Our Information Technology Project Management professor was explaining how value of substance depends on it’s attributes which sometimes is marked by a label.
“Johny Walker scotch comes in different brands, red label 3 years old, black label 6 years old, green label some 12 years old etc. I can’t tell the difference but some people say they can, and that is why a green label costs more than red label. “
The same professor also described the difference between value and cost.
A Rs 15 pen that my son gifted me from his money he had saved, has insignificant cost but it is very valuable to me. I have saved many inexpensive but extremely valuable things in my safe which probably be thrown in dustbin after I die.
In last few years India has seen sudden growth. Those people who managed to get themselves good education despite the problems government created in their path have managed to offer themselves a good life style. But then these people have become rich suddenly, they spend a lot in Multiplexes, Malls and Spas.
A good movie show ticket cots Rs 250 in multiplex, the most ordinary branded shoes will not cost less than 3k, a humble meal at a good restaurant is never less than Rs. 500. I see a huge crowd going for all these goods are services which are smartly branded as “only for rich”.
It reminds me of story of Eklavya. Dronacharyaa refused to educate Eklavya because he did not belong to the varnam that deserved to get education from Dronacharya. During those times the determining factor for varnam was birth by default. today varnam is replaced by entrance examinations like JEE and GATE. [It's ironical that the so called champions of so-called backward classes are demanding that "birth" be used as a criteria instead of merit].
Eklavya learnt everything he wanted to learn without any help from Dronacharya. But he wanted “Authority”, he wanted “certification” and he wanted it from someone like Drona. Hence when presented an opportunity he did not hesitate to sacrifice even his thumb for that certificate. Because he knew that, his sacrifice will also mean that Drona has accepted him as his disciple. Drona too knew Eklavya’s wish and exploited it to make sure that Eklavya will not become a threat to the ruling class.
Just like Drona, the companies which have established themselves as brands-for-rich have successfully exploited young people who are dieing to prove themselves as rich. This certainly has not happened by offering services and goods that have value equivalent to their cost but sometimes even far inferior value.
Rickshaw-drivers who never keep change, waiter’s who expected extra tip, Courier delivery boy who demands “Bakshish” for doing his duty, Policemen who makes a point to catch a non-resident-techie, landlords who demand extra deposit from software developers are all such exploiters.
Birmingham: a more exciting place than you might imagine...
A fascinating debate is raging over at the Birmingham Post, whose reporters and bloggers have often impressed me with their insightful writing and out-of-the-box thinking.
It started here, when John Clancy and Professor David Bailey argued that a little land reform might be a good way of reducing the budget deficit.
Yup, the Post have a revolutionary business professor on their hands:
However, how would you like a new revenue policy that helps to significantly cut the deficit but that only affects some 100 or fewer people? Surely, this is a dream from another age, a pre-credit-crunch, pre-banking- crisis world that is consigned to history?
Well, the policy itself comes from history. It’s called crowning. We crown land. We return to the ownership of the Crown in Parliament the country’s great landed estates, which have been languishing for centuries in the hands of individuals and families who won the state lottery at various stages over the last 600 years in a series of land grabs, in some cases going back to the Norman Conquest.
Over the centuries, kings and queens awarded land in return not for money but for past and (more importantly) future services like raising an army (services long since forgotten about) and gave the grantees of the land fancy titles as part of the lottery win, like Viscount, Earl, Duke, Marquess and Baron. Alternatively, they simply stole the land, grabbed it out of opportunity, or fenced it off and enclosed it; possession, in reality, being 9 tenths of the law when it came to land, historically speaking.
Our research estimates that some £100 billion at least is available in asset value, currently in the hands of about 100 men (an almost exclusively male club, by the way), consisting of a sizeable chunk of the land surface of the UK, including much of the commercial property in the hearts of our towns and cities. This land simply has been handed down generation after generation from eldest son to eldest son.
Let’s ‘ave it back! They cry…
This won’t affect Birmingham, will it? This is about the landed gentry in the ‘Shires, surely? No – it’s about central Birmingham.
For rising high at no 6 in our top 20 is our very own Sir Euan Anstruther Gough Calthorpe. Yes, he of the great sprawling Calthorpe estate. By accidents of Birth (and marriages, as it happens) he has come to own the freehold, and more, of great swathes of our city, commercial and residential. You may very well be reading this on Calthorpe Estate land.
This is not a business matter, is it? Well, the wealthiest British-born business man in the Sunday Times Rich list 2009 is The Duke of Westminster. He has assets at his command of £20billion in land simply inherited over centuries to run one of the biggest businesses in Britain, Grosvenor Estates.
All we are saying to the likes of the Duke of Westminster and Sir Euan Anstruther Gough-Calthorpe is: thank you very much for looking after our land for the last few hundred years, you’ve done very well, now mosey along and do something else. Our need is greater than yours, Sir Euan. This land will now be returned to the Crown in Parliament, where it belongs.
