From my roommate Tim’s New Zealand travelogue, that I recently discovered:

The whole cost? Twenty-five dollars (and those are New Zealand dollars, it was $13 American).

For the curious ones among you, he has strained his lateral tendons and may have inflamed some of the nerves in his arm. If it’s not better in six weeks, we’ll find another clinic and he’ll be taking care of for twelve dollars. Amazing.

The woman we were staying with described the wonders of socialized medicine and reasonable pension plans and all things New Zealand. All I could think about was how much it all cost and how it was paid for. She seemed to anticipate my question and explained “Of course it helps when you’re not paying to build nuclear weapons and fight illegal wars.” There it is. As a country, the United States has chosen war and destruction over education, medicine, science, and infrastructure. What a choice.

This is why travel is important. It allows you to see other systems, meet other people, and experience the roads not taken. It makes you a better citizen of the world and of your community. The world is a big place and you should always try to see more of it than you have. And there the lesson ends.

Philip Greenspun’s article on money has an interesting opening parable:

“There are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it.”
— conventional wisdom in Italy

A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said, “Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I’d accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife’s father died and left us two million dollars.”

Techcrunch continued their usual Yahoo-bashing with this story today:

It appears that a few days ago there was a slight change to Flickr’s logo: an addition of a small Yahoo logo to the right side so it reads “Flickr from Yahoo.” In response, many Flickr users have taken to the photo-sharing site’s forums to express their horror at the Yahoo’s new branding of Flickr.

There is definitely some truth to the community backlash, but what I see as more aggravating is a great missed branding opportunity for Yahoo!.

Flickr and Delicious have both been adamant opponents to Yahoo! branding. Even though Yahoo! owns it, the Delicious frontpage doesn’t contain a single mention of Yahoo. Both sites’ communities are predominantly “indie” brand lovers; and don’t want “the man” to infringe their beloved service (even if the man is running it).

What’s crazy is that Yahoo recently launched a $100 million campaign called “Y!ou and Yahoo!”. What’s also interesting is that Flickr actually had a branding that said “Flickr loves you” (in place of Flickr BETA), which reflected Flickr’s personality and branding. People got used to it, and some even thought it was cute.

The last thing you want to do is force a new logo on to the community in an ungraceful manner. Here’s a convenient solution: to morph the “loves you” logo into the “Y!ou and Yahoo!” campaign and do a “flickr loves Y!ou” logo, killing two birds with one stone. The community sees a subtle evolution of the existing logo, and the “Y!ou” campaign is placed on a huge community”.

It’s been a little over 2 weeks since I moved to the Big Apple for the summer. Much like my last visit to NYC in 2007, this time I’m working for the another dotcom company .

NYC is a seriously awesome place. There’s so much stuff going on that it became a little hard to pick exactly what to do. Being the lazy person that I am, I decided to crowdsource this decision. So I put up a Facebook status update: Arnab wonders what to do in NYC. Suggestions? Within a few hours, I had 16 suggestions! Here’s an edited list. I’ve also added a few of my own suggestions:

• Venture over to Brooklyn Brewery
• Eat at the Peanut Butter Sandwich Shop in SoHo
• Djerdan for some east european, balkan food.
• Serendipity the ice cream parlor.
• The Bodies Exhibition, which I think is a little creepy, but I might go.
• The Strand Bookstore, endless hours of browsing secondhand books
• If you like meat and lots of it, try the Churascaria Plataforma
• Upright Citizens Brigade – improv.
• The Museum of Modern Art , AMAZING place if you like contemporary, modern and post-modern art. Even if you don’t care about art, the place has 2 restaurants where you get to sit and eat right by a Picasso, for example. I actually bought an annual membership which is 50$, which gets me unlimited access and allows me to take guests for 5$ each. Great deal!

• Look for indie acts on Oh My Rockness — I’m a huge fan of live acts, this is going to be my go-to directory for music events this summer.

The plan is to strike each one of these off my list (in addition to the usual stuff like going to see a Broadway play, etc). Let’s see how this works out!

