Achal Augustine

Who wants manufacturing? Let's the machines make metal

2013-10-06T09:31:00.001-07:00

If you listen to national or local politics you will notice that political leaders all over the world are trying to either create new manufacturing jobs or offering subsidies to bring manufacturing back to the US.

One example of these subsidies is the power subsidies offered by Ohio

Manufacturing jobs sounds appealing as they seem to offer decent jobs to people with medium and low level training. Most of people don't realize is that the same people can be employed in service industry with almost no training. Manufacturing jobs are usually monotonous and the people who do the jobs don't enjoy it. The customer who see the products don't care if their products were made by real people or by robots because they don't have any direct interaction with the person making the products like tire or metal car doors or shirts.

Customers appreciate human interaction in services where another person is able to help them in ways machines are not able to help. Services like training kids, cooking great food, paintings, music, arts, therapy, sports etc are jobs that cannot be replaced with machines in the near future.

Policy makers should create policies that will eventually increase the number of teachers, nurses, artists, doctors, designers and entertainers instead of trying to increase boring manufacturing jobs which are best left to machines.

Growth and National Debt

2013-05-27T11:14:00.001-07:00

Austerity proponents like Reinhart and Rogoff have suggested in their now infamous book This Time is Different that debt to GDP ratio higher than 90% has a signification negative impact on growth. Keynesians like Paul Krugman opposes this view.

Here's my take on this debate.

Why do macroeconomists want to link debt to growth? Will micro-economists argue that debt is the most important factor determining growth for companies? Correlation does not imply causation.

High levels of debt can hinder growth for companies if debt financing results in lack of investment in areas that will result in higher revenue or making the company more profitable in the future. National economies should have the same result. If debt burden results in lack of investment to make countries more efficient then it will hurt growth but if cheap debt can create productive investment then debt is be good.

Guns - Freedom and Safety

2012-12-15T09:52:00.001-08:00

The recent tragedy involving the fatal shootings Friday of 26 people at a Connecticut elementary school - including 20 children - immediately reignited the debate about national gun laws.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting

I hope people don't see this tragedy and start demanding more regulations that will make it harder for people buy guns to protect themselves from criminals or to go hunting. Although the intensions of people who want more government regulation is good the outcome is usually bad. We can create laws that will make it harder for law abiding citizens to buy a gun but it will not stop criminals from getting more guys because by definition criminals do not care about gun control laws.

We don't ban fast cars or planes because car or plane crashes kill people but instead we make cars more safer to drive my deploying more safety gear in them. We can reduce the incidents of gun violence by creating gun free zones and screen people for guns before they get into schools, movies and other gun free zones. These screenings can be left to private owners / local community discretion. Metal detectors managed by private owners or just selective screening for anomalies by the security guard.

It's interesting to see left leaning people and liberals who believe in personal freedom and call themselves pro-choice wants to hand over their choice to government when it comes to guns in the hope that creating a law that bans certain types of guns will make them safer.

People should be free to keep guns at home for protection and hunting. Yes, some criminals and crazies will be able to sneak in guns but they would do that even if all guns are banned.

Economics of Corruption

2012-12-01T09:09:00.001-08:00

I was shocked recently to hear from some of friends with graduate degrees in computer science and engineering that some form of corruption is OK and necessary because running a government is a complex operation and greasing the palms of politicians and government employees makes government work faster.

Corruption or any use of public power for private gain has large negative implications beyond the amounts paid as bribes. I will highlight a couple here and point to few sources for details.

1) Corruption disrupts free markets and allows inefficient companies to thrive by shielding it from competition.

2) Corruption diverts government funds to people who are able to pay kickbacks and bribes instead of investing in most productive sectors like education, infrastructure and health services

3) Corruption creates moral hazards for companies and people when "buying" favorable tax structures and environmental regulation becomes cheaper than building an efficient and productive company.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Will you mow your lawn if it costed you $10,000

2012-09-15T12:36:00.002-07:00

Mowing lawn can cost anywhere from $25 to $200 depending on the size of the lawn. Will you mow your lawn if it costed you $10,000? Why is this hypothetical question relevant? I want to explore immigration policies and the impact it has on wages.

Increasing the supply of people with a certain skill set will reduce the price of that skill set in the market. If there are only 5 doctors who could do heart surgeries in the world then the price of a heart surgery will go up to such a level let's say 10 million USD so that those 5 doctors will perform only surgery on people who can afford 10 million USD. Is that a good thing for the doctors? Yes, doctors are likely to prefer to get higher salaries but it will also result in thousands of people dying because there are not enough doctors to perform the number of surgeries needed.

