CDOQ

I dream of a world where babies don't lose their innocence with age. In our world, Venus had to be born as an adult to be an innocent adult and she exists only in fiction. 

An entry from my mother's diary today:  --- July 31st, 2021 A few lessons from happenings and surroundings: 1. A short term pleasure can lead to long term traps.  2. If things come easy and you get comfortable, you are getting trapped into dependency.  3. When you don't use your skills, you can lose them. And, this loss might limit your choices and freedom. 4. Freedom does not come easy and can be lost quickly.  5. Nothing comes easily in life but if something does come easily then it might not be worth having it.  6. Don't curse your struggles. They are your blessings in disguise.  ---

Desire clouds judgment.

Predictable things command a premium. 

Why do babies like toys?

If you have to choose between importing bread and circus, import bread. The hungry don't care where the bread comes from but the populace can be made patriotic with the right circus.  

I am writing this post to internalize the lessons learned from my investing (in public companies) mistakes over twenty years.   Chapter 1 (2000 - 2003) My journey of investing in public companies began around year 2000, at the peak of the  dotcom bubble . At the time, all I remembered about investing from my recent MBA was that companies trading over a  P/E  (Price Earnings Ratio i.e. price of the stock divided by earnings per share) of 15 were overpriced. People were very excited about investing at the time, stocks were what everyone talked about in social gatherings. I worked with people I liked and respected. They were making money every day in the market and how much money everyone was making was the lunch topic every day. I brought up P/E ratios in the conversations and they all laughed and said it was a new economy, old rules didn't apply. I thought this is why people say that reality is different from school. I was applying what I learned in sch...

Government creates laws. Corporations follow laws. Government complains about the results of the laws and vilifies corporations. 

What is a garden that is not visited by bees, birds, and butterflies?

We prefer reason, however flawed, to no reason. 

My father (papa), Dharam Chand Chawla, passed away on April 30th, 2021. He was 77 years old. I want the time to stop but it turns out that no matter how you are feeling, time does not stop. Papa lived up to his name, Dharam Chand, which means someone who exemplifies the right (Hindu) way of living. He dedicated his life to his family, religion, and society. Papa profoundly influenced my thinking and gave me the values I live by. Some of things I learned from papa are:  Dharam: Do karma (take actions) to fulfill your dharam/dharma (~duty). Don’t think about likes or dislikes. He was making sacrifices on a daily basis to do what is best for his family and in his whole life he did not complain once.  Family: There is nothing more joyful than being in a happy family. He adored my mom, my sister and me. Everyday, papa worked tirelessly to make us happy. An incident I remember vividly is that he had the habit of reading the Hindi newspaper every morning. When I became a teenager, ...

For how long can government subsidies in one nation fight the comparative advantage of another nation?

It is Tuesday and I can not order anything from Amazon for rest of the week because my recycling bin is full from the orders that arrived yesterday. 

Present societal problems are the consequences of the past solutions. 

The populace has never been in more control of the powerful. The bread is cheap and the circus is free . You can get both in wide variety with the press of a button, sitting at home. 

It is easier to be against something than for something. 

The easiest way to have a comfortable life is by getting used to being uncomfortable. 

I spent most of the 2020 at home and I thought that it would result in a lot more reading than usual (~12 books a year).  I was wrong but not entirely, I read 14 books last year:)  2020 Books  Following are some random and interesting excerpts:  1. The Worldly Philosophers   There is a "preanalytic" process that precedes our logical scenarios, a process which we cannot escape, and which is inescapably colored with our innermost values and preferences. "Analytic work", writes Schumpeter, '...embodies in the picture of things as we see them, and whenever there is any possible motive for wishing to see them in a given rather than another light, the way in which we see things we can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them.  2. Technology Strategy Patterns  When the good leader's work is done, his aims fulfilled, the people will all say, "We did this ourselves." - Lao Tzu  Definition of [technology] archite...

What is a bigger US national security breach - 9/11 or 1/6?

A culture that eats strategy for breakfast, eventually dies of indigestion. 

It is harder to reimagine what exists than to imagine what does not exist. 

At the end of 2019, I wrote down the list of societal trends I had been noticing over the years because I wanted to actively observe these trends in 2020. A pandemic happened in 2020 and we are still living in it. Surprisingly, almost all trends (19 out of 20) are still continuing. Following are my Y ear E nd of 2020 U pdates (YE2020U; all new 2020 text is in blue) to the trends.  ----- 2019 is coming to an end and continuing my quest to better understand human behavior, I wrote down the twenty trends I have been noticing for a few years. It would be interesting to observe these trends in 2020 to see how they evolve and if they achieve wider adoption. There are multiple reasons why these trends have emerged but in this article we will only look at what the trends are. Unless specified, the trends are for the US.  Source: Wikipedia  Here they are:  1. Phone calls on decline:   Millennials  and post-millenials do not talk on the phone much. They prefer text ...