Jean Dominique Bauby

I just watched an amazing movie about Jean Dominique Bauby called “The Diving bell and the Butterfly”.  Jean-do as he was affectionately called was a director of the french Elle.  He was living life to the fullest when he has a cerebro-vascular incident (stroke) that paralyzes him from head to toe.  He still has an active mind but has whats called a locked in syndrome, where its like he alive and active but locked within his body which he cannot do anything about.He is able to move one eye and uses that to communicate.

This man is so amazing and courageous that he starts to write a book with help from his speech therapist and others where he picks the letters of the alphabet using blinks of the eye (one for yes, two for no).  In this book he reports first hand what it is like to be in this state of being locked in, how he experiences his life, his regrets and wishes.

Today is the day in 1995 that Jean-Do had his stroke… his life lives on in his book and an award winning movie.

45mpg: Its available now and its not a hybrid

I really dont understand why people think they dont have many fuel efficient options for their transportation needs here in the USA. Even when oil reached over $130 a barrel, people seemed to think that our only option was the costly hybrids that none of the US manufacturers made at that time (Of course now many of them have licensed the technology from Toyota or have rolled out their own).

I drive a VW Jetta Wagon TDI Diesel. It offers 45 mpg in city driving and 49 mpg on the highway and I have been able to verify these numbers as valid during my trips. This car is not the smelly, polluting diesel car of the old. Its powerful and efficient engine provides enough power to pull 5 people and lots of luggage to over a top speed of 140 mph. Its actually fun to drive and quite zippy on the acceleration. To make things even more interesting, most of the US car manufacturers make such cars.

So why dont we get such cars in the US? Why are they only sold in Europe? The answer lies in two factors:

• Regulations: Taxes and Emission regulations on diesel make it more expensive to make and sell diesel cars.
• Perception: Peoples perception that diesel cars are more polluting, smelly, underpowered and not fun to drive.

I am not suggesting that we loosen the emission regulations (infact california tightened them so that all diesel is now ultra low sulphur diesel) but removal of the punitive taxes on diesel as well scrapping of the limits on the sale of diesel cars will certainly make a big difference to the availability and economy of such cars. I think its definitely time we changed these antiquated regulations and as for perception, test drive a diesel today and you will be pleasantly surprised!

And look at whats coming next: A diesel electric hybrid that could easily top 70 mpg in fuel efficiency!

Crisis in the Main Street: Is it over yet?

Lehman Brothers failed!, Wamu bankrupt!!, AIG in a fire sale!!!  When you hear such headlines, you are left to wonder if your money is safe anywhere.  How can this be happening in the largest economy in the world and the epitome of Market Capitalism?  How did it get so bad so quickly and Why doesnt someone do something?

If you find yourself asking such questions, then be assured that you arent alone.  My guess is that there are many folk around the world asking these same questions and wondering about the answers.  Some consider this to be an example of Market Capitalism gone bad, where rampant greed for profits lead these companies to take unreasonable risks and now face the consequences.  Others think this upheaval is normal and while the swings may seem large, they are part of the process of a self correcting system.

For me the question or issue that is more important is what happens to the common person on the street.  How are they affected by these happenings?  Do they know enough to ride this out or were they able to take steps to shield themselves from this crisis.  Have their retirement funds or pensions been severely impacted that they cannot retire?  Have they had to postpone buying that house or car because they cannot afford to anymore?  Do their children have to consider other educational options since their education funds have been wiped out?

I think the worst is yet to come when people start realizing the real impact this will have on their lives.  Jobs are going to be harder to get, folks are going to postpone purchases and growth is going to come to a standstill if not regress.  Companies are going to find it hard to borrow to grow and more importantly dont have the confidence to step forward to take such risks.