In any economic activity mowing lawn, picking fruit, programming computers or performing surgeries keeping the supply of skilled workers artificially low by strict anti-immigration policies will result in several lawns not being mowed, less fruits being grown, several computer systems not being built or many surgeries not being performed so there's case for immigration of people with the required skill set through legal means. If higher wage is the only interest of workers then they could also wish for the death of people with the same skill set in hope of higher wages. On the other hand allowing people to work in market where there's a higher demand for their skills will increase the total output of the world global GDP and also increase the national GDP as workers can work in countries where they are most productive.

What's the best action for policy makers? Allow legal immigration to industries where there's a shortage of workers. An example would be to allow immigration to an industry where unemployment is less than 5%. What's the best action for workers? Acquire skills that will help them to compete in a global market place of skilled workers.

Almost all humans are Humanists

2012-06-23T17:55:00.001-07:00

Most people consider themselves as theists, atheists or agnostics but they don't realize that they are fundamentally humanist because they have not been exposed to situations which would reveal the fact that they are realists and humanists. Here's a hypothetical situation that might expose the truth.

Imagine that gods existed and they have decided to build a new intergalactical shopping mall where Earth is currently located and they are in the process of destroying earth with "nuclear like" explosion. Will you stand up to the gods and tell them that they are wrong and fight for the survival of the planet ? If the answer is "Yes, I will fight for the survival of Earth" then you are a Humanist because you not only disobeyed gods but you derive your decision making process from something outside of gods' will. Your decision making does not depend on existence or non-existence of god unlike atheists who might change their course of action once they are convinced that god exists.

According to The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU)

Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.

So almost all humans are Humanists ?

OWS Should Celebrate Inequality Demand Mobility

2012-03-18T09:37:00.002-07:00

One of the recurrent themes in Occupy Wall Street movement of last year has been the increase in the income inequality in the last three decades. Although it's true that income inequality has increased over the last 3 decades in the US it's still below historical low levels over the past century as this report by IMF shows. Is I income inequality really bad ? Will inequality create a more wealthy world ? Is social mobility and economic growth more important than reducing income inequality ?

Inequality in income occurs due to various factors including luck, talent and hard work. A region in the world blessed with lots of rain or oil is likely to produce more wealth than a region which doesn't have either. A genius in consumer electronics in last few decades would have improved more lives, possibly become more wealthy, with iPhones and Tablets than an even smarter engineer who studied astrophysics and gravitational force on Mars.

Is it fair to steal or force rich people give money to the poor so that income inequality is reduced ? It's harder to answer this question in today's world where the rich are demagogued so let me reduce this problem to a simpler times and try to find an answer there. Imagine that we still lived in a world that sustained itself by farming and hunting. Let's say a farmer Tom worked hard and with some good luck produced 10,000 pounds of wheat while another farmer Harry could only produce 7,000 pounds of wheat either because he worked less hours or he planted bad seeds or he had some bad luck with the weather.

Is it better to force Tom to give a large portion of his produce to Harry or is it better to allow Tom to keep most of his wheat and let him decide what to do with his produce ? Tom may not need all the wheat he produce and therefore he will find ways to get rid off the excess wheat and will try to exchange his excess wheat for work or other produce from Harry or other farmers in the society. This will result in a system where the farmer who produced good results to continue to focus on more farming and others who have been less successful in either assisting the successful in his farm or taking on other forms of work. If a village elder decides to take away Tom's wheat and distribute it equally among all the villagers then Tom will have no incentive to work hard next year to produce the best result he could as he know that he will be paid by the village elder irrespective of his hard work.

The important thing to note is that a free market will distribute the means of production in a way to produce maximum wealth. What about next year when Harry wants to improve his farming skills or borrow farming equipment from others to improve his production ? What about Tom's and Harry's kids ? Will they have access to less farm land because of their father's mistakes or fortunes ? This is where income inequality meets social mobility. In order to ensure that the best hands are put at the means of production it's important to ensure that there are opportunities for people who have failed once due to bad luck get an opportunity to try again. If there's no social mobility then we will end up in a society with accidental millioners who will continue to control larger portions of production while the truly talented people will left behind without having the right amount of influence on important decisions.

In order to ensure social mobility in todays's world where formal or informal training and education is necessary to succeed it's important that every child gets access to the best education that the society can provide irrespective of the zip code or school district that they are born in. This means all public education should be turned into a direct payment to parents who can then choose to spend those dollars to send their kids to any public school they choose. This will ensure that the schools will compete for students and the good schools will get a larger portion of the students and expand into more franchises while the poorly performing schools will shunt down and will be replaced by franchises of excellent schools. Providing every child access to best education will set the stage for everyone in the society to have a good shot at either starting their own companies, creating the art they like, becoming athletes and pop stars or pursuing whatever career they want to pursue.

