The rise of modern socialism

With the economies around world slipping into recessionary trends and growing concerns about demand in general, there will be more and more countries moving towards a socialist approach (USA is fast moving towards that). Not for the reason that socialism is better than others but it offers a sense of security as mass and being together. The free market will be looked at, evaluated and nicely constrained to prevent wealth aggregation by selected and privileged few.
The issue with current system is not of demand and supply but of mindless consumption driven by the constant bombardment of lavish life by few on to masses and hence making them a spoke in wheel of consumption.
With globalization of demand, production and consumption we can not continue to function on the premise that externalization of cost to satisfy demand in one part of world will continue to provide sufficient returns. Slowly we will see economies around the world will have to turn inwards in order to rejuvenate the system and create a system of inclusive growth.

Has the world changed

Sometimes you long for security of known variables around you and at other times you want to break all established notions of security. Human life and mind is probably an anti-establishment by nature. Seems the genes are programmed to rebel at rules and regulations intermittently so that there is a world order. I guess even after millions of years of civilization the humans are still more animal. This is something which baffles me, even millions of years of training have not changed the way nature has programmed us.

For examples all the sports events are nothing but a grand platform for the wild expression of yesteryears when a hunt and kill was celebrated by dancing around fire. The stronger and bigger the kill the higher the hunter was in society and he attracted more women than others. Today also when a weak team/player defeats stronger opponents all the supporters of winner go in a tizzy. You can also look at the way females drool over likes of David Beckham. The world has not changed in many senses from the forming years of society.

Why are changes uncertain

I was thinking has mankind ever been able to predict/anticipate the high
impact changes? I guess no, but why?

Probably the uncertainty is what makes such changes high impact and
inability to predict is what causes concerns and resistance. In times of
quantum changes the ones who adapt to it survive and thrive. The ones who
resist will be washed away by the huge waves caused.

Change is the only constant in life.

What do we teach kids

Do we teach them what is required or we teach them what is convenient to the world in a manner that the kid grows up as a conformist instead of a non-conformist? Is the primary and secondary education system which we have today allows a kid to grow and have a personality of their own. Why is it that we teach them about national heroes instead of businessmen or the administrators or for that matter the corrupt politicians? Why none of the text book any where in the world is allowed to list mistakes of current governments or some recent governments.

I believe we all are too comfortable believing the place in which we live to be perfect adobe for ourselves. We all have accepted somewhere in our sub-conscious mind that this world is not a good place and we want to project a false image to our kids.

Procrastinating for survival

Everyone will remember their parents shouting on them for being lazy sometime or the other. Is procrastination really evil? I am going to present a completely different angle of being lazy. I will stretch myself and say being lazy is one of the main reasons you will succeed.

While designing a communication protocol stack I realized how precious each CPU cycle is, every time unit spent in parsing the message will hit your overall capacity and bring the peak system processing down. So the way out I choose was to be lazy, don’t parse anything till it is necessary.

Almost everyone who is connected to web has heard about DOS (denial of service) attacks. This is kind of attack is based on the premise that system under attack will not be able to handle high load. If the system is lazy enough then it can survive such an attack longer than others [1].

Even the budding entrepreneurs will agree that being lazy (about expansion) in their initial years helps. Don’t do anything on the periphery until it becomes necessity (the very defining attribute of a lazy person).

In the software domain it is said “Don’t fix if it isn’t broken” and all of us know there no software which can not use some fix. This is nothing but procrastination.

I think being lazy is good as long as you can be selective about it.

[1] It does not mean the system will not be affected by the attack, it will just withstand longer. And this strategy alone can not protect your system.

Boot strapping the way to go

There are mainly three types of entrepreneurs, one who write a business plan and then wait for someone to drop a load of money in their idea, seconds are the ones who think about what they want to start with and have a working capital within 2 months, then comes the third variety who have cashed out of a successful venture and are starting a new one. The third variety has already created a reputation so easier for them to raise capital. The first timers are the ones who struggle with initial funding.

There are only two ways to start a company, one is with money and other is without money. In my opinion it is better to go about it in the without money way. That way at least you are not blowing off your hard earned money and leaving yourself under heavy debts. It certainly will require a great deal of discipline to do it. Here I am trying to put some steps which may help new entrepreneurs.

- Work in you spare time and build a core of product without telling the world about it (it should take around 4-5 weeks to get it done if the product is not very complex)

- Start selling your idea/product to prospective customers. Take their feedback and let them have a feel of what you are trying to deliver, ask what is it that they want this product to do.

- Refine the prototype and incorporate some of the features requested by potential customers.

- Send beta version for limited filed trials. Subscriptions can be tied to revenue to build cash flow.

- Hire a sales team to generate more sales so that you can hire technical experts.

Watch this space for more to come.

Random Thaughts

While doing some work today I thought there are things
which can be measured and but not everything which
exists can be measured (at least not with the facilities
available today). Happiness is one such thing social
scientists have grappled to define and measure.
What is it that we call happiness? Is it a state of
mind? Or it is an impression which we want to believe.

Here I want to differ with the popular notion which
defines happiness as a state of mind, because then it
should be possible to make anyone happy with the help
of chemicals. In my opinion the feelings are much more
than state of mind. It is also about a person’s ability
to understand and react to change/situation. I think we
all have an image of what a happy person looks like and
we try to imitate similar actions and behaviors,
including facial expressions.

A new born baby probably does not know what laughter is
and what is crying, it is only the adults of world who
give names to expressions and the child starts using
them to communicate. When an infant is crying it is
probably trying to get attention of someone close and
we mistake it for expression of emotions.