Earth Hour Leads to Higher Taxes and More Abortions

Yesterday was Earth Hour, the annual event where every major city in the world voluntarily turns out electric appliances for an hour. This event is designed to raise awareness towards the global climate change.

How does the defacto spokesperson for Republican Party oppose it: By linking the Earth Hour to two of the Republican Parties pet peeves i.e. higher taxes and abortion.

According to Mr Limbaugh, an hour less worth of electricity consumed will result in less tax revenue for the government. So in order to offset that, the government will raise the tax on electricity.
As for abortion, Mr Limbaugh believes that an hour of darkness will result in hanky-panky between a man and a women leading to unwanted pregnancies and ultimately more abortions.

"Earth hour leads to higher taxes and more abortions". This is what the right wing wants to take to the voters in 2012.

Can Wikipedia Predict Who Will be the Next Indian PM?

Manmohan Singh, Mayawati, Sharad Pawar and LK Advani have all been in the news as potential candidates for the next Prime Minister of India.

Their popularity in the offline world may ebb and flow on a daily basis. What about their popularity in the online world? One way to compare the leading contenders online popularity is through Wikipedia. The graph below provides a thirty day snap shot of Wikipedia searches for the leading PM contenders. If you go by the wikipedia barometer, Manmohan Singh is leading the pack with Mayawati and Sharad Pawar closely following him. As for LK Advani, even though he has a pretty extensive website, his fortunes in the online world in terms of Wikipedia searches seems to be non existent.

So this begs the question:

"Will the popularity of the leading PM contenders judged by the number of wikipedia searches translate into any significant electoral gains for their respective coalitions?"

Manmohan Singh, Lal Krishna Advani, Sharad Pawar, and Mayawati on Wikirank

Car Motor and Transmission Overhaul for $20

Wouldnt it be nice if car repair cost only this much. Blame it all on inflation....

Why Credit Card Companies are Located in South Dakota?

If you own a credict card from Citi Bank, have you ever wondered why you get statements that are mailed from South Dakota or why you have to mail payments to addresses in South Dakota.

Well here is a shocker.

Many states have a usury law which limits the interest rate that a company may charge. Most of these laws capped interest rates at 18%. However, some states, such as South Dakota, do not have a usury law, allowing in-state businesses to charge as much interest as they want.

Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, which includes regulating nationally chartered banks which do business in more than one state. In the Supreme Court case Marquette v. First Omaha Service Corp. in 1978 the Court ruled that nationally chartered banks do not have to follow state law in which they do business, but only the law of the state in which the company is incorporated. Because state usury laws were not uniform this rendered all of them irrelevant as credit card companies picked up and moved to the states that allowed them to charge the highest interest rates.

Now you know why the interest rates on your credit card is so high.

Read more about the usury laws at South Dakota - A Haven for Credit Card Companies

Also listen to Market Place report on the same topic at Sioux Falls- The City that Credit Built

The Life You Can Save

How much money do you spend on a bottle of water, or a cup of coffee everyday? $2, $5 or even $10. Now imagine if somebody told you that if you had donated even half of that money to eradicating world poverty, we would be able to make some serious dent in reducing the number of poor people in the world.

Peter Singer, Professor of Bio Ethics at Princeton and author of the new book The Life You Can Save makes a case of individual action and responsibility in reducing world poverty.



Also read my previous post Think Before You Spend

Who Will Form the Next Government in India?

Election season is almost here. With each passing day, the landscape of the Indian electoral map changes. With no one party with a wide enough national appeal to gain an absolute majority to form a government, coalition politics is here to stay at-least for another five years.

According to a recent survey UPA has an upper hand and coming within hand shaking distance of forming the next government. So who do you think will form the next government in India?

Now You Know Why C-Suite gets Paid That Much

View the complete Calvin and Hobbs clever take on CEO compensation, subsidies and labor costs. Its capitalism at its best.....

Demographic Dividend Vs Demographic Disaster

Watch Nandan Nilekani talk about lack of good primary education in India, and how it may prove detrimental to India's progress, on the The Daily Show.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Nandan Nilekani
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things w/ Demetri Martin Political Humor

Quote of the Day

With the outrage over the $165 million bonuses to AIG executives reaching feverish proportions, the Quote of the Days comes from Sen. Chuck Grassely of Iowa



With all due respect to the Senator from Iowa, who I am pretty sure is outraged over the whole bonus issue, saying such outrageous things does not contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way and neither does it help in solving the problem at hand.

Image obtained from Time

Questions I Want to Ask AIG Executives

Bonus: a sum of money granted or given to an employee in addition to regular pay, usually in appreciation for work done.

This is how Dictionary.com defines bonus. With this definition in mind, I am not sure how to react to the news about AIG executives receiving $165 Million in bonuses.

