The book begins by taking you through case study after case study of how the process works. Initially, Facebook was launched as a platform for users. You could see only the posts that people you were connected with published. It was kept clean so that you had the incentive to come back, and since your friends were all on the same platform, it acted as a lock-in as well. Once the user was locked in, Facebook began opening up the news feed and surfacing posts from publishers and advertisers. At this stage, they were making the product better for their business users and making it worse for individual users. Once the business users were locked in and became dependent on the distribution, they started rent seeking and turning the screws on them. Making it harder to surface posts unless the publishers paid top dollars for them.

Case after case, Apple, Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon, the same playbook follows. Make the user very happy, tie them into the platform. Then focus on the business user, drivers in the case of Uber, sellers in the case of Amazon, make them really happy, tie them in and then become a rent seeker.

Before software, it was possible to rent seek and try to extract the most out of your customers, but this was a fraught process. For instance, in a retail store, you could change the price of a product 2 or 3 times in a day, but with digital displays, it is now possible to change it with the click of a mouse. Norway, which has the highest penetration of digital price tags in store shelves, records 2000 price changes per day in stores on average. Technology has made rent seeking and bad behaviour a lot easier.

Paying the Uber partner less or increasing the pricing as soon as it starts raining is very easy. What is worse is that the companies hide behind the garb of the platform and behave as if they have no control over how the price changes. They use the term “dynamic pricing” to escape taking the responsibility for what they are doing.

Google recruited all of its engineers with the promise to be the “do no evil” company. As the company began to saturate the market, it needed new ways to generate more income. The decision was to make search worse! If people had to work their way through more pages, the likelihood of clicking ads increased. The engineer who had spent countless nights building the product refused. The company had to cave to the engineers.

Engineers in Silicon Valley are some of the highest-paid employees in the world. This is not because the companies love them. Look no further than how Amazon treats its delivery workers who must pee in a bottle to meet delivery quotas. They treat their engineers well because there is a supply shortage, or at least there was till AI showed up. The only thing that AI is good at is writing code (So long as it does not have to think about how a human would try to break it).

The rapid and rabid push towards AI is to break the bargaining power that engineers have so that these companies can continue to enshitify their products and create more avenues for seeking rent.

The author endorses a push for more antitrust action against companies that dominate industries and a push to increase competition. He closes by quoting Martin Luther King, who said, “The law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.”

John Montagu was the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Born into nobility, he was a statesman, but also a man of many vices. One of his vices was gambling, and he would spend a lot of time at the gambling table at the Hellfire Club.

The story goes that Lord Sandwich was a conversant gambler and would spend many hours playing cards at the gambling table. He also loved to eat meat while playing cards. But eating meat would render his hands greasy and spoil the cards. He would therefore ask his valet to bring him beef served between two slices of bread. The others at the gambling table began asking for “the same as Sandwich”, and thus the Sandwich was born.

There is still debate over the veracity of this story. This story arose out of a rumour in a travel book called Tour to London by Pierre-Jean Grosley.

Interestingly, Lord Sandwich was a great supporter of Captain James Cook. As the First Lord of the Admiralty, he approved the funds for three ships captained by James Cook. In his honour, James Cook named the Sandwich Islands in Hawaii as well as the South Sandwich Islands in the Southern Atlantic Ocean.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off India’s first hydrogen-powered train on 17 July; the journey covered 89 kms from Jind to Sonepat in Haryana. With this, India joined the small league of countries with hydrogen-operated railways, including Germany, Japan, China, the US and France.

The 10-coach passenger train runs on hydrogen fuel cell technology, a major step towards clean rail transportation, according to a press release by the government. This makes it significantly larger than most hydrogen trains globally, which are around three to four coaches long.

The train has also been designed, developed and manufactured entirely in India, designed by the Research, Designs and Standards Organisation and assembled at the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai.

Source: The Print

India barely produces any crude oil. It imports all of its demand for crude oil, and this leaves the country with a huge import bill, which hurts the currency, the budgets of the government and the common man. When war mongering commences in the Middle East, Indians are often left holding the bag. A shift away from oil is a great thing for India in every way imaginable.

Electric mobility, which is currently touted as an alternative, does not achieve this goal because more than 50% of the energy produced in India comes from coal, oil, and gas. The only upside is that the pollution and the consumption of fossil fuels have been moved to another location.

What is needed is a fundamental shift in the energy source itself.

India has access to a lot of renewable energy since there is sunshine throughout the year. In addition to that, the 11,000 Km coastline ensures ample availability of wind. The problem with renewable energy is that it is not constant. It rises and falls. The sun is not shining in the sky at night. One way around this is to store that energy for later use. Producing hydrogen could be one way to store that energy. Think of Hydrogen as a battery.

