Suzie, may her soul rest in peace.

I had written about how we are short-changing our future by overemphasizing local languages over English in education (here). A similar subject came up yesterday at PPR Redux while we were discussing the IBM iSeries. “What’s that got to do with language?” you might say. Well, read on.

I’ve seen the tendency among programmers to focus too much on the tool rather than the problem. This often leads to overly engineered solutions that try to fit a square peg into a round hole. For example, I’ve had experienced C++ programmers write MMFC (Miles & Miles of F**king Code) to solve a problem that would’ve taken 10 lines in Python only because they don’t know a world outside of C++. How do seemingly smart people end up doing dumb things?

Just like the Tower of Babel in the good old book, we have a digital ecosystem that has mirrored the problems in the real world. We have created languages, culture and cult in our digital lives that puts a cruel spin to the term “intelligent design.” How can anyone afford to be a one-trick pony (I am a Java guy) when reality demands a jack-of-all-trades (I am a programmer)?

How will a C programmer architect a solution if he’s never heard of reflection? Will a Java programmer ever understand memory-mapped IO? So, if you don’t have a word for it, will the thought ever enter you mind?

Is This The Greatest VC Pitch Prank Ever Pulled?.

Topics

The coolest part is that you can follow any topic you are interested in.

Interested in startups in India? Just follow http://www.quora.com/Startups-in-India 

I’ve followed more than 50 topics and answered questions related at least half of them. And I have questions for the other half.

Voting

The up-votes and down-votes make it easier to find what you are looking for. And when you follow a person, you get to see what they voted on and the questions they followed. Never seen anything like it before.

Social graph

I guess the best part about Quora is that it drags in your social graph with you. Your online identity is tied to either you facebook or twitter profile. It keeps you honest to a certain degree.

You can catch me at http://www.quora.com/Shyam-Sunder

Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket – StockViz Capital Market Analytics for India.

An interesting take on how success breeds success.

During the middle-ages, there were the aristocrats and then there were the peasants. The peasants pretty much worked for the land-owning aristocrats. Then came the industrial revolution that replaced the aristocrats with the industrialists. Then came Karl Marx and countries chose to swap the aristocrats and industrialists with socialists. I’m pretty sure that at each inflection point, the idea-sellers made some pretty cogent arguments to the peasant-class as to why their best days were ahead of them and how the new model will carry them to utopia: all that is needed is some good-ol’ fashioned hard work and some elbow grease.

Two centuries ago, a somewhat obscure Scotsman named Tytler made this profound observation: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy." – Elmer T. Peterson

The born-again sceptic

I hope that the experiences in Argentina, Hungary, France and Ireland rekindle the sceptic within the voting class. In case you’ve been living in a cave, you would know that:

• Argentina transferred about $24 billion of pension assets from the private to the state sector in 2008, with the result that $4 billion of annual contributions flowed into the government’s coffers.
• Hungary created a mandatory supplementary pension system in 1998 with contributions deducted from wages and invested in a private fund. These funds have since accumulated nearly $14 billion of assets. Those assets (and the employee contributions) are now being taken back by the government.
• Ireland’s National Pension Reserve Fund is providing €12.5 billion (half the fund’s assets) towards the bail-out of the banks.
• France seized the €36bn assets of the Fonds de Reserve pour les Retraites, the country’s reserve pension fund.

And there are talks of benefit cut-backs in the US as well.

So what exactly has the social safety-net achieved other than reducing savings rate and increasing consumption up-front and yanking away the net when pensioners and the poor need it the most?

Not only have the west collectively destroyed self-correcting market mechanisms in their own countries, but now they are trying to sell that model to Asia. They (principally the US) want us (principally China) to consume more (reduce savings rate). And after penalizing savers over successive generations through a combination of hidden inflation and low interest-rates, they want China to adopt the same policies so that they can all become “consumers”? Given the initial reaction of the Chinese, it looks like even the communists do not believe that this model will work.

Boil the milk

I remember arguing with my mother as to why she insisted on boiling packaged milk (that was pasteurized) before letting the family have it. Doesn’t “pasteurized” mean that its already boiled?  And she said: “that’s what the label says. But I don’t trust them”.

Given the experiences with “just trust us” crowd, it makes sense to have at least some of your monies in gold, buried in your backyard.

I nearly jumped right off my seat when I saw this graph. Lets face it, the battle ground is shifting towards the the smartphone/tablet arena. Waiting for your computer to boot-up is so 20th century. If you cannot be reached with a swipe and tap, you might as well be invisible to a vast swath of your customer-base.

There used to be a time when people had to go to the mall to shop together. But with Facebook redefining the social experience, consumers now have a plethora of social shopping experiences to choose from. Groupon (which Google is soon going to pay a gazillion dollars to acquire) and Mertado are some of the early adopters of the online-social-shopping experience.

With Foursquare and Facebook Places, your in-store customers are “checking-in” and becoming “mayors” of your store.

Say goodbye to loyalty cards: you now have everything you need to offer points, rewards and special discounts through the location-aware smartphone that your customer is carrying.

The combination of social networking and location aware services provides a wide array of opportunities to increase the visibility of your products & services and take the lead in engaging your customers like never before.

We are here to leverage your strengths and help you navigate the new paradigm. Drop us a note.

Its not funny how often I’ve seen this story: One generation toils to build wealth. Passes it on to the next where an incremental improvement occurs. The third is about dividing the spoils and living it up. And there is lament all over when the wealth is all gone. What surprises me is the inevitability of the cycle – even with families who are aware of it.

Is it embedded in human nature? Are we truly incapable of keeping the drive and hunger of the first generation burning in the new? Does it take scarcity to kindle ambition?

Manufactured scarcity

If the drive to create wealth is rooted in overcoming scarcity, then perhaps one way to preserve wealth across generations is to actually starve the next one of it. Make your children work for discretionary widgets, vacations, etc. Once they learn that they need to create value in order to enjoy the fruits of it, they may be better equipped to appreciate what they have. This may actually reduce the sense of entitlement I see in young adults today.

Apply endogenous shocks

I feel that one of the most important lessons I’ve learnt is the non-linear nature of life. Shit happens, and so do mannas from heaven. To expect life to be a linear progression where tomorrow is guaranteed to be better than yesterday is an easy trap to fall into for the financially insulated generation. The challenge is to pass this message on in a controlled environment. No amount of lecturing and “case studies” are going to help here. Perhaps the best bet is to engineer a shock and control the risks from spiralling out of control.

I guess the best approach I’ve seen so far are in families that push their kids out of the family-run businesses so that they can prove their entrepreneurial skills outside of the cushy confines, and then bring them back into the fold once they have proved their mettle.

But then again, there is nothing wrong with your progeny enjoying the fruits of your labour sipping cocktails and philandering in the French Riviera, is there?