Day: August 9, 2019

Back To College: S01E04 Learning More With Zubair Noqvi

Zubair, a past student of Gokhale Institute, visited us recently, and I got the chance to speak with him in front of our students at the Kale Hall this past Friday.

Past student is an understatement: Zubair is currently on sabbatical from the Indian Economic Service, and is using this time to finish a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard University.

He was part of the team that revamped the Economic Survey, and turned it into an eminently readable document over the years. There’s much more to unpack, and all of it can be listened to on the podcast (link here)

This is Zubair’s LinkedIn profile, this is his Instagram handle

Feel free to get in touch with him for any help you may need from him.

Etc: Links for 9th August, 2019

  1. “The laborious and inefficient production process adds to the costs. As it turns out, the jumbo baristas take a long time and a lot of raw material to produce one kilogram of elephant poop coffee; it ‘takes 33 kilograms (72 pounds) of raw coffee cherries to produce 1 kilogram (2 pounds) of Black Ivory coffee.’ A big portion of the beans gets chewed up, broken, or get lost in tall grass after being excreted.”
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    I couldn’t resist, in spite of the obviousness, and I beg forgiveness, but: that’s some expensive shit!
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  2. “Big companies dominate consumption. This is not a bad thing in itself. Companies get big by winning customers, and they win customers by providing a good product and/or service, which is the whole point of consumer markets. Different divisions of large companies may compete against each other; consumers are often unaware that they are choosing between two products owned by the same company. The problem comes if success leads to incumbency, with large, powerful companies able to use their power to shape regulations to suit them, rather than assist their competitors. Being market-friendly is not the same thing as being business-friendly, a confusion common to politicians. Big is neither beautiful nor bad, so long as regulators remain faithful to consumers, rather than the companies serving them.”
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    An interesting read from the Guardian about consumer choice over the day – or rather the lack if it.
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  3. “Thefirm invests $60 million of a $112 million fundraising round for home-sharing site Airbnb, which is already in some 186 countries and more than 16,000 cities.Airbnb embodies the idea of “software eating a traditional business,” a trend Andreessen expounds on a month later in his now-famous manifesto. In his “Why Software is Eating the World” article, he writes that software firms will become “highly valuable cornerstone companies in the global economy, eating markets far larger than the technology industry has historically been able to pursue.””
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    A useful timeline of A16Z, and how it evolved over time. If you have not read the article mentioned in this excerpt, please do so! Ritholz’s newsletter is worth subscribing to.
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  4. “Looking out across the City of Light—the new Place du Carrousel, the theaters around Châtelet, the boulevards stretching their long arms across the city from the Arc de Triomphe—filled one Parisian with disgust. “We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris,” wrote nineteenth-century journalist-turned-politician Jules Ferry. “We see the grand and intolerable new buildings, the costly confusion, the triumphant vulgarity, the awful materialism that we are going to pass on to our descendants.””
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    The Paris that I loved so much last year was nothing more than ‘awful materialism’ about a century or so ago.
    …in the eye of the beholder…
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  5. “The Speedmaster—a “mechanical” watch, meaning it is powered by a mechanism—remains one of the most popular Swiss watches around. Besides telling time, it has a chronograph, which basically means it can also work as a stopwatch, and a tachymeter, which measures speed. It also looks remarkably, to use a technical term, cool.”
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    I don’t collect watches, but I did enjoy reading about this story about the Speedmaster.