, finding fire warm, would conclude that curling up to sleep in the middle of the flames would be even warmer. Cave bears would dine on roast ancestor, and we'd never get any bad news and pain because we wouldn't be here.

But God, Sir, in Your manner of teaching us about life's consequential nature, isn't death a bit ... um ... extreme, pedagogically speaking? I know the lesson that we're studying is difficult. But dying is more homework than I was counting on. Also, it kind of messes up my vacation planning. Can we talk after class? Maybe if I did something for extra credit?

Why can't death -- if we must have it -- be always glorious, as in "The Iliad"? Of course death continues to be so, sometimes, with heroes in Fallouja and Kandahar. But nowadays, death more often comes drooling on the toilet seat in the nursing home, or bleeding under the crushed roof of a teen-driven SUV, or breathless in a deluxe hotel suite filled with empty drug bottles and a minor public figure whose celebrity expiration date has passed.

I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.

Furthermore, I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy's. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass ... well, I'll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreatic? Liver? Lung?

Which brings me to the nature of my prayers. They are, like most prayers from most people, abject self-pleadings. However, I can't be the only person who feels like a jerk saying, "Please cure me, God. I'm underinsured. I have three little children. And I have three dogs, two of which will miss me. And my wife will cry and mourn and be inconsolable and have to get a job. P.S. Our mortgage is subprime."

God knows this stuff. He's God. He's all-knowing. What am I telling him, really? "Gosh, you sure are a good God. Good -- you own it. Plus you're infinitely wise, infinitely merciful, but ... look, everybody makes mistakes. A little cancer of the behind, it's not a big mistake. Not something that's going on your personal record. There's no reason it can't be, well ... reversed, is there?"

No doubt death is one of those mysterious ways in which God famously works. Except, on consideration, death isn't mysterious. Do we really want everyone to be around forever? I'm thinking about my own family, specifically a certain stepfather I had as a kid. Sayonara, you s.o.b.

Napoleon was doubtless a great man in his time -- at least the French think so. But do we want even Napoleon extant in perpetuity? Do we want him always escaping from island exiles, raising fanatically loyal troops of soldiers, invading Russia and burning Moscow?

Well, at the moment, considering Putin et al, maybe we do want that. But, century after century, it would get old. And what with Genghis Khan coming from the other direction all the time and Alexander the Great clashing with a Persia that is developing nuclear weapons and Roman legions destabilizing already precarious Israeli-Palestinian relations -- things would be a mess.

Then there's the matter of our debt to death for life as we know it. I believe in God. I also believe in evolution. If death weren't around to "finalize" the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas. We'd eat by surrounding pizzas with our belly flab and have sex by lying on railroad tracks waiting for a train to split us into significant others.

I consider evolution to be more than a scientific theory. I think it's a call to God. God created a free universe. He could have created any kind of universe he wanted. But a universe without freedom would have been static and meaningless -- the taxpayer-funded-art-in-public-places universe.

Rather, God created a universe full of cosmic whatchmajiggers and subatomic whosits free to interact. And interact they did, becoming matter and organic matter and organic matter that replicated itself and life. And that life was completely free, as amoral as my cancer cells.

Life forms could exercise freedom to an idiotic extent, growing uncontrolled, thoughtless and greedy to the point that they killed the source of their own fool existence. But, with the help of death, matter began to learn right from wrong -- how to save itself and its ilk, how to nurture, how to love (or, anyway, how to build a Facebook page) and how to know God and his rules.

Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace. (Although this option is not usually open to reporters.)

I'm not promising that the pope will back me up about all of the above. But it's the best I can do by my poor lights about the subject of mortality and free will.

Thus, the next time I glimpse death ... well, I'm not going over and introducing myself. I'm not giving the grim reaper fist daps. But I'll remind myself to try, at least, to thank God for death. And then I'll thank God, with all my heart, for whiskey.

Source.

According to data from the World Gold Council (WGC) and metals consultancy GFMS, demand for gold is currently greater than the supply by as much as 1000 tons per year. The WGC and GFMS have correctly identified two distinct economic spheres comprising gold supply and demand. In the western economies, jewelry and industrial demand are weak, but investment demand is strong, while outside the western economies broad gold demand continues to grow. India remains the largest buyer, while gold demand in China is rising. China has been aggressively adding gold to its reserves and has not only made it legal for Chinese citizens to own gold but is encouraging gold ownership. The potential influence of increased, long-term Chinese demand on the price of gold cannot be ignored.

Monetary inflation and supply and demand considerations are not the whole picture. There is a much deeper reality. For nearly four decades, gold, priced in US dollars, was implicitly linked to oil and the resulting demand for US dollars moderated the affects of monetary inflation on prices in the US. The end of the petrodollar standard and the resulting global decline in demand for US dollars will cause the price of gold to rise significantly. The value of the US dollar changed qualitatively after 1971 when it became an irredeemable pure fiat currency, no longer backed by gold; a fact that has been masked by the petrodollar standard.

Higher demand for gold also reflects a growing recognition that the US dollar and other currencies currently being devalued are not reliable stores of value. In fact, the US dollar has not been a store of value at all for 38 years during which massive quantities of fiat money, including trillions of petrodollars, flooded the global economy. The weakness of the US dollar exposed by the financial crisis, i.e., its inability to function as a reliable store of value regardless of its utility as a transactional medium, points exactly to the strength of gold. The decline in international demand for US dollars, rejected as a failed store of value, indicates strong demand for gold in the foreseeable future.

18th-century French philosopher and writer Voltaire once said that “paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero”. Understandably, Voltaire failed to consider a world where all money was purely transactional rather than a store of value, and where the relative values of currencies were managed in a loosely coordinated manner by central banks and governments through manipulation of the money supply, interest rates, etc. In theory, such a world could function indefinitely provided that currencies were relatively stable; provided that currencies were widely accepted and interchangeable; provided that large trade imbalances did not destabilize the system; and provided that currencies were not debased excessively, i.e., in a reckless or irresponsible manner, which would lead to a variety of economic problems. However, Voltaire’s inability to imagine such a world may be insufficient cause to dismiss his observation.

It seems possible that Voltaire’s superficially antiquated understanding was precisely that “paper money” can never function in the long run as a store of value, i.e., that it will inevitably, either by accident or by design, be mismanaged, and that it will always, eventually, be rejected, thus rendering its intrinsic value clear. History certainly supports Voltaire’s view in that fiat currencies tend to perish. As recently as 1999, referring to the sale of British gold reserves, Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, said that “Fiat money paper in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.” As the Chinese discovered in the 11th century, money has a qualitative dimension and for “paper money” that dimension is confidence. In contrast, because it is a tangible asset that required an investment of human labor and other resources to produce, the value of gold does not ultimately, in extremis, depend solely on the unreliable subjective feeling of confidence.

Source.

The petrodollar standard allowed the US to print vast quantities of US dollars without high domestic price increases because steady international demand strengthened the US dollar, thus moderating prices in the US, e.g., the prices of oil and of gold. The petrodollar standard, which can be undone in a relatively short period of time, is the Achilles’ heel of the US dollar’s world reserve currency status. What is more important, however, is that ending the petrodollar standard will put massive upward pressure on prices in the US: a fact that few have recognized.

