Notes and Review: Letters from a Stoic (Seneca) (Campbell translation)

I found out about this book after Sreejith wrote a note about it. I knew vaguely about Seneca as being a philosopher of some kind, but I had not considered reading any of his work before seeing this note. Now, I have read the book and it is at the top of the list of books that I strongly recommend to everyone. In this post, I have put together some of the most insightful things that I think Seneca talks about in this book. This book is a perennial guide to living the life of a “wise person”: happy, contented, and prepared for whatever fortune might throw their way.

An Unscientific Comparison of News Websites - Part 3 (Subjective Analysis)

This series of posts looks at 13 news website home pages and compares them at a single point in time based on the content that they choose to host and the presentation of that content to the common user. This is the third post in this series and it looks subjectively at the look and feel of the news articles on each news home page. As I explained in the first post in this series, this part of the analysis is subjective and not based on any standards. I take a free-form “scoring” approach to rank the website on some predefined characteristics and then compare those scores. If your sensibilities do not match my own, this part of the analysis might not hold much value for you.

An Unscientific Comparison of News Websites - Part 2 (Objective Analysis)

This series of posts looks at 13 news website home pages and compares them at a single point in time, based on the content that they host and the presentation of that content to the common user. This is the second post in this series and it looks objectively at the content and classification of the articles on each web page. We look at the various websites and try to classify why some news websites are clearly “good” while others are “tolerable” at best.

Programming note: (Post 1: released yesterday, Post 2: this post, Post 3: March 15)

An Unscientific Comparison of News Websites - Part 1 (Motivation and Methodology)

This series of posts looks at 13 news website home pages and compares them at a single point in time based on the content that they host and the presentation of that content to the common user. This is the first of three posts for this series. It explains my motivation and the methodology that I used for this comparison. I took screenshots of the above-the-fold content on 13 popular news websites at a single point in time. Then, I counted the total number of news articles on each site and classified each one into various categories. I also did a subjective analysis of the site’s look and feel by ranking them between 1 and 10 on 4 metrics (I came up with these metrics using my expectations from news websites as a guide). Once again, this is an unscientific comparison study.

Programming note: (Post 1: Current post, Post 2: March 14, Post 3: March 15)

Financial Markets are Complex

The Gamestop stock started 2021 at a modest $17.25. It then went up to $347.51 on 27th January. It went back down to $53.50 on 4th February. It closed on February 17th at $45.94, about 2.66 times it’s price at the start of the year. Millions of words and thousands of column inches have been devoted to explaining what happened, why it happened, and who was hurt. I wanted to write about a few peculiar things I noticed in the past few days that were the bizarre side shows to the main event: politicians (and Elon Musk) posturing for publicity by saying things about other things that they know nothing about, truth not prevailing no matter how much effort is spent on explanation, general disapproval of complexity in a system and societal conviction that the stock market is “rigged”.

2020 Was Not "Unprecedented"

“2020 was an unprecedented year because …”. All of us can find several phrases to complete that sentence. Versions of this quote have been circulating for more than a year. In particular, creators on YouTube and News announcers love this quote; every turn in the economy and the things they are able to / unable to do in their lives is “unprecedented”. In her book “This Time Is Different”, Reinhart makes the argument that there is a compulsive urge to claim that the present is completely different from the past, that there are no similarities and that whatever challenge / victory came yesterday is different and more significant than something that happened a 10 years ago. Reinhart rejects this practice of turning every insight into an epiphany and points to the fact that the same type of financial crises keep happening, over and over again, to demonstrate that the present is no more special than the past.

My experience with partiality in school sports

When I was about 12 years old, I was in school in Mumbai. At the school, I was in the Basketball team. I started playing the sport without any special reason; it was something to do. As I played the sport, I discovered that I was particularly good at some of the defensive positions (mainly because I was able to run faster than everyone else who was at the same school in my age group: an exceedingly small sample). This discovery was a revelation to me. I believed that the connection between “skill” and “success” was real: I believed that my coach would see that I had talent and pick me to play in regional matches. This didn’t happen; in fact, I remember being picked only once during my 5 years on the team. This is not a sob story. I wish I did feel bad about it, I wish I felt like I had been wronged, so that I could talk about recovering from that place. I don’t feel like that at all; I look back at that phase of my life as an amusing few years. This post is an exploration of my feelings about what happened then and how I make sense of it now.

What's Great about Newsroom, the TV show?

3 months ago, I had absolutely no idea that people found Sorkin’s writing annoying. Then, I heard that someone I knew had given up on watching Newsroom after watching the first few minutes of the Pilot episode. Hearing about that sent me for a brief whirl while I figured out what I liked about Sorkin and why. I think now I have a better understanding of that. I recently re-watched Sorkin’s Newsroom. Watching it again after a few years since the last time I watched it, I noticed that I was familiar with a lot more people in the show (BJ Novak from The Office, Clea DuVall and Sarah Sutherland from Veep). I also realized that the show is packed with information, nuance and characters who know what they are talking about. Why can you only either “love” the show or “dislike” it passionately?

New Yorker Magazine Subscriptions

About 11 months ago, in Feb 2020, I signed up for a 12 week subscription to the New Yorker magazine. It was the first print magazine I came across that supported International shipping and would ship to Japan. It was also a magazine that I had heard about a lot on TV shows and podcasts (Seinfeld happens in New York, and in one episode, the main characters discuss a New Yorker cartoon in depth; This American Life and The Daily are both podcasts that are made by crews that live in New York) After 24 weeks, I ended up canceling my subscription because I couldn’t keep up with the sheer volume of content that was being delivered each week. This post is a recap of my experience.

Reserve Bank of India's Interventions to maintain excess liquidity - Part 2

In the previous post, we looked at what the RBI has been doing over the 2020 calendar year. The over-all effect of RBI’s interventions have been that the exchange rate (INR to USD ratio) has remained within a narrow window, despite the unprecedented capital inflows into the Indian equity market. This is by design, and the RBI has tried to explain their policy a few times in various documents. Although this excess liquidity can theoretically cause high inflation and have an adverse impact on the currency, a couple other things are happening simultaneously and making this policy prudent (existing over-valuation and RBI’s strong balance sheet). After reading some of these documents, here’s my thesis of the advantages and disadvantages of what the RBI has been doing, as I best understand it.