Interest

If everybody in the world has enough money to keep in bank such that they can easily survive on interest alone, who will do the work? This will not work for obvious reasons, but this is what everyone dreams to achieve.

May be money should have a half life.

Jammu Airport

Few things happened at Jammu Airport which defies all economics:

1) Taxi service is controlled by a union guy. I wanted a taxi for a day without specifying how much kilometer I will travel. The guy simply refused to give me a per km rate as his commission depends on total value of the travel charges. With per KM model he doesn't knows beforehand what is his commission and hence the refusal to act on this stupid per KM model.
2) The taxis are assigned in round robin fashion. As the number of taxis increase without any increase in tourist traffic (less demand and more supply) the taxi charges will be increased to compensate the decrease in per taxi profit.

Demand & Supply

One of the fundamental premises of classical economics is the rule of demand and supply. In a free market when demand is more and supply is less, prices go high and when demand is less and supply is more, the prices go down.  This works most of the time but not all the time. Here is when it doesn't works.

• Free markets are hard to achieve. Typically we have less number of producers and high number of consumers in any market. This gives unfair advantage to producers to artificially keep the prices high simply because their number is small enough to organize. Real Estate, Sabzi Mandi, Auto Stand, etc are some of the places where producers will typically unite and charge high prices.  With GroupOn and other demand aggregator sites, what we now see in consumers uniting to create artificially lower demand to impact the prices. This would not be required in a free market.
• The second factor is how many times the buying decision is taken. We don't change phone numbers often, which means even if the new plan from Airtel is very good, it will not create enough demand. If I have bought a house at some price, any changes is price later are irrelevant for me. The same is the case with home loan, because of the switching charges and no guaranty by the bank on the floating home loan rate. Only when the buying happens over and over again, it is possible for the demand/supply rule to be effective. If it doesn't happens often enough, the equilibrium is lost. Same is the case with representative democracy where we end up voting only once in five years.  Demand/Supply will not work if consumers just have to make this decision only once or twice. The markets will only be fair if consumer needs to choose over and over and not when they are stuck with their choice for lifetime or a big duration of time.
• The third factor is the time of delivery of the product or service. If the product is only scheduled to be delivered, the decision of payment has already been made and the quality of service/product doesn't comes into picture, only its expectation. When an enterprise buys some software from other company, it is paying for the product as well as the maintenance charges which will happen only in the future. When we sit in an auto, we will know if his meter is bad or the driver is slow or reckless only when have made the buying decision. Or when buying a house, the house will be delivered only in the future which means actual cost of house will be known only in the future.  What this really means is that it is impossible for us to take an informed decision about the purchase or at least is fairly complicated decision to make, which gives the producer unfair advantage it terms of setting prices.

What I want to say is that their exist enough markets which appears to be free but are not, because they don't give consumers enough time/chances to revise their decisions and this gives unfair advantage to the producers, which means fair market theory fails and we need government intervention or group buying or really establish fair prices in these markets.

Principles

Every subject, philosophy, area of interest defines some set of principles which provide the basic framework for thinking about the subject. Be it physics or computer science or politics or economics, every subject will define something. It is impossible to talk about anything unless we define it. This act of definition does two things: it simplifies thinking about the subject and at the same time what is doesn't defines becomes insignificant, forgettable. Think of a clean sheet of paper and then think of a line drawn on it or a circle. Suddenly we have a left side and a right side or inside of circle and outside of the circle. The act of definition allows us to focus on somethings and make us blind to what is not defined.

Einstein talked about countable and uncountable things, I am taking this one step behind....only what is defined could be countable or uncountable, what is not defined is simply outside the scope, irrelevant, unknown, unthinkable.

As a programmer I need to define endless concepts to simplify my code. And often the concepts become weak when new features are added, which break the existing code contracts. I don't think it is possible to avoid inventing concepts, but I feel the less the better. If it was possible to write code without inventing these concepts, I would be happy, but they are necessary evil. They allow understanding the code, they make some things very easy to do, but the very act of defining them limits the kind of problems that can be solved using them. And eventually the code rewrite/refactoring is needed.

I find this very similar to what happens in life, except that the code is the "language" we talk (the sum total of human knowledge) and every one speaking that language is its "developer".  The whole world is writing a software called "language" and it is hard to change meanings when everyone in the world is working on the same piece of code. So the human race continues to be backward compatible, maintaining the legacy code, even though we might be badly needing a rewrite.  Things like nation states, religion, money, government, inheritance, etc. the foundations of our existence may already have reached their end of life, but we will continue to be trapped because we defined them sometime in our history. May be the problem of poverty, corruption, unemployment, wars,  nuclear race, global warming, religious intolerance,  alienation, etc cannot be solved in the realm of our "language".  They are end result or logically valid outcomes of the conceptual models of world we have defined over the years.

May be we need a redesign but that too will need to be defined...and then thousands of years later it will also becomes obsolete.

Understanding

Everybody wants people in their lives to be understanding. The point at which we believe we understood is exactly the point at which we stop understanding. This is fairly obvious. What is the point of trying to understand when you have understood. But what if you have not understood but you think you have? When we are in conversation with the belief that we may not have understood, that is when we really are in a position to understand and are being understanding.