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.

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.

Standing at West Baray in Angkor, it is immediately obvious that one end of the reservoir is extremely shallow compared to the other. This is not because the engineers at the time did not know how to design a proper reservoir. The King wanted a reservoir that was aligned East-West for religious reasons. This compromised the hydrology of the location and hence resulted in several instances of flooding.

Religion is just another name for politics, and the cities that we live in today are a result of the politics that go into their design.

West Baray

In the book, the author covers the rise and fall of four cities.

- Çatalhöyük in Turkey

- Pompei in Italy

- Angkor Wat in Cambodia

- Cahokia in the USA

She chronicles the lives of those who lived in these cities. The social systems and the manner in which they influenced the development and the rise of these locations. And finally, the manner in which those very choices drove the demise of these cities.

It is often assumed that the people of Pompei left the city after the Volcano, but that was not the case; the city tried to rise again. Given the class system of the city, the city would not be successful. Angkor was used to seasonal flooding caused by the poor engineering of their water infrastructure, but that resilience gave way at some point, and people were no longer willing to drag the city out of the mud.

In the seeds of the rise of any city are the clues to its demise.

Every city from the past has been actively and knowingly abandoned by the very people who lived there.

She ends the book by saying - in 500 years’ time, some archaeologists will explore the streets of San Francisco, snorkelling through a city submerged underwater. They would wonder about the lives that people led, the classes that existed, where certain people were allowed to go and what they did in their daily lives.

Capitalism had no other choice but to put a price on this, and therefore, another genius at IMF, arrived at the value of “ecosystem services” provided by a whale, estimated at $2 million. That is the value of a Whale.

By this token, the value of human life in any urban context would probably be negative, proving Thanos right!

The Value of a Whale is a book about the hypocrisy of the entire Green Economy and how it is built to support the narrative of financialisation of everything in the environment. They want to put a price on everything that happens in nature, NOT TO SAVE THE PLANET, but to make money while harbouring the pretence.

A small number of index funds control a large number of companies.

A small number of governments have outsized influence on international climate policy

A small number of organisations issue all of the bond ratings

A coterie of powerful people meet at Davos to determine how to divide the world

They come up with stupid ideas, such as carbon sequestration, and decide that they can solve the climate problem simply by removing all the carbon from the air. Never mind that this would require the forestation of land equal to the area of Brazil. Or that to undertake these projects, a neo-colonial effort is underway that ensures the dispossession of lands from people in Africa so that trees can be planted where they once lived.

The entire premise of the green economy is that markets are competent enough to solve all problems. On the one hand this statement is patently false and on the other hand, we are in the current situation because the markets have completely failed at the task.

Also, many of the “facts” the undergirder the climate change thesis are complete nonsense. The 2 degrees Celsius figure that has become a tentpole for all climate discussions is not based on environmental impacts but modelling done by economist William Nordhaus of the economic loss due to an increase in temperature.

All of the climate projections magically stop at the year 2100. As if the world either stops existing at that point. The truth is, when you have 70 and 80-year-olds making decisions, 2100 is going to be so long after their death that they need not care.

This book is an incredible critique not only of the green economy by a naked indictment of the failure of what we call the economic system across the world. I highly recommend reading this book.

In this whistleblower account masquerading as a memoir, Sarah Wynn Williams, one of the first people to be employed in the Facebook policy team, takes us deep into how the executive teams operated and made decisions at Facebook. As a person responsible for engaging with governments and enabling the kinds of conversation that would help keep Facebook out of the crosshairs of policymakers, she was privy to many of the compromises the company made to keep itself out of trouble.

The book begins with her life and what got her interested and brought her to Facebook. As someone who was working at the UN on behalf of the New Zealand government, she saw Facebook’s impact on the world and the role she would be able to play as a “Diplomat” for Facebook rather than that of New Zealand.

She set her sight on this role at Facebook and got them to create this position in the company for her. At first, the entire executive team at Facebook was quite dismissive of the role and the department in general. Everything in Facebook is driven by engineering concerns, and the focus was on growth at all costs. As the growth opportunities in the United States were exhausted and the need to focus on other countries rose, the role of the policy team came into focus.

Starting with attempts to open up Myanmar, then China, and the push to make governments adopt Internet.org. Facebook comes across as a company that is desperate for growth and willing to get into bed with any regime so long as it would deliver a few more million users.

By 2016, it was clear that Facebook could influence the outcome of elections and had incredible power. The only thing that seems to have grown with that level of power is the carelessness with which things were approached within the company.

When you read the accounts, the only word that comes to your mind to describe the leadership at Facebook is not malicious but indifferent. They do not care about the real-world consequences of their actions. So long as they produce profits and pay as little tax as possible, they know they have power. They are content with exercising that power to ill-treat those who are often within arms-length rather than create some global agenda.

Everything bad that happens around the world because of the actions or the inaction of Facebook is the result of the pursuit of more revenue at a lower cost. Everything else is an externality.

Unlike Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg is painted as too stupid and whimsical to have grand plans. His only goal seems to be higher valuations. If protests are stoked in Myanmar, and a few hundred people die in the pursuit, it is merely the cost of doing business.

