India -- Politics -- Nuke deal

Only one thing comes to my mind

In Democracy, even one man makes a difference.  You have to KILL him to convince him otherwise.

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Make FRIENDS

Make Friends

Have Friends

         Friendship NIBHAO (didn't get HINDI of this)

Uncertainty

Living in Uncertainty is the Greatest Virtue

BUT THAT'S JUST ME

Victory belongs to those who believe in it the MOST and the LONGEST

 

There is nothing more strong than the heart or a volunteer

 

Kick Ass --- BUT THAT'S JUST ME !!!!!!!!!

I like sub commanders

Pearl Harbor again

I like sub commanders...

.... They don't have time for bull-shit ...

        ...... Neither do I

Brilliant

Brilliant is the man who can find a way not to fight the war - Pearl Harbor (movie)

There is no Brilliance in strategizing or in executing the strategy....  Brilliance is only in doing what can't be done by many and is done for the larger good

The Black Swan-Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Just posting the summary of the book......

More to come when I am done with the book and have formed my own points

 

Life isn't fair. Many of the most coveted spoils--wealth, fame, links on the Web--are concentrated among the few. If such a distribution doesn't sound like the familiar bell-shaped curve, you're right.

Along the hilly slopes of the bell curve, most values--the data points that track whatever is being measured--are clustered around the middle. The average value is also the most common value. The points along the far extremes of the curve contribute very little statistically.

If 100 random people gather in a room and the world's tallest man walks in, the average height doesn't change much. But if Bill Gates walks in, the average net worth rises dramatically. Height follows the bell curve in its distribution.

Wealth does not: It follows an asymmetric, L-shaped pattern known as a "power law," where most values are below average and a few far above. In the realm of the power law, rare and extreme events dominate the action.

For Nassim Taleb, irrepressible quant-jock and the author of "Fooled by Randomness" (2001), the contrast between the two distributions is not an amusing statistical exercise but something more profound: It highlights the fundamental difference between life as we imagine it and life as it really is.

In "The Black Swan"--a kind of cri de coeur--Mr. Taleb struggles to free us from our misguided allegiance to the bell-curve mindset and awaken us to the dominance of the power law.

The attractiveness of the bell curve resides in its democratic distribution and its mathematical accessibility. Collect enough data and the pattern reveals itself, allowing both robust predictions of future data points (such as the height of the next five people to enter the room) and accurate estimations of the size and frequency of extreme values (anticipating the occasional giant or dwarf.

The power-law distribution, by contrast, would seem to have little to recommend it. Not only does it disproportionately reward the few, but it also turns out to be notoriously difficult to derive with precision. The most important events may occur so rarely that existing data points can never truly assure us that the future won't look very different from the present.

We can be fairly certain that we will never meet anyone 14-feet tall, but it is entirely possible that, over time, we will hear of a man twice as rich as Bill Gates or witness a market crash twice as devastating as that of October 1987.

The problem, insists Mr. Taleb, is that most of the time we are in the land of the power law and don't know it. Our strategies for managing risk, for instance--including Modern Portfolio Theory and the Black-Scholes formula for pricing options--are likely to fail at the worst possible time, Mr. Taleb argues, because they are generally (and mistakenly) based on bell-curve assumptions.

He gleefully cites the example of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), an early hedge fund that blew up after its Nobel laureate founders "allowed themselves to take a monstrous amount of risk" because "their models ruled out the possibility of large deviations."

Mr. Taleb is fascinated by the rare but pivotal events that characterize life in the power-law world. He calls them Black Swans, after the philosopher Karl Popper's observation that only a single black swan is required to falsify the theory that "all swans are white" even when there are thousands of white swans in evidence.

Provocatively, Mr. Taleb defines Black Swans as events (such as the rise of the Internet or the fall of LTCM) that are not only rare and consequential but also predictable only in retrospect. We never see them coming, but we have no trouble concocting post hoc explanations for why they should have been obvious. Surely, Mr. Taleb taunts, we won't get fooled again. But of course we will.

Writing in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne, Mr. Taleb divides the world into those who "get it" and everyone else, a world partitioned into heroes (Popper, Hayek, Yogi Berra), those on notice (Harold Bloom, necktie wearers, personal-finance advisers) and entities that are dead to him (the bell curve, newspapers, the Nobel Prize in Economics).

A humanist at heart, Mr. Taleb ponders not only the effect of Black Swans but also the reason we have so much trouble acknowledging their existence. And this is where he hits his stride. We eagerly romp with him through the follies of confirmation bias (our tendency to reaffirm our beliefs rather than contradict them), narrative fallacy (our weakness for compelling stories), silent evidence (our failure to account for what we don't see), ludic fallacy (our willingness to oversimplify and take games or models too seriously), and epistemic arrogance (our habit of overestimating our knowledge and underestimating our ignorance).