The average monetary inflation rate, estimated at approximately 8% per year over the past 38 years, compounded annually, shows that the US money supply increased by roughly 1,863% since 1971. However, according to the US government, prices in the US have increased only 533% since 1971, a 1,330% differential. The number of US dollars exploded on a global basis to accommodate the growth in US dollar transactions, i.e., international trade, especially oil, and currency reserves.

China is the second largest US trading partner and the primary source of the chronic US trade deficit. As trading partners, the Chinese and US economies are linked by the US dollar, but compete for oil, currently priced in and purchased with US dollars. China needs more oil and wants to buy it with Chinese yuan. By buying gold and encouraging gold ownership, the Chinese government is betting against the US dollar and positioning the yuan to become a universally accepted transaction medium. China is quietly diversifying out of US dollars, buying resources and hard assets. Ending the petrodollar standard will allow China to buy oil in yuan and make the yuan a more viable currency internationally while, at the same time, clearing the way to take on a larger role in the global economy.

With currencies being debased throughout the western world in the hope of saving banks, stimulating economic activity and restoring trade. Until the US reverses course, or until a new reserve currency is in place, gold will continue to shine. Gold investment and central bank demand will likely remain strong because gold can function as a commodity, as a currency and also, unlike the US dollar, as a store of value immune from the hazards of currency devaluation caused by monetary inflation. As the only financial asset without counterparty risk, the historical reasons for holding gold, all but forgotten during the 1990s, have never been more clear.

The end of the petrodollar standard and eventually of the US dollar’s world reserve currency status combined with increased demand for oil and gold, particularly on the part of China, is a fundamental restructuring of the global economy already in progress.

The perfect storm for the US dollar comprises the consequences of past decades of monetary inflation punctuated by the dot-com and housing bubbles; excessive levels of debt in the US economy (hampering a US economic recovery); the poor condition of US banks whose balance sheets, still burdened with toxic assets, continue to deteriorate; an expanding Federal Reserve balance sheet that includes toxic assets; extraordinary spending by the US federal government driven by Keynesian economic policies and by what are most probably economically unworkable socialist programs; rapidly declining foreign appetite for US debt; quantitative easing (“money printing”); near 0% interest rates and a growing US dollar carry trade; not to mention the imminent end of the petrodollar standard, and the eventual end of the US dollar’s status as the world reserve currency.

THERE is nothing the computer industry likes better than a big new idea—followed by a big fight, as different firms compete to exploit it. “Cloud computing” is the latest example, and companies large and small are already joining the fray. The idea is that computing will increasingly be delivered as a service, over the internet, from vast warehouses of shared machines. Documents, e-mails and other data will be stored online, or “in the cloud”, making them accessible from any PC or mobile device. Many things work this way already, from e-mail and photo albums to calendars and shared documents.

This represents a big shift. If you store more and more things online, and access more and more software through an ordinary web browser, it suddenly matters much less what sort of computer you have, and what kind of software it is running. This means Microsoft, which launches the newest version of its Windows operating system this month, could lose out—unless, that is, the software giant can encourage software developers and users to migrate to its new suite of cloud-based services. Its main rival is Google, which offers its own range of such services, and continues to launch new ones and interlink them more closely. Yahoo!, which is allied with Microsoft, and Apple also offer cloud services for consumers; specialists such as Salesforce and NetSuite do the same for companies. Amazon has pioneered the renting out of cloud-based computing capacity. Some firms will offer large, integrated suites of cloud-based services; others will specialise in particular areas, or provide the technical underpinnings necessary to build and run clouds.

The new approach has great promise. It makes life easier for consumers (no need to install any software) and cheaper, too: many cloud services are free, supported by advertising or subsidised by a minority of users who pay for a premium service. Using a cloud-based e-mail service means you do not have to worry about losing all your e-mail if your laptop dies, and you can access your mail from any web browser. As cloud services expand, the same will be true for other documents and data.

There are also benefits for companies. By switching to cloud-based e-mail, accounting and customer-tracking systems, firms can reduce complexity and maintenance costs, because everything runs inside a web browser. Providers of cloud services, meanwhile, can benefit from economies of scale. Why should every company or university set up and maintain its own mail server, when Google or Microsoft can do it more efficiently? Companies are already happy to rely on utilities to provide electrical power, after all. Cloud computing will do the same for computing power.

The ability to summon computing capacity from the cloud when needed will also give the software industry a shot in the arm. During the dotcom boom, the first thing a start-up had to do was raise the money to buy a room full of servers. If a website experienced a sudden surge in popularity, more servers were needed to meet demand. Today a capacity can be rented as needed, allowing cloud services to scale up smoothly. This lowers barriers to entry and promotes innovation and competition. It also presents an opportunity to Microsoft, Amazon and other companies that are hoping to create the cloud platforms on which other firms will offer services.

To anyone familiar with the history of computing, there is an obvious concern: that one company will establish a dominant position and attract the attention of antitrust regulators. What IBM did in the mainframe era, and Microsoft did in the PC era, one of the new challengers may succeed in doing in the cloud.

Regulators are already acting to head off incipient problems. They are signalling worries about, for instance, overlapping board members at Apple and Google, or the indefinite retention of search histories by search engines. So far none of these skirmishes has led to a big court battle—something technology firms, which are keenly aware of the industry’s history, are anxious to avoid. But there are three areas where users of cloud services should be vigilant, and providers must be responsive, or regulators may yet step in.

A storm brewing?

First is the familiar risk of technological lock-in, as rival companies promote their own, mutually incompatible, standards and formats, as they have done in the past. Moving data from one cloud-based storage system to another, for example, is not always easy. Buyers of cloud services must take account of the dangers of lock-in, and favour service providers who allow them to switch between services without too much hassle.

Second, storing so much personal information, and using it to target advertising, has privacy implications. Consumers who are unwilling to pay for cloud-based services will have to put up with some advertising based on their online activities, since it pays the bills. Most users will be happy to trade some privacy for free services, but they should have control over their personal data, and be able to amend the profiles which service-providers compile and use to target advertising.

Third, data stored in the cloud may not be safe. This month tens of thousands of people with Sidekick smart-phones, for example, lost their address books, calendars, photo albums and other personal data, all of which were being stored in the cloud by Danger, an aptly named subsidiary of Microsoft. But a disaster on this scale is unusual: occasional outages are more common. Ensuring that cloud-based systems become more reliable is in the best interests of the firms that provide them, if they want to attract and retain customers.

Prodded by users and regulators, providers of cloud services are gradually moving towards new standards and greater transparency and reliability. If they do not move fast enough, regulators may yet have to intervene more forcefully. But cloud computing’s advantages already outweigh its drawbacks for many consumers and business users. In contrast with previous computer-industry battles, a single victor seems unlikely this time around. May the best clouds win.

Source.

“If it’s never our fault, we can’t take responsibility for it. If we can’t take responsibility for it, we’ll always be its victim.”
Richard Bach

“Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.”
John W. Gardner

One big problem a lot of people have is that they slip into thinking of themselves as victims that have little or no control over their lives. In this headspace you feel sorry for yourself, the world seems to be against you and you get stuck. Little to no action is taken and you get lost in a funk of sadness and self-pity.