As I said in the beginning, the book is a whistleblower account masquerading as a memoir. This makes it rather entertaining. But it is a damning indictment of executives at Facebook.

Unlike most of her books which are investigative, this one is a fictional scenario peppered with interviews with a lot of senior officials in the US.

North Korea launches a single inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) at the US. An ICBM is a missile that travels into space before re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere to find its target. It travels at 6 times the speed of sound and is nearly impossible to intercept.

There is a well-known nuclear doctrine of mutual assured destruction.

In conventional warfare you launch a bomb, the other guy launches one back at you and you can go on doing this till either one is exhausted or bored or both. When it comes to nuclear war, If I launch one I am sure the other guy will go straight after me. Hence, you tend to launch everything at once. The response of the opposite side is to launch everything at once as well.

Hence mutually assured destruction.

War planners in the Pentagon are confused to see this one Nuclear Bomb; because it is so dumb to do that.

From the moment that an ICBM is launched the US president has 6 minutes to determine if a retaliatory strike is to be ordered. A missile from North Korea would take about 33 minutes to land on the East Coast.

There is confusion, chaos, indecision and uncertainty. They don’t know if the missile is just a dummy test or if it is carrying a nuclear payload.

As the indecision persists, the Secret Service moves into action and carries the president physically out of the white house to move him to Raven Rock, an underground bunker for such contingencies. He has still not made up his mind and the minutes are ticking by.

In the meantime, a submarine surfaces off the West Coast and fires another nuclear missile at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. Attacking a Nuclear Power Plant with any bomb is illegal according to the UN Charter but in a nuclear conflict, no rules apply. The bomb detonates and destroys the plant and creates a fallout that will make Northern California uninhabitable for centuries.

The US decides to fire 80 Nuclear missiles at every known target in North Korea but those missiles have to cross Russian territory to reach North Korea.

Russians are alerted of the launch. The Russian president pauses to think but then decides the US is not trustworthy since they lied to effect regime change in Iraq, their words hold no value.

Russia assumes that it is being attacked. It prepares to respond by firing over 1000 nuclear ICBMs on every known American target. American planners see the Russian launch and decide to launch everything in their arsenal as well.

The missiles destined for North Korea also kill millions of Chinese citizens who are then drawn into the war and make their launches.

Only one time has a nuclear bomb been used against a foe. Only one side possessed it. In the world we live in today, a nuclear war would imply that a handful of humans would be left sitting in holes in the Earth waiting to die slowly.

From time to time there are flippant conversations about nuclear war but the true consequences of it are not well understood.

This book makes it all too real. It should be a mandatory read so that we can at least ask all the right questions to leaders who sit on the triggers of such weapons.

The Tiger follows an Amur Tiger, also known as the Siberian Tiger that is found in the easternmost provinces of Russia of Primorsky. The region is one of the hardest places to live and also one of the poorest. Many of the people who live in the rural areas have to forage the forest and hunt for a living.

The Amur Tiger is a protected species in Russia. At the same time, there is incredible demand for the tiger in China because of their belief that the Tiger provides great strength and virility; many parts of the Tiger are considered delicacies.

In a region that is populated by incredibly poor people, such demand naturally results in poaching.

An Amur Tiger is big! They are usually 10 feet long and weigh about 250 Kgs. Their paws are bigger than a human face and their heads are as big as a wash basin.

This book follows an incident from 1997 when an Amur Tiger turned maneater. It began with the death of Markov, a poacher, attacked and eaten by the tiger. By the time his fellow poachers found his body, there was nothing left to bury.

By the 1990s the Russian policy had shifted towards conservation of the Amur Tigers and the officers in charge in Primorsky wanted to avoid a situation where they had to kill the tiger.

The natives of the region, the Nanai have existed in a delicate balance with the tigers and tigers are not known to hunt humans. They often kill their livestock and dogs, if other wild animals are hard to come by. At the same time, Tigers have been known to leave their hunt half-eaten for humans to scavenge.

Within a week of the first attack, a second man is killed by the same tiger. The paw prints leave no doubts in the minds of the trackers.

Thus begins a search for this man-eating tiger. Yuri Trush, who is tasked with conserving the animal must take a call on whether to let it live or to kill it. But before that, he must wade across the Taiga and find the tiger as Winter Solstice approaches.

While the book revolves around this game of cat and human, it also provides a lot of background on the ecology, geo-politics, and the struggles of the region.

By the end of it, you have a growing appreciation for large cats and nature in general.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book.

In this book, William Dalrymple argues that the Silk Road never existed. Instead, what existed was The Golden Road from India, to China, Europe, Middle East and South East Asia.

Of all the Roman coin hoards that have been found across the world, none have been found in China, instead you find all the coin hoards in South India in regions that are the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka.

The first export from India was Buddhism, which found its way out of India through the Hindu Kush mountains into what is modern day Afghanistan and then moved across the Tibetan plateau to reach China and even go as far as Japan.

