Category: arbit

Days of the week in Bahasa

Most languages name  their days of the week after a single source, and this is usually consistent across languages. For example, the original Latin names for the days of the week came from “planets” – Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn respectively. And this got copied into various languages.

So the days of the week as we know in English are derived from the names of these planets or Gods representing them (Thor giving Thursday and so on). Indian names for the days of the week are direct translations of the Latin names. And some days have multiple names in Indian languages, all of which mean the same thing.

So you have Ravivara and Bhaanuvara and Adityavara, all of which refer to Sunday, and all of which precisely translate to “Sun day”. The more formal name for Thursday is “bRhaspativara” but more commonly referred to as “Guruvara”, with “Guru” being the more common name for bRhaspati. And so forth.

Based on this background, I found the names of the week in Bahasa Indonesia, which I observed from signboards (Bahasa uses Roman scripts, so one level of Rosetta stoning can happen from signboards), rather interesting.

The names are (starting with Sunday):
Minggu
Senin
Selasa
Rabu
Kamis
Jumat
Sabtu

Ok I got that from this link as I was writing, but what I got from signboards yesterday was the names of Friday, Saturday and Sunday (Jumat, Sabtu and Minggu respectively). And I found it fascinating since it seems like they come from multiple sources.

So Jumat, it appears, is the day of prayer, or Juma. Considering that Indonesia is a Muslim-majority country (it’s not funny how empty restaurants are during lunch nowadays, since it’s Ramzan), naming Friday as “the day of prayer”, using the Muslim word for prayer, is absolutely logical.

Sabtu for Saturday is obviously derived from “Sabbath” – another day of prayer but for a different religion (Judaism). It looks like it’s derived from European names for Saturday – Saturday in Spanish is Sabado, for instance. So actually, in this case we are seeing a wider adoption of naming the day of week after its religious significance than the associated planet.

And Minggu, it appears, is diminutive for Domingo, the Spanish and Portuguese word for Sunday (and perhaps there are similar names in other European languages). And it appears that “Domingo” has nothing to do with the Sun, but instead is derived from Latin for “God’s day” (since Sunday is the day of the Christian God, who famously took rest on that day).

So it’s interesting that Bahasa has names for three days of the week which are not based on the planets, but on different versions of “God’s day”, with multiple origins among them! Or rather, that Bahasa has three “God’s day”s, with each referring to a different god.

I’m reminded of this store that existed a long time back close to where I currently live. It was called “yellAdEvarakRpe stores” (store with the grace of all gods).

New line of business

I’m considering a new line of business. This is basically advising startups on option valuation and how to account for different conditions and optionalities that venture capitalists put in in term-sheets.

Aswath Damodaran has an extremely interesting piece on valuation of the so-called “unicorns” and how such valuations are inflated on account of optionality in favour of investors. He takes a stab at valuing such optionality, but I think there’s scope for going deeper and helping companies figure out the valuations in each individual case. Money quote from the piece:

As an outsider with an interest in valuation, I find venture capital deals to be jaw-droppingly complex and not always intuitive, and I am not sure whether this is by design, or by accident. When it comes to investor protection, the stories that I read for the most part are framed as warnings to owners about “vulture capital” investors who will use these protection clauses to strip founders of their ownership rights. I think the story is a far more complex one, where both investors and owners see benefits in these arrangements, and where both can expose themselves to dangers, if they over reach.

Do you think this is a good line of business to get into? Will startups be willing to pay for a service that allows founders to get value for money for the equity they are giving away? Or will they be so focussed on execution that trifles such as a change in valuation by a few percentage points don’t matter to them any more?

And what are the odds that if I get into this business and do a good job of it, a VC will want to hire me just so that I stop damaging their carefully designed ratchets?

Slider design

Not often that I comment on User Interface, but this has a quantitative aspect to it, so I thought I’ll write about it. Basically it’s with the use of sliders on websites that you move around to determine an amount or a limit.

More specifically, I’m in the process of planning an extended weekend in Bali next month (the wife is going to be based in Jakarta for two months starting this weekend), and checking out sites such as TripAdvisor and AirBnB for accommodation. This necessarily means using a slider to determine my maximum willingness to pay for a room.

The problem with such sliders is that they’re linear. So for example, on the Travelmob page where I’m looking for villas, the price per night varies from Rs. 650 to Rs. 65000, or a factor of 100. And the slider uses a linear scale. So considering that I consider about Rs. 3500 per night as my budget, in order to set that budget I have to move the right slider (my maximum willingness to pay) way over to the left, till it almost coincides with the left slider (which determines the minimum price). And considering the small distance between the two sliders, it is easy go wrong and not be precise on your limits. A rather frustrating experience!

