Reading
across disciplines is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen.
Here is a summary of some of the best articles I read this week.
A self-declared space nation called Asgardia is
planning a fully functioning space economy
The Space Kingdom of
Asgardia is a genuine project to set up a nation entirely in space, with
hundreds of thousands of members paying "residency'" fees and a
parliament that is in the process of forming the foundations for its society.
Asgardia's goal is to transport thousands of people to an enormous space
station by 2043, beyond Earth's jurisdictions, to "build a new democratic
society." Ambitiously, the space nation is looking to the likes of Tesla
CEO Elon Musk and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to get them there. Both billionaires
have also set up commercial space firms.
It's counterfeit we consume
One estimate of
India’s total counterfeit market is Rs 1 trillion. The dummies are often mixed
up with originals at the delivery point to escape easy detection. Companies are
often reluctant to go public with the fact that the bazaar could be awash with fakes
of their brands, though it’s ubiquitous and affects all brands. Interviews with
dozens of brand surveillance officials of top companies reveal an estimate:
some 25 to 40 per cent products of every available brand is allegedly
counterfeit.
The span of fake
branded goods takes in a wide variety—besides tea, salt, spices, ghee, paneer
and the like, and toothpaste, shampoo, hair oil, conditioner, bathing soap,
there’s mobile phones, computer hardware, apparel—and yes, liquor. And most
dangerously, pharmaceuticals.
E-commerce offers no
immunity. Many reports point towards the large-scale presence of counterfeits in
online buying. The authorised attorneys of some top companies admit some 40-50
per cent of products sold online via top e-commerce sites are fake. They declined
to be quoted officially. Smuggling, especially from China, is another route for
supply of counterfeits in India.
India to get its second Lion sanctuary
Located in north
Madhya Pradesh, Kuno was one of the hunting grounds of the royal families of
the region and was notified as a sanctuary in 1981. It has been 29 years since
Kuno Palpur was identified as the site for the relocation of Asiatic lions,
from their last habitat in Gujarat, to protect them from extinction. Currently,
there are 523 (as per the last census carried out in 2015) lions in Gir and
this relocation project was supposed to have been completed by 2020.
Catastrophes such as an epidemic, an unexpected decline in prey, natural
calamities or retaliatory killings could result in the extinction of the lion
population when they are restricted to single populations. Gir in Gujarat is
the last refuge of the Asian lion population.
Expecting
approximately a realised growth that has been observed for recovering tiger
populations, along with supplementation every four years from Gir; the lion
population in Kuno WLS should reach the current carrying capacity of 40 within
15 years.
To reach the required self-sustaining population size of 80 lions, the time required would
be close to 30 years.
Online advertising - is it all mumbo jumbo?
A friend asked me to read up on Affle and also on the
online advertising space. This article is a fascinating one and exposes how a
lot of metrics around online advertising is just hogwash.
For more than a
century, advertising was an art, not a science. Hard data didn’t exist. You put
your commercials on the air, you put your brand in the paper, and you started
praying. Would anyone see the ad? Would anyone act on it? Nobody knew. In the
early 1990s, the internet sounded the death knell for that era of advertising.
Data will take over the world
Yuval Noah Harari is one of my favourite authors. He
has a crystal clear mind and extraordinary writing ability where he can make
complex subjects appear simple. Here he talks about how authority will shift
from humans to Big Data and how authority has historically shifted over time.
For thousands of
years, humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the
modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.
Now, a fresh shift
is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious
mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so
high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal
narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel
creed may be called “Dataism”.
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