Bonus is something that you get when you perform better then expected or the company wants to share some of the profit with the employees. I understand if the bonuses were paid by companies who were profitable or companies that were rewarding their employees for their expectational performance. But,AIG which has received $170 Billion from the taxpayers to keep it afloat, rewarding bonuses to the same executives who remained blind to all the risk that the company was taking, putting not just the company but the entire US economy at risk: I fail to comprehend this.

Here are some questions that I would like to ask these AIG executives that are receiving their big bonuses today:
1. When your company reported the largest quarterly loss in corporate history of $61.7 billion in the last three months of 2008, how can you sit there and except this bonus with a straight face?
2. What are you going to do with the $165 million bonus? If you have no idea can I give some suggestions: buy a big house, a yatch, drive around in a Bentely or a Ferrari and don't ever come back again asking for bailout money.
3. When millions of hardworking people have lost their jobs, homes and life savings by the very actions that you guys took, how come you are being rewarded with $165 million and these hardworking people are left with nothing?
4. Is there no limit to your rapacious desire for more? Did you leave your moral and ethical compass at the door when you walked into AIG?

If any of you have other questions to ask the highly paid executives at AIG, please pen them.

Sixth Sense to Merge the Digital and Real World

If you have the movie Minority Report and thought the technology that Tom Cruise uses to interact with the computers was cool and wish you had access to a similar technology, then your wait might be over soon.



If the technology which is a prototype, can do things that are featured in the video, the gap between the digital world and real world would be further narrowed. Just cool stuff.....

Link obtained from Churumuri

You Dont Need a Title to be a Leader

With Lok Sabha elections fast approaching, the political scene is India is heating up. Every party wants to projects its candidate as the next prime minister. First it was NCP turn, projecting Indian cricket chief and current agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar as its Prime Ministerial candidate. Now it is the turn of the BSP.

In the latest political developments in the ever changing world of Indian politics, Ms Mayawati wants to join the Third Front only if she is projected as the Prime Ministerial candidate of this hurriedly clobbered coalition of parties. Her reasoning behind the claim to the post of the Prime Minister is “based on the fact that she is the leader of the largest state in the country and more popular than any other leader in the state”.

Granted she is the leader of the largest state in the country. But India does not just comprise of Uttar Pradesh. There are other states in the union and Mayawati may have forgotten about that in her hunger for power.

The so called leaders can play all the shenanigans they want, but ultimately it is the citizens of India who will decide who they want to be Prime Minister, be it ManMohan Singh, LK Advani, Sharad Pawar, Mayawati or Deve Gowda.

Maybe Ms Mayawati should read You Don't Need a Title to be a Leader just to put things in prespective.

A Case Study in Bad Marketing

The below video produced by Rafael, an Israeli Defense Company, is a case study in "What Not to Do When You are Marketing a Product". For three long minutes you are not sure what this video is about.
This video was shown at Aero India 2009 recently.



After watching this video, if I were AK Antony I would not want to trust the defenses of my country to whatever the company is trying to sell, however good the product may be.

Holi Hai

Today is holi, the festival of color. And no song captures the mood of Holi better then Rang Barse from the film Silsila

Has Lalu Yadav Really Turned around the Indian Railways?

The amazing turnaround of the Indian Railways from a loss making entity to a profitable venture has caught the eyes of the the premier business schools, Harvard, Warton and IIM-A, in the world. Writing for the American Magazine, Graeme Woods writes,

Lalu’s term as railways minister has been shockingly successful. Instead of turning India’s most prized national institution into a basketcase and a ruin, Lalu has led one of most spectacular economic turnarounds in a country bursting with economic miracles. Indian Railways began raking in cash and posting surpluses in the billions. And the intelligentsia and technocracy, at first shocked and dismayed that a shameless populist had seized a fragile and unwieldy national institution, have largely come around to acknowledging that India Railways has been transformed into a respected institution—and so, possibly, has Lalu.

But has this turnaround been real and are there costs associated with the turnaround that we dont know about. For example, on the day that Lalu Yadav presented his last Railway budget before a new government takes office, one of the trains derailed killing about 16 people and injuring scores of others.
1. So in the name of profitability has safety of the railways been compromised?
2. What happens when the new government comes to power with somebody other then Lalu as the rail minister?
3. Will there be a smooth transition of power and will the turnaround continue?
4. What about the sordid state of affairs in the maintenance of railway equipment as highlighted by the picture below?
5. Is this the image of the developing India that the railways wants to project to the world?

Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Party

CPAC, the stage which has featured previous Presidents including Ronald Regan as key speakers, hosted Rush Limbaugh as the keynote speaker this year.

In response to this speech, Tim Egan writes on his blog:

There is a war, all right. We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.