For anyone who has been compelled to give a long-term vision or read a marketing forecast for the next decade, Mr. Taleb's chapter excoriating "The Scandal of Prediction" will ring painfully true. "What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors," observes Mr. Taleb, "but our absence of awareness of it." We tend to fail--miserably--at predicting the future, but such failure is little noted nor long remembered. It seems to be of remarkably little professional consequence.

I suspect that part of the explanation for this inconsistency may be found in a study of stock analysts that Mr. Taleb cites. Their predictions, while badly inaccurate, were not random but rather highly correlated with each other. The lesson, evidently, is that it's better to be wrong than alone.

If we accept Mr. Taleb's premise about power-law ascendancy, we are left with a troubling question: How do you function in a world where accurate prediction is rarely possible, where history isn't a reliable guide to the future and where the most important events cannot be anticipated?

Mr. Taleb presents a range of answers--be prepared for various outcomes, he says, and don't rush for buses--but it's clear that he remains slightly vexed by the world he describes so vividly. Then again, beatific serenity may not be the goal here.

As Mr. Taleb warns, certitude is likely to be found only in a fool's (bell-curve) paradise, where we choose the comfort of the "precisely wrong" over the challenge of the "broadly correct." Beneath Mr. Taleb's blustery rhetoric lives a surprisingly humble soul who has chosen to follow a demanding and somewhat lonely path.

I wonder how many of us will have the courage to join him. Very few, I predict--unless, of course, something unexpected happens.

Reinvent yourself

Constantly reinvent yourself ... again and again and again

No one Knows anything

No one knows anything

You know as much as I know and as much as the analysts know or as much as the policy makers know....

 

All are equally clueless.......  No one knows what will happen .......   No one knows what to do..........

 

When this is the case and IT JUST HAPPENS and is As random as randomness................. 

Lets sit and enjoy... Lets sit and have fun .......  Lets sit and make EFFORTS

Shit Happens

Just to add to my repertoire -- SHIT HAPPENS from Forrest Gump

Everything is PERSONAL

Sab kuchh NIJEE hai.

Everything is personal

NOW What

After I wrote this I read this and I am proud that I also believe and practice NOW WHAT

The management consultants got their Business cards developed on the philosophy of NOW WHAT too.....

We love patterns ... We love solutions

Why can't we just understand that things are just random

There is no pattern what so ever in it

 

Why don't we just understand that everything doesn't need a solution

Leaving the problem as it is, is enough.

My most used "one liner"

SO WHAT

NOW WHAT

Oil is surging ... Is someone authoring this

The oil prices are on a HIGH.... Without doubt, without fundamental reason ....

Is it being hyped... Is this the game of some speculators...

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rising fuel prices --> rising prices --> Reducing demands --> reducing customer spending --> reducing growth in economy --> reducing growth in income --> ???????????

Where does this all lead to ???????? 

What next

What to be done

Call for a nationwide revolution
    - People to work more
    - Increase supply
    - Increase working hours
    - Lend hands in growth of the economy
    - Corporates to increase initiative to get foreign players to buy stuff
    - foster innovation
    -

क्या मैं ठीक कर रहा हूँ .

Kya main theek kar raha hoon....

Somebody asked me this -

I said theek kar ke kya kisee ko kuchh mila hai.....
Agar tumhein sahee lage to karey jao... sahee apney aap ho jayage and the jo kiya voh hee theek ban jayega....

Is fuel price hike justified? What more to be done?

Let me draw a parallel into this....

 

Suppose in our family, our expenditure on something increases... May be you have to give more in your EMI as you have bought a house or a new member has come into your family.... How do you handle this????

-  Reduce your savings and defer your expenses

-  Reduce your other expenditures

-  Reduce your consumption

-  Strive to increase your income

Now lets see in the larger perspective.... in the perspective of oil prices

The oil prices have gone up.  Now what you can do

-  Reduce your savings and defer your expenses -- Oil bonds in place

-  Reduce other expenditures --  Doesn't seem to be realistic but can be thought of

-  Reduce your consumption -- Has the government thought on these lines and appealed to the nation to reduce consumption... Can't the government issue an appeal and national emergency situation in which people join in and reduce consumption so as to make the demand less and reduce prices.... Lets at least try it... I know its a BIG OD initiative at the country level.. But with WILL and GRIT it is definitely possible.

-  Strive to increase your income -- Lets produce more and let the corporates and the government try to increase the exports .... Each drop counts... Lets do a Japan in India......

I am ready to give my bit... Are your ready?????

Entertainment and Reality

I don't need much help from fate to get larger-scale entertainment: reality provides such forced revisions of beliefs at quite a high frequency

Wealth Grows

" we all become stingy and calculating when our wealth grows and we start taking money seriously."

How to be on the EXTREMISTAN side

I want to put my career on steroids and hence would like to stand on the Extremistan side -- as that seems the only viable option...

I want more !!!!!!!!!!!!