Category: Food for thought

For all the hate Elon Musk gets—especially post his Twitter acquisition—there are some real, tangible benefits that he has given to the world. Quentin Stafford-Fraser talks about how he changed the EV space.

Though he neither founded Tesla nor designed the cars himself, his perseverance, vision, and willingness to spend his cash where others weren’t, has dragged an entire industry, mostly kicking and screaming, into a far better place, both technologically and for the planet.  I remember the shock of traditional car dealers in 2016, trying hard to sell a few more cars at discounts to fill their next quarter’s quota, when it was announced that quarter of a million people had put down a deposit for the recently-announced Model 3: a car they had never even seen.   It took that kind of major eathquake to rattle the enormous global inertia of the fossil-burning world and to kick investment in battery-production up to a whole new level.   I won’t pretend Musk was doing all of this for purely selfless reasons, or that he did it entirely on his own, but many thousands of Greta Thunbergs combined could not dream of having such an impact.  He changed the world.

Bonus: Quentin Stafford-Fraser created the first webcam.

Jennifer Pahlka explaining rule of law with the inaugration of Donald Trump for the second time.

In The New York Times a few weeks ago, Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein characterize the incoming administration’s patrimonialism (rule through personal power and patronage) as “an assault on the modern state as we know it.” Noting that Trump won the presidential election fairly, they correctly assess that reversing this assault “will require more than a simple defense of ‘democracy.’ …The threat we face is different, and perhaps even more critical: a world in which the rule of law has given way entirely to the rule of men.”

I agree. The rule of men is fundamentally inconsistent with the principles and values of our nation, and I do not welcome any nepotism, graft, or abuse of the system for retribution that may be coming our way. But why would half of voters tolerate this? The authors propose that “a slew of self-aggrandizing leaders has taken advantage of rising inequality, cultural conflicts and changing demography to grab power,” suggesting that the rule of law is a hapless casualty of other circumstances. But the principle of a nation governed by laws not men should have been non-negotiable. It should have been a crown jewel of our democracy for which all else could be tolerated. It wasn’t. The crown jewel was tarnished, and unless we understand the nature of that tarnish, we have little hope of returning that jewel to its rightful place.

I learned about this term—planned obsolescence—when news broke out that Apple intentionally slowed down their older iPhones. And today I learned that there existed a lightbulb cartel who did this 100 years before Apple.

The cartel’s grip on the lightbulb market lasted only into the 1930s. Its far more enduring legacy was to engineer a shorter life span for the incandescent lightbulb. By early 1925, this became codified at 1,000 hours for a pear-shaped household bulb, a marked reduction from the 1,500 to 2,000 hours that had previously been common. Cartel members rationalized this approach as a trade-off: Their lightbulbs were of a higher quality, more efficient, and brighter burning than other bulbs. They also cost a lot more. Indeed, all evidence points to the cartel’s being motivated by profits and increased sales, not by what was best for the consumer. In carefully crafting a lightbulb with a relatively short life span, the cartel thus hatched the industrial strategy now known as planned obsolescence.

— THE GREAT LIGHTBULB CONSPIRACY

An insightful long read on n+1 by Will Tavlin on Netflix.

One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.

It was fascinating for me becuase I have been part of this Netflix’s journey as a subscriber and I didn’t realise that I was doing casual viewing for sometime now.

That audiences clearly prefer the films of the past has been an inconvenient fact for the streamers who tout themselves as the future of entertainment.

Another revelation for me. I have been watching reruns or discovering old shows.

How to predict the audience’s taste — what will make money and what won’t — is a question that’s plagued Hollywood since its inception. The problem was captured by the screenwriter William Goldman in 1983. “Nobody knows anything,” he wrote in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work.” Netflix’s greatest innovation was that it found a way around this uncertainty: it provided a platform on which there are no failures, where everything works.

…

But by insulating their films from failure, the streamers have destroyed the meaning of success. Thierry Frémaux, head of the Cannes Film Festival and a vocal critic of streamers, understood this well when he presented the dilemma at a Cannes press conference in 2021. “What directors have been discovered by [streaming] platforms?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Frémaux began calling on journalists to name an auteur whose career had been launched by a streamer. By this point, Netflix had released more than seven hundred films in the US alone, with hundreds of directors attached. Yet as the Guardian later reported of the scene, “nobody could name any at all, in fact.”

Wow!

Five years before the WGA and SAG’s historic overlapping strike, which in part sought to redress the streamers’ elimination of back-end payments, LaPorte concluded what it would take major newspapers and magazines years to report: streaming had brought about “the death of Hollywood’s middle class.”