Deploying a new fuel directly to consumers is impractical.

The problem with consumer transportation is that it is driven by network effects. EVs faced the same problem for years. You could buy the car, but if you go on a highway, where will you charge it? The problem wasn’t intractable. Innovators need certain incentives to solve these problems, and they need to see that there is going to be a sufficient market when they produce a solution. As the governments across the world started to push EV policies and chose it as the lowest hanging fruit to show that they were serious about climate change, 100s of businesses got into the act of trying to solve these issues.

I have argued for a long time that Hydrogen is a better solution than the current EVs since EVs still require the mining of a lot of metals regularly, and most of this is highly polluting in nature. EVs are a tool for greenwashing. The pollution caused is hidden in mines and supply chains that exist in invisible corners of the world. The mining and processing of metals needed for producing an EV battery causes as much pollution as a petrol car that has been driven 40,000 kilometres.

No solution starts at 100% efficiency. People work and innovate to reach there. In 2000, an electric car with a battery pack was considered impossible. The physics did not work. The weight of the battery pack was so high that all of the energy it stored would be spent hauling the battery pack itself. Then people innovated. On materials, battery compounds, motor drives, energy distribution and a whole load of other things to make the modern electric vehicle possible.

It also sucked all of the research dollars away from other fuel sources, such as hydrogen. This was not by chance but by design. If you are an entrepreneur who is betting that electric vehicles are the future, you would not want equal effort being put into a competing technology. Hydrogen has been deprived of research dollars.

I have also argued that the best way to roll out a new technology is to find closed systems where the technology can be tried and tested. Airports are a great use case, the vehicles - buses, never have to go outside the perimeter of the airport, they have a captive user, and the trips are short enough in case of any failure. Also, they are all owned by a single customer. Electric was first tested out in airports. Without even realising, for the last 10 years, you have been moving around airports in electric buses.

In India, the railways are a monopoly run by the government. It is a closed system with one operator. An operator who has several routes, long and short, with its own engineering team to troubleshoot and solve. This is the perfect starting point for a new technology.

There will be more innovation in this space to make it more energy efficient and safer. But that innovation will only happen when there is a sufficient market available for those innovators.

The entry of a customer, such as the Indian Railways, augurs well for that innovation to occur.

Unlike the urban legend, SOS does not stand for save our souls. It was picked because on morse code SOS is … - - - … which is impossible to miss, easy to type and simple to commit to memory. Also, it is language agnostic.

This remained the distress signal for 2 decades, and then radio showed up.

How many times have you tried to spell something out over the phone, and the listener confused the P with T or S with H? Listening to specific words over radio static was very difficult. In the early days of radio, it was not that clear either.

In 1923, Fredrick Stanley Mockford, working at Croydon Airport as the senior radio officer, coined Mayday. At the time, the traffic between France and England was rising. In French, “help me” is m’aider. He took the phonetic equivalent in English. Since almost all of the air traffic between the two countries at the time was between Croydon Airport and Le Bourget, his proposal had a huge impact.

It became standard protocol to say mayday, mayday, mayday, three times in the event of an emergency, just in case the radio garbled part of the signal.

In 1927, the International Radiotelegraph Convention in Washington DC adopted the voice call “Mayday” as the radiotelephone distress call.

Adam Smith thought that both capital and labour were equally important. Without labour, it would not be possible to turn resources into products. But at the same time, it would take labour a lot more time to produce the product without the tools that capital can buy.

Since both sides want to win the argument, the suggestion for balance was never accepted.

The argument on the side of labour has been that without labour, there would be no product. All capital requires labour. Capital by itself is incapable of accomplishing anything. Also, those with capital pay labour less than what their effort is worth. This is what creates surplus value, which is referred to as profits. Capital always aspires to increase its profits while labour is constantly trying to get itself compensated for the effort that it is putting in.

Capitalism argues that, firstly, those with capital could have engaged in excess consumption, and by avoiding this, capital is created. They then take on financial risk and invest that capital to create opportunities. The argument has been that without capital, no factories would exist, and hence, capital is more valuable than labour.

This is a debate that has been ongoing for the last 300 years. Academics would say that the debate has not been settled. In reality, the debate has been settled because labour cannot buy politicians. Capital can.

That trade was walloped when the Israeli war with Iran started in February.

Leave alone dealing with price inflation, there was no one to pay that inflated price to. All the ships were stranded in the Persian Gulf, unable to pass through the Straits of Hormuz.

India has a historic caricature of a milkman who mixes water into milk and sells it to the customer. The Indian government drew inspiration and decided to adulterate Petrol as a solution to the looming crisis. They started mixing ethanol with petrol and increasing the quantity of petrol available to them. It helped that this could be branded as green. All the petrol available in India today is E20 or contains 20% Ethanol.

