1) Pay attention to your attention
I felt that I had to
pay attention to my attention, that I had to focus on my focus. It was new. It
wasn’t something I’d had to think about since I was a kid.
The same way we
discovered that the sedentary lifestyles of the 20th century required us to
physically exert ourselves and work our bodies into healthy shape, I believe
we’re on the cusp of discovering a similar necessity for our minds. We need to
consciously limit our own comforts. We need to force our minds to strain
themselves, to work hard for their information, to deprive our attention of the
constant stimulation that it craves.
The same way
the consumer economy of the 20th century called upon us to invent the
nutritional diet, I believe that the attention economy of the 21st
century calls upon us to invent an attention diet.
The first and most
important goal of an attention diet should be to consciously limit the number
of distractions we’re exposed to.
Basically, the name
of the game is quality over quantity. Because in a world with infinite
information and opportunity, you don’t grow by knowing or doing
more, you grow by the ability to correctly
focus on less.
2) Tax on BigTech by France - will others follow?
France has approved
a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by the US, which argues
that it unfairly targets American tech giants. The 3% tax will be levied on
sales generated in France by multinational firms like Google and Facebook. The
French government has argued that such firms headquartered outside the country
pay little or no tax. At present, they are able to pay little or no corporate
tax in countries where they do not have a large physical presence. They declare
most of their profits where they are headquartered. The European Commission
estimates that on average traditional businesses face a 23% tax rate on their
profits within the EU, while internet companies typically pay 8% or 9%.France
has long argued that taxes should be based on digital, not just physical
presence. It announced its own tax on big technology firms last year
after EU-wide efforts stalled.
3) Is FaceApp, the new sensation, safe or is it
collecting information about you to be able to misuse later?
Wireless Lab, the
company behind FaceApp, has very expansive Terms of Service that raise a
growing number of privacy concerns. Section 5 of the Terms of Service “grants
FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide,
fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify,
adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly
perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness
provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels
now known or later developed, without compensation to you.”
“You just sent them
close up, well-lit images of your face,” he continues. “Now, they know your
name and vital details and can create an annotated image record of you as a
human. The next model would have no problem triangulating and verifying and
adding more data from other sources like LinkedIn which would then give them
your education, your work history, skies the limit.”
4) Cordless charging of EV batteries - now a reality
If the future of
mobility is destined to be electric, CEO Alex Gruzen of WiTricity wants to make
sure it’s cordless, too. WiTricity, a Massachusetts-based start-up, designs
systems that deliver power wirelessly to car batteries using a technology known
as magnetic resonance.
Electric vehicles
are now the single largest consumer of battery-watt hours. EVs have surpassed
cell phones and all consumer electronics. That’s kind of remarkable, given the
billions of phones sold every year.
This summer, they
hit a major milestone: for the first time, a global automaker, BMW, launched a
plug-in hybrid car featuring their wireless-charging technology.
5) What is wrong with India's PSU banking system in
the backdrop of 50 years of bank nationalization
Bank nationalization
was a by-product of a power struggle between Gandhi and rivals within the
Indian National Congress party that was only superficially about
economics.
Gandhi wanted to
isolate her rivals, including her finance minister, and force them out of the
government. So, she maneuvered them into declaring that the public sector was
inefficient and should be dismantled. Then she herself took the opposite
position, nationalizing the banks and leaving her enemies with no option but to
go. It was a matter of intra-party politics, not poverty relief.
The Harvard Business
School economist Shawn Cole found that “while nationalization
initially spurred financial development and caused unprecedented amounts of
credit to flow to agriculture, this came at a cost of lower quality
intermediation. Moreover, a more than doubling of agricultural credit to
villages led to no measurable increase in agricultural investment. Even the
increase in credit was not sustained.”
The effect on
industry, meanwhile, was clearly negative. Banks, once nationalized, became
risk-averse and hidebound, rarely lending to new
firms. Under-lending became chronic; manufacturers found themselves
severely short of credit. Bank officials did not have to care about finding and
evaluating profitable firms. Instead they lent to those companies selected, for
whatever reason, by their political bosses.
Such cronyism led to
periodic bad loan crises that required bailouts by the banks’ owners, the
taxpayers. The same dynamic continues to this day: The last Indian budget set
aside 700 billion rupees ($10.2 billion) for recapitalizing public sector
banks. This means a total of
2.7 trillion rupees has been infused into the state-controlled banking sector
since 2017. Even so, banks are still burdened with bad assets and reluctant to
lend.