At the same time, India is blessed with the cyclical monsoon winds that blow into the lands in summer and outwards into the sea during winter. The Southern dynasties took advantage of this and sent trade missions across the seas into South East Asia as well as the Middle East.

India was also the centre of knowledge and culture. Great mathematicians such as Aryabhata and, building on that work, Bhramagupta created the foundations of modern Algebra. In what is modern day Baghdad, the Barmakid dynasty, which was in power, sought out Indian knowledge. They invited Indian scholars to their lands to help teach them mathematics. As the influence of Islam spread across the region, maths spread alongside it. All the way from Baghdad to Al-Andalus (a.k.a. Andalusia). This knowledge found its way into Europe thanks to the son of an Italian customs official who was called Leonardo of Pisa, more commonly known as Fibonacci. Incidentally, it was this very knowledge of numbers that made the East India Company possible.

Southern India was never in the spell of Buddhism, and Hinduism remained strong in the land. As the centuries went by, those kings conquered vast portions of South East Asia. They brought their religion along with them. Angkor Wat is the largest temple complex in the world, also happens to be a Hindu Temple.

India was the critical node in all the movements of goods and knowledge across the world. Even Pliny the Elder complained about India being the sink for all the gold of Rome.

The Europeans set out to find the new world in the last 1400s. They were looking for India, not by chance. The land they found was called West-Indies, again not by chance.

If all roads led to Rome, from there, they definitely led to India.

This is the rightful place of India in the world, which has been deftly erased by Chinese adoption of the Silk Road. Also, Indians have done a poor job of highlighting their own history.

An incredible book that every Indian should read.

Material World by Ed Conway - Everything around you is made up of materials. These materials do not come out of nowhere, although it is produced far enough that we believe that their extraction is in no way harming the environment. This book takes us on a journey of the production of 6 materials that are crucial to our lives and our survival. The supply chains that bring these materials to us and the destruction that they produce.

I highly recommend reading this book.

1984 by George Orwell - I know! I had not read this book till now. 75 years after he wrote the book, it perfectly reflects the world we live in today. Orwell wrote the book as a criticism, the “leaders” used it as a prescription. If you have not already read it, like me, then do read it.

Glorious Misadventure by Owen Matthews - North of San Francisco, there flows a river which is known as the Russian river. It got this name because a Russian expedition set out from Sitka, Alaska, in the nineteenth century to acquire lands in the south. The Russians and the Spaniards faced off in what is California today. Had the Czar sitting 10,000 km away understood the value of these lands, history could have turned out very differently.

An incredible piece of history about the quest of one man to bring a portion of North America under the sway of the Russians and his eventual failure to manage the intrigues of the court of Catherine the Great.

Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant - Brian Merchant is a gifted author who can move you in time to another place. This book about the Luddite uprising gives a blow-by-blow account of what motivated the men at the time to rise against the factory owners and how the uprising was eventually quelled by capital. It is perhaps the most important book of our times when AI is rising.

Cannot recommend it enough.

To Dye For by Alden Wicker - The textile industry was one of the first to get shipped out of the “west” and for good reason. It uses incredibly harmful chemicals and in the pursuit of lower costs treats its workers in the worst possible ways. In this book, Alden dives into the entire supply chain.

She follows the story of American Airline workers who refused to wear uniforms issued by the company since they cause them terrible irritation and rashes. The book shows how hard it is for a consumer to prove that harmful chemicals are used in such fabric, since tests can run into 10s of thousands of dollars. I wish I could report the book has a happy ending. Many of the airline workers who have worked for decades at these companies are now staring at bankruptcy trying to manage their ailments caused by their clothing - unable to prove it or seek restitution. Having to forgo the rest of their career since they have been rendered grievously ill by their clothes!

The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh - In the 18th century, every single Nutmeg in the world originated from a small group of islands east of Java. In a well known tale of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, the white man arrived with the colonial mindset to exploit the lands. Set in the pandemic and the George Floyd murder as a background, this book weaves in and out of history and the current planetary crisis that is the result of the same avarice.

The only difference between the story of the goose that laid the golden egg and the climate crisis is that, this goose is taking a little longer to kill.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk - A book about the psychology of trauma and how the body deals with it. This book goes through cases that explain how our mind learns to forget past trauma and bury it, such that some people genuinely have no recollection of it. While at the same time the body remembers it and surfaces it in manners that are hard for even the sufferers to understand.

It is a painful book to read but incredibly insightful.

Fire Weather by John Vaillant - This Pulitzer Prize finalist is an incredible journey into the wildfire that burnt down the North-Western Canada in 2016. The first half of the book taken you on a journey across the Canadian Tar Sands and the fire that erupted right next to it; the pace at which it moved and the manner in which it consumed entire towns. He describes the movement of the fire blow-by-blow. The second part of the book deals with the broader question of our understanding of the science of warming and the fire weather which has become a part of so many people’s lives.

I highly recommend this book.

Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley - If you believe feudalism was bad, then you must believe that capitalism is bad. These are two side of the same coin. In one the landowners had power to force people to do what they wanted, in the other capital owners have the same power. This incredibly insightful book lays bare the truth about how capitalism works today. How corporations across the world are using their capital to build a system where the workers have lesser and lesser power.