Instead, if the slider were to use a logarithmic scale, then 6500 would be the midpoint (geometric average of minimum and maximum), and that would allow me to pull the slider to 3500 without much hassle, improving my experience!

But then I suspect the current poor design is by design – by making it hard for you to move sliders down to low prices, maybe they are nudging customers to go for higher priced rooms?

On a different note, while on the topic of sliders, there are “fin-tech” startups that determine whether you are good credit depending upon things like the amount of time you spend moving around a slider to determine how much money you want to borrow. Quoting from Sangeet’s blog:

As an example, most peer lending platforms have a slider allowing the borrower to decide what loan they would like to take. In an excellent whitepaper by Foundation Capital on the state of peer lending, Charles Moldow shares that  the longer a borrower spends moving the slider up and down (and hence, potentially, debating her ability to return the loan), the more likely is she to return the loan. Such correlations help platforms improve their ability to curate participants over time.

This slider also looks linear, rather than logarithmic! And so it goes.

Update

AirBnB actually uses a logarithmic slider! Whatay!

Dispassionate blogging and Wife Bonus

So I’ve figured out that the key to being a good and interesting blogger is to be able to look at things dispassionately and not let your value judgments crowd out your reasoning abilities. Of course, while saying this I’m assuming that I’m a reasonably good blogger (based on feedback, implicit and explicit, that I’ve received over the last decade, and given that I’m coming close to 2000 posts here).

So earlier this morning I was talking to a friend about long distance relationships and careers and marriages and responsibility sharing, and he sent me a link to this rather fascinating concept called the “wife bonus“. The money paragraph:

A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.

So I responded that this looks like a rather interesting concept, and started my own analysis of why this works and these bonuses have been structured in the fashion that they have. Unfortunately the discussion went nowhere.

Because my friend who sent me the link found the concept disgusting and abhorrent and demeaning to women, and he was fascinated that I had managed to actually analyse it without feeling the same kind of emotions. As I write this, the conversation continues (as the old Coffy Bite ad went). Ok I googled and found that it’s actually “the argument continues”. Here is the ad:

So based on this one data point, and a few other data points from my and my wife’s blogging past, I figured out that such dispassionate analysis (I’ll present my dispassionate analysis on wife bonuses later in the post) is key if you are to be a good blogger. Because such dispassion allows you to not get swayed by the emotion or repugnancy of a concept, and instead analyse it to its full merit.

In this case you start wondering why these highly qualified women don’t work, but are “interested in art”. You start wondering about how a family’s finances would work if the qualified wife doesn’t work. You start wondering who controls the budgets, and considering that one half is not contributing financially, how stable such marriages are.

So my hypothesis, which I’ve never bothered to test, is that people who have access to funds but don’t have an independent source of income are less careful about spending it optimally than those who have access to funds on account of their own sources of income. To be less politically correct, the hypothesis is that housewives (and househusbands, to be more politically correct) are less careful about their money than people who work.

So now if you have a spouse with no independent income source, but want to make sure she has access to sufficient funds while making sure she doesn’t fritter away the wealth, the best way of achieving this is to ringfence the money under her control. Which means that giving her control of your bank account is not optimal, but creating a separate purse which is under her control is superior! And thus you create what can be classified as a “wife bonus”. As simple as that.

Now I realise many of my readers will find this blog post repugnant, for it is not politically correct, and they will allow their emotions to take over and brand me as a misogynist or a chauvinist or whatever else. All because I looked at an existing phenomenon logically without attaching a value judgment to it. And by doing so, they deny themselves the opportunity of reading my analysis. But there are others who are happy that there is someone doing this dispassionate analysis, and they will like such analysis. And my blog popularity grows on that front.

My wife has been blogging heavily through her life in business school (coincidentally I started blogging a decade ago when I was in business school; and we met each other through LiveJournal), and has already got to the stage where her professors read her blog. And while a lot of her classmates read her blog, there are some who have problems with it, that she writes dispassionately about everything without value judgments.

Anyway, I sent her the NYTimes piece on the wife bonus. She replied that she also wants one now!

Investing in dabbil-dabbi startups

So the wife has come up with this new concept – “dabbil-dabbi startups“. Check out this scene from yedurmane ganDa, pakkadmane henDthi where miser Shashikumar is looking for the money that he has stored inside a series of boxes (watch at 3:48 here).

