here ...And never miss a post An IAS couple in Madhya Pradesh owns 25 flats and 400 acres of land. A middle-ranking engineer's wife owns three houses and has more than 10 kg gold in her bank locker. And wherever the income tax department conducts a raid, so much cash is unearthed that counting machines have to be brought in
Read more: In MP, babus sleep on bed of cash - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/In-MP-babus-sleep-on-bed-of-cash/articleshow/7323240.cms#ixzz1BY7XFc7m
Economic implosion, then volcanic explosion: not since the Viking raiders has Iceland been associated with so much tumult in Europe.
There are only 317,000 people on this barren north-Atlantic island and until recently, with the exception of eccentric pop singer Bjork, they'd barely caught the outside world's attention.
But now Iceland is famous -- infamous, even.
The Eyjafjoell volcano on the south coast may have caused relatively little damage here since erupting last week. Only 700 people, mostly farmers, are affected and no one has been killed.
Yet in Europe, ash from the hard-to-pronounce volcano has inflicted spectacular disruption, shutting down the continent's air travel network and stranding passengers around the globe.
The ash cloud is the second storm from this once quiet corner in the near past.
During the 2008 world economic crisis the country's high-flying main banks collapsed, taking with them the savings of 340,000 people in Britain and the Netherlands and forcing Iceland, until then among the world's wealthiest nations, to seek an IMF bailout.
When the British and Dutch governments demanded 3.9 billion dollars compensation, furious voters in Iceland used a referendum to tell their powerful neighbors to get lost unless they came back with a fairer deal.
A joke gleefully repeated since the volcano erupted relates that Britain "wanted cash, but because the Icelandic alphabet contains no letter C, they got only ash."
Another quip goes like this: "When Iceland's economy died, its final wish was that its ashes would be spread across Europe."
That humor is one way Icelanders are dealing with the shock of turmoil in their formerly stable country -- and with finding themselves in the unfamiliar position of being cast as villains abroad.
One joke perfectly catches the absurdity of tiny Iceland, which doesn't even have a standing army, going out to bully the world.
"You mess with Iceland?" goes the gag, in full Mafioso mode: "We shut down all your airports."
The laughter masks soul-searching about how Iceland got into such a mess and about who should be held responsible.
Richard N Foster's while talking about Creative Destruction provides a wonderful example in an interview in Forbes
Here's an excerpt...
I love your story of creative destruction in sailing ships. Please share it with my readers.
Sure. The first steam ship sailed around 1830. Yet when we look at some of the first photographs of ships from the early 1870s, a full 40 years later, we see an abundance of sails. The vast majority of investments that went into so-called "innovations" in the ship industry had gone into adding more masts to existing ships and more sails to those masts. Why? Because the incremental cost of building a slightly more advanced sailing ship always looked to be less than the full cost of starting up a steam ship from scratch. So there was no incentive for the incumbents to change to the new innovations, there was only incentive for new entrants to come up with steam ships, and that's in fact what they did. This went on for over 50 years, and even as steam ships got better and better, the incumbents continued to just add more sails. How could that be? Well, what was really happening was declining share in a growing market. This can often mean increasing sales--even though market share is falling. Your share is falling in a business that's defined differently than the way you think of it, so you generally don't even notice when in fact your lunch is being taken and eaten right before your very eyes.
So the big shipbuilders of the time didn't even realize that sails were about to be relegated to the realms of leisure boats?
Yes. This is one example of a very broad class of problems called confirmation bias, where we tend to only accept information from the outside that fits into our existing mental models, and we don't actively explore whether our own mental models are actually correct. Certainly, the innovators in the case of the steam ships understood this. The original steam ship builders knew perfectly well that the steam ship could not be competitive initially with the sailing ship. So they did what many innovators do, they came up with a hybrid product, which was a steam ship that had sails on it (or a sailing ship that had a steam engine in it, depending on your perspective).
Over time they improved the efficiency of the steam engine, which allowed the ship to go further and further and sail when there was no wind, and eventually the steam engines became so good that eventually, after 70 or 80 years, they could take the masts and the sails right off and just have a full blown steam ship, and that's in fact how the steam ship evolved. You could find steam ships up until the 1920s and 30s that were built with masts even though there was no capacity to put sails on them! Such was the nostalgia associated with the sailing ships. The basic idea was a confirmation bias, and it's a tremendous threat to companies trying to make a proper economic decision, which is often the decision to move onto a new technology. One doesn't have to look too far north of Detroit to think of current examples of a similar sort of thing…
Flooding right in front of my house ! Waist level water for 2 days in a row
There was no telling the difference between the mini "kuvam" behind my house and rain water
Our neighbours fared no better when water from 3 lakes around the Ambattur area was released
A few lucky ones who were at a slightly higher ground
Marooned cars...
...and flooded ones too that needed manual water scooping
Work going on at nearby building that was being newly constructed 
Dogs had the experience of a lifetime
And as the flood started receding, the stuff it had deposited started showing up
Don't be fooled by the color of the water...it is contaminated to the core.
And in this water lay earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, snakes, scorpions, rats, crabs and every other creature that can give you the creeps
Elsewhere in Chennai, a school building flooded...
..., a Chennai urban transport bus met a watery grave.
Life goes on for some Chennaites...floods or no floods.
And the earth opened up right in the middle of a main road.