Now that government has been forced to the rescue, just who is insisting on taxpayer bailouts? Who is in line for handouts? Who is saying that only government can save capitalism? The very leaders of unregulated markets who injected this poison into the economy, the very plutocrats that Limbaugh celebrates.

And, of course, let us never forget that the bailouts of banks and insurance companies were initiated by the Republican president Limbaugh defended for eight years.

Read the full post by Tim Egan at Fears of a Clown

Keeping Wall Street Honest

The news for the economy gets dire by the day. Gone are the heady days when the Dow Jones was 14000. As of yesterdays close, the Dow Jones was below 6600, the lowest it has been in 12 years. The last 15 months have changes the face of Wall Street: Lehman Brothers bankrupt, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch acquired by other companies, the once giant insurance company AIG hanging on by a thread with billions of dollars in taxpayers baliout and the once behemoth among banks CitiBank virtually on the brink.

Now the question is how did we get here and why did so many so called smart minds on Wall Street and 24/7 business news channels not anticipate it? Jon Stewart provides his take on how one 24/7 business news channel failed to do its job and keep Wall Street honest.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

The End of Cricket as we know it

The growing fangs of global terror have not even spared the gentleman's game. The brazen day light attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers in Pakistan is a reminder that when it comes to terrorists, nobody is immune. Lucky for the cricketers and for us that all of them survived with minor physical injuries. They can still continue to work their magic on the field. But the face of cricket in the subcontinent, where it is second only to religion, has taken a beating.

In lamenting about how the attack on Sri Lankan cricketers will change how cricket is viewed on the sub-continent, Harsha Bhogle writes:

Increasingly cricket grounds will be heavily guarded, cricketers will play in what look like garrisons; it will take longer to get into a T20 game than actually watch it. Little children will no longer eye the wax paper packet in which their mother has packed the best sandwiches in the world. People might stay in drawing rooms, not only because they are more comfortable, but because they are safer. Increasingly cricket will be limited to what the camera shows and what the commentator says. If they can fight their way through all the advertising! I fear cricket watching will become clinical rather than innocent.

Read the complete article" The game we love

The Paradox of Thrift

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the consumer saving as a percentage of disposable income went up to 5 Percent, the highest it has been in a while.

This might be good news in the long run, but in the short run for an economy that is sinking, this spells more trouble. Consumers saving more means, they are spending less money on other goods reducing their demand and inturn further driving down prices of goods and commodities. New automobiles sales decline of 40 percent for the top three car makers even with deep discounts can be attributed to lower consumer spending.

John Maynard Keynes called this the Paradox of thrift. According to him

Thrift may be a virtue for the individual, but could damage the economy as a whole. The more people saved, the more they reduced effective demand, thus further slowing the economy. Faced with slowing demand, businesses would not necessarily use the extra savings available in the economy to invest. As the slump in demand cascaded through the economy, the resulting slowdown would mean that everyone had less income - ultimately reducing the absolute amount of savings, even if people increase the proportion of their income they put aside. As unemployment grew, investment would fall, whatever the level of savings.

The current economic downturn seems to follow Keynes's script word for word.

Also read BBC Analysis on the Paradox of Thrift and my previous post To Save or Not to Save

Self Fullfilling Prophecy

Here is Bernard Madoff, the former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange, talking about how in today's regulatory environment it is virtually impossible to violate any rules. He even talks about how violation of rules cannot go undetected over a long period of time. As it turns out, time did catch up with him. He is currently under house arrest waiting to be charged for violating some of the same rules that he said were virtually impossible to violate.

If only he had applied his thinking in the video to real life, we would not be talking about Bernard Madoff and associating him with the largest investor fraud ever perpetrated.

Water Water Everywhere, Not a Drop to Drink

To celebrate Maha Shivratri, the BJP Government in Karnataka transported large quantities of Gangajal (Holy Water) at taxpayers expense which was distributed among devotees in various temples across the state.

In response to this, ER Ramachandran writes:

Why do we waste lakhs of rupees bringing in Gangajal when we cannot supply Cauvery water even to people in Mysore, located 18 km from the Cauvery, on a regular basis for drinking purposes? 50,000 gallons of Gangajal was brought to the State at a cost of Rs 2.5 lakh. What moksha will people get by having the prokshane of Gangajal on them when they cannot get water to quench their thirst or when their children have to sit under the scorching sun in a school because of a “regime-change”?

Read the complete post by ER Ramachandran on Churmuri

And You Thought Hummer Was Bad for the Environment

Owners of Hummer may want to breath a sigh of relief. There is a worse offender when it comes to global warming. And pretty much every body in the US complicit in this, including yours truly. Now what can be bad then the Hummer that are commonly used: Home Heaters, Air Conditioners, Light Bulbs.... Out of ideas.... Cant wait to find out. Ok lets reveal the identity of the offender.

No prizes if you guessed it correctly.