Which is why I think any steps the governments take should be to bolster people’s confidence.  Throwing good money at companies that made bad decisions is not going to help the common person feel better.  What we need is a decisive show of force whereby you and I can feel confident in the fundamentals of our economy.  Why cant our politicians stop their half measures and their bickering and really step up to take charge of the situation?

del.icio.us Tags: economic crisis,lehman brothers,wamu,aig,main street,economy

Dr. Greenspans four steps to solving hard problems

I have been reading The Age of Turbulence, by Dr. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve.  I find this book to be very interesting and surprisingly entertaining given Dr. Greenspans well known penchant for terse and convoluted speeches.  Only as you read the book, you actually learn that this is standard fed-speak and is not the real voice of the person speaking. 

Anyways, as I progress through the book, one of Dr. Greenspans anecdotes struck me as very important for people to learn and for our politicians to follow.  When faced with  a hard problem to solve compounded by a wide range of strong opinions on how to solve it, Dr. Greenspan recounts the following steps the team came up with:

1. Limit the scope: If a problem is truly hard, you are unlikely to solve it in all its complexity.  So limit the scope of the problem to something that is more tractable. For example if the problem we are trying to solve is World Hunger, may be consider solving it in one country in the  developing world first.
2. Agree on the numbers: Recast the problem in terms of numbers and get agreement on them.  For the World Hunger example, identify the  number of people in the country who go hungry along with where they are, what their income  is.
3. Bring everyone along: Since consensus of the team is important, keep everybody informed of the decision making process.  The  feeling of lack of participation or the chance to voice opinions can severely undermine a solution.
4. Stand by the solution: Once you have arrived at a solution based on the previous steps, stand by it.  Some of the best solutions can be undermined if when faced with criticism afterward, the team wavers in its confidence in the solution.

I can see uses for the above even in decision making within a company.  While the leaders of the company can take decisions, the rest of the company needs to be convinced and carried along and the above four steps enable most reasonable people to participate in the solution rather than remain part of the problem.

Politicians: Do you know what they really stand for?

del.icio.us Tags: President,politics,John McCain,Barack Obama

With the conclusion of both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, we now have the designated nominees for President from both parties.  This gave me a chance to reflect on where these candidates started and where they have come to.  What struck me the most was how much they had changed from who they originally were and what they stood for to what they had to do to get the nomination of their parties.

Call me naive, but I still believe in old school ideas like “Stand for what you truly believe in” and “Say what you mean and Mean what you Say”.  Both John McCain and Barack Obama are equally guilty of pandering to segments within their party to gain the nomination.  Barack Obama’s flip-flops on FISA and Public Finance are only exceeded by John McCain’s long litany of changes in his attempt to appeal to his republican base.

Sure, we should allow people to change their minds, especially in the presence of new information that leads them to a different conclusion.  But if most of the time they appear to change their minds in order to sway with the political winds, how do we really know what they stand for.  Again, this moral flexibility seems to be a necessary if not mandatory part of the character of most politicians.

Given that we cannot foresee all the situations a President will be called to resolve, how can we have any faith or place any trust in these leaders.

Short term thinking by Politicians

As I was reading  “Inspite of the Gods” (mentioned in the previous post), I was struck by how many of the bad decisions made by politicians are due to short term thinking.  In the book, the author points to a recent (2004) decision by the Indian Government to pass a law called the “Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme“.  This act in summary offers any person 100 days of guaranteed employment in a rural area doing activities needed by those communities.  On the face of it, this seems like a good thing, offer employment to people who dont have jobs, giving them an opportunity to get some stability while they pick up their lives.  But as most people who understand the impact of such laws (economists, administrators etc) point out, this law has the potential to slow India’s economy by as much as 2%.

How can more jobs slow an economy down? Well..it because the jobs offered in the program are not “good” jobs that enable people to get training, learn new skills and earn a decent salary to gain them the foundation they need after those 3 months are up.   Most of the jobs are menial labor jobs like cleanups, building earthen dams and levies and filling potholes.  They can probably be done more economically and efficiently by a few people using  the right mechanization.  The workers do not get any training and are paid a minimum wage.  The rural community get a little window dressing while the real problem of lack of infrastructure is not addressed or impacted.  What is potentially worse is that poor people transplant themselves for these kinds of jobs and then are left completely in the lurch once those 3 months are up.

