chakravyuha

… art, because Jackson Pollock pulled this off.

To all the desis out there… Happy Holi !! 

My brother is not particularly fond of the Holi mess and sometimes the celebrations can turn rather nasty (what with people sailing on bhang and all that) but I love it and that’s one of the things that I miss living here in the US. Just try this Flickr link for tons of Holi photos from India and elsewhere.

Had to post a pointer to this.

While we are talking about graffiti, if you’ve not already seen it, check out this artist who goes by the pseudonym of Bansky here and here. His (her?) art is breathtakingly simple and carries an underlying idea most of the times.

IRS sent me a notification yesteday regarding my stimulus package. It seems I could be getting somewhere in the range of $300 to $600. Yay! It goes straight to the bank of-course and that of-course is not the intention of the package. The bill for the package passed with bipartisan support but amazingly there seems to be no clinching evidence that that this scheme works. In fact, here’s an argument against it. It seems that it’s more symbolic than actually carrying a real expectation of directly injecting adrenaline into the economic system by encouraging people to spend. People like me are not going to and I am sure a lot of other are not going to blow away the amount on frivolous expenditure either. It could, however, send signals to the market that the government has your back. This ties in with what Ben Stein was talking about a while back in a session with the Commonwealth Club. Also, here’s Brad DeLong on the same subject.

A view of the teraces facing my house. This photograph has been taken from my terrace. The image is extremely complex because it shows a variety of roofs of houses and I suspect, some other things.

Wheel valves for the uninitiated

A picture of pipes and veal valves on my terrace. These valves resemble miniature steering wheels. They are used to control the flow of water A overhead tanks to my house.

A water tank and it’s associated down take pipes

Sound scape of water tankThis image is of a water tank on top of my house and it’s down take pipes. This was the first image I took using the latest version of the vOICe and my Nokia E51.

Terrace panorama

A view of the Street facing my house. This photograph has been taken from my terrace. The image is extremely complex because it shows a variety of vehicles and I suspect, parts of people.

Hehehe… vote for Amitabh Bachan for the Prime Minister of the US. It’s hilarious how he compares himself to Optimus. Also watch how they poke fun at both Elliot Spitzer (his sex scandal) and the Hillary Clinton (her 3 A.M ad) in the same sketch. Clever.

This is a follow-up to a previous post of mine. John Bogle is the father of the indexed fund and the founder of the largest mutual fund organization in the world – Vanguard). Russ Roberts interviewed him about a year back on his podcast EconTalk and here’s the gist of what he said. For wherever he does offer opinion, you can take it as unbiased and honest because I did not find him pushing any agenda beyond advocating something he really believes in.

• Bogle calls the stock market a “a giant distraction”. His main argument is for owning businesses as opposed to owning stocks. Buying into the indexed fund model of investing is a way to achieve that. Potential investors invest in businesses and they enjoy returns on their capital via the dividends (which investors can re-invest, put in the bank etc.) that these businesses are supposed to pay on their earnings.

• The idea rests on the following premise. Economics has very little to do with the stock market. Economics and stock market are not correlated, however, economics and businesses are. In terms of earnings per share, the businesses can be shown to grow at the same rate as the economy which is a historical 6% nominal growth rate per annum.

• Bogle is (conservatively) invested 60% bonds (fixed income) and 40% stocks (equity), all at Vanguard. He mentions that he follows a self imposed rule of “do not peek at your portfolio”. Since this is not the stock market, investors do not need to obsessively track their stocks.

• The secret to investing is that there is no secret. Investing is locking and tackling – making sure your costs are low, asset allocation is right, making sure your risks are commensurate with your ability to deal with risk, diversifying, and investing for the long term.

• Bogle says, most of the bond funds are not “worth the powder to blow them to smithereens”. The main reason being that in the bond market the returns are pretty much predictable from one manager to another, so a managed fund is not really adding any value. If the bond market deliver a (say) 7% return (on, let’s say investment quality bonds – treasury, investment grade corporate etc.) you are not going to have managers presiding over returns of (say) 0% or 15%. Managers add very little value to bond funds, so why pay them any money. Bond market is very homogeneous so most of the returns center in a very narrow band. Managers can, in fact, detract from value.