This book answers the question - Why is the world so broken and divided today?

The Golden Road by William Dalrymple - The traditional interpretation of trade has always been that the Silk Road moved goods between China and Europe. This narrative which was first proposed in the 1870s was adopted by the Chinese and eliminates the role of India altogether. In fact, India was an important stop in this trade from China to Europe. In fact, almost no evidence of Roman coins have been found in China, while several have been found in India. There is a reason the Europeans went out looking for the Indies and not the Chines. The Golden Road passed through India, and its impact extended throughout Asia and the Middle East.

An incredible book that touches upon so many ideas that came out of India. If you are an Indian, you should certainly read it, especially because the souther history is not even touched upon in our own curriculum.

Crossings by Ben Goldfarb - Over the last 100 years, we have been prolific in building road across the world. These roads are a scar upon the land and often cut across important ecosystems. To an animal, a road is a wall that cannot be penetrated. They have not been taught to look left and look right. As a result, their choices are to get trapped on one side of the highway where food sources are scarce, or try to make a perilous crossing that may result in their death. Every year, over 1 billion animals - mammals and birds - are killed on the road.

This book opened my mind to issues that I had no idea about.

Wall Street’s War on Workers by Les Leopold - If we raise the wages, prices will go up and business will suffer is an argument that is often used to justify poor pay. This book takes direct aim at that argument. Financial engineering has a lot of tools at its disposal that it uses, including financial strip-mining, lay-offs and share buybacks. These tools are used to enrich the shareholders at the expense of workers.

The outcome of the American elections are often painted as a rightward shift in the priorities of White America. Far from it, people want change. The excessive financialisation of everything in America is leaving the working class out, and they are trying to change that.

Palestine Laboratory is a book that unveils the Israeli Defence Industrial Complex for what it is. A machine for mass murder and imprisonment of the Palestinians.

Israel is not only one of the largest producers of weapons, but also perhaps the only country that is willing to sell its weapons to any country or regime that demands it. Apart from Iran, the country has sold its weapon systems to almost everyone, including the Russians. The more despotic the regime, the more willingly Israel sells.

For America, this has been a godsend since they are able to sell weapons to dictators and “rebels” through Israel when such action would be blatantly illegal under American law.

If you leave aside Diamonds, cut and sold from Israel, their greatest exports are weapons.

Why are they so good at making weapons?

They get a lot of practice.

They use all kinds of weapons against the Palestinians, and this makes it possible for them to project their weapons as “battle tested”. This is also the reason they have some of the best surveillance technology, including drones and cameras that are used to spy on Palestinians and keep track of all of their activities.

While these are all bad, the most insidious technologies to emerge out of the surveillance state is software. When news about Pegasus broke, it was shocking for the world to find out that no device anywhere in the world was safe. The technology underlying that software was developed to monitor the Palestinians. They use the technology to identify the weaknesses of individuals living in Palestine. These individuals are then blackmailed to turn into informants.

Israel has gladly made Pegasus technology available to dictators across Africa and the Middle East. It played a role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The US does not have any control over what Israel does with its technology.

While human rights groups have been flagging these problems, little to nothing has been done about it. In fact, Israel is the only country that uses videos of actual attacks on the Palestinians as marketing material to sell its wares.

This goes a long way in explaining the reluctance to vote against Israel at UN forums. Almost all the countries sitting there are crushing some minority group using technology that Israel has sold them.

It would be an overstatement to say that I was shocked after reading this book, but my revulsion for the state of Israel went up a few notches.

This is the main thrust of this book, which demystifies how capitalism operates today and how it has never served the needs of the masses.

The author begins by focusing directly on the concept of free markets. By using the word “Free”; the impression is created that somehow this system espouses freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Free Markets are an imposition by the Haves over the Have-nots. Just about a century ago, the US was one of the most protectionist countries in the world. After having used protectionism to develop its markets, it pivoted towards the Free Market once all the chips had been lined up after the Second World War.

But this Free Market principle is often shoved down the throats of developing economies as a panacea for their growth challenges. Free markets enable established American firms to compete on unequal terms with those in underdeveloped markets.

Free markets are not free at all. When faced with real competition from China in the Automobile space, the US using the excuse of national security pivoted to a protectionist role. Where are the free markets?

Another point discussed at great length is the role of capital in capitalism. What land was to feudalism, capital is to capitalism. It is a way of owning something using which one can control the people or workers. Capital is not available to everyone just like land was not available to everyone. Capital is used to exert power over people just as landowners would exert power over those who did not have lands.

The simplest way of understanding this power is by looking at the dynamics of any work environment. When one is employed, it is not like they read the contract every morning and go to work and perform only those things that have been agreed upon. Often one does things that were never agreed upon in any contract. Why? Well, an employee often does not have a choice in the matter because of the power imbalance. That power imbalance exists because of capital.

One interesting case discussed in the book is that of wage increases offered by Ford to his workers. This is often portrayed in heroic terms as a capitalist going above and beyond what the norms called for so that his workers could be happy. The truth is that the increased wages came with their requirements such as not being allowed to drink alcohol. He wanted workers to show up on time and deliver peak productivity and he achieved that by paying them more but at the same time extending his influence into how they lived their lives outside of work.

