Thoughts on insider trading charges against McKinsey, Intel, IBM'ers

"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad"

~~ Theodore Roosevelt

Ramblings for 2009-02-23

Links for 2009-02-23 Posted: 24 Feb 2009 12:00 AM CST Worst. Redeye. Ever. Life Imitates The Onion EconomPic: Top Ten Banks.... Then and Now Netbooks have reshaped the market for portable computers Gmail: Use Gmail's Multiple Inboxes Feature to Manage Multiple Addresses ALWAYS check those hotel reservations! Marc Andreesen in Charlie Rose US Remains World’s Leading Manufacturer Capitaland pays bonuses in shopping vouchers » Singapore Retrenchment Blog Learning to Speak Better English: Yes, We Can! - WSJ.com 3. Actress's blubbering makes British wince

Ramblings for 2009-02-18

Links for 2009-02-18 Posted: 19 Feb 2009 12:00 AM CST Article Skimmer DNA: India: If convicts have rights, so have victims: Supreme Court We Are Not Amused... If I had a billion dollars… (second verse) The Kerala Model - At Risk? Bangalore to become more affordable- Property / C'struction-Services-News By Industry-News-The Economic Times

Ramblings for 2009-02-17

Links for 2009-02-17 Posted: 18 Feb 2009 12:00 AM CST Hope is a Four Letter Word Don't Look Down ...and then it gets weird. Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly - A hand picked TV channel Skype strikes deal with Nokia | Webware - CNET

Ramblings for 2009-02-16

Links for 2009-02-16 Posted: 17 Feb 2009 12:00 AM CST Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 02-15-2008 Is Latvia First Country in World to Fall Into Depression? Photo #62 What’s the dress code at the 7-ELEVEN in Hong Kong? YouTube - A woman missed her flight at the boarding gate HKIA The Ultimate Dogfooding Story

Ramblings for 2009-02-15

Links for 2009-02-15 Posted: 16 Feb 2009 12:00 AM CST Municipal Bonds That Predate the Bronx Are Maturing Now - NYTimes.com Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai : Destiny or Hype? | Newgeography.com India’s Innovation Gap: Product Managers Crisis is the Mother of Entrepreneurship Fewer, Quieter Ex-pats in Shanghai Surviving the initial downturn is not enough – Part 1 Survival is Not Enough Part II: Cost Cutting vs. Business Transformation How Google's layoffs and project cancellations are affecting it's culture of innovation Too big to rescue Get Your Guns Out

Ramblings for 2009-02-14

Links for 2009-02-14 Posted: 15 Feb 2009 12:00 AM CST How to Cut Travel Costs Luxury, Business Travel Take Hit - Business Travel Column - Joe Brancatelli - Seat 2B - Portfolio.com Buying Abroad Urban Travel Legends How to Complain Ship, Don't Schlep The Miles Bye Club

Get what you deserve

My thoughts on the US housing crisis...
"Why are they doing these stupid inflationary things to solve the problem? Who said every clown deserves a house?"

The free electric band

Wed and Thurs are the worst days in the week for me. On Wed, I create 4-5 status reports and send them out. On Thu I am engaged in conf calls all day, taking clients thru the reports.

Today, this is what I am listening to currently to get me thru the status reports.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lep0Fzq6omM

"My father is a doctor, he's a familiy man
My mother works for charity whenever she can
They're both good clean Americans who abide by the law
They both stick up for liberty and they both support the war.
My happiness was paid for when they laid their money down
For summers in a summercamp and winters in the town
My future in the system was talked about and planned
But I gave it up for music and the Free Electric Band.

I went to school in handwashed shirts with neatly oiled hair
And the school was big and newly built and filled with light and air
And the teacher taught us values that we had to learn to keep
And they clipped the ear of many idle kid who went to sleep.
Till my father organised for me a college in the east
But I went to California for the sunshine and the beach
My parents and my lecturers could never understand
Why I gave it up for music and the Free electric band.

Well they used to sit and speculated upon their son's career
A lawyer or a docter or a civil engineer
Just give me bread and water, put a guitar in my hand
'Cos all I need is music and the Free Electric Band.

My father sent me money and I spent it pretty fast
On a girl I met in Berkley in a social science class
Yes and we learned about her body but her mind we did not know
Until deep routed attitudes and morals began to show
She wanted to get married even though she never said
And I knew her well enough by now to see inside her head
She'd settle for suburbia and a little patch of land
So I gave her up for music and the Free Electric Band"

Give and Take

"We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give."
-- Winston Churchill

Steadfast Principles, Integrity, Independence

“Not all Germans believe in God, but they all believe in the Bundesbank.”
-- Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission, 1992

For42 years the German Central bank defended the German currency from irresponsible fiscal policies of short-term oriented politicians, making it a bedrock next to the US$. Now you can see the same inherited gene pool running in the ECB.

To paraphrase Trichet, fuck growth.

Every great cause eventually degenerates into a racket

Eric Hoffer once said - "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket". The same can be said of Microsoft, especially Microsoft India.

For context see this post on Mini Microsoft... Go thru the comments... I am sure there are some exaggerations. But there is no smoke without fire...

War and Peace

"For no one is so insane as to prefer war to peace, for in the latter sons bury father but in the former fathers bury sons."
-- Herodotos

Who's tending the fire while you play?

"We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."
-- Fear and loathing in Las Vegas

Karan Johar and Shahrukh Khan???

Really???
Need to check with my housemate Mr. Bakhwas for more details...

Karan had always struck me as a wee bit effeminent on his absolutely horrible show "Koffee with Karan". This show is so bad that I stop channel-surfing to watch it and cringe. Something like the Gigli effect I guess (So bad, that it's good).



For scientific reasoning behing the Gigli and "Koffee with Karan" effect, see this post by Kathy Sierra. Summary in pic below (taken from Kathy's blog also)...

Wise Guys

"A wise guy’s always right. Even when he’s wrong, he’s right."
-- Al Pacino in "Donnie Brasco"

Quantity vs. Quality

"Quantity Has A Quality All Its Own"
-- Lenin


Can apply to so many things... Offshore engineering, The Sherman vs. Tiger etc etc...

Born to kill

"I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed, and that the guy sitting up at the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking. Now why would I know that? How can I know that and not know who I am?"
-- Jason Bourne

Unfettered...

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
-- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Choose life

"Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?"
-- Opening lines from "Trainspotting"