So how can you move out of that mindset? In this article I’d like to share a few things that have helped me.

1. Know the benefits of a victim mentality.

There are a few benefits of the victim mentality:

• Attention and validation. You can always get good feelings from other people as they are concerned about you and try to help you out. On the other hand, it may not last for that long as people get tired of it.
• You don’t have to take risks. When you feel like a victim you tend to not take action and then you don’t have to risk for example rejection or failure.
• Don’t have to take the sometimes heavy responsibility. Taking responsibility for you own life can be hard work, you have to make difficult decisions and it is just heavy sometimes. In the short term it can feel like the easier choice to not take personal responsibility.
• It makes you feel right. When you feel like the victim and like everyone else – or just someone else – is wrong and you are right then that can lead to pleasurable feelings.

In my experience, by just being aware of the benefits I can derive from victim thinking it becomes easier to say no to that and to choose to take a different path.

It also makes it easier to make rational decisions about what to do. Yes, I know that I can avoid risk and the hard work of taking action by feeling like a victim. But I also know that there are even more positive results if I choose to take the other route, if I make the better choice to take a chance and start moving forward.

2. Be ok with not being the victim.

So to break out of that mentality you have to give up the benefits above. You might also experience a sort of emptiness within when you let go of victim thinking. You may have spent hours each week with thinking and talking about how wrong things have gone for you in life. Or how people have wronged you and how you could get some revenge or triumph over them.

Now you have to fill your life with new thinking that may feel uncomfortable because it is not so intimately familiar as the victim thinking your have been engaging in for years.

3. Take responsibility for your life.

Why do people often have self-esteem problems? I’d say that one of the big reasons is that they don’t take responsibility for their lives. Instead someone else is blamed for the bad things that happen and a victim mentality is created and empowered.

This damages many vital parts in your life. Stuff like relationships, ambitions and achievements.

That hurt will not stop until you wise up and take responsibility for your life. There is really no way around it.

And the difference is really remarkable. Just try it out. You feel so much better about yourself even if you only take personal responsibility for your own life for a day.

This is also a way to stop relying on external validation like praise from other people to feel good about yourself. Instead you start building a stability within and a sort of inner spring that fuels your life with positive emotions no matter what other people say or do around you.

4. Gratitude.

When I feel that I am putting myself in victim role I like to ask myself this question:

“Does someone have it worse on the planet?”

The answer may not result in positive thoughts, but it can sure snap you of a somewhat childish “poor, poor me…” attitude pretty quickly. I understand that I have much to be grateful for in my life.

This question changes my perspective from a narrow, self-centred one into a much wider one. It helps me to lighten up about my situation.

After I have changed my perspective I usually ask another question like:

“What is the hidden opportunity within this situation?”

That is very helpful to keep your focus on how to solve a problem or get something good out a current situation. Rather than asking yourself “why?” over and over and thereby focusing on making yourself feel worse and worse.

5. Forgive.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in thinking that forgiveness is just about something you “should do”. But forgiving can in a practical way be extremely beneficial for you.

One of the best reasons to forgive can be found in this quote by Catherine Ponder:

“When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free.”

As long as you don’t forgive someone you are linked to that person. Your thoughts will return to the person who wronged you and what s/he did over and over again. The emotional link between the two of you is so strong and inflicts much suffering in you and – as a result of your inner turmoil – most often in other people around you too.

When you forgive you do not only release the other person. You set yourself free too from all of that agony.

6. Turn your focus outward and help someone out.

The questions in tip #4 are useful. Another question I use when I get into the victim headspace is simply:

“How can I give value right now?”

Asking that question and making that shift in what you focus on really helps, even if you may not feel totally like doing it.

So I figure out how I can give someone else value, how I can help someone out.

And thing is that the way you behave and think towards others seems to have a big, big effect on how you behave towards yourself and think about yourself. For example, judge people more and you tend to judge yourself more. Be more kind to other people and help them and you tend to be more kind and helpful to yourself.

A bit counter intuitive perhaps, but that has been my experience. The more you love other people, the more your love yourself.

7. Give yourself a break.

Getting out of a victim mentality can be hard. Some days you will slip. That’s ok. Be ok with that.

And be nice to yourself. If you have to be perfect then one little slip is made into a big problem and may cause you to spiral down into a very negative place for many days.

It is more helpful to just give yourself a break and use the tips above to move yourself into a positive and empowered headspace once again.

Shubhra Gupta

The results of Hindi cinema’s ventures into the global mart have been mixed. The only real successes in this sphere have been the Chopra-Johar rom-coms which are more about extended large-hearted Punjabi families showing their love than about two individuals getting it together. The rest have come and gone, dreaming of those elusive dollars and pounds. And, doubtless, yen and dirham, as well.

But more than anything else, Blue is being seen as the film which will take Bollywood to the next level in foreign markets. So, what is it about Blue that could make it capable of spreading the new Bollywood gospel in markets hitherto untapped?

Till the early 1990s, the general perception of Bollywood was that it consisted of shrill socials or florid melodramas. And then, in 1995, Aditya Chopra placed teenage heartthrobs Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan in the middle of London, got them to do a Europe-darshan on Eurail, and changed that perception forever: post Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, being Indian was cool, and young people espousing traditional Indian values were even cooler.

Then came Karan Johar and his brand of designer desi cool: his young leads flaunted American brands like DKNY and GAP, but were unafraid to go to the temple, and do an aarti. His lovers lived in New York and New Jersey, were as swish as any ‘foreign’ actor, and as comfortable in the colour of their skins as the cut of their couture.

Between these two directors, and their made-for-NRI movies, the whole outlook of Indians living abroad changed — not only towards their movies but also what those movies told them about themselves. But even these films did not really charm the non-traditional audiences, which continued to be derisive about the costume changes and the songs-and-dances and the high-pitch of the dialogue delivery. A Monsoon Wedding here, and The Namesake there, did manage more of a crossover, but it can be argued that they were not really the real Bollywood thing — the film with songs and dances and heroes and villains and extravagant tale-telling.

And that’s precisely why Blue, and its potential, is so interesting. It’s both completely unlike the traditional Bollywood film, and yet very firmly a traditional Bollywood film with all its trappings. Will it, in the hyperbolic terms used by marketing mavens, really conquer the world?

by Michael Ervolini

Like all primates we over-value the things we possess. It's called the ''endowment effect'' and it can ruin your portfolio.

Monkeys do it. Chimpanzees do it. Even educated investors do it. But don't you do it, don't fall in love--at least not with assets in your portfolio. Following nature's lead may be, as Cole Porter urges, the right recipe for matters of the heart. Effective investing, however, often requires that you fend off natural impulses and act in ways that reflect more analytic reasoning and less emotion. One impulse to be wary of is the tendency to hype the value of an item merely because it is in your possession. It's termed The Endowment Effect.

The Endowment Effect was first discussed by Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago back in 1980. He noted that people often assign greater values to items when they are owned vs. just prior to ownership. It is as if things suddenly become worth more simply because they are yours--part of your endowment. This extra appreciation for items owned makes it tougher to sell them.

