Short read: CATL, the little-known Chinese battery maker that has the US worried
As the west, particularly the US, tries to wean away from its reliance on Chinese manufacturing, it finds that in certain areas there is no way out. One of them is electric batteries. CATL, the Chinese electric battery maker used for electric vehicles as well as power grids is not just the world’s largest but […]
Short read: Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts
We know Formula 1 teams build the most advanced cars on this planet. Each of these cars – we are informed by this article – cost $12-16mn. Apparently, these teams operate with a budget cap of $145 million. And yet, these teams use Excel software to track all their wonderful high tech gadgets and cutting […]
Short read: Why Asia Should Sound the Trump Alarm
James Crabtree, Author of the bestselling book, ‘The Billionaire Raj’, argues in this piece that Asian politicians are underestimating the risks that Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House poses to Asia: “Then there are three bigger problems that should alarm Asian leaders. The first is Trump’s growing unpredictability. Here, the recent case of […]
Long read: Why women, once ignored, are being treasured in Krishnagiri
Over the past year, we have highlighted some emerging themes in the India story including the rise of India’s women, the ascent of southern India and growth in Indian manufacturing thanks to China plus One (a phrase used to describe the world’s imperative to reduce reliance on China for its manufacturing needs). Here’s a heartwarming […]
Long read: How businesses are actually using generative AI
Artificial Intelligence or AI has been threatening to disrupt our lives for long but never has it been closer to being reality than from the launch of GPT4 a year ago. Whilst some of us might have played around with ChatGPT in our individual capacities, how is the world adopting it at scale? Especially businesses […]
Long read: How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin
Byron Tau’s article helped us understand how badly constructed apps not only give third party advert providers a free ride on our time & attention but can also compromise our privacy (and give away the most intimate details of our lives). The central protagonist of the article is a US government contractor-cum-techie, Mike Yeagley. Through […]
Short read: Rest Takes Hard Work
In response to a piece we featured a few weeks ago about why free time is so elusive despite working so hard, a reader shared this article on why we need to work hard towards our rest i.e, deliberate rest. Alex Soojun-Kim Pang, the author of the article says his study of people’s lives over the years […]
Short read: How to Generate Good Idea
Whilst the author of this piece being an investor talks about idea generation in the context of investing, the essence is quite generic and applicable in any field of life. “Idea generation, in the investment business, has always been something of a dark art. Some managers prefer stringent quantitative screens to generate ideas. Others keep […]
Short read: Electoral Bonds data by SBI needs different levels of inquiry: Ashok Lavasa
Ashok Lavasa is a retired IAS officer of considerable repute and a former Election Commissioner. Amidst the breathless excitement about the Electoral Bonds (EB) data published by the State Bank of India (SBI), Mr Lavasa has written a piece in The Print in which he lays out the three issues which deserve deeper probing. “First, […]
Long read: Conviction and Quality
The Warren Buffett school of looking at permanent ownership of businesses or long-term investing in general inevitably requires high conviction as even the best of businesses tend to go through bouts of weakness, testing the investor’s patience. But what do we mean by conviction? How can we train ourselves to build it? This is an […]
Long read: The magic of the mundane
Last week’s 3 Longs & 3 shorts featured a piece on how millions of people across the world are giving up on speaking to their native language and instead switching to speaking more widely spoken languages such as English, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic. That led us – and many of our clients – to ask […]
Long read: How an airplane toilet works at 40,000 feet: The extraordinary science behind everyday flying
This long read answers all those questions you had about airplanes but were afraid to ask. Firstly, how does the toilet work in a plane. Short answer: a toilet in a plane works in a completely different way to the toilets in our residence. Julia Buckley of CNN writes: “Using water to flush airplane toilets is […]
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