So when enough educated people including a Nobel Prize winning economist pointed out these issues, why did the Indian Government still persist and while did the legislature pass this law with an overwhelming majority.  The answer is that it looks very good on paper and plays very well in speeches.  The administration of this law will require a new bureaucracy that will enable corrupt politicians to line their pockets and allow them to control the votes of a large transient population that is dependant on them for these 3 month handouts.

Here in this country, our current politicians are making up all kinds of plans and programs to help deal with the rising cost of oil.  These ideas range from drilling offshore, drilling in ANWR to clean coal, nuclear power etc.  Many of these ideas are presented as sound bites in speeches without a clear explanation of how or why these would solve our problems.  Any additional drilling may reduce our dependence on middle east oil but is unlikely to reduce the price.  If the demand is strong and consumers are willing to pay, why would the oil companies reduce the price and impact their profits?  In a free and efficient market, the price will continue to rise until the demand starts to soften.

Nuclear power produces wastes that remain toxic for thousands of years.  France, which derives most of its power from Nuclear reactors is facing a growing problem of securely storing this waste.  This will likely become a major problem for future generations.  Clean coal is once again only going to reduce our dependence on the middle-east but will do nothing to the level of pollution and  environmental damage that will be caused by the extensive mining and combustion required to generate the energy we need.

So for a change, if the politicians can stop thinking short term and think about how we can move to an economy that completely moves away from fossil fuels.  We need a clear plan that in a sustainable way reduces both pollution and our dependence on foreign oil.  This may mean that we need to conserve and reduce our runaway consumption and we need politicians with the courage and true leadership to convince us that this is the path we need to follow.

When are we going to get such leaders who are not just politicians?

A few books that I am reading

I recently happened on a co-workers reading list and found some very interesting books.  Gave him a quick ping on IM and found that he owned these copies and voila!  I was able to start reading them the very same day!  faster than Amazon huh!!

So here they are in no particular order:

1. Inspite of the  Gods:  The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce.  This is a very interesting book chronicling the rise of India in the last two decades from a struggling third world country to one of the worlds leaders in Software.  There are now 5x more billionaires than there were in the 1980′s and Indian companies are now competing at a global level.  I am currently reading the third chapter..so you will have to wait for a review, but here  is the nytimes reveiw.
2. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.  This book is about how mass media in the hands of a few people manufactures and molds public opinion.
3. Undercover: How I Went from Company Man to FBI Spy — and Exposed the Worst Healthcare Fraud in US History by John W. Schilling.  This book reports on one of the largest frauds that is happening right underneath our noses: in Medicare.  Quite a scary read about how much of taxpayer money is being stolen by these healthcare conglomerates.
4. Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America’s Reputation and Leadership by Madeleine Albright.

What version is our government?

Recently, I was involved in a discussion with a few friends about governments and democracy.  I had just received my ballot for the elections in California and there were elections going on in Bangalore, India, where my parents live.  One of the claims we debated was  “Nothing seems to have changed in politics and government!”.  Most of the support for this claim was the apparent lack of change (to us) in the way we elect representatives, conduct elections and pass laws.    Examples used were the electoral college, the defacto two party system etc.

Given that the web is already claiming to be in version 2.0 within a short span of 5 years, this led me to wonder what version our current form of government was?  0.1? 1.0? 10.0?, 43.0? .  What would constitute a major version change?  A new President?  Each time a new law passes?   Each time a constitutional amendment is made? or each time the Supreme Court makes a landmark decision like Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education.

Each of the above four choices definitely seem plausible, but which would be more appropriate or should we use a combination?  Let us understand the basis for updating the version of a thing.  We apply a version change to a thing when its current embodiment is substantially different (and possibly enhanced) from its previous form.   While a new President has the  ability to substantially change the tone and form of the government, some have had more of an impact than others.  Presidents like Washington, Madison, Lincoln, Roosevelt all have left significant marks on the country while others like Chester Arthur, Franklin Pierce and William McKinley passed into history without much of a ripple.