Selling is generally experienced as a loss, even if the sale price is more than was originally paid. Something deep within the brain interprets the sale as your now being deprived--no longer having access or use of whatever is gone. Some theories suggest that before organized markets existed, early man learned to horde. Trading was risky back then and something to be avoided. Remnants from this store-to-survive strategy today drives endowment in humans and other animals.

Your RX for dealing with an endowment …

Sorry Cole, but the best advice for falling in love with investments is don't do it … or at least try to avoid doing it. A strategy that helps is to periodically review your portfolio holdings to make sure they still support your investment plan. Carefully reassess the winners while doing so, and if they have given their best then consider selling them. Much like the old political saw, it's not what the investment has done for the portfolio in the past its what will it do to help returns today and tomorrow.

Compare your actions with your personal values. It doesn’t matter what we say is important to us — the things that are priorities in our lives are the things we actually do. How does what you do mesh with what you believe? If you say that getting out of debt is important to you, are you actually doing the things that will lead you to get out of debt?

The truth is that the things that are priorities in our lives are the things we actually do. It’s one thing to say something is a priority, but it’s another thing to do it.

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by Satyajit Das

New paper economies emerged directly from the demise of the gold standard that removed restrictions on the ability to create money, especially debt. Finance inexorably displaced industry with trading and speculation becoming major activities as financial engineering replaced real engineering. In an earlier age, Heinrich Heine, the German poet, too had identified the change: “Money is the God of our time….” The rise of financiers is intimately linked to this financialisation of the global economy.

Financial innovations such as securitisation (the packaging up and sale of loans) and derivatives (effectively risk insurance) enabled banks to extend more credit. Banks could literally by increasing throughput, making more loans and selling them off to eager investors, magically increase returns to their investors. Bankers had invented a ‘money machine’.

Bank also began to trade more actively with their shareholders money, following the advice of Fear of Flying author Erica Jong: “If you don’t risk anything then you risk even more”.

All of this, of course, meant increased earnings for the bank and its star performers. As people who work in financial institutions know, it is primarily an enterprise that is run for the employees with an afterthought for shareholders.

The ability to earn high rewards only becomes a problem where the promise of a share of profits encourages excessive risk taking and a focus on short-term earnings. It also becomes a problem where the basic measure of performance is ambiguous and can be systematically manipulated. Unfortunately, ‘earnings’ proved to be the result of wildly inaccurate models, accounting tricks and risks that had not been accurately captured.

The golden age seemed to come to an end with the GFC. Initially, the world viewed the destruction of storied financial institutions in Global Financial Crisis as an entertaining blood sport.

Commentators briefly dared hope that the power and influences of finance and financiers would be reduced. Finance would revert to being a facilitator rather than the central driver of the economy.

Unfortunately, those hopes are misplaced. Low or zero interest rates, heavily managed markets, reduced competition and state underwriting of solvency has helped surviving banks prosper.

Bank risk levels have increased to and in some cases beyond pre-crisis levels. The higher levels of risk taking reflect increasing comfort in central bank support of financial institution’s liquidity and their ability and willingness to intervene to limit price risks.

Over the last 30 years, talent has increasingly been lured from productive profession into finance and the speculative economy. The rewards available mean that the brain drain into these professions is unlikely to stop. The excesses of the financial economy are also unlikely to be easily tamed.

The Masters of the Universe that survived the carnage are back to their old tricks. The ‘fight for talent’ means that bonuses and remuneration guarantees for new employees are all back in vogue.

A year after the collapse of Lehman, the near collapse of AIG and the grande mal seizure in financial markets, the Masters of the Universe are still firmly in charge. As Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard knew: “everything must change so that everything can stay the same.”

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Motivating people is an extremely difficult and delicate task as anyone who’s ever taught, managed, collaborated with or given birth to someone knows. In business, as opposed to say, child-rearing, the debate is slightly less daunting, though not always much clearer. For instance, offering incentives to employees for improved performance is a fairly common approach to encouraging higher sales —though surprisingly unproven by data.

For the most part, the effectiveness of incentives is supported by intuition and some anecdotal evidence. Wouldn’t everyone work at least a little harder for a $100 bill on top of their usual paycheck? Certainly it can’t hurt. But one important open question is whether monetary or tangible (spa retreat, ipod, dinner for two, etc) rewards more efficacious motivators?

Those who advocate for monetary incentives claim they have the greatest appeal given that the winners can do anything with them; what if someone needs an ipod like they need another hole in their head? On the other side, those in favor of tangible incentives argued that money lacks the emotional appeal of, say, a weekend for two at a romantic country inn or swank hotel. But either way, there was nothing to back up either camp.

Thankfully, there is some data on this debate. A few years ago Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company decided to test which method was more successful in an effort to improve sales of a new line of Aquatred tires. Their plan was simple and elegant: first they ranked their 60 retail districts according to previous sales, then divided them into two groups of equal performance and assigned one group to receive monetary incentives and the other to receive tangible incentives of equal value to the first group.

The results were very interesting; it turned out that the tangible-reward group increased sales by 46% more than the monetary-reward group. They also improved in terms of the mix of products sold by 37%. One explanation, and it seems to me a fairly good one, is that we can visualize tangible rewards (imagine yourself on a Hawaiian beach), which creates an emotional response. Money, on the other hand, is not accompanied by images as often (aside from maybe Scrooge McDuck swimming in piles of it), and lacks the emotional pull that tangible rewards have, so they’re less effective in motivating employees. I guess it’s called “cold, hard cash” rather than “future beach vacation cash” for a reason.

The people you surround yourself with, the books you read, the courses you participate in, the shows you watch – all of these are a sure predictor of where you’re going to be 5 years from now. So where are you headed?

It might be time to re-evaluate just who or what you let influence you. If you can’t identify people in your life who you aspire to be like financially, or in business, or indeed in any aspect of life, then it’s time to look around for some new friends. Paying a good mentor or coach is one way of doing this, but regularly reading and learning from uplifting blogs is definitely another very useful method, and one that I’ve used to great benefit.

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Source.

In a new study, Moore School of Business marketing professor Stacy Wood suggests that it’s in times of upheaval that we’re particularly inclined to leave our comfort zone and try new things.

On first thought, this sounds counter-intuitive. You would think that upon losing our job or girlfriend, we’d be more intent on crawling under the sheets with a favorite book or movie and lying low for a while – not deciding that now’s the time to quit smoking or take up sky-diving.

And yet, these are the very kinds of challenges that we’re likely to take on following a big life change, according to Wood.

It seems that when we are confronted with one disruption to our daily routine, we become more open to other change. Or, to put it differently, when things break, we enter the right mind-frame for breaking our old habits as well. According to Wood’s rationale, this is because once something pivotal in our routine gets switched around, we’re no longer so attached to all the other habits that formed our daily script.

"It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do.

"So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse."

"We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.

"There's no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that. There is no intimate interaction between Windows and a Dell notebook.