In order to encourage people to work exceptionally hard they should be promised exceptional rewards. If American Idol only awarded $10 and did not provide opportunity for winners to sign up lucrative record deals then thousands of young people will not prepare months for it. If college football didn't lead to million dollar contracts in NFL then thousands of young people wouldn't work hard tirelessly for years in high school and college to get to their goals. Why is it OK for college football coaches to earn multimillion dollar contracts while it's evil for corporate CEOs to earn the same ? College football coaches decide how 22 players on the field run up and down the football field but CEOs of multinational companies like Walmart decide where 2 million people stand and how they speak and interact with people and machines for 8 hours each day. It's really crucial for any society to get the brightest and the most hardworking among us in critical positions as those of a CEO of a big corporation. The best way to attract best talent and demand hard work is to promise success and glory for those work.

Great successes needs great motivation and to discoure success by robbing the rich and handing the money over to bureaucrats to distribute it among their lobbyists is not the best way to allocate resources. Government should be focussed on improving social mobility and forget about income inequality as there will always be income inequality in a society where an writer can write a book once and produce millions of copies of his work with little effort and there are so many factors including luck that will determine who produces more wealth each year. A flat tax that tells the society including the rich that we believe in fairness will result in society where the rich will not see the government as it's enemy and the respect for rule of law will be supreme. It's also unfair to give preferential treatment to capital gains taxes as if capital is superior to labor. Capital is nothing but savings from yesterdays labor. All forms of income should be treated equally with the same tax rate. There's also a need to create a small wealth tax similar to property tax as the wealthy enjoy the benefits of big portions of the government including army and police more than the poor. The army and justice system provide protection to wealth of every citizen and there should be a wealth protection tax for everyone which will provide for any reduction in taxes due to a flat tax system.

A society should be judged on how many people can move easily from poor to middle class and to the rich during their lifetime and not by how many people belong in each category.

Economics of when to upgrade an iPhone ?

2012-03-10T22:04:00.007-08:00

What's the right time to upgrade an iPhone after you become eligible for an upgrade? If you think a new iPhone is worth $200 or more then the answer is simple. Since you value the iPhone more than your $200, the new iPhone increases your quality of life and therefore buy it immediately but this question can become harder for those who do not see any additional value in a newer version of an iPhone.

When should someone upgrade an iPhone if they don't see any value in the newer version ? Or in other words if the value they associate for the new iPhone is $0 ? If iPhone was not subsidized by telephone companies and you had to pay full price of the iPhone then again the answer would have been simple. Never upgrade, as you value your $200 more than the new iPhone. The carriers subsidize iPhone when you buy a new iPhone and you end up paying back the subsidy on a monthly basis in form of higher monthly fee for data plans, text messages etc. Since apple sells the iPhones to carriers for roughly $600 and carries sells it to customers at $200 there's approximately $400 subsidy for a new iPhone. Typically Apple refreshes it's iPhones after 18 months which means that the carriers will have to collect back $400 within 18 months. This shows that a normal user gets charged roughly 400 / 18 = $ 22 every month as a subsidy recouping mechanism.

A customer eligible for an upgrade can save $200 by not buying a new iPhone on the first month but they will still have to pay $22 every month to the carrier for the iPhone subsidy for an iPhone they don't even use! This means that they are subsidizing other iPhone users who elect to buy an iPhone. A customer is better off by paying $22 in first month as subsidy and not spending the $200 for the new phone as they will still be saving $178 but as months go by they will be paying more and more money as subsidy to avoid paying $200. How much should someone pay to carriers to save $200 ? The maximum one should pay to save $200 is $200. As you can see in the chart below, this means that after 10 months the customer will have paid $220 to save $200 which doesn't make much sense.

I believe that if you think that the iPhone is worth $200 then you should upgrade your iphone immediately after you become eligible for an upgrade and if you think that a new iPhone is worthless then you should upgrade your iPhone after 10 months after you become eligible for an upgrade.

Do we need Cable ?

2012-01-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

More and more people are cutting their cable subscriptions and are using services like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon movies, Google Movies to get their entertainment.

Is traditional model of distribution of content through Cable relevant ?

What should on be on TV as "live" or What should be broadcast on TV for everyone ? It doesn't make much sense for TV channels to broadcast movies and traditional TV shows when only a fraction of people who receive the broadcast actually watch those shows. It would be more efficient to only broadcast events like news and live sports events which have value for being available immediately when the event occurs. These events and content becomes stale as time goes on and will have close to zero value after a certain period of time.