So, where does this Ethanol come from? Ethanol is primarily produced by converting plant sugar into alcohol. The plant with the highest amount of sugar is sugarcane. In India, about 47% of the sugarcane is grown in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and another 22% of it is grown in Maharashtra. The two states account for almost 70% of the sugarcane grown in India. Let us say that it is a huge coincidence that both these states are instrumental in the BJP being in power.

India has had an ethanol blending policy since 2003. The idea was being piloted, and after early pilots, in 2006, it became policy to blend 5% ethanol in Petrol. In 2018, the current government began to make a push for greater ethanol blending. When the war broke out, someone said, don’t let a crisis go to waste. Blending 20% ethanol was mandated and forced through as policy.

Any fluid that catches fire in a highly pressurised chamber within certain temperature tolerances can be used as fuel in an internal combustion engine. Ethanol fits that bill.

Ethanol does not have the same energy density as petrol, and hence the mileage is bound to decrease. Also, despite distillation, Ethanol tends to contain some amount of water in it. Which is completely absent in the case of Petrol. Hence, the use of Ethanol over a long period of time or with older engines can cause the vehicle to rust.

Adulteration was always considered a bad thing to do. The sort of activity one would want to stop, but in India, adulteration has now become state policy when it comes to petrol. Of course, it helps that they can charge us $100 a barrel rates for Ethanol.

Cabinet approves Ethanol prices at Rs. 57.97 per litre for procurement by OMCs

Also, have you noticed how prices only go up for fuel in India? They never come down. When the market was asking $140 a barrel, we raised prices. When the prices returned to $70, the retail prices stayed put.

Farmers who were producing food are not harvesting crops that are used to produce alcohol, and that alcohol is being used to power the country.

Let me also disabuse you of the notion that the farmers are making more money. You can analyse the GDP of every district that is a majority sugarcane producer; their incomes have not seen any major change. In fact, Lakhimpur has the largest sugarcane cropping in Uttar Pradesh, and the per capita income for the district is Rs. 77,000. Just for reference, the poorest district in Karnataka is Kulaburagi, which has a per capita income of Rs. 1,44,449. More than twice that of Lakhimpur.

When the price of oil falls back to Earth, India uses the price increases notched during the volatile periods to run its exchequer. It is also turning the agriculture in two of the largest states (by population) in India into petroculture.

You would have a category expenditure described as Capital Expenditure. You would have to buy cooking ranges, mixers, ovens, utensils, cutlery and the like. This is a starting expense, and you expect longevity. You do not expect to buy another cooking range for a decade, if not more.

Then you have operating expenses. Under this, you would have rent, salaries, ingredients, marketing and the like. In this, rent and salary will go out each month. The property owner does not care if 1 customer came or 10,000; the entire rent gets paid. These are called fixed costs.

By comparison, ingredients are truly a variable cost; you don’t use them up unless you make a dish. Hopefully, you do not make a dish unless a customer shows up.

Now, let us say your fixed cost is 50000. And your variable cost per customer is 50. You are charging the customer 100. You are making 50 over, and above your variable cost on every sale, hence you need to sell 1000 units to arrive at what is known as operational breakeven. At 1000 customers, you can pay off your fixed cost of 50000.

The moment you exceed 1000, you start recovering Capital Expenditure. At some point, you reach full breakeven.

Now, let us consider AI businesses, especially those claiming to build foundational models and raising billions as if they were millions.

Their Capital Expenditure is the data centres that they require. Data Centre capacity is measured in terms of Megawatts. The frontline companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are building 100 MW data centres. This requires 50+ acres of land to begin with, and then they require an array of Nvidia GPUs. Each GPU costs about $5000. A data centre could have close to 100,000 to 200,000 of these. Then you have the building and all the other paraphernalia needed. Typically, a data centre costs about $3-5 billion to set up.

A 100 MW data centre is capable of catering to 10 - 50 million users based on the load it is receiving. For instance, if I send Claude a query asking it to convert a report into an interactive website, this can take 20 minutes of operation on several GPUs. Hence, the ability to cater to a large number of users can come under stress if the requests require a high degree of sophistication.

Then come the operating expenses. Depending on the cost of power, operating a 100 MW data centre can cost between $50 million and $150 million per year. Most of the foundational AI companies require Gigawatt scale to cater to the demand that they are receiving. Hence, the 100s of billions being spent.

But here is the fun part. The life of a GPU is between 5 and 10 years, depending on the amount of use it is subjected to.

Have you ever bought a laptop and, after a decade of use, it starts to sprout all kinds of issues? It starts to freeze up, crash, and be generally very slow. That is the result of, for the lack of a better expression, “wear and tear”.