On the benefits of owning an operating system: "That allows us to innovate at a much faster rate than if we had to wait for Microsoft, like Dell and HP and everybody else does. Because Microsoft has their own timetable, for probably good reasons. I mean Vista took what -- seven or eight years? It's hard to get your new feature that you need for your new hardware if it has to wait eight years. So we can set our own priorities and look at things in a more holistic way from the point of view of the customer. It also means that we can take it and we can make a version of it to fit in the iPhone and the iPod. And, you know, we certainly couldn't do that if we didn't own it."

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"If everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane!"
"A hundred thousand sperm and you were the fastest?"
"Vegetables aren't food. Vegetables are what food eats."
"I've got nothing against God. It's his fan club I can't stand.
"My Karma ran over my Dogma."

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The way our politics is going these days regional issues are more important, regional parties are taking centre stage...

That's because the quality of our political leaders is going down. Remember when Jawaharlal Nehru was the PM between 1950 and 1962 this country achieved extraordinary growth. Five steel plants were completed, Bhaba Atomic Energy Research Centre was established Tata Institute of Fundamental research became strong, Bhakra Nangal dam came up, IITs, AIIMS, you name it all of that happened in 12 years post independence. You tell me of any other 12 year period where we made such growth in government.

If you have a great leader of the caliber of Nehru even India with all its problems even after independence, with all its lack of resources can make extraordinary progress. Establishing five steel plants is not easy but the man did it. Establishing a centre for atomic energy research is not easy, he did. Getting 400 plus Phds from around the world to IIT Kanpur was not easy, he did it. All of this happened because of the vision of one man.

In fact in 1967 many of my professors at IIT Kanpur said they all came back to India because of the vision and the enthusiasm of Nehru. Today these institutes are not able to attract five such faculties per year but that man attracted 400 such people at just one institute. What does it tell you? It tells you if you have great leaders you can achieve what seems impossible. I am absolutely convinced, as I have written in the book, three fundamental pieces of development — values practiced by people, leaders who serve as a role models and the elite and the powerful who will eschew any asymmetry of benefits. These three pieces of development puzzle are absolutely necessary if India has to make decent, equitable, just fair, growth.

Post the Satyam episode the issue of corporate governance has come to the fore. What do you think should be done to avoid such instances?

Any community that encourages, directly or indirectly, a feudal structure or dictatorship is bound to result in disaster. On the other hand any community (company, city, town, nation etc) that espouses the cause of democracy committed with fair, balanced, transparency and accountability will never see a disaster.

What happened in Satyam is that it was a huge scandal. Nobody could stand up and say, what is happening is wrong. Even those who thought what was happening is wrong did not have the courage and were not in an environment to say that it was wrong.

But lot of companies has a feudal approach...

That's where I think the investors, particularly the institutional investors, have to put pressure on such companies to eschew feudalism and install an enlightened democracy. I believe feudalism was responsible for what happened at Satyam.

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Be it the undisputed powerful Nehru-Gandhi family in the national capital or the Abdullahs in India-controlled Kashmir to the Reddys and the Karunanidhis in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu respectively, dynasty politics is an irony considering that India considers itself the world's largest democracy -- all one got to possess is a big and famous name and then even with no prior experience in governance, one can aspire to be the one calling the shots in a political party -- a clear sign of nepotism, say political analysts.

"It all started with the Nehru-Gandhi family, India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru bringing his daughter Indira Gandhi to the Congress. After Nehru from 1947-1964, Indira Gandhi ruled India from 1966-1977 and again from 1980-1984, and her son Rajiv ruled during 1984-1989," said political scientist Professor Ajay Singh.

"No other dynasty in modern history has ruled so many people for so long a time. Even in India it is necessary to go back to the 17th-century Moghul Empire to find a parallel even before British rule. No doubt, it's sheer nepotism in a country of billion people," he added.

Agreed political scientist R.K. Basu: "In India, family succession is at the core of society, business, and, to a surprising degree, politics. Even the lowliest jobs on the railroads are often passed from father to son. It's in the mindset of people. This is the reason why dynasty politics is surviving even after 62 years of independence from British rule. It shows nepotism has a place in Indian politics, and it would stay, thanks to the people and power."

The Nehru-Gandhi family is not alone. In India-controlled Kashmir, the current Chief Minister Omar Abdullah had succeeded his father Farooq Abdullah as the executive head of the state, who in turn had succeeded his father Sheikh Abdullah.

Likewise, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi is mulling to hand over the baton to his son Stalin, the namesake of the former Soviet leader.

Political analyst Prof S.K. Gupta contended: "It shows that experience of good governance doesn't count in secular, democratic India. Experienced politicians are always ignored for making way for sons and daughters of politicians to keep alive the tradition of dynasty politics. Party members are always charting the careers of their leaders by succumbing to nepotism, thereby setting aside the true values of a democracy."

However, according to the political analysts, India is not alone as the dynasty politics is prevalent even in developed nations like the United States and Japan.

"The election of George W. Bush as President eight years after his father left the White House, and Makiko Tanaka's induction as Japan's Foreign Minister almost 25 years after her father was Premier, shows that dynasty politics is not a preserve of Third World democracies. Even it is prevalent in developed nations. Why to blame India only?" said Professor Singh.

Rightly summarized in India's leading English daily in an editorial in the recent past, "India is a democracy of dynasties, for dynasties and by dynasties."

“It’s not how hard you hit but how hard you can get hit. And keep going.” from the movie “Rocky Balboa”

"The corn and the cattle are my care, and the rest is the will of god." - Hindu proverb

A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.


Best New Year's Resolution? A 'Stop Doing' List by Jim Collins

She looked sideways as she became conscious of two boys on a faraway table staring at her. It wasn't surprising, considering she was the best looking girl in Dairy Den by a huge margin. Why are there so few pretty girls? Why hadn't evolution figured it out that men liked pretty women and turned them all out that way?
--
Unrelated images of the day my dad left us flashed in my head. Those images had not come for years. The look on his face as he shut the living room door on the way out. My mother's silent tears for the next few hours, which continued for the next few years. I don't know why that past scene came to me. I think the brain has a special box where it keeps crappy memories. It stays shut, but everytime a new entry has to be added, it opens and you can look at what is inside. I felt anger at my dad, totally misplaced as I should have felt anger at the
earthquake. Or at myself, for betting so much money. Anger for making the first big mistake of my life.

The 3 Mistakes of My Life: A Story about Business, Cricket and Religion
by Chetan Bhagat

“Goals are not only absolutely necessary to motivate us. They are essential to really keep us alive.”
Robert H. Schuller

Enjoying success is a very positive experience. It can weaken influence of other, bad experiences in our life. We often find it easier to act in one direction, when we expect success, while we avoid handling different, unpleasant problems in our life. What is important is that we are often unaware of this mechanism as it mostly works on unconscious level.
- Kacper Wrzesniewski

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Could the whole decade-long explosion of blogging have been a mere fad — the transitory adolescence of a Web destined to grow up? Rebecca Mead's 2000 New Yorker piece about Blogger and Meg Hourihan and Kottke had referred to blogging as "the CB radio of the Dave Eggers generation." Nicholas Carr, meanwhile, compared the blogosphere to the flourishing of ham radio in the early days of broadcasting. It had taken roughly two decades for "social production" of radio to be absorbed into "corporate production," Carr observed. Now, he maintained, with only the slightest hint of regret, the same thing was happening somewhat more quickly to bloggers, as the amateurs got pushed to the periphery by the pros.