This is brilliant stuff! And from a business professor blogging in a Trinity Mirror paper too!
Read an angry response from a fellow blogger at the paper here and their reaction to that here…
The warning comes after three weeks of increasingly irate exchanges between the US and China over contentious issues including internet censorship, trade and a decision by the Obama administration to sell £4bn of arms to Taiwan.
Although the Chinese government routinely objects to any foreign leaders meeting the exiled Tibetan spirutal leader analysts say the strength of the latest condemnation reflects genuine anger in Beijing at a perceived hardening of US attitudes towards China.
Zhu Weiqun, a vice minister of the united front work department of China’s ruling Communist Party, which steers policy on religious affairs said any meeting would “seriously undermine” the political basis of China-US relations.
“If the U.S. leader chooses this time to meet the Dalai Lama, that would damage trust and co-operation between our two countries, and how would that help the United States surmount the current economic crisis?” added Zhu.
The apparent linking of the economics to the widely expected meeting comes after Beijing took the almost unprecedented step of threatening economic reprisals against US companies participating in the Taiwan arms deal, including the aircraft maker Boeing.
The White House has yet to formally confirm the timing of a meeting with the Dalai Lama who is due in Washington later this month, however officials have made clear that Mr Obama fully intends to meet the Tibetan leader at some point.
A White House spokesman, Mike Hammer, said last month that “the President has made clear to the Chinese government that we intend to meet with the Dalai Lama, it has been his every intention.”
Mr Obama was accused by rights groups of appeasing the Chinese leadership when he failed to take an opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama before his maiden visit to China last November.
Chinese officials are understood to be keen to avoid a meeting before the Chinese President Hu Jintao makes a reciprocal visit to Washington, possibly this April.
The Tibet issue has always been highly sensitive for the Chinese government, but became more so after widespread riots in 2008 seriously shook the party leadership’s confidence in its control over the Himalayan region.
Beijing regards the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Laureate, as a “dangerous separatist” intent on regaining independence for Tibet which he fled in 1959 after a failed uprising, setting up a government-in-exile in the Indian hill station of Dharamsala.
The Dalai Lama, whose profile on the world stage infuriates Beijing, says he wants “meaningful autonomy” for the region, however the latest round of talks between his representatives and Chinese officials ended last week with both sides “sharply divided” according to the Chinese side.
Look, of all the reasons I went to university, the opportunity to earn more money that those that didn’t was barely on the list. In fact, thinking back, I don’t think it was on the list at all. I went for the freedom, the knowledge, the library, the experience, the parties, to meet interesting people and the opportunity not to have to work full-time for a couple more years. I sure as fuck wasn’t thinking about how I would be in a beater position when I entered the job market. Who the fuck goes into higher education for that?!?
Okay, maybe it’s a little different in the UK. The government paid my fees and I don’t have to start repaying my student loan until i’m earning a certain amount. But still, seriously? You went to uni to earn more money in the long run? You shallow, vapid, proto-yuppie consumer fuckwit.
Okay, that was totally uncalled for and not a true reflection of my thoughts and feelings on the situation. Sure did feel good to type though.
In recent years, the nonprofit College Board touted the difference in lifetime earnings of college grads over high-school graduates at $800,000, a widely circulated figure. Other estimates topped $1 million. [...]
Mark Schneider, a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, calls it “a million-dollar misunderstanding.”
One problem he sees with the estimates: They don’t take into account deductions from income taxes or breaks in employment. Nor do they factor in debt, particularly student debt loads, which have ballooned for both public and private colleges in recent years. In addition, the income data used for the Census estimates is from 1999, when total expenses for tuition and fees at the average four-year private college were $15,518 per year. For the 2009-10 school year, that number has risen to $26,273, and it continues to increase at a rate higher than inflation.
Dr. Schneider estimated the actual lifetime-earnings advantage for college graduates is a mere $279,893 in a report he wrote last year. He included tuition payments and discounted earning streams, putting them into present value. He also used actual salary data for graduates 10 years after they completed their degrees to measure incomes. Even among graduates of top-tier institutions, the earnings came in well below the million-dollar mark, he says.
Search engine finds winners, losers in job postings
Teachers and detectives face brighter prospects than actors or photographers, says SimplyHired.com based on an analysis of on-line job listings from the first quarter of 2008 through the close of 2009.
A report from the search firm says California has 21 percent fewer jobs available overall — no employment rebound here, yet.
In terms of specific occupations, nationwide, leading categories include:
– Teachers and Instructors: unique jobs up 389 percent
– Detectives and Criminal Investigators: unique jobs up 276 percent
– Fish and Game Wardens: unique jobs up 200 percent
Positions that experienced an extreme decrease in postings include:
– Actors: unique jobs down 87 percent
– Proofreaders and Copy Markers: unique jobs down 85 percent
– Petroleum Engineers: unique jobs down 84 percent
– Amusement and Recreation Attendants: unique jobs down 67 percent
The Afghan War is turning into the US Army war against the Navajo, who were a nomadic, small group raiding tribe – fierce fighters.