The AI companies are throttling use because of the demand that they are seeing. Safe to say, very high wear and tear. So the 100s of billions being spent will have to be spent all over again in 5 years!!

Imagine you are building a hotel and you have to demolish and build all over again after 5 years! No hotel would ever break even.

Have you heard of an AI company that has managed to break even?

In no world is a $4 billion monthly revenue run rate small. If, at that scale, you are unable to breakeven, there is something fundamentally wrong financially. OpenAI boasts 50 million paying subscribers, and Anthropic claims 30 million paying subscribers.

At what scale should operating income overtake operating expenses? This is not an ad subsidised business such as Google or Facebook.

Also, it is one thing to get revenue, and it’s another how you get it. Across companies there are leaderboards set up for engineers who use the highest numbers of tokens used by the engineers on AI. Bad incentives lead to bad results.

Axios reports that an unnamed corporation managed to “accidentally” torch roughly $500 million in a single month. The cause? The company introduced Anthropic’s Claude to its workforce but forgot to put caps on usage. Employees ran long, unchecked queries and complex agentic workflows, racking up an enormous tab before the finance department even realized the meter was running.

Source: Inc

This is lunatic.

If you paid $25,000 a month to an engineer, you could have hired 20,000 engineers for a month with $500 million dollars. That would be the number of software engineers that a company like Apple or Facebook has on their rolls. I hope they get some output from all that AI use, although I highly doubt it.

This kind of wanton spending is propping up revenues. This is sure to disappear sooner or later.

Ultimately, the problem is that all of these companies are starting with the stated goal of putting a lot of humans out of work. They hope to achieve this using regurgitation machines.

There is a simple problem they are all struggling with. The human brain runs on 20W of energy; to replicate that capability, these companies require several megawatts of energy. That asymmetry is proving hard to overcome and manifesting itself in the form of economics.

There was a 500 KB limit on the document size, while also having a very specific 2130 X 1346 resolution required for the image.

Why?

Then something occurred to me. I have yet to come across a government site that is not a form. This is true of every country where I have had to engage with a government website.

Every single government site is always a form.

In India, we regularly use government websites for Income tax, GST, Aadhaar, Driver’s License, Passport, and Voter’s ID. But even beyond this, birth/death certificate, stamp papers, duty payment and the list goes on.

Every single site is a glorified Form.

Someone figured out how to make a form online in 1992. Why are we still sucking at it?

None of these forms has any elaborate back-end computation. No AI. Not like you are uploading a picture and AI figures out the rest.

It is just a form which often does not even validate for data type. You can type text in the phone number field.

In India, all of the government sites are either designed by TCS or Infosys. Why can’t our IT behemoths deliver decent forms??

In the game of cricket, if a bowler were to take three wickets on three consecutive balls, or if a player were to score three goals in a football match, they were presented with a hat by the fans through a collection. It was a mark of respect offered to the individual who performed the feat.

Therefore, this came to be known as a Hat-trick.

The first known instance of this in cricket was in 1858, when H.H. Stevenson, who took three wickets on three consecutive balls and the fans collected money to buy him a hat.

Let us consider for a moment what that will involve. The only evidence of ownership that the hotel would have is an invoice for the purchase of the chair. That purchase, unless the hotel is new or recently refurbished, could have been made years, perhaps even decades ago.

So, are you free to carry away the chair if the invoice is not presented?

Not all properties are equal, and land, if it was bought even centuries ago, would have some paper trail.

In India, some forests have been tended to by tribes for centuries. It is such a vast country that parts of it have been left untouched. I was recently talking to a colleague, and she mentioned that there are places where you do not feel the presence of the government. How do you feel the presence of the government?

We do not think about it?

Every piece of public infrastructure, including roads and bus stops are a result of work done by the government. Our cities look a certain way, and our buildings are built in a certain way because there are rules laid down by the government. If you are robbed, there is an authority that you can report it to; the police are put there by the government.

If something is broken, there is someone to blame - the government.

But in the tribal recesses, none of these exists. There are no roads, no building rules, no authority, and you are the custodian of everything around you. You take care of what you consider valuable, and you ignore the rest.

So when the relentless march of capitalism suddenly requires land to build a factory, and the government realises that there is some land lying untouched in some corner, they show up to take charge of it.

When the tribal claims ownership, they are asked to present evidence. Some of them have been living in those forests since even before this country existed. Who was supposed to issue this evidence?

Going back to the hotelier, you would not assume that the chair did not belong to him because he did not have a paper to prove it, but the same standards do not apply to the tribals. They need either to present evidence or vacate! That pretty much explains all tribal militancy in India.