Similarly while every law has an impact on our  lives,  some make significant changes to it.  Since the constitution is the supreme law of the land, most amendments seem to be significant like the first amendment that gurantees the right to free speech, the fifth amendment right against self incrimination, the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery to name a few.   However there are others like the third and the twentieth that merely fix certain procedural issues of the time.  Notable landmark laws include the Naturalization and Citizenship act of 1923, the National Banking act of 1863 etc.

So now that we have figured out what kinds of events constitute a version change, each of us may end up with different counts based on what we think are important and significant.  Please feel free to post about what you think the version number ought to be.  I will present my count in the next post on this topic.

Tidbits from the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report

Most people have heard of Warren E. Buffet.  If you havent, please crawl out from the rock that you have been hiding under.   Mr. Buffet is the center of a lot of discussion and in some quarters, significant adoration as a very astute investor whose Berkshire Hathaway fund has performed consistently well for the last 40 some years.  I am sure that I dont need to write yet another puff piece about great he is.. after all he is revered as the “Sage from Omaha”.

What I do want to  talk about are some items included in a booklet called “An Owners Manual“, issued by Mr. Buffett to Berkshire shareholders.  Here are some valuable tidbits:

• Consider shareholders as owners and partners with whom you have entered into  a long term partnership
• Eat your own cooking.  The management should be substantially vested in the company stock and company products.
• Use debt sparingly and typically use long term debt if necessary.
• Check noble intentions periodically with  actual results
• Be open in reporting successes as well as failures
• The stock price should reflect the intrinsic value and communications to the market should reflect that

Many of the above are not just relevant to large companies, but to startups as well.  Most startups claim to run so fast that they miss these basic principles like using their own product, not just speak of noble intentions but validate  with results and being truthful and open about their performance.
I would suggest that anyone considering a role in business, be it at a large company or a small startup, would  be well served by adopting the above principles.

We should get out from Iraq

For a while now I have held the view that we should get out from Iraq as quickly as we can.  Why?  because we are sacrificing the lives of both americans and iraqis without any plan or end in sight.  So there I was propunding this when V walked into the discussion.

He said that would be the worst thing that we could do…because he felt that our leaving will cause genocide there (or what ever the term is for sub sects of a religion slaughtering each other).  I countered with “How do we know that?”.

What if our withdrawal was like the withdrawal from Vietnam?  Yes, the year succeeding the withdrawal were perhaps the worst in Vietnams history with thousands killed or sent to re-education camps.  But look at Vietnam now. After the renovation policy that began in 1986, Vietnam has emerged as a vibrant economy with significantly better relations with the rest of the world while still remaining communist.  Perhaps after some turmoil, the various iraqi factions would find a way to reconcile or will lead to a partition of state like what happened in the former Yugoslavia.  There is no denying that there may be more loss of life and misery but perhaps it would afford the people the opportunity to determine for themselves what sort of a country do they want to live in.  And the best support for self determination is a recognition of the exterme failure of the military options.

An avid student of history, V pointed out to me that there are also other examples where the presence of a strong military force has enabled the population to stand back on its legs.  The examples he cited were Germany and Japan after the WWII.  Japan had an arcane fuedal system and if we had left right after the war, they would have lapsed back in to a emperor led state rather than becoming a democracy.  We needed a MacArthur to rewrite their constitution and put in place enough safe guards to enable the fledgeling democrary to take root.  After the many years under Saddam Hussien, the Iraqi government and people too need the strong support of the US to stand up as a democracy.

These are fair points, but I think the Iraqi politicians and people know how to be a democracy and if they dont let them figure it out.  We should provide as much material support as we can, but at some point we need them stand on their own.  And as to the argument that we caused this mess in the first place and hence it is our responsibility to clean it up, I say “Our politicians caused this mess, and we will not pay with our citizens blood to clean this up”

Update:  As V pointed out, this may seem like a cop out.. where does this argument end?  Correct.  We should also take as much responsibility for electing the current administration and hence responsibility for the actions that are being done in our name.  However, my point was not to disown the responsibility, but the reasoning behind the  decisions that led us to this situation in the first place and continue to keep us there.