The other more popular ones across America are the TacoBell, Dunkin' Donuts, Subways, PizzaHut, Jet's Pizzas, Wendy's and the list goes on endlessly. Be it Chicago , Detroit, San Francisco or Texas, you will find these stores sprinkled liberally all over the landscape. They serve burgers, French fries, tortillas, tacos, pizzas and donuts.
Walmart stands out distinctly because most others in the scene today have borrowed the idea from the Big Daddy of them all. Each Walmart outlet is nothing less than a monster outlet offering everything you would want to have in life under one single roof.
The Walmart outlets are also famous for their lowest prices in the market. They proudly display "Walmart prices...always reducing". This also has been the butt of many a joke. One goes like this "If Walmart prices are always reducing, then they ought to become zero sometime soon..." Now who woudn't love to see that day.
However, unlike the previous two categories of stores we talked about, these, are based on an entrepreneurship scheme. If you have the money and moolah to invest and a good real estate spot to bank your cash upon, you can open a garage and get affiliated to these groups. Very much on the lines of computer institutes like Aptech, NIIT, etc having spread across India.
The other that has carved a niche for itself is the Tim Hourton's coffee stores chain. Both these do serve amazingly intoxicating coffee. Two months into US and I am already a fan of the Starbucks Cafe Mocha .... With a cup of this in hand and a nice novel to drool upon in the other hand, I would say "Paradise Gained".
You name an electronic gizmo and these shops flaunt it, each one advertising lower prices then the other. You enter these shops and any amount of money you have in your bank account suddenly seems a pittance. Well, can't help it....that's the sad part of it.Here's an old article I had written based on the experience of one of my colleagues. Republishing for your reading pleasure
Predicaments come in various formats. Some predicaments do end after a short duration. Some come in just to stay with you, eternally. But how would one explain predicaments that seemingly end every moment, only to pop up the very next moment!!!
One such predicament is that of my colleague, Dipankar. And the predicament faced by him is no small one. It assumes gigantic proportions at times and ceases to be even a bother the following minute.
Ours is the cubicle that is present right as soon as one enters the door to our floor. It is indeed a fantabulous place!!! Fantabulous, because no one can really escape our notice while on their way to their cubicles. Not to mention also the privilege of getting to know any news as soon as it bursts open on our floor, be it somebody announcing a special event in his/her family or distributing sweets to celebrate the occasion. We are never left out!!!
Now amidst such a marvelous place, what could possibly go amiss for Dipankar? Lots!!!…. according to Dipankar.
This door of ours requires a proximity card swipe to even get out, something that is not anymore in vogue. But then the whole parody lies in it. And our floor is full of people who keep coming in from other branches of the company and it is obvious that they lack the access rights to come in or go out.
Come in, they surely do, courtesy the security outside. But, go out…. How do they do that? Some do knock on the door to grab the attention of the security outside. But to the majority of others, Dipankar is saviour incarnate. Being the guy who sits closest to the door, they turn to him to grant them access to get out.
Time is
The process has been fine tuned to such an extent that our guy’s hand involuntarily gropes for the badge as soon as he sees a person approaching him.
Now, pray what might it be that turns the whole process into a predicament! It’s the “attitude” of certain people as I have noticed it. There are individuals who just demand “Hey man, open this door”. They just extend their hand in a fashion that reminds one of the mannerisms of a “Supari Killer” who asks for his payment before carrying out the assignment. Our guy opens it but then I can see a look on his face that talks of his displeasure over their behaviour. The look on his face clearly says “What do they think I am sitting here for? Is it just to open the door for them every time they feel an urge to get out? I will surely ignore all these people the next time……” And he reseats himself with a steely resolve.
But then the very next person, who requests him for the card, does so in such a sweet manner that our hero is in a quandary. The big question that hovers in front of him is this…”Do I open it or do I pretend he doesn’t exist ?”
His magnanimity at heart rules the roost!!! So magnanimous that he forgets all the bitter episodes and is back to business. Not an iota of pain on his face!!! “Here you go gentleman!!!” and out he lets the guy.
Amazing Guy!!! So much so that our cubicle guys have christened him lovingly “Dwarpal”. And he loves every crumb of attention that we shower on him!!! And on rainy days it’s the experiences of our Dwarpal that keep us engaged!!! Long live the Dwarpal!!!
However there is a dark side to it. One that involves robbing the bones from graves, pullling off corpses from burning pyres the moment the relatives of the deceased disperse, keeping the skeletons hanging in the rives for the fish and bacteria to lick clean the flesh, boiling the bones in a vat of caustic soda to remove remaining bits of flesh, drying the bones in the sun and washing them with hydrochloric acid to give the bones a white shine and exporting them illegally to Western medical institutions that pay anywhere between $1500-$5000 for a skeleton. Read the full story here 
Within a single day, the bell weather stock indices of the developed world like S&P, the tech heavy NASDAQ and the Dow Jones Industrial sensex had all taken a hit and fallen to record lows in the last 2-3 years. European and Asian bourses were next as they fell on cue too.
Some of the games out there on World Wide Web are truly good and allow you to pass some time when you get really bored and you are not in the right frame of mind to do any mind bending work. One such game I found was Double Wires. An exciting game based on Spiderman capabilities. You need to swing from one cliff to another using two elastic sticky wires that you can throw at the cliffs and get hooked on. Hope the game gets you hooked on too.