An ideal TV will only broadcast news and live sports events and every other traditional channels will be only available on demand and will be grouped in various Genres as done in Netflix or Hulu. I can imagine that TV show producers would argue that taped fake reality TV show audience can be tricked into believing that those shows are in fact real by broadcasting new episodes at the same time to a certain market. Even if exceptions are made for these "reality" shows there's no need to have broadcast the reruns of these shows. The channels could go from "live" mode to on demand mode once the broadcast event is complete. After all there's no economic or social value in getting everyone to watch "The Black Swan" on HBO at the same time!

Google's biggest contribution is not the search engine.

2011-03-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

Most people think of search engine when they hear the word google. Although search engine is one of the biggest contribution from Google by becoming the yellow pages for the internet tubes. The impact of programs like AdSense is often misunderstood.

"Google AdSense is a free program that empowers online publishers to earn revenue by displaying relevant ads on a wide variety of online content".

AdSense has provided a great way for a large number of people to monetize their knowledge and as a result thousands of people have started sharing their knowledge on their websites or blogs. These AdSense powered websites have contributed in a big way to productivity of both the authors and immensely for the readers and therefore the economy.

You can read more about the impact of various products in this report published by Google. The impact of knowledge sharing is not documented in this report and that I believe would be biggest flaw of this report.

Economics behind Groupon and LivingSocial

2011-03-05T09:10:00.001-08:00

Groupon and LivingSocial are two of the fastest growing social media companies in 2010. Together they are expected to gross about $2 billion in revenues in 2011. Groupon recently rejected an offer to be bought by Google for $6 billion. Groupon is also in talks with Meryl Lynch and other investment bankers to do an IPO for an estimated $ 15 billion.

Have you wondered what's the secret behind the success of these companies ? The reason these coupon companies are popular is because they are able to provide services like house cleaning, massages, sushi, rock climbing, sky diving etc from local business to consumers at discounts anywhere from 50% to 90%!!!

How do they provide these discounts ? How can companies afford these levels of discounting ? Is the high levels of discounting sustainable ? Here's my theory on how the Groupon / living social / social coupons work. There are several benefits of social coupons.

Social coupons provide a direct marketing and advertisement for many new and small companies. Instead of spending the money in media buys and promotional events new companies can promote themselves by selling their product / service to customers at a steep discount and they are guaranteed to get a certain amount of customers.

Social coupons are acting as advanced resource management systems for many small firms and thereby reduces the slack in their system and improves productivity of smaller firms and their resources. This is the biggest invention / contribution to the economies of small firms by social coupons. A spa or tanning salon will have to employ certain number of employees to address walk in customers. The span owner do not usually have a very accurate method of estimating how many customers they will get on a given day therefore they will have some employees who will be waiting for customers and this means employees will have to be paid while they wait for customers to show up at the firm and hence the average price of the service goes up because it includes both the actual cost of service and also the cost of employees who are waiting. By using social coupons these small firms can plan their resources in advance sometimes even for couple of months so that they can reduce the time wasted by their employees in waiting for customers and as a result the cost of the service will come closer to the actual cost of hiring employees who perform the services.

Then there's the economies of scale, A small firm which knows in advance how much raw material it needs for the next month or year can manage to get better prices from their suppliers by getting into long term contracts thereby pushing the cycle of efficiency one step back into the supply chain / economy

Stocks and Options

2010-05-24T14:07:00.000-07:00

Stocks are forms of investments while options are a zero sum game that can be used for insurance or as a speculative tool. Here's a link from investopedia confirming this.

Five things about time travelling

2009-06-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

I have tried to understand time traveling and relativity for several years and had several attempts to learn it from the web.

I think I finally got a good hold of it after reading "About Time" by Paul Davies. The book has hundreds of theories which have continued to be speculation rather than successfully proven facts. The first 3 or 4 chapters of the book are useful though. Here's the 5 things i took away from the book.

1) There's no universal time. There's Earth time which most of us follow and there's other more dynamic time which changes like another physical dimension in space due to gravitation and velocity.

2) Time can be slowed down by both gravitation and by velocity. Gravitational time dilation and Velocity time dilation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

3) You can travel to the future but you CANNOT travel to the past. For example you can travel on a spaceship at high speeds close to the speed of light starting in 2010 for five years of your local time measured by your clock on space ship and when you return to earth you could find that you are 2030 earth time. Twin paradox is a good example for this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox

4) Experimental results have proven time dilation and therefore its not science fiction but real physical phenomenon.