So the wife’s point is that startups nowadays are not adding value by themselves but instead simply offering an additional layer around an already existing product/idea. This, she says is similar to Shashikumar in the above scene putting one box inside the other – basically no real value is added.

I take this analogy further, perhaps distorting it in the process, like any analogy taken too far. Basically in the above scene, Shashikumar, after opening all the boxes inside boxes, retrieves money from the innermost box and rhetorically cribs that the money hasn’t grown.

Similarly, when an investor invests in a “dabbil-dabbi” startup, his money meets the same fate as Shashikumar’s in the movie – there is no growth!

So think twice before investing in a dabbil-dabbi startup.

Splitting BBMP and gerrymandering ToK

Kannada organisations have argued against splitting of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), the civic agency that is supposed to govern Bangalore, arguing that a three-way-split of the municipal corporation, as has been proposed, will lead to “non-Kannadiga mayors” for some of the newly created corporations, and hence this is an “anti-Kannada” move. In a funny twist, the Chief Minister himself has had to make a statement that the split won’t lead to “Telugu and Tamil mayors”.

A couple of months back, Thejaswi Udupa had written this tongue-in-cheek post on the geopolitics of Bangalore, for April Fool’s Day on Takshashila’s Logos blog. The Business Standard picked it up and published it as an Op-Ed the next day. The reason the piece matters is that it introduces the larger public to the wonderful phrase ToK. Quoting,

The largest of disputed territories in Bangalore is that of ToK. Tamil occupied Karnataka. These are large swathes of interconnected parcels of land in the South-Eastern quadrant of Bangalore. ToK’s existence is mostly under the radar, and people notice it only when the census figures come in once a decade with its linguistic break-ups, and suddenly people realise that nearly 25% of Bangalore’s population is Tamil. However, there are many who believe that ToK stands for Telugu owned Karnataka, as most of the land here is owned by Telugu landlords.

So basically the concern of the Kannada organisations is that when Bangalore is split ToK (however you may define it) will become an independent city. While some people might consider it a good thing in a “ok those buggers are not in our city any more” sort of way, these organisations will see this as a loss of territory, and consequently as a loss of power. So this is a genuine problem.

While this might be a genuine problem, the fact is that there is a “genuine” solution to this problem. We had seen last month about how Bangalore city is so badly gerrymandered in terms of splitting its assembly constituencies. For example, my constituency (Padmanabhanagar) looks like a dancing hen. To refresh your memory, this is what Bangalore’s assembly constituencies look like:

So if assembly constituencies are so badly gerrymandered, what prevents us from gerrymandering the municipal corporations? And there is further precedence to this – there are primarily three Parliamentary constituencies in Bangalore, and it is not hard to argue that they have been gerrymandered in a similar manner.

It all finally comes down to the mechanics of how we split the city. If the city is cut into three by drawing North-South lines (creating “Bangalore East”, “Bangalore West” and “Bangalore”), we have a problem, since the Bangalore East thus created will largely coincide with ToK, and we might end up with non-Kannadiga mayors there, as the Kannada organisations fear.

However, considering that Bangalore is being split for purely administrative efficiencies, and for no real cultural reasons, there is no reason we need to split the city in that way. All we need to do is to draw the lines in an East-West fashion, as we have done with our Parliamentary constituencies, giving us a “Bangalore North”, “Bangalore Central” and “Bangalore South”. A split like this, well done and well gerrymandered, will ensure that ToK is split evenly into the three new corporations, and all will remain under the control of the Kannadigas.

So the Kannada organisations don’t need to fear the split. Solution exists. Only thing they need to fear is the way the split is implemented. And with precedence (parliamentary gerrymandering) on their side, they really have nothing to fear!

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Varun Shenoy for the discussions leading up to this post

Value addition through comments

My friend Joy Bhattacharjya is a star on Facebook. He has a large number of friends (I haven’t bothered to see how many), most of whom seem to have him on their “good friends” list thanks to which they get each and every one of his updates (I had recently cribbed about Facebook’s algorithm, but when your friends love you, it doesn’t matter). And most of his updates are extremely insightful, some of them funny. If you are his friend, it is not hard to guess why his updates are so popular.

There is only one problem – it is impossible to comment on them. I mean, the comments section is always open, but the problem is that by the time you see an update, so many people would have commented on them that adding one more comment there doesn’t add any value. Writing something there, it seems, is not worth the time, for you assume that given the sea of comments the author won’t have time to read and appreciate your wisecrack. And so you move on.

