January 2021

Business
The perpetual amateur

Kids and Adults - A Contrast From the balcony of my house, I can see the kids' playground. It is fun observing kids play for hours, seemingly achieving nothing, trying the same thing over and over and still having so much fun. It is instructive to contrast that behavior with the group of adults. Just […]

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Business
Kumar Mangalam Birla on 2020

Kumar Mangalam Birla, in his 2020 letter on linkedin, reproduced here makes some very interesting points about the impact of the pandemic on the businesses and draws some insightful conclusions. Corporations are Citizens that count Perhaps uniquely, the crisis also brought to fore the regenerative and stabilising power of large corporations. Especially the ones with the ability […]

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Business
Asset Allocation and Diversification

There is a lot of research on how much of the typical returns of funds are from Asset Allocation and how much are from performance of individual asset. The general consensus is that "Asset allocation determines the majority of returns". Some researchers put it to the extent of 90% of the returns. Wow! Is that […]

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Business
Why is Bill Gates buying farmland?

There were several media reports that Bill Gates, the owner of Microsoft and one of the richest people in the world, was now the biggest owner of Farmland in the world. The question is why he is doing so? His core strength is the world of technology and there are many opportunities in the technology […]

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Business
Slow Compounding

In this great Youtube video, Chamath talks about a very important phenomenon for success in any field. He talks about the ability to get extraordinary returns on capital as an ability to work on hard problems in an unique way over a very long time horizon making very small but consistent progress year on year. […]

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Uncategorized
Wittgenstein's Rule Following Paradox

In Philosophical Investigations and even in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein talks about the contradictions in the "Rule Following" paradigm of human knowledge, epistemology and linguistics. The idea he is trying to address here is the idea that says that language is essentially a set of rules that try to communicate the […]

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