5) Maximum speed that can be achieved is the speed of light and this precludes traveling to the past and also prevents from causality violations like the grandfather paradox in which you travel to the past and kill your own grandfather and therefore prevents your own existence etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox

There are other interesting things in the book but I think I have covered the important ones here.

How Sarah Palin made my Yahoo id secure

2008-11-18T12:11:00.000-08:00

Governor Sarah Palin's yahoo email id was hacked on Sep 17 2008. You can find more about the hacking here. This incident exposed the weakest form of password protection Yahoo practiced for years. The hacker used the reset the password option of Yahoo mail to reset Sarah Palin's email account to reset the password to a new password and then logged in using the new password.

Until this incident happened resetting password in yahoo was very simple. The three steps to hacking are as follows. Click on forgot password link on the mail.yahoo.com page after entering the username. Yahoo will ask you answer to a secret question. If you can guess the correct answer of this question then Yahoo will let you reset the password to a new password of your choice. How convenient!! As long as you know someone's pet's name or birth city or mom's maiden name this three steps will enable you to get into their yahoo mail account.

Unlike Yahoo, Gmail and other online accounts do not let anonymous users / hackers to reset your password. When password reset option is used in Gmail, Gmail sends a reset link to the users's secondary email account and Gmail requires the user to go to secondary email address to reset the password. This adds additional security to the system.

Within few days of Sarah Palin's password hacking incident I tried to reset my password in yahoo and found that it was a walk in the park for anyone who knew my first pets name, which includes almost every one of my friends!!! People at Yahoo must have been embarrassed by this incident that they finally decided to change the password reset option of Yahoo mail accounts. As the result of the change any reset attempt on my yahoo mail will result in sending a reset password link to my secondary email and thanks to Sarah Palin my email is more secure.

Although the governor couldn't convince enough people to vote for her she has certainly helped us in making our Yahoo email ids more secure.

The shrinking web

2008-11-11T14:03:00.000-08:00

The launch of Apple iphone shook the smart phone market and has resulted in a fierce competition for dominance of smart phone market. On Monday Nov 10 2008 wireless research group NPD released a report revealing that Apple Incorporated’s iPhone 3G had become the top-selling handset throughout the

United States

amongst adult customers, thus having outrun the Motorola RAZR phone.

No matter who ends up being on top of this smart phone war, one thing is clear, consumers are getting a wide range of options accessing internet from their mobile devices and as a result almost all popular websites have developed mobile phone friendly web pages. The graph below published by Nelson shows the rapid growth in mobile access in US. If this trend of 30% growth in mobile users continues for 5 years, more than 150 million users would be accessing internet from web pages.

Currently all the top 10 websites in Alexa.com's most visited sites have a mobile version of their websites. As of Nov 2008 the top 10 sites are Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, Live.com, msn, wikipedia, ebay and AOL. If this trend continues almost every website will have a smaller sized, mobile friendly webpage. Many of this websites will continue to have both wide screen and mobile webpages running in parallel so its not a complete shinking of all the pages of the web but if you consider the average size of all the webpages you will notice the shrinking.

If the last 5 or 10 years saw non-IT companies being aggressive in getting their web pages ready for the regular internet users and the next 5 years should see more and more non-IT companies developing mobile friendly pages not only because it is necessary for revenue generation but also for making their businesses visible to a wider population. It is also a good time for developer to finally have a compelling reason to use MVC ( model View Controller) and other architecture patterns which have the separation of visualization, business logic and data at its core.

Smart and Stupid government rescue plans

2008-10-17T12:48:00.001-07:00

US and along with it the rest of the world is facing a severe credit crisis today. A large number of banks are facing credit crunch and are at risk of a being put through a "run on the bank" and a susequent collapse. Some of these banks are too big to fail. If they fail then they will have a domino effect and result in other bank failures and trigger a collapse in the economic activity by credit freeze or a cardiac arrest of the banking system.

What should the government do? Should it stand by and watch the destruction of the market system until inflation reaches 2000% like Zimbabwe or do something to stop the bleeding and stimulate the system back to normalcy?

The government is the ultimate god father of our era and government should bring confidence to market place so that economic activity goes back to normalcy. How should government intervene ?

Should government be stupid enough to buy all the CDS ( Credit Default Swaps ) and derivatives which has no value and socialize the losses of the banks ? No absolutely not. Should it listen to a ex CEO Goldman Sachs for advice on rescuing wall street. No way! even eight graders should know better than that.