Kit was not an “Indian Hater” – in fact he was married to one. He understood the Navajo, spoke their language and admired their fierce independence, but understood that their raids against “settlers” just could not be tolerated.
In the end, kit and the Army had to drive them to surrender by both attacking and killing and by destroying their infrastructure needed to feed themselves. He killed their livestock, burned their crops and cut their peach trees.
The Taliban in Afghanistan live among the people, and fight in small groups – not unlike both the Indians, and the American Militia in our Revolutionary Wars.
We KNOW how to do this – from both sides.
We also know that the Taliban have strongholds in areas of poppy production. Destroying the poppy fields brings more support to the Taliban as the farmers join them in a fight against those of us who destroy their crops.
Eventually, however they run out of fighters because having run out of poppy field income THEY STARVE!
That is what defeated the powerful Navajo nation. Even when defeated in numerous small-scale battles, the Navajo inflicted sufficient casualties among the Army that the Army had Pyrrhic victories and from sheer numbers the Army was eventually simply going to win, what cut the war short was starvation. You may still want to fight when you are your family are starving but you won’t fight well.
Marjah is the next Taliban stronghold in the Marines way. They should destroy all of the crops surrounding it as they move closer, and wait a year before attacking. Given a year, time will be on their side.
Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri
The head of the UN’s climate change panel – Dr Rajendra Pachauri – is accused of making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.
Published: 8:30AM GMT 20 Dec 2009
The head of the UN’s climate change panel – Dr Rajendra Pachauri – is accused of making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies. Photo: EPA No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.
Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.
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What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.
These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.
Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.
It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.
The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.
Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri’s personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.
The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.
The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company).
Although TERI has extended its sponsorship since the name change, the two concerns are still closely linked.
In India, Tata exercises enormous political power, shown not least in the way that when it expressed its interests in developing land in the eastern states of Orissa and Jarkhand, it led to the Indian government displacing hundreds of thousands of poor tribal villagers to make way for large-scale iron mining and steelmaking projects.
Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.
In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.
However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.
Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.
Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.
Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.
TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.
All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.
Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.
It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to “mothball” nearly three million tonnes of steel production at its Corus plant in Redcar, while opening a new plant in Orissa with a similar scale of production, gaining in the process a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (while putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).
More than three-quarters of the world ‘carbon’ market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata – and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India’s own carbon exchange.
But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.
In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’,
In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.
In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.
The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on. He has become head of Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute, which enjoys millions of dollars of US state and corporate funding. He is on the climate change advisory board of Deutsche Bank. He is Director of the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and was until recently an adviser to Toyota Motors. Recalling his origins as a railway engineer, he is even a policy adviser to SNCF, France’s state-owned railway company.
Meanwhile, back home in India, he serves on an array of influential government bodies, including the Economic Advisory Committee to the prime minister, holds various academic posts and has somehow found time in his busy life to publish 22 books.
Dr Pachauri never shrinks from giving the world frank advice on all matters relating to the menace of global warming. The latest edition of TERI News quotes him as telling the US Environmental Protection Agency that it must go ahead with regulating US carbon emissions without waiting for Congress to pass its cap and trade bill.
It reports how, in the days before Copenhagen, he called on the developing nations which had been historically responsible for the global warming crisis to make ‘concrete commitments’ to aiding developing countries such as India with funding and technology – while insisting that India could not agree to binding emissions targets. India, he said, must bargain for large-scale subsidies from the West for developing solar power, and Western funds must be made available for geo-engineering projects to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.
One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.
As for TERI itself, Dr Pachauri’s main job for nearly 30 years, it is so coy about money that it does not even publish its accounts – the financial statement amounts to two income and expenditure pie charts which contain no detailed figures.
Dr Pachauri is equally coy about TERI’s links with Tata, the company which set it up in the 1970s and whose name it continued to bear until 2002, when it was changed to just The Energy Research Institute. A spokesman at the time said ‘we have not severed our past relationship with the Tatas, the change is only for convenience’.
But the real question mark over TERI’s director-general remains over the relationship between his highly lucrative commercial jobs and his role as chairman of the IPCC.
TERI have, for example, become a preferred bidder for Kuwaiti contracts to clean up the mess left by Saddam Hussein in their oilfields in 1991. The $3 billion (£1.9 billion) cost of the contracts has been provided by the UN. If successful, this would be tenth time TERI have benefited from a contract financed by the UN.
Certainly no one values the services of TERI more than the EU, which has included Dr Pachauri’s institute as a partner in no fewer than 12 projects designed to assist in devising the EU’s policies on mitigating the effects of the global warming predicted by the IPCC.
But whether those 1,700 Corus workers on Teesside that will be losing their jobs next month will be quite as excited about the international ‘carbon market’ as Dr Pachauri, is quite another matter.