Recently one friend announced his engagement. Another announced the birth of her child. It was again impossible to add value via comments to either – there had already been so many comments that adding one more wouldn’t add any value! I doubt if these “announcers” even bothered to read through all the comments people had posted. A compression algorithm might have done the trick for them, for most of them were extremely banal and non-value-adding “congrats” posts!

The last time my birthday was listed on Facebook (2010, if I’m not wrong), I got so many scraps on my wall that I had no time to read them, let alone respond to them. I promptly delisted my birthday from Facebook, with the result that nowadays hardly anyone wishes me on my birthday. Not on Facebook, at least, and I’m happy about not having to respond to a mechanical action!

On a similar note, one thing I get very pissed off (on Facebook) is “thread hijacking”. You get a nice discussion going in the comments thread on some post, and then someone else comes in (usually an aunty) and says something so banal that you don’t want to be seen on that thread any more, and the discussion goes for a toss. Oh, and such thread hijacking is more prevalent on Facebook’s other product Whatsapp (:P ), especially on groups where lack of threaded conversation means deep discussions are highly prone to being disrupted by long forwards someone sends!

Recently, Facebook introduced the threaded comments feature, one that I loved so much that I resisted a move away from Livejournal for ages just for that one feature, and when I moved to this blog, one of the first plugins I installed was one that allowed for threaded comments. Facebook has done badly, though. I use it primarily through the iPad app, and the threaded comments suck big time, requiring way too many clicks to navigate. If done so badly, I’d prefer blogspot-type dumb linear comment scheme only!

I sometimes wonder why I’m on Facebook at all. I used to use it at one point in time to look at people’s photos, and what they were up to. But now i find that it’s impossible to subscribe to a person’s photos without subscribing to her political views also, which are generally downright uninformed and sometimes extreme. And thanks to blogger-style comments, you cannot keep uninformed people out of your discussion on Facebook, unlike Twitter – they just keep popping up.

And there is no way for me to explicitly tell Facebook I want to see more or less of someone’s feed (like I could with Pandora, back when I used it). I have to rely on the algorithm.

All in all, Facebook seems like a dumb social network. To use a concept I’d mentioned here a few months back, it’s an “events and people” social network, with Twitter being more conducive to ideas. I sometimes end up asking myself why I’m on Facebook at all. And then I realise that there is no other way for me to access Joy’s updates!

Dominant affiliation groups

I was writing an email to connect two friends, when I realised that when you know someone through more than one affiliation group, one of the affiliation groups becomes “dominant”, and you will identify with them through that group at the cost of others. And sometimes this can lead you to even forgetting that you share other affiliation groups with them.

In social networking theory, affiliation groups refer to entities such as families, communities, schools or workplaces through which people get connected to other people. It is not strictly necessary for two connected people to share an affiliation group, but it is commonly the case to share one or more such groups. Social networking companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn sometimes suggest connections to you based on commonly identified affiliation groups.

So my hypothesis is that when you share multiple affiliation groups with someone, you are likely to have been more strongly connected to them through one than through others. For example, you might have gone to the same school and then worked together, but your interaction in school would have been so little that it almost doesn’t count. Yet, the school  remains as a common affiliation group.

Does it happen to you as well? Do you forget that you share an affiliation group with someone because it is not the “dominant” one, since you share another? And due to that do you miss out on making connections, and thus on opportunities?

I had this hilarious incident two weeks back where I was meeting this guy W with whom I share three affiliation groups – BASE (the local JEE coaching factory), IIT Madras and IIM Bangalore. Due to the extent of overlap and degree of interaction, I know him fundamentally as an “IITM guy”. And there’s this other guy X who I also know through three affiliation groups – BASE (again), IIM Bangalore (again) and a shared hobby (the strongest).

So I was talking to W and was going to bring up the topic of X’s work, and suddenly wondered if W knows X, so I said “do you remember X, he was in your batch at BASE?”. And then a minute later “oh yeah, you guys were classmates at IIMB also!”.

The rather bizarre thing is that I had completely stopped associating both W and X with IIMB, since I have much stronger affiliation groups with them. And then when I had to draw a connection between them, I even more bizarrely picked BASE, where I hadn’t interacted with either of them, rather than IIMB, where I interacted with both of them to a reasonable degree (X much more than W).

