Year: 2007

Linux on Desktops

The WSJ has a rather negative article on Linux penetration in desktops. Apparently Torvalds’ father and sister use Windows.  Far more interesting is the accompanying interview with Torvalds where he points out that desktops simply do not matter any more.

I suspect Vista is doing well enough — I think the problems with it are more indicative of the maturing market than anything else. The desktop market in general simply has a very high inertia, and while a Microsoft update obviously ends up having a lot of the advantages of that inertia, I think Microsoft is also noticing that the inertia can work against them.

So I don’t think Vista will “fail” or anything like that. But if I was Microsoft, I’d realize that this whole “let’s redesign everything” mentality just doesn’t work in a maturing market. And we may not be there yet, but the whole operating system thing is definitely turning into a commodity, not a “bells and whistles” kind of thing.

I think that some time soon, Microsoft will collapse under the burden of keeping its products compatible with previous versions and keeping all its products compatible with one another.  The loose couplings that are the hallmark of  OS software used to be a pain so far, but will soon prove an advantage.

Sugar and Weight

A hospital had organized a free health check-up for us overworked IT employees. It turns out that I have slightly less blood sugar than is ideal and am slightly heavier than I should be. To fix the first problem, I should consume sweet stuff more frequently and that will worsen the second problem. What should I do?

The Examined Week – 26/10

I apologize.  I could not find time to put together this week’s edition of The Examined Week. However, I do not want to leave my readers in great anxiety, so I pass on the following message from the Jagadguru:

Sorry guys. I haven’t approved the comments since past several weeks. The comments got accumulated so much (mostly spam) and I had a tough time clearing it off. Finally, I have cleared it and I hope I didn’t miss any important comment when deleting the spam. I apologize if I had deleted any of your comments.

Mechanism Design and Kishore Biyani

This year’s Economics Nobel was awarded for work on something called “Mechanism Design”.  I hadn’t heard of the term, but I realized that I knew something about the topic. Designing auctions is a fascinating exercise. Slight changes in rules can lead to drastic changes in outcomes.

Kishore Biyani, head of Big Bazaar, Pantaloons, etc. has a mechanism which can work only for him or someone like him.  When looking at a property to start his next shop, he gives the other guy one chance to quote the rent. If he likes the price, he takes it. If he does not, he walks away. Because everyone knows that there will be no second chance and because a Pantaloons or a Big Bazaar is a sought-after component of a mall, the counterparty has every incentive to quote the lowest possible rate.

I learnt this factoid in the fascinating, but badly written book “It happened in India”, which I picked up because it was available at a Big Bazaar checkout counter for 99 rupees.  Add that to my review queue.

Relived: A Weekend in Hospital

I was a sickly boy as a child, but I realized how far I had come when I had to rush to the hospital on Sunday. All because of medical insurance. 

It wasn’t for me, but for my wife. She caught a fever on Saturday and it wouldn’t subside by Sunday. I realized that we’d need to see a doctor, and I also realized that I did not know any doctor in Hyderabad.  So we took her to one of the hospitals that were on the approved list provided by the insurer.

My belief is that if you are a generally healthy person, your medical needs are best served by finding a decent doctor who makes his living by treating lower middle-class people and sticking to him. This is from my personal experience, having been a lower middle-class person myself in my childhood.  You are better off with this guy than with an excellent doctor who treats the rich.  The first reason is that he will have more experience. The second, more important reason is that his incentives will be aligned to yours. He will be used to treating people who cannot afford too much money for useless tests. He will be focused on volume rather than on trying to extract as much value from you as possible. So you will get treated for your disease in  a no nonsense way.

Opting for insured treatment for minor illnesses is usually a bad idea, because the hospital will find multiple ways to treat you and charge the money to the insurance company.  First, they insisted on hospitalizing my wife rather than gave her outpatient treatment, because the latter is not covered by insurance. Then they tested her for every illness imaginable. Then they put her on the drip and injected her with such a large diet of antibiotics that by the end of Monday, she was in tears from the pain and was begging me to take her home. Today morning I insisted on a discharge and got it.