Historically, the succession of media forms and technologies follows a predictable pattern: every innovation arrives with a fanfare announcing that it will replace its predecessor. But when the dust settles, the newcomer almost always winds up having redefined that predecessor rather than eliminated it. Radio did not kill off the telegraph. (Although it is now, finally, dead — Western Union shut down telegram service in 2006 — it was the Internet that delivered the final blow.) Television killed off neither radio nor the newspaper. The cinema failed to kill live theater. Home video did not shutter the movie theaters. The Web may be wreaking havoc on the newspaper industry, but it is unlikely to wipe out all publishing on paper in the near future.

Similarly, as people have flocked to Facebook and MySpace and Twitter, they will not stop posting to or reading blogs — but their patterns of blogging will change. The social networks turn out to be an easier and more efficient channel for casual messages intended for a handful of friends. If what you want to tell the world requires only 140 characters, you may well choose to say it on Twitter instead of in a blog post. As a result, some unquantifiable portion of the world's blogging has already started to change, to become a little more deliberate, a little less telephonic in nature.

But there is scant sign of mass abandonment of the form. There's likely to be a long future in which a great number of people who wish to communicate online find the unique characteristics of a blog irresistible. Next to the traditions and constraints of older media on paper or the airwaves, blogging tends to look anarchic and ephemeral and superficial. But next to the crowd-driven networking on Facebook or the stream of Twitter snippets, blogs appear far more substantial and free-standing and powerful. A blog lets you define yourself, whereas on a social network you are more likely to be defined by others. Sure, blog readers can write comments — but the blogger can delete the comments, or disemvowel them, or turn them off entirely. Sure, a blog is dependent on the links you point outward and those that others point in; but it has its own independent existence in a way that no amount of messaging and chat and interaction on a social networking site can match. A blog is not necessarily better than a Facebook profile, nor is it worse; it is, simply, different.

So, while there is no question that the energy that has poured into Facebook and its ilk in the latter part of the 2000s has drawn some of the excitement and media attention that bloggers formerly took for granted, it is also true that the rise of the social networks clarifies exactly what characteristics made blogging last. They are the same traits that once excited its earliest pioneers. A blog lets you raise your voice without asking anyone's permission, and no one is in a position to tell you to shut up. It is, as the journalism scholar Jay Rosen puts it, "a little First Amendment machine," an engine of free speech operating powerfully at a fulcrum-point between individual autonomy and the pressures of the group. Blogging uniquely straddles the acts of writing and reading; it can be private and public, solitary and gregarious, in ratios that each practitioner sets for himself. It is hardly the only way to project yourself onto the Web, and today it is no longer the easiest way. But it remains the most interesting way. Nothing else so richly combines the invitation to speak your mind with the opportunity to mix it up with other minds.

Excerpted from "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters"

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The other money quote from Damon is also misleading and was taken out of context:

That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”

Note the break between “Getting it right is expensive” and “Getting it first is cheap.” The break is there because there were paragraphs of dialog between them. Damon saw a way to slap them together to make us look bad. He did that because it fit his original thesis, which he had formed prior to talking to us.

The Real Story

The real story is what I said between those two sentence fragments, and it’s that stuff that makes all the difference. I talked to Damon about how stories evolve on our blog. How it can start with a rumor, which we may post if we find it credible and/or it’s being so widely circulated that the fact of the rumor’s existence is newsworthy in itself. But then we evolve a post to get to the truth.

Jeff Jarvis calls this Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture in a post today. His arguments deserve to be fleshed out into an entire book.

We don’t believe that readers need to be presented with a sausage all the time. Sometimes it’s both entertaining and informative to see that sausage being made, too. The key is to be transparent at all times. If we post something we think is rough, we say so. If we think it’s absolutely true, we signal that, too, while protecting our sources.

A good example of this is another Twitter story we wrote, this time about Google. in Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter (Updated) we wrote, based on a solid source, that Google was in late stage talks to acquire Twitter. The post itself brought out other sources who disputed that the talks were in late stage. Within minutes after posting we had updated the text, adding “Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine. But discussions between the companies are confirmed.”

That update is 100% correct. Google was in talks over a data deal, and there were discussions of an acquisition. Our original source got his information from a Google employee. We have subsequently confirmed that a Google employee did in fact tell him that they were in late stage acquisition discussions with Twitter, because he believed it to be true. There was some internal miscommunication about the discussions.

But anyway, media outlets like the NYTimes think that having to update a story is a sign of weakness. I believe the opposite, that it’s a sign of transparency and a promise to our readers to continue to give them the best information we have. Corrections and updates are made constantly to big news posts.

Some people ask why we don’t just wait until we have the whole story before posting. That’s where the cheap/expensive quote above comes in. The fact is that we sometimes can’t get to the end story without going through this process. CEOs don’t always take our calls when we’re asking about speculative rumors. But when a story is up and posted, it’s amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information.

It’s that iterative process, which Jarvis nails completely, that I was trying to guide Damon to. He can like it or hate it, but it works. And readers love it. The only people who don’t like it are competitors who like to point out that a story was partially wrong, and that they got it right later. But the fact is that they didn’t even know there was a story to begin with. Our original post kicked off the process, and they, like us, started digging for the absolute truth.

Oprah Winfrey told an interviewer in 1991, one of the secrets of her success is sometimes not acting:

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned recently is that when you don’t know what to do, you should do nothing until you figure out what to do because a lot of times you feel like you are pressed against the wall, and you’ve got to make a decision.

You never have to do anything. Don’t know what to do? Do nothing. I wait. And that has been a big lesson: to be willing, to be still with myself, and trust myself and my higher power to help me make the right decision. And to not feel pressured.

Smart, well-meaning people have tried to plan economies at amazingly precise levels of detail. Consider the five-year economic plans of the former Soviet Union. Essentially, a group of economists would decide, say, how many dump trucks would be needed in Latvia in five years. Then they would work backwards, deciding how much steel would be needed for that many trucks, and then how much iron ore and manganese would need to be mined to supply the steel mills, and then . . . you get the idea. The calculations for dump trucks alone were incredibly complex, not to mention insensitive—they had no way to allow for any changes in the economic environment over the next five years. It simply couldn’t be done, which is why the Soviets often ran out of things like toilet paper, and why we now speak of the former Soviet Union.

By contrast, the capitalist system seems chaotic. No centralized body decides what the supply of any given product should be. No one is minding the store. Yet somehow the system self-organizes over time. When was the last time you wanted to buy popcorn, but couldn’t? Or toilet paper? Or a dump truck, for that matter? Somehow, our needs are met quite well in the almost complete absence of master planning. Given certain premises—that people tend to act in their own self-interest, that they will benefit from their own labor and innovation, that those who don’t play fair will be punished— over time spontaneous order succeeds where central planning could not. With extremely complex systems like economies, in fact, self-organization may be the only choice.