If I had a million dollars to spend, I would invest them in these two things:

Preventative secondary healthcare for rural areas:

They are not doctors. They are not nurses. They are illiterate women from India’s Untouchable castes. Yet as trained village health workers, they are delivering babies, curing disease, and saving lives—including their own.

and Cell Phones for developing areas :

Mobile phone ownership in India is growing rapidly, six million new mobile subscriptions are added each month and one in five Indian’s will own a phone by the end of 2007. By the end of 2008, three quarters of India’s population will be covered by a mobile network. Many of these new “mobile citizens” live in poorer and more rural areas with scarce infrastructure and facilities, high illiteracy levels, low PC and internet penetration.

There has been a lot of debate and noise about the 2008 US election. Politics, ethics and opinions aside, let’s think about this from a simple facts-and-numbers perspective. Ignore all the controversy of popular vote vs electoral college, etc etc. Let’s consider the contest in the way it’s defined right now.

You have finite resources, and you need to win the election. It costs a fixed amount of effort to convince each person. What’s the most optimal way to win an election?

So you run an optimized campaign. You strategize and make a campaign that gives you a much better “bang for buck”. In a perfect world, you should spend enough time to convince as little over 50% of each constituency and then move on, since you’ve won there and you should spend your resources elsewhere. This should be the primary objective function to measure a campaign’s efficacy.

Using numbers from the Wikipedia :
Obama : 66,495,308 votes, 365 electoral votes. 365/66 = 5.5
McCain : 58,123,419 votes, 162 electoral votes. 162/58= 2.79

Hence, we can see that Obama’s campaign was TWICE more efficient than McCain’s.

If the ability to lead a campaign is any reflection of leadership of the country, this does seem like a decisive victory in leadership skills.

Now, in case someone argues that Obama had more money, let’s look at spending reports from Opensecrets.org:
Obama : 640M$ = 1.75M$ per electoral vote
McCain : 370M$ = 2.28M$ per electoral vote

Again, Obama was 1.3 times more efficient with his donation money.

So overall, 2x efficiency in campaign effort, and 1.3x efficiency in use of money. What I see is a great contest in management, with a clear winner.

Brand New reports the purported rehaul of Pepsi’s entire branding inventory :

More information at Adage.com (Google cache link) :

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — PepsiCo today said it will pour some $1.2 billion over three years into a push that will include sweeping changes to its brands, including what Chairman-CEO Indra Nooyi characterized as a revamp of “every aspect of the brand proposition for our key [carbonated soft drink] brands. How they look, how they’re packaged, how they will be merchandised on the shelves, and how they connect with consumers.

The white band in the middle of the logo will now loosely form a series of smiles. A “smile” will characterize brand Pepsi, while a “grin” is used for Diet Pepsi and a “laugh” is used for Pepsi Max. Also, Mountain Dew will be rebranded as Mtn Dew.

I spent all of last night worrying in my sleep about the 500$ that I had deposited into the bank, but was not showing up in my online account summary. “What could go wrong?”, I thought.

I go to bed, with this idea that “Oh well, it must take some time for the account to get the data, so when I check my account tomorrow morning, the money will be there.”

It’s 1 am now, and I’m now thinking in my sleep, “No you idiot, I gave them cash, not a check. Even checks are instant transfer these days. Cash should show up immediately!”

A while later, I decide that I can just go to the bank tomorrow morning, and sort this out in person. But wait, what do I tell them? My memory now rewinds and plays the moment when the cashier asked me if I wanted a receipt for the transaction, and I coolly say “No thanks”.

No receipt, no proof, no cash.

From there on till around 5am, I’m mostly trying to replay the sequence in my head, how I went there and gave them the money, and they put it in my account. Hmm. What if they put it in the wrong account? I often tend to mumble, and maybe in my mumbling Indian accent, I sounded like I was giving them some other account number?

Or maybe it was the feds… did my cash get “seized for review” or something — I cashed those dollars at a New York bank — you should never trust these New York banks!

Grr, it’s six o clock. Might as well wake up and get some work done. Check account — nope, no money still.

Hmm. Maybe…

I pick up my wallet and look though it. Right there, in one corner, is a folded bunch of 5 benjamins. I guess I never deposited the money after all.

Damn you fake memories.

This is just plain crazy: a PlayStation 3 just got sold for $10,000 on eBay.