I could turn this into a discussion on the various interesting ways in which the market fails when it comes to medical treatment – and how the attempts to fix it breaks it in various interesting ways – but I am too drowsy from having spent two nights in a hospital bunk.

The Examined Week -19/10

Welcome to The Examined Week,  a collection of reading matter published on the web in the past week*, published every Friday afternoon.

Dilip D’Souza writes:

In other words, what I hope this judgement sheds light on is the whole sickening culture of police “encounters”, and the widespread societal approval for them. Dreaded gangsters or not, the police cannot be allowed to shoot them down, and cannot be allowed to get away with shooting them down. But once we do allow them to do those things, we had better be prepared for murders like on that day in 1997: murders of perfectly ordinary folks like you and me.

Yes, it could have been you in that car that day. Because of Justice Kumar, there’s just that much less chance that it might be you, bullet-ridden dead in another car, tomorrow. Think of it like that.

The Economist calls for flexible labour laws in India:

This partly explains why most firms are so small: 87% of employment in Indian manufacturing is in firms with fewer than ten employees, compared with only 5% in China. Small firms cannot reap economies of scale or exploit the latest technology, and so suffer from lower productivity than big firms.

Andy Mukherjee writes on  the joke that the NREGS is. You have of course already read Amit Varma on the same subject.

Ajay Shah writes that it is not that the Rupee is appreciating, but that the dollar is depreciating –   an important distinction. He also abuses the RBI.

The mysterious and anonymous blogger Indian maverick analyses the failure of the nuclear deal.

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha writes  about Radiohead’s voluntary pricing model and what it means. On that note, check out the Marginal Revolution poll about what readers paid. It also turns out that more people pirate it than download it for free.

Tyler Cowen looks at a paper that investigates whether the caste system was economically efficient.

Sandeep surveys  Rama in Tamil tradition.

Megan McArdle, the smartest woman alive, writes about the theory and practice. She also has two posts [1], [2] on the implications of  the disappearing family.

Finally, the Jagadguru wishes constipation upon Rajinikanth:

Seriously, is Rajini asking K to talk to Rama and sort out the matter? Already this fool is dumbing the previously dumb Indians with his movies like Baba. Now this. It is high time this nutcase is ignored by the masses and shown his way out. He has messed up with the “illiterates” of Tamilnadu with Babas and Chandramukhis. It is time he shuts his butt out and stays away from anything other than his crap called acting.

*”Past week” will be defined as loosely as I please

Why Delhi is Better Planned

The discussion on the collapse of the Punjagutta flyover in Hyderabad some time back had turned into a debate on civic infrastructure in India and on why New Delhi has much better infrastructure than other cities.  My argument:

  • It is because New Delhi was built by the British.
  • The British cared more about civic infrastructure than Indian politicians after independence.
  • Yes, I know that they built better civic infrastructure for their selfish reasons, but that does not alter the point.  They built better infrastructure. Current Indian politicians do not have any incentive, selfish or selfless, to build cities.
  • By and large, all the cities built by the British – Bombay, Calcutta and Madras have held up better than the cities that came up after independence. But Delhi is the best planned of these, because it was the last one that the British built and the only one that was built after the advent of the car. Plus, they had special reason to build, being the capital and all.
  • It will be an interesting exercise to compare the cities the British built with the capitals of the better-governed princely states, like Mysore and Hyderabad old city. I’d expect that the British and the princes would face similar incentives.

Discuss.

Relived: Mungaru Male

Watching a Kannada movie was not my idea of the ideal way to spend a Sunday morning. When I last checked, directors of Kannada movies had not yet learnt to distinguish between making a movie and directing a play in a village which had not yet been introduced to electricity.  Characters in the typical Kannada movie used to stand shoulder-to-shoulder while having a conversation – something that normal people don’t do, but which makes perfect sense for actors in a play, because they’d need to face the stage. If they wanted to express something, it wasn’t enough to show it on their face – their whole body needed to convulse with surprise, shock or anger – something completely natural when you realise that the typical drama has poor support for close-ups. They also needed to scream their dialogues because the Ram-leelas fifty years back did not have microphones.

Continue reading →