On May 21, 1967, as was his custom, Bigul Kisan went to harvest the crop on the fields of a landlord in the Naxalbari district in northeastern West Bengal. This particular day was different, however. He was to take over the land as his own, per the instructions of the Krishak Sabha (Farmer’s Union), a peasant organisation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), commonly known as the CPM. As Bigul Kisan would describe the incident twenty years later, “The goons of the landlord attacked me. They nearly crushed my head. They took away my plough and oxen.” That spark set off a wave of peasant attacks on landlords.

On May 24, when the police tried to defend the landlords, two arrows from peasant bows killed Constable Sonam Wangdi. All the village men then went into hiding, leaving the women to form a barricade against further police force. The police stepped up its offensive, shooting and killing nine women and two children. Armed rebels continued to attack landlords. The CPM, which had unexpectedly vaulted into power as part of a United Front coalition government in the state assembly election that February, was initially sympathetic to the rebels. But by mid-June the CPM assumed its governmental role of maintaining law and order. The Chinese jumped in to counter the CPM’s anti-rebel position.

On June 28, Radio Peking lauded the rebels as the “front paw of a revolutionary armed struggle,” adding that the peasant movement was inspired by Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

Indian authorities began repressive measures against peasant rebels on July 12. Backed by colonial-era laws, which permitted arrests without charges and trial, Indian police launched a major operation to round up the rebels and their leaders. By the end of July, about 1,500 armed policemen had established themselves in Naxalbari. Under the overwhelming force of the police, Bengal’s armed peasant movement folded.

Source: India is Broken, A people betrayed

Since the armed rebellion started in Naxalbari, the people engaged in the rebellion were referred to in Hindi as Naxalwadi. In the English media came to be referred to as Naxalites or Maoists.

About a dozen states in India have been known for Maoist activities. Characterised as terrorists, these were tribals who were forced to turn political because they wanted ownership over lands that they lived in. It is difficult for tribals to fight a government that derives revenues from crores of Individuals and has the freedom to employ it how it deems right.

In a defining moment in India’s battle against its decades-long Maoist insurgency, CPI (Maoist) top commander Tippiri Tirupati alias Devji also known as Devu Ji has laid down arms and surrendered to Telangana police.

Sources in the state’s Special Intelligence Wing confirmed to DH that Devji surrendered alongside senior Naxal leader Malla Raji Reddy alias Sangram, Narasimha Reddy alias Ganganna, and 16 other cadres.

Source: Deccan Herald

This surrender is a victory of the state machinery over the tribals. It is the loss of hope of a people who preserved their lands. They have given up on the possibility of preserving their lands and given in to the state machinery that will use it for more manufacturing plants, presumably. This is not a story of glorious victory; it is the story of attrition and the victory of capital.

The people who followed a strict diet that Graham preached were known as Grahamites.

To meet the needs of the Grahamites, the Graham flour, which was coarsely ground whole wheat flour, was produced. The Graham Cracker was produced by Graham himself. A biscuit made with unsifted flour.

He did not produce or profit from the product. The demand from the thousands of Grahamites was so great that many biscuit companies, including the National Biscuit company started mass producing the product in 1898.

They have remained popular ever since.

Source: Wikipedia

The frame that was used to suspend the meat was translated by the Spaniards to barbacoa. The original Arawak term, barbicu, referred to the framework of wood, which was also used to store food above ground.

The word found its way from Spanish to Portuguese to French to English. It was first used in English in 1661 in Edmund Hickeringill’s Jamaica Viewed: “Some are slain, And their flesh forthwith Barbacu’d and eat”. It was initially used as a verb rather than a noun, and the noun usage evolved later in the century.

The word has also had several spellings, including barbeque, barbecque and barbecue over the years.

No.

Politicians are people who tend to be extroverted, have charisma, charm people, speak well, and are extremely confident. That already creates a filter for the sort of person you would find in the political office. The way in which electoral politics is framed, there are certain people who are already excluded from the possibility of office.

Further, it is not like people who have served in office once are excluded from being in office again. They can keep running for political offices over and over.

This creates a small group of people whom we refer to as politicians.

Democracy is a rule by the people. Dictionaries will sneakily insert “typically through elected representatives,” which is not a precondition to democracy.

In this book, the author makes the case that picking 500 random people to run the government is a far more representative and egalitarian means of selecting a government than through the electoral system that we have come to depend on. The electoral system only serves to exclude a large number of people from being able to rule or create rules that govern our societies.

This leads to the capture of the government by a small number of politicians. This is the rule of the few, more appropriately defined as an oligarchy. We, the people, are sent to elections at a fixed cadence to choose from the same set of candidates over and over.

These people can then be easily bought and owned by the elites in the system who fund their elections and drive all of the policy agenda.

If at all, any policies are passed that align with the needs of the larger masses, it is because the interests of the elites align with the masses and not because there is any interest in doing anything for the masses.

Historically, several societies, including Athens, picked people for political offices through lots. This system was slowly eroded away by the 17th century to give us the modern electoral representative system.