She also points out how the entire capital system always engages in picking winners. Banks decide which sectors to lend to. There is no democratic control over this. They are free to make these decisions and a handful of people sitting in ivory towers make them. This has a significant impact on the economy. The democratic control is nothing but a mere illusion.

The book does a great job of pointing out all that is wrong with capitalism today and points to the fact that democratic measures need to come back. She points to the example of Iceland which after the 2008 collapse decided to take the harder road because the decision was taken democratically and refused to accept the bailout offered by the British and Netherlands. It has left the country in a much better place today.

I highly recommend reading this book whether you care about economics or not. Read it because you exist in that system.

They are also known as strong magnets. If you have ever used an iron magnet, you know that it loses its strength as time goes by. Also, the strength of the magnet is directly proportional to the size of it.

Magnets are used everywhere. For frivolous features like sticking your pencil/pen to the side of a tablet. In motors which are essentially copper wound around a magnet. Also, in all batteries Cobalt does a lot of the heavy lifting although they are known as Lithium Ion Batteries. You most likely end up with Lithium Cobalt Oxide or Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide.

Safe to say - We are surrounded by stuff that has Cobalt in it.

Half of the Cobalt in the world comes out of a country that used to be called Zaire, today known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Southern region of the DRC is rich in Cobalt and Copper which are both important for the “Green Economy” that the world is embarking on.

Congo has a sad history. The Europeans went into the country wanting to civilize them. They accidentally found copper ore. The Belgians who took control of Congo under King Leopold engaged in a combination of Genocide, Ethnocide and Slavery of a kind experienced in very few places across the world.

Towards the end of the 21st century, the country seemed to have secured independence and was starting on a path to renewal. They had just started figuring things out when the craze for everything electric started and alongside that craze capitalism (a.k.a. Neo-colonialism) arrived taking the country down a very dark path.

The book Cobalt Red written by Siddharth Kara is an investigative journey through the mines of the country. At risk to his own life, he documents his travels across to the south of the country where most of the mines are situated in places such as Lubumbashi and Kolwezi. Through first-hand accounts, he illustrates the lives of the people who play a critical role in the mining of cobalt in the country and the consequences that they must face.

There are two types of mining carried out in Congo - Open Pit Mining where people do not die every day and artisanal mining where handmade tunnels are used to dig out ore. These tunnels routinely collapse and it is normal for people working in these mines to either die (if they are fortunate) or be rescued with dozens of fractures and rendered useless for the rest of their lives. The video below is an example of the conditions in which these miners work.

Most miners work for about a dollar a day and the author does an incredible job of illustrating how opaque the supply chain is. If any company tells you their minerals are not sourced through child labour and forced labour, they are most certainly lying. The detailed descriptions of the supply chain leave no doubt that there is literally no way to keep track. None.

Cobalt Red is a difficult book to read which the author wrote with the explicit intention of bringing to light the condition of the miners in Congo. His hope is that action would be taken and people would demand change once they come to know about the plight of the people who make our gleaming techno-utopian life possible.

His message, if you have any electronic device, you have blood on your hands.

The book begins with the chronicle of the Fort McMurray Fire in Alberta, which started as a forest fire that was considered far from catastrophic but grew to incredible proportions and ended up consuming almost 1.5 million acres.

The book is incredibly hard to read at the beginning.

The impending doom and the absolute lack of preparedness of the town make for a stark dichotomy. At one point, officials refused to call in firefighters from Slave Lake who had dealt with a similar fire 5 years before to keep costs low, since Slave Lake firefighters were paid 3 times as much as at Fort McMurray.

They say you are often left with one or two sentences when you read a book. This one left many etched in my mind.

The heat produced from some of these fires is so great that at times NORAD confused the energy signature to an atomic test. During the Chinchaga fire in 1950. The US thought that Canada was conducting Nuclear Tests without informing them.

Forest departments are trained to deal with forest fires and city fire departments train their men to put out a building fire. What is beginning to happen more and more are these fires at the Wild-Urban Interface (WUI) which neither is prepared to deal with. A forest officer is not trained to anticipate flammable liquids in the basement and the city fire officer never has to deal with fires that reach temperatures that are the same as that of the surface of Venus.

The second part of the book focuses on the science behind forest fires and climate change. The greenhouse effect was known before America was even a country. In the 19th century, the first predictions of global warming were made and by the 1950s definitive proof already existed. All of it was swept under the carpet and even today there is little to no change being made to address the problem truly.

The book is incredibly well written and I would think it should be prescribed as mandatory reading to every human on the planet.

The author is a researcher in the area of failure and this book is a treatise on how to fail well within organisations.

The author starts by describing the types of failure that an organisation should embrace. The right kind of mistake is described as an intelligent mistake. A mistake which is made in an area that nobody has trodden before, one that cannot result in a catastrophic disaster and one from which provides you the opportunity to learn something.