• All bond funds are load funds (sales commission). The load fees is approximately 5% per year which is about what the yield is these days. So your first year income is gone. Besides, bond funds have expense rations of 1% per year on average. Add to that the transaction costs (trading bonds), it implies another hidden costs of a ¼% per year. So in now you are seeing actual returns of 3 and 3¼%. One side affect of all this is that the managers might take more risks with the portfolio to compensate for the costs.

• If you do want to buy bond funds, buy lost cost offered by reputable organizations. The first thing you think about then is the maturity, short term (maturity of about 5 years), intermediate term (maturity of about 6-8 years) or long term (with maturity of about 15-16 years). If you have money in the bank, a short term bond fund with a maturity of about 5 year will be a good idea. Their value will fluctuate but over a few years the fluctuations will inevitably be overwhelmed by the higher return over a money market account. Intermediate term bond finds involve a little more risk to the principle but the records show you get a small premium for the longer term you sign up for.

• Bonds are very sensitive to interest rate fluctuation but they should not concern a long term bond investor. On the contrary, one of the things that you want to pray for as a bond investor is for interest rates to go up! Sure, your principle will go down for a year or so but they will gradually come back up because the bonds will be retired at their maturity for their par value, but the re-investment rate for your bond portfolio will also go up.

• A typical fund investor earns about 3 percentage per year points less than the typical fund. So if we are looking at a fund with returns of about 5½% a year, the typical fund investor will actually earn 2½% per year. Adjusting to inflation of about (a projection from historical data into the next decade) 2½% per year, the real return is approx 0 for the coming decade!, and that’s not taking into account taxes on the mutual funds.

• A good fund will under perform one year out of three. It has been observed that after the two good years the money pours in and after the one bad year money pours out. So buying a fund when it’s high and selling it when it’s low is not exactly a very profitable strategy.

• Bogle’s says that investors are terrible stock pickers because they (inevitably) look backwards and that’s why he wants investors to steer clear of the stock market. He cites an example of how the best 10 mutual finds of 1996 and 1999 ranked roughly from 790 to 800th when the market went down. So performance chasing is the investors worst enemy, because you can never predict the future. Never think you know more than the market.. nobody does. At this point they cite Bill Miller and how he has incredibly beaten the odds for a long time. (You can read more about Bill Miller here if you are interested).

That festival is just around the corner again. Yes, I am talking about Holi. I appreciate the sense of community, the triumph over good and evil etc., but please, one water balloon is one too many and don’t spray water and or color on me without asking!

Yes, I have played holi with gusto many times and wont mind doing it again but it was with a group of people who had consented to play. There is an assumption on holi day on the streets of Delhi that any one walking is desperate to play and in a spirit of fellowship, must be obliged!! Just because it is holi, people will not stop taking their constitutional though they may do so at an unusual hour and mundane things like going to a grocery store (I wonder if any will be open) still have to be done.

Here and here. It’s interesting to see the extent of the Fed’s involvement. Should it not have been allowed to go bankrupt??

Side view of car

This image shows the view of the side of a car. It has been taken from the backside passenger window of an other car. I have used the vOICe to take this image. You can clearly hear the doors of the car. I suspect most of the image is of the part of the door that is just below the passenger windows of the car.

Soundscape of an autorickshaw

The image below shows an autorickshaw from the side. You can clearly make out the dividing bar between the back and front halves. For more information on autorickshaw’s, see the following link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw

A soundscape of the same image can also be downloaded here. I took this image using my Nokia E51 with the very latest version of the vOICe. Again, I was looking out the left side passenger window of a car.

Soundscape of a complex street scene.

Above is a complex street scene captured at a red light. There are a number of vehicles visible in the image.

Over at xkcd, the kilobyte abbreviations sorted out. Fun stuff.

I had heard Russ Roberts interview John Bogle for his EconTalk podcast a couple of months back. Bogle is the man behind Vanguard, and he is an indexing evangalist. His book The Little Book of Common Sense Investing is a defense of the indexing investment stratergy. Today, NYT ran this[*] and it seems to bear out his argument. Need to revisit Bogle’s conversation with Russ Roberts and analyze it again, more so in the context of this article.