The problem is that having career politicians reduces the need for them to do anything for the larger populace. The current state of equity across the world is a result of having politicians who would serve the will of the monies interests alone.

End Times is a book in which he presents his research on Cliodynamics without the mathematical formulae. The book, Foundation, by Isaac Asimov, is based on the same theory.

Cliodynamics treats history as a science and uses mathematical modelling to predict cyclical patterns that repeat themselves over and over. This does not mean that the future is set and society is doomed; it just means that one can make meaningful predictions by looking at what has happened and what is currently happening.

The dumbed-down version is that there are always the elite class and the working class in society. There are instances in history where the elite class has allowed wealth to percolate into the working class and not tried to hoard all the wealth for themselves. The author describes this as the wealth pump.

As recently as the 1960s, the richest people in the USA paid 90% in taxes. This was normal, and it is also the last time there was equity in the US. Since the 1980s, the elites in the system have been hoarding up more and more of the wealth and pumping the wealth pump harder.

This has resulted in greater inequity.

Often, when the wealth pump is primed, it results in elite overproduction. There is a fixed number of industries/political offices that the elites can control. As the number of elites grows, there have to be losers who do not get to control anything.

As Amitabh Ghosh writes in The Nutmeg’s Curse, revolutions don’t start on the streets; they start in the courtyard of palaces.

The priming of the wealth pump produces extreme poverty, and there is a discontented populace waiting to explode. The presence of an elite who is willing to go against the system is the match that the powder keg requires.

Peter Turchin wrote in 2012 that the system would explode by 2020.

While it seems a bit like voodoo since the book does not plunge deep into the maths, it is nevertheless a very compelling read.

This was the Iron Age and getting through fortified castle walls was not easy. Medieval siege warfare was brutal and extremely human intensive. These were meat grinders where several men had to be lost to get through the fortifications.

One of the methods that was devised as a means of getting around the fortifications was to dig under the foundation of the walls to weaken the walls and make them easier to bring down. This practice of weakening the foundation came to be known as undermining.

This practice also gave rise to technique of fighting wars from covered trenches known as sapping. The divisions engaged in these operations came to be known as Sappers. The engineering regiment of the Indian army located off Ulsoor Lake, Bangalore is known as the Madras Sappers.

It was not until the 15th century that word started taking a metaphorical meaning which it is known for today.

I was quite curious about the LBO structure itself, which was the reason I picked up the book. In a leveraged buyout, the PE fund (buyer) buys shares of a company by making the company take out a huge loan.

If you have taken a class in accounting, you would know that

Assets = Debt + Shareholder Equity

and

Shareholder Equity = Share capital + Share premium + Retained Earnings

Retained Earnings = Revenue - Expenses - Dividends

Retained earnings are the part of the profit that the company has kept for reinvestment, or as reserves for black swan events.

The share capital + share premium reflects the share price, which is a proxy for the assets that the company has, including cash and property.

If you were to invest in a company, of course, you would like the company to have more assets than debt. Or in other words, you would like it if the company has a lot more equity than debt.

Typically, if you look at a publicly traded company, the debt to equity ratio would be in favour of the equity, say, 1:3. In other words, the debt that the company has is one-third of the equity. An LBO reverses this and makes the debt-to-equity ratio 3:1.

Toys R Us, for instance, took $ 5 billion in loans to fund its acquisition by PE funds. This came with a $400 million interest payout every year.

PE Funds like to project themselves as knights in shining armour who are helping dying businesses rejuvenate themselves. Most of these companies eventually are run into the ground, and the collateral damage is the employees. So, how does it make sense for the PE funds, and how does it make sense for the banks? Why do they even do this?

This is where I found the book really illuminating. The author follows 4 individuals and what happened to them before the PE fund took over, during the takeover and after it. The story is very common: a PE fund comes in, talks about efficiencies and productivity, and fires a lot of people. Makes one person do the job of 5 while reducing that person’s salary. Pays 1000 times that person’s salary to the CEO. Runs the business into the ground, or continues to amalgamate and make sure more such businesses roll into the holding company, reduces choice and gouges the customer while providing shitty service.

It makes sense because, the PE fund has itself raised most of its money from pension funds and the likes. The partners are on the hook for just 10%. Those very partners charge 2% per annum in management fee. That 2% is on the entire capital deployed. Say a PE fund is managing $1 billion, the partners kick in $100 million but charge management fee on $1 billion. They are netting $20 million each year even if they are doing a lousy job.

What caught my attention was the industries that were covered. Housing, Newspapers, Retail, and Hospitals.

The common thread is that almost all of the businesses are ones that started 30+ years ago. They are barely profitable or loss-making with an inability to make more investments. But most importantly, they all own land, sometimes in prime locations of the city, which have accumulated huge capital gains over the years.

