Category: Thinks

Thinks 136

How mRNA vaccines like Moderna’s and Pfizer’s are propelling us into the ‘new golden age’ of vaccinology: from Fortune. “Unlike other vaccine types, producing RNA and DNA vaccines is a matter of assembling nucleic acids and packaging the fragile genetic material in such a way as to protect it until it can make it into a cell. In the case of current vaccines, that package is a tiny particle of fat. This process means the vaccines are quick to make, compared to other kinds of vaccines that use components that have to be grown, and they can be modified with relative ease.”

The CEO of Pfizer on Developing a Vaccine in Record Time: in HBR. ” It took a moon-shot challenge, out-of-the-box thinking, intercompany cooperation, liberation from bureaucracy, and, most of all, hard work from everyone at Pfizer and BioNTech to accomplish what we did in 2020. Organizations of any size or in any industry can use these strategies both to solve their own problems and to produce important work that benefits society.”

Atanu Dey: “The cost of any economic good is the cost of the energy that went into its production. We can go into why this is so later. If this is true, then it follows that the cost would fall if the cost of energy falls. And if the cost of energy tends to go close to zero, then the cost of everything would tend toward zero. In other words, super abundance…Super abundance is just round the corner, just over the horizon.”

Thinks 135

Ninan on what is likely in India — tax and spend. “With economic disruption, growing inequality, & lack of government resources, economic practice is coming full circle…Higher tax rates, central banks pumping out cash, protection for home industry, suppressing interest rates, increased social welfare pay-outs — it all harks back to pre-Thatcher-Reagan. Sure, taxes will not go back to the 70-90 per cent range that existed once in Britain and the US (as in India), and governments still believe in market orientation when it comes to products and services. But they are re-assuming the primary role in building physical infrastructure and funding research.”

Sunil Jain in Financial Express: “The government should use this opportunity to raise corporation tax rates; companies are doing exceptionally well and can afford to pay a higher tax rate for a couple of years. A 30% tax rate won’t kill them. These are extraordinary times and call for special measures. The rates can be reversed after two years. Meanwhile, the additional revenue can be used to bring some succour to MSMEs and also the less privileged; MGNREGA allocations can be increased and more cash transfers can be made.”

According to me, India needs exactly the opposite: this is the time to implement the ideas in the Mission 10-20-30 blog series I wrote a year ago.

Thinks 134

Resources Are More Abundant Than Ever, and People Are the Reason: from Cato Unbound. Quoting Julian Simon: “There is no physical or economic reason why human resourcefulness and enterprise cannot forever continue to respond to impending shortages and existing problems with new expedients that, after an adjustment period, leave us better off than before the problem arose.… Adding more people will cause [short‐​run] problems, but at the same time there will be more people to solve these problems and leave us with the bonus of lower costs and less scarcity in the long run.… The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.”

Ideas of India: The History of Textiles: Shruti Rajagopalan and Virginia Postrel discuss the development of textiles and their economic relevance in India and throughout the world. “The sari is interesting in several different ways because the other thing about a sari is, it’s a rectangle. And of course, a sari can be, as you say, very expensive. It can be made of silk. It can be brocaded, which requires very complex weaving patterns. If you go back in history, almost everybody wears clothes that are basically rectangles. Think about a sari. Think about a sarong, a toga, and the toga-like cloth in West Africa. Think about a kimono, which is basically some stitches, and even European peasant clothing is basically rectangles. You can make a skirt; you can make a shirt. It’s just rectangles.”

Reading: Murder at the Mushaira. A mystery set in 1857 Delhi with Ghalib as detective.

Thinks 133

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think: by Arthur Brooks. “The secret to bearing my decline—to enjoying it—is to become more conscious of the roots linking me to others. If I have properly developed the bonds of love among my family and friends, my own withering will be more than offset by blooming in others.”

Bloomberg on Asmodee Holding: “You might have noticed something about Catan, Pandemic, Game of Thrones, Ticket to Ride, Specter Ops, Agricola, 7 Wonders, and Lord of the Rings. If you’d bought them a decade ago, they would have come from a half-dozen producers. Today, those titles are made by a single company: Asmodee Holding…Like the Monopoly player who never rolls doubles or lands on Free Parking but suddenly has hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, the company has quietly bought up game studios and distribution licenses.”

Theodore Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Thinks 132

Geoffrey Hinton has a hunch about what’s next for AI: from Technology Review. “A decade ago, the artificial-intelligence pioneer transformed the field with a major breakthrough. Now he’s working on a new imaginary system named GLOM…Hinton thinks of GLOM as a way to model human perception in a machine—it offers a new way to process and represent visual information in a neural network. On a technical level, the guts of it involve a glomming together of similar vectors.”

Messing with the web of social conventions: by Arnold Kling. “We live in a web of social conventions. Each social convention by itself is a sort of Chesterton Fence. You may wonder why it’s there, but take it away and you may not anticipate what will happen elsewhere in the web. You ignore potential interdependencies at your peril…Once social conventions have been adopted for awhile, they become very sticky.”