And middle class is struggling everywhere.

I bought the highly praised book The Ministry for the Future. Unfortunately. I couldn’t complete it, gave up half way. The book has so much exposition that at times I forgot where the story was and who were the characters.

But there was one paradox mentioned in the book that caught my attention.

Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease. William Stanley Jevons, writing in 1865, was referring to the history of the use of coal; once the Watt engine was introduced, which greatly increased the efficiency of coal burning as energy creation, the use of coal grew far beyond the initial reduction in the amount needed for the activity that existed before the time of the improvement.

The rebound effect of this paradox can be mitigated only by adding other factors to the uptake of the more efficient method, such as requirements for reinvestment, taxes, and regulations. So they say in economics texts.

The paradox is visible in the history of technological improvements of all kinds. Better car miles per gallon, more miles driven. Faster computer times, more time spent on computers. And so on ad infinitum.

This post by Chinmay Karande on Threads brought my attention to the Overtun window

But the catch: Without the progressives still fighting those (then seemingly hopeless) fights 20 years ago, the progress on those issues today’s wouldn’t happen. Playing for progress and losing, still moves the Overton window, which is a pre-requisite for any actual change.

To progressives, this must feel bleak, a thankless job. But it is how it is. Assuming their cause has timeless merit, someday they will win if they sign up to lose till then.

The Week explains the Overtun window.

The concept is used to describe the range of ideas that voters find acceptable and “outside which lie political exile or pariahdom”, explains Politico.

The theory is that politicians are limited in what policies they can support as they risk losing voters if they pursue ideas that are not seen as legitimate options by society.

…

“Politicians respond to the public’s definition of the window, not the other way around,” it says.

As Lehman explains, politicians are “in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it”.

In the age of thirty seconds Instagram reels these are a lot of questions. Let’s answer them one by one.

What is RSS feed?

You can Google the above query to understand what is RSS feed. But in the age of generative AI who wants to do that. So let me dump the explanation that ChatGPT gave right here. 

(more…)

Over last couple of years the chatter around passive funds have grown and so have the AUM. I also jumped in this bandwagon with investment in Nifty 500 and Sensex 30 fund. The reason was their simplicity. 

But this article by Finshots team looks into tracking error of passive funds and how closing price affects it. Apparently, it’s not that simple. 

Passive funds base their trades on the closing price of stocks. And since closing prices are determined using VWAP, it can sometimes deviate the fund’s performance from the main index. And the result of this is something called a tracking error or a small difference between the fund’s returns and the index’s performance.

An insightful podcast from Capitalmind discusses the recent FII selloff, which also personally affected me. Got to learn quite a few things from it.

On FIIs.

The reason they are called institutions is because they are not principles themselves. They have investors behind them.

Indian investor, apparently, has it easy! At least easier than their US counterparts.

Now, this is interesting because only registered financial institutions can buy in India, which means that your friend who is an American citizen who lives in America and is not an Indian, cannot buy Indian stocks directly. Why is this interesting? Because you as an Indian can buy American stocks living in India.

FII is not the same as FDI.

Now, if you come back to what FII is, we actually got two concepts. One is FDI and one is FII. The concept of an FDI is essentially something where you say, a foreign direct investor is a person who comes in strategically…

…It was like I am directly investing and participating in the story of an Indian company who I strategically control. This was Coke, was Nestle, was Pepsi, was a bunch of other people. They invested under the FDI route…

…But we have to consider that FII is what is called an FPI, Foreign Portfolio Investor. This is a mutual fund that comes in West India. They expect to invest in India and take money out, but they don’t own the company meaningfully, in the sense of controlling the company.

And apparently what is happening now is that both FII/FPI and FDI are selling rather than just the FII/FPI selling.

By the way, HDFC Bank is probably majority owned by foreign entities. ICICI Bank is probably majority owned by foreign entities, so as a bunch of other banks

What?

*checks notes*, I mean *checks moneycontrol*

FIIs own 48% of HDFC Bank. FIIs own 46% of ICICI Bank. ¹

…the fact is that the foreign ownership was quite high, why should it have ever happened in the first place? There are very interesting sinister reasons.

Listen on to hear some interesting stories from the past and how they affect the present.

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Footnotes

1. Data as of 13-Dec-2024 ↩︎

A very astute observation by Dr Dang on how in all the news about AI thinking like humans, we humans have started thinking like AI! I wouldn’t paste the snippet over here as it is already a small article.