Three kinds of mistakes are described in the book:

Basic mistakes - You are distracted reading a text on the phone while driving and get into an accident.

Complex mistakes - Almost all aeroplane accidents are complex mistakes because there are so many checks and balances at so many levels. All of them have to fail simultaneously for a failure to take place. Enough attention from even one of the people - ground staff, air traffic controllers, pilot, co-pilot, and navigator can result in the mistake being avoided.

The same holds for complex work environments such as hospitals where right from a nurse anyone can call out an anomaly but when nobody does, things can quickly escalate.

Intelligent mistakes - These are the third kind where usually a person is trying to do something that has not been done before, maybe it is Research and Development, an organisation’s design change, or any such new activity. Here mistakes are often a result of not being aware that doing something a certain way could be wrong.

The most important thing about encouraging intelligent mistakes in an organisation is Psychological Safety. If an employee feels that they might be persecuted or singled out if they point out something wrong, they will learn not to point it out. This was at the heart of the Challenger disaster. It is not like the O-Ring issue was not known it was just a psychologically safe environment that did not exist for someone to fight about it.

I found the book interesting. It is replete with case studies while providing a great theoretical framework alongside that.  Whether running an organisation or part of one, you would resonate with it.

I highly recommend the book.

Few Fei Li was a Chinese immigrant who came to the USA to join her father. The family did not have great means, and her introduction to America was challenging because she did not know English and had to assimilate into American society at the age of 8. She talks at length about the challenges that she faced as someone who could barely speak English.

She got lucky when her application to Princeton was accepted and she also managed a full scholarship.

While she started studying Physics, an opportunity to assist researchers at Stanford took her across the country where her path crossed with a new field called Artificial Intelligence. She completed her studies and took up a role at Stanford.

Her greatest realisation was that the data played a more important role than the algorithm in developing greater computer intelligence. With that thought in mind, she started exploring possibilities and came across Alexnet which was a program focused on image recognition.

Knowing the importance of data, she embarked on a project called Image-net which set out to create a repository of images of 10,000 different items that computers could identify.

A large part of the book focuses on how this project seemed doomed from the beginning. Every single person thought that it was too much to undertake and dissuaded her. Despite all the setbacks and lack of support within the research community, they were able to complete the project and it was made available to the world to develop AI algorithms.

In 2008, the prevailing thought was that AI was not good enough because algorithms were not good enough. The data and quantum of computing that we take for granted today was not available in 2008 and anything approaching the speeds and storage we are used to today was unthinkable. Her project was running on 2 Nvidia GPUs.

It was after a couple of years of making the data public that a team showed a huge improvement in being able to identify images using an algorithm. The surprising thing was that they were using an algorithm that had been developed in the 80s called Neural Networks.

Everyone realised that provided sufficient data, Neural Networks could do the job much better than any AI algorithm. This led to a proliferation of attempts being made and AI and the entire field split into specific lines of attack such as Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, etc.

Work in the area of Natural Language Processing led to the development of another algorithm called Transformers. This in turn led to the Generative Pre-trained Transformer which we call GPT today. GPTs are the heart of Large Language Models (LLM) today.

It was a short and interesting read and if you are interested in AI, I would highly recommend it.

In 19th century England machines were invading every textile mill in the country already. The introduction of Broad Frame Machines implied that the skills required to weave cloth were not required. While it sacrificed quality to a certain extent, it was passable. The Mill owners in their avarice started hiring orphans from nearby orphanages and treating them as bonded labour.

Children at orphanages would be lied to. They would be told that if they left to apprentice, they would get learn at a factory and ride ponies and have stomach fulls. When these children consented and left, they were often treated just as badly as slaves. They would be forced to work 12 hours or more weaving at the mills.

This in turn led to unemployment and loss of bargaining power for the weavers.

In 19th century England, one had to spend years as an apprentice to graduate to a craftsperson and gain employment. Apprenticeship was almost like a limited-period slavery agreement.

Under the name of Ned Ludd who was a fictitious leader, the weavers started to break solely the broad frame machines in the factories. They would not touch any of the other machines. This was an economic fight and not one against technology. The very same weavers who were breaking the machine were users of technology. They were against the practice of using children to replace them.

At first, the movement was very successful and many mill owners were forced to suffer huge losses. They had to hire full-time security for their mills and had taken to canvassing the politicians to put an end to the menace.

Ultimately, they were able to get the government to extend capital punishment to those who were involved in breaking the machines and capital punishment took on a whole new meaning in and of itself.

The police state found, tortured, murdered and brought to justice all the people involved in the Luddite movement.

The book goes into great detail about the rise and fall of the movement and ends by comparing the current state of the world with those of the Luddites. Gig work has robbed workers of any power to negotiate while those wielding the tech try to centralise the power and by extension the money in their hands. The same applies to AI and all areas where one sees it used today.

Brian Merchant is a technology journalist who understands the issues so well and brings a great deal of clear-eyed thinking to the economic structures that technology enables.

An incredible book that I would highly recommend to all.

For each of these questions, there is an algorithm that can be used to answer the question effectively or to avoid answering the question at all.