The PE business in America is an elaborate scheme to transfer capital gains without incurring taxes.

No sooner have the PE funds moved in, their first order of business seems to be to sell the asset and lease it back to the business. The one thing that made the business operation financially efficient is removed. This is billed as a way of creating capital pools that can be reinvested in the business. The proceeds are rarely used to invest in the business; they go partly towards the debt and partly towards paying the management fees that the PE funds charge their target businesses for the disastrous job that they do.

They manage to project it as a service that they are doing for the retirees by making larger returns for them.

When the company eventually fails, the banks that lent money move in to sell whatever assets remain within the company to the next highest bidder and make good their investments.

PE Funds are just another way the boomers are screwing over their kids and their grandkids.

While several American billionaires and politicians were named in the files, Pan Bondi said, if we were to go after all the people who are named in the files, the entire system would collapse.

The reaction of the American people was ‘Meh’. Late-night hosts made fun of it. The women who came forward felt stupid. Life moved on.

Incidentally, Donald Trump was named 5300 times in the files and as someone usefully pointed out on Twitter, Harry Potter is named fewer times in all of the 7 books put together.

Across the Atlantic, there was far more enthusiasm to do something about the people named in the file. At one point, it even seemed like the British government would collapse not because the current Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, was named in the files, but because he had appointed Peter Mandelson as the Ambassador to the US, and his name figured prominently.

The former Norwegian PM Thorbjørn Jagland was rushed to the hospital since he attempted suicide because his name surfaced in the files and triggered corruption charges.

Thomas Pritzker, the Chairman of Hyatt Hotels, stepped down from his role.

Kathy Reummler, the Chief Legal Officer of Goldman Sachs, who had previously served as the White House Counsel during the Obama Administration, stepped down.

Peter Attia, the Logetivity influencer, had his CBS show cancelled.

Richard Axel, a Nobel laureate and Professor at Columbia University, said he would be stepping down from his position.

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University who served as treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and head of the National Economic Council in the Obama administration, said he would step away from teaching at Harvard.

The list is long, but the highlight is that Former Prince Andrew, brother of King Charles, was arrested in England.

The Harry Potter of this saga was beginning to feel the heat. Hence, the bombing began in Iran.

Israel and the US had bombed Iran in 2025. Iranians had launched missiles towards Qatar and then informed the US that retaliation was on the way. Damages were avoided, but so was contagion. Iran did not want an escalation, unlike Israel. Turned out, Iran was the country with greater statesmanship and forbearance.

Iran had strategically ensured that it had put its country right next to all the US bases, expecting a situation like this.

Source: Al Jazeera

Israel and the US were aware, if they attacked, all the countries around Iran with US bases would be attacked. With absolutely no concern for their bases but also for the people living in all of those smaller nations, an attack was launched with no clarity of purpose or an end goal. This has to be perhaps the dumbest CIA operation.

Without a legitimate replacement in the country, they assassinated the Ayatollah. A regime change is either effected by sending troops to decapitate the state completely, as they did in the case of Iraq or by supporting an actor who has the respect of the masses and the military, like they did in Bangladesh when Sheikh Hasina was ousted.

So now what?

The Epstein story is buried, and all of the attention has shifted to Iran.

With no clarity of purpose or goal, the bombing of Iran continues. The economies of the Gulf nations will suffer as this bombing endures. For one thing, three of the largest airlines in the region - Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways are not able to fly.

They have given a huge jet and invested heavily in Trump’s businesses. The pressure is going to be on Trump to end this soon.

The real question is, what is the exit ramp? After having engaged in this escapade, when they stop bombing, what will be justified as victory?

Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples

Source: Wikipedia

By this definition, anti-semitism seems to be a euphemism for Islamophobia. It is a twisted interpretation that implies anti-semitism is hatred of the Jews.

Since we are on the subject of hatred of the jews, the people who hate them the most are British. The current Jewish population in Britain is estimated at 0.5%. When Britain occupied Palestine during the Second World War, there was a restriction on the number of Jews who could migrate to Palestine. The British did not want anything to do with the jews. Probably why they started by trying to appease Hitler until the war came home. They created the state of Israel because they wanted to play no part in accommodating any jews after the war was over.

The European “semites” went on to occupy Palestine after the Second World War, and their demand for a Jewish state was a cornerstone of Zionism.

Theodor Herzl was the founder of the modern Zionist movement. In his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat, he envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century.

Source: Wikipedia

It speaks volumes that even the document that envisioned the founding of Israel was not even written in a Semitic language. It was written in a language of the Zionists, a European language.

The first government of Israel was full of Europeans.

