AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks
An argument in favour of automation using Artificial Intelligence replacing humans with machines for jobs that are menial is that humans will go on to devoting more time to solving the harder and more challenging problems the world is facing. However, cognitive psychology suggests that in some fields, taking away the menial jobs from humans […]
‘The 3.5% rule: How a small minority can change the world
The arresting piece contends that “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.” The article begins with several examples of how quickly authoritarian governments cave-in when faced with civil protest. It then says that […]
Contradictory Figures: Lessons From Uber’s Rise
Ben Carlson, another star commentator from the fabulous Ritholtz stable, discusses one of the best business books he has read for a long time – Mike Isaac’s book ‘Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber’. Carlson says that there are no neat black & white takeaways from Uber’s rise; instead there a good, bad and ugly […]
Is it possible to disrupt a cow?
We have featured the rise of the fake meat or the plant based protein industry in this space earlier highlighting how this could go a long way in reducing carbon footprint generated by the beef industry. This blog by Seth Miller provides an alternate perspective – about how the success of fake meat may not […]
Notes from a Sun Tzu skeptic
In many aspects of our lives, we tend to take certain age-old practices for granted without understanding the underlying principles and context, including our own world of investing – whilst principles of investing are broadly applicable across the world, there are nuances in each market which require a more contextual application. In this article, John […]
Consistent Compounders benefit disproportionately from tax rate cuts
The superficial approach of choosing winners from the recently announced tax rate cuts, is to look for companies paying the highest rate of tax and then expect a 10-15% increase in their profits. Instead, the real winners will be determined by the ability of a company to either: (a)reinvest the incremental cash flows back into […]
What former CAG Vinod Rai found when auditing the accounts of Kerala’s Shree Padmanabhaswamy temple
t Marcellus we never stop harping on the importance of clean books of accounts and why companies with cooked up numbers have caused major wealth erosion of shareholders/bondholders/banks over the years. Among other things, companies must pass our forensic audit to become part of our portfolio. This article is an excerpt from Vinod Rai’s new […]
The House Releases the Declassified Whistle-Blower Complaint Against Donald Trump
A whistle blower has released a letter that has set off the events that may well end with President Trump’s impeachment. The contents of the letter are so remarkable that Trump’s decision to make public the recording of the call to the Ukranian president (which is at the centre of the controversy) in an attempt […]
The curious case of Bhavish Aggarwal and Ola Electric
More than a decade after the Lehman Brothers bust unleashed the greatest tide of liquidity seen in the history of mankind, across the world we are now seeing weird & wonderful transactions in the Tech sector. From WeWork’s stalled IPO to Uber’s tanking share price to, closer home, the remarkable valuation of Ola Electric. Moneycontrol […]
Facts Don’t Change People’s Minds. Here’s What Does
“When my information changes, I change my mind”, is an oft quoted statement, usually attributed to economist John Keynes. But Keynes clearly is an outlier. Confirmation bias makes people ignore data or information that counters their beliefs, and no matter how hard you try, your arguments, based on facts, will usually have no effect. This […]
Casper Dreams of Being Bigger Than Mattresses
If building a business with strong competitive advantages is tough, sustaining the competitive advantage is many degrees tougher. In retailing, the internet makes it relatively easy to replicate at scale, an existing business model. And this makes it tough for incumbents to protect their market share till the time they have built enough scale for […]
Why can’t we agree on what’s true anymore?
It is fashionable to believe these days that Trump, Putin, Modi, Xi, Erdogan, etc have ushered in a new era of right-wing politics wherein all of us being relentlessly subject to propaganda and our liberties are being curtailed. This piece in The Guardian questions this notion and says “It’s not about foreign trolls, filter bubbles […]
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