This book takes the world of algorithms that have been developed over a century now and helps you apply them to questions that arise in everyday life.

When to stop looking - When you are on the hunt for a new house, or recruiting a new candidate, how many of them should you see before making up your mind? The problem is that the hunt for something better can continue forever, in the process you might lose out on something great!

Explore Vs Exploit - When you have the choice between going after something that you are aware of or going after something new such as picking the restaurant to eat at, or the store to shop clothes from. In computer algorithm terms, explore is when you need to find a new solution and exploit is when you use an existing one.

Making Order - When you have sorted items, choices, guest placement on dinner tables anything that involves creating order from disorder. There are a whole host of sorting algorithms that exist but one needs to be aware of the context in which the same is being used.

Forget about it - What should you remember and what should you not? In computers, a concept of caching exists to deal with overloading the memory. The idea is to figure out the bits of information that are required most often and keep them handy so that they can be referenced quickly.

First things First - There are often situations where several things need to be done. This is something that all of us are confronted with each morning - A to-do list. Scheduling is a daily issue and there are several scheduling algorithms but there is also human psychology that comes into play when scheduling many things.

Predicting the Future - Bayes’s Rule - Using probability to map out the most probable events and then predicting what one needs to be prepared for. Many of us do this subconsciously when it comes to everyday things. Will the bus arrive on time today?

Overfitting - Who amongst us has not overthought a situation and made things worse by thinking more than is essential? There are things that we do not know and often they play a role in the outcome of events. Thinking in such cases is futile.

Randomness - There are entire books written on randomness but this author offers strategies to think about randomness and handle it.

Networking - Perhaps the most important aspect of any person’s life. The place you end up working, the life you end up living, all have their links to the people you surround yourself with. Networking is a theory and there are entire books devoted to how a network should be structured for optimum outcome. Here the application of those theories is from the perspective of life.

Game Theory - In almost any interaction, there is a game that is being played based on what is known and what is unknown. He suggests several ways in which one can look at these games that we play every day.

I found the book quite illuminating and interesting. I would highly recommend reading the book.

Alaska Airlines produced reports from various testing agencies saying that there was nothing wrong with their uniforms. Further, they went out of their way to stop the flight attendants from using alternate ones procured from other stores. At the same time, the flight attendants who suffered from symptoms were pronounced hyper-sensitive.

This sent the author down the garment supply chain looking for answers to the question - Can our garments hurt us? What comes out of the investigation is not pretty.

First of all unlike the food you consume, your garments come with no ingredient list. There is no way for us to know what a garment has been coloured with or treated with, this is especially true of performance fabrics that claim to be dirt-resistant, water-resistant, fungus-resistant, colour-fast, etc.

Underlying all of these properties are chemicals that are often carcinogenic and unsafe for humans. The chemicals found in clothes include lead, arsenic, mercury, formaldehyde, and benzene, all concocted into formulae that even those well-trained in chemistry would struggle to recite.

A lot of these materials generously use PFAS or Poly-Flourinated Substances which are known as forever chemicals since it can take millennia for them to break down.

The chemicals used are even worse when it comes to synthetic fabrics. Have you ever tried painting on plastic? Natural dyes will not stick to polyester and hence stronger chemicals are used. There is a method called Dope Dying that is safer but requires larger orders because the fibre itself is dyed a certain colour. In the world of Shein and Zara where designs change by the week, there is no room for large production runs.

These chemicals are wreaking havoc on the environment and ecosystems in India, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and many more places.

What these chemicals do to the human body is an even bigger problem.

Many of these chemicals are responsible for triggering auto-immune diseases. These can become lifelong ailments that people have to live with just because they bought the wrong t-shirt.

Many of these chemicals can get absorbed into our bodies through the skin. They can also find a way to our lungs. Many of these are carcinogenic and have been shown to cause infertility. There is a case study in the book of a woman who was unable to get pregnant even after IVF but was able to conceive once she changed out her wardrobe.

At the other end of the spectrum are skin-related diseases such as psoriasis, skin irritation, allergies, etc.

What is worse is that there are no conclusive random trial tests done that prove this and hence many doctors would reject that possibility out of hand. Many of the airline staff from Alaskan and American Airlines ended up with the psychiatrists for having complained that their clothes were causing their diseases.

There are testing bodies such as OkoeTex and GOT that provide testing and certifications to clothing brands but even they test for a small list of substances. In the case of PFAS for instance, they test for 48 molecules whereas there are over 12,000 variants that exist. Manufacturers are therefore incentivised to use variants they know for a fact would not be tested for.

The crux of the problem is that clothing manufacturers have no reason to clean up their production methods so long as brands are willing to switch factories for a savings of a single penny per item. Brands wish to keep all of the margins and expect products delivered at the lowest cost possible.

The author takes a trip to Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, India which is one of the largest production bases in the world. The condition of the labourers working in these factories is far worse than those wearing the clothes. Most of them have skin diseases that they do not even understand. These people are subject to the chemicals every single day.

Nobody in any corner of the world is immune to the scourge of chemicals being unleashed by the fashion industry. If you think laws in your country protect you, think again.