If financial system needs capital then governmet should provide capital by buying equity positions in the trouble financial institutions or like Warren Buffest negotiate a sweet deal with the troubled banks to get equity at highly discounted price.

lets take an example:

If Bank of America need 80 billion to write off bad loans then government should give it 80 billion but not by buying toxic derviates but by buying equity in Bank of America. This gurantees that government is buying a stake in the pofits and losses of the bank and is essestial providing gurantee that the banks won't fail which sould be good enough to restore confidence in the bank.

Let government buy into all major troubled banks and save them from credit crisis but it should never be stupid enough to buy only the bad loans at higher than market price instead it should get an equity for every tax payer dollar it spends.

It would be useful for our "god father' or the government to get out the market system in long term future when the markets starts to function again so that banks can be free to do what's best for them and government can focus on its core functions of national security, law and order, protection of enviornment and investment in human development and sciences which usually don't find any private investment.

I hope government would be smart with the tax payer money and not socialize private sector losses.

Innovation is the only way to increase wages

2008-08-15T07:04:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered how wages rise? I am sure everyone wants to know when their salaries are going to rise but its sometimes trickier to understand why we get a raise and why average salaries are going up from year to year, decade to decade.

When I say innovation is the only way to increase wages I mean that innovation is the only way average salary for the workers can increase. To be more precise I am talking about real increase in wages and not nominal increase in wages which compensates for the rising living costs due to inflation.

What does increase in wages imply ? An increase in average wages above inflation implies that we as an economy or society is creating more wealth and therefore can consume more. If we need to consume more we need to produce more. How does the same society or economy produce more with same number of workers? Innovation. We find new efficient ways to do the same work and produce more with less input. We discover new energy resources and this can enable us to consume more but that will not definitely give the kind of increase in production innovation can provide.

Scientific pursuit has given as machines, business processes, computers, factories, cell phones, cars etc which increase our productivity and hence more wages and has enabled as to consume more. Next time you worry about wages its a good idea to remember all those people who found innovative ways of completing our tasks with less human and mechanical energy. Long live innovation.

The unselfish "selfish gene"

2008-03-27T20:08:00.001-07:00

Casual observation of animals seems to suggest that they all hunt, kill, defend and live for themselves but humans seems to be compassionate about each other or at least compassionate to immediate family which is unseen among animals. How is this possible if humans are results of evolution like other species? Shouldn't Humans be selfish like other animals? Human are compassionate and care about other humans so they must be different from other species and hence they must be created by god!!???

Are we betraying our natural instincts when we act selflessly to save our family and friends? Will a person unexposed to religious dogmas ever be compassionate??? Is religion necessary to make human care about each others' welfare??

Richard Dawkins in his famous book the god delusion has given a very compelling explanation for the above questions by explaining how natural selection and human evolution might have made humans compassionate and why religions do not have almost nothing to do with instilling love and brotherhood in us.

Evolutionary explanation for compassion and brotherhood. Humans unlike tigers and lions hunted in packs right from the early days when our ancestors were Chimps. Hunting and gathering food in groups required each memeber of the group to help out the other members of the group so that they could survive bigger enemies and also other tribes of hunters. Those tribes which believed in a common brotherhood and actively helping each other during conflicts will be more capable of winning wars between groups of humans. Humans were dominating most of the other animals due to their ability to make weapons and climb trees so most powerful enemy they had was other humans themselves.

The compassionate tribes and hunting packs of humans would have been more successful in overcoming wars and famine and disease while the selfish tribes perished resulting in a natural selection and procreation of those genes which were compassionate slowly but steadily the compassionate genes were more successful in moving to the next generation.

This argument clearly shows how humans could be compassionate at a group level due to evolutionary reasons without religious teachings although at individual level every one of us still has the selfish gene which would prefer its own survival more than anything else in the world.

Lound conversations in planes and silent elevators

2008-01-09T17:25:00.000-08:00

When groups of people get into an elevator they usually stop their conversations and become silent all of a sudden and the silence sometimes suffocates everyone there but no one says a word until they get out the elevators. I think this is good gesture which ensures that the elevators riders don't bother each other with details of their private lives. When the same group of people get into a public transportation system like a bus or a plane this rule somehow dies.

It is really difficult to listen to people elaborating the tiny details of their lives loud enough for at least 25 passengers in the bus or flight. I recently had a horrible experience in a flight to Austin when a lady behind me started playing with the small kid of another passenger. She was so loud in here conversations to the baby that made me believe that either baby has hearing difficult or she wants everyone else in the plane to know that she would become and excellent mother if given a chance because she is totally capable of singing all the nursery rhymes loud enough for 10 or 25 kids..

