Category: Food for thought

Noah Smith reflecting on the recent meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. This is a paid article—which I do not have access to—but the below paragraph caught my eye.

The world is not made up of heroes and villains, like in Star Wars or a Marvel movie. Instead, like the Game of Thrones universe or a dark edgy comic book, the world is made up of antiheroes and villains. The kindest person you ever meet will have some moments of cruelty in their life; even the most upright and honest bend the rules once in a while; even people fighting for noble causes will have times when they’re selfish, arrogant, and greedy.

I previously read and liked M. Pattabiraman’s thoughts on financial independence.

Morgan Housel writes about independence and offers a another perspective on financial independence.

5. Financial independence doesn’t mean you stop working.

This idea is related to the previous one: Financial independence is a wonderful goal. But achieving it doesn’t necessarily mean you stop working – just that you choose the work you do, when you do it, for how long, and whom you do it with.

Those who retire early tend to come from one of two camps:

They hated their work but kept doing it to make as much money as they could.

They enjoyed their work but quit when they had enough money.

To each their own, but both look like situations where money controls your decisions. The irony is that some people who think they’re financially independent are actually completely dependent on money, so much so that they spend their days doing things they’d rather not because money tells them they should. Rather than using money as a tool, the money used them.

A sensible discussion on The Morning Brief podcast between Anirban Chowdhury and Nishanth Vasudevan on the FPI sell off. They also discuss some strategies for you to navigate the current market.

If you look at the price to earnings ratio, which is a very widely followed valuation parameter, that has kind of come closer to the 10-year average or it has kind of fallen slightly below the 10-year average, which basically shows that valuation among large caps, those have kind of eased quite a bit and they are looking much better in terms of valuations. But now when we look at the smaller companies, the small and mid-cap companies, the valuations who are there, they are still much above the 10-year average. Even despite all the correction.

 …

Despite that, many of the stocks are still trading above their averages. And yeah, there is still a fair bit of valuation concern in many of them. And that is the same point which ICICI Prudential, CIO S Naren raised.

He said that in a recent conference, where he said that the appetite for small and mid cap stocks, they have not subsided. People are still doing a lot of SIPs in that. And that is where he warned that you can’t do SIP, a systematic investment plan in an overvalued asset class.

In that, he actually was eluding to small and mid cap stocks. So over there, his suggestion was that, if at all you want to do a SIP, you should go for large cap oriented schemes or large cap oriented stocks.

I have came across some interesting perspectives on risks previously over here and here. This post by Paul Krugman—where he quotes his discussion with Jim Chanos—particularly caught my attention. While the Nifty 500 has dropped 16% since September 2024 and showing no signs of recovery, Jim Chanos is talking about US stock market which remains strong.

The one thing I’ve learned after 40 years of running money is that my idea of where the markets are going is pretty much worthless. What you can do at any given time in market cycles is look at things like sentiment and valuation that give you an idea of what kind of risk you’re taking. It’s not necessarily a timing mechanism, but should anything go right or anything go wrong, what type of risk are you incurring? And right now, I believe pretty strongly that risks are pretty elevated for lots of reasons. We can get into them. But valuations are very, very high. And they’re very, very high on what are basically all-time high corporate profit margins, which used to mean revert, but don’t apparently do that anymore, as you know better than I do.

And then you’ve overlaid on this a really, really set of new political economic risks that could really take things in all kinds of different directions with unintended consequences. There’s elevated valuations on elevated profitability with a dynamic that is somewhat new in the political sphere.

A little later in the post.

…markets sometimes refuse to acknowledge what’s right in front of their noses, which seems relevant to our current situation.

I am a big believer in small car, just like small phones. They are easy to maneuver, pollute less and have smaller blind spots. The Indian government already encourages small car with their sub four meter rule. But, we need something more for buyers to tilt towards small cars. Hormazd Sorabjee and Sergius Barretto from Autocar highlight this crucial point. 

…what can save the small car, frankly, is better roads. Because, you know, everyone wants an SUV largely because that’s the best way to survive Indian roads, whether it’s speed breakers, potholes. And that’s really the problem with the Comet.

The small wheels, you know, the ride is really choppy, it bounces all over the place. One small bump can, you know, kind of make it rock and shake. So we need to improve roads.