I know I didn’t do much damage, but in another context, not realising connections that exist might prove costly. So I find this “interesting”!

Is there anybody else in here who feels the way I do?

Agile programming and Parliamentary procedures

Supposedly the latest (ok not that latest – it’s been around for a decade) thing in software engineering is this thing called “Agile programming“. It’s basically about breaking away from the old “waterfall model” (which we had learnt in a software engineering course back in 2003), and to a more iterative model with quick releases, updates, etc.

I’ve never worked as a software engineer, but it seems to me that Agile programming is the way to go – basically get something out and keep iterating till you have a good product rather than thinking endlessly about incorporating all design specifications before writing a single line of code. Requirements change rapidly nowadays, and unless you are “agile” (pun intended) to that, you will not produce good software.

Agile methodologies, however, don’t work in parliamentary procedures, since there is very high transaction cost there. Take, for example, the proposed Goods and Service Tax (GST). The current form of the Goods and Service Tax is an incredibly flawed bill, with taxes for movement of goods across states and certain products being excluded from the ambit altogether. Mihir Sharma at Business Standard has a great takedown of the current bill (there is no one quotable paragraph. Read the whole thing. I’m mostly in agreement).

So it seems to me that the government is passing the GST in its current half-baked form because it wants some version (like a Minimum Viable Product) off the ground, and then it hopes to rectify the shortcomings in a later iteration. In other words, the government is trying some sort of an agile methodology when it comes to passing the GST.

The problem with parliamentary procedures, however, is that transaction costs are great. Once a law has been passed, it is set in stone and the effort required for any single amendment is equal to the effort originally required for passing the law itself, since you have to go through the whole procedure again. In other words, our laws need to be developed using the waterfall model, and hence have full system requirement specifications in place before they are passed.

It’s not surprising since the procedure for passing laws was laid down back at a time when hardly any programming existed, leave alone agile programming. Yet, it begs the question of what can be done to make our laws more agile (pun intended).

PS: I understand that Agile software development has several features and this iterative nature is just one of them. But that is the only one I want to focus on here.

Arranged Scissors 16: Liquidity

Ok so the last time I wrote about Arranged Scissors was more than five and a half years back, when the person who is now my wife had just about started on her journey towards ending up as my wife. And today she made a very interesting observation on arranged marriage markets, which made me revisit the concept. She tweeted:

It is a rather profound concept, well summarised into one tweet. Yet, it doesn’t tell the full picture because of which I’m writing this blog (more permanence than tweet, can explain better and all that).

Reading the above tweet by the wife makes you believe that the arranged marriage market is becoming less liquid, because of which people are experiencing more trouble in finding a potential partner on that market. And there is a positive feedback loop in play here – the more illiquid the arranged marriage market becomes, the more the likelihood for people to exit the market, which results in making the market even more illiquid!

But this makes you believe that there was a time when the arranged marriage market was rather liquid, when people were happy finding spice there, and then it all went downhill from there. The fact, however, is that there are two countervailing forces that have been acting on the liquidity of the arranged marriage market.

On the one hand, more people are nowadays marrying “for love”, and are hence removing themselves from the arranged marriage market. This is an increasing trend and has resulted in the vicious circle I pointed to two paragraphs earlier. Countervailing this, however, is globalisation, and the fact that the world is becoming a more connected place, which is actually increasing the liquidity of the market.

Consider the situation a century back, when most marriages in India were “arranged”, and when it was the norm to pick a spouse through this market. While that in theory should have made the market liquid, the fact remained that people’s networks back in those days was extremely limited, and more importantly, local. Which meant that if you lived in a village, you could get married to someone from a village in a small radius, for example. Your search space was perhaps larger in a city, but even then, networks were hardly as dense as they are today. And so there was a limited pool you could pick from, which meant it was rather illiquid.

And over time, the market has actually become more liquid, with the world becoming a more connected place. Even a generation ago, for example, it was quite possible (and not uncommon) to get “arranged married” to someone living in a far-off city (as long as caste and other such factors matched). In that sense, the market actually got better for a while.

But it coincided with the time when social norms started getting liberalised, and more and more people found it okay to actually exit the arranged marriage market. And that was when the illiquidity-vicious-circle effect started coming into play.

In recent times, connectedness has hit a peak (though it can be argued that online social networking has helped extend people’s connections further), and the vicious circle continues unabated, and this is the reason that we are observing that the arranged marriage market is becoming less liquid.

Oh, and if you’re in the market, do get in touch with the wife. She might be able to help you!