If people could extend the elevator silences to buses and flights or at least keep the conversations quite know for 4 or 5 people around them then public transportations would be much better experiences.

Are men wired to be polygamous?

2008-01-09T16:51:00.001-08:00

According to most studies including this one http://www.menstuff.org/issues/byissue/infidelitystats.html more men cheat on their spouses than women. Is there an evolutionary explanation for this? The most commonly seen sociological explanation is that females have an incentive to stay faithful to one strong male in the group to ensure the successful growth of the next generation but one flaw with this argument is that this does not explain why the male would not care about the offspring's future and be loyal to the mother to ensure that offspring is safe and healthy.

Let's assume that in the beginning all males and all females are monogamous and then by genetic mutation (evolution) one of the males genes becomes a cheater and starts to have multiple partners. The cheater male gene then spreads in the population as a cheater male can have 100s of children while a monogamous male gene can only have 10 to 12 children if they stay with the same women for their entire life. What about cheating female genes ?

What is the evolutionary advantage of having multiple partners for a male that the female doesn't have? If a human male has 10 partners in an year then it possible for the male to have 10 children in a year provided the group can provide for the healthy growth all the children while a female can have only one offspring no matter how many partners she has so there is no incentive for the females of the human species to take the additional risk of finding multiple mates when it doesn't provide them more children. Cheater genes may die of due to additional risk taken by the cheater woman.

Natural selection from such a behavior will result in a population which becomes increasing has more and more polygamous males and monogamous females but this does not happen in reality and why?

An opposing force for this polygamous behavior of men could be the death of children who do not get enough care from the fathers and there by resulting in the decline of the polygamous genes. Polygamous genes would only survive only when the father has only few children so that the family or human group can support new born kids. This two opposing forces would then should find a balance where the polygamous genes remains polygamous but at the same time the degree of polygamy or number of partners is limited so that the survival of the children is sustainable.

If similar natural selection of genes where to take place in woman then woman would then become a serial monogamist because although woman doesn't have any incentive to have multiple partners at any one time they will have more children if they continuously have partners when first partners no longer mates with them and provides children. The serial monogamous gene can only survive if the number of children created as the result of the serial monogamy is limited so that the human group tribe can support the growth or survival of the children produced as the result of serial monogamy.

How can US reduce wars around the world

2007-09-16T13:39:00.001-07:00

War is an expensive business, I hear 2 billion US dollars are spent every week in Iraq war now (Sep 2007). US is running a huge trade deficit but it is still spending huge amounts of money on war why?

Who benefits from war? Whenever there's crime the first question asked is " who benefits most from the crime?" and many times answering this simple question can solve many crime mysteries. Well for war the answer is simple, the companies who make weapons benefit from the war more than anyone else.

Imagine an industry that doesn't have any customers in peace and suddenly find trillions of dollars worth of revenue in times of war. Wouldn't that industry be interested in having wars every once in a while? Hell yeah. Weapon manufacturing companies would try all possible means of creating wars between nations, or wars inside nations also know as "civil wars".Look at this for sample revenues for 2002 http://www.fas.org/asmp/profiles/top10fy02.html

I'm huge fan of capitalist system and I believe capitalism brings efficiency to everything it touches. In case of war and weapons capitalism helps the world to make most modern weapons in the most efficient way and when a war is real and necessary countries with private weapon manufacturing like US has advantage over countries like India where weapons are manufactured by government controlled companies. Government run weapons companies are inefficient and produces low quality weapons.

The sad part of private war companies is that they have to lobby constantly to keep the industry alive. If there's no war then there are weapons, if there are no weapons there's no revenue no profit. So for war companies civil wars in Africa, Israel Palestinian war, the Iraq war are necessary for providing them revenue. War companies will spend billions of dollars at Washington to lobby the congress, senate, republican and democratic party to make sure that wars keep happening. Its just a simple argument and I don't we need any evidence to prove that these lobbying is real.

How can this negative effect of war capitalism be reduced? Simple naive solution is to prevent congressmen, senators and presidential candidates to from taking contributions from weapon manufacturing companies but this policy will not be effective because investors in wars companies also invest in other non war companies and therefore this non war sister companies of war will lobby for the war companies. An effective solution to this problem would be to take back all the weapon manufacturing from the private companies. Government should take over all war companies including, all kinds of weapons, logistics and ammunition companies. Once government takes over the production of weapons and logistics of war there won't be any lobbying for war, billions of dollars of lobbying money will be saved, trillions of dollars spend in wars will be saved more importantly millions of human life will be saved.

Sometimes capitalism can work against us and war is a good example of that.