We’re getting good road infrastructure, but, you know, I think just the quality is just not there. Massive speed breakers, there’s just no thought given to that. As it is, EVs are generally low slung because the battery pack.

So again, you know, it pushes you again to an SUV where you have a higher clearance. So I think one thing to save the small car also is just we need to improve the roads.

Jason Cohen talking about our fixation to become like #1. 

When someone insists you need to be “more like Google,” consider that perhaps it’s the only thing they know to compare to.

When someone insists you need to be “more like 37signals,” consider that almost no successful companies are like 37signals.

When someone insists you need to be “more like Apple,” consider that they probably have no idea what really goes on inside Apple, or whether they’re anything like you. Also, do they mean “Apple, today” or “Apply when they were 3 years old, like you, and doing hardware with the mindset of the late 1970s”?

No. More interesting is when someone suggests that you remind them of this other little company you’ve never heard of, but when you visit their website and try their product you realize it’s resonating with you, that this feels like a finer, more mature version of yourself, that you’re getting reinvigorated about your own business not because of their top-line revenue or celebrity status but because they’re inspiring you to become a better version of what you already are.

It’s fine to muse about being #1, but let’s not all strive to become just like #1.

For me, the fourth paragraph from the above quote is the key. Always look for people who give you feedback that resonates with you rather than someone who asks you to follow a pipe dream.

Like Ted Lasso says “For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves, on and off the field.” Find someone who can be Ted Lasso for you.

So this is how it begins.

In an episode that would be laughable if it were not symptomatic of a greater rot, a troupe of errant primates has reportedly plunged an entire nation into darkness. The Panadura Power Station, a facility emblematic of our fragile infrastructure, succumbed to an altercation among these unwitting simians, causing an island-wide blackout. The Ministry of Power and Energy, in its characteristic obfuscation, has assured the public that investigations are ongoing—a phrase which, in political parlance, often translates to indefinite inertia and zero accountability.

From Sri Lanka Guardian. Although funny, real reason is the systemic corruption.

Ars Technica lists down the worst offenders for enshittification. What caught my eye was the inclusion of PDF. 

But Acrobat was ultimately an Adobe product, with all that came with it. It was expensive, it was prone to bloat and poor performance, and there was no end to its security issues. Features were added that greatly expanded its scope but were largely useless for most people. Eventually, you couldn’t install it without also installing what felt like half a dozen seemingly unrelated Adobe products.

By building PDF capabilities into its OS, Apple allowed me to go Adobe-free and avoid some of this enshittification on my computers.

After reading the article, I realized the author was right. When I first used PDFs, I remembered how painfully slow Acrobat Reader was. Searching for alternatives, I found Foxit, which was blazing fast. I haven’t used Foxit in a long time, so I am not sure if it has also slowed down like Acrobat Reader.

When I switched from Windows to Mac, Preview became my go-to app for viewing PDFs. Over the years, I never once used Acrobat Reader’s features like commenting, signing, or annotating—not even once.

While the term enshittification was coined in 2022, it existed all along.

Steve Mould explains how much of the lead in your pencil we actually use—or rather, how much we waste.

Alexandra Witze writing for Nature:

Fragments of the asteroid Bennu, carefully collected and ferried to Earth by a robotic spacecraft, contain the building blocks for life, NASA announced today.

Not only does Bennu contain all 5 of the nucleobases that form DNA and RNA on Earth and 14 of the 20 amino acids found in known proteins, the asteroid’s amino acids hold a surprise. On Earth, amino acids in living organisms predominantly have a ‘left-handed’ chemical structure. Bennu, however, contains nearly equal amounts of these structures and their ‘right-handed’, mirror-image forms, calling into question scientists’ hypothesis that asteroids similar to this one might have seeded life on Earth.

This is an interesting discovery. The closest I read something similar in fiction was in Dan Brown’s Deception Point where NASA discovers a meteorite filled with fossils.

The discovery also raises a few questions.

Glavin is most perplexed by the discovery of an equal mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids on Bennu. He, like many scientists, had thought that organic molecules from primordial asteroids would have had the same left-handed dominance as those from life on Earth. Now, researchers have to go back to the drawing board to understand how life might have been seeded on Earth.

“I felt a little bit disappointed at first, like it invalidated 20 years of my research,” Glavin says. “But this is why we explore — to learn new things.”

I tried to understand why amino acids are left handed, but that was too heavy for me to understand.