Viswanathan K's Thoughts

By 2006, the US could see that sanctions against Iran weren’t working. That’s when an American civil servant named Stuart Levey realized the US “can leverage the dollar’s role in global financial flows”, says Jordan Schneider’s interview with Eddie Fishman. What does that mean?   The US began to threaten banks – stop transactions with Iran or you won’t be allowed to trade in the US dollar. This threat worked with most banks. Why? Because the dollar is the international currency of commerce; and not having access to it would lock a bank out of any international transactions.   Notice how it is a unilateral tool? America was using its status as the international currency as a stick (obey us or else you can’t do any transactions using the US dollar).   When Obama was President, a lot of members of Congress worried he was too soft on Iran (He’d campaigned saying diplomacy was the way forward with Iran). To thwart Obama, Congress passed many legislations wrt sanct...

Foreword : When in Rome, do as the Romans do. So I will use the Italian names for places. Only in the titles of the blogs though, not in the body. The other reason for using Italian names is that the language is musical to hear, due to the vowel ending sound to most words and also the way they say it. Even “Ferrari” sounds better when pronounced by an Italian. Enough said, let’s get started. ~~   We’d planned to visit Italy in December ’23 but didn’t because the visa came just a day before the journey. Even though we’d applied it for many, many weeks in advance. We didn’t have the stomach to wait for the visa until that close to the trip (we’d also lose a lot if we cancelled that late). The next time, we applied for a French visa which came so much faster and went to France, Netherlands and Austria last year. We used that same visa for the Italy trip this year.   I’ve never cleared immigration as quickly as we did in Rome! They just check for a valid visa and don’...

Back in 1956, computers were still new. They were as large as rooms and broke down frequently (they used vacuum tubes, not the IC’s of today). They consumed a huge amount of power, heated up, and had to be cooled. Interaction was via punched cards and printouts – there was no keyboard or monitors, no mouse or GUI. There were no programming languages yet, instructions had to be entered in 1’s and 0’s format. Access to computers was a precious and expensive service. One had to book slots to use the computer. Usage was designed with “efficiency” of the machine, not users. After all: “Machine time was far more valuable than human time.”   Yet, even then, writes Mitchell Waldrop in The Dream Machine , a handful of people were already imagining a world where computers could be used for fun! Reactions to this outrageous idea? “Some people thought it was wrong . They almost spoke in ethical terms. Computers are serious, you shouldn’t treat them lightly. You shouldn’t have fun with ...

For a while now, America has had the ability to impose unilateral sanctions. That means no UN or international consensus is needed, the US can cut off pretty much any country from international markets. How did that happen?   The knee-jerk response may be to say the powerful can do whatever they like. But the truth is a lot more interesting, as I found via this Jordan Schneider interview of Eddie Fishman.   As recently as 2003, America was finding even UN-authorized, naval blockade enforced sanctions on Iraq were not working. The other option the US had was to prevent American companies from trading with its enemies. This was crippling for many countries, but not say, Iran with who America had almost no trade anyway. Successive US Presidents found all this frustrating.   So what changed since then? Why is it now that the US is able to cut off anyone, from Iran to Russia, whenever it likes? ~~   It starts with how the US dollar stayed on as the int...

Our hotel in Rome was walking distance from the Vatican, and we stumbled upon this church on the way. Almost invisible, its entrance was easy to miss, appearing like the door of all the buildings next to it. Even that unknown church (Google couldn’t help) gave us a glimpse of the artworks of Italy that we would experience over the next 10 days. It even had a finely polished table at the center, which provided a perfect reflection of its ceiling. So much easier to take a pic via the reflection (us doing just that in the pic below). Later, I felt they could have created this “reflection” system too for ease of photography. But then again, no photos allowed in the Sistine Chapel.   After a point, the endless religious themed sculptures can feel repetitive. So sculptures like these in the Vatican provide a good break. Only later after seeing the Statue of David in Florence did I notice something about the goat (top-left above) – like David, the statue cannot stand on just the legs, s...

When it comes to Big Data, privacy and security, India’s view is totally different than that of the West. The difference is due to the answer to the following question – Do the benefits and applications of analyzing large data outweigh the privacy and security risks? And it’s not just India, all countries without pre-existing well-functioning systems look at data sets, AI and machine learning favourably since they enable better systems and better governance.   It reminded me of that term WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It was used a lot to refer to the Western view of how things should be, how studies and research should be done etc is unconsciously skewed since they didn’t know or understand non-Western (or non-WEIRD) countries and cultures. Today, more and more people think that the Western views on privacy and security should be added to the list of WEIRD worldview topics , i.e., matters where Western views are inapplicable to non-WEIRD coun...