Time Mastery: How Temporal Intelligence Will Make You A Stronger, More Effective Leader by John K. Clemens, Scott Dalrymple

Full article here.

Given that most Indians still live hand-to-mouth, he said, proposals to give freer rein to investors and banks to do as they see fit could backfire as they did in Southeast Asia in 1997 when the collapse of a credit bubble and a run on the Thai baht led to economic calamity in the region.

“We cannot afford to take the kind of risk that other countries can, because of our large population,” says Yaga Venugopal Reddy, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India. “As a smaller emerging market economy, I might not be able to get the type of money that is required to get over a crisis.”

Now retired and living in the southern city of Hyderabad, which is geographically and culturally distant from the power centers of New Delhi and Mumbai, Mr. Reddy has no official role in Indian policy making. But he and his views are respected and shared by many political leaders, bankers and economists here.

He dismisses the calls for greater financial reform, which come from economists and some in the government. To be successful in India, he said, regulators must tailor proposals to fit the “time and context” in which they are working.

Right now, he says the government must focus on its fiscal health, invest in infrastructure and improve education, health care and governance. Until India addresses those issues, he said, further financial reforms will not be effective and, in fact, could make it more vulnerable to crises.

by JONATHAN

I’ve found the secret to being excited about waking up every day; and I’ll tell you what it is right now. It’s starting a Revolution. I didn’t always think in these terms though…

I used to ask: What can I gain? How can I turn this into a business that will support me?

I focused on helping others by sharing my perspective, but that was the extent of it. When I did that, working on this blog would be exciting sometimes, and at other times it would feel like just a chore.

Now, I can’t even contain my energy for the work I’m doing. I feel like there’s electricity in the air. I’ve changed my mindset and made the decision to do something epic. Now I’m focused on creating a social movement of people living on their own terms. Because of this, I’ve moved from ego-centric to collective-centric.

It’s bigger than me now.

Guess what happens when you make something bigger than you? You get plugged in. You become connected to this amazing source of energy that was never previously available to you.

Now I ask: How can I take action that will support this vision? How can I create momentum to further ignite this revolution?

The biggest benefit to working on a revolution is that it gives you an insane amount of energy. Working on a revolution will make you want to wake up. You might even have a hard time falling asleep at night, because you’re so motivated to take action on your vision.

Once in a while you’ll question whether or not you’re up to the task.

But something else is even scarier: what you left behind.

The ordinary, conventional, safe, secure, default life that you could have chosen instead. That’s what’s really scary. Remember that and you’ll be okay.

Try an experiment. It involves an old-fashioned sandglass, now known as an hourglass or three-minute egg timer. Fill one end with sand, then turn it over and watch the sand pass from the upper chamber to the lower.

Everyone knows intuitively that the sand must flow through the bottleneck at a constant rate. Yet the sandglass presents us with an apparent paradox. When the upper chamber is full, it seems that the amount of sand in it decreases at a slow, steady rate. But when it is about half empty, we perceive that the speed of the emptying sand increases.

And then, when it is almost empty, the flow seems to increase exponentially. Now time, which seemed so languid before, races ahead. This is not only a metaphor for how events seem to flash by as we grow older, but also an example of the variability in how we perceive time.
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If a routine task is too simple, then boredom results and time seems to pass slowly. If a task is complex but not routine, then it requires our conscious attention and time seems to pass slowly. But when a task is complex enough to sufficiently engage the brain, yet familiar enough to be routine, then time shows its elasticity quite clearly—it actually seems to flow at a faster rate.
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Here are some actions you can take to turn your knowledge of time’s elasticity into practice:

Stop crises by stopping time. Maintain your objectivity when a crisis occurs, rather than getting caught up in the subjective frenzy. Time masters ‘‘stop’’ time by asking why rather than when—or, better yet, by making a completely out-of-context suggestion. Such reframing gives everyone an opportunity to reboot and brings fresh perspective to a problem.

Don’t restrict yourself to ‘‘clock time’’—living by minutes and hours. As important as these can be, ‘‘event time’’—the occurrence of meaningful events—can be even more important.

Be aware of the time-related differences in team members. Recognize that everyone has a ‘‘time personality,’’ a set of unique characteristics and individual differences that disposes each person to act and react temporally in different ways.

Slow time down. Recognize that top speed is not always the most appropriate pace. Take the time, if needed, to do more research or ask more questions. Don’t get caught up in a momentum that might bring you to market before you’re really prepared, or lead you to make a decision that isn’t yet ripe.

Time Mastery: How Temporal Intelligence Will Make You A Stronger, More Effective Leader by John K. Clemens, Scott Dalrymple

From Wikipedia.

The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future. For example, if a fair coin is tossed repeatedly and tails comes up a larger number of times than is expected, a gambler may incorrectly believe that this means that heads is more likely in future tosses. Such an expectation could be mistakenly referred to as being "due". This is an informal fallacy.

Full Article here.

Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” As beneficiaries of the greatest information boom in the history of the world, we are suffering, by Simon’s logic, a correspondingly serious poverty of attention.

Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the “dumbest generation” is leading us into a “dark age” of bookless “power browsing.” Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we’ve all become mentally obese.

One of the weaknesses of lifehacking as a weapon in the war against distraction, Mann admits, is that it tends to become extremely distracting. You can spend solid days reading reviews of filing techniques and organizational software. “On the web, there’s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need,” he says. “But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There are a lot of people out there that find this a very sticky idea, and there’s very little advice right now to tell them that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit.

“The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data.”

"Results matter, efforts don’t"

“Priorities are like arms: If you have more than two of them, they’re probably make-believe”

Never borrow for personal needs

I have inherited the value systems and principles from my parents. My father followed the golden principles—never borrow money for personal needs and don’t ever give guarantees. He would always say: ‘The repayment liabilities are yours. You can’t disown them. On the other side, the asset that you believe belongs to you, may or may not remain of that value always. So, the value of assets goes down but the liabilities stay with you. Live within your means.’ So, he would also explain to us by saying: ‘Liabilities are like taxi meters, which keep running 24 hours, even when you go off to sleep. The interest meter runs all the time. If you do business with your own money, you can withstand any bad time.’”

Nimesh Kampani, Chairman & Managing Director, JM Financial


Take risks but one at a time

My personal friend and philosopher, Prof. Lord S.K. Bhattacharyya, Head of Warwick Manufacturing Group, has had an enormous influence on my growth as a business leader. His advice: never take more than one risk at a time. He typically classifies risks into people, markets and money—three legs of a tripod. If you take more than one risk, the tripod loses balance. For instance, he would say only when you have a strong team and a stable market, can a financial risk such as an acquisition be attempted successfully.

Venu Srinivasan, Managing Director, TVS Motor Company

Original Post

I would like to offer my deep condolences to the people of Tamil Eelam for their immense losses in recent months.

As a Kurd, I have followed the liberation struggle of Tamils in Sri Lanka-along with my own people’s fight for an independent state-since mid-1980s, when I first saw the pictures of uniformed female cadres of the LTTE in Jaffna and fell in love with them. The LTTE, in my view, is the gold-standard for all national liberation struggles despite its defeat. And what a glorious defeat it was! My people suffered many defeats too; in 1925, 1938, 1946, 1975, 1988, 1991 and 1999. None could match the glory of LTTE’s fight to the death. This was a struggle against overwhelming odds that ended in martyrdom for your leaders, but their memories and their struggle will live in songs and stories of all Tamil people for a thousand years to come.

