Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When the West found oil in Persia/Iran, the Saudis started looking too and found it in 1938, writes Tomas Pueyo. They have the world’s largest onshore and offshore oil fields. Its oil is cheaper because it is nearer the surface, easy to access, and it spurts up easily. Oil today accounts for 80% of government income. That is scary and we will get to why that is the case.   The Saudis spend a bigger share of their income on the military than the US, Russia and Iran! Why spend so much? Partly the Shia and Iran threat, obviously. “Part of it is because the government has no legitimacy beyond that of the sword and religious radicalism, so it must make sure people are not scheming against it. This requires a big security apparatus.” And also, it creates many jobs in and related to the military, but again controllable by the government. And lastly, its location has too many choke points: the Suez Canal, the narrow strait from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, and the Straits of Hormuz. S...

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, recently wrote a 3,100 words memo on the company’s new direction. It rambles on without any indication of how Microsoft intends to deal with the post-PC world that even Nadella acknowledges: “We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world.” Microsoft is singularly badly placed to do anything about mobile. Here’s why: 1)       Their original plan had been to license the Windows Phone OS to manufacturers. Google destroyed that plan by making Android free. 2)      With nobody other than Nokia making Windows phones, Microsoft had to buy Nokia. Because Nokia was going bankrupt and also “defecting” to Android. 3)      Having refused to write Office apps for iOS and Android until very recently, they found that the mobile world had moved onto other editors. Or to non-Microsoft Office apps. Like the Polaris Office suite. 4)      Microsoft makes around $2 billion a ...

When we went to vote today, there was no clear information as to where one was supposed to go. We went back and forth before finding our place, then stood in a queue for almost an hour to actually cast the vote. All of which made me wonder whether someday it might be possible to cast one’s vote via, what else, the Internet, to avoid all this hassle. The risks with that approach are obvious: what if voting accounts get hacked? Turns out Scott Adams had already responded to that risk by first acknowledging the inevitable: “There’s a 100% chance that (an electronic system)…will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged.” In India’s case, aren’t elections rigged in any case? So any objection to what I proposed is just opposition to a different form of rigging! Adams refers to the average (American) voters as “snake-dancing simpletons”. In India’s case, don’t most people vote their caste (or religion) or for whoever gave them a TV or liquor or a bicycle, if not hard ...

This is a blog of 2 time travelers, one from the past and the other from the future. First, the one from the past, the one Tim Wu describes : “A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases. The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent that he does not recognize (twenty-first-century American English). The woman on the other side of the curtain has an extraordinary memory. She can, without much delay, recite any passage from the Bible or Shakespeare. Her arithmetic skills are astonishing—difficult problems are solved in seconds. She is also able to speak many foreign languages, though her pronunciation is odd. Most impressive, perhaps, is her ability to describe almost any part of the Earth in great detail, as though she is viewing it from the sky.” And so, says W...

Paul Sawers thought what the future of libraries would be and made some interesting points. Before you switch off, no, Sawers isn’t a Luddite who hates technology. He starts by pointing out though that most of us think of a library as a “bricks-and-mortar building filled with paper books”, yet “at a more abstract level, it’s really just a repository of information”. And yes, digital format counts as information. By this definition, Wikipedia and the entire Internet is a library and Google is the new Dewey Decimal system to find what you want! Having acknowledged that the library of the future is indeed digital, Sawers comes to the biggest issue with the new format of information. While a digital library doesn’t run the risk of loss of data (like what happened to the Library of Alexandria), Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, said it does run the risk of “bit rot”: “This means, you have a bag of bits that you saved for a thousand years, but you don’t know what t...

If you knew what the future would be, could you change it? Sci-fi loves that question; philosophers argue about it since it impacts the determinism v/s free will debate. And then are people who analyze the question with data! Like Scott Adams, who framed the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters : “Simply stated, my observation is that whenever humanity can see a slow-moving disaster coming, we find a way to avoid it.” Adams’ examples of disaster scenarios that got averted because we anticipated them and had time enough to do something about it include the Malthusian doomsday (population would grow exponentially while food production would only grow linearly) and the Y2K problem. I think there is something to Adams observation. Except that he should an additional condition: People should have the freedom to do something about it. To see why that additional condition is needed, think of George Orwell’s prophetic books, Animal Farm and 1984 . Guess what? Communism played...