Watched: Mr. Holmes

Thinks 131

Technology will save emerging markets from sluggish growth: by Ruchir Sharma in FT. “As economist Carlota Perez has shown, tech revolutions last a long time. Innovations like the car and the steam engine were still transforming economies half a century later. Now, the fading era of globalisation will limit the number of emerging economies that can prosper on exports alone, but the era of rapid digitisation has only just begun. This offers many developing economies a revolutionary new path to catching up with the living standards of the developed world.”

The Importance of Epistemic Humility: by Atanu Dey. ” Epistemic — of, relating to, or involving knowledge and cognition. Humility — the attitude that acknowledges weakness or incompleteness in one’s capacities. Epistemic humility is when you know that you don’t know, and resist the pretense of knowledge…People who hold absolutely rigid views on matters that are intrinsically unknowable or incompletely known cause a lot of misery. They lack the wisdom to realize that as imperfect beings we are subject to all sorts of illusions and have at best an incomplete understanding of the world. We have to be especially wary of our beliefs.”

What Walt Whitman Knew About Democracy: from WSJ. “For the great American poet, the peculiar qualities of grass suggested a way to resolve the tension between the individual and the group…Whitman’s image of the grass suggests that the one and the many can merge, and that discovery allows him to imagine a world without significant hierarchy. Can any one blade of grass be all that much more important than any other? When you make the grass the national flag, as it were, you get to love and appreciate all the people who surround you. You become part of a community of equals. You can feel at home.”

Thinks 130

Future of Money: from CitiGPS. “The race towards Digital Money 2.0 is on. Some have framed it as a new Space Race or Digital Currency Cold War. In our view, it doesn’t have to be a zero sum game — there’s a lot of room for the overall digital pie to grow.”

Rajiv Bajaj: “My interpretation is that it is the strategy of the company, which you can call as its vision or its direction or its purpose, that actually leads the company. My 30 years at Bajaj since December 19, 1990 has really been invested in trying to define as robust a strategy as possible — which also means simple, and as I like to say, one that should be self-evident and eminently clear to everyone from the chairman to the watchman. Only then, can such a strategy align a company, have us all working as one in the same direction and if you’re able to do that reasonably well, then maybe that’s not all what leadership is about but that is what is most important when it comes to leadership.”

16th-century French political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie: “It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such a complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.” [via CafeHayek]. See his “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.”

Thinks 129

How People Get Rich Now: by Paul Graham. “How are people making these new fortunes? Roughly 3/4 by starting companies and 1/4 by investing…By 2020 the biggest source of new wealth was what are sometimes called “tech” companies.”

A new era of innovation: Moore’s Law is not dead and AI is ready to explode: from Silicon Angle. “We’re entering a new era of innovation where inexpensive processing capabilities will power an explosion of machine intelligence applications. We’ll also tell you what new bottlenecks will emerge and what this means for system architectures and industry transformations in the coming decade.”

Why Bangladesh is flying high at 50: from Mint. “Once a byword for poverty and disaster, famines and floods, Bangladesh’s per capita GDP now closely rivals India’s after having surpassed Pakistan in the last decade. According to human develoment indicators, Bangladesh outranks its bigger neighbours —a far cry from the “basket case” that then US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had once made it out to be.”

Thinks 128

UBS on the Subscription Economy: from subscribed.com. “Millennials are the ones behind the massive shift toward digitization. They—and the Gen Zers right behind them—are true digital natives who prefer “access over ownership”: paying for Uber, not a car note; streaming a new release on Netflix, not buying a DVD. The Subscription Economy model is what makes this shift possible…More and more corporations are now embracing a subscription model because they love how it allows for more predictable and sustainable cash flow. Think going from paying for huge data processing centers to subscribing to storage in the cloud.”

Atanu Dey has quotes from Lee Kuan Yew: “India is an established civilization. Nehru and Gandhi had a chance to do for India what I did for Singapore because of their enormous prestige, but they could not… Policies of self-reliance are no longer relevant in an interdependent world with fast-changing technology…A second relic of India’s historical legacy is its preoccupation with fair distribution…To redistribute all the gains in the early stages of growth will slow down the capital accumulation necessary to generate further growth. Wealth springs from entrepreneurship, which means risk taking…The only way to raise the living conditions of the poor is to increase the size of the pie. Equality of incomes gives no incentive to the resourceful and the industrious to outperform and be competitive.” No much has changed; we continue to lose opportunities to transform India.

Times of India on the making of the new Mumbai-Delhi expressway.

Thinks 127

Four Metrics SaaS CEOs Need to Understand Before Selling: from Software Equity Group. “Retention, Gross Margin, LTV:CAC, Rule of 40.”

How to stop psychopaths and narcissists from winning positions of power: by Steve Taylor. “One of the human race’s biggest problems has been that people who occupy positions of power are often incapable of using power in a responsible way. In the past, this was mostly due to hereditary systems which assigned power to kings and lords and others, who often didn’t have the intellectual or moral capacity to use their power well. But in more recent times, it seems as though power attracts ruthless and narcissistic people with a severe lack of empathy and conscience. In psychology, there is a concept of a “dark triad” of malevolent personality traits: psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. These traits are studied together because they almost always overlap and combine. If a person has psychopathic traits, then they tend to have narcissistic and Machiavellian traits too…Every government (indeed every organisation) should employ psychologists to assess potential leaders and determine their suitability for power.”

Shane Parish: “You’re free when no one can buy your time.”