That the LTTE managed to keep its leader and senior cadres alive right down to the last day and the last fire-fight before they too succumbed to the vastly superior man and fire power of the SLA is a testament to the intelligence, strength, discipline and dedication of the organisation. V. Prabhakaran and his senior commanders could have ordered the rank and file LTTE personnel to lay down their arms, before fleeing the island for a third country. The fact that they -as well as their families-did not flee the conflict zone nor surrendered, but chose to fight to the death like tens of thousands of other LTTE cadres that preceded them is a lesson to all leaders who ask others to sacrifice their lives for a cause. I doubt many insurgent leaders, Kurds included, would show as much courage and offer as much personal sacrifice in similar circumstances.

Compared to armed Kurdish movements, the LTTE had many strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths were too numerous to count. Its weaknesses and mistakes were few but deadly in the long run. In my view, there are two generalised, structural weaknesses of the LTTE, followed by a few specific mistakes they made.

Firstly, the LTTE was extremely inflexible in its political expectations. In the absence of international support for an independent homeland, an autonomy agreement for a federal Tamil state in Sri Lanka was the most realistic outcome for the LTTE. It was the responsibility of a new generation of Tamils to take the struggle to its next stage, if Sri Lankan state continued to be ill-disposed towards Tamil people. By then, of course, the federal Tamil state would have gained some international recognition for the status quo and thus would have been far less isolated as a ‘terrorist’ outfit. That V. Prabakharan instructed his bodyguards to shoot him if he deviated from the demand for independence is a clear sign of the inflexibility of the LTTE leadership.

Secondly, the LTTE put unnecessary emphasis on revenge and retaliation. As Clausewitz famously said, “war is politics by other means”. In politics,-as in war-revenge and retaliation is always secondary to the main objective. Every political act must be judged by its consequences; that is, whether it helps bring the main objective closer to reality, not whether it satisfies primitive urges for some injustice done in the past. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and many attacks on Sinhala leadership, some of whom were useful and could have been of further use to Tamil struggle in time, are cases in point.

In more specific mistakes, the LTTE should have pushed on to re-capture Jaffna at all costs after liberating the Elephant Pass in 1999, even if this meant losing ground elsewhere. The cost could have been very high with tens of thousands of SLA soldiers still occupying the peninsula but the SL political and military forces were in complete disarray. Unfortunately, the window of opportunity was lost and the LTTE eventually found itself fighting on more than one front.

The ceasefire agreement of 2002, following the 9/11 events, was correct; perhaps inevitable. However, the Indian Ocean Tsunami of late 2004 and its devastating effect on Tamil territory should have humbled Prabakharan and the LTTE into seeking a genuine half-way compromise with the SL government. It should be noted that the Tsunami and its effects ended the Aceh independence movement and it should have played a role in LTTE’s political calculation as well.

Another grave error was the boycotting of elections in 2005 that brought hardliners to government in Sri Lanka. As a general rule, people should never ever be asked to refrain from voting in an election under any circumstances. The benefits of election boycotts, such as refreshing community spirit and as gestures of dissatisfaction, are small and ephemeral. They are far outweighed by the dangers as well as the real and lasting costs of handing the power to a less amenable adversary.

Karuna’s rebellion should also have been foreseen and dealt with quite early and sincerely. As a faraway, non-Tamil observer, nothing disappointed me in LTTE as much as the Tiger vs Tiger violence. I can imagine its demoralising effect on all Tamils. As a Kurd, I am not unfamiliar with infighting among our people and between many of our political parties, but never has a single, Kurdish military outfit turned its guns on to itself. Perhaps, Karuna was also motivated by Prabhakaran’s inflexibility, the effects of the Tsunami and the result of election boycott of 2005.

If, as was charged, Prabhakaran committed the grave error of ‘narrow regionalism’ in LTTE, then Karuna could have only compounded the error with his rebellion. (’Narrow regionalism’, that is, giving preferential treatment to people of certain regions, is considered a great sin among Kurdish movements. Still, it’s inevitable and widespread) But more likely, being the supremo of the Eastern Tamils must have gotten to Karuna’s head, and he must have considered himself a better leader for the entire LTTE than Prabhakaran.

History will never forgive Karuna for betraying his commitment and turning his guns on his leader and comrades no matter what the real reasons for his defection might be. The best and most honourable action for Karuna, as well as for his movement and for his people, was to either resign altogether from all his functions and duties within the LTTE -after voicing his grievances in private, even if it meant death for him-or seek a less active role in the movement.

He did neither, preferring to be an active turncoat. Beloved, respected and trusted neither by Tamils nor Sinhalese, Karuna will surely meet a violent end, with each side crediting the other for it, and with very few people shedding tears for his demise.

People of Tamil Eelam are smart, talented and resourceful. You shall rise again from your ashes. By ballots or bullets, Tamil Eelam shall become a reality so long as you keep up your hopes and dreams alive.

- Shexmus Amed

Economic Growth Begins To Transform Food Demand

After more than three decades of sluggish economic gains stretching from independence to the early 1980s, Asia’s elephant has now broken into a jog. The economy has grown at an annual rate of 5.7 percent since 1980, ranking India among the fastest growing economies. Rapid per capita income growth is now the major force behind the emerging transition of Indian agriculture and policy. Although India is still home to a large share of the world’s poor, the share of the population in poverty is declining, and a significant, relatively affluent, middle class has emerged.

India’s per capita income of about $460 remains low by developed country standards, but actual buying power is more than five times that amount because Indian prices for many goods and services are well below world averages. Middle-class households with buying power well above that average include roughly 150-200 million consumers and constitute the fastest growing segment of the population. Urbanization is also on the rise. Urban dwellers account for about 28 percent of the population, and their share of the population is growing about 3 percent annually.

Higher incomes, particularly in lower- and middle-income households, are having an important impact on food demand in India because these groups tend to spend a relatively large share of their income on food consumption. Middle-income and urban consumers are also likely to spend more of their income on upgrading and diversifying their diets, eating out more often and eating more processed and convenience foods.

Indian food consumption patterns have diversified significantly since the 1980s. Consumption of fruits, vegetables, edible oils, and animal products is rising much faster than that of wheat and rice, staple grains in the Indian diet.

Milk—of which India is now the world’s largest producer—along with eggs and poultry meat are the most important animal products, and all are registering strong growth in production and consumption. Poultry meat is finding broad consumer acceptance, in part due to its low relative price, and the sector is growing 10-15 percent per year—ranking it among the fastest growing poultry sectors in the world.

Despite traditional vegetarian dietary preferences, the growth of the poultry and egg industries is evidence that the expansion of meat and feed demand will play a role in the transformation of Indian agriculture, as it has in other developing countries. In fact, consumer studies suggest that while 20-30 percent of consumers have strict vegetarian preferences, meat consumption by the remaining 70-80 percent is limited more by income than religious preference.