David Ben-Gurion - Born in Poland

Dov Yosef - Born in Canada

Zalman Shazar - Born in Belarus

Moshe Sharett - Born in Ukraine

Eliezer Kaplan - Born in Belarus

Haim-Moshe Shapira - Born in Belarus

Pinchas Rosen - Born in Germany

Gloda Meir - Born in Ukraine

Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit - Born in Tiberias

Yehuda Leib Maimon - Born in Moldova

David Remez - Born in Belarus

Yitzhak-Meir Levin - Born in Poland

There was a grand total of one person on the cabinet who was born in semitic land.

Paternal Country of Origin - Present-day Israel

Source: Wikipedia

Even today, two-thirds of the jews in Israel trace their origins to non-Semitic lands. Israel is a collection of a bunch of Eastern European people.

Given the genocide in Gaza. If at all, any country that can be deemed anti-semitic, it is Israel. The G7 are active participants in the anti-semitism perpetrated by Israel.

Referring to the people of Israel as Semitic is like saying ‘Trump is pro-European’, because all the white people in the US descend from Europeans.

As the idea of genes took root, so did the idea that some people had bad genes and some people good ones.

It was assumed that those who were prone to diseases such as epilepsy were perhaps suffering the results of having bad genes. The idea soon emerged that if such individuals were taken out of the gene pool, bluntly put, if such people could be sterilised, the future generations would be better off and would not have to suffer these faults. This gave birth to the field of eugenics.

Genes were also considered responsible for shortcomings and immoral behaviour. In the US, such people were considered feebleminded. Feebleminded people were also categorised into three categories. Stupid, Imbecile and Moron.

A Stupid was a person with a mental age of less than 35 months.

Imbeciles and Morons had a much more fluid definition. Essentially, people found to be engaging in indecency, prostitution, etc, which could not be harshly punished by the law, fell into this category.

In the US, in 1910, the idea of separating the feebleminded took root. A colony was created at Lynchburg, Virginia, where these feebleminded were taken to live. It was a Hotel California that you could check into, but you could not get out of.

The colony was authorised by a 1906 bill written by eugenicist and social welfare advocate Aubrey Strode, in collaboration with eugenicists Albert Priddy and Joseph DeJarnette. The colony received its first patients in 1911 and by the end of the calendar year had more than 150 men who suffered from epilepsy, a condition of social abhorrence. Colonies like the Virginia State Colony had been established in order to separate the disabled from criminal populations, for example, many of the first inhabitants of the Virginia State Colony had previously been housed in prisons and state hospitals. Originally, only men could be patients of the colony, but after roughly one year of operation, superintendent Priddy allowed women into the colony who were diagnosed as feeble-minded.

Source: Wikipedia

The institution underwent several rounds of rebranding but was finally shut down in 2020.

When Hitler was being released from prison after the Beer Hall Putsch, a lady by the name of Carrie Buck arrived at Lynchburg, and she was the subject of a court battle over the legality of the state go Virginia to sterilise her. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that it was legal for the state of Virginia to sterilise Ms Buck.

While the sterilisation program at Lynchburg continued till 1956, the eugenicists involved there also marvelled at how efficiently Hitler was pushing the idea of the purity of the race. The idea of segregating and doing away with individuals with poor genetics appealed to many of them.

The concentration camps run by the Nazis were explicitly run with the idea of killing people with a particular gene. Or rather, killing all those who did not possess Aryan genetics.

Hence,

Geno ~ referring to a or belonging to a gene; and

-cide ~ denoting a person a substance that kills.

We got Genocide.

I was travelling to the US towards the end of January and did not want to post anything fresh that would result in my deportation. At the time, the hottest thing in the news was the ICE raids in Minneapolis.

The other piece I had written was about the most anti-semite nation in the world - Israel.

I chose to keep my mouth shut.

My choice was not irrational either. I knew an American citizen, who just happened to be brown, who was stopped at immigration and had their phones and laptops checked by the officials.

Censor is a word derived from the Latin word Cēnsēre, which means to appraise or to judge. But when that appraisal is done in the context of political acceptability, one is already on a slippery slope.

During the Nuremberg Trials, the reasoning offered by the Nazis for their actions was - it was the right thing to do at the time. Joseph Goebbels ran propaganda for Hitler the way he did because otherwise, he would have been fired.

It was the “politically acceptable” thing to do.

Pam Bondi is defending the people named in the Epstein files the way she does because otherwise, she might be fired.

Across the world, the state reserves the monopoly on violence. They inflict that violence through the police. The system that controls that violence determines behaviour. When that control slips into the hands of one all objectivity is lost. Polical acceptance becomes a proxy for self-preservation.

Not every German was a Nazi, every German did what was politically acceptable.

Doing the politically acceptable thing results in self-censorship. That kind of censorship enables the few at the top.