Many of the clothing shipments arrive in the form of small parcels thanks to a just-in-time supply chain and constantly updating designs. There is no way to inspect all of these packages at an individual level and maintain the 24-48 hour delivery promises that most companies make today. No matter which country you live in, clothes with many of these chemicals pass through the borders and land up in the stores or perhaps even directly at your doorstep.

The EU has introduced laws that forbid the use of certain chemicals and is perhaps the only government anywhere in the world that has taken any steps towards curbing this menace.

The author ends the book on a depressing note that the Alaska Airlines crew have still not got the new clothes that they had been promised in 2020 and many who suffered because of the new uniform which is almost 10% of the staff have been either required to soldier through with their diseases or quit the job completely.

As long as the forces of capitalism are aligned with just reducing costs without fear of consequences, our clothing will continue to pose grave threats to our health.

On the upside, mankind will slowly lose its ability to reproduce, more people will die of auto-immune diseases and as a result, climate change will be solved!

The book looks at 6 materials that make our modern world possible without which we would not be able to live the way we do today. Also, the havoc that the extraction of these materials wreaks on the environment.

Sand

Sand is important but also extremely varied. There is sand that is used for making glass, there is sand that is used for construction and then there is sand that is purified to pure silicon to make chips. Not all sand is equal and that is perhaps the first thing one needs to understand.

Sand is very important as a construction material. None of our buildings would be possible without using sand as a binding agent.

One of sand’s greatest gifts to us is glass. So much of our life is different because of glass and manufacturing techniques that need glass and mirrors. We do not even realise this because of how hidden it is. The discovery of glass changed civilisation. The entire internet operates on fibreglass cables running around the world. We would not have the internet without glass! Not to mention we would not be able to any silicon chips without silicon.

The production of electronics requires 100% pure silicon and this requires a lot of purification and the entire production process itself takes several weeks and involves the longest supply chain in the world.

Sand mining is a dirty industry which generates a huge amount of pollution. Sand demand from the construction sector has led to sand mafias. There are illegal dredging that is undertaken in ecologically sensitive sites.

Salt

Salt is perhaps one of the oldest materials that humans have exploited on the planet. It is important for healthy living and our body derives several micro-nutrients from Salt. Salt was so important that the Roman legions were paid in Salt where the term salary comes from.

Salt was so important that taxing salt was the greatest source of income for many empires across the world.

Salt was traditionally mined by creating pools and drying ocean water. The huge demand for salt has meant that we have found salt mines and salt flats and exploited them for what they offer.

Iron

Iron is one of those materials that we are constantly surrounded with. If there is a ceiling above you, possibilities are that it is reinforced with iron within, unless it is made completely of wood. Even if it is made of wood it is most likely held together by Iron nails. There are some construction techniques where it might be possible to build a roof without using Iron but it is hard to find in the modern world.

The most ubiquitous manifestation of iron in our world today is in the form of steel. Iron ore is often high in Carbon and this makes iron brittle and easy to break. But by heating Iron, the carbon content can be reduced and add some Chromium and voila you got Steel! That excess carbon finds its way into the atmosphere as CO2. Steel production has become one of the biggest contributors to pollution on the planet.

Having said that, our thirst for this material is near infinite. Our vehicles, our electronics and even our zippers are made out of Iron. Modern life would cease to exist without it.

Iron mining is extremely extractive on the land but at the same time, it causes immense pollution when being turned into metal.

Copper

The author starts the journey of Copper at one of the largest mines in the world where dump trucks carrying 400 tonnes of ore drive out with freshly blasted ore. Without Copper, we would not have access to electricity. When wound copper is rotated in between a magnet, electricity is generated. It is the foundation of almost all of the electricity production and the extent to which we have gone to extract this resource is incredible.

Copper is rarer than iron so the quantum of ore or material that is extracted is much greater and most of this is allowed to accumulate on land dumps after the metal is extracted. This not only destroys ecology but also has the potential to leach into groundwater systems and make the entire area unsafe.

Oil

There was the Iron age, the Copper age and the Oil age. Oil provides perhaps the greatest density of energy apart from Nuclear Energy. This along with the relative safety of using it has made it the fuel of choice across the planet.

There was a time 100 years ago when you could find oil just by digging a few tens of feet. Today not only do we dig thousands of feet but also separate it from rock using steam in a process called Fracking.

Oil extraction and then the refining process to produce petrol, diesel, etc is incredibly bad for the environment and has a huge impact on the climate. Fracking makes this all the worse since it uses up a lot of water as well in the process. Water that is eventually left unusable.

Lithium

Lithium has been turned into a precious resource by the increasing push to move towards an electric world. Having said that the production of lithium is just as bad for the environment as any other material that we have discussed.

It presents all the same problems that the extraction of Copper poses to the natural world. In the pursuit of electrification, the downsides are being ignored and often undertaken in non-western nations to avoid strict environmental laws.

The book covers how these materials are extracted, how they get used and what they do to the environment in great detail. None of us can go a single day today without using all of these materials.

It is important to first realise and become conscious of how we are dependent on these materials before we can think about reducing our footprint.