[*]: via Marginal Revolution

I took a look at the HCL MiLeap ultra mobile PC. The screen is just 7 inches wide and the keys resemble those of a calculator. The PC is similar in size to those fat exercise books one used to carry in school. I am not talking about registers here but those fat books between small copies and large registers. You can’t really feel the weight of the machine. I even tried installing a screen reader namely Jaws for Windows on it. The installation took a lot of time but in a brief test, the screen reader behaved as it was supposed to. I then tried the vOICe which was why I was looking at Ultra Mobile PC(s) in the first place. That worked too. All in all, the MiLeap is a good option for any one looking for a light weight laptop. I wish it were smaller so that it could fit into my pocket. The model for Rs. 17500 (approximately) comes with LINUX. You can get Windows XP loaded on to it for a small fee. My tests in the shop were done on a MiLeap Y series laptop which is around Rs. 35000.

I was impressed with the prompt presales service of HCL and the patience of the staff who allowed me to test my programs on their computers.

I paid a visit to Mobile Asia 2008. All I can say is that it was a very “me too” affair. All the vendors had the same kind of phones with touch screens. Everyone was showing off their cameras and music playing features.

Samsung had an interesting Haptic phone while Nokia was betting big on it’s maps. The Haptic phone was interesting but I suspect it’s true capabilities were not being shown since there were no real applications that could take advantage of the technology. Nokia maps are ok and resemble the maps used by Wayfinder. The Wayfinder maps are quite good but as of now, in India, there is no address level navigation.

Randhir Singh, former Professor of Political Theory, University of Delhi, defends socialism as an ideology and talks about it’s future here [*]. I cannot claim to have an in-depth understanding of different economic systems, but from whatever I do understand and from all the evidence around me, I do not see socialism as having done so well. Particularly in India, where I see it as a spectacular failure in seeding a political and social environment that can support an efficient economic system. Randir Singh says that,

Socialism failed primarily due to the inadequacies of theory and practice, to the mistaken choices that the Communist parties in power made.

If this is the main argument being presented to give socialism a second chance, then it’s is a poor case indeed. By the logic of this argument the state is key to the success or failure of this system. Since the state is not a single organism or a dispassionate machine but a composition of hundreds and thousands of people, how are we to guarantee ideological purity throughout the state? Surely, that’s necessary since without that socialism would not have a chance. Contrast this with capitalism where one of the key concept itself is that there is no central planner. It is supposed to be a self-regulating self-adjusting machine that maximises efficiency for the use of scarce resources avaialble to us.

For now, I am just putting this up here as a reminder to myself to dig a little deeper into this topic and to investigate arguments both for and against the idea that socialism is not a discredited ideology at all and that capitalism is not the success it is made out to be.

[*] Link via booksforum.

Neil Gaiman has put up his book American Gods to read for free at the Harper Collins site. You can get to it here. American Gods is very enjoyable fantasy-fiction with a plotline featuring Gods from various cultures tranplanted to American soil (the immigrants bought their Gods with them). The Gods live among people and are duking it out amongst each other for relevance and survival in modern time and settings, the key conflict being among the Gods of yore and the new Gods of the technology. If you wish to look below the surface there’s a commentary on America’s identity as an immigrant nation and what immigrants bring to the cultural. I would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the fantasy-fiction genre and/or wants to read a good story.

Neil Gaiman is among my favorite authors and I have read (and own) almost everything put out by him. He is a fantastic storyteller with a prodigious imagination and he along with Terry Pratchett wrote my all-time favorite Good Omens – a funny, masterful and intelligent satire that combines Terry Pratchett’s zany humor and Gaiman’s dark atmosphere and character constructions. Gaiman also built the elaborate mythology of the 10 books of the Sandman graphic novels, a series that is reputed to have lifted the comic book format to appeal to a more mature audience (and in the process turn into graphic novels). A lot of his work, including Neverwhere, Stardust, and now Coraline has been translated to celluloid and television.