Slums are good for the economy

2007-08-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

Slums are good for the economy. The portion of land which is currently a slum is best utilized as slum. Had it not been slum it would have been some piece of land owned by the government which is left uncared and unproductive. If government had some need for the this piece of land then the land would not have been left unoccupied and uncared.

Slum land could have been more productive if it were private property but then if the land had been a private property there wouldn't have been any slum in the first place. So slum lands are more or less unoccupied government land.

Though slums make barren lands productive by giving houses to working masses in city. It creates lots of visual pollution and unhygienic life. For all the other disadvantages of slums its necessary to make sure that there is no barren , unoccupied land in cities where ppl are disparate to settle down.

Slums can be removed from a city just like weeds from a garden. Make the land private property of the slum dwellers or remove the slum dwellers and use the land for construction for the government or sell it. Just as the best way to remove weeds to cultivate thick grass or plants so that there is no clear land for the weeds to come up.

If the land is given to the slum dwellers then they will make as productive as other property surrounding it by construction there or by selling it to people who can make it productive.

Absence of god impossible to prove

2007-08-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

How can anyone conclusively prove that God doesn't exist. Its not possible as long as all possiblities of Gods existence is proved to be wrong.

Forget all possiblities ,its not possible t0 just prove that God doesn't exist in each and every points in the space (universe). Even if we find a method to check the presence of God a point in space the time required to cover the entire universe is unlimited (non deterministic). so the problem is unsolvable.

Well the funny thing is that its also impossible to prove the absence of elfs, fairies under the garden, Aalis's wonderland, or a flying tea pot. The burden of proof for presence of god is then clearly with proponents of god. Will they be able to prove it ?? I don't believe so.

Life is a dream

2007-08-03T10:20:00.001-07:00

There are hundreds of different philosophical views on what life is and many people have their own versions of what life actually is. Is it a drama as Shakespeare said or is it a game like Sai Baba say or is it a spiritual journey as many of the religions preach or is it just electrical impulses interpreted by the brain as the movie matrix depicts or is it Maya as Buddha has taught.

I am not a Buddhist nor a spiritualist .What is a dream and why do we call a dream a dream and real life real. A dream is something of very short duration say 10 minutes while our life is comparatively long say 100 years or 876060 minutes. In life, life can be experienced by the five senses and can be measured by scientific instruments similarly in dream, dream can be experienced by the five senses of the character in the dream and the scientific instruments “available” in the dream. The effect of the dream is limited to the dream only once you wake up your life has no effect on what kind of dream you have had similarly once you go out of life or you life end there is no effect of your life on your state after life .Just as a the dream ends without a trace your beautiful life ends without a trace of the person who lead the life.

So the real difference seems to be just the differential in the duration of time we spend in our dream and in the real life. Spiritualist may disagree with me because I don’t refer to soul in dream and life but ironically it is much easier for a spiritualist or anybody who believes in soul to convince himself of the irrelevance of our glorified life and why it is no different from a dream or a nightmare. If you believe in soul then you can now clearly imagine a situation where the soul has several lives one after another of different duration in different parts of the universe and many other lives are of duration of 10 100 solar years then the life we spend on this planet as humans would certainly as irrelevant as a dream .The planets and the stars revolve and rotate at the same place as before, universe keeps on expanding irrespective of what kind of life we lead.

For non spiritualists who believe in things that can only be measured scientifically life is a dream because when one person finishes his life just as he finish his dream he no longer can feel the life he had with his five senses neither can he use the scientific tools he had in his life to feel his life he had.

Well what difference does it make to our lives whether it is a dream or it is an important affair as most of us like to believe? Is it not better to end a life when one find it to be a nightmare, if life is just a dream or a nightmare? Well we could do that but the sad truth is that even if we end the nightmare we go through, there is no assurance of a beautiful dream after it so what best we can do is to try to convince ourselves of the irrelevance of the nightmare and have hope in the nightmare we go through that our nightmare has brighter, beautiful future. For all people who run hard among the rats to be the first it is always better to convince ourselves that it is just a dream and no matter how hard we try to decorate it, it has to end .We can have a life like a dream if we can convince ourselves that life is a dream and all the heartburn and stress and strain is just part of our attempt to glorify our humble existence to satisfy our mysterious ego.

Free software == stealing

2007-08-03T10:17:00.001-07:00

The preachers of free software are none but communist and socialist of the new world they dont believe in right to have private wealth. It's a great thing that many people are ready to give away their software for free and such people are noble men but forcing everyone to give up ideas and codes they have created is nothing but stealing..

free software should be promoted like pro bono service of the lawyers or free medical service . It can be